Winterstrike (15 page)

The captain was, ultimately, pragmatic. ‘So, she’s heading for the Noumenon. So are we. I’ll insist that she gets off just before the border, in case customs find her. If
we’re harbouring a criminal, you can’t see us being welcome, can you?’

I couldn’t. ‘That reminds me,’ I said. ‘Do I need papers, for the Noumenon? All my documentation got left behind in Caud, it was such a rush to get out.’

They’ll usually accept bribes,’ Peto said. ‘You have money, don’t you?’

‘I’ve got a chip.’

‘I think you’ll find that they’ll take whatever you’ve got.’

Somehow, this did not surprise me.

The cut-off was clearly visible now: a squat guard tower flying warning pennants of cross-canal traffic, a signal system that I did not fully understand but which was apparently familiar to
Peto. High in the guard tower there was a flash as someone’s binoculars caught the late sun. Peto was squinting against the light.

‘It’s closed. We’ll have to see if they’re letting traffic through.’ Her heavy face was frowning and I knew why: what action might our unwelcome guest take, if we
were not allowed passage? I hoped she’d have the decency to deactivate whatever device she’d installed and go on her way. But decency wasn’t common Martian currency these days,
especially amongst Rubirosa’s kind. Or, indeed, mine. It struck me that the marauder might simply take us down into the cargo hold and dispatch us, leaving no witnesses behind her. If so, I
promised myself, I wouldn’t go down without a fight.

When we came to the cut-off, Peto signalled a left turn and hauled the barge across the channel, heading for the series of locks that led down onto the Plains. I could see the cut-off canal
clearly now: a silver line leading, arrow-straight, towards the mountains, which towered, deceptively close, above the wintry grassland. I knew how far they were and yet I could see the lines of
glaciers snaking down through the rocks, all of it ghostly in the pale light as if sketched onto the sky.

We were stopped. Just as the barge came to a wallowing halt, Rubirosa’s voice whispered in my ear, ‘Not a word, now!’ She sounded quite cheerful about it; doubtless she felt
she held the upper hand. As indeed, she did. I turned to retort, but there was only a glitter of haunt-tech, vanishing into the shadows of the cargo hold.

Peto had to hand over a seemingly endless series of document chips, all of which were carefully stamped through a rudimentary blacklight device, but it appeared that it was the boat that
mattered, not the personnel. Secretive though they were, the Noumenon didn’t seem to have Caud’s degree of paranoia and the barge was not searched. I remained on deck, watching as the
ferry disappeared slowly down the canal, accompanied by the other vessels that I had come to regard as neighbours during our time on the Grand Channel. I wondered what had become of the Centipede
Queen and her entourage, feeling the prickle of darksight that suggested I would see them again. It was one of the abilities that the Matriarchy had tried to train in me, but this one had remained
largely useless. It gave me future glimpses of cups of tea, shop assistants, oncoming weather – rarely anything of real value or use. Whether my future meeting with the Centipede Queen would
be among the latter, I did not know.

At last Peto was done. The door to the cargo hold remained closed. The first of the locks was activated from the guard tower and we moved through, leaving a queue of boats behind us. It appeared
that we’d have company on our journey through the mountains; I wondered what that might bring.

TWELVE

On the second day, the pilgrimage took on a monotony. Without the presence of the brown-clad women to distract me, I found that I was becoming accustomed to the sonorous chants
and the dismal tone of the instruments. The pilgrims had lost their mystery for me: familiarity had indeed bred if not contempt, then at least tedium. I should have been more alert, and I tried,
but the attack in Winterstrike was already assuming the dimensions of a dream and I felt oddly hot. My arm burned where I’d been bitten and that made me anxious. If I collapsed . . . But I
didn’t feel faint, just slightly feverish.

The weather continued to be dreary, with a misting sleet drifting across the plains in veils and encrusting the ruins with ice. The road beneath us still had the old heating mechanism, glowing
faintly at the roadsides: not haunt-tech, but something older and perhaps more robust, drawing on the internal heat of the deep soil and passing it upward. But in places it had broken down, so that
we walked on bare tarmac and then ice.

The attack, when it came, was a rush and a confusion. We were passing one of the ruins, a more extensive complex of turret and fortifying buildings that surrounded it. In the chilly weather, it
looked like a column of ice. The assault itself lacked subtlety. The women raced out from behind the ruin on ground-bikes, bouncing easily over the frosty plain. They wore skin-tight white armour,
much patched, and black goggles against snow-glare, which suggested to me – when I thought about it later, that is – that they were not local, but had come down from somewhere much
colder. There were four of them and they carried glowing lances beneath one arm. The bikes themselves were equipped with shriekers: I clapped my hands to my ears involuntarily and I was not
surprised to see the guards do the same, before they activated whatever protective mechanisms existed within their helms and started firing. One of the attackers was hit in the tank of the ground
bike and it exploded in a bright thermal flare. I saw her cast up towards the ruin, a flying, burning doll. Then a hissing swift thing was bowling pilgrims right, left and centre as one of the
ground-bikes dodged between them. Women screamed. The guard, hampered by the swarming mass of people, fired, but it went wide and sent up a tussock of grass in a fiery spray. The bike was heading
straight for me and the shrieker was deafening, interfering with my balance. I stumbled, ducking to the side, which turned out to be a mistake: the bike did not hit me, but it rapidly became clear
that running me down was not its rider’s intention. She grabbed me efficiently by the waist and threw me over the front of the bike at its widest part. The shrieker howled in my ear and the
rider slapped me across the side of the head. By doing so, she must have given me some kind of patch, because a brief chill spread around my ears and the noise of the shrieker was abruptly muted.
Then we were heading off across the plain. I squirmed around, struck upwards at the rider and caught the glowing lance with my hand. It burned and I snatched my hand away. The rider laughed: I
could see black polished teeth beneath the rim of the goggles. A mesh had worked its way out of the bike and now held me securely. The rider put both hands on the steering and kicked the bike into
a flaring speed. I caught a last glimpse of the little dark shapes of the pilgrims in front of the tower and then we were over the horizon.

The rider didn’t bother to stun me, so I got to see the whole of the trip, albeit face-downwards. Half an hour or so passed, hurtling through driving sleet and then snow. We were climbing.
The wind stopped and the world took on a blanketing hush. Twisting my head, I saw trees: the black, conical spires of pin-wood. That meant we were probably up in the Hattins, a long way to the
north-west of Winterstrike. Once, my ancestors had enjoyed country residences here, before the fashion changed to the more southerly lakes and winter hunting was no longer so popular. Common legend
spoke of ruined mansions, deep in the forest and haunted by shrikes and cold-tropes, as well as the ghosts of the dancing, hunting dead. Looking at the dark trees as we shot by, I did not find this
difficult to believe.

My position on the bike was, not surprisingly, uncomfortable. The uneven surface of the pommel was starting to bruise my ribs, so that every bounce and jolt sent a flare of agony through my
chest, ricocheting from my spine. I had a quite remarkable headache and my vision had started to blur. The geise was muttering away in my mind but everything else was blotting it out, which was one
mercy, at least. Throwing myself from the bike had long since been ruled out as an option: I couldn’t wriggle free, and in any case, if I managed to fall off, I’d only be picked up
again. And I’d have to find my own way back to the pilgrimage over several miles of rough ground. It seemed better to stay put but I chafed at the knowledge all the same.

The trees were thinning out now, and we were climbing. When I looked back I could see the long slope stretching behind us, with the cold sweep of the plains beyond. There was no sign of the
tower from which the bikes had come. The rider gave my shoulder a shake.

‘Not long now!’ she shouted. She sounded quite cheerful about it, as though we were out on some pleasure jaunt. I mumbled something sour. The bike was slowing down as it wove its way
through the trees, but the top of the rider’s helmet touched a branch and shook down a great pile of snow. I spluttered and sneezed, hearing the rider laugh. Ahead, I glimpsed an enormous
cliff face, many thousands of feet in height and ending in ice-locked crags that looked like teeth. Clouds wreathed the summit, smoking in and out of the rocks. The bike swung dangerously close to
a thick tree trunk, veered away, and headed straight for the wall of ice that was the foot of the cliff.

‘Hey, watch out!’ I cried, but it was too late. The bike was speeding towards the wall and I shut my eyes. Next moment, we were into darkness and silence. For a second, I thought I
was actually dead. Then I realized that the ice wall had, like a miracle, opened up in front of us and let us through. The bike stopped with a great scraping and rattling of gears. I was hauled off
and thrown against a wall.

I was certain that I hadn’t banged my head, but even so, things became very dim for a while, as if I’d slid into dreaming without the bother of falling asleep. The chamber swam
before me – high rock sides and a roughly cut ceiling, clearly hacked out of the cliff wall. All these mountains outside Winterstrike were riddled with caves, the legacy of ancient floods,
perhaps even before humans came to Mars. But this looked human-made. I could hear the steady drip of water and a hollow, echoing boom that I could not identify: later, I wondered whether it was
simply the sound of my own blood, reverberating inside my head. A pair of eyes floated before me like lamps. A voice said, hissing, ‘Yes, this is the one.’

‘Who are you?’ I thought I said, then wondered whether the words had really been spoken aloud. The voice did not reply. I felt myself drifting along, moving through corridors and
channels. There was the lap of water by the side of my head, although I didn’t remember lying down. Then the slap of oars and a light far ahead, gleaming off the water and sending reflections
dancing across the ceiling.

Everything went dark again, but I was still conscious. Something was sparkling and glittering all around me.

‘Where am I?’ I said, but again, was not sure if I’d even spoken aloud. I didn’t remember being drugged, there had been no sting of injection, no sudden puff of gas, but
I felt completely blank, as if someone had switched me off. The eyes swam above me and I now saw that they were moons, the small moons of Mars circling high above the planet’s orbit. Then I
saw Mars itself, a round russet ball, white-capped. The plains and mountains were very sharp, as if etched onto the blank surface of the world with some galactic scalpel. Further out and now I
could see the haze of Venus and the azure globe of Earth, swimming with cloud and its little satellite spinning around it. Sparks of light passed between the worlds and once the black sky cracked,
revealing a flash of something between: a haunt-ship, jumping from life into death and back again.

I watched all this quite passively, unconcerned by the fact that I seemed to be leaving the solar system altogether. The gas giant passed by, then ringed Saturn, then the outer worlds: the
mining colonies of the asteroids, the pilgrim places solitary and serene on the blasted surface of barely terraformed rock. I swung low over a temple, a huge place sprawling across the surface of
Io, saw its pools and ice-locked waterfalls, its towering spires dedicated to deities of the outer reaches and unknown to me. Then on, past the farthest world of Nightshade and the cobweb span of
Farlife.

And then . . . somewhere else. A shadow land, with high crags and a tower on a jutting crag, outlined in flame. A missile hurtled upwards and exploded in firework petals.

‘What do you see?’ said a voice, caressing and soft.

‘I see—’ Down into a landscape of fractured rock – except that it was not rock at all, but water, endless seas and a city rising from them. I glimpsed another high tower
made of iron, rising out of the waves, and then an impression of black coiling tentacles.

‘I see,’ I started to say, but I could not get the words out and a cold clamping hand came down on my wrist and hissed, ‘
Tell me . . .’

‘Take a look,’ I said and in some uncomprehended way I opened up my own head and let her stare inside.

‘Ah . . .’ said the voice. ‘No. She’s not really seeing anything. She’s just picking it up from me.’

‘Nowhere,’ someone else said. With dim surprise I realized that it was I who had spoken. ‘Its name is Nowhere.’

Then the place was gone and I was back within the comforting, confining cage of my own skull. Dark globes were gazing down at me: eyes, not moons, floating in front of a polished obsidian
ceiling. The blacklight sparkle of haunt-tech was all around me and I realized that I was in a vertical vice, with my wrists and ankles securely bound. An electrical wind blew through the chamber,
stirring my hair with static.

The eyes were black and milky at the same time and they belonged to a pointed face, surmounted by a trailing veil. A small mouth twitched. I glimpsed sharp teeth. There was the swish of robes as
the creature took a step back.

‘You’re—’ I said. I’d seen something like her before, in the streets of Winterstrike. I remembered the theatre, with the masked women dancing in front of it, then
the thing I’d seen floating above the canal. But demotheas didn’t exist.