Winterstrike (16 page)

‘I am Mantis,’ the creature said.

‘Hello, Mantis.’ I struggled against the bonds. Any chance of letting me go?’

‘Not just yet.’ Mantis reached out a hand and touched my pulse. Her fingers were cool, with an extra-than-human joint.

‘Why did you take me?’ I said.

Ah, well, I wanted a closer look at you, you see.’ She frowned. ‘What’s
that
inside your head? That whispering?’

‘I’m under a geise,’ I said.

‘Who put it on you?’

‘My mothers.’

There was a low whistle of surprise across the chamber. I craned my neck and saw the rider who had brought me in. She was still wearing riding gear and goggles; there was snow melting from her
boots and pooling on the mirror-black floor. ‘Not a happy family, then?’

‘You could say that.’

The rider strode across the chamber and seized me by the neck. There was a twinge in my head and then I was saying, babbling almost, ‘My name is Essegui Harn, ceremonialist of
Winterstrike, a scion of the House of Calmaretto, sister of Shorn, once called Leretui, still called the Malcontent.’

‘I know who you are!’ Mantis said impatiently. ‘I’m interested in Leretui,’ she added. ‘Imprisoned for consorting with a male, indeed. Shouldn’t you be
at home, instead of cavorting across the Plains with pilgrims?’

So she did not know that Leretui was missing – or was affecting ignorance in some elaborate double bluff.

‘I am a ceremonialist,’ I said. ‘I observe Ombre. These are difficult times. I felt the need for spiritual succour.’

‘Yet you went to the Temple of the Changed,’ Mantis said. ‘Then to the fortress. Why was that?’

Had she been there, listening among the shadows? I was becoming increasingly certain that this was the person responsible for the attacks on me. I thought of the little aspith, fleeing into the
depths of the Temple. In my head, a bridge shattered and fell.

‘I work there,’ I said. ‘Why shouldn’t I go there?’

We can blacklight you again, drag it from your head,’ Mantis warned.

‘If you do,’ I said, knowing that it was the truth, ‘I’ve had warning now and I’ll just faint. And what will you listen to then?’

I looked into her dark-milk eyes, and knew that, for the moment, I’d won.

In spite of the haunt-tech laboratory, the rest of the complex was primitive, really no more than a series of underground tunnels and rough-hewn chambers hacked out of the side
of the cliff, reeking of mildew and age. The rider who had originally snatched me now accompanied me down through a maze of passages, with a sting-prod at my neck. I did not care to test it out,
having seen what lay outside, and I decided not to give her any trouble. She introduced herself perfunctorily as One, and introduced me also to a small cramped cell in which, she gave me to
understand, I would be spending the indefinite future. This was all very well, but the geise was now battering at my senses, shouting at me to get a move on, and despite that quasi-sentience it
seemed to possess it evidently did not understand that I was in no position to act out its wishes. Was Leretui herself here? I bit back frustration. ‘You won’t be able to get out, by
the way,’ One explained, somewhat unnecessarily, as I’d already seen the blacklight glitter running through the mesh. The cell door was wired up to the haunt system, and as an
experiment I ran a hand across it, once One was safely out of sight. Immediately the system erupted into a shrieking ward that flashed across my head. I ducked, even though I knew it wasn’t
real, and the nerve-jangling it left in its wake reverberated through my head for a moment after it had passed through the opposite wall. But I was used to my mothers’ systems at Calmaretto,
too, though these were different. I wondered just how far Mantis was prepared to go. I sat down on the rudimentary bed and thought of flight.

THIRTEEN

Half a day and the mountains appeared no closer, and no further, either. My world and Peto’s had shrunk to the distant glacial peaks, an icy green sky, the red ridges of
the Plains as we progressed along the side cut of the canal. The only glimpse I’d had of Rubirosa in the last few hours had been a glint of eyes in the shadows of the hold. She was whittling
something with a haunt-knife that whistled and whispered as the shavings fell away. I thought it might be a bone. I didn’t really want to know.

So I sat on deck with Peto instead and took turns at steering and boiling tea on the little deck kettle. It was growing colder now, the comparative mildness of the Plains beyond Caud dropping
away as we rose in a series of stages towards the Noumenon. When I looked back, I could still see the long straight stretch of the Grand Channel and some of the masts travelling down it. Along the
bank, the grass grew sparser, replaced with a dense plant with shiny dark-green leaves, and the small birds of the lower Plains disappeared. Red-eyed predators appeared in their place, sailing high
on fringed wings, catching the thin thermals.

Peto pointed out areas of interest: she knew this country. There were battlefields, barrows of the dead dating back to the Age of Children, scenes of great valour. It all looked the same to

Crater Plain me. I couldn’t tell what she was pointing at half the time. It had all been swallowed by the remorseless, still-transforming earth, though Peto also told me that the place was
full of spirits, and this I did not find difficult to believe.

‘Wait until night comes,’ Peto kept saying, peering at me from the corner of her eye to see how I was taking it. ‘Then you’ll see.’

Something to look forward to, then. She did, however, manage to attract my attention with a phenomenon that was clearly visible: a ruined fortress on top of a great crag, seemingly all on its
own before the beginning of the mountain wall.

‘Temperire,’ Peto said. ‘It’s said they invented haunt-tech there, when the Matriarch Mantis found a way to harness the conjured spirits of her torture
victims.’

I felt a need to dismiss this in robust terms. ‘Nonsense! Everyone knows haunt-tech came from Nightshade, from the laboratories there, and was given to the Memnos Matriarchy. Although I
won’t deny that some folk claim it comes from torture, all the same.’

‘That’s what some folk
would
say,’ replied Peto, placidly enough. I sighed, although I couldn’t deny that Peto had a point.

‘What happened to Temperire, then?’ I asked, to change the subject.

‘Oh, there was a great battle. Ended in a siege and Mantis disappeared. Her enemies brought in their majikei, stripped the spirits from their enemies and sacked the castle. Stole
Mantis’s own technology and turned it against her: drove her soul into an engine and they say it grinds there still, down in the rocks beneath the ruin. You can hear it on winter nights,
groaning and grinding away.’

I’d have loved to dismiss this as folklore, but it’s hard to do that if you’re Martian. ‘What does this engine
do
?’ I asked.

‘It drives a mill and the mill makes creatures of blacklight and sends them out across the plains to steal other people’s souls.’

‘How delightful.’

‘Well, that’s what they say.’

We fell silent for a moment, then I said, ‘And have you ever seen one of these creatures? You’ve been this way before.’

‘Plenty of times,’ Peto said, confounding me. ‘But they can’t touch me.’

‘The boat’s warded?’ I’d already surmised as much. But it hadn’t kept Rubirosa out.

‘I’ve got my own stuff. My people’s stuff. A mesh, in my head.’ She gave me a sidelong look. It seemed that, somewhere along the way, we’d abandoned the pretence
that I was from the same neck of the woods as she was.

‘That’s . . . sophisticated,’ I said.

‘You think it’s only the city folk who have that kind of thing? My mother’s mother’s mother grew this mesh, from an old brain. Trapped spirits in the marshes, gave it its
power. We each had a bit of it, my sisters and me. Just enough to protect us.’

‘What does it do?’ An intrusive question, but I was fascinated.

‘Likely you’ll find out,’ Peto said, with what I hoped was neither warning nor threat. Conversation died after that and I took refuge in the excuse of making more tea.

Although other vessels had followed us through the cut, they now sailed far behind. Peto thought that the first one had encountered some administrative difficulty, because it was an hour or so
after we’d got through that the next vessel showed up on the radar. So the barge glided on up the lock skein in solitary splendour. We left Temperire on its crag, and the locks increased in
frequency: we were rising. At last I looked up from the tiller and got a shock, because far from the hovering sameness of distance that they’d displayed all day, the mountains now looked as
though they were hanging right over my head, gilded with sunset against an arctic sky.

‘They say Mantis went mad because of the view,’ Peto said, appearing suddenly at my elbow and making me jump. ‘Looks like they’re going to come right down on you,
doesn’t it?’

It did. ‘So, what happens now?’ I asked. ‘More locks, and then – what?’

‘It’s actually not as close as it looks,’ Peto admitted. ‘There are step locks from now on – you can let the boat handle them, they’re remotely activated. All
you have to do is keep steering straight, so that’s why we’re going to pull in for the night. You needn’t worry about being hit. Everyone else will do the same and if they
don’t, they’ll just have to wait.’

The stream was wide enough still for more than one boat. ‘Are you stopping in mid-channel, then?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why, because of wandering spirits?’

Yes.’

So that was that.

We slept down in the cabin, along with Rubirosa. Peto had clearly activated some kind of ward, for when I went back on deck for a final check, the air was filled with a silvery humming and the
air around the barge glistened. I touched the coal in my pocket and it felt less cold, almost comfortingly warm, in fact, but there was still no sign of the Library. I watched the air for a moment
all the same; I found that I missed the warrior’s grisly presence. Besides, she might be able to tell me what the hell was happening in Winterstrike. I’d tried, as surreptitiously as
possible under the dual suspicions of Peto and Rubirosa, to contact Gennera again, but the coder had stayed silent and there had been no reply. The only stuff on public channels was allegedly
morale-boosting propaganda, utterly useless unless one happened to have been born an idiot. I chafed under the lack of information, but I couldn’t do much about it. I suppose it was sad that,
even with a wired-up-and-about-to-explode boat, wandering ghouls and flying dreadnoughts, my life right now was calmer than it had been for some time.

Time for a change. I needed a way out of this game, needed to break free.

A low moon was hanging over the mountains, glowing yellow, and as I watched, the other climbed up above the glacier rim. In the west, Earth was a lamp. I remembered my cousin Leretui, poring
over the atlas that depicted the changes of Earth, her longing to go there. Maybe I could go to Earth, too. I hoped they’d let Leretui keep her books in that cruel imprisonment. Knowing
Alleghetta, probably not, but I trusted Essegui to sneak things in to her sister, just as she had done when they were children. She and I.

It was growing colder. Water slapped gently against the sides of the barge, interfacing with the wards and producing an occasional electric hiss. I went back down the stairs, to find Peto and
the marauder staring at each other like a couple of cats.

‘Is all well?’ Peto asked.

‘As far as I can tell. It’s pretty quiet up there. Your wards are holding.’

‘Good,’ the captain said. She wrapped herself in a blanket and lay down to sleep. I did the same, fully intending to keep a secret watch until Rubirosa, too, fell asleep. But my last
memory of that evening is of the marauder’s red eyes in the lamplight, watching me instead.

When the disturbance came, however, Rubirosa was as startled as Peto and I. There was a sudden, thunderous bang from the deck. We all leaped from our beds, senses conditioned
to immediate action, however unwise. Rubirosa and I knocked heads like some comedy act. We both swore. Peto was already running up the stairs, armed with an ancient scimitar that I hadn’t
even seen before.

But when we reached the deck, nothing was there.

‘What was that?’ The marauder’s armour was glittering as though wet, and her wrists bristled with weaponry. She turned from right to left, swinging with swift, economical
movements. Peto was hunched over the sword. I prowled around the circumference of the deck, looking for incursion. The only anomaly was a long scorch mark close to the bow, as though something had
tried to enter and been fried by the wards. ‘Peto!’ I called. ‘Look at this.’

The captain’s face was dour as she surveyed the damage to her deck. ‘Ghosts,’ was all that she said.

‘All right,’ said the marauder, looking from side to side. ‘Where are they now? There was more than one of them. My armour tells me that.’

We peered cautiously over the side of the barge. The water seemed untroubled, but I thought I glimpsed something moving in the depths, far below.

‘What was that?’ I started to say, and then all hell broke loose. There was a cannon-like boom as the wards on the starboard side activated and then fused, with a shriek that knocked
me against the railing. Something shot overhead, a white gleam against the frosty stars. Beside me, Rubirosa cursed as her armour shorted out with a high-pitched whine. She started stripping the
cuffs, trying, I presumed, to get manual access to her weapons.

That won’t do any good!’ Peto snorted. I turned. The captain’s face was aglow. She’d told me that she’d had a mesh implanted. What she hadn’t told me was that
it penetrated the entire dermis: her square face and stubby hands sparkled with a quick, unfamiliar haunt-fire, a wet marsh gleam. High above us, a thing like a white bat rattled down through the
sky. It wrapped its bony wings about it as it fell and as it came below the mast, it turned into smoke. Peto’s mouth opened wide and inside, it too was glowing. She swallowed the smoky thing
and shut her mouth with an audible snap. I couldn’t see why she’d even bothered with the scimitar, which now hung listlessly from her hand.