Winterstrike (25 page)

In the lamplight, her face was a startled mask. I struck out, catching her across the cheek. She stumbled and immediately the ground was a writhing mass as a great centipede dropped out of her
sleeve and fell to my feet. It lashed out; a pincer caught my boot and stuck in the leather. I kicked up with the thrashing creature attached to my toe, a pantomime performance. I stamped on its
head with my free foot and felt it crush. Shurr gave a howl of fury and rushed forward, her veil billowing out behind her. I snatched at the veil and twisted it in my hands, pulling her further in.
Then I dodged her strike and whipped the veil around her neck, throttling her until her hands went up and clawed.

I’d never strangled anyone before and this must have presented a lurid tableau: the vehicle rumbling on, Shurr crumpling to the icy ground, myself curved above her and the centipede still
palely thrashing in its death throes. When Shurr had gone limp – not dead, but unconscious – I tore the veil from her head, wrapped it into a bundle and ran in earnest, heading for the
canal bank and what I hoped might be freedom. No chance of asking anyone to take me in: I was too obviously from Winterstrike and I thought the Caudi refugees might take advantage of the presence
of an enemy scapegoat in their midst.

I stumbled down the bank, at first trying to avoid the barges that were moored along the water’s edge, but further upstream decided to take a risk and struck out onto the canal itself. The
water traffic was so thick at this point that the boats formed a bridge over the canal; I thought I might have a better chance of escape if I took to the opposite bank. I wrapped the brown veil
about myself: if anyone saw me, they might take me for a servant of the Queen, or at least, might not recognize the alien garment.

The journey across the canal seemed to take for ever: a cold breeze blew down from shattered Caud, smelling of gunpowder and ice and making the lamps rock so that reflections splintered across
the surface of the water. I could do this, I tried to tell myself. I’d survived two attempts on my life and a kidnapping. I wasn’t just the sheltered child of Calmaretto.
Hestia
could do this sort of thing. And maybe Shorn already had.

I avoided those boats that might be fitted with alarms, keeping instead to the poorer-looking craft. I saw few people moving about on deck: most were huddling in the shelter of their cabins, and
that suited me. I crawled, clung, leaped across the barges for an hour or more, until the lamps of the refugee train grew dimmed by the rising mist and the further shore swam up ahead. When I
jumped down from the last barge onto the opposite bank, and clambered up the steep stone barricade to the land above, I realized what I had done. I had left both Caud and Winterstrike behind and
ahead lay the lands of the Plains, and then the hills of the Noumenon. The geise whispered in my head. I thought of my missing sister, took a breath, and walked on.

By mid-morning, I was a long way from the Grand Channel, though not far enough to satisfy my longing for safety. The ground was rising, giving a sweeping view back over the
plain, and the icy rubble was broken up by great boulders, lacy spires and pillars of rock, legacies of early terraforming when this land had been nano-blasted into submission. Ahead, the mountains
were visible, and I remembered a superstition that a governess of ours had once told me:
All things go to the mountains. Everything ends up there.
And now, it seemed as though I would,
too.

Whereas the Hattins, the foothills, were a relatively low range, these mountains, the Saghair, were immense, roaring up into a green sky. The rocks were the colour of flame, and underneath my
feet, between patches of snow, the sand was red as rust. Once, all Mars had been like this, until the alchemical transformation wrought upon it by Earth had changed it to the shades that now
dappled its surface.

A buzzing sound, almost subliminal, brought my attention towards the horizon. Something was coming, a dark dot just above the skyline. I ran for the rocks, crouching down in a crack between two
of the tumbled boulders. Seconds later, the thing roared overhead: an excissiere craft, needle-narrow, but with no indication of whether it came from Caud or Winterstrike. I didn’t care to
chance it. I kept my head down, hoping they weren’t looking for me, and the craft was gone, twisting down over the mountains. The reverberation left by its passing echoed among the rocks for
a moment and then all trace of it had disappeared.

How much power did the Queen’s retinue possess, here on Mars? It wasn’t something I wanted to test. I stayed between the rocks for a quarter of an hour, and then when I was quite
sure that the vessel wasn’t coming back, I went on my way.

There was a track leading up into the jagged rocks of the foothills. At first it wasn’t clear to me that it really was a road: it was nothing more than scuffs in the dirt, something that
could have been made by an off-road vehicle. Then, a little way on, the soil thinned out to reveal tarmac. It looked old, pitted and pockmarked and scoured by wind and ice. The geise shivered in my
head when I laid eyes on it, making the back of my neck prickle. As I walked along it, I started to feel that I was walking out of my own time, into the far past: if I had seen an early spacesuited
settler, from the days before terraforming, I would not have been at all surprised.

The road wound up into the mountains. I looked back once, to see the empty plain stretching out behind. The masts of the boats that thronged the canal were needle-small. So I kept walking.

City girls don’t hunt. I wish I could tell you that I’d proved myself in those hills: made a makeshift bow, brought down some small but nutritious vermin. But I
couldn’t find any suitable pieces of scrub for making a weapon or a trap, and I didn’t see any vermin anyway. I just got hungrier and colder as the day wore on and I began to think that
it might have been wiser, after all, to take my chances with a band of Caudi refugees, or to have braved it out with the entourage of the Centipede Queen. My mothers should have hired an excissiere
to find Shorn, not me. And as if thinking about her had conjured her up, I saw Alleghetta again. This time, she was very faint indeed and wore different clothes: her dressing wrap. She shouted
something.

‘I can’t hear you!’

Alleghetta looked distractedly around and vanished. Stay that way, I thought.

I did manage to find water, though I had to break ice to reach it, and to light a fire with the sparkpack I used for lighting the old-fashioned lamps in the bell tower. I missed the tower:
somehow, over the years, it had become more of a home than Calmaretto. I wished I too had been able to simply disappear, just as Shorn had.

Moments later, I wished it even harder.

The voices floated through the air like moths. I hid in the rocks as soon as I heard them, trying to tell whether they were coming closer. But it sounded as though the speakers were somewhere up
ahead, and in one place. Cautiously, I made my way through the boulders until I could gain a vantage point.

There were four of them, and three were ghosts. They were truly spectral – I could see the rocks through their robes, which drifted in a wind I could not feel – but motionless,
unlike the weir-wards of houses, which are almost always moving. Their clothes suggested that they were from the Noumenon itself: robes of fawn and grey and black, like the old illustrations
I’d seen in books. One of them was human, or appeared so: she was, at least, more substantial than the rest. She wore armour, a leather harness, which flickered. I thought she might be an
excissiere, but she wore no identifying emblems. She was speaking in animated tones, gesturing, but I wasn’t close enough to hear what she was saying.

One of the ghosts, a tall woman in grey, shifted restlessly. She spoke in turn, pointing towards the mountain ridge that lay ahead of us. Here, if I had got my directions right, lay the
Noumenon.

They turned and began walking. I hesitated, then followed. They were, at least, likely to lead me to where I wanted to go. Yet they were ghosts, and the woman moved with a lithe stride that
suggested danger to me; she was clearly armed. And there was something familiar about her . . .

The armed woman stopped and paused. She pointed, into the sky. Concealed behind an outcrop, I couldn’t at first see what she was gesturing at. Then I noticed a tiny speck against the
mountain wall, twisting and turning as it descended. It was coming in fast: seconds later it resolved itself into a familiar shape. It was the dreadnought that had stolen away the Centipede
Queen.

NINETEEN

Rubirosa’s armour was cumbersome at first, but I rapidly got used to it. In the old days, so I’d heard, haunt-armour was haunted indeed, but this simply whispered
to itself, then fell silent, as I stripped it from its mistress and put it on. Then Shorn and I strapped the unconscious marauder to a passenger chair.

‘What if you don’t come back?’ Shorn asked. ‘I never learned to fly a ship.’

‘If I don’t come back,’ I said, ‘then it’s over for both of us. Give me three hours. After that – make your own way, Leretui. I’ll have done what I
can.’

After a moment, she nodded. ‘Fair enough.’ I left her staring dubiously at Rubirosa and left the ship. I hoped she wouldn’t take it into her head to do anything drastic while I
was gone, like dispatching Rubirosa. It wasn’t that I had
feelings
for the marauder, I told myself. She’d be a valuable source of information, that was all. I was trying not to
think about Gennera, aware of how far I’d already crossed the line. Shorn might not have been telling the truth, after all, but I’d gone ahead and acted on it anyway. If what Shorn had
said was true, I’d have gained a lot of kudos from turning her in to Gennera.

Fuck that, I thought. I might have a duty, but Shorn was my cousin and Gennera had distrusted me enough to send a spy after me.

Besides, I needed to know what was going on: who, or what, Mantis really was. Who had engineered the attack on the Noumenon. What the weapon was that I’d delivered from Caud. I was sick
and tired of acting from ignorance. So, moving fast in my borrowed armour, I headed towards Mantis’s turret. I kept expecting to turn and see the Library striding alongside: I missed her. I
wondered whether we’d left her marooned in the past, or whether temporality had any meaning for someone who wasn’t even real in the first place. But the sky was starting to darken over
the mountains, highlighting the faint lamps of the Noumenon and causing the column of smoke that still spiralled up from the chasm of the city to become thinly etched against the clouds. I was
still high up, climbing through rocks that looked as though they’d never known terraforming.

And there was the turret of Temperire ahead. Three hours, I’d promised Shorn, and it might be a promise I could keep. I didn’t want to be another one who’d let Shorn down, but
I might have to, even so.

On that fateful night of Ombre, I had not been in Winter-strike, but down in the south, near Tharsis. But I hadn’t tried to rescue Shorn either, although I’d tried to negotiate with
my aunts, who had proved predictably obstinate. Alleghetta was furious about the council post, of course, and in any case disinclined to listen to me. Talking things through wasn’t the same
as getting the girl out of there, however. It struck me again with some force that what I might actually have done was to save Shorn from the wrong enemy.
Mantis has been kind to me.
I
repressed a shiver.

Whatever the situation, it had left me with a spy mistress whom I could no longer trust. I could have felt betrayed, but instead I felt like a free agent for the first time in a decade, and now
Temperire was towering over me again, the haunt-armour revealing flickering shapes along its ruined battlements. I headed for the rocks around its base and hoped the haunt-armour would protect
me.

At least our previous adventures had given me some idea of the layout. I avoided the lower reaches of the turret, vulpen-thronged as they were, and headed back up the stairs.
The haunt-armour kept talking to itself, murmuring and muttering, occasionally tingeing my vision with crimson flashes. It unnerved me until I realized that the armour was trying to mesh itself
into the haunt-arrays of the turret itself, rendering me unseen, and then I was grateful. I had no idea whether it had achieved it, however, when it finally fell silent.

By this time we were on an upper landing, close to the chamber where I’d found Shorn. I could hear conversation and drew closer.

‘She’s scared,’ Mantis was saying. ‘You can’t blame her.’

‘You need to find her.’ An unfamiliar voice, deeper than Mantis’s, and weirdly accented.

‘Of course I need to find her,’ Mantis snapped. ‘For her own sake. If our maker catches up with her, she’ll be put back in a laboratory. Don’t you think I
don’t know what that’s like?’

‘I know you know.’ The voice, caressing, sympathetic. And I thought to myself, without understanding how I knew:
that’s a male voice.
I edged closer to the chamber door
and looked through the crack.

Mantis was sitting on the bed, straight-backed, like a skin-and-bone doll in her leather harness. Her coiling hair was tightly braided and haunt-energy flickered over her skin like lightning.
I’d seen her as an ancient warrior, and also as one of the Changed, and now I saw her for the first time as an excissiere. Whatever Gennera had done to her – if she had –
she’d been designed as a warrior.

A vulpen sat at her feet. It –
he
– wore a billowing black robe, pooling out over the floor like ink. All hollows and shadows, I thought, almost too fascinated to feel
repelled. Almost. His head was more like a beaked skull, as though the engineers of the Changed had decided to dispense with the soft flesh, paring down to edge and blade. His long fingers held
Mantis’s hand, gripping tight, their curving nails meshing together.

Lost children, and deadly.

‘Have you spoken to the Queen?’ the vulpen said, and my ears pricked up.