Winterstrike (28 page)

‘They’re firing!’ Rubirosa sounded more offended than anything else. There was a watery gleam across the cabin and the manifestation of our haunt-array was back. This time, her
face was bloodied.

‘Damage sustained to arc-side stabilizers,’ she said. The wailing which had previously accompanied her was now considerably more pronounced.

‘Chain security,’ Rubirosa proclaimed.

‘That’s it,’ I said. ‘We’re leaving.’ I punched in the first of the destination codes and we shot towards the Chain.

When you travel through haunt-space, you die. I can’t say it doesn’t hurt. It’s like having the air torn from your lungs, the breath snatched from your mouth. All moisture
flees: you are desiccated, mummified. Catch a glimpse of yourself on the journey and you will see your own nightmare self, eyes wide and staring, hair astream, hands clawed. I gather it’s
fashionable to do this, among certain social circles. Mine wasn’t one of them.

Rubirosa and I watched our own swift demise in the reflective window of the viewport as the array hurled us into haunt-space. Since neither of us were trained pilots in this particular realm,
all we could do was remain in our chairs, paralysed, dead, as the aftergone of the Eldritch Realm swirled around us. We shot through entire histories: mutant faces from the Memnos Matriarchy and
the Age of Children, hands clawing at the sides of our craft as we passed by, beings striding beyond the perimeters of vision, unguessable, unknown. Sometimes, I knew, they became weary of the
constant transgression and seized a ship: there were a lot of lost vessels in haunt-space. But we were not one of them. With a shudder and a gasp and a cry we hurtled out of the other end of the
Chain. Rubirosa and I were reanimated under Earth’s moon and Earth lay below.

As we reappeared, so did the representation of the array. She emerged with a shriek, spinning wildly. Her limbs were contorted and blood arced out into the air, to spatter through me. I
didn’t need her presence to tell me that the ship was in trouble. Earth swung up below, a wheeling azure ball. A scatter of lights skeined down darkside. Rubirosa swore.

‘Moonstation requesting add-on destination codes!’ the array shrieked, and tore her hair.

At this rate,’ Rubirosa unnecessarily informed me, ‘we might as well give them all of them. Since we’ll be coming down in bits.’

‘We need to head for Ropa. My mother should have sent the coordinates through.’

I was still trying to process everything that Sulie had said to me and it didn’t make easy processing.
Go to Earth, to Ropa. There are people there, servants of the Centipede Queen.
Tell them she's missing, if they don’t already know.
And when I’d asked – Who are these people? What are they doing there? – because I’d known that the Queen had
come from Malay, on the other side of the planet from drowned Ropa – she’d told me that they were a research team.

And they’d been hired to look for demotheas. Matters were beginning to knit together, into a pattern that I did not like the look of.

I didn’t have time to think about this now. The ship was starting to shake, a deep through-the-bone shuddering that I’d felt once before, on a flyer stricken above the mountains just
outside Winterstrike. We’d crashed then, but we’d been flying low and over trees. This time, after all, I’d only just been reanimated, on our re-entry from haunt-space. I
didn’t fancy going back into the aftergone quite so soon.

The array was still screaming. I slammed a hand down onto the console and shut her off, taking the ship back onto manual. It was no comfort to know that I’d only ever done this before on
simulators from this altitude. I hauled the ship around out of the path of a satellite station, looming up in front, keyed in a hopeful-but-optimistic re-entry angle and took the ship down. There
was a ripping sound from behind me, and a moment later I saw a fragment of nacelle fall away and spin planetwards.

Someone said, ‘Best let me do it.’

Rubirosa said, ‘Who the fuck are you?’

I turned, to find myself staring into the flayed face of the Library.

‘You’re back!’ – to the Library. And to Rubirosa, And you can see her!’

‘Haunt-space,’ the Library said modestly, ‘seems to agree with me. You can see me because this is a haunt-vessel. I’m linked into its array. What’s left of
it.’ She passed a sinewed hand over the console and the manual array flickered in its wake. Rubirosa was still gaping.

‘But my armour—’ she began.

‘I reasoned with it,’ the Library said.

I said, ‘This is the Library of Caud.’

‘What, all of it?’

‘No,’ the Library said, modestly. ‘Just an archive.’

‘Some archive,’ Rubirosa said, impressed.

Earth was a lot closer now. We were flying in over darkside and the ship was still screaming and shaking, but at least it was remaining intact. The Library’s hands were a blur:
representation only. Her essence was inside the array; I could see the codes whipping through her half-solid flesh, like the wounds displayed by an excissiere.

I was familiar with Earth from viewcasts, of course, but it was the old atlas at Calmaretto that came most readily to mind, the skeins and patterns of islands, the fractured lands between.
There, a patch of white that had to be the Thibetan island shamandoms, running all the way up through the Siberian Sea. Here, the ridges of the Americas, barriering the Atlan Ocean.

I turned to the Library. ‘Where are we due to land?’ Might as well be optimistic.

There,’ the Library said, and pointed to a shimmer of white peaks.

‘Isn’t that Ropa, there?’ Rubirosa asked. ‘The whole continent’s nothing but a swamp.’

‘Fine with me,’ I said. Swamps sounded soft. We were out of darkside now and flying lower, curving around the world. The ochre splash of the Dahomey lands was beneath us, the
mountain cones rising out of shallow seas, scattered with the white spires of the great cities of Afrique. Possibly just as well that the Library didn’t plan to land us there; I wasn’t
sure where the Afriquenne Matriarchies stood with Mars.

But politics weren’t my main preoccupation right now. Earth was coming up fast. The Library said, ‘Excuse me,’ and vanished in a rush of data into the array. We shot over
sandbanks and long, snaking rivers, over deserted shorelines and low ranges of hilly islands that looked as if another tide would submerge them completely. The viewport was partly obscured by smoke
and I realized this was coming from us.

The Library reappeared, no more than a shadow.

‘Controls!’ she ordered. ‘Go to manual!’ and I grabbed the flight control and tried to glide. This was not completely unsuccessful. We spun, once, causing curses from
Rubirosa and a stream of instructions from the Library that, unfortunately, I failed to understand. We flipped again, hung briefly over the uprushing world and then crashlanded, right side up, in a
morass of reed and water and peat.

The silence was deafening and brief. A moment later, the haunt-array kicked back in with a shriek. The Library strolled over to her, walking easily on the tilted floor, and took the spirit by
the arms. Then she folded her neatly down into a little smoking pill and swallowed her whole. I think this unnerved me more than the crash.

That’s better,’ the Library said. ‘They don’t like releasing information, sometimes. Had a hard job getting it out of her on the way in.’

‘Where are we?’ Rubirosa asked. The viewport was too mired in black spatters of peat for me to be able to see out, so I disentangled myself from my seat and lurched down to the
hatch, holding on to the console as I did so and discovering several new areas of injury: bruised ribs, a banged shin and several cuts where my knuckles had met the surface of the array. I could
not have cared less; I felt lucky to be alive.

The hatch was stuck. I kicked it, and nearly fell into the marsh.

‘How safe is this thing?’ I shouted to the Library. From the pungent scent of burning, not very. Rubirosa joined me at the hatch and together we helped one another down onto a reed
bed. The ship shuddered: it was starting to sink. A thick column of black smoke was rising from its side and spiralling up into a pale grey sky. Rubirosa and I hobbled along the reed bed as fast as
we could. My concern now was not just that the ship might blow, but also the kind of attention we’d attracted on the way down: I didn’t have a clear idea of Earth’s regulations
but
unauthorized ship, lack of proper permits, forced re-entry, crashlanding
did not inspire me with confidence. It didn’t bode well for the ultimate success of our hastily planned
mission, either.

‘Bit bleak,’ said Rubirosa, leaping nimbly across to a causeway. She was right. The saltmarsh extended as far as the horizon: a labyrinth of reed beds and causeways, which might or
might not have been human-made. As far as the eye could see lay a wilderness of silver-grey water, the reeds bleached fawn, with frothy plumes like smoke, and the black crumbling earth rising low
out of the water. The air smelled of salt and wet and rot. There was no sign of any habitation.

‘How long does this go on for?’ Rubirosa asked the Library, clearly underwhelmed.

A thousand miles, maybe? Perhaps more. This has changed a little since I last took data in.’

‘This is the north of the northern hemisphere, yes?’

‘Yes. A great centre of civilization, once. Cities and spaceports and all.’

I balanced on a narrow strip of earth and looked down into the swirling water. Not far away, a startled flock of birds flew up from the reeds, black against the pale sky. From the position of
the sun, which was low, this felt like mid- to late afternoon, but I could not be sure. And of those cities, now?’

‘They say their bells toll under the waves,’ the Library said. ‘That if you look down at low tide, you can see roads and towers. There’s the ruin of a great city a little
further to the north. But the tides took almost everything, over centuries. Folk moved east to the more developed lands. Here, they were too proud, so it’s said, to take action. In the east,
people were more accustomed to disaster.’

I stared into the water and thought of cities. ‘Is anyone likely to come after us?’ I asked.
Apart from Gennera, that is.
‘We must have violated any number of
laws.’

‘I’m not aware of any broadcasts,’ the Library said. ‘But whoever was after you is unlikely to give up.’

‘We’ll have been pretty visible,’ Rubirosa agreed. She looked back to where the roof of the ship was still visible, but only barely. The smoke was finally dissipating, smearing
the air.

‘Better keep walking,’ I told her.

By early evening neither the ship nor the smoke from the crash was visible. I was growing very tired of saltmarsh. But the sky had stayed empty: only a very faint contrail, far
above, as some vessel sought orbit. No one had come looking, but that didn’t necessarily mean anything. I hoped they’d assume we’d died, but if I’d been in their position, I
wouldn’t have assumed a thing.

I was also growing more and more certain that the causeways had been made by sentient beings. They seemed too regular, too straight. The Library, when consulted, confessed that she did not know.
I pointed out the interwoven mesh of reeds, so tightly and carefully twined together that it made a strong floating base for the causeway. ‘That isn’t natural,’ I said.

‘Doesn’t mean a human made it,’ Rubirosa pointed out.

‘What else?’

‘Earth is full of the Changed.’ The marauder spoke with an authority that irritated me. ‘Many water people – the kappa, the deinah, the phine. A big thing in engineering,
once – they wanted to make sure people would cope with the water levels.’

I thought back to my own dry Mars and shuddered. There, the Small Sea was the largest sea and all this water made me feel weak at the bone. I said as much. And I couldn’t help thinking
about demotheas, too.

‘Do any of these amphibious folk live here?’

‘I don’t know,’ Rubirosa said, uneasy. ‘But this has to lead somewhere.’

And indeed, it did.

TWENTY-THREE

It was as though the village manifested out of thin air: one moment the saltmarsh was empty apart from the desolate call of birds and the slight slosh of water, the next, we
were on the edge of a settlement of round huts. I pulled Rubirosa behind a wall, which seconds before had resembled a bank of reeds. The Library walked on, fading as she did so. I could smell smoke
over the salt-and-bullrush odour of the marsh.

‘Where’s she gone?’ Rubirosa murmured. Her hand showed the tips of weapons.

‘I don’t know—’ but a minute later, the Library was back, striding stiffly out of the air.

‘There,’ I said.

‘Where?’

‘I’ll speak to your armour,’ the Library said, with what might have been a sigh. A moment later, Rubirosa took a step back and said, ‘All right, I can see you now. What
have you found?’

‘No one’s home.’

‘What? Nobody?’

The Library shook her grim head. ‘It’s deserted. Can’t have been that long ago, though.’

There’s smoke,’ I said.

‘More than that,’ said the Library. ‘There’s food on tables.’

Cautiously, we followed her into the settlement’s one and only street: a narrow lane between the huts, ending in a perimeter wall that, curiously, ran along only one side.

‘Maybe they’re all out hunting,’ Rubirosa said, doubtful.

‘Maybe they’re hiding,’ I said aloud, and wished I hadn’t. Whoever had built the settlement had done so with some degree of expertise: the walls of the huts were tightly
woven from reed and the roof beams, which were a mixture of wood and metal, fitted snugly. But they were still primitive in design. A central hole lay above a firepit in each hut and the furniture
was basic, consisting mainly of low tables, also woven, baskets, and blankets that seemed mainly to consist of reed pith and feathers.

‘Know anything about the people here?’ Rubirosa asked the Library.

‘Nothing at all. They lived like this on Earth, in the ages before the ages. Before the Flood. Or so it’s told.’ Which meant ‘no’ too, when all was said and done. I
glanced out of the doorway behind us.