Winterstrike (33 page)

‘What about my soul?’ I demanded. ‘There’s a piece missing, and I want it back.’

‘I’ll speak to Gennera,’ my mother said, and I knew she lied.

‘Do that,’ I said.

‘You can go now,’ Alleghetta said. ‘I’m sure you need your rest.’

It was a dismissal, not a suggestion. I left the parlour without looking back and sought the relative sanctuary of my own room. Leretui was gone from the passage window and I had a duty to
myself, as well.

Once in my chamber, I stripped off my dusty, dirty skirts and ran a bath. The steaming water, immediately available, was more of a luxury than I could have imagined. I sank down into it and
tried to submerge my anxieties in its depths. But they kept floating back to the surface. Someone had tried to kill me. Several people had been responsible for my kidnapping. I couldn’t
believe that this would just
-go away,
now that Leretui was home. Maybe she was the target and not me, but one thing was clear: Leretui was wanted, by all manner of factions. Going back to
life as it had been was no longer a viable possibility. I got out of the bath feeling cold, despite the humid warmth of the room, and dressed quickly. Time to find out what my mothers were really
up to.

By the time I headed down the hall, it was dusk. I was hungry, after several days of self-imposed rations. I wondered how the Centipede Queen was faring: somehow, I’d had
the impression that she didn’t need to eat. It wasn’t that I owed her any loyalty, but the Queen had intrigued me, and she’d helped me, too, which meant a lot. She might even have
saved my life. She’d told me to go, but I still felt a twinge of guilt about that.

I wasn’t prepared to go in search of supper until I’d located Leretui, but in an anticlimactic moment, I did so in the dining room.

‘Ah, there you are,’ said Thea, as though I’d merely stepped out for a constitutional stroll. She was seated along the table, sipping something sticky and yellow that smelled
of fruit: my mother liked her sweet cocktails as well as her sherry. ‘How are you feeling, dear?’ Her smile was as sickly as her drink.

‘How do you
think?

‘You must have something to eat, dear,’ Thea said, anxiously. I didn’t trust myself to speak. Instead, I nodded and sat down at the opposite end of the table from Alleghetta,
who might have been carved out of stone.

‘Where’s my sister?’

‘In her room,’ Alleghetta said.

‘Well,’ Thea added quickly, ‘isn’t this nice? All the family together again. It won’t be long before Canteley’s old enough to eat with us, too.’

‘Oh, do stop babbling, Thea,’ Alleghetta snapped.

‘Where’s Canteley?’ I asked. The meal already had a dreamlike quality: this morning, I’d been out on the Crater Plain dodging vulpen. ‘I haven’t seen her
yet.’

‘She’s been at her lessons all day. She’s doing very well. Won’t you have some soup, dear?’ Thea looked as though she was on the verge of collapse. One of our
silent serving maids wafted in with a tureen. A thousand meals in this very dining room, a thousand thin soups served out of this same tureen of faded ancient china. It made me depressed all over
again. I started thinking about Earth to cheer myself up: I still hadn’t relinquished that particular dream.

‘I’ll have a little soup,’ I said. We ate in silence: all through the soup itself, and then the meat in fruit sauce, then a sorbet which tasted as cold as the dusk outside
looked, and then tea. It was all remarkably tasteless – strange, after the erratic meals of the last few days.

I would be surprised, I thought, if Leretui was still here in the morning. I didn’t think anything we could do would be enough to keep her within Calmaretto’s walls. But as usual,
I’d reckoned without Alleghetta.

Excusing myself abruptly, I headed for my sister’s chamber. They’d put her in her old room, not the Malcontent’s sealed prison, but I couldn’t see this as evidence of any
softening on Alleghetta’s part. But when I knocked on the door, there was no answer.

‘Leretui?’ I was beginning to get déjà vu when my sister’s voice snapped, ‘Go away!’

‘Are you all right?’

‘Yes.
Now leave me alone.’ The same sort of conversation we’d had growing up. Some things never change. At least she was still in there. But although tiredness was
starting to beat down on me in waves, I did not seek my bed. I crept back downstairs, feeling like the child who’d tried to eavesdrop on her mothers’ dinner parties: that fascinating,
golden world of adult conversation which, once I’d joined it, turned out to be merely dull. I wished Hestia was here. But Hestia was gone, who knew where, and Leretui had turned into Shorn,
and I was alone.

Except for Canteley. My little sister ambushed me halfway down the passage, eyes wide.

‘Essegui! You’ve come back! What about Tui? Is she with you?’ A torrent of questions, all falling over one another.

‘Yes, and yes. She’s in her room – the old one,’ I added hastily.

‘But where did you
go
?’

‘Somewhere very far away. But we’re home now.’ I felt my tongue stumble over the noun.

You were very brave, to follow her,’ Canteley said. I didn’t disabuse her. Our mothers wouldn’t have told her about the geise, and although the servants gossiped, it
didn’t seem to have reached my sister’s ears. Or perhaps Alleghetta had been more prudent than I’d thought, and news of the majike’s visit had not got out.

My little sister lowered her voice. ‘Did you see –
him
?’ Her eyes grew even wider with the transgression of uttering the forbidden pronoun and my heart sank. Romanticism
could be dangerous and never more so than now.

Gently, I said, ‘No. No, I didn’t. He – it – didn’t rescue her, Canteley. She rescued herself.’

And as far as I knew, it might even have been the truth.

I made Canteley go back to bed. There were voices coming from Alleghetta’s parlour. I kept an eye out for weir-wards, but the only one I glimpsed was a faint, screaming soul that saw me,
recognized me for one of the household, and drifted away. I suppressed a grin: Alleghetta would have done well to have reconfigured the house to react to me, too, but perhaps that would have been
too troublesome. It was always my mother’s weakness, I thought, to underestimate her children. I put my ear to the parlour door and listened.

‘. . . don’t now know what to expect.’ That was Alleghetta, speaking tightly.

‘Of course not.’ A woman’s voice, not Thea but familiar. It spoke in smooth, reassuring tones and there was a twinge inside my head, at once and unlike the geise. The majike,
of course. The little centipede – which I’d missed when I undressed and bathed – crept from my sleeve and sat on the back of my hand, rearing up as if listening. I didn’t
know how to discourage it and besides, it might be that the Queen had a right to know. I left the creature where it was.

‘How could you know, when they have not told you? But I understand your suspicions.’

‘We’ve
seen
them.’ Thea spoke urgently, and all at once I realized where Canteley had got her manner of tumbling speech. I’d never noticed it before.

‘In the house?’ the smooth voice said.

‘No. Not as close as that.’ There was an unfamiliar note of relief in Alleghetta’s voice. ‘But in the garden, on the canal. They seem to float.’

‘It’s an illusion. They’re good at that. They exude mental alterators, it was part of their design specifications.’

That may be so,’ Alleghetta said, and it seemed to me that she shared my unease. ‘But it isn’t natural.’

‘Nor is disappearing,’ Thea said, still rushing, as if they were trying to keep her silent. ‘She vanished out of a locked room, right under our noses, and came back the same
way.’

‘I doubt that,’ the majike said. I pictured her squatting in the middle of the parlour like a toad. I could almost feel Alleghetta, staring.

‘What do you mean?’ Alleghetta said.

‘I think it is much more likely that on that first occasion, your daughter was in that room all the time. You just didn’t see her.’

‘Impossible. My other daughter was the first to find her missing. She searched the room. Although Essegui has not always been the most obedient child—’ I could hear her mouth
turning downward, too, and thought:
too bad.
‘—I do not suspect her of any collusion.’

‘I’m not suggesting that, either. Didn’t you hear what I said? That they can create and control illusions?’

‘You mean she made Essegui think she wasn’t there?’ Thea said.

‘Yes. And then someone came for her. But now – her abilities will be growing.’

Alleghetta was silent. I imagined her mulling over the majike’s remarks, trying to assess what manner of thing she was dealing with, in her daughter and her adviser both. At this point, I
thought I heard a faint sound behind me. I spun round but there was no one there. I told myself it was only one of the weir-wards, briefly active.

‘But a – a demothea?’ Thea said. Ironic, I reflected, that the word contained part of her name, as if the clue had been staring us in the face all the time and none of us had
grasped it.

‘Leretui was an ordinary enough child,’ Alleghetta said slowly, ‘if frail.’

‘Are you so sure?’

‘She suffered from fainting spells. That’s all.’

‘Demotheas are slow to mature,’ the majike said. ‘That was one of their flaws, perhaps the reason why so few survived. Many of them were wiped out in their hatcheries when the
Age of Children came to an end.’

‘If what you say about my daughter is true,’ Alleghetta said, ‘then what now?’
My daughter.
Never ‘our’, as though Alleghetta had herself given birth
to Leretui in some archaic manner, not merely lifted the mix of DNA from the vat.

‘Well,’ said Gennera Khine, as if amused. ‘It won’t be entirely your decision, believe me.’

‘We’ve done everything you asked.’ Alleghetta sounded sour again.

‘You have indeed,’ the majike said, soothing, ‘and I won’t cast you adrift. Don’t worry. I’ll take care of things.’

‘I cannot afford to lose any more status.’ Alleghetta sounded agitated. ‘The ball is in a few days’ time – I’m to be encouncilled then.’

‘I know. And so you will be. We’ll concoct a story. Leretui’s disgrace was a matter of public record, little could be done about it, even by me. This is different.’

I didn’t like the sound of that. Leretui might have changed -literally, from what the majike had said – but she was still my sister.

There were sounds from inside the parlour, indicative of movement. I backed hastily along the corridor and ran up to the landing. Soon there were footsteps on the stairs below. I looked down at
the sleek black head of Alleghetta – now devoid of her Ombre curls – the untidy blondish one of Thea, and the majike’s hat. She was pulling on her gloves as she walked. The lights
from the canal suggested that a sledge was waiting for her.

Thank you for coming,’ Alleghetta was saying, stiffly, as if forced.

‘We’re old friends, aren’t we?’ Gennera Khine said. There was a cosy note in her voice which made my skin creep. ‘Don’t worry. All will be well.’

I watched, covertly, as my mothers escorted her down the stairs and into the main hallway, moving across its black and red tiles like pieces in some ancient game. There was a blast of cold as
they opened the river door and through the coloured glass I saw the shadow of the majike moving down the path to the canal.

In spite of my exhaustion, however, I still couldn’t sleep. The geise might be gone, but my soul was still incomplete. At last I got out of bed and went to the window, throwing aside the
heavy drapes. The majike’s sledge had long gone and so had the bulk of the daytime canal traffic. Beneath its blanket of snow the garden looked peaceful, and I had to remind myself that this
was still a city at war. I’d looked up the newsview a little earlier in the evening, but it had held nothing of great interest: it seemed that my own journey had taken place in a lull. It
wouldn’t last. I tried to imagine Winterstrike under weapons fire, perhaps even occupied, but the attempt failed: the city still held the stifling sense of continuity that it had always done.
I wondered whether they’d repaired the bridge to the bell tower, and went over to the anti-scribe to take a look. If I couldn’t sleep, I might as well read.

There were a few headlines about the bridge. Caud had been blamed, and had not bothered to issue a denial. Repairs had already started, but the bell tower was off limits. Just as well. As I was
scrolling down the latest report, the scribe chimed with an incoming message.

‘Accept,’ I told it.

‘Esse?’ My cousin Hestia’s face appeared on the screen, curiously fractured and pixellated.

‘Hestia? You’re very faint. Where are you?’

‘I’m on Earth. We—’ Hestia glanced over her shoulder at a background of static.

‘I didn’t catch that. What are you doing on Earth?’

‘. . . to get out of the Noumenon. I—’

But her image was gone. I tried to put a track on it, which ended in a jumble of numbers: no address that I recognized and one that would not allow incoming messages. I sat staring at the scribe
in dismay, thinking
What now?

It was very late. I hadn’t thought I’d been lying there for all that length of time. I switched off the mainscreen of the scribe, first asking it to alert me if there were any more
messages, and went back to the window to draw the drapes.

Someone was hurrying down the path. I caught sight of a figure, swathed in a heavy coat, disappearing between the weed-wood trees, and I recognized her walk. It was Leretui.

So, I thought, she’d got out after all. I threw on boots and my greatcoat over the shift and hurried down the stairs.

The river door was still bolted shut and a blacklight crackle showed that the weir-wards were in place. I knew where Leretui had gone: the little cellar door that had once led below the building
and now opened out onto a short flight of steps. It was warded, but as a child, Hestia had discovered the ward key and all of us knew how to turn it on and off. It had been years since I’d
used the cellar door; I’d imagined that the codes would have been changed a long time before, but it seemed they had not. Sure enough, the door was ajar. My sister’s footsteps led out
across the snow like the trail of a mouse. I followed.