Winterstrike (42 page)

‘Where’s Thea?’ Alleghetta hissed. ‘Why isn’t she with you?’

I was in no mood to be diplomatic. ‘She was too drunk. We took her into the winter garden and left her there.’

Alleghetta turned on me as if about to strike. Another team of excissieres sprinted past, wounds glowing and shifting. Bit late, I thought. ‘How could she get drunk at a time like
this?’

‘Because she’s an alcoholic, Mother.’ Alleghetta was taking it as a personal affront, which I supposed was fair.

‘The winter garden’s that way.’ I pointed. ‘I suggest you go and find her. We’ll meet you outside if we can.’

Giving Alleghetta no time to argue, we made for the doors at the side of the building. I didn’t want to meet Mantis again, and I couldn’t help wondering who – or what –
might be accompanying her.

I wasn’t happy to be proved right. We just couldn’t get to the doors: there was too great a crush. Shouts and the sound of weapons fire from behind made it impossible to head back
the way we’d come. Then I remembered the stairs onto the gallery that led in the direction of the winter garden, on the opposite side of the building. Holding hands, we ran up the stairs. The
corridor was deserted. We hastened along it until we found an open door. Inside, on the other side of the building from the ballroom, there was a long room. A series of small tables and some stuffy
formal portraits suggested that this was one of the supper rooms used by the Matriarchy for visiting dignitaries. Another flight of windows looked out across Midis, sparkling with frost. Canteley
and I ran to the windows and opened one that led out onto the balcony.

Outside, cushioned from the tumult within, the air was suddenly very quiet. It reminded me of Ombre itself, the still heart of winter. But I could hear distant shouts from the front of the
building, and as I leaned over the balcony to see if there was a way down, movement attracted my attention. I heard Canteley gasp.

A demothea was standing on the parapet overlooking the Long Reach, poised like a dancer. I recognized her in spite of the changes. Her back was slightly arched and one foot was placed forward,
the toe pointed. She’d got rid of her Calmaretto clothes and wore something tight and banded, with coils and drifts of loose material that reflected her limbs. Her sharp face was upraised to
the balcony. Under the snaky mass of hair, her face was probably still more human than it should have been, though elongated and different about the jaw and the hollows of her eyes. Her cheekbones
stood out like blades. An ice sculpture, I thought, almost translucent.

‘Hello, Leretui,’ I said. Her voice floated dreamlike up from the parapet, but there was a sharpness in it and a grating hiss which wasn’t human at all.

‘My name is Shorn.’

All right,’ I said. ‘Be Shorn, then. What do you want?’

‘Winterstrike.’

If you’ve never had any power, and then some of it is given to you, sometimes you become what you’ve most hated. I don’t know how fine a line there is between envy and hate:
not fine enough, if Shorn was anything to go by.

Canteley was gripping the balcony. ‘Tui, I mean, Shorn – won’t you just come home?’ A child’s plea that I couldn’t have made.
Can’t things just go
back to normal?
But Canteley was old enough to know how impossible that was, even if there hadn’t been the sounds of gunfire behind us. I’d like to say that Shorn’s face
softened, that some remnant of love for her little sister was enough to bring her back, just for a moment, but the white face staring up at us remained the same grinning mask. Then she flipped over
and up in a blur, and was down onto the canal.

‘Tui!’ Canteley shouted. Moving almost as quickly, she fled along the balcony to where a spiral stair stretched into the gardens. She ran across the snow to the parapet, with myself
close behind, then went over the edge and vanished.

It was my turn to shout. I flung myself at the parapet and saw that it retreated down to the surface of the Long Stretch in a series of steep, elongated steps. Canteley was scrambling over the
last one of these. I stopped to slip on my skates and that was the undoing of both of us.

It glided out from the shadows of the parapet, its robe swirling like a blizzard, just as it must have done all those months before. I glimpsed Shorn a short distance along the canal, watching
and waiting, ready for flight. The vulpen seized Canteley around the waist and she screamed, but it was already skating fast down the Long Reach, with Canteley balanced on its hip like a captured
doll.

I dropped straight to the ice and started skating, not stopping to think, just moving fast. I was damned if I’d lose another sister to the Changed, but it seemed to me as I skated that
this was truly the end: the city would fall and Calmaretto with it, and if we did not die, then we would go to Earth and start again in another world, without my mothers, without Shorn. And what
the hell had happened to Hestia? And the Centipede Queen?

The vulpen was skating faster than I could, faster than any human. As I followed, the cold air slammed into my lungs and made my feet feel leaden. In contrast, the vulpen skated with effortless
grace, gliding along the length of the Reach with its robes whirling about it like snow. To think of it as merely an animal no longer made sense. I knew then that this must have been what Shorn had
seen: perhaps half conscious of the change she was about to undergo, she’d recognized a dignity in the thing she had met, and this was why there had been so little remorse within her.

But there was no sign of Shorn now. She seemed to have been swallowed by ice and lamplight and shadows, and her disappearance brought my heart into my throat. I had no doubt that if she felt she
needed to, she’d skate out of the night and take me down. We were nearing the end of the Reach now. I glanced back over my shoulder and saw a flickering brightness. The Winter Palace was on
fire. A drift of smoke, fragile as a ghost along the Reach, filled my mouth with the choking bitterness of ire-palm. Despite everything, I hoped my mothers had got out alive.

‘Canteley!’ I shouted after the retreating figure of the vulpen, more to give myself a measure of courage than anything else. ‘Hold on! I’m coming!’

Next moment, as if my cry had opened a door in the air, they were gone. I slid to a disbelieving stop, skates grinding on the ice, and looked frantically around.

We’d almost reached the end of the Reach, a T-junction where, in summer, a canal called Fountain Break ran parallel with one of the main lower promenades of the city. There were
cafés along the length of Fountain Break and as its name suggested, a series of waterspouts provided coolness and ornamentation. Now, in winter, these central fountains were frozen tumbles
of ice: they were left until spring, and there was a tradition of using the icicles in divination, examining the patterns they made and reading the results. All they spoke of to me now was failure.
There was no sign of Canteley or her abductor.

I called her name and there was no reply. She hadn’t made a sound since the vulpen seized her and that made me think that it had knocked her out, or drugged her. It wasn’t like my
little sister to bear things quietly. I bent down, fearing at any moment a bolt between my shoulder blades, and examined the surface of the ice. A thin, faint line told me that they might have
taken the turn to the left, so I skated along it, weaving in and out of the masses of frozen water.

Then, a short distant along Fountain Break, something appeared which gave me hope. It was a culvert, leading under the bank to form a low, rough arch. It probably joined up with one of the other
links of the canal network. I didn’t like going into it unarmed, but I didn’t think I had a choice. I skated into the culvert. It took my eyes a moment to adjust to the darkness and
when they did so, I saw that I’d been wrong. The culvert was a dead end, terminating in a wall of ancient bricks. I was about to turn and skate out again when a very faint sound caught my
attention. It was as though something had scraped against stone. Probably a rat, I thought, but it was worth investigating. Cautiously, I moved forward.

The scraping came again, then stopped. I waited for a moment, fearing a trap. Looking around the corner, I saw a line of barrels. At first I thought this must be the entrance to some kind of
storage cellar: perhaps one of the waterfront bars kept its stocks down here. Then I realized that the barrels, which were made of some rubbery substance, had originally been floating and were now
locked into the ice. This wasn’t a storage place, but part of the canal barrage, used to regulate the water levels along with the complex systems of sluices and cisterns that lay beneath the
city. At the end of spring, when the meltwater poured down from the heights, Winterstrike had in the last few hundred years been prone to floods. The barrages were emergency measures.

And someone lithe could easily have clambered around it. There was a narrow ledge running along the side of the arch, about two feet above the ice line, enough for a canal worker to sidle her
way along in pursuit of her duties. Now, it wasn’t necessary until one got to the barrels themselves, as one could skate over the ice, but the base of the barrels was wider than their upper
parts – they looked as though they were half submerged – and I’d have to step up onto the ledge to get by.

That wasn’t the hard part. The difficult bit was not knowing – or rather, suspecting – what might lie on the other side. I listened. The scraping had stopped, but I thought I
knew what it had been – the sound of bladed feet on stone. Reaching the barrels, I hauled myself up onto the ledge and looked through. Balance was difficult with skates, but I didn’t
want to waste time putting them on again when I’d crossed over. I half expected to find myself staring straight down into the face of the vulpen, but there was nothing on the other side
except more of the passage. Here, however, it was lit by lamps and I could see that the ice was scratched and scraped with a myriad twisting tracks. It wasn’t just the vulpen and Canteley who
had come through here. I dropped onto the floor and skated forward. I thought I knew what was up ahead: the same low arch and narrow expanse of tunnel, so I was startled to find that the space in
which I was moving had suddenly opened out. And I wasn’t alone.

Hastily, I hid behind one of the thick columns that reached down from the roof. The tunnel had become a hall: low-ceilinged but immense, and relatively brightly lit. After a moment I recognized
what it was. The culvert led into one of the big cisterns that lay underneath the city and it was in one of these that I now found myself. Not to mention the crowd of the Changed that thronged its
opposite end.

Luckily for me, they were facing away from the entrance, so no one had spotted me. I made sure to slide around the column, so that I would also be invisible to anyone coming into the chamber
behind me. I saw aspiths decked primly in fluted black dresses, all ruffles and frills, sulpice in leather and brass. There were a handful of vulpen among them, but their robes were white and
shadow-grey and if the one who had snatched Canteley stood there, I could not pick him out from his fellows. Canteley herself was nowhere to be seen and one of the vulpen’s robes was spotted
with bright splashes of what might be fresh blood. I swallowed hard and made myself keep watching. There was a palpable air of anticipation in the chamber, an electricity. A moment later, I
discovered what they’d all been waiting for. There was a raised platform at the end of the room and Mantis stepped onto it, followed by Shorn. My sister’s unhuman hand clasped
Canteley’s.

She followed Shorn meekly onto the platform with a bewildered air that seemed foreign to the girl I knew, even given the circumstances, and this lent weight to my suspicion that the vulpen had
somehow drugged her.

‘Look!’ Shorn cried to the crowd in her new voice. She raised Canteley’s hand high, swinging her arm up, and a murmur went through the crowd. ‘This is what I used to look
like!’

Mantis grasped Canteley by the shoulders and turned her this way and that so that the crowd could get a proper view of her face.

‘I am a Harn of Calmaretto!’ Shorn cried. ‘I am demothea; I am of the Changed.’

Mantis said from the side, ‘She is our pioneer.’ A look of affection crossed her face. She reached out and touched Shorn’s shoulder. ‘She crosses boundaries, she has
shown us the way.’

It all seemed very staged to me, choreographed. Then, ‘She’s a city aristocrat,’ came an objecting voice from the crowd. I couldn’t tell by the accent who, or what, had
spoken. ‘You told us Winterstrike would be ours. But this is a human.’

‘I’m not human!’ Shorn hissed.

‘Human enough!’ The crowd gave an uneasy shift of position and I thought I knew who it was who had spoken: a tall sulpice in a flowing robe of red and grey, a parody of Matriarchal
garb which, in the city beyond, would have earned a fine or imprisonment under the Dress Code. ‘Human until last week, and Changed because of what? An experiment begun in a Matriarchy
laboratory!’

A note of alarm flashed over Mantis’s features and I wondered what kind of story she’d been planning to concoct about Shorn. A religious transformation, perhaps? Some kind of
miracle? But the truth seemed to have seeped out, as truth will.

‘She—’ Mantis began, but Shorn was obviously keen to test her new abilities. In the blink of an eye, a long black whip shot out over the flinching heads of the crowd and
flickered across the head of the dissenter. There was a burst of what, in other circumstances, I would have described as blacklight. The tall sulpice fell as if poleaxed. Then the whip was gone and
Shorn was smiling. The crowd fell silent. Very slowly, the sea of people around the fallen body of the sulpice melted away, until she lay unmoving in a huddle of red and grey. Only a vulpen
remained, staring down at the corpse with its sad dark gaze. Canteley gasped audibly, as if she’d woken up, and I could see her trying to tug her hand away from her sister’s grip.
Shorn, however, did not let go.

The mood of the room was altering fast. I could feel fear building up from the crowd, washing over me in waves. Mantis evidently felt it as well, because as the crowd took a step forward, moving
unanimously, her smile faltered. Shorn wasn’t paying attention. The whip cracked again over the heads of the crowd and this time they surged towards the stage. I heard Canteley scream. Next
moment, I was out from behind my hiding place, shoving and pushing through the mass of the Changed. I was, suddenly, pressed up behind the vulpen, my face against the musky robes. A hard, knobbly
spine thudded against my cheekbone. With a strength borne of rage I gave it a great push and the vulpen stumbled, then fell, carried down by my impetus and the weight of the crowd. I leaped over
into the small gap left by its fall and found myself at the front of the stage. I was looking at Shorn’s feet and she was looking over my head at the crowd. If I thought about that whip,
I’d be lost, so I seized the front of the platform and hauled myself over it. Mantis whirled as she realized someone was coming onto the stage. I hit her full in the face and felt my knuckles
crunch painfully on gristle. I knocked her off balance and as she went down I saw the crumpled imprint of my punch, as though I’d hit a sheet of plastic instead of a face. Then it rounded
out, like someone popping out the dent on the door of a vehicle. I chopped down at Shorn’s wrist and felt something snap. Canteley’s hand finally broke free. Then the demothea was
turning on me, whirling, and the instant between recognition and the whip flash was enough. I grasped Canteley by the wrist and dived for the back of the stage.