Winterstrike (43 page)

My main thought was of getting free of Mantis and Shorn. My example seemed to have inspired the crowd and they were following me, a tide of the Changed breaking over the front of the platform
and submerging Mantis and Shorn beneath them. Canteley and I made a run for the side of the stage and jumped down.

A passage snaked off into darkness. We bolted along it like rats. Halfway down it, past a bend, the lamps on the walls were once more lit: we were running over damp stone. We followed the
passage upwards.

‘The vulpen—’ Canteley panted.

‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘No one will know.’

‘Tui knows!’

Suddenly I had an awful sense of history repeating itself.

‘Canteley,’ I said. ‘You don’t want to go back, do you?’

‘Of course not!’ We ran on and came to a flight of steps. There were cries from behind us, which reminded me of the scene at the Winter Palace. We seemed to be leaving disaster in
our wake – but as long as it stayed in our wake, I didn’t care.

The stairs were stone, and old. Something about them tugged at my memory, but I didn’t understand why until I reached the top. Here, an ancient iron door stood ajar; the metal polished to
a dull gleam that indicated that it had been cared for – this damp underworld was a haven for rust. I pulled it open and we stepped through into a vast, dim hall, with columns marching off
into the distance. And then I knew where we were. I’d been here before, watching as an aspith spied upon me. We were in the Temple of the Changed, which explained why there had been so many
of them in the cellars, and why those arches had been used. Had Shorn been told she’d rule here, Winterstrike’s transformed queen? If so, her palace was empty now.

At least, as far as I could see. The hall looked empty and yet it felt filled with presences: as I stared, trying to see into the gloom, something flitted quickly into the shadows.

‘What was that?’

‘Canteley, I don’t know.’ But at least now I knew how to get out. Assuming we weren’t stopped. Assuming we still had a home to go to. If Mantis and the vulpen had tried
to snatch Canteley once already – as a hostage, or something even more sinister than that, a replacement if anything happened to Shorn – then they’d know where to find us if we
went back home.

But there was another place that could be more easily defended. If we could reach it.

‘Follow me,’ I said to Canteley. We raced across the hall, footsteps echoing on marble that was slick with snow. At some point a window had been smashed, and the snow was already
piling in, lying in drifts under the sill and scattering in tentative fingers across the floor. With Canteley behind, I made for the shattered window rather than the main doors, which might still
be bolted.

We weren’t quite fast enough. Just as I got to the window and boosted Canteley over the sill, taking care to avoid the sharp edges, someone cried out from the other side of the room.

‘There they are!’

I didn’t stop to see who it was, but scrambled after Canteley. A shard of glass caught on the sleeve of my coat. I tore it free and dropped down onto the terrace, landing in a drift.
Canteley was already running in a panicking zigzag line across the terrace. I caught up with her and together we sped over the long courtyard. I glanced back once, to see the Temple of the Changed
rising behind me through the snow; its immense façade like a skeleton in the night. Ahead lay the crater, and the bell tower.

Ire-palm does not shatter or break. It eats, melts, devours. I’d seen on the antiscribe newsfeed that there was still something left of the bridge that led over the crater to the bell
tower, even though most of it had gone. It was fragile and I didn’t know whether it would bear the weight of both of us, but I am not heavily built and Canteley was a girl. I hoped it would
hold and I clung to that hope as I ran, with the snow starring cold on my face and my boots slipping and sliding on the black patches of ice that made the courtyard so treacherous.

It wasn’t until we drew close to the lip of the crater and saw the ruined middle section of the bridge with struts peeling away into empty air and the long drop, that I fully realized how
much damage had been done. I nearly turned back then. Nearly, but not quite. Canteley and I reached the edge of the crater and looked around.

The vulpen was skating across the snow, following the iced-over watercourse that led down the edge of the courtyard. His robe whipped out behind and his head swung from side to side, moving as a
predator scents the air. He didn’t need to smell us. We stood in plain view at the crater’s lip. The vulpen slowed a little, perhaps reasoning that the last place we’d be heading
was out across the bridge. The vulpen was wrong.

I looked at Canteley and saw her eyes become wide and frightened.

‘Essegui?’ she faltered.

‘I don’t think there’s any other way,’ I said.

She nodded, and swallowed. ‘Then – all right, then.’

I didn’t want to send her ahead of me, but nor did I want to risk the vulpen seizing her from behind. We stepped out onto the bridge. At this, its early stages, the bridge was as it had
always been: filigreed black ironstone with rubberized treads against the danger of ice. We ran along it, ready at any moment for the bridge to teeter and collapse. I chanced a quick look behind
and saw the vulpen pausing at the entrance to the bridge, its head on one side. Then it took a careful step forward, arching each foot so that the blades retracted into its feet, and started to
run.

We were coming to the shattered part of the bridge.

‘Hold my hand, Canteley,’ I said, and edged onto the narrow rim. With one hand I grasped the fragments of the rail, and Canteley did the same, creeping along at an agonizingly slow
pace while the vulpen followed. I could see other figures behind him, glimpsed in a shard of lamplight from the temple, and they looked like Mantis and Shorn.

I wanted to tell Canteley not to look down, but we had no choice if we weren’t to fall. The vulpen was close behind now, a few yards away, and I thought he was having an even harder time
than we were: his feet weren’t designed for this kind of motion. And we were nearly at the end of the gap.

‘Jump!’ I ordered. We landed on the edge of the gap and Can-teley’s foot slipped on a piece of broken metal. She nearly went into the gap, but she grasped a strut as she
slipped and I hauled her onto firmer ground. The whole bridge was starting to groan and shift as though it stood in a high wind and I was afraid that our movements might send it into destructive
resonance. We couldn’t turn back. We sprinted for the doors and behind me I heard a thud as the vulpen followed our lead and leaped. The bridge lurched, but did not fall. We reached the doors
and I put my eye to the pad, hoping that the events that had befallen the bridge hadn’t damaged the mechanism, or, once more, that what had been done to my soul hadn’t damaged that, as
well. The doors opened just as the vulpen lunged, and we were through and slamming the door shut behind us. I closed it on the vulpen’s arm and heard something crack. The vulpen gave a
whistling cry, whether of pain or surprise I neither knew nor cared. Then the door was shut and Canteley and I were alone.

My sister was shaking. ‘Can it get in?’

‘I hope not. We can get out through the base of the tower,’ I said, thinking of that earlier flight into the crater. In a sense, though, we’d just be going round and round:
back towards the arches from which we’d originally fled and full of vulpen. We’d have to go the other way.

But when we reached the entrance to the steps, we found that going down wasn’t possible either: the spiral stairs had been blasted apart. I heard movement, elsewhere in the tower. It
seemed our enemies had got here before us.

The only other option was up. I might be able to seal us off in the highest point, in the bell tower itself. We headed for the stairs. Memories of my usual duties were coming thick and fast. The
hole in my soul felt as though something had taken it by the edges and pulled, dragging it further apart as we climbed. Then the door of the bell tower was up ahead and I was racing towards it,
putting my eye to the scanner, feeling it read.

The door swung open and we fell through. I slammed it shut behind us, an echo of the main doors that, by now, the vulpen might have broached. I checked the security camera and saw that it had.
Mantis stalked down the hall, her long coat swinging, catching the light and sending fractured reflections across the panelling. Beside her, the vulpen was no more than a prowling shadow. There was
no sign of Shorn and yet, with some remnant of sisterly psychism, I felt she was there.

‘What’s happening?’ Canteley asked.

‘They’ve got into the building.’ I didn’t like the thought of Mantis trawling through those records, as if it was myself she would be violating, not merely a set of data.
‘Let’s make sure they don’t get in here.’

As we were making our way across the remains of the bridge, a plan had been forming in my mind. I’d had no time to put it into action in the hallway, in case the vulpen had broken through
immediately, but now we had a few minutes and I intended to make full use of them.

When we were children, and Hestia had taken Leretui’s soul from her, I’d asked her how it was done. So she’d shown me, leaving herself open to having her own soul stolen, by
myself.

I didn’t share Hestia’s eldritch gifts, however. I’d not been able to take her soul – which, frankly, had been a relief. But I’d been able to draw it out a little
way and it had awoken in me an understanding of the patterns of the spirit, how they could be linked. In a way, it was more that Hestia had shown me the connection between us, how one soul might
touch another, and this had been the interesting thing, rather than any real power it had given me.

I knelt down by the lock and looked into it, as if ready to be scanned.

‘What are you doing?’ Canteley’s voice came from behind me.

‘Wait. I need to concentrate.’ I looked into the dark hollow of the lock and focused. It was as though the lock expanded outward, allowing me to glimpse the universe that it
contained: spirals and whorls of stars and pinwheel suns, spinning galaxies and the traceries and networks between them. I wasn’t looking at a universe, I realized. I was looking into my own
soul and the links between it and the lock itself. Haunt-tech, where everything is animate, at least to some small unsentient degree. I drew the lock’s spirit out into myself, sealing it in
the hole in my soul. It felt strange, as though I’d put a large metal ball in my mouth and couldn’t speak around it. But when I took my eye away from the lock and stepped back, I knew
it had worked. Mantis wouldn’t be able to open the door, unless she blasted it apart with ire-palm. I myself had become the lock: she’d have to reach me first if she wanted to open the
door, and since I was behind it, that would not be possible.

Canteley was staring at me with curiosity.

‘You look different,’ my sister said. ‘What did you do?’

Perceptive, and worryingly so. The thought that Canteley might be another of the majike’s experiments came back to mind and I thrust it firmly away.

‘Sealed us in,’ I mumbled. Then I turned and looked out of the windows.

Our escape and its consequences had taken longer than I’d thought, although the ball had been timed for midnight, so it was hardly surprising to see a glow in the east. Dawn was rising
over Winterstrike, banishing ghosts into the shadows, though not, I thought, for long. Through the crimson window the city was the colour of blood: red spires rising into the new day. Through the
white window, the city was all snow and ice, as pale and ethereal as a spirit city, and I remembered the Noumenon.

I turned back to the bell tower. ‘We may as well be warm,’ I said, and lit the brazier. It fired into life immediately, unaffected by the damage sustained by the tower, and we held
out our hands to its heat in silence. Linking with the lock had given me a connection to the security system of the tower. It was very faint and I didn’t think I could do anything concrete
about it – no sealing of doors and locking my enemies behind them – but I could see things in a blurry, grainy, way. And what I could see was that Mantis had come up the stairs and was
standing in front of the bell-tower door.

I gestured towards the door, motioning quiet. I could hear something scratching at the lock, a stealthy scraping. Outside, through the link and through the security camera itself, I saw Mantis
bending in front of the lock with a thin tool. She was murmuring. I watched. A few minutes later, she straightened up, frustration evident in the set of her shoulders. She turned to someone beside
her, whom I could not see, and spoke.

Canteley screamed. I whipped round and saw Shorn standing beside me. Up close, I was almost too intrigued to be afraid. The coiling tentacles, some as thin as worms and some thick as a finger,
were piled on top of her head and gave Shorn the appearance of a grand lady of several hundred years before, as did the tight bodice and the drifting garment. She was holding out her hands as if
beseeching me for help, but her face was mocking: still half human, despite the wicked pointed jaw and the huge hollowed eyes.

‘Tui!’ Canteley gasped.

‘She isn’t real,’ I said, because I could still see that
nothingness
beside Mantis on the other side of the door, and I knew now what that was: Shorn herself, the young
demothea using her illusions. Shorn, discovered, spat, but at that moment the door exploded inwards. Canteley dropped to the floor, her arms covering her head, and I was flung backwards against the
wall. Mantis had decided to dispense with subtleties.

It wasn’t ire-palm, but some other kind of melting explosive. Hot droplets spattered my skirt, missing my skin but eating into the leather. I rolled under the crimson window. Mantis strode
across the room, reaching for me. I got to my feet and kicked out, sending the brazier flying towards her. She dodged, but the artificial coals had already spilled and one of them caught the hem of
her coat and ignited. Her coat went up like a torch and then Shorn was there, dragging her out of the burning fabric and stamping it out. One side of Mantis’s face looked like melted wax and
I remembered how she had responded to my blow. Shorn’s whip lashed out and I ducked. It struck the crimson window and shattered it into a thousand shards of bloody glass. I think it was this,
even more than the abduction of Canteley, that made me act: that window had been in place for hundreds of years. I leaped over the remains of the brazier and sprang at Shorn. We went backwards
through the door and down the stairs. Bruised and dizzy, I grabbed Shorn’s head as soon as we hit the landing, and slammed her skull against the boards. We’d never fought as children,
at least not physically, but we were fighting now. Shorn was trying to roll over and up and her strength was frightening: I could barely hold on to her. I shifted my grip to her throat to see if
throttling worked, but Shorn’s throat was hard and ridged. She hissed, the immense pupils dilating, and spat at me. I glimpsed her tongue, which also looked hard.