Winterstrike Read online

  TWELVE

  Essegui — Crater Plain

  On the second day, the pilgrimage took on a monotony. Without the presence of the brown-clad women to distract me, I found that I was becoming accustomed to the sonorous chants and the dismal tone of the instruments. The pilgrims had lost their mystery for me: familiarity had indeed bred if not contempt, then at least tedium. I should have been more alert, and I tried, but the attack in Winterstrike was already assuming the dimensions of a dream and I felt oddly hot. My arm burned where I’d been bitten and that made me anxious. If I collapsed . . . But I didn’t feel faint, just slightly feverish.

  The weather continued to be dreary, with a misting sleet drifting across the plains in veils and encrusting the ruins with ice. The road beneath us still had the old heating mechanism, glowing faintly at the roadsides: not haunt-tech, but something older and perhaps more robust, drawing on the internal heat of the deep soil and passing it upward. But in places it had broken down, so that we walked on bare tarmac and then ice.

  The attack, when it came, was a rush and a confusion. We were passing one of the ruins, a more extensive complex of turret and fortifying buildings that surrounded it. In the chilly weather, it looked like a column of ice. The assault itself lacked subtlety. The women raced out from behind the ruin on ground-bikes, bouncing easily over the frosty plain. They wore skin-tight white armour, much patched, and black goggles against snow-glare, which suggested to me – when I thought about it later, that is – that they were not local, but had come down from somewhere much colder. There were four of them and they carried glowing lances beneath one arm. The bikes themselves were equipped with shriekers: I clapped my hands to my ears involuntarily and I was not surprised to see the guards do the same, before they activated whatever protective mechanisms existed within their helms and started firing. One of the attackers was hit in the tank of the ground bike and it exploded in a bright thermal flare. I saw her cast up towards the ruin, a flying, burning doll. Then a hissing swift thing was bowling pilgrims right, left and centre as one of the ground-bikes dodged between them. Women screamed. The guard, hampered by the swarming mass of people, fired, but it went wide and sent up a tussock of grass in a fiery spray. The bike was heading straight for me and the shrieker was deafening, interfering with my balance. I stumbled, ducking to the side, which turned out to be a mistake: the bike did not hit me, but it rapidly became clear that running me down was not its rider’s intention. She grabbed me efficiently by the waist and threw me over the front of the bike at its widest part. The shrieker howled in my ear and the rider slapped me across the side of the head. By doing so, she must have given me some kind of patch, because a brief chill spread around my ears and the noise of the shrieker was abruptly muted. Then we were heading off across the plain. I squirmed around, struck upwards at the rider and caught the glowing lance with my hand. It burned and I snatched my hand away. The rider laughed: I could see black polished teeth beneath the rim of the goggles. A mesh had worked its way out of the bike and now held me securely. The rider put both hands on the steering and kicked the bike into a flaring speed. I caught a last glimpse of the little dark shapes of the pilgrims in front of the tower and then we were over the horizon.

  The rider didn’t bother to stun me, so I got to see the whole of the trip, albeit face-downwards. Half an hour or so passed, hurtling through driving sleet and then snow. We were climbing. The wind stopped and the world took on a blanketing hush. Twisting my head, I saw trees: the black, conical spires of pin-wood. That meant we were probably up in the Hattins, a long way to the north-west of Winterstrike. Once, my ancestors had enjoyed country residences here, before the fashion changed to the more southerly lakes and winter hunting was no longer so popular. Common legend spoke of ruined mansions, deep in the forest and haunted by shrikes and cold-tropes, as well as the ghosts of the dancing, hunting dead. Looking at the dark trees as we shot by, I did not find this difficult to believe.

  My position on the bike was, not surprisingly, uncomfortable. The uneven surface of the pommel was starting to bruise my ribs, so that every bounce and jolt sent a flare of agony through my chest, ricocheting from my spine. I had a quite remarkable headache and my vision had started to blur. The geise was muttering away in my mind but everything else was blotting it out, which was one mercy, at least. Throwing myself from the bike had long since been ruled out as an option: I couldn’t wriggle free, and in any case, if I managed to fall off, I’d only be picked up again. And I’d have to find my own way back to the pilgrimage over several miles of rough ground. It seemed better to stay put but I chafed at the knowledge all the same.

  The trees were thinning out now, and we were climbing. When I looked back I could see the long slope stretching behind us, with the cold sweep of the plains beyond. There was no sign of the tower from which the bikes had come. The rider gave my shoulder a shake.

  ‘Not long now!’ she shouted. She sounded quite cheerful about it, as though we were out on some pleasure jaunt. I mumbled something sour. The bike was slowing down as it wove its way through the trees, but the top of the rider’s helmet touched a branch and shook down a great pile of snow. I spluttered and sneezed, hearing the rider laugh. Ahead, I glimpsed an enormous cliff face, many thousands of feet in height and ending in ice-locked crags that looked like teeth. Clouds wreathed the summit, smoking in and out of the rocks. The bike swung dangerously close to a thick tree trunk, veered away, and headed straight for the wall of ice that was the foot of the cliff.

  ‘Hey, watch out!’ I cried, but it was too late. The bike was speeding towards the wall and I shut my eyes. Next moment, we were into darkness and silence. For a second, I thought I was actually dead. Then I realized that the ice wall had, like a miracle, opened up in front of us and let us through. The bike stopped with a great scraping and rattling of gears. I was hauled off and thrown against a wall.

  I was certain that I hadn’t banged my head, but even so, things became very dim for a while, as if I’d slid into dreaming without the bother of falling asleep. The chamber swam before me – high rock sides and a roughly cut ceiling, clearly hacked out of the cliff wall. All these mountains outside Winterstrike were riddled with caves, the legacy of ancient floods, perhaps even before humans came to Mars. But this looked human-made. I could hear the steady drip of water and a hollow, echoing boom that I could not identify: later, I wondered whether it was simply the sound of my own blood, reverberating inside my head. A pair of eyes floated before me like lamps. A voice said, hissing, ‘Yes, this is the one.’

  ‘Who are you?’ I thought I said, then wondered whether the words had really been spoken aloud. The voice did not reply. I felt myself drifting along, moving through corridors and channels. There was the lap of water by the side of my head, although I didn’t remember lying down. Then the slap of oars and a light far ahead, gleaming off the water and sending reflections dancing across the ceiling.

  Everything went dark again, but I was still conscious. Something was sparkling and glittering all around me.

  ‘Where am I?’ I said, but again, was not sure if I’d even spoken aloud. I didn’t remember being drugged, there had been no sting of injection, no sudden puff of gas, but I felt completely blank, as if someone had switched me off. The eyes swam above me and I now saw that they were moons, the small moons of Mars circling high above the planet’s orbit. Then I saw Mars itself, a round russet ball, white-capped. The plains and mountains were very sharp, as if etched onto the blank surface of the world with some galactic scalpel. Further out and now I could see the haze of Venus and the azure globe of Earth, swimming with cloud and its little satellite spinning around it. Sparks of light passed between the worlds and once the black sky cracked, revealing a flash of something between: a haunt-ship, jumping from life into death and back again.

  I watched all this quite passively, unconcerned by the fact that I seemed to be leaving the solar system altogether. The gas giant passed by, then ringed Saturn, then the outer wo
rlds: the mining colonies of the asteroids, the pilgrim places solitary and serene on the blasted surface of barely terraformed rock. I swung low over a temple, a huge place sprawling across the surface of Io, saw its pools and ice-locked waterfalls, its towering spires dedicated to deities of the outer reaches and unknown to me. Then on, past the farthest world of Nightshade and the cobweb span of Farlife.

  And then . . . somewhere else. A shadow land, with high crags and a tower on a jutting crag, outlined in flame. A missile hurtled upwards and exploded in firework petals.

  ‘What do you see?’ said a voice, caressing and soft.

  ‘I see—’ Down into a landscape of fractured rock – except that it was not rock at all, but water, endless seas and a city rising from them. I glimpsed another high tower made of iron, rising out of the waves, and then an impression of black coiling tentacles.

  ‘I see,’ I started to say, but I could not get the words out and a cold clamping hand came down on my wrist and hissed, ‘ Tell me . . .’

  ‘Take a look,’ I said and in some uncomprehended way I opened up my own head and let her stare inside.

  ‘Ah . . .’ said the voice. ‘No. She’s not really seeing anything. She’s just picking it up from me.’

  ‘Nowhere,’ someone else said. With dim surprise I realized that it was I who had spoken. ‘Its name is Nowhere.’

  Then the place was gone and I was back within the comforting, confining cage of my own skull. Dark globes were gazing down at me: eyes, not moons, floating in front of a polished obsidian ceiling. The blacklight sparkle of haunt-tech was all around me and I realized that I was in a vertical vice, with my wrists and ankles securely bound. An electrical wind blew through the chamber, stirring my hair with static.

  The eyes were black and milky at the same time and they belonged to a pointed face, surmounted by a trailing veil. A small mouth twitched. I glimpsed sharp teeth. There was the swish of robes as the creature took a step back.

  ‘You’re—’ I said. I’d seen something like her before, in the streets of Winterstrike. I remembered the theatre, with the masked women dancing in front of it, then the thing I’d seen floating above the canal. But demotheas didn’t exist.

  ‘I am Mantis,’ the creature said.

  ‘Hello, Mantis.’ I struggled against the bonds. Any chance of letting me go?’

  ‘Not just yet.’ Mantis reached out a hand and touched my pulse. Her fingers were cool, with an extra-than-human joint.

  ‘Why did you take me?’ I said.

  Ah, well, I wanted a closer look at you, you see.’ She frowned. ‘What’s that inside your head? That whispering?’

  ‘I’m under a geise,’ I said.

  ‘Who put it on you?’

  ‘My mothers.’

  There was a low whistle of surprise across the chamber. I craned my neck and saw the rider who had brought me in. She was still wearing riding gear and goggles; there was snow melting from her boots and pooling on the mirror-black floor. ‘Not a happy family, then?’

  ‘You could say that.’

  The rider strode across the chamber and seized me by the neck. There was a twinge in my head and then I was saying, babbling almost, ‘My name is Essegui Harn, ceremonialist of Winterstrike, a scion of the House of Calmaretto, sister of Shorn, once called Leretui, still called the Malcontent.’

  ‘I know who you are!’ Mantis said impatiently. ‘I’m interested in Leretui,’ she added. ‘Imprisoned for consorting with a male, indeed. Shouldn’t you be at home, instead of cavorting across the Plains with pilgrims?’

  So she did not know that Leretui was missing – or was affecting ignorance in some elaborate double bluff.

  ‘I am a ceremonialist,’ I said. ‘I observe Ombre. These are difficult times. I felt the need for spiritual succour.’

  ‘Yet you went to the Temple of the Changed,’ Mantis said. ‘Then to the fortress. Why was that?’

  Had she been there, listening among the shadows? I was becoming increasingly certain that this was the person responsible for the attacks on me. I thought of the little aspith, fleeing into the depths of the Temple. In my head, a bridge shattered and fell.

  ‘I work there,’ I said. ‘Why shouldn’t I go there?’

  We can blacklight you again, drag it from your head,’ Mantis warned.

  ‘If you do,’ I said, knowing that it was the truth, ‘I’ve had warning now and I’ll just faint. And what will you listen to then?’

  I looked into her dark-milk eyes, and knew that, for the moment, I’d won.

  In spite of the haunt-tech laboratory, the rest of the complex was primitive, really no more than a series of underground tunnels and rough-hewn chambers hacked out of the side of the cliff, reeking of mildew and age. The rider who had originally snatched me now accompanied me down through a maze of passages, with a sting-prod at my neck. I did not care to test it out, having seen what lay outside, and I decided not to give her any trouble. She introduced herself perfunctorily as One, and introduced me also to a small cramped cell in which, she gave me to understand, I would be spending the indefinite future. This was all very well, but the geise was now battering at my senses, shouting at me to get a move on, and despite that quasi-sentience it seemed to possess it evidently did not understand that I was in no position to act out its wishes. Was Leretui herself here? I bit back frustration. ‘You won’t be able to get out, by the way,’ One explained, somewhat unnecessarily, as I’d already seen the blacklight glitter running through the mesh. The cell door was wired up to the haunt system, and as an experiment I ran a hand across it, once One was safely out of sight. Immediately the system erupted into a shrieking ward that flashed across my head. I ducked, even though I knew it wasn’t real, and the nerve-jangling it left in its wake reverberated through my head for a moment after it had passed through the opposite wall. But I was used to my mothers’ systems at Calmaretto, too, though these were different. I wondered just how far Mantis was prepared to go. I sat down on the rudimentary bed and thought of flight.

  THIRTEEN

  Hestia — Crater Plain

  Half a day and the mountains appeared no closer, and no further, either. My world and Peto’s had shrunk to the distant glacial peaks, an icy green sky, the red ridges of the Plains as we progressed along the side cut of the canal. The only glimpse I’d had of Rubirosa in the last few hours had been a glint of eyes in the shadows of the hold. She was whittling something with a haunt-knife that whistled and whispered as the shavings fell away. I thought it might be a bone. I didn’t really want to know.

  So I sat on deck with Peto instead and took turns at steering and boiling tea on the little deck kettle. It was growing colder now, the comparative mildness of the Plains beyond Caud dropping away as we rose in a series of stages towards the Noumenon. When I looked back, I could still see the long straight stretch of the Grand Channel and some of the masts travelling down it. Along the bank, the grass grew sparser, replaced with a dense plant with shiny dark-green leaves, and the small birds of the lower Plains disappeared. Red-eyed predators appeared in their place, sailing high on fringed wings, catching the thin thermals.

  Peto pointed out areas of interest: she knew this country. There were battlefields, barrows of the dead dating back to the Age of Children, scenes of great valour. It all looked the same to

  Crater Plain me. I couldn’t tell what she was pointing at half the time. It had all been swallowed by the remorseless, still-transforming earth, though Peto also told me that the place was full of spirits, and this I did not find difficult to believe.

  ‘Wait until night comes,’ Peto kept saying, peering at me from the corner of her eye to see how I was taking it. ‘Then you’ll see.’

  Something to look forward to, then. She did, however, manage to attract my attention with a phenomenon that was clearly visible: a ruined fortress on top of a great crag, seemingly all on its own before the beginning of the mountain wall.

  ‘Temperire,’ Peto said. ‘It’s said they invente
d haunt-tech there, when the Matriarch Mantis found a way to harness the conjured spirits of her torture victims.’

  I felt a need to dismiss this in robust terms. ‘Nonsense! Everyone knows haunt-tech came from Nightshade, from the laboratories there, and was given to the Memnos Matriarchy. Although I won’t deny that some folk claim it comes from torture, all the same.’

  ‘That’s what some folk would say,’ replied Peto, placidly enough. I sighed, although I couldn’t deny that Peto had a point.

  ‘What happened to Temperire, then?’ I asked, to change the subject.

  ‘Oh, there was a great battle. Ended in a siege and Mantis disappeared. Her enemies brought in their majikei, stripped the spirits from their enemies and sacked the castle. Stole Mantis’s own technology and turned it against her: drove her soul into an engine and they say it grinds there still, down in the rocks beneath the ruin. You can hear it on winter nights, groaning and grinding away.’

  I’d have loved to dismiss this as folklore, but it’s hard to do that if you’re Martian. ‘What does this engine do?’ I asked.

  ‘It drives a mill and the mill makes creatures of blacklight and sends them out across the plains to steal other people’s souls.’

  ‘How delightful.’

  ‘Well, that’s what they say.’

  We fell silent for a moment, then I said, ‘And have you ever seen one of these creatures? You’ve been this way before.’

  ‘Plenty of times,’ Peto said, confounding me. ‘But they can’t touch me.’

  ‘The boat’s warded?’ I’d already surmised as much. But it hadn’t kept Rubirosa out.

  ‘I’ve got my own stuff. My people’s stuff. A mesh, in my head.’ She gave me a sidelong look. It seemed that, somewhere along the way, we’d abandoned the pretence that I was from the same neck of the woods as she was.