Winterstrike (7 page)

‘But the men-remnants are real, aren’t they?’ Leretui’s voice was startlingly shrill. ‘The vulpen, the hyaenae, the awts? They exist, don’t they?’

For a moment, I thought Alleghetta might slap her. ‘Of course they exist, but it is not seemly to speak of such things.’

Essegui nudged her sister in the ribs. ‘Shut up, Tui.’

Leretui subsided, gnawing her lip. The carriage moved on, leaving the demotheas behind. We reached the theatre and sat through the play, which was about political matters and was dull: a
propaganda piece against Caud, dealing with Mardian Hill. In retrospect, one could see the seeds of war even then. I wanted to be out on the streets, chasing demotheas that were as sinister and
elusive as moths, or back at Calmaretto, messing about with the boat. Beside me, Essegui and Leretui appeared equally bored, but Alleghetta sat with her hands gripping the sides of her chair and a
fire burned in her face.

That night, in the room that I shared with Essegui, something woke me. I lay for a moment, staring into the shadows, not quite sure where I was until I remembered. On the other side of the room,
Essegui lay in a foetal heap. There was no sign of anything amiss, but my senses were jangling. Then it came again, the creak of a floorboard from the passage outside the room.

Very quietly, I got out of bed and went to the door, opening it a crack. Down the hall, which was lit by a single sconce, there was a whisk of movement just before the stairs. I wasn’t
sure what it was that I had seen: a servant, perhaps, or maybe one of the weir-wards activating itself as a moth or beetle blundered past. The weir-wards at Calmaretto were highly strung:
Alleghetta was either paranoid, or thought that a high level of security created an impression of importance. Either way, I had become accustomed to the wards in my mother’s house and I
slipped out of the bedroom, leaving Essegui still curled around her dreams, and down the hallway. A very old rug, rather grand but now somewhat worn, scuffed under my feet and I nearly fell. The
sound of my elbow striking the wall seemed very loud in the night silence of the mansion and I bit down on a curse. Ahead of me, going down the stairs, footsteps speeded up. I knew where the wards
watched, and where they originated. I ducked and dodged along the hallway, taking more care this time, and when I reached the top of the stairs I looked back to a peaceful hall. Whoever ran ahead
of me on the staircase obviously knew similar tricks, for the stair, too, was silent. I went down it and found myself out in the torchlit main hall. A breath of wind stirred the drapes by the front
door and when I followed it into the parlour, I found that one of the long doors that led to the lawn was open.

Back along the veranda, back down the steps, retracing the path through the weedwood trees to the banks of Canal-the-Less. Leretui was standing on the very edge of the canal, with her hands
outstretched. In her long summer nightgown, she looked like a spirit herself: conversing with someone who stood, impossibly, at the very centre of the canal.

I started to say her name but it died upon the air. The thing that stood there was a demothea, and now that I was looking at it, I realized just how unlike it the women in costume had been, how
human their movements were. The demothea was dancing, its limbs contorting and flowing at wholly unnatural angles. In the torchlight, its eyes flared a bright brief gold and its flimsy garments
billowed out behind it across the water, skeins of material swirling as if in a great wind, though the summer night was humid and still. Leretui took a little step forward and tottered on the brink
of the canal. The demothea reached out a long, long hand and beckoned her further yet; I saw its pointed, smiling face upraised, an expression incapable of human interpretation. All this came to me
later, glimpsed from the far-away perspective of the Mote: as a young girl, I felt only panic and fear. I called out,
‘Leretui
!’

The demothea abruptly vanished. I thought Tui was going to fall into the canal; she gave a faint cry and clawed at the air. I don’t remember rushing forward to catch her, but suddenly we
were both sprawling on the canal bank and the water was rocking up beneath my face. I edged quickly back. There were said to be things living in the canals, coming up to the surface at night.
Leretui sat in a huddle on the damp grass, shaking.

‘What happened?’ I asked her. ‘What were you
doing?
But she shook her head and would not answer. I took her by her fragile shoulders and hauled her to her feet and we
both stumbled up the steps and through the open door. I expected the shriek and whirl of the wards, the running feet of servants, but there was nothing and no one. Calmaretto was quiet. I bundled
Leretui up the stairs and into bed, telling her that on no account was she to stir until morning. She gave a mute, unhappy nod; she seemed half asleep already.

As I turned to close and lock the door to her bedroom, a hand fell on my shoulder. I must have jumped a foot in the air.

Aunt—’

‘It’s me,’ Essegui hissed. ‘What’s going on?’

I felt myself go limp with relief. I pushed past her into our own room, sank down onto the bed and told her everything. She listened, frowning, and when I had finished she said, ‘Well,
something’s the matter with her, that’s for sure. I’ve heard of people being haunted, though not like this.’

‘But where will it lead?’ I asked. Somehow, I knew that neither Essegui or myself would be repeating this conversation to my aunts.

And Essegui said, with what from the distance of my time in Caud seemed so bitter a hindsight, ‘Nowhere good for her, or us.’

FIVE

I could not look away from the contents of the teacup, swirling like a little galaxy. Trivialities seemed to grip me with an unexpected fascination. On the way to the
tea-house, in my stumbling trying-to-be-dignified flight out of Calmaretto, I’d become intrigued by a flashing red neon sign on the side of a building, had stood staring at it with my mouth
open for some minutes before the suspicious, curious stares of a couple passing by had brought me to my senses. Was this what it was like to have a piece of your soul gone missing? To be a little
bit less than human, to become entranced by human things? I remembered how my cousin Hestia had stolen my soul once, years ago on the lawn of Calmaretto. Hestia had done it just to see if she
could, and I didn’t recall much about the experience itself, only a bright blankness, as if I was walking into the sun. Later, they told me that I’d stumbled around as if drunk, or
bewitched, but I just didn’t remember that part of it. The Matriarchy had begun to take an interest in Hestia after that, to Alleghetta’s fury.

I still couldn’t believe that my mothers had done this to me. If I’d thought it would do any good, I’d have tried to reason with Thea, but I knew how far she was under
Alleghetta’s thumb. She might regret what had happened, but she wouldn’t do anything to stop it – just sink further into the sherry, most likely.

I had no doubt that the geise was working. My sister’s disappearance, until recently, had been a source of sorrow, bewilderment, anxiety, and it still was, except that now everything had
fused into a nagging compulsion, driving me on through Winterstrike. It took a considerable effort of will to force myself to stop, to sit down, to drink tea and warm my numb hands.

And the ironic thing was, I’d have done it anyway. I’d have gone after her without the geise on me, and if anything would hold me back beneath its lash, it would be the lack of my
mothers’ trust.

When I looked up from the cup, everyone else looked away. I must have been muttering to myself. Or maybe the geise was visible, in the way that you sometimes looked at people staggering through
the streets and knew that there was something wrong with them. There was a lot of it about, these days.
Black science. Majikeise. Whatever you wanted to call it.

I turned and met my own stare in the metal wall of the teahouse. This was an old place, and the metal was spotted and stained: my skin looked mottled, as though I’d fallen ill. But apart
from that you’d never have known, for I looked the same: white face, grey eyes, long black hair. All monochrome, with no colour in me except the stain on my soul. And I looked more like Shorn
than I’d have liked, too – her ageing self, gaunt and hunched into her woes.

I wanted to stay here in the tea-house, amongst the steam and the murmured conversations, with the old-fashioned spine trees in pots by the door, signs dating from the last century advertising
different kinds of tea, and the burnished metal walls reflecting us all. The conversations were all about the war – about some news report that last night, on the sacred night of Ombre, the
heretic matriarchy of Caud had launched an attack on Winterstrike and we had responded with an assault of our own, some new weapon developed by our dedicated scientists and unleashed only at the
most extreme provocation.

The murmurs were cynical. I didn’t believe it either. And I had other things to worry about. I had to go where Leretui had gone, and the only thing I could think of was that, somehow,
impossibly, Leretui had gone to the vulpen. That meant the mountains, and as I had told my sister, the mountains in winter were no place for anyone human. At that thought, the geise snapped my head
forward so that I gave a small muffled cry and people looked at me out of the corners of their eyes and started talking to one another a little too loudly. Time to get out of the tea-house. I
stood, in a flurry of coat-tails, slapped a few coins down onto the table and went through the door into the icy air.

The geise, I was finding, had not only taken a piece of my soul. It had a soul of its own, and also its own voice, with which it was starting to whisper and prompt: a thin, reptilian hiss.

‘Remember,’
the geise said.
‘Remember.’

And all at once, I did remember: riding in the gliding carriage towards the theatre with Leretui and my cousin Hestia, over fifteen years ago now. I couldn’t remember what the play was
– some mind-numbing piece which Alleghetta had insisted we go to see – but I had a small, sharp, recollection of looking out of the window of the carriage and seeing a group of women
dressed as demotheas, or perhaps not dressed up at all, but demotheas themselves. Vulpen were the Changed, and so were the mythical demotheas, and even though the years of the Thousand Cults of the
Age of Children were centuries gone, the remnants of those cults remained. And there was one place where the records were to be found. A place I knew very well.

These days, the Temple of the Changed stands on the very edge of the great crater of Winterstrike. Its fall into the crater itself was predicted every year due to erosion and
lack of funds, but somehow the Temple survived, like a tottering drunk, staggering but not falling. A bridge led from it to the fortress where I carried out my own ceremonial duties; where I had
rung the Ombre bell. In the undamaged turret of the fortress were kept records: ancient texts and inscriptions dating back to the Age of Children, detailing lost races and antique technologies,
vanished abilities that were now no more than myths.

I was thinking of a defenceless girl’s sudden ability to vanish from a locked room, leaving defiance and mockery behind her. Something had happened to Leretui during the course of that
half-free night of Ombre, and I needed to know what it was. The fortress was not open to the public, but I wasn’t an ordinary citizen: I had access.

It was mid-afternoon when I made my way back to the fortress, but the light had already begun to fade and the first of the street-torches had been lit along the Grand Avenue, flaring and hissing
into the sleet. The tea-houses were doing a roaring trade all the same, and there was a stream of shoppers going in and out of the state stores, using hoarded savings for the holiday discount,
carrying off electrical goods and bags of clothes. Normally I avoided this part of the city at the festivals; Alleghetta had always told us that it was common to seek discounts and had stuff
ordered, usually at much greater – and pointless – expense. Thinking of this, I had a sudden desire to rush into the nearest state store and buy lots of cut-price unnecessaries, but the
geise, perhaps fortunately, was pushing me on.

The Grand Avenue stretched before me, pointing to the towers of the civic buildings and the circular walls of the Matriarchy, arrow-straight. To my right – through what had ceased to be
sleet and was now snow, falling in huge, soft flakes – I could see the bell tower above the roofs. It struck me that I should like to be able to turn back the clock, to be standing there once
again, tolling the bell for Ombre and a different outcome. I turned towards its shadowy height, ducking under a sodden red awning down a side alley. The further I walked, the older the city became:
massive walls of ancient marble, pitted with bullet holes and fire strikes, dovetail-jointed in the old manner and so finely done that even now you could not have slid the blade of a scalpel
between them. The walls reared up, with windows that were no more than slits high above me, set deep in angled sills. Defensive fortifications, now used for public housing, but the Matriarchy had
made no effort to make them less fortress-like. Wise, under recent circumstances. I passed along the alley and came out onto the banks of a narrow canal: one of the secret waterways of
Winterstrike. A woman was driving a sledge along the silvery ice, invisible beneath a broad-brimmed hat. She did not look up and I, not wishing to be seen for reasons that I did not fully
understand, melted back into the wintry shadows and slipped along the canal, hugging the wall.

Over a little arched bridge I came into a district smelling strongly of food. Someone was frying batter-cakes in a pan of hot oil and the odour cut through the numbness of the winter air,
comforting and greasy. Apart from the tea, I’d last eaten at breakfast and I was hungry, but I didn’t think I’d be able to keep anything down. Instead, I walked quickly on, down
further alleys and snickets running between the fortress walls, until an insistent, rhythmic banging caught my attention and I realized that I was close to the Temple: someone was beating a gong.
My heart started to beat in time with it and so did the whisper of the geise, though this time I could not understand what it was saying. I felt as though I’d become a seamless whole with the
rest of the world and that world had contracted down to this single hammering pulse. A moment later, I came out into the plaza that led to the crater.