Winterstrike (8 page)

It looked like the surface of some distant moon, an expanse of stone that was pitted and holed with meteorite strikes. Cracks ran along its length, spreading outward from the crater. They could
have covered it, rendered it anew, but the Matriarchy preferred to remember this single greatest disaster in the city’s history.

At the far end of the plaza, I could see the Temple of the Changed towering up through the falling snow, its façade mottled to a fleshy pink by winter. The gong had stopped but it seemed
to me that its reverberations continued, striking out the hour across the city and pulling us all in its wake. Beneath my booted feet, the surface of the plaza was icy, the snow that had been
melted by last night’s torchlit procession, to mark the start of Ombre, had pooled and frozen. I had to keep my head down in order to retain my footing and was at the steps of the Temple
almost before I knew it. I looked up. Two pillars marked the entrance, so coiling and curling with entwined figures that it was difficult to distinguish them from one another, but all of them were
representations of the Changed themselves, mythical and real, mainly coyu and aspith, but a few demotheas, cenulae, sultrice, also. Stylized representations of DNA spirals wound amongst them,
celebrating difference.

They were the last remnants of the Age of Children. They were supposed to be the future of the human race: created by a cult that had originated here in Winterstrike and which held
diversification to be the final product of evolution. Earth had its own peoples: the kappa, the moke, the kajari, and many more. It hadn’t really worked. Genetically unstable, often
physically frail, the majority of the Changed failed to thrive.

Movement between the pillars attracted my attention. Someone was watching, someone who did not want to be seen any more than I did, but who did not have the skill to remain unobserved. I turned,
pretending that I was heading past the Temple, and slipped along the steps in the snowy shadow of the left-hand pillar. I came up behind the watcher. She was hunched against the stone, clinging to
it as if it could protect her from the cold.

‘Hello,’ I breathed. She jumped, and stood shaking. I looked down into a long-muzzled face, the eyes human and sad, the skin covered in a faint fawn down. Her hands were unnatural,
the fingers oddly jointed. If the aspith had been engineered for some particular purpose, I could not imagine what it might have been: animal genes seemed to have been thrown into the mix at
random, or perhaps selection had bred into particular traits. I half expected her to wring her hands. She was dressed in the customary red of the cult, her hair concealed behind a veil. It reminded
me of the majike.

‘Why are you watching me?’ I demanded, but the aspith turned and ran, her veil streaming out behind her like red smoke. She disappeared through a tall open door into an echoing space
that was barely warmer than the plaza outside. I followed the sound of her footsteps, the hem of her skirts rustling against the stone floor like wind in the branches. Far ahead, along the rows of
columns, I could see daylight once more, as if the other side of the Temple was open to the crater.

I ran after the aspith past rows of columns – there seemed to be far too many more of them than was necessary to support the roof, and each one depicted a different race. Nightmarish faces
glared out at me and I was sure one of the columns represented the vulpen. A long, beak-like skull snaked from top to bottom of the column, as if looking down its nose at me. All at once I felt
that the carvings had eyes. The back of my neck prickled with chill. A little scatter of what looked like hail eddied over the floor, blown in from the direction of the crater.

The aspith whisked around a corner and I’d been right, for the Temple did lie open at the far end. Past the bulk of the fortress, I could see the opposite walls of the crater, with the
dark hollows of the maze of dwellings visible even through the snow. I could see lights, which looked as though they were floating.

The aspith was nowhere to be seen. I stood in an echoing hall, its walls mirrored like the old stained metal of the tea-house, and casting a fragile light across the black stone floor which sent
my reflection, also white and black, spinning into infinity. The fanciful thought came to me that if I could step into one of those reflections and disappear, so much the better.

Disappearing. Leretui, I thought. Oh, Shorn.

It was now almost completely dark, the torches flaring through the sleet across the plaza. Snow starred the tall windows that separated the front façade of the hallway from the outside
world; it was marginally warmer in here, but I still kept my coat securely buttoned. I had plans to stay the night in the fortress, perhaps in the tower room, where at least I felt safe. But my
mothers would know to look for me there: safety was an illusion. Wild beasts would not have dragged me back to Calmaretto and I thought my presence might prove a liability to one of my friends. I
had the odd sensation that the whole world was changing around me, some projected but unrealized future in which this really was the condition of the human race, and that if I walked outside now to
the cold plaza, I would find a different city.

I’d wasted enough time on the aspith. I left the Temple and went out onto the plaza, feet scuffling in the drifts of snow that were building up against the steps. The bridge to the
fortress lay on the opposite side of the plaza, reaching out over the crater pit. It was a route I’d taken dozens of times, ever since my majority and the days when I’d first been
assigned my duties in the bell tower. I’d won the role by birth, not through any merit on my own behalf, but I still thought it was the closest that Alleghetta had come to being proud of me.
Now, as I approached the gate, I was filled with a queasy unease, thinking of the aspith, that unlikely spy, and whether Calmaretto might have sent someone after me, to bring me home by force. But
there was no one waiting for me at the gate and my other fear, that the majike’s black work would have altered my soul-engrams to the point where I’d be unreadable by the matrix of the
gate, proved similarly unfounded. The mechanism scanned my eye and I felt the familiar tickling deep inside my head. Then the gate swung open. I stepped through onto the bridge.

The fortress always seemed to be a place of extremes. When you were on the bridge itself, the winds tore at you, snatching at hair and hood and whipping coat and skirts around you. I always
hurried at this point, afraid of being snatched up by the wind and blown into the dark pit of the crater. But once I reached the other side – traversing the iron railings, each side with its
spindly statue of the fortress spirits, my feet beating on iron – the sound was abruptly cut off. I looked back down the shadows of the bridge to the gate, and once again, no one was
watching.

No one that I could see, at any rate. Again I put my eye to a mechanism and again it spoke to my soul, opening the main doors to the fortress. I was glad to shut the night and the weather behind
me and step into the empty, echoing corridor that led, ultimately, to the bell tower. All metal and stone, a red floor, punctuated with black and white tiles. Above, the ceiling was fashioned in an
ancient style, representing feathers like smooth black wings. I don’t know how this conceit had originated. Bronze lamps lit the corridor with a subtle glow and ahead, stairs led up to the
bell tower. There was no elevator, though they had certainly possessed the technology: interminable academic speculation suggested various explanations, all of them esoteric, most to do with the
journey of the soul. For me, it was workplace and sanctuary, nothing more. But I pretended a mystical leaning, if questioned. It was politic.

And of course, on this occasion, my shattered soul’s journey would be correspondingly incomplete. I wasn’t going right to the top of the bell tower, but to one of the antechambers
that lay halfway up the stairs. These were separated chronologically, their books and records divided according to age: since I was interested in the handful of texts dating from the Age of
Children, I would not be climbing very high today.

This particular chamber was lined in bronze, like the lamps, which lent it a pleasantly warm cast when I sat down and asked the light to come on. There were no windows and I was glad about this:
I didn’t want to see beyond the confines of the bell tower. It reminded me too much of what I’d have to do when I got back out there. An ancient antiscribe stood on the central desk,
and it whirred into life as I switched it on and input my entry data.

Some years before, my cousin Hestia had suggested to me that it might be helpful if we manufactured a separate identity for ourselves. This, more than any more tangible evidence, indicated to me
that the rumours about my cousin’s profession – supposedly that of young-lady-about-town – had some truth. But we didn’t discuss it. Hestia was as well aware as I of the
difficulties of Calmaretto and I’d agreed with her enthusiastically that it might not be a bad plan. I’d even managed to siphon some money into an additional account, under that name:
Aletheria Stole, a name that would be redolent of Tharsis to the casual observer, nothing to connect it to the aristocracy of Winterstrike. I suspected that Hestia might use the same name on
occasion, as the account fluctuated, though the sums I placed in it remained scrupulously constant under a separate credit heading.

So
Stole
was the name under which I entered myself into the antiscribe, and the account details which churned ponderously up fell beneath that heading also. Once entered, I began to scan
the system for relevant records. Anything religious could be ruled out – I’d had to survey these records once before for a visiting academic and they had proved opaque in the extreme. I
don’t know whether the woman ever made anything of them in the end, though academics can usually generate some kind of theory to cover available data. But there was a handful of texts that
referred to battles, and these I brought up on the scanner and studied.

The first text referred to a journey across the Silent Sea: a catalogue of islands, most of them in all probability imaginary. Interesting, but not apparently of relevance.

The second and third were partial and made little sense: one was a list of curses and the other a list of names. But the fourth was of greater note.

Mantis.
A name that rang a bell, somewhere. She’d been one of the warrior matriarchs in the Age of Children, had vanished from a fortress under siege. There had been no clue to how
she had done it: her warriors, once the fortress had fallen, maintained that she had been taken by the spirits of the Crater Plain and stuck to their stories despite torture. Mantis the Mad, who
had held and ruled the lands around the area that was now known as the Noumenon, a remote mountain matriarchy that no one knew very much about. A closed, secret place, high in the ragged crags
beyond the western Plains.

That was the only text that had any vague relevance, and I thought this was probably stretching things. I doubted whether Mantis, mad or not, had really disappeared into thin air: more likely
she’d bolted down a tunnel or had been done away with by one of her own troops. But one thing did engage my attention, even though I was sure it was still no more than coincidence: the
Noumenon was said to be a haunt of vulpen – not, obviously, within the bounds of the Matriarchy itself, but beyond, in the high crags and rifts. Vulpen were said to haunt ruins, and there
were a lot of those in this part of the Crater Plain – also dating from the Age of Children. The geise was tugging at me, but I didn’t know how much store to set by that: I didn’t
think it had any extra knowledge that wasn’t also possessed by me, and I directed a swift but heartfelt curse in the direction of Calmaretto for saddling me with this additional set of
unreliable instincts.

There were no more records. I closed down the antiscribe, turned off the light, and left the bronze chamber with reluctance.

My feet nearly took me up the stairs to the bell tower, but I made myself turn away, back down the bronze corridor. It seemed warmer, almost stifling, and I thought at first that this was
because I was so reluctant to leave. Then I reached the doors and realized. The bridge was on fire.

It didn’t look like a normal flame. It was white and blazing, so bright that I had to shield my eyes, and that meant ire-palm. I slammed the doors shut. My hands slipped on the metal,
sweating, as I fumbled at the lock. There was no way I could face the bridge, not in those conditions: one touch and I’d go up like a torch. I ran back down the corridor, all longings for the
bell tower abandoned: I had a vision of the fortress as a tall iron oven, with myself roasting at its heart.

I’d no inclination to be cooked. I’d never been down into the cellars, but I’d studied the plans of the building when I’d first started working there, and I knew roughly
what was there. A spiral staircase led downward, twisting until it was lost in the shadows. I followed it down, footsteps pattering on the metal struts, until I felt dizzy. Looking back up, the
ceiling seemed impossibly far away. I thought of fire and kept on descending.

I stepped out into a long, dusty room lined with stone blocks. This looked even older than the rest of the fortress: red Martian sandstone, grooved as though water had at one time flowed along
it. Double doors at the far end of the room were heavily bolted, but at some point a more modern haunt-lock had been installed. I ran across and tugged at the bolts, which after some minutes gave
way in a shower of rust. Then I put my eye to the haunt-lock and heard the familiar whirring of the soul-scan. The doors swung open, to my mingled relief and apprehension. I didn’t know what
might be waiting on the other side of the exit.

But they opened onto night and nothing. I came out into the expanse of the crater floor and a bitter smell. Glancing up, I saw the ire-palm burning out on the bridge, and a second after that the
centre of the bridge gave way. Outlined against the night-glow of the city, a section of the bridge collapsed, to hang for a moment in the void, and then to fall in seeming slow motion into the
crater. There were shouts. An excissiere orthocopter, lights blazing, swung low overhead, veered up, came back around. I flattened myself against the wall of the fortress and watched as the burning
section of the bridge came to rest in a blinding flare. The reek of ire-palm filled my mouth and nose; I choked. The floor of the crater was an expanse of ice and snow, melting out from the burning
bridge. Dodging out of sight of the craft and hoping that any heat-sensitive equipment would be baffled by the ire-palm, I started to make my way to the crater wall.