by Liz Williams
‘What do you want?’ I asked, as if I didn’t know.
‘What do you think? Or “who”, I should really say.’
‘They’ve come for Leretui,’ I said.
‘No.’ That was Alleghetta. Thea gaped like a fish and I nearly said, ‘Take her.’
Alleghetta stepped forward, bristling. Seeing them together, I was suddenly struck by the resemblance between Mantis and my mother: they did not look physically alike, for Alleghetta was the product of years of Winterstrike engineering and Mantis was what she was, but the psychic similarity was remarkable.
‘I don’t think you could stop me,’ Mantis said. ‘Where is she?’ she added to me. Her voice was caressing, almost hypnotic. ‘You want to get rid of her, don’t you?’ she said. ‘I can see it in your face.’
‘Don’t,’ Thea’s voice trembled, and it was this rather than Alleghetta’s barked ‘Essegui!’ which made me, against my better judgement, say, ‘I won’t tell you where she is.’ I stepped to stand in front of Mantis, between herself and Thea. But Mantis, instead of betraying annoyance, smiled.
‘Not to worry,’ she said gently. ‘Looks like you won’t have to.’
There was a sound behind me. The demothea that had once been my sister stood in the doorway. Leretui was still recognizable: something about the shape of the face, the angle of the eyes, and her long black hair. The small mouth opened and a trilling sound emerged. Mantis was staring, as much as myself and my mothers, and I saw something cross her face that might even have been a distant horror.
‘Hello, Shorn,’ she said.
The demothea’s mouth worked. I could see components inside that were not remotely human: Leretui’s transformation had been swift and effective. She extended a long hand to her friend, the fingers more like tentacles, but it was a graceful gesture, a lady asking her beloved to join her on the ballroom floor. After a moment’s distinct hesitation, Mantis reached out and took it.
‘Well, goodbye,’ she said, mockingly. ‘I’ll make sure she writes.’ Alleghetta made a convulsive move forward but they were gone, through the French windows and down to the canal in the fading light.
We waited until the majike returned before investigating Leretui’s abandoned nest.
‘I think their genes must have been spliced with eels,’ Gennera said on our way upstairs. ‘Those things that live in the marshes of Earth, that stun their prey. The military were keen naturalists, when all this began.’
‘She won’t change back now, will she?’ Thea quavered.
‘Doubt it.’
The smell was apparent as soon as we stepped onto the landing.
‘Like death,’ I said, retching. ‘It wasn’t this bad earlier.’
‘Let’s take a look,’ the majike said.
Leretui’s room was now filled with a clustering mass of dark threads, trailing from the ceiling and across the bed. It wasn’t clear where the smell was coming from until we looked into the pit at the centre of the bed itself. Tangled in a mass of sheets was a decomposing form: something small and twisted.
‘It’s a child,’ I said. ‘Where the hell did that come from?’
‘A little older than a child, I think,’ the majike said. ‘It’s shrunk.’
When we looked at it more closely, we found that it was a young woman, and when the majike lifted her head to display short red hair, I recognized her as one of the more recent servants, Jhule.
‘How long has she been here?’ I did a quick mental calculation. It wasn’t long enough for true decomposition to set in, as far as I understood the process; that meant that this decay had somehow been accelerated. ‘Did she use the girl to feed?. Propel her transformation?’ I sat down in the least contaminated of the chairs, feeling sick.
‘I can only assume so. You can rest assured that this won’t get out. I’ll deal with it.’
‘I’m not concerned with Calmaretto’s reputation!’ Not entirely true, but it seemed to me that we’d gone far beyond any questions of social status. ‘Someone’s been killed!’
‘She’s gone,’ Gennera said, evincing some frustration. ‘It’s unlikely she’ll be coming back.’
It was useless to ask her where she thought Leretui might have vanished to: I had a better idea of that than the majike did.
‘We’ll get this cleaned and tested,’ Gennera added. ‘I don’t suppose you’ll be wanting to use this room for a while in any case.’
I shuddered. ‘If ever.’
Back in the parlour, I told my mothers what we’d discovered. Thea, predictably, went into hand-wringing panic. Alleghetta, also predictably, was dealing with fright by spitting nails.
‘That she can just walk in here and – who is this Mantis, anyway?’
‘I told you.’ More or less. I sank wearily into an armchair. It was by now quite dark outside, the short winter day coming to its close. The majike had departed for her laboratory. I realized suddenly that the little centipede, the Queen’s informative pet, didn’t seem to be in my sleeves or anywhere on my person. Irrationally, I missed it. However strange she might have been, I felt that the Queen had been able to provide answers, somehow. I hoped she still lived.
‘Essegui?’ That was Alleghetta. ‘I asked you a question.’
‘Sorry Wasn’t concentrating.’
‘I have as much on my mind as you, Essegui.’
I sighed. ‘What was it?’
‘When did Gennera say she’d be coming back?’
‘Later this evening. With a team.’
Alleghetta bristled once more. ‘More people invading the house.’
‘I don’t think it can be helped, Mother.’
‘And what am I to tell the serving agency?’
‘That your daughter changed into a monster and ate one of their personnel?’
‘This is no time for levity!’
‘Mother, people will go missing.’ I hated not to assume responsibility for this, even if it was a relief of sorts to have the majike taking care of things. ‘We’ve been invaded by an army of ghosts. You can blame it on that. Did you even know what the girl was called?’
‘I can’t be expected to remember everything.’
I got up. ‘We’ll have to give the servants some sort of freedom, you realize that?’
‘I don’t see why,’ Alleghetta said. My mother had always taken a rather grand view of staff: the assumption that they should show a proper gratitude for the great favour of being employed by us. Given how much they were paid and how they were treated, I’d never thought this was realistic.
‘Because we’re at war! We can’t protect them.’ We couldn’t even have protected ourselves, if Mantis had decided to attack. And the incursion showed how effective the weir-wards were against certain persons. ‘They have to be free to make their own choices as to whether they stay or not.’
Alleghetta’s face showed what she thought of this idea.
‘Look, I’ll talk to you later,’ I told her. It felt more like midnight than teatime. I went down to the kitchen, avoiding the servants’ eyes. There was a palpable tension in the air: hardly surprising. I decided to take matters into my own hands.
‘If the mansion’s attacked,’ I said, ‘you’re to do what you think best as regards your own survival. No one will be prosecuted later for desertion if you decide not to stay.’
‘I won’t leave Mistress Thea.’ That was the cook, who’d been there for years.
‘It’s up to you, Shia,’ I said. I could tell from the expressions of the younger servants that they’d be bailing out at the first opportunity if it came to it.
‘Mistress Essegui?’ someone said. ‘I think Jhule’s already gone. She wasn’t in our chamber this morning and I haven’t seen her for a couple of days.’
‘She’s probably fled,’ I said, ashamed. I knew exactly where Jhule was. I wished the majike would come back, sweep all traces of Leretui from our home, leave us in peace. But peace obviously isn’t an option in war.
I was coming back up
the stairs when a group of people swept into the hall: Gennera, returning.
Alleghetta and I once more hovered as the majike and her little team of whispering excissieres stripped Leretui’s chamber. Jhule’s body was the first to be removed, and that lessened the stink, to some degree. I’d expected them to do tests, as Gennera had said, and they did, but they also removed all the furniture, including the wall hangings and the rugs. Leretui’s childhood books were taken from the bookcase and piled into sterile crates. I watched them go numbly; she wouldn’t be needing them now. It all took less time than I’d supposed, to get rid of a life. The majike gave me a penetrating look as she came through the door.
‘Now you can start to grieve,’ she said, with a sensitivity that I wouldn’t have expected of her, or would not in any case have expected her to express. But I thought that I’d started grieving a year before, when the Malcontent had come home from Ombre.
‘Thank you for everything you’ve done,’ Alleghetta said, gushing. I tried not to wince.
‘If we need further assistance, I’ll call you, of course,’ the majike said, with the faintest trace of warmth. Her gloved fingers pressed mine like claws. ‘There’s nothing more for you to worry about.’
Except invasion and war and my sister, changed. I saw her out of the house and sought my bed.
THIRTY-ONE
Hestia — Earth
I woke from an unsettled sleep to find that we were landing. Stiff, but warmer, I climbed down out of the hatch and saw that we’d come down onto a huge platform. The sun was sinking in a lemony sky and the heave of waves was clearly visible. After the chill of the ruined city and the saltmarshes, the humid heat struck me like a big warm fist.
‘Where are we?’
‘The edge of Ropa,’ the kappa informed me. She pointed to what might have been a distant line of land. ‘Pan-Asia beyond.’
‘And this?’
‘A refuelling station. For ships as well as aircraft. Owned by the Tukriya.’ She pointed to where several figures were scurrying around a tank. ‘I’ve arranged payment.’
‘Will it be enough to get us to Malay?’
‘No. We’ll need more fuel later. In the shamandoms.’
That sounded more exciting than the platform. I walked to the edge of it with Rubirosa while the orthocopter was refuelled, but could see nothing except the slow churn of the waves. Small boats clustered around the base of the platform, riding out the night.
‘A dreary planet, so far,’ Rubirosa said. ‘And wet.’
I was obliged to agree. We returned to the orthocopter, not wanting to leave the demothea alone for too long, although Rubirosa had told me that the kappa had stunned it again.
‘Can’t take the risk of it regaining consciousness.’
‘No,’ I said. I wasn’t sure why it hadn’t used its illusory powers on me when we were on the tower: perhaps it was simply a matter of overconfidence. It had thought it had the whip hand, after all. Literally.
But the demothea was still unmoving. Evishu had put it back in the holding cell and I watched it as we took off and the platform fell away, watched it as we sailed into night over the chop and froth of the Ukrainean Ocean and islands appeared and vanished again, a scatter of lights against the shadows. The orthocopter flew on and still the demothea did not stir. Nor was there any sign of the Library. Gradually, we caught up with the sun again and it broke over a range of mountains as high as those of the Crater Plain, except Olympus herself. In its cell, the demothea gave a convulsive twitch and Evishu reached forward and touched the gun to its whorled head once more.
‘Too much of that, and it could die,’ Rubirosa said from the pilot’s seat.
‘I won’t take the risk of it breaking out again. A dead one’s better than nothing at all.’
‘A dead one’s better than a live one, if you ask me,’ I said. I didn’t like this change of heart within myself: I’d always tried to support the rights of the Changed, even if I hadn’t contributed greatly to the various political efforts on their behalf. And it wasn’t just that the demothea had personally attacked me – people had tried to kill me before, out on the Crater Plains, and I hadn’t come to detest other humans because of it. It was the level of difference that had caused the change in me, and I didn’t like that, either. Rights for demotheas? Yes, in theory. I didn’t want to have the mad insularity of Caud, their paranoia about other peoples. It wasn’t the demotheas fault that they’d been made as they had, but here they were, and with my destruction as one of their admittedly more minor aims. If I’d been the kappa or her mistresses, I’d have left the demothea to their marshlands.
I passed the watch over to Evishu, who had been sleeping, and went to the cockpit to see the Thibetan islands rising up out of the water. The cliff sides were sheer, with only a tiny fringe of shore around them, and as we flew over the first islands in the chain I saw that their summits were rosy with snow. Strange to think that these must once have been landlocked mountains.
‘Where’s the landing pad?’ Rubirosa shouted.
‘In the second chain.’ Evishu briefly abandoned our captive to point over her shoulder. ‘There, do you see it? Halfway up the mountainside.’
There was a settlement there, too: a series of long, low, white buildings with scarlet and purple flags snapping in the breeze. We flew over a forest of poles and banners.
‘It’s the religion here,’ Evishu said, but did not explain further. And when we landed and walked out into a cold that was close to Martian, I saw that they were also men. Once you got over the shock, the difference wasn’t so marked: they were bundled up in layers of wool, their hair covered up by tasselled hats. Doe-eyed faces peered out and they smiled when they saw the kappa. One of them greeted her by name and took her webbed hands in his own. I thought of my cousin Shorn, imprisoned for so much less, and reminded myself that this was a different world.
The kappa, generously, insisted that Rubirosa and I eat while she kept watch on the demothea. We went into the hall of what was apparently a monastery and were given bowls of meat broth. I was conscious of sidelong glances as we took our seats at a window with a spectacular view of the coast. They might not have known we were Martian, but we were certainly foreigners and that would attract attention. We were hardly unmemorable, after all. I told myself that it might not matter, but I preferred unobtrusiveness.
‘We’re surrounded by males,’ Rubirosa murmured. It was the first time I’d seen her truly unsettled.
‘Just ignore them.’ In their colourful woollens, they could almost have been women. I didn’t want to pay too much attention to them, in case we attracted more of it ourselves. I concentrated on my broth, wondering how the kappa was faring. We did not linger, but went straight back out to the landing pad. The orthocopter was waiting. I turned up the collar of my coat as we walked to it; the banners rattled in the wind. We took off in a rising gale as Earth’s uncertain climate drew the winds over the islands.
‘How long till Malay?’ It would be Rubirosa’s turn to rest soon, while I took over the controls.
‘Six hours or so.’
I found the orthocopter easy enough to fly and fell into a rhythm as the seas rose and retreated below, the high spines of islands occasionally rising up. Even though I’d seen images of Earth, and maps, it startled me how little land there was. Or maybe it was simply that I was used to Mars and its lack of seas.
Eventually the kappa came up front to tell me that we were close to the coast of Malay. I could see it now, a long string of lights, some rising high into the heavens, betokening cities.
‘Khul Pak,’ the kappa said, with satisfaction.
THIRTY-TWO
Essegui — Winterstrike
When I woke and switched on the little night lamp the shadows fled racing into the corners of the room, clustering and lingering like weir-wards. I looked at the clock. It was just before dawn. There was no black oil seeping under the door, no hint of menace. Everything was as it should have been, but
I’d woken with a start, all the same.
Going back to sleep was out of the question. I wrapped myself in a robe and went to the window, drawing the drapes aside. The lawn of Calmaretto was stark under the snow, a bare white blanket. Further snowfall the day before had smoothed over any footprints that Leretui and I might have left. There was nothing hovering over the icy surface of Canal-the-Less.
I put on a skirt and blouse, and laced a jacket over it. When I opened the door, the hallway was peaceful. It was still too early for the servants to be up. We might be under invasion, but it was very quiet: unnaturally so, it seemed to me. Shouldn’t I be hearing the sound of distant bombardment, shouts and cries? But what would they bombard? It was as though Calmaretto had been removed to a different Winterstrike, some sidelong dimension.
Without the barbed presence of Alleghetta, the parlour was a pleasant room, lined with books, although my mother had only ever read the ones she thought she ought to. I clicked on the anti-scribe. The rumour boards of the city were humming: stories of ghost soldiers in the streets, things that hadn’t been seen for hundreds of years walking arm in arm over the surface of the frozen canals, people visited by long-dead grandmothers, and through it all the undercurrent of paranoia and fear. I shared it. I’d seen a demothea stroll through my home as if none of the weir-wards had even been there. When all this was over, I thought – assuming there was anything left – Calmaretto wouldn’t be unusual any longer. Because vulpen had also been seen: in broad daylight, skating along the arcs of the canals, disappearing under bridges in a swirl of robes, and they probably hadn’t been ghosts, either. The Changed were coming back to Winterstrike in force.
Just as I thought that, a siren started to wail, making me jump out of my seat. Moments later, Calmaretto was awake. Alleghetta came striding down the hallway, shouting orders to anyone who’d listen to make sure that the wards were working.
‘What’s going on?’ Thea was at Alleghetta’s heels.