Winterstrike

by Liz Williams

  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 b
ending 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.

  ‘Esse!’ Canteley shouted from the top of the stairs. The brazier was rolling down towards us, bouncing and bounding, its metal sides clattering on the steps. I didn’t know whether Mantis had thrown it or whether it had rolled, but I flung myself off Shorn, who tried to rise. As the brazier reached the bottom step I grabbed it by its handles, ignoring the sudden searing heat, and swung it at Shorn’s head. The heavy metal canister hit home. The back of my sister’s inhuman head caved in like a broken egg and Shorn collapsed.

  I looked down in horror. Shorn lay in death, looking immediately smaller, more human. Her eyes were glazing. No time to say I was sorry, no time to say goodbye. She was simply gone, and I wondered whether she’d finally be free or whether her troubled spirit was already flying out to greet the ghost army of the Noumenon. I didn’t have time to dwell on the issue. From above me, Mantis gave a thin, high wail. She came flying down the stairs, her burned face blackened now and her arms reaching wide. She cried something in a language I did not understand and I heard movement behind me, but Mantis was already there. She struck me in the face and knocked me to my knees. Up on the stairs, I was dimly aware of Canteley screaming. But Mantis had achieved what Shorn had not and I could feel consciousness slipping away from me. I fell forward but as I did so, I heard chanting.

  I’d heard it before. It had ripped a piece of my soul from me, and now, with the later hole partially filled by the lock mechanism, I could see with my soul what my eyes could not. Someone was standing over me, someone familiar, and she was speaking. The majike had caught up with us and she was doing to Mantis what she had done to me. The chanting went on and on, horribly insidious, words keyed into soul-engrams, and of course the majike must have known what they were, since she was Mantis’s creator. No wonder Mantis had sought the sanctuary of the Crater Plain, with such a weapon against her; she must have been very sure of the Noumenon army to return to Winterstrike.

  It wasn’t my soul but it hurt all the same. I didn’t quite lose consciousness, however, and when my vision finally started to clear and I could sit up, Mantis was crouched in a huddle of skirts across the landing, her face as slack as an idiot child’s. The majike was folding something into her reticule, primly, as if about to return home after a party.

  ‘Essegui,’ she said severely. ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Leretui’s dead,’ I said, blinking up at her. It seemed as accurate as ‘Shorn’, now.

  ‘Yes, I can see that. But we need to go.’ She reached out a hand and after a hesitant moment, I took it and allowed her to pull me up.

  ‘I know you don’t trust me,’ Gennera Khine said. ‘But I’m on your side, you know.’

  ‘And which side is that?’ I didn’t see how she could say such a thing, when I didn’t know myself. ‘Calmaretto’s? The Matriarchy’s?’

  The majike regarded me calmly, as if I was a particularly slow pupil. ‘No. Winterstrike’s.’

  We went quickly and cautiously down the stairs and out of the bell tower. There was no point in trying to secure the turret room any further – if someone wanted to try and make off with the festival bell, they’d have to go right ahead – but I released the lock, into the doorframe of the archive room. It might not stay secure for long but it was all I could do and I didn’t want to go out of the tower with the lock still with me: it felt wrong. The majike watched as I worked, and said nothing.

  When we finally stepped through the blasted doors to the remnants of the bridge, the sun was up and spilling brightly over the snow, sending sparks from the icicles. The majike pointed. ‘Look,’ she said. A figure was skating across the courtyard of the Temple, its robes a drift of cloud. The vulpen, leaving.

  They’re still here,’ I warned. ‘They’ll stay in the tunnels under the city.’

  The majike gave me a reproving look. ‘They’ve always been here. They come and go as they please, not as we do. I’ve sent squads of excissieres into the catacombs in the past and half of them didn’t make it back. Where do you think Shorn’s creature came from? All the way from the Crater Plain? Whenever a woman goes missing, or a child – chances are that’s where they’ve gone.’

  ‘What about the rest of the Changed?’ I asked. ‘Without Mantis, they might not be so keen to band together.’ But we could not be sure. ‘And what about the Noumenon?’

  ‘The Noumenon will have to be fought,’ the majike said. ‘But I confess, I don’t know how. We’ll have to wait and see what happens with the Changed.’

  ‘What about my soul, then,’ I asked, but she only smiled.

  We were on the bridge, and conversation languished until we were safely over the gap. The majike’s vehicle was waiting by then, on the forecourt of the Temple which even now was melting into sunlight and snow. Canteley and I climbed into the vehicle in silence, and in silence, returned to Calmaretto.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  Essegui — Winterstrike

  I was surprised to find the mansion still standing, and appearing so normal. When we’d reached the Temple courtyard, I’d looked back to see the bell tower, the familiar crimson eye of the window no longer gazing out across Winterstrike. We’d mend it, I thought. Maybe. But it wouldn’t be the same. The majike had told me that she’d send excissieres in to retrieve Shorn’s body. I wondered if she’d be able to spare them. The morning city had a wary air, with no one about. I had no idea what might have happened in the course of the night. I saw neither citizens nor ghosts. Mantis had been led away, going meekly, by an excissiere waiting at the c
ar.

  When we reached Calmaretto, Canteley threw herself out of the car and up the steps, with myself close behind: it might not be wise to rush in. But the entrance hall was quiet, the black and white checkerboard of the floor and the tapestries that hung on the panelling were undisturbed. A moment later the parlour door was flung open and there stood my mother Alleghetta, her red and grey hat askew but still attached to her head. She’d probably take to sleeping in it, if we survived. She gave us all a glowering look and said, in the direction of the majike, ‘Your crew fought off the ghosts. They’ve chased them out of the Winter Palace and put out the fire.’ She looked grimly triumphant, although I couldn’t see that she’d had anything to do with it.

  ‘It won’t be for long,’ the majike said. ‘The Noumenon have come too far. They might not be able to enlist the Changed next time, but they won’t give up. This city is infested with ghosts now.’

  ‘We’ll see about that,’ said Alleghetta.

  Canteley clutched her arm. ‘Where’s Thea?’

  ‘Sleeping it off Alleghetta said with a downward twist of the mouth, and for the first time it struck me that an actual Matriarch might not want to have a liability as a wife. Divorce might be frowned upon, but so was addiction. And something in Alleghetta’s face as she looked at the majike, a sly, unexpected speculation, made me wonder whether Canteley and I might not be anticipating a new stepmother fairly soon.

  ‘Leretui’s dead,’ I said, because the majike hadn’t said anything about that and clearly it was falling to me. The result was more extreme than I’d expected: Alleghetta staggered back and clasped the banister for support.

  ‘How?’

  ‘I—’

  ‘She tried to cross the bridge to the bell tower,’ the majike interrupted. ‘I’m afraid she fell.’