by Liz Williams
“Armor!”
Instantly, Embar Khair’s armor uncurled itself from its resting form and flowed across her outstretched hand. Soon she was covered in familiar gleaming green. Dreams-of-War stood up, supported by the armor. She felt no different—at first. But when she looked into herself, she was conscious of a new, sore spot inside her head. Dreams-of-War probed it, imagining fingers gingerly touching, and the result was a flooding anxiety, an adrenaline rush that made her gasp. She closed her eyes, and had a sudden disquieting image of the interior of her mind. Normally as dark, hard, and resolute as metal, her inner self now contained a small hole, pink and tender from recent bleeding. The sensation was as compelling as a stolen tooth.
The door opened. The doctor’s face was disapproving beneath the high scarlet hat.
“You should not be on your feet! And who told you that you could get dressed?”
Dreams-of-War took a single stride across the room and seized the doctor by the throat.
“What have you done to me? What have you put in my head?”
“Rather,” the doctor said faintly, scrabbling at the hand around her neck, “you should be asking what it is that we have removed. Now let me go.”
“Removed?”
The doctor was gasping. The scalpel blade shot out from beneath her fingernail. Desiring answers, Dreams-of-War let go and experienced a curious and unfamiliar sense of relief.
“This is what I have done,” the doctor said, massaging her neck. “There is a psychological callus that is grown on the mind of a warrior, that increases day by day after your release from the growing-skin. It is that callus that enables you to act fearlessly, to make your goals your only focus, that permits you to go forth and slaughter your enemies with as little compunction as I feel when I swat a weed bug down from the wall at night. That emotional callus makes you everything that you are, and now it is gone. You will feel as a normal made-human feels. You will feel love, affection, need, and anxiety for a child.”
“I have no intention of having a child!” Sitting by a growing-skin for months while someone congealed within, followed by years of restriction and worry? No thanks.
“No, but you will be looking after one. An indifferent guardian is no guardian at all. You have to care. And Memnos is determined to make you care. I do not understand you warrior clans. What is wrong with having emotions?”
Dreams-of-War stared at her. “Nothing at all. Emotions are a fine and necessary thing—pride, aggression, loyalty . . . As for caring,” she added, bristling, “my duty as a warrior should be enough.”
“It seems Memnos does not think so.”
“How much have they told you about this child whom I am to guard?” Dreams-of-War asked.
“They have told me very little. In all probability,” the doctor added, “as little as they have told you.”
“And what about me?” Dreams-of-War asked uneasily. “If this—this cork in my psyche permitted me to function as a warrior, to kill without qualm, what will happen now that it is gone?”
“Since you have just recently embarked upon my throttling,” the doctor said, rubbing a bruised throat, “I wouldn’t worry too much about that.”
CHAPTER 4
Earth
Tersus Rhee waddled slowly through the chamber, checking with thick fingers the drip-feeds that led to the growing-skins, monitoring the minor changes and alterations that might token an incipient systems failure. They had already lost the previous children. If this one, too, failed, the Grandmothers had told her, then the project might have to be terminated. And that would be a great shame. The Grandmothers had gone to an immense amount of trouble on behalf of the child in the growing-skin. The services of Tersus Rhee herself had been procured. A Martian warrior was now on her way, at no small difficulty and expense, to guard the child.
Tersus Rhee, for various reasons of her own, did not want the project to be terminated. The Grandmothers had told her little enough about this line of made-humans, this special strain to whose care she so diligently attended. But then, despite her skills, she knew that she was nothing more than the hired help to the Grandmothers, just another kappa, indistinguishable from all the rest of her kind. She did not expect to be told a great deal. She knew only that the child in the bag was known as the hito-bashira, the woman-who-holds-back-the-flood. She had her own suspicions as to what this might mean.
But speculation had already run rife throughout the clans of the kappa when it was learned that she, Tersus Rhee of Hailstone Shore, was to be sent all the way south to Fragrant Harbor to serve the Grandmothers.
How much do you know about the Grandmothers?” the clan leader had asked Rhee.
“Very little.” Rhee shuffled her wide feet in a supplicatory gesture and spread her webbed hands wide.
“Unsurprising. No one knows anything of them, it seems—who they are, where they come from. Now, they keep to their mansion of Cloud Terrace, but it is not known how long they have been there. They squat above the city like bats. Then, suddenly, they send word to me, asking for a grower, a carer. An expert.”
Rhee frowned. “Why are you telling me this? Am I to be that expert?”
The clan leader gave a slow frog blink. “Just so.”
“But what about my duties here?”
“This is more important.” The puffed eyelids drifted shut and tightened. Rhee knew that she would say nothing further.
“When am I to leave?” Rhee asked in resignation.
“On the third day of the new moon, when the time is auspicious. Take what you need.”
And so, with a hired junk waiting in the harbor below, Tersus Rhee had packed her equipment: the box of scalpels, the neurotoxin feeds that, if carefully applied, would alter genetic development to the desired specifications, and a handful of the starter mulch that had now been in her family for seven generations, nurtured and handed down like a precious yeast. For all else, she would be obliged to rely on the Grandmothers of Cloud Terrace, and the thought did not please her.
The journey south pleased her even less. She would be traveling not as an expert hired by Cloud Terrace, but incognito, as a hired help. This was so commonplace for the kappa as to be unremarked. It was, after all, they who provided most of the world’s drudgery. Rhee traveled in the communal hold of the junk but spent most of the day on deck, watching the peaks of the Fire Islands recede into the distance until they were no bigger than pins against the lowering skies. From then on, the journey was uneventful: only ocean, like so much of Earth, wave after endless rolling wave. Rhee passed her time in the passive, contemplative trance that was the default mode of her people, and made doubly sure that no one noticed her. The kappa spoke little among themselves, anyway, when away from the clan-warrens.
On the third day out, however, there was excitement during a sudden squall. A commotion at the prow of the junk suggested an unusual occurrence, with all the crew rushing to see. Rhee was sitting under a furled sail, just far enough into the rain to be comfortable. She rose to her feet with difficulty on the slick, plunging deck, and ambled toward the prow. Everyone was shouting and pointing, but Rhee was too short to see what they were all looking at. With placid determination, she shoved her way through and stared.
Something was rising on the horizon: a huge, curling shell. From this distance, Rhee estimated, the thing must be hundreds of feet high. Coiling, spatulate tentacles drifted out from the main bulk, forming a nimbus against the stormlight. When it once more sank, the rain had passed, leaving a clear sky in its wake.
“What was that?” Rhee asked a crewmember. The woman, red-clad like all sailors, turned toward the kappa. Her face was wizened with a lifetime of saltspray and wind; she bore the mark of Izanami, creator goddess of ocean, between eyes like black currants.
Rhee thought she already knew what manner of thing it had been, looming up out of the waters, but she wanted to be sure.
“Why, it was a Dragon-King,” the crewmember said. She touched the mark between her b
rows in respect. “Did you see its whips?”
“I did,” the kappa said. “Are Dragon-Kings common in these parts?”
“Do you not know?”
Rhee shook her head with the affectation of doleful stupidity.
“Why, there are said to be no more than four of the great beasts, which survived the Drowning. Once, the world was full of dragons, so they say—from what are now the Shattered Lands to the islands of Altai and Thibet. But then they raised the wrath of the ocean, of Izanami, and the sea rose up and drowned the world and all the dragons with it. And now there are only the sea dragons left, the great kings who once bore pearls in their claws and jewels in their manes.”
The kappa forbore from saying that the thing they had just seen had neither claws nor mane, and the great polished shell more closely resembled metal than scales, only inclined her head and mumbled, as if in awe. The crewmember moved on and Rhee wandered thoughtfully back belowdeck.
Later, a bandit boat was seen, coming out from one of the inlets, but it veered away after the junk raised a warning, and sped back toward the ruined shores of its home.
After that, there was nothing of note until the towers and typhoon shelters of Fragrant Harbor appeared, with the mansion of the Grandmothers squatting amid the great houses at its summit. They arrived at dusk, with the lights of the city glowing out across the harbor, flickering and changing in the choppy water, mirroring nothing. The kappa chose to take it as a sign.
Once she was actually in Cloud Terrace, immured in the growing-chamber for most of the day, the situation pleased the kappa even less. The mansion—itself in a district filled with the ancient and decaying houses of the long-dead rich—was labyrinthine, full of weir-wards that the kappa constantly had to avoid activating. The Grandmothers had been forced to make some allowance for her inherent clumsiness—it was clear that the mansion had been designed for classical human form and not for the Changed, despite the Grandmothers’ own appearance—but they had been clear in their disapproval. And Rhee, in turn, hated the weir-wards: the forms they conjured up, beings of the distant past and distant deep, all teeth and eyes, swimming through the empty air of the passages and hallways, snapping at things that were not there. But if someone unauthorized had fallen into their path, the kappa knew, then the teeth would have proved all too real.
She hoped for the Martian’s sake that the warrior would retain some grace in the slightly different gravity. Two of them stumbling about the mansion, summoning the lost beasts of the Eldritch Realm, did not bear thinking about.
So Rhee kept mainly to the growing-chamber, whose wards were outside the door in order to avoid disruption to the delicate life-form within the skins, and she slept on a pallet. It suited her to do this, too, for when it came to the moment of hatching, it was vital that she should be present. She hoped the Martian would be there for this new child, as well. The woman should see what manner of thing was to be guarded, right from the start. But for now, the skin was quiescent, dangling from its long feeds like a ripe fruit. Only a small pulse at the base of the stem indicated that there was anything living in it at all. But soon, the kappa knew, it would reach fruition.
And then everything would change.
CHAPTER 5
Mars/Earth
Dreams-of-War waited impatiently as the ship joined the queue of vessels waiting to dock. There was little traffic from the edges of the system. She gazed out at freighters and passenger craft with lunar markings, the insignia of some of the client factories of Earth: all of it pockmarked, scarred, old.
“Approach,” she heard the ship’s consciousness say, formed, perhaps, of some past pilot or a composite of pilots, haunt-shifted into the ship’s blacklight system.
The ship was entering the Martian maw of the Chain, ready for the rush. The maw gaped before them, a mile or more in width, lined with rotating spines to keep out intruding traffic—the disaffected of the lesser worlds, who occasionally tried to disrupt the flow of the Chain. At the back of the maw, Dreams-of-War glimpsed the energy spirals that would take them onward: a twisting glint. In the next few minutes they would be passing through the dimensional interfaces that the Chain manipulated to compensate for different planetary orbits and then entering the Eldritch Realm, the dimension of the dead, before once more emerging through another maw into the atmosphere of Earth. Or so one hoped.
Strapped into her seat, Dreams-of-War was uneasily reminded of the experience that she had so recently undergone beneath the blacklight matrix. She closed her eyes and leaned back. The ship roared and shuddered as it entered the first portals of the maw. Dreams-of-War hoped it would hold up. Often ships did not; rent and sundered by the forces within, they emerged as antiques, or not at all.
Restless, she opened her eyes again and looked around at her fellow passengers. Most were Martian: the bleached women of the north, dressed in elaborate swathes and robes, all overlapping folds. Suitable for the chilly Martian plains, thought Dreams-of-War, but the ship was stiflingly hot. The women showed no signs of discomfort, however. They sat upright, cold and wan as stone.
Other passengers were less easily placed: a woman with dark skin and protruding vertebrae, a too-long neck that continually angled and flexed as if seeking comfort; a squat person with a depression in the top of her head, deep enough to hold liquid. The Changed, thought Dreams-of-War with distaste. She glowered down at her own armored self. The Changed passengers passed by, heading for economy class.
The ship juddered as it began to enter temporal recalibration. A bewildering kaleidoscope of images whirled and wheeled before Dreams-of-War’s eyes.
She saw a small, grublike child lying in a black metal bed in the depths of a tower, ice riming the interior windows . . .
... A woman stood on the deck of a ship, staring out at storms . . .
. . . A single dark wing spiraled down from out of the clouds and Dreams-of-War felt rain on her face, before touching her hand to her cheek. Her fingers came away slimy with blood and ichor . . .
Dreams-of-War jumped, filled with sudden dismay.
Possible futures, possible pasts, unskeining as the interior of the Chain folded and refolded time, enveloping it in upon itself, merging and sifting. She could feel time running past and through her, traveling in both directions. Dimly, she was aware of the other passengers. The pale northerners wore identical expressions of deep affront.
The ship was entering the final stages of recalibration. It slid with a shriek into the deeplight web of the Chain. Shadow-space rose up to enfold it. Then memory rose up and engulfed Dreams-of-War as time changed.
She was only just out of the clan house. A warrior was missing; it was assumed that hyenae had taken her, high in the crags. Or perhaps the warrior had slipped and fallen, and now lay at the bottom of one of the sharp ravines. Dreams-of-War hoped it was hyenae. She disliked killing beasts, because of their beauty, but the men-remnants were another matter.
Warriors did not work well together, and it was not expected of them. The women set off in the early morning, just before dawn. It was cold, with a ground frost that snapped at Dreams-of-War’s heels. She was not wearing the armor of Embar Khair, for this was a year before she had earned it. A leather apron, underharness, boots, and a gutting knife were all that she wore, but her dental implants had recently been made. Her gums were sore, and they still bled first thing in the morning. Dreams-of-War recalled looking up from the ice-cracked basin and seeing scarlet running down her chin, reflected in the metal walls of the bathroom. She had borne the pain with pride, nursing it as warriors were encouraged to bear all small anguishes, that they might better be accustomed to pain when it made its first true visits upon them in the combat-ring, or life.
Unlike the other girls, Dreams-of-War chose a difficult route into the mountains: up the face of Mount Haut, which rose in a sheer rock cliff from the stones of the plain. Usually the canyons that led to this cliff were to be avoided; it was known to be a place where Earthbones were found, with
pits and traps in the ground leading to the devouring flesh beneath. Dreams-of-War smeared lattice pulp on the soles of her boots to disguise her odor and was careful where she walked, but she could still smell the Earthbones as she slipped through the canyon: a faint trace of rotten meat. She avoided any place where the soil appeared unstable or bloody; the Earthbones exuded a seep of purulence upward into the earth, to form their entrapping webs. But it was still too easy to take a misstep; two warriors had been lost that year alone.
It was a difficult ascent up the cliff. Dreams-of-War was compelled to remove her boots halfway up and climb barefoot, to give herself a better grip. When she reached a ledge a little way below the summit, she was sweating and her mouth was filled with blood from where her new teeth had snagged her lip. She spat in a crimson arc down toward the plain, and looked forth.
The sun was bursting up over the horizon’s edge, casting sharp shadows across the plain. She could see the angular buildings of the clan house, rising up through the nest of trees, half-lost in a haze of smoke from the still-smoldering fires of the previous evening. The Memnos Tower broke the line of the horizon. Beneath the plain ran a labyrinth of tunnels, reaching out from the Tower into the hills. Dreams-of-War looked at the Tower with distaste. It was the place to which all else must defer, the governing seat of Mars and thereby of Earth, a place full of politics and intrigue. Dreams-of-War was not a political being.
She dismissed the view with a curl of the lip. She would be relieved to be free of the clan house, too—free to win her armor and travel the slopes of Olympus, the sands of the Crater Plain. There was no doubt in her mind that the armor would be won, when the time came. Now, however, she turned and looked upward.
The crags towered above her, ochre and rust and blood. She could smell smoke—from the clan house?— but it was surely too distant. A faint trace of burning meat: hyenae, then. Hope rose in her. She started to clamber up, following the scent. As she crested the top of a high ridge, she found them below. Four of the men-remnants were crouched in a hollow in the rock around a fire. They were, indeed, hyenae, from the deep fastness of the mountains; unusual, to find them this far west, away from their caverns and the female remnants with which they bred. Dreams-of-War repressed a shudder at the thought. Coarse, tawny hair spilled down their backs; the long, overshot jaws bore small up-reaching tusks and their eyes resembled black, shiny seeds. Occasionally, one of them gave voice in a grunting bark of satisfaction. They were eating what remained of the missing warrior.