Banner of Souls

by Liz Williams

  Oh well, thought Dreams-of-War. Not a noble end, but probably she had died fighting and there were enough of the hyenae on which to exact a reasonably satisfactory vengeance. She leaped down from the ridge, slid along a bank of scree, and uttered a roar. The hyenae looked up, startled, with fragments of human flesh raised halfway to their tusks. They had a limb each, she noted. Very equitable, but Dreams-of-War was not about to give them the chance to benefit.

  She dispatched one with the gutting knife, another on a backhand swing, kicked the third in the face and crushed his skull. The fourth bolted, still clutching a fireblackened portion of arm. Dreams-of-War started after him, but he was gone down the ravine, leaping from crag to crag with engineered speed. She retrieved the warrior’s lost insignia from the flames, tucked it into her apron, then made her way sulkily back. She had not even had a proper chance to try out the new teeth.

  Dreams-of-War returned to the present with a start. Shadow-space was fading back into deeplight as the Eldritch Realm slid away. She felt it pass through her soul as it left, a cold burn followed by a nausea that was closer to revulsion than motion sickness.

  Earth and Fragrant Harbor lay ahead.

  Cloud Terrace

  CHAPTER 1

  Earth

  8 MONTHS LATER . . .

  Lunae was in the tower room of Cloud Terrace, a chrysalis in her hand, when Dreams-of-War came to find her. The chrysalis rested velvet-light against Lunae’s skin, a woven parcel too large for her childish fingers to close all the way around. She sat cross-legged on the window seat, looking out over the jumbled tenements as they stretched down from the Peak toward the harbor. Her Grandmothers still used the old names for the city: Hong Kong, Fragrant Harbor, the City of Sails. She tested each one on her tongue, staring down into the late-afternoon shadows between the immensity of the tenements.

  Across the water, at the edges of High Kowloon, the crimson sign of the Nightshade Mission burned through the haze, casting a glitter over the sea. A junk was coming in from the east, the filament sails turning in a glare of gold to catch the wind. Lunae thought she glimpsed its dragon figurehead and imagined it gliding over long-drowned lands, coming into port beneath the volcanoes of the north.

  Far above the horizon, the maw of the Chain arched upward: the initial segment of the Earth–Mars pathway. Even in daylight, Lunae thought she could identify incoming ships as the maw turned, but it was hard to see through the smoky air, so she looked back to the chrysalis in her hand.

  There was a sudden twitch inside her head. Beyond the window, the view changed: a darker day, with the red sign of the Mission flickering through fog. Farther east a great lamp glowed, warning ships away from the walls of the fortress-temple of Gwei Hei. The chrysalis, too, shifted and altered. A silk-moth now sat upon Lunae’s palm, beating iridescent wings.

  Lunae’s mind twitched again. The chrysalis was back, as tightly wrapped as before. The afternoon sunlight flooded in. Lunae smiled, but then a voice behind her said, “And what do you think you’re doing?”

  Lunae jumped. Dreams-of-War stood in the doorway, her armored hand tapping impatiently against the lacquered wood. Lunae looked up into her guardian’s icy green glare.

  “Nothing.”

  “What’s that you’re holding?” Dreams-of-War strode across the room, steel-shod feet clicking on driftwood boards, razor teeth glistening wet in a sudden shaft of sunlight. Her wan hair flowed down her back, unbound today, suggesting that her guardian must be in a relatively good mood. Enboldened, Lunae held up the chrysalis. It rested in her palm, innocent, untransformed.

  “I found it under the windowsill. It will be a silk-moth one day.”

  “So it will,” Dreams-of-War said, seemingly appeased, then added, “one day. You are not to exercise your talents, except at the beginning and end of your lessons. I’ve told you before—the Grandmothers have insisted upon it. Do you understand?”

  Lunae nodded. “I understand.” Then she added, reluctantly, “I’m sorry.” There had been a time, not long ago, when she had obeyed her guardians without question, but recently the restrictions placed upon her had begun to chafe. No point in asking for forgiveness, though. Dreams-of-War did not believe in it. It was not, she had said, a Martian concept.

  Lunae looked up at her guardian. The armor, as green and iridescent as an insect’s carapace, flowed over the Martian woman’s skin, covering everything except Dreams-of-War’s angular face and her hair. A dragonfly-Samurai, Lunae thought; rows of needles bristled from Dreams-of-War’s breastplate like viridian thorns. Her mailed hands were demon-clawed.

  Once, Lunae had woken with a toothache and, unable to locate her nurse, had sought out Dreams-of-War instead. She had often wondered whether her guardian even slept, but sure enough, when she stepped into the red lacquer room at the far end of the eastern wing, there was Dreams-of-War, lying on the bed, neck resting on an iron pillow. Her arms were crossed austerely over her breast and she was still wearing her armor, like some ancient statue. Lunae could not help wondering whether the armor provided some kind of support system; certainly Dreams-of-War never seemed to remove it, and she had never joined Lunae in the bathing chamber. This was perhaps a relief. Lunae thought that it would be disturbing to see her guardian naked. She imagined Dreams-of-War as cold and pale, with flesh as hard as marble. Surely she was never as vulnerable as the unraveled contents of the chrysalis.

  Dreams-of-War had told her that the armor was old and that it marked her as a member of the Memnos Matriarchy. When Lunae had been able to access her buried memories, she had learned of the women of the Memnos Tower—the current rulers of Mars and Earth. She learned how they had taken pity on the weakness of humans and created the kappa and other creatures to serve the people of Earth.

  Her guardian’s words echoed in her mind: “The Martians have always been superior. It is, after all, we who colonized Earth thousands of years ago. My ancestors come from the ice palaces of the far south; they roamed the snow-seas in far prehistory.”

  Now Dreams-of-War reached out a spiny hand and, careful not to touch Lunae’s face, took a strand of hair between her fingers. Lunae squinted down, surprised, for Dreams-of-War had long ago expressed a dislike of intimate contact. The dark red threads glistened against the Martian woman’s fingernails, the armored hand changing, becoming spidery and delicate.

  “I’m glad you understand me,” Dreams-of-War said. “You are nine months old, almost grown. Soon you will be a woman. You are old enough to obey instruction without mutiny.”

  “I do the best I can,” Lunae protested.

  “You do tolerably well, at that. But you must do better, and that means practicing restraint.” Dreams-of-War squatted on armored heels until she was level with Lunae’s gaze. The armor flowed smoothly to accommodate the movement: needles retracting, joints shifting.

  Lunae shifted uncomfortably on the window ledge.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “It’s just—how am I ever to grow and learn if I am not allowed out of the house?”

  She had seen little even of the harbor, except glimpses from the heights of Cloud Terrace and through the spy-eyes that the Grandmothers had installed in the streets between the tenements of the Peak. Lunae spent hours in front of the oreagraph, watching everyday life pass before the spy-eyes. She knew that the Grandmothers would forbid this if they knew, but Dreams-of-War had once caught her in front of the oreagraph and had turned away without saying a word. Later, she had devoted a lesson to the workings of the oreagraph: ostensibly a theoretical study, but Lunae took it for approval nonetheless.

  From the altered perspective of the spy-eyes, the mansion in which Lunae now sat resembled a wrecked vessel, a sprawling black mass of uneven wings and curling gables, pagoda-roofed, as though cast up by some impossibly high tide. Cloud Terrace was a vulture-house, she thought, with the Grandmothers squatting at its heart.

  On the rare occasions that Lunae had been taken down into the streets of the Peak, beyond
the weir-wards of Cloud Terrace, she had been made to stay in an enclosed litter. Frustrated, confined by lacquer walls, Lunae had listened to the multiple babble of Cantonese, Kitachi Malaya, and the Lost Tongues of the north, smelled smoke and kimchi and lemongrass, the odors of the tea stalls, and the blood that ran from the slaughter-racks of the meat market. She had been unable to catch even a glimpse of the world around her. But for once, Dreams-of-War and her kappa nurse had been in agreement with the Grandmothers’ dictates: Lunae should not be exposed to the view of the general populace. Lunae did not understand why this should be.

  But now rebellion rose in Lunae’s breast like the silk-moth in its captive web. She knew only her home, loved the kappa, respected Dreams-of-War, and obeyed her Grandmothers, but she so greatly wanted to see what it was like elsewhere, to witness the world beyond the weir-wards and the oreagraph. With sudden longing, she remembered the junk running in from the north.

  “When am I to be allowed outside?” she asked once more, for her guardian had not yet replied.

  “Not today,” Dreams-of-War replied, simultaneously fanning and withering Lunae’s hopes. Frustration rose to choke her.

  “When, then?”

  “When you are ready.”

  “I would love to travel the Chain,” Lunae ventured.

  Dreams-of-War laughed. “Would you? My home of Mars, perhaps, the Nine Cities of the Crater Plain? Winterstrike and Caud? Or would you prefer to ride the links all the way to Nightshade, see the sun as nothing more than a pinprick star?” She added after a moment, “Not that one can enter Nightshade space. The lab clans won’t allow it.”

  “Everything,” Lunae said, wide-eyed. “I want to see everything.”

  “Well, you have spirit, I’ll give you that,” Dreams-of-War answered.

  When Dreams-of-War had gone, Lunae rose restlessly from the window seat and made her way down the twisting stairs. Her footsteps clattered on the boards, for all that she tried to be quiet. The Grandmothers always told her off for making a noise, and when she told Dreams-of-War how hard she endeavored to keep silent, the Martian merely snorted and said that the floorboards were made deliberately creaky, so that the Grandmothers would always hear who was coming. Lunae did not find it at all difficult to believe this explanation and she took additional pains to walk softly.

  She passed the door that led to the Grandmothers’ chamber and paused, but no sound came from within. The hallway smelled musty at this point, as though something old and forlorn had leaked beneath the door and permeated the atmosphere. Lunae hurried on, seeking fresher air. Soon she found herself in the narrow kitchen. The stove had been lit, which made the room smoky. Lunae sneezed once, then went to the back door. She was not allowed to go into the garden without the kappa or Dreams-of-War, but she tried the door handle anyway, half-expecting the weir-wards to shriek up. They did not, suggesting that the kappa was already outside. It would surely be permissible, Lunae told herself, to go in search of her nurse. Stealthily, she opened the door and stepped out into the garden.

  The back of the mansion was overhung with trees— maple and oak, which towered up above the lower storys of the building. The skeins of moss that hung from their branches cast the garden beneath into a wan green light. The air was humid. Lunae made her way between overgrown rows of hibiscus, crimson flowers rearing out of the gloom, stretching long furred tongues toward her. A dragonfly, jade and armored, hummed past her ear and Lunae smiled, reminded of Dreams-of-War. She could see the kappa now, bending over a pile of compost some distance away and digging industriously in it with a small sharp tool. She did not see Lunae, who was about to call out before she checked herself. Instead, she slid past until she was concealed from the sight of the kappa by the hanging moss.

  At the far edge of the gardens stood a great oak, ancient and gnarled. Only a fortnight before, Lunae had stood under it in the company of Dreams-of-War and had noted, idly, that she was too short to clamber up to the lowest branches. But she had grown since then. Without stopping to think, she reached up and clasped the branch, then swung herself up into the tree. It was not easy, dressed as she was in an ankle-length robe, so when she was in a more secure position, she reached down and tucked the robe up into her sash. Then she inched out along the coiling branch that grew in the direction of the wall.

  At the end, she looked back. The kappa had risen from the compost with a snort. Lunae held her breath. The nurse picked up a basket and began to waddle back toward the house. Lunae looked ahead once more. She could see the crackle of the weir-wards along the wall, a black-and-silver sparkle. They were intended to keep out intruders, linked as they were to the mansion’s blacklight matrix, but they were also designed to keep the occupants inside. An adult would not have been able to crawl under the blacklight sparks, but Lunae was not yet fully grown. She crawled to the very end of the branch and ducked beneath. The wall was wide enough for her to lie balanced across it. She could hear the snap and sizzle of the weir-wards above her head. She swung her legs around, grasped the edges of the wall, and dropped down.

  It was a much longer drop than she had anticipated and it knocked the breath out of her. She sat down on the curb, momentarily winded. But she was out of the house, and the realization hit her almost as hard as the fall. She had not really meant to escape. She looked back up at the wall. It was smooth and vitrified, with no handholds. If she were to get back into the mansion, she would have to go round to the front gate. The Grandmothers would be furious. Dreams-of-War would grow even colder and icier. Lunae thrust these images from her mind and concentrated on the present. If she went straight back to the house, she would still be punished. She might as well make the most of the experience.

  She scrambled up from the gutter, rearranged her robe, and hurried down the street. Here, she was surrounded by the other great houses that she had glimpsed from the tower: sprawling, decaying mansions topped with moldering cupolas, half-gilded, roofs askew, porches slipping into the mass of undergrowth, starred with flowers that grew in profusion over what had once been formal gardens. The air was filled with the scent of blooms and rot. Lunae, fascinated, longed to explore, but something held her back. The interiors of the mansions were dark, save for a few. Even though it was still afternoon, lamps burned in some of the upper windows, casting a sickly light out into the foliage.

  At the end of the street, Lunae looked back. She could see the tower room rising above the oaks. Ahead, a long street sloped down to become lost in the teeming maze of the lower Peak. The spy-eyes would surely be watching, but perhaps she might see a little, at least, before she was spotted. Lunae hesitated for a moment, but the prospect of investigating the streets that she had only experienced from the interior of a litter was too alluring. She thrust thoughts of the spy-eyes from her mind and ran down the road, heading for the maze.

  Little by little, the mansions gave way to narrower, more crowded streets. The great houses were replaced by tenements, rising in tottering columns up from the roadway, covered with rickety balconies filled with vegetation. The tenements looked like great vertical gardens. Birds sang from cages, captive crickets whirred. Crowds of women in the traditional black, red, or jade jackets thronged the streets, wheeling ancient bicycles, leading cats on leashes, carrying mesh shopping bags that bulged with vegetables. No one took any notice of Lunae, who felt happily invisible. That this was clearly just an ordinary afternoon for these people made the day even more special. There was a heady, complex smell of spice and shit, smoke and dust. Lunae made her way slowly along the road, poking into baskets filled with seeds, dried snakes, cat food, laundry powder. Then, at a little junction, someone stepped out into her path.

  This person was a small woman, clearly of Sheng origins, with a moon-face and blank black stare. Her mouth was slack, releasing a string of spittle. At first, Lunae thought that she was having difficulty in focusing, because the woman seemed blurred and out of phase. But then she realized that everything else in the street was clear.


  “You are different! Who are you?” the woman said, and there was a strange overlay of sound, a buzzing hum beneath the words.

  “My name is Lunae.”

  “What are you?” The woman stepped up to Lunae and thrust her face close. Lunae moved back and around her; she noticed that people were starting to edge away. She heard someone mutter, “Possession!”

  There was a low, uneasy susurrus of sound from the crowd. Lunae, becoming frightened, tried to turn, but the woman reached out and grasped her by the arms.

  “I asked you what you were!” The woman was even more blurred now, as if shaken in agitation.

  “I do not understand you,” Lunae answered. She pulled away, but the woman clasped her by the hand.

  Lunae felt her fingers enveloped in something hard and spiny. Startled, she looked down and saw the woman’s small fingers and bitten nails, but it felt nothing like a human hand. She felt as though she was clutching a lobster. She tried to tug free, but the woman’s grip was too strong.

  The next moment, the street cracked open, splitting with soundless speed. The apartment blocks, the crowds, were all gone. Lunae was standing on a great plain, gazing toward the banks of a river. The grass was hazy with pale flowers; there was no sign of sun, or moon, or any living thing. Then something brushed her face and the grass rippled as though a bird was flying across it. She thought she glimpsed a shadow moving swiftly over the land.