Banner of Souls

by Liz Williams

  The encounter had given her information, and more than that, strength: this reminder that she was not alone, that the former inhabitants of the ancient armor were all still with her. “Lonely,” however, was another emotion that Dreams-of-War despised.

  CHAPTER 3

  Mars

  No one,” the Matriarch said, “has been inside this room for a hundred years.” They were standing before a metal wall opposite the Tower room, Yskatarina enveloped in soot-colored furs, the Matriarch in ceremonial red-and-black, from which she peered like a toad out of a hole. Behind the Matriarch stood two of the excissieres: the scissor-fighters of Memnos. Both were tall, angular, with harsh, bony faces. Yskatarina found it impossible to tell one from another; they must be from the same growing-bag. Both wore armor: a faded metallic black, pitted with strikes and gouges. Scissor-images flickered over exposed flesh, holo-tattoo wounds that faded into instant scars and then were gone, only to appear again. She was not sure whether it was art, reminder, or penance.

  Yskatarina raised an eyebrow. “It’s been sealed for all this time?”

  “Someone was imprisoned here. Walled in.”

  “Why?” Yskatarina was beginning to enjoy needling the Matriarch, watching the woman’s face grow yet more pinched.

  “I am not at liberty to say. Enough that you know that she was one of the Changed, a descendant of the creatures of the Age of Children, and committed a crime against us. For that, she was placed in this room, at the summit of the Tower of Memnos, and the door was welded shut. I do not know how long she lived after that. It is irrelevant.”

  “So her corpse is still in there?” Yskatarina looked toward the metal wall. She could see what might have been a faint outline in the iron, perhaps a seam, perhaps no more than a trick of the light.

  “If it is not,” the Matriarch said, with the first flash of anything approaching humor that Yskatarina had yet seen in her, “I shall be very surprised.” She gestured toward the wall. “Open it.”

  The excissieres stepped forward, scissors clattering. Yskatarina frowned, imagining what it would be like to be hunted by these women. Now, however, the razor-edged weapons remained on their metal chains, secured to the bodices of the armor. The women carried flame-flowers, which they placed on either side of the seam. Each touched the iron-hard stems, causing the leaves to rattle. Blue-white acid spat forth from the stamens, melting the welded door. Yskatarina stepped back, choking on smoke and the musty smell of old fungus, released as the door fell clear.

  “I shall go first,” the Matriarch said. She stepped through the door, Yskatarina close on her heels.

  The thing that crouched in the corner of the room was much larger than a human being. Its head was sunk into its breast. Pincer-hands rested limply on the floor before it, and around them were curled the spiny remnants of a tail, disintegrated into individual vertebrae. The flesh had darkened to a blue-red, the color of ancient meat, or perhaps, Yskatarina thought, this had been the original shade of the thing. It reminded her of some of the beings that lived in the catacombs beneath the wastes of Nightshade, the creatures she had occasionally glimpsed bolting into the shelter of the frozen rocks. She wondered what the being’s crime had been. It seemed to her that Memnos knew few enough limits.

  The Matriarch was eyeing the remains with distaste. “I did not think there would be so much left,” she muttered.

  “A sealed room, dry air ... It has simply desiccated,” Yskatarina replied. She found the mummified remains both pathetic and repulsive.

  “It is vile,” the Matriarch stated baldly. “Now, such a creature would never be allowed to remain here.”

  “Standards must have been lower in those days.”

  “It is in part because of the crimes of this thing that the Changed are kept away from Memnos. Shall we get on with it?” Yskatarina nodded. The Matriarch gestured to the excissieres. “Take it down to the matrix.”

  The scissor-women stepped forward and picked up the desiccated form.

  “Careful!” the Matriarch said. “It is fragile.”

  Yskatarina followed them down the stairs to the chamber that contained the blacklight matrix. A doctor was waiting, face grim beneath the medical hat. The excissieres set the corpse down on the couch beneath the matrix.

  “You realize there is no guarantee of success, with something so old?” the doctor said.

  “Do as I told you,” the Matriarch replied. The doctor gave a shrug and began to manipulate the slender black tubes that were the generating device of the matrix.

  Sound welled up, shivering the air and causing the hair to rise on the back of Yskatarina’s neck. She gave a small smile of satisfaction: This, and the creeping chill that cast itself over her skin, was a sure sign that the device was beginning to work. Then she remembered the last time she had been in this room, and had to force herself not to turn away.

  “You play it like an instrument,” the Matriarch remarked to the doctor, with an evident and unwilling fascination. “No matter how many times I see this, it still causes wonderment.”

  “It is an instrument, in part. It uses sound to conjure the particulates of spirit, to summon them through from the Eldritch Realm and reassemble them. Watch.”

  The device was singing to itself, a quick, thin song. The air sparked with blacklight. Slowly, as if seen through heat haze or mist, an essence began to form around the dry thing that crouched on the floor. Pincers clacked together and made no sound. A lipless face raised its gaze to the ceiling, mouth gaping. The image overlay the mummified form, a ghost, indeed.

  The Matriarch stepped forward. “I have questions! I—”

  “Wait,” the doctor said. “Give it time to assemble.”

  The phantom head swung round to look at the Matriarch. She found herself gazing into two great dark eyes, lensed like the eyes of the Animus. The similarity made her queasy. They were flat and blank, with no light behind them. The mouth moved. Moments later, a dry whispering emerged.

  “I am dead,” the thing said in wonder.

  “Yes,” Yskatarina answered. “You died here a century ago.” She glanced at the Matriarch for confirmation. The Matriarch gave a sour nod. “This woman has questions for you,” she added.

  “First, I wish to ask you something,” the Matriarch said to Yskatarina. Then she turned to the doctor. “Go.” The doctor did so, without demur.

  Yskatarina suppressed a sigh. “Let me guess. You once more wish for reassurance that this is no trick? You want again to query how it will be that we can attest to the accuracy of the information that this being provides?”

  “That is easily enough ascertained, or so you have assured me,” the Matriarch said tartly. “The extraction of particular information, known to none other than this being and myself, will be sufficient. No, the question I have is different. I want to know how, having raised this thing, we may contain it.”

  “Its essence will disintegrate once the device is powered down,” Yskatarina said.

  The Matriarch’s moon-face seemed to swell, as if it were being pumped up. “But ghosts are even now roaming the Crater Plain, infesting the city streets of Winterstrike. I do not want this thing to crawl down the walls of the Tower and start babbling critical information to all and sundry.”

  The spirit turned its head slowly from side to side. Yskatarina wondered how much it really understood.

  “This is a pure form, not infected by nanotech, as far as I am aware. Its conjuration will, therefore, not be sustained. It is energy, rather than partial matter.”

  “And you are sure of this?” the Matriarch asked.

  “I am certain.” Yskatarina looked the Matriarch in the eye. She saw the flicker of doubt and tried not to hold her breath, for she lied to the Matriarch. She intended to keep this old being around for as long as possible. It, and the information that it might still carry. First steps, Yskatarina told herself. Animate the thing, and then apply the means of controlling it.

  “Then let us begin,” the c
urrent Matriarch said. “I must ask you to leave. This thing can provide information that must remain confidential to Memnos. You may return when I have completed my inquiries.”

  “Of course. I understand,” Yskatarina said. She bowed her head, and let the excissieres lead her from the room. The matrix would, she knew, record the session in its entirety, and transmit it to Nightshade. It was not necessary for her to be present.

  Later that evening, Yskatarina and the Animus slipped from the ship to stand in the shadows.

  “Where is it?” the Animus asked.

  “There. That fourth window. You can glimpse the blacklight within.”

  “They will have weir-wards on the windows.”

  Yskatarina smiled. “There are advantages to being the purveyor of a technology. I have deactivation runes. Just get me up there.”

  She slid her arms around the Animus’s torso and clung to him. The Animus sailed upward, to hover like a bat outside the window of the blacklight chamber. Yskatarina risked a glance below. There was no one to be seen. A monstrous face swam out of the darkness, hissing. Neon flickered across its jaws.

  “Hush,” Yskatarina whispered. She leaned forward until her face was close to the visage, and murmured the deactivation sequence. The face, with a comical grimace of dismay, vanished. The window lay before them, unprotected. The Animus drew closer. Yskatarina once more murmured an incantation, this time to the haunt-lock. The window opened without a sound. She climbed from the Animus’s back onto the sill.

  The body lay within, beneath the cold filaments of the matrix. It was still strapped to the couch. It raised its head and looked at Yskatarina as she entered.

  “You were here before,” it said.

  “Yes. I’ve come to help you.”

  “I do not believe you. You are of Nightshade,” the thing said. “I remember Nightshade.”

  Yskatarina flexed the sensors within her legs and squatted down beside the ancient thing. “You were the Matriarch, were you not, a hundred years ago? Do you remember two sisters? Yri and Yra?”

  “Yes. They sought sanctuary with us. We sent them to Earth.”

  “Do you know where they went? And what happened to the ship they traveled in?”

  “I will not tell you,” the old Matriarch said. Feebly it raised itself up, hissing. Yskatarina acted quickly. There were excissieres just beyond the door and she did not want them to hear. She touched a sleep-pen to the creature’s neck and it slumped back onto the high couch. Then she switched on the matrix and whispered Elaki’s sequence into it.

  She had never seen this particular function of the matrix before. It was different. The familiar sparks darkened above the prone figure, forming spirals and coils of blacklight. Then, as the sequence took hold, the world opened up and Yskatarina found herself staring down into the hellish abyss that she had glimpsed during her own modification. She fell back, hand over her mouth, trying not to cry out. There was a dreadful sense of familiarity, recognition, that sent her soul cowering within her.

  Something rushed upward. She saw a mouth agape in a silent shriek. Then it was gone, evaporating into the figure on the couch. The gap closed. The blacklight disappeared, with a burst that hurt the eyes. Yskatarina stepped forward and released the bonds. The thing on the couch sat up.

  “I am alive,” it said, wonderingly. “I have a body.”

  “Yes, you do,” Yskatarina said in relief. The Kami looked out at her from the former Matriarch’s dull gaze. Yskatarina held up a small silver phial. “This is a copy of that which belongs to the current Matriarch. My aunt gave it to me. It contains the substance that controls the excissieres. And I now will tell you what you must do, when you are strong enough ...”

  Fragrant Harbor

  CHAPTER 1

  Mars/Earth

  Yskatarina held tight to the spiny claw of the Animus as the ship—a public carrier—wheeled over the Crater Plain. Other passengers shifted and grumbled around them. She did not like being confined so closely with so many others, but at least all kept their distance from the Animus, eyeing it askance, drawing skirts and robes aside.

  From the view port, misted with droplets of ice, Yskatarina could see the plain in its entirety, all the way to the slopes of Olympus. The Memnos Tower rose up out of the red earth like a diseased finger. Yskatarina, with a trace of wistfulness, remembered the gaezelles and wondered where they now ran.

  She was pleased with her work at the Tower. She was confident, after a further conversation with the Kami that now occupied the body of the former Matriarch, that Memnos would be unable to tell the difference. Very soon, now, the Kami would be able to carry out its task. She wondered that the current Matriarch had taken the risk of reanimating the ancient thing, given Nightshade’s involvement. But Martians were always arrogant, always overreached themselves.

  Then there had been the emotion-wipe, of which few memories remained. Something about a shred of flesh, and Elaki sitting on a crag ... Nothing more than this, but when Yskatarina looked within, to the place where that turbulent storm of resentment and loyalty and love had raged, there was only a small dark hole. Wonderful to feel nothing but hate for the woman who had threatened to take the Animus away from her—no more conflict, no more tearing on the mind’s rack. She felt whole for the first time since childhood. Now she could begin to plan. Now she could keep the Animus safe. She did wonder, for a moment, whether all of her emotions had been similarly implanted, whether the bond that existed between herself and the Animus had artificial origins, but then she dismissed the thought. That bond was a given; there was no voice within, telling her that it was wrong.

  She had been luxuriating in hate for over two days now. Memnos had done its work well. It remained to be seen whether they had slipped anything else past her mental guards: some small neural bomb. There was nothing Yskatarina could have done about it if they had; they would just have to cross that bridge when they came to it. But she now had a weapon, in the form of the old Matriarch.

  Thinking of this, Yskatarina smiled.

  The ship flew on, arching past Olympus and around, across the cities that populated the eastern part of the planet. The Small Sea lay at the edge of the horizon, the green-blue glow of algae forming a vivid contrast with the soil. One by one, the cities fell away: Caud, Winterstrike, Ardent, and Ord. Yskatarina watched them pass without emotion. Soon, the ship reached the Martian edge of the Chain.

  Night was falling over the South China Sea when Yskatarina’s craft emerged from the Earth-end of the Chain above the Kita Hub. Passengers stirred and muttered restlessly around her; she longed to be alone with the Animus. She looked through the view port to see an ocean of lights below, towers nailing the sky. Along a narrow channel, boats starred a narrow harbor.

  “What is that city?”

  “Fragrant Harbor,” the monitor said. Its voice took on a tinny quality. “First city of the region.”

  “I can see islands.” Then, as the ship turned, “It is all islands.”

  She surveyed the ragged, eaten edge of the coast. Helpfully, the seat oreagraph sent a highlighter running through the view port, so that each island was delineated with a tiny ring of light. There must have been hundreds: a rash of land.

  “Ancient mountains and artificially raised settlements like Fragrant Harbor are all that remains. The city has been devoured by the sea, countless times, and each time built again.”

  To Yskatarina, used to the frozen wastes of Nightshade, it seemed strange to be looking down on this great wash of ocean. It gave her a spinning, disoriented feeling, as though she stood on the deck of a seagoing vessel rather than that of a spacecraft.

  She sat impatiently until the ship docked, then caught a transit into High Kowloon with the Animus. Compared to the relative emptiness of Nightshade or Mars, the city felt packed. She could sense the press of bodies all around her, feel the city going down and down into its multiple layers, buildings built upon the wreckage of buildings.

  “This is an old
place,” the Animus said, echoing her thoughts.

  “Old and dying.” She looked through the grimy windows of the transit at the peeling paint of a temple wall, a hail of gilt flakes catching the lamplight like golden snow. The bulks of the factory district rose ahead, symbols blazing through the dark. The district went on and on, seemingly unending. Figures trudged by, carrying baskets, wheeling carts, and Yskatarina realized that for much of this world’s people, little must have changed since the earliest days of history. For these women, Mars must be nothing more than a cruel, cold dream, and yet it ran their lives.

  Eventually, they emerged from the factory district. Streets lined with old mansions appeared, half-hidden by trees trailing with moss. But these folk, too, would be dependent on the whim of Mars: of the Houses of Winterstrike, or Ord, and ultimately Memnos itself. Yskatarina shifted in her seat and forced open a window. The scent of night jasmine and unburned fuel drifted through, catching at the back of her throat. The transit ground to a halt in front of a towering building, and Yskatarina at last felt safe.

  Accompanied by the Animus, she made her way into the hotel lobby and was assigned to a suite at the summit of the tower. Ascending in the silent elevator brought back memories: of Memnos, of Tower Cold. She probed the place where Elaki had lain like a serpent in her mind and again found nothing, only a painless hollow. When she stepped out onto the hotel terrace, it was with an overpowering sense of freedom. Fragrant Harbor stretched below, a sprawl of lamplight and shadow, neon and water glitter.

  “Tomorrow we travel north,” she told the Animus. “I have to make arrangements, speak to the Mission, to find out what they have learned.”