Banner of Souls

by Liz Williams

“Who are you?” Dreams-of-War demanded. “What are you? Answer me!”

  But the assassin was silent. A tiny hole appeared at the base of this new mask, pursed in and out, before puckering once and sinking into smoothness. The assassin lay bleeding at her feet, the blank silver countenance becoming dull and rubbery. Soon, it held no more vitality than an un-stringed puppet.

  Dreams-of-War, after a short internal debate, looked about her. No one could be seen. She hoisted what remained of the assassin across her shoulder and set off in search of a rickshaw.

  CHAPTER 5

  Earth

  I do not know what it is,” the kappa said, as they stood staring down at the remnants of the assassin’s corpse.

  “You’ve never seen anything like it before?” Dreams-of-War asked. They had peeled back the silver countenance, first with care, and then with impatience as the surface proved hard to remove. The thing was like an onion, its face constructed from layers. Eventually, however, they had come to its true physique: a demihuman visage with no nose or hair and a lamprey’s mouth. Needle teeth ringed a round hole; within was a series of segmented grinding edges.

  “Not as such. It’s a death-dealer of some kind. I’m not sure exactly what. There are many variations: the war-madams breed them. It has some kind of reptilian heritage,” the kappa said. “See? It has vestigial scales.”

  “But who sent it? The Kami?”

  The kappa sighed. “Most likely. Your guess is as good as mine.”

  “We had best put it in the freezer until we can work out what to do with it, or find out where it’s come from, or both.”

  “That doesn’t leave much time.”

  “Best we find out as much as we can, then, as quickly as possible. This supposed entrance to the Mission. Do you have details? Plans or maps?”

  “There is a map.”

  “I’ll go now.” Dreams-of-War paused. “Watch Lunae closely while I am gone. She is growing increasingly restless. I don’t want anything to go amiss before we leave.”

  “You cannot blame her,” the kappa pleaded.

  “Who said anything about blame?”

  With the kappa’s directions safely downloaded into her armor, Dreams-of-War made her way through a maze of streets, avoiding as much as she could of the litter that strewed the rough concrete. The steps that led down toward the harbor were slimy with weed and moldering vegetables, but the way was at least clear. Between the teetering tenements, the garbage covered the first three storys. Dreams-of-War wondered whether anyone lived in those lower tenements, and concluded that they almost certainly did. Temporary shacks had been constructed on the current level of the garbage; wan faces peered forth. The makeshift roofs, sheets of corrugated plastic salvaged from the flooded ruins at the city’s edge, were already coated with litter thrown from the summits of the tower blocks.

  Dreams-of-War grimaced and carried on, shouldering her way through muttering passersby. The armor prickled, sensing their dislike, but Dreams-of-War remained indifferent. The assassins’ sonar had proved impossible to decrypt, but the armor had nonetheless retained an imprint of it. If there were any more of the things, Dreams-of-War would be alerted. She could not help but feel a grim satisfaction. It was almost reminiscent of her days on Mars.

  The eastern entrance to the meat market lay at the end of the steps: columns of soot-blackened stone marked with ancient symbols so eroded by acidic rain that they were barely visible. One of the iron gates was already drawn across the entrance, signifying that the market was about to close. Dreams-of-War slipped quickly through the gate and entered the main hall.

  The floor was slick with black blood, dripping from the carcasses that hung on hooked racks from the ceiling. Dreams-of-War looked up to see cylinders of meat: headless torsos hung on metal bolts. Each torso ended in a smooth stump. These were tank-grown things, only alive in the barest sense of the word, grown in the vats that covered the roof of the meat market and extruded forth to be bled and butchered. Dreams-of-War wondered vaguely what kind of animal these things had once come from, what combination of genes had gone into the mix to make these huge sausages of flesh. The meat was not uniform: Some of the cylinders were dark and mottled, marbled with pale veins of fat, while others were composed of a translucent white meat, veined like the rings of a tree. A thin stream of blood was channeled into a raised culvert, leading to a sequence of vats.

  The lamprey-mouthed assassins had almost certainly been vat-grown. The more she thought about them, the more convinced she became that they were someone’s private army. But whose? The kappa was busy making inquiries and Dreams-of-War was startled to realize that she actually trusted the nurse to come up with something. But it took power to raise creatures of that level of sophistication, a degree of power that was equivalent to a Martian’s.

  Memnos’s excissiere squads were claimed to be ruthless in cutting back those who sought to challenge Martian authority. But Dreams-of-War distrusted the say-so of her mistresses. Who knew what lay in the northern lands, beyond Kamchatka and the Fire Islands? The excissieres rarely seemed to venture beyond the lands of the Yellow River, beyond the Thibetan city states, beyond the Rift or the Altai queendoms or Andea: the settled mountain lands of the middle planet. At present, the only capacity to find answers lay with the kappa.

  She was not disturbed by the meat market. The sight of the meat did nothing for her appetite. This was not freshly hunted and slain, and as such had little appeal for her. But the smell of the blood was invigorating. Dreams-of-War stepped carefully around the pools that had accumulated on the stone floor and walked to the edge of the chamber. She could hear voices coming from behind the row of vats. Stepping closer, she listened. Idle talk, nothing more, regarding technical matters for which Dreams-of-War had no concern. She moved on, seeking discrepancies in the walls, the armor measuring echo distances to search for gaps and spaces behind the stained brick. If the entrance to the Mission lay anywhere around here, Dreams-of-War intended to find it.

  The depths of the market were cavernous. Behind the racks of hanging meat lay the way to the growing-chambers. Spiral stairways led upward. Dreams-of-War craned her neck, seeing the faint shapes of the tanks through the plastic ceiling. There was little of interest up there. She moved around the walls, concentrating on the information filtered back by the armor.

  Then a woman stepped out of the wall. Dreams-of-War leaped back. There had been no warning of her presence. The woman was small, dark-haired, slant-eyed. There was a vapid vacancy to her face. She stood before Dreams-of-War, evincing no surprise, saying nothing.

  “I was lost,” Dreams-of-War said abruptly. “I was searching for the payment section. Perhaps you can advise me?” Dissembling did not come naturally to her, but it sounded a reasonably convincing excuse. The woman remained silent, only stared.

  “Did you hear me?” Dreams-of-War said. The woman’s head tilted slowly back. She opened her mouth and emitted a high-pitched hiss. Then her form blurred and shifted, as though she were nothing more than a badly tuned image.

  “You are lost?” a voice said from behind her. Dreams-of-War spun around to see a small group of women clad in blood-soaked overalls. One of them held a meat cleaver. “Perhaps we can advise you. The main gate is in this direction.”

  “What is wrong with your coworker?” Dreams-of-War asked as the woman slunk away.

  “Wrong?”

  “There is something the matter with her eyes. She hissed at me. She is possessed, is she not?”

  The women murmured among themselves. One said, “She is not the first. There have been others thus afflicted— most often those who are lacking in their wits. They walk the streets endlessly, seeking something. Often they claw and bite at others. Sometimes they talk in a language that no one can identify, like mad people. But it is just one of many woes that afflict us. There are a hundred diseases at any given time.” She spoke with indifferent despair. “And many other afflictions are worse.”

  Dreams-of-War frowne
d. “Is there no medical provision?”

  “Against so much sickness?” Now the woman’s face was no longer placid. “You do not know how we live, Martian witch. You do not know what we suffer. You’ve seen the city. What wonder that plagues infest it?”

  “Then do something about it,” Dreams-of-War said. “You do not have to live in squalor.”

  “What would you have us do? Spend time and energy throwing the refuse of a thousand years into the sea? The waves are eating in upon Fragrant Harbor. Already land has been lost this year. The seas rise higher and nothing can be done. We cannot keep raising the city forever. The edges of the islands are salt marsh and soon they will be gone. There is no more land on Earth. Our daughters will have to take to the boats or die.”

  “It is the way of things,” Dreams-of-War said uneasily.

  “But once there was the means to control it. The Dragon-Kings. The great beings who rose out of the seas when the world began to sink, who worked in harness with humankind to keep the waters back.”

  Dreams-of-War smiled, remembering the tapestries that hung on the walls of Cloud Terrace, depicting ancient gods. “The Dragon-Kings are a myth, nothing more.”

  “No, that is not so,” another of the women said, very earnest. “They have been seen by sailors, out upon the deep. They are still here. If their worship was restored—”

  “You should not put your faith in fairy tales,” Dreams-of-War told her, as kindly as she could.

  “It is no tale.” The woman glared at her.

  Dreams-of-War sighed. “Show me back to the entrance, then. Perhaps it is best if I leave you to your work.”

  She allowed the women to conduct her back to the beginning of the meat market, and there she waited, fidgeting with impatience behind a pitted pillar. The sky darkened to rose. Shortly after twilight had fallen, the women emerged from the meat market, still clad in their bloodstained wraps and robes. They moved with quick, shuffling steps, murmuring to one another in hushed voices, looking neither right nor left. Informing the armor to remain vigilant, Dreams-of-War crept back to the iron gates and picked the lock.

  The market was dark and silent, reeking of the day’s bleeding. Mindful of the Kami she had seen, Dreams-of-War walked warily, directed by the kappa’s map, until she reached the place where the culvert ran into the wall. It was only just large enough to accommodate her, with the armor thinned until it was no more than a sleek film of skin.

  The culvert stank, not only of blood, which would have been quite acceptable, but of other substances that she was unable to identify. What exactly was the blood rendered into? Food products of some description, no doubt, at the cheaper end of the comestible chain. She followed the stained passage to the point indicated by the kappa’s map. There was no sign of any opening.

  “Armor? Where do I go from here?”

  “There is a variance in the texture of the floor,” the armor said after a pause. Dreams-of-War knelt and placed a hand in the trickle of blood that still seeped through the culvert from the day’s catch. She could feel a bolted panel, some two feet in diameter. Dreams-of-War began to prize it apart.

  The bolts were rusted tight. Cursing, Dreams-of-War used all the implementation of which the armor was capable, and after much wrestling, wrenched the panel free. Blood dripped stickily into the resulting hole. Cautiously, Dreams-of-War lowered herself into it. There was a short drop and she almost slipped on the bloody patch beneath. At least there was now only a single option open to her. A narrow passage led onward, canted sharply down.

  Clearly, no one had been along here for many years. She wondered what the passage had originally been: perhaps a drainage system of some sort. It was dank and smelled of the sea. Pools and puddles formed on the floor, and occasionally she was forced to clamber over drifts of refuse that seemed to have washed in from elsewhere. The walls were slick with patches of weed.

  Dreams-of-War was starting to consider that the passage might end in the ocean that lapped at the evereroding shores of Fragrant Harbor, when she came to an abrupt halt. Something was blocking the way. Bemused, Dreams-of-War put out a hand and touched a smooth surface, like warm glass. The lights of the armor reflected nothing, but the barrier was quite impenetrable. This must be the wall of the Mission, running down far into the earth. Dreams-of-War tried to cut through, but the hand-tools of the armor merely glanced off without making a scratch. Frustrated, Dreams-of-War pressed her face to the barrier and peered inside.

  She could see something within: columns of a pale, insubstantial substance that writhed like smoke. And there were faces inside it, forming and fading like the metal visage of Embar Khair. Dreams-of-War counted nine of them. The faces were all a little alike, with puffy cheeks and lank black hair. But now they had seen her. They began to cluster to face the barrier.

  “Help us!” she heard them cry. “Set us free! They have imprisoned us, moved on. Set us free...” The voices bore the unmistakable quality of powerful haunt-tech; the hair rose at the back of Dreams-of-War’s neck. Before she realized what she was doing, she was backing away, then turning to run down the passage, toward the meat market and the night beyond.

  The Fire Islands

  CHAPTER 1

  Earth

  The next day, the hours before noon seemed interminable. Eventually, Lunae grew tired of kicking her heels on the bed and made her way to the uppermost part of the tower. She curled up once more on the windowsill and stared out across the harbor. There was a fine mist this morning, blurring the contours of the city. Ships drifted through the fog like spirits, their lights soft as flowers, but a shaft of sunlight bathed the Peak. Farther along the sill lay the silk-moth chrysalis, where Lunae had left it. She watched it, hoping that it would split and release the moth into the morning air, but the chrysalis remained as tightly sealed as a lotus bud. It crossed her mind that she might once more accelerate time, win a few days for the silk-moth, but something held her back. Today was her time for flight, not the moth’s. Still filled with fear that her leaving would, after all, be prevented, she jumped from the window seat and ran back down to her room. The kappa was waiting.

  “The Grandmothers wish to see you before you go,” the kappa said.

  The nurse seemed agitated, her thick fingers fluttering about the folds of her clothing. Lunae followed her along the corridors. The Grandmothers were waiting, bright-eyed and spidery, amid the hangings of the bed. There were no last-moment revelations of pride or love. Right-Hand did most of the talking, echoed in a senile mumble by her companion.

  “Dreams-of-War has told you where you are to go. Obey her; do not rely too heavily upon your own judgment. Remember that you have little experience and are still unformed. We will send messages. Do not think we will forget about you.” Right-Hand beckoned. “Come closer.”

  With reluctance, Lunae did so. Left-Hand seized her wrist, pulling her down onto the bed. Left-Hand smelled of old, musty flesh; flesh that had lived too long, Lunae thought. She would rather be close to the kappa, with her shore and seaweed odors, than the Grandmothers.

  “Remember what you are,” the Grandmothers hissed. “Now go. The litter is waiting for you.” Right-Hand gave Lunae a push, none too gently. Lunae left the Grandmothers’ chamber and did not look back.

  Dreams-of-War was standing on the steps of Cloud Terrace, impatiently tapping an armored foot.

  “Have you seen the Grandmothers?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “And? Did all go well?”

  Dreams-of-War’s face was as anxious as it could be, so Lunae answered only, “Yes. We discussed the voyage. I am to obey you in all things.”

  “You can tell me all about it in the litter. It’s at the gate. But first, there is something we must do.”

  Today Dreams-of-War’s armor was covered with porcupine spines; her head rose above a column of linked steel rings. She is afraid, Lunae thought. She bristles.

  “Come with me,” Dreams-of-War said. She marched down to the mansion�
�s blacklight chamber, normally a place where Lunae was forbidden to go.

  “What are we doing here?” Lunae asked. Dreams-of-War closed the door behind them.

  “Armor!”

  Lunae watched as the armor flowed from Dreams-of-War’s body, leaving her standing in her underharness, as hard and marmoreal as Lunae had imagined her. The armor’s shattered head turned toward its mistress in inquiry and Lunae stared at the half-faced form.

  “Who is she?” Lunae breathed.

  “She is Embar Khair, the warrior whose spirit inhabits this armor.” Dreams-of-War turned to the armored form. “This girl who stands before you. Envelop her.”

  “Dreams-of-War—!” Lunae started to protest, but the armor was already flowing obligingly over her. It weighed her down and she gave a muffled cry at the unaccustomed pressure.

  “Let her imprint you,” Dreams-of-War commanded. “Her soul-engrams, her DNA. Read her well and file the information.”

  It lasted only a moment. Minutes later, Lunae stood ruffled on the floor of the blacklight chamber and the armor was once more moving to encase Dreams-of-War.

  “What was that for?”

  “I wanted the armor to have a record of you. If we are ever in a position of grave danger, then I have instructed the armor to respond to you as well as to me. It will also be able to detect you if you are lost. I should have done this before. I was remiss. And now, the litter is waiting.”

  At the gate, Lunae looked around at the tangled garden, then back at Cloud Terrace, which rose in its untidy jumble above her to blot out the sun. She wondered whether, in time, she might come to miss it. She was certain that she would not miss the Grandmothers. It had been wonderful to stand before them and believe that this might be the last time she would ever set eyes upon them. With this thought, Lunae turned and hurried to the litter.

  The journey down through the streets of the Peak was as frustrating as ever. Lunae pleaded for the shutters to be drawn back just a fraction, so that she could see what was passing by, but Dreams-of-War refused. Beside her, the kappa nodded in eager agreement.