by Liz Williams
“I am aware of the format,” Dreams-of-War said with hauteur.
“It is expected that you will put up a suitable defense.”
“Of course.” She longed to be outside the Tower, into the clear night air. And if Yskatarina Iye was close by, then what did that imply about her armor?
The excissieres led her down the stairs of the Tower. Memories assailed her. The last time she had trod these worn iron steps had been when she left Mars to travel to Earth. Then, her armor-shod feet had rung on ancient metal, and Embar Khair had whispered inside her mind. Now, her leather boots made little sound, as though she were already no more than a ghost in this world. Was this what it was like to be dead? Dreams-of-War wondered. Did Embar Khair feel this way, perhaps, trapped in the ghost-armor, a prisoner in the shell? Living no life except that which was granted to her through someone else’s eyes? For the first time in her life, Dreams-of-War felt truly afraid. She halted abruptly on the stair, causing the excissiere behind her to stumble and curse.
“What are you doing?”
“A thought, nothing more.” Through the slitted window of the Tower, an affectation from the days when Mars was at war with itself and the bow-women prowled, she could see a single glowing star. Was that Earth? Venus? From this angle, she could not tell. There was the snagging touch of scissors between her shoulder blades.
“Move. Do you wish to live to see the hunt?”
Dreams-of-War acquiesced with a nod of the head. She continued down the staircase until they reached the stone vault of the hall. This place must be wreathed in ghosts, she thought, even without haunt-tech. In the Lost Epoch, the bones of warriors had gone to make the walls, embedded into plaster and girdled with Isidis adamantine. The practice had been discontinued thirteen centuries before—or so the Matriarchy claimed—but the bones remained, fragmentary now, hard as the stone that contained them. And so are we, the living. Hard as Mars itself, tough as our world-cradle, little di ference between us. I am about to die, Dreams-of-War reflected . My bones will make Mars. There was a certain comfort in the notion.
The excissiere was hauling open the oldest door: a narrow plate of sheet metal, thinner and taller than any Dreams-of-War had ever known. Almost as though the door had been made for something not human, a curiously twisted opening that one had to angle oneself through to pass. As the excissiere opened it, the door emitted a ringing note like a bell, to signal the beginning of the hunt.
“Your weapon,” the excissiere said. She handed Dreams-of-War a knife-flame. The blade flickered in the twilight, a sliver of gleam.
“Go,” the excissiere said, but Dreams-of-War was already through the door.
CHAPTER 5
Mars
Toward late afternoon, they reached the banks of the Grand Channel. Ramparts of crumbling crimson stone tumbled down to the water, frosted with a thin glitter of ice in the shadows. The canal was perhaps a quarter of a mile wide, big enough to take the great barges that Lunae had seen on the image-viewer, traveling to and fro along the curve of the world. Knowledge-of-Pain frowned.
“The canal is low.”
“Where does the water come from?” the kappa asked.
“From the poles. It’s channeled down the Ninth Meridian, all the way to the Small Sea.” She climbed to the summit of the rampart and stood, looking out across the plain. The frown remained.
“What’s wrong?” Lunae asked, clambering up to stand beside the warrior. Up here, the air was even colder, a cruel drift of wind across the plain.
“Look.”
A tower stood beyond spires and pillars of rock, so twisted and convoluted that at first Lunae thought it was no more than the rock itself. Even from this distance, she could tell that it must be huge, rising out of the floor of the plain in a mottled sequence of red and black, all blood and bruises.
“That is the Tower of the Memnos Matriarchy,” Knowledge-of-Pain informed her.
Smoke was emanating from the summit of the Tower, smudging the clear sky.
“Is it on fire?”
Knowledge-of-Pain shook her head. “No. The smoke signals the beginning of a hunt. Once the sun goes down, some transgressor will be sent out into the wilds, to fight for life and fail.”
Lunae stared at her in horror. “They’ll hunt the person down?”
“It’s the ancient way.” Knowledge-of-Pain seemed unconcerned. “You have similar things on your world.”
Lunae was silent. After all, Earth was hardly a haven of peace... “What do you have to do, to be hunted so?”
Knowledge-of-Pain shrugged. “It depends on the whim of the Matriarchs. Offenses may be slight, or major.”
“Do you know if you’ve offended them? Is there a— rule list, or some such?”
“Of course not.” Knowledge-of-Pain gave a feral grin. “It all adds to the excitement of being. The Matriarchs reflect its unpredictability. Memnos is a mirror of life.”
Cruelty, su fering, and woe, Lunae thought, but did not say. What of beauty, of gentleness? She looked from Knowledge-of-Pain’s sharp profile to the sharper silhouette of the Tower, and reflected that there was little point in voicing her doubts. Mars and the Martians were all of a piece.
“We follow the canal,” Knowledge-of-Pain said now. “It runs past the Tower; it is the straightest way.”
“What of the hunt?”
Knowledge-of-Pain looked blank. “What of them? They are occupied with their own ends and aims. They will not bother us.” She began climbing back down the ramparts, sidling, surefooted. The kappa hung back.
“We cannot trust her.”
“But do you think that she really knows what’s going on?”
“Whether she does or not, we cannot simply stroll into Memnos and ask for clarification. Remember what your future-self said.”
“I have never forgotten it. And there has been no sign of Essa.”
The kappa sighed. “I do not even understand what Essa is.”
“My future-self said that things would be decided at Memnos. She said I had to go there.”
“Maybe we can trick Knowledge-of-Pain in some way,” the kappa said. “Lose her, perhaps.”
“I think that might be difficult.”
The warrior was waiting impatiently at the bottom of the ramparts. Lunae took a last look at the Tower, like a fire-twisted arrow in the distance, and slid down to join her.
“Who are the huntresses?” she asked. “Other warriors?”
“Yes. They are the most extreme of us, the most evolved. They are excissieres, the killing-women—nothing more, nothing less.”
The kappa snorted. “I would not call that evolved.”
“You are not asked to do so,” Knowledge-of-Pain snapped. “What can you know of power? The huntresses live for the chase, just as in the most ancient texts of the time before all time. The bow-women of the Martian forests are legend.”
Lunae and the kappa followed her to a gap in the ramparts, leading to a narrow walkway.
“This is the towpath. We follow it.”
The kappa frowned. “I have seen images of barges. What could be used to tow something so large?”
But Knowledge-of-Pain was already striding ahead out of earshot. It was not long, however, before they found out.
The barge was moving swiftly, at first no more than a black square in the distance, but rapidly resolving into a curling hull, ribs of ridged wood, a cabin formed of metal arches upon the deck. It was perhaps a couple of hundred feet in length, at once sinister and whimsical. Fretwork decorated its sides, like cobwebs. But it was the thing that pulled it that made Lunae stare, openmouthed.
The creature was attached to a chain, leading the barge along close to the bank. It was the size of a beast she had seen pictured in an ancient image book: a pachydermic genetic cross. Its hide was a mottled jade-and-black, stretched over prominent bones that gave it the look of a huge moving skeleton. Its eyes were as dull and mild as the surface of a weedy pond. Its back was covered in overlapping
scales. It padded, splayfooted, along the towpath, bony jaws moving in rhythmic counterpoint.
“What is that?” Lunae breathed.
“A water-beast,” Knowledge-of-Pain informed her indifferently. “They use them throughout the canal network.”
“I don’t see anyone on the barge.”
“That is because no one is there. The water-beast guards the barge, from both land and canal-side.”
“Does it have intelligence?” the kappa asked doubtfully. “It does not look as though it does.”
“Of course not. It is programmed, nothing more.”
The barge glided on, keeping pace with them.
“It’s slowing down,” Lunae said.
“The beasts appear to like company. No one knows why.”
“But it hasn’t even glanced at us.”
Knowledge-of-Pain shrugged. “Who is to say why they do what they do?”
Lunae studied the creature for a while, but it did nothing remarkable and eventually she grew tired of looking at it. It became part of the landscape: the glowing sky, the crimson and ochre rocks, the padding skeletal leviathan. Lunae sank into a kind of trance, still slightly nauseated from the meat she had eaten.
They had been walking for perhaps an hour alongside the barge before the sun started to sink down over the horizon. A moon hung low in the west, like a chewed bone. The shadows lengthened, until even the kappa appeared as a tall, slender figure, gliding over the waterglow. The air grew colder and Lunae’s mouth tasted of metal every time she took a breath. Knowledge-of-Pain said, without pausing, “Soon, we will halt and make a fire. Best we keep away from the canal when true darkness falls. Things live in it, which are drawn up by the moons.”
“What kind of things?”
“Just things.”
A long, trembling note rang out across the plain and faded into silence. Knowledge-of-Pain’s head went up.
“The hunt’s begun.”
Lunae could not help thinking about the woman who must, even now, be sprinting for her life across the stony ground. Did she care that she was about to die? Did she regret what she had done to bring her to this pass? Or was she as cold as all these Martian women seemed to be, without any real feelings beyond duty and rage? It was at once admirable and unnatural. Lunae drew closer to the kappa, another unnatural being, and yet somehow closer in her humanness, despite her amphibian form. The sun vanished. Twilight drew on.
CHAPTER 6
Mars
Dreams-of-War moved swiftly across the plain, heading for the hills. The cone of Olympus quivered on the horizon, catching the light from the sinking sun and glowing like a beacon of rose-and-white ice. Dreams-of-War fixed her gaze on its distant promise and ran on, pausing only to reach down and snatch a handful of fragrant grass from the edges of a dewpond. When she reached the edge of the rocks, where the ground became littered with boulders and the going was no longer so easy, she slowed, then halted. She doubled up, panting, clutching at her chest, as if winded. Let whoever might be watching from afar think that her time on Earth had lessened her fitness. With her other hand, working swiftly, she twisted off a strap of leather from the back of her harness and looped it into a snare. She hung this from a point of rock above a sage bush, and ran on, paying close attention to her harness, where it rubbed and chafed.
For the next half hour she dodged around boulders, through a narrow canyon that smelled of herbs and death, and back to where she had set the snare, taking a different route through the stones.
The snare was snaking about, turning and writhing. Dreams-of-War reached back between her shoulder blades and found what she sought: a round nub of metal attached to the harness. It was a tracking device. She tore it free, then bent to the snare. Within it, caught by the neck, was a plains hare, its great dark eyes frantic in the growing light of a little moon. Dreams-of-War reached down and grasped it firmly behind its ears, then, with difficulty, secured the tracking device with a leather thong around the struggling creature’s throat. When she released it, the hare shot off into the shadows, zigzagging away up into the canyon. Dreams-of-War rose from her crouch and took the steepest route up the rock face.
This was, she was now sure, the place where she had confronted the four hyenae all those years ago. She could almost smell the charred odors of human flesh, fire, sweat. And above all these scents was the rank-blood and rotten-meat signature of the Earthbones, which lay concealed and congealing beneath the treacherous soil.
She looked up into the starlit sky, wondering if Yskatarina’s stolen ship was somewhere in orbit. Yskatarina would surely not have risked bringing the armor back to Mars, Dreams-of-War thought, for she must know that Dreams-of-War would stop at nothing to retrieve it.
She turned, looking back toward the Memnos Tower for the first time. It was shrouded in darkness now, but she could still see the dying glare of the torch that blazed at its summit, signaling the hunt. They would have started out by now, would be heading across the plain. She wondered where the hare might be. Wherever, it would not deceive them for long. This was as good a place as any to make a stand. Dreams-of-War strode along the canyon, and began to make her preparations.
She worked quickly, listening to the wind all the while for signs of approaching pursuit. The huntresses would be expecting a trap of some kind. Dreams-of-War had no way of knowing how much they were aware of the nature of this particular piece of terrain, but it was the only advantage that she currently possessed and she intended to make full use of it. She had stripped herself of everything but the knife-belt, and was now engaged in covering every remaining inch of flesh with a mixture of ash, earth, and water from the nearest small pool. She bound her hair into a tight knot, smothering it with mud. The night was freezing, but she had long since learned to ignore the cold. Then she retreated into the shadows, to watch and wait.
Pursuit was not long in arriving. She heard them coming along the pass, scented them on the wind above the moldering smell of the Earthbones and the rankness of her own mud-smeared skin. Dreams-of-War closed her eyes against any betraying gleam and crouched lower between the rocks. There were three of them, moving swiftly and silently, with only the occasional snap of brushweed under foot or the roll of a pebble to indicate their presence. Dreams-of-War held her breath.
Finally, they were visible: shadows in the double moonlight, gliding past the walls of the canyon. She knew that they had spotted her. A shadow paused, raised the great bow, notched an arrow ... It was then that Dreams-of-War broke cover, mimicking panic, bolting up from the rocks and dashing through the scrub toward the only apparent exit: the cavern mouth. An arrow sang past her, whizzing into the bushes, and she heard the huntress’s whistle, sending sonar trails out against the canyon wall. But Dreams-of-War was into the cavern and down, dodging past the first mouth of the Earthbones.
Her intention was that the mud and ash would disguise her scent long enough to enable her to dodge past the initial maw, but it became immediately apparent that the plan was not flawless. Perhaps she had not covered herself adequately, or perhaps the Earthbones was more sensitive than she had given it credit for. The walls of the cavern began to grind inward, a thousand needle spines curling out from the surface and stiffening as they scented her. Dreams-of-War dodged between the spines, throwing herself to the floor, rose again on a patch of ground that was in the middle of the second mouth. Here, the spines were longer, and barbed. But there was a sudden wailing shriek from behind her, followed by shouts. The air filled with a raw iron odor. Dreams-of-War silently rejoiced.
The first mouth had, it seemed, claimed a victim from the huntresses. That left two to go.
As she dived through the twists and turns of the second mouth, the spines caught her skin, snagging it. She tore herself free, snatching at a spine and wrenching it from the wall. The Earthbones shuddered and heaved. The floor buckled; Dreams-of-War went down. A further short shower of arrows, notched and fired at random, struck the wall, releasing an acrid stream of liquid
that smelled more mineral than animal. The floor rocked like a ship at sea. Dreams-of-War slithered forward, out of the maw and into the sultry, dank realm that led down to the third mouth and the gut.
“Come back!” The call came from behind. “You will die in the maw, digested slowly. But we will make it a quicker death ...”
Dreams-of-War did not answer. Instead, choosing her position with care, she paused at the lips of the third mouth and began hacking swiftly at the curling spines with the gutting knife. The spines thrashed and coiled, lashing out with barbed tips that bit deep into Dreams-of-War’s flesh, sending lightning along the wounds made by the excissieres. Behind her, the padding feet of the huntresses drew closer.
Ducking between the spines, Dreams-of-War made a deep vertical cut in the wall of the lip. It drew back, flattening out against the earth. Now she could see the threads of the Earthbones, running red-veined through the soil. Moonlight flooded through as the breathing vent opened, and in another second Dreams-of-War was swarming up the side of the third maw, using the spines as a ladder. She was already forcing herself through the vent into the cold night air, emerging from the ground in a witch-haze of smoke, as the third mouth turned back upon the huntresses. Dreams-of-War listened to their brief cries with a grim satisfaction, before all fell silent. At her feet, the vent closed once more with a wet snap.
Dreams-of-War strode away down the canyon, and did not look back. With the Earthbones evaded and her pursuers dead, she was now free to plan. When she reached the end of the canyon, she squatted at the edge of a spring sink, gazing out across the shallow water. Rust-red reeds swayed in the breeze, cracking the ice that lay across the sink. Dreams-of-War welcomed the cold.
There were, to her mind, only two true choices. She could remain out here in the wilds, battling hyenae and other men-remnants, for an indefinite period. The notion held a certain appeal. Dreams-of-War was sick of people, particularly her own kind. But thoughts of Lunae kept intruding, weakening her. To restore her spirits, she drew more closely to the fire of anger: a rage that was directed purely at Yskatarina and the Memnos Matriarchy. That, then, was the second choice: to return to the Tower and extract vengeance. To Dreams-of-War’s mind, this was by far the most alluring option. Besides, the Memnos Tower seemed to present the greatest opportunity for gaining information.