Banner of Souls

by Liz Williams

  The ghost looked puzzled. “You are the hito-bashira.” She smiled. “I have waited a hundred years for you, and you know who I am. How so?”

  “We’ve met,” Lunae said, “but not in this day and age.”

  She turned to Dreams-of-War. “You should take this back.” She gestured to the armor and saw her guardian’s face contract with disbelief, relief, a sudden joy, and something else. Unease? She could not tell. But this time, Dreams-of-War held out her hands without hesitation. The armor flowed from Lunae, up and over. Dreams-of-War was again the martial, bristling figure that Lunae remembered so well.

  “I need to gain information. I will be back,” the ram-horned ghost said, and began to face back into the interface of the rock.

  “Wait!” Lunae cried, but Essa was already gone.

  “Lunae. Come with me.” Dreams-of-War made for the ship. Lunae followed.

  CHAPTER 2

  Mars

  Yskatarina stood at the base of the Memnos Tower, listening into the darkness. She could hear nothing.

  “Animus? What’s happening?”

  “Someone is coming,” the Animus said.

  “Do you know who?”

  “They are shod in metal. They have a human weight.”

  “Excissieres?” Yskatarina said.

  “Perhaps the Matriarch has sent them.”

  “I do not have much faith in the Matriarch,” Yskatarina said. “Kami or not.”

  “I think she is mad.”

  “Not surprisingly.” She stepped forward as the excissieres reached the bottom of the stairs. The Animus melted back into the shadows.

  “The Matriarch wants to see you,” one of the women said.

  “Very well.”

  “Your creature? Is it here?” The excissiere sniffed the air suspiciously.

  “No,” Yskatarina lied. “I told it to stay beyond the perimeter of the Tower. Have you located the ship?”

  “It has not left Martian orbit; we are certain of that. But it continues to baffle the sensors.”

  “It should not,” Yskatarina said. “The tech we gave you should be able to detect it.”

  “But the ship is old,” the second excissiere said. “It uses frequencies to which our equipment is not attuned.”

  “The ship must be found,” Yskatarina said in agitation. “It is a great prize. I cannot let it slip away.”

  “It will be found,” the excissiere said. “The raven-ships are out looking for it, even now.” She shifted impatiently. “Do not keep the Matriarch waiting.”

  Yskatarina, acquiescing, followed her up the stairs. With every step that she took away from the Animus, it felt as though a link between them was being stretched, an almost physical ache. Eventually, they reached the top of the Tower.

  “In there,” the excissiere said. Yskatarina stepped through the door and halted.

  The study of the former Matriarch had changed. The furniture was gone, leaving bare stone walls and floor. Wires and tubes ran from the center of the room, channeling down through the floor, pulsing with pallid fluid. Yskatarina was immediately reminded of the Grandmothers’ chamber; this was the same kind of tech, keeping the desiccated corpse of the former Matriarch sufficiently intact to permit her spirit to animate it. The results were mixed. The body moved in a series of twitches and jerks, the jaw unhinged and gaping. Yskatarina wondered how long the ghost had to spend hooked up to this apparatus each day. The long head swung up to stare blearily at Yskatarina. The excissieres stood close behind her. She could feel their breath on her neck, like the edge of a blade.

  “Send them away,” Yskatarina said to the Matriarch’s ghost, without looking behind her.

  The ghost gave a soft, whistling exhalation. “Why should I?”

  “Because they will not like what we are about to say.”

  The long head dipped and nodded. Yskatarina saw the knobbed line of vertebrae, now bound together with skeins of slimy wire.

  “Go,” the ancient voice said. Yskatarina waited until the excissieres had clattered from the chamber, then she closed the door.

  “I wonder that you bother with that body,” she said. “We could arrange for you to inhabit a new one.”

  “I could take another body, if I so chose. This one is— interesting.”

  “It’s a mummified corpse. It’s falling apart.”

  “Still, its decay intrigues me. When it finally falls apart, then I shall move on. And it gives me such power. The lightest word from me,” the thing went on, “and the excissieres will come running. They will cut you to ribbons and I will mount your limbs on decorative plaques in this chamber. And there is also your creature.”

  Yskatarina grew cold and still.

  “If you harm him—”

  “No one has harmed him yet,” the Matriarch said. “And no one will do so. At least, not until the arrival of your aunt Elaki.”

  CHAPTER 3

  Mars

  Dreams-of-War was silent once Lunae had finished telling her what had befallen them. She sat frowning, encased in the armor, on the deck of the stolen ship. Phobos rose up through the porthole, casting a thin light across the floor. The ship remained on the floor of the canyon; Dreams-of-War did not want to risk orbit just yet. Lunae, racked with fatigue, sat beside her.

  “The Kami are the ghosts of the future? Returning to the past to possess the living?”

  “This is what I was told by my future-self,” Lunae said. “And what I saw—Earth is become a hell. Mars was a wasteland. My self spoke of other worlds, names I did not know.”

  “And the Kami control Nightshade now?”

  “I believe so.”

  “It would make a certain degree of sense. Nightshade has always been apart from the rest of the system, first as a renegade colony, now as a powerhouse. It sits at the system’s edge, draining it of life and wealth. It is a vampire planet.”

  “And it gave the system haunt-tech.”

  “If haunt-tech is not an old discovery,” Dreams-of-War said, “but a discovery that comes from the far future, it explains how it seemed to emerge from nowhere. It is a scientific anomaly, an unexpected direction. For thousands of years, the physical sciences held sway. And then, quite suddenly, via Nightshade, the Kami appear. They have no bodies; they tell tales of a place where the dead go—the Eldritch Realm. Superstition is revealed as truth. Ghosts are a reality. Consciousness can be separated from form. Séance is a viable form of scientific methodology and technical development. Once, this would have been seen as delusion.” She blinked. “A strange thought.”

  “And now the Kami are to invade, and I am to be the one who holds them back.” Lunae rubbed eyes that were reddened by the Martian dust. “The trouble is, I have no idea how to go about it.”

  “What did your future-self have to say on the matter?”

  “My future-self said that she had failed. Essa was there—the horned ghost with whom you were speaking. They told me that there would be a time when I could act, but she could tell me little about it. She implied that time could be changed. And this makes me most reluctant to shift time.” She looked at Dreams-of-War. “What if I do the wrong thing?”

  “There is no way of knowing what the right thing might be,” Dreams-of-War said. “And there is another issue. That woman, Yskatarina, is here. She is of Nightshade; she and the reanimated Matriarch control Memnos now.”

  “And the kappa is still at Memnos. If anything has happened to her—”

  “Don’t worry,” Dreams-of-War said, but it was clear to Lunae that she did not believe this. “We will save her, if that’s what you wish.” She looked around her at the ship. “Do you know what is happening at Memnos?”

  “Memnos has been broadcasting,” the ship said with startling abruptness. “The woman from Nightshade is raising an army.”

  The approach of twilight saw Dreams-of-War standing at a crack in the cliff face: the entrance to the eastern tunnels. Lunae remained with the ship. Dreams-of-War approached the entrance cau
tiously, expecting guards, but no one seemed to be there. Dreams-of-War slipped inside.

  The tunnels were old, dating back to the foundations of the Matriarchy and perhaps before. Dreams-of-War walked on smooth, bare stone, mottled with the droppings of the small dactylates that lived high in the cavern roof. She could hear them now, twittering and rustling, and this was a good sign. She would not put it past the Matriarchy to flood the tunnels with gas. But this was only the beginning.

  She walked for perhaps an hour or more, trying to remember the twists and turns of the labyrinth. It had been years since she had trodden these paths, and the network was deliberately disorienting. Dreams-of-War had argued with Lunae of the wisdom of attempting to rescue the kappa in the face of everything else that was going on. It would, the Martian argued, be simpler to leave the nurse to her fate, rather than risk capture. The kappa herself would not expect them to place themselves in danger on her behalf. Dreams-of-War thought that she had convinced the girl, for Lunae had fallen silent and contemplative at last.

  “Moreover, remember what the Grandmothers told you,” Dreams-of-War said, pressing home the message.

  “The Grandmothers are dead,” Lunae murmured. “But yes, I remember.”

  Satisfied, Dreams-of-War had gone to the ship’s interface to inspect the monitoring relays. When she returned, Lunae had gone.

  Heart pounding, Dreams-of-War made sure that the girl was nowhere on the ship, then raced outside. Lunae was halfway down the canyon, walking quickly.

  “Where are you going?” Dreams-of-War cried. Lunae looked at her, quite calm.

  “To rescue my nurse,” she said, as if none of the previous conversation had taken place. Recognizing defeat, Dreams-of-War had marched Lunae back to the ship and gone in her stead. But the incident had finally made her realize something. In the span of time over which they had been apart, Lunae had become an adult, however willful. If the situation had not been so desperate, Dreams-of-War would have stood back and given in. She could control a child. She would not control a woman who, to all appearances, was not even so very far from her own age. And that thought, too, was disturbing: When would Lunae stop aging?

  Another long hour, and she stood beneath the foundations of the Matriarchy, before the iron doors that led into the cellar chambers. Here, the walls radiated an icy chill and the stone felt damp to the touch, rimed with the remnants of cobwebs. Dreams-of-War doubted that even spiders lived down here these days. The doors were tightly shut, the ancient locking mechanism blackened with soot and age. Last time these doors had been opened, to the best of her knowledge, had been when she herself had forced them from the other side. It was easy to believe that they had not been opened since. She could feel the Tower rising above her, sense the weight of it. The holding chambers were deep underground, banded by weir-wards generated by the Tower’s blacklight matrix. If the kappa still lived, which Dreams-of-War doubted, she would be kept down here.

  “Armor,” she said. The fingers of Embar Khair’s battledress snaked out, spreading into hand-tools. Dreams-of-War tried to stifle the sense of relief that being back in the armor had granted her, and failed. She had managed without it, she told herself. She had fought change-tigers and excissieres, had survived the Earthbones and the Crater Plain. But resuming the armor had felt like coming home. Never mind Lunae’s own aging, Dreams-of-War thought. I myself have grown old. Old and soft.

  The doors slid open. Ahead lay the sparkle of weir-wards, and beyond that, the holding cells.

  CHAPTER 4

  Mars

  Yskatarina stood with the Matriarch at the summit of the Memnos Tower.

  “Your aunt Elaki is here. All the way from Nightshade, to oversee the army,” the Matriarch murmured. “The engine is being prepared.”

  Two excissieres now walked with Yskatarina wherever she went, and did not let her out of their sight. Failure gnawed at her. She had not found Lunae, did not know why the girl was so important to Elaki, although the Matriarch had now explained to her what Elaki planned to do. She did not know where the Animus was being kept. On the previous night, she had tried to creep from her chamber and search, but the doors were firmly bolted. After some minutes of fruitless scratching at the locks, the door had opened to reveal one of the scissor-women: arms folded, holographic wounds chasing across flesh, and a dreadful eagerness in her eyes. Yskatarina had stepped quickly back into the room.

  Even now, the excissieres were making the final adjustments to the haunt-engine in the basement of the Memnos Tower. When all was ready, the Matriarch would give the word and the engine would be switched on. Already, the blacklight matrix was linked up to the broadcasting facilities of the Tower, connecting with dormant nanomemories across the Crater Plain and the Olympian slopes, sending ancient signals out to the ghosts that lay latent in the Martian soil and that would be summoned to feed the haunt-engine.

  Yskatarina was biding her time. The Animus would, she knew, be working to free himself and come to her. She had to have faith. She had gambled and, for the moment, failed. One question was, however, besetting her. Did Elaki know of her earlier modification? Was her aunt aware that Yskatarina was no longer bound by that mortifying love? The previous Matriarch had been instructed to keep no records, just in case, and Yskatarina could not believe that she had discussed it with her reanimated successor. If the current Matriarch did not have knowledge of Yskatarina’s changed state, then it might be possible to deceive Elaki.

  It was one of the few cards remaining to Yskatarina, and she intended to use it.

  CHAPTER 5

  Mars

  Within the confines of the ship, Lunae soon became bored. The ship itself was willing to talk to her, but for most of the time its speech was such a mad jumble that Lunae at last asked it to be silent. She prowled restlessly about the deck, trying to access the databanks, but much of them were written in an alphabet that she did not understand. At last she activated the screens and sat gazing out across the floor of the canyon.

  After a few minutes, movement captured her attention. Something was walking along the canyon. Frowning, Lunae peered at the screen. For a startled moment, she thought it was Essa. There was something familiar about the movement, about the gliding walk, but then she saw that this being was different, and not alone.

  They were rising up out of the ground. There were many of them, perhaps fifty or so: red-legged gaezelles, women with speckled skin and tails. They came to cluster around the sides of the ship, staring at it in wonder from great golden eyes.

  “Ship?” Lunae asked with some alarm. “What do they want?”

  “We do not know,” the ship said after a pause.

  The creatures made no attempt to touch the ship. Their hands remained by their sides, or held up in front of them in the manner of paws. They milled around for a few minutes, whispering to one another. Lunae could hear them over the monitor, but their speech made no sense, and perhaps it was not even words. Then they turned and began to run, moving swiftly away down the canyon, as if summoned. Lunae watched them until they had disappeared. None of them looked back.

  “More are rising,” the ship said. It was by now quite dark. The ship lay at the bottom of the canyon, as if it had fallen down a well.

  “More?” Lunae said. She peered into the blackness. “I can’t see anything.”

  “We will not put on the lights,” the ship said. “It will draw them forth like moths. They like the light. There is little enough of it in the Eldritch Realms.”

  “But aren’t they ghosts?” Lunae said. “Phantoms?”

  “These are animated ghosts,” the ship said. “These are solid.”

  As if to punctuate its words, something heavy slammed against the side of the vessel, causing it to rock. Lunae leaped up.

  “What was that?”

  “I do not know.”

  “Put the lights on! They’re already here—I want to see what that was.”

  A moment’s pause, and then the canyon was flooded with light
.

  The things were everywhere: massive armored shapes, moving with heavy purpose. They were a world away from the delicate gaezelles. Beneath the armored helms, their faces were stripped down to gaunt bone, and in the next moment, Lunae saw that they were not covered in armor at all, but thick hide. She had seen them before, overrunning Fragrant Harbor.

  “What are they?”

  “They are the Sown,” the ship said. “Who once were known as Dragon’s Teeth. Armies seeded into the earth, to lie dormant until needed.”

  The creatures were swarming around the ship. She could hear their tread above her. The ship swayed.

  “They’re attacking us! Can they get in?”

  Through the viewscreen, she saw the scorpion-tail of the craft spin across and strike. A swath was cut through the Sown. They fell without a sound, severed limbs tumbling to the earth. They oozed black fluid, like mud. Lunae breathed again, but the ghosts were once more rising, gestated by the soil itself. A rhythmic thundering assailed the sides of the ship.

  “They’re trying to break in,” Lunae said.

  “There are too many of them,” the ship said.

  “Then take off.”

  The ship shifted, engines powering. A moment later, it rose, lurching into the Martian sky. The Sown fell from its sides like leaves. Lunae ran to the viewscreen and watched as they drifted down toward the mouth of the canyon. A needle shape appeared on the ship’s monitor, moving fast and closing in.

  “Memnos has found us,” said the ship.

  CHAPTER 6

  Mars

  Dreams-of-War set the armor to maximum protection and stepped into the passage that led to the holding cells. She held out a hand. The blacklight matrix sizzled, sending sparks cascading across the surface of the armor. Even through the protective casing, the workings of the matrix stung her skin, passing through metal and bone alike into the Eldritch Realm. But if she held her hand there for long enough, the armor would be able to create a feedback loop within the matrix. Hopefully, without attracting too much attention from the excissieres ...