by Liz Williams
“Yes, it will be better. Take me. And we will go and look for Elaki.”
CHAPTER 14
Mars
Just as Dreams-of-War was about to fire, she was struck from behind in a tangle of spiny black limbs. Together, Dreams-of-War and the Animus fell from the steps into the midst of the excissieres. They hit the floor of the cavern in a tangle of limbs and bowstring. Any illusions that Dreams-of-War might have entertained about the Animus’s state of health were now dispelled. The strength that she had earlier discerned during their flight over the sea was back in full force. The thing was hissing, snaking around, spines ripping through her flesh. It was like wrestling with a giant scorpion. Excissieres milled about them, reaching out. The Animus’s tail lashed forth and brought two of them sprawling. The tail snaked up and over, striking down at Dreams-of-War’s face. She rolled, pinning the creature beneath her. The sense of the Eldritch was redoubled when she looked into its black lens gaze and saw Yskatarina looking back at her.
“That body is dead,” the Animus spat. “And we are back together again.”
“Congratulations.” Dreams-of-War stabbed a thumb into one of the lenses. It shifted beneath her touch, then snapped back again, taking Dreams-of-War’s thumb with it. The severed digit vanished into the depths of the Animus’s eye. Dreams-of-War swore in mingled pain and fury.
“What is happening?” she heard the Elder Elaki cry. There was a commotion among the excissieres. They parted. Dreams-of-War had a brief glimpse of black robes as Elaki strode through. The Animus’s tail was thrashing about behind her. She felt the side of the sting graze her shoulder, twisted to one side. Seizing the razor-sharp bowstring, she wrapped it around the Animus’s wasp neck and pulled it tight. It lacerated her bloodied hands, but the Animus’s head again parted company from its body. Dreams-of-War leaped to her feet and kicked the head into the haunt-engine just as an excissiere’s scissors plunged into her side. Dreams-of-War doubled up, but as she did so, she saw the still-twitching tail of the Animus beneath her. She grasped it, dragging the body upward, and thrust the sting into Elaki’s abdomen.
The sting went through the Elder’s robes with ease. Elaki’s mouth gaped open. Her hands drifted up, slowly, slowly, to clasp the tail.
“Out . . .” she said.
But the neurotoxins were already taking effect. Reeling back, Dreams-of-War saw black glitter spark through Elaki’s veins, lighting her from within. Her eyes fell shut, opened again a moment later. And once more Dreams-of-War saw Yskatarina looking back at her from someone else’s eyes.
“I’m here,” she heard Elaki say, and then the Elder dropped to the floor. The excissieres stared in mute shock. No one moved. A spinning shape flowed from the Elder’s open eyes, bicolored silver and black, and was sucked into the haunt-engine.
“Not wise,” Dreams-of-War heard someone say. She could not think who it might be. “Kill her. Throw the body to the Sown, to feed upon.”
Dreams-of-War looked up and saw the swaying shape of the Matriarch standing before her. But the cavern and all it contained were overlaid by somewhere else: a vast caldera of night, filled with stars so small that Dreams-of-War could have reached out and grasped them in her hand. She was standing on the edges of the Eldritch Realm, on the lip of death.
“Dreams-of-War!”
The voice was very distant. This, she thought, cannot possibly be important.
“Dreams-of-War, listen to me. Open your eyes.”
She forced herself to do so. The Matriarch was still standing in front of her, but it, too, had no head. A little trickle of blood, nothing more, seeped from the severed tendons and arteries of its neck. Then it crashed to the floor. Dust, the color of old iron, gushed out. The kappa stood behind, a sword clasped in thick fingers.
“You!”
“I have been biding my time,” the kappa said mildly. “Not a good idea to die, right now. You’d enter the Realm in very bad company.”
Stepping to Dreams-of-War’s side, she strapped a torn strip of cloth over the wound in the Martian’s side. Cold antitoxins flooded through, making Dreams-of-War gasp. “Now your hand,” the nurse commanded. Numbly, Dreams-of-War raised her injured hand to the attention of the kappa. The Eldritch Realm was receding, a dark line at the limits of vision. And now that it was going, she saw that the excissieres were standing in a silent crowd, rigid and unmoving.
“Why aren’t they doing something?”
“They have no leader, I suspect. The Matriarch is dead.” The kappa nodded toward the fallen figure of the old creature, now decaying into ash. “Whatever inhabited it is gone into the engine—I saw it. They’re controlled by the key in that perfume locket. It’s tied into their DNA. You’re of the Memnos line, aren’t you? I’d suggest taking it, once I’ve attended to your hand.”
Dreams-of-War stood watching as the kappa bound her wound and then, stooping, picked up the little phial.
“Here,” the kappa said, unstoppering it. She sprayed a mist of perfume onto Dreams-of-War’s skin, making Dreams-of-War cough. It stung for a moment, then seeped out through the chamber. The excissieres stirred into life. As one, they turned and looked in the direction of Dreams-of-War. She heard the snick of scissors. She had an army, but behind them, the haunt-engine was still growing.
CHAPTER 15
Mars
Lunae watched as a flood of excissieres poured through the gates of the Tower. The dawn light was glowing rose and white above the distant Olympian cone. Certain that the excissieres were coming to join the ranks of the Sown, Lunae shrank back against the bank of the canal. But the sounds from the foot of the Tower suggested otherwise: shrieks of fury, and the clash of battle. Unable to resist curiosity, Lunae slid up over the top of the bank again and looked out. Excissieres and the first rank of the Sown were fighting.
The Sown surged forward, leaving the plain empty before Lunae. Stumbling along the bank of the canal, she ran, skirting the army. The Sown paid no attention to her, but as the light grew, she could see that the excissieres were falling. The Sown moved inexorably onward, surrounding the Tower. Soon, Lunae reached the edges of the lock. The Tower reared up above her. Blacklight poured out of the slit windows, vying with the dawn. Lunae stood in a glittering twilight. Sparks poured from the chitinous carapaces of the Sown, running into the ground, which churned and boiled as the mass of the Sown passed across it.
Then, running up onto the edge of the bank, Lunae saw a woman. Her pale hair streamed out behind her. She wore body harness, carried a bow. Beside her, struggling to keep up, was a familiar squat figure. Lunae almost cried out, but the Sown were too close. She clambered up the lock gate, clinging to wet splintered wood, and dropped down to the other side. She landed painfully on her hands and knees. The fall knocked the breath out of her and it took a moment for her to haul herself to her feet. When she did so, Dreams-of-War and the kappa had vanished. Gasping, Lunae continued along the bank and looked down.
A glimpse of long blond hair and white skin, like a candleflame through the shadows. The Sown were cutting their way through a line of excissieres. The scissor-women went down as easily as the gaezelles had done. The Sown, trudging forward, caught up with Dreams-of-War and the kappa and surrounded them.
“Dreams-of-War!” Lunae shouted. The Martian whipped around.
“Lunae! Stay on the bank! Don’t—” She struck out. There was a sword’s gleam. Two of the Sown fell. Blacklight was still pouring out of the Tower and then, as abruptly as if someone had flicked a switch, it stopped. The Sown turned. In the skull-faces of those nearest to her, just a step down now from the edge of the bank, Lunae saw life stop for an instant, and another consciousness flood through. The Kami had come, conjured through time. She had failed to stop the Flood.
She paused in indecision at the top of the bank. If she acted now, would it be the right time? If she moved herself through time, what would it accomplish? She might find herself in the very midst of the Sown, about to be cut down. Her future-self had
said she could not die, would move forward at the moment of death . . . But it was not herself that she was worried about.
One of the Sown, perhaps swifter or stronger than the rest, wheeled around from its temporary interruption. A great arm came down upon the kappa’s head.
Lunae did not know whether or not she cried out. There was no more room for indecision. Instead, she shifted.
She intended, in that split second, to move only the kappa and herself. But as she made the shift, she felt the presence of the Kami, rank upon rank. The shift attracted their attention. In the smallest space between times, she felt them turn. And she could feel the haunt-engine, too: a great pulsing beat at the edge of the world, a gateway to the Eldritch Realm.
She also saw the scene below her with anguished clarity: Dreams-of-War bloody, bandaged, half-naked; the kappa, a second away from death at the Sown’s fist, the red Tower, the army . . . Lunae, still in that space between times, turned her full concentration upon the haunt-engine. She could see it, now, as though she stood in two places at once. It filled the Memnos Tower: a gate of blacklight. Beyond it, she could see what must be the Eldritch Realm itself, a whirling, spinning mass of darkness and light and something in between that she could not describe. A stream of sparks arced out from the mass, half-resolving into faces before fading into smoke and pouring into the haunt-engine.
Before, she had taken the chrysalis through time, and then the kappa. She knew that she could shift solid objects. But that had only been under her own power. The power of the haunt-engine, designed like a smaller version of the Chain, to bring spirits through time, was far greater. Lunae reached out with shifting senses and touched the edges of the blacklight matrix. It surged through her like a released sea. She looked down into the abyss of the Eldritch Realm itself: the million layers and nations of the dead. Into that realm she shifted the haunt-engine. She felt Mars turn beneath her feet—a terrible sensation. A weight of bodies and souls moved in behind her, drawn in the engine’s wake, and finally the gateway itself collapsed inward.
She knew where to take them. She had been there before. This time, it was not the toxic, fungal mountains of Mars, but the very end of the world: the gray plain. She drew everything behind her, skirting the Eldritch Realm, which flashed fast by. She glimpsed things that she could not comprehend; in those glimpses, she saw that the Realm itself was alive. Something was coming to join her, spiraling up from the chaos below: the tiniest spark of light. She did not have time to study it. With a great effort, she set her thoughts on the plain. Then the Realm was falling behind, beyond—and Mars lay below.
She was once more standing on the plain, but it was darker now, and colder. The grass beneath her feet was crisp with frost. The only light came from the Memnos Tower itself, as though shadows cast shadows.
“Lunae!” Dreams-of-War’s voice came out of the dark like an arrow. She sensed a mass of bodies shifting all around her: the Sown, groaning into consciousness.
“Dreams-of-War! Where are you?”
But there was some light, she saw—a tiny spark, no larger than a firefly. It danced above the heads of the Sown, spreading what at first Lunae took to be light in its wake. But then she saw that it was not light at all, but fire. She thought of the thing that she had brought from the Eldritch Realm.
A hard wet hand clamped itself to her arm.
“Lunae! What have you done?” Dreams-of-War hissed.
“I took us through,” Lunae said, but as she spoke, she remembered Essa speaking of the end of Mars.
And of firestorms.
“Where’s the kappa?”
“I am here,” the nurse said, seeming to bustle out of the darkness.
Dreams-of-War was staring at the spark, which spun frantically above the dazed heads of the Sown.
“It’s looking for a body.”
The thing was crying out, in a high, thin voice like a wasp. Dreams-of-War gaped at it. “Yskatarina?”
There was nothing to contain the spark, torn from the Realm. The haunt-engine was dead, the Tower quite dark now. But the coarse grass had caught, blazing up like burning hair. Lunae saw each one of the Sown burst like a pitch torch, fire streaming from beneath the chitinous helm-heads. She heard the Kami shrieking, fleeing their borrowed bodies—but there was nowhere to go. Next moment, she looked up into a firewall. A blast of heat struck her, so intense that it felt cold. Lunae snatched Dreams-of-War and the kappa up and out.
The Eldritch Realm once more lay before them, but this time it seemed a calm and ordered place: a sea of night, filled with stars and sparks, each gliding around its appointed sphere. The Realm spoke to her.
“Are you disembodied?” It did not sound greatly disturbed, merely somewhat puzzled, as though the smallest cog in its mechanism had developed a minute perturbation.
“I don’t know.”
The Realm made a minuscule adjustment, turning in upon itself, leaving room for Lunae to take them back to the place they had left—to the Martian morning and the rising sun.
Epilogue
They stood in the Martian dawn, staring down into the newest crater of the plain. Where the Memnos Tower had stood for thousands of years, where the Sown had risen and the Kami poured back through time, there was now only a gaping hole, a wound in the red earth.
“No matter.” Dreams-of-War, latest Matriarch of Mars, spoke briskly. She stood in only her underharness, unweaponed. But not, Lunae suspected, for long. “I’ve never liked that place. Too much intrigue. I don’t like intrigue. Now that I have the Matriarch’s phial, I shall return to the clan house and recruit from the women of Winterstrike. We will live as we once lived, out on the plains and mountains, doing what we do best.”
“And what of Earth?” the kappa said, mild as ever. “Who will govern our world, now that Memnos is gone?”
“I don’t know.” Dreams-of-War gave her a blank look. “You kappa are pretty much running its industries and services, as far as I can see. Sort something out.”
“That is your only piece of advice, Matriarch?”
“Why should I care?”
“Why, indeed?” the kappa said after a moment. She turned to Lunae. “And you?”
Lunae thought back to Fragrant Harbor, to the smoldering ire-palmed ruin that had once been her only home. Then she looked at the crater, now starting to flood as the canal seeped forth into it.
“Do you really understand what you are?” the kappa asked.
Dreams-of-War scowled. “What is she, then?”
“She is the first of the Kami, really. A person who can move through time. Perhaps the only one—though we do not know what has become of the Mission on Earth, whether any remain there.”
“Well, I can’t think of her as Kami,” Dreams-of-War spoke firmly.
“Yet she is.” The kappa gave a grim smile. “And what if Lunae’s existence causes the kind of future we have just prevented to unscroll again?”
Dreams-of-War made a dismissive gesture.
“Don’t trouble me with paradoxes. I have decided not to believe in them.”
“The kappa is right,” Lunae said. “And I know what I want to do.”
“Then what is that?”
“I told you, back at Cloud Terrace. I want to travel as far as I can. First to Nightshade, to look for answers. And then—perhaps—beyond. If I can shape time, perhaps I can shape space, too. Who knows what I may be able to do? Who knows where I might be able to go?”
“Who knows?” the kappa agreed, and they followed her gaze upward, to where the Chain was slowly turning.
BE SURE NOT TO MISS
Darkland
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Darkland
Liz Williams
Aldur Eskind and I came in at Iznar spaceport—the only one in operation on this part of Nhem since the others had been so badly bombed in the war. Looking across the cityscape—the vitreous green buildings and d
arker jade domes against the rosy sky—it struck me that Nhem should have been a hot world, but it was winter for most of the year in these latitudes, with a thick frost lining the ground in the mornings and lingering in the shadows for the rest of the day. I did not mind that—it reminded me of Muspell—but the cold did not seem to settle the dust, and the air was so dry that my mouth and skin felt immediately desiccated. And there were other unsettling signs, too. When I stepped down onto the pitted ground of the spaceport, I felt a disrupted current of energy rise up through my feet, causing my spine to tingle as though someone had drawn an unexpected finger down it. The senses that on Muspell are called the seith were immediately alert and jangling. This was a blighted place, inimical to women.
“That wind blows in from the Salt Desert,” Aldur said as we hurried to catch the flyer, our hair whipping in the breeze. The flyer took us upward, skirting the spaceport and the old city and heading out over the sprawl of slums and suburbs. “The Nhemish are constantly fighting to hold it back.”
“They wouldn’t have to if they hadn’t caused the Inner Seas to dry up in the first place.”
“They said it was the Hand of God.”
I snorted. “They say everything’s the Hand of God these days. That’s what we were told in the debriefing, anyway.” I looked down across the city. The domes of the Most Holy floated above the old town like a collection of glass bubbles, green and unreal in the sunlight.
“That’s where the Hierolath’s chambers are,” Aldur murmured into my ear. I glanced forward to check that the pilot could not overhear, but I kept my voice low all the same.
“Yes, I read the notes. I’ll need a pass for the old city; it seems they’ve become obsessive about checking documents.”
“That shouldn’t be a problem,” Aldur said. “Even for a woman. They’ll give you a pass for the period before curfew, as long as you’re properly dressed.”