Banner of souls (17 page)

"You should not be up here. I told you to stay below." Sek frowned. "How did you get out of the cabin?"

Lunae's eyes widened in simulation of meek inno-cence. "The door was not locked. I'm sorry to disobey. I wanted to see the city. I've never seen it so close."

The captain stared at her for a moment. "How old are you?"

"Fifteen," Lunae said, using the lie that Dreams-of-War and the Grandmothers had established between them.

"And you've never been allowed outside?" The captain clicked her tongue. "You're a sheltered little thing, aren't you?" But her scorn did not seem directed at Lunae. "Where is your guardian?"

"I don't know. My nurse is in the cabin."

"Come with me and find your guardian. I will instruct her to keep closer to you."

"She'll make me stay below again."

"Likely so."

Reluctantly, Lunae followed the captain to the prow, where an armored figure stood looking out to sea, legs braced.

"Princess?"

Dreams-of-War turned, her mouth turned down in distaste. When she caught sight of Lunae, it lengthened to dismay.

"Is something wrong?"

"Our guest felt unwell; I had her brought on deck for some air," the captain said smoothly, creating a sudden bond of complicity between them that made Lunae un-comfortable. Disliking Sek as she did, she did not want the captain to have that kind of hold over her. Or perhaps Sek, believing that the door had indeed been unlocked, merely wanted to conceal her own negligence.

"I see. Are you feeling better now?" It was clear from the arch of the Martian woman's eyebrows that Dreams-of-War did not believe her.

"Yes," Lunae muttered.

"Seasickness is unpleasant. I think you should remain with her, princess."

"Princess?" Lunae questioned.

"She's a Martian warrior, isn't she? Best to humor her," the captain said with a flicker of contempt and something that, Lunae thought, could almost have been envy. Dreams-of-War's face grew still and cold.

The captain laughed. "It's my ship,
princess
. My ship, and my favor."

Dreams-of-War gave a small, curt nod. "Lunae will stay here with me," she said, as if it had been her.decision alone.

Sek wandered back along the deck.

"She does not like me," Lunae murmured.

Dreams-of-War shot her a puzzled glance. "She dislikes me, also. But why should we care? She does not have to."

"But I wonder why. Perhaps she is afraid of the Grand-mothers." At this, Lunae could not help looking back in the direction of Cloud Terrace.

It was burning.

Forgetting the prohibition, Lunae clutched at the Mar-tians arm. "Look!"

High on the Peak, the mansion was lost in a flare of unnatural light, a mauve flicker.

"Ire-palm," Dreams-of-War said, openmouthed.

"My Grandmothers?"

"They will be dead." Dreams-of-War's mouth was a tight line, but she had not, the girl noticed, removed Lunaes hand from her armored arm.

"The Kami?"

"I do not know. But I will start asking questions."

"Dreams-of-War? Is this ship using haunt-tech?"

"It should not be."

"But I heard voices."

"I know. I am not dismissing this, Lunae. I just don't know what to make of it." Dreams-of-War glanced around her. She shifted Lunae's hand from her arm, but she did so gently. They stood in silence on the deck, watching as Cloud Terrace burned. At last, the amethyst flare blazed out in a final column of sparks.

Fragrant Harbor was falling behind. They were pass-ing the headlands at the edges of the city now, and the sub-urbs had grown sparser until there was little more than a thin band of lamps along the shore: the fishing settlements and outcast villages that clung to the cliffs along the dark reaches of the coast.

The junk was now passing the beacon light that led into the Yellow Sea. The gleam at the top of the tower flickered, sending complex data out to shipping. Lunae smelled sagebrush and salt, the warm scents of sun-warmed earth, fading into night.

Then they were around a black rim of cliff and out into open waters. The city was invisible. The stars were bright seeds and flowerheads away from the city's muted glow. A crescent moon hung low on the horizon and behind it arched the maw of the Chain, outlined in phos-phorescence against the drop of night, flares and flashes all along its perimeter. Lunae breathed a sigh of relief. It was good to get away from the city, and the ashes of what had so recently been her home. She thought of the Grandmothers, and there was nothing but relief there, too. She could not muster even the semblance of regret. They had given her life and childhood and fear; she was glad to be rid of them. The night air seemed easier to breathe.

"Look," Dreams-of-War said with a thin satisfaction, and pointed. A red dot burned in the east.

"Mars. It's very close now, the closest it has been for over a thousand years."

Lunae reached out to touch her guardian's arm again, but remembered just in time and snatched back her hand.

After a moment Dreams-of-War said stiffly, "It's all right." But she did not invite a further touch, and Lunae did not expect her to. They stood, watching Mars rise and the Chain turn, as the sails creaked and twisted above them and the junk pulled farther out to sea.

Earth

"We will have to go to him," the Animus said, alighting in a bundle of wet wings upon the veranda of the ruined fortress. Steam rose from the damp boards; the air was heavy with humidity. Fragrant Harbor and the ruins of Cloud Terrace lay far behind.

"I was not expecting to do otherwise," Yskatarina an-swered, vinegar-sour. She wrapped her arms about herself, swayed in the stormlight on fragile legs. "What did you make of this Prince Cataract when we spoke across the anti-scribe? The Grandmothers' Animus?"

"He is old. He repeated himself over and over. I do not think he is sane."

"Sane or not, he surely has knowledge that we can make use of. Knowledge of the haunt-ship that brought them all from Nightshade, the place where Tower Cold's lost records are stored, where details of the
hito-bashira
are to be found."

"He may have such knowledge, but why should he tell us? I would not put much faith in Prince Cataract."

Yskatarina snorted. "I do not. Especially since he de-serted Elaki's sisters. I am surprised that he even agreed to see me, and he only did so after I told him I had informa-tion about them. We will have to see what we can offer him. I have not, obviously, told him that I am Elaki's rela-tive."-

"Have you spoken with Memnos today?"

"No, but recently. They were guarded, elliptical, eva-sive as ever, but the old Matriarch will very soon be strong enough to act. In the meantime, lets see what we can get out of Prince Cataract."

"Do you wish to go now?"

Yskatarina nodded.

"Then I shall take you," the Animus said.

Yskatarina slipped her arms around the Animus's ab-domen and hung on. The missing fingers made it difficult to grip. The Animus's spined wings unfolded, beating out into the rainy air. Yskatarina looked back as they spiraled up into the sky, to see the ruined fort fall behind, a small gray square against the darkness of the island. Far out across the South China Sea lay a wall of storms: a green flash of lightning, the distant mutter of thunder across the horizon. The Animus turned and wheeled toward the storm.

Soon they were out across the sea. The Dragon-King would rise, or so they had been told.

Yskatarina closed her eyes for a moment, and rested her cheek against the Animus's slick hide. It occurred to her that the only body of water on Nightshade was frozen: She had never needed to learn to swim. But if she fell from this height, there would be no chance of survival, in any case.

A series of distant needles rose out of the sea, black against the heaving water. The Animus flew lower. The needles resolved themselves into spires and pinnacles of rock, rising straight from the sea. A lacy collar of white-green tide encircled each one.

At first, Yskatarina thought they were about to land on the spires, but the Animus, circling, soared lower yet. The waves towered up, so high that Yskatarina gasped, think-ing they were about to be engulfed. Then she saw that the wall of water that rose before them was not water at all, but a great glassy hull, rearing up upon bone-white struts.

"What is
that
?"

"The Dragon-King," the Animus said. It plunged down before Yskatarina could utter a word of protest, and alighted on the uppermost level of the hull, a walkway protected by the struts.

Yskatarina slid from its back and stood shaking, her back pressed against a strut. Sea streamed past her. She wished that she had not chosen such light legs for the pur-poses of flight: translucent plastic, supported by inner steel. When she looked down, she seemed to be floating. Only a glassy smear of seawater across the transparent sur-face of her shins betrayed their presence. It made her feel flimsy, as if the next gust might blow her away. She reached out and took tight hold of one of the Animus's arms.

"Where is he?" Her voice sounded raw and unused.

"He must be below" The Animus sidled through a crack in the wall, angling itself through like a squashed spider. "And there may be others."

"What kind of others? His children?" Yskatarina, with a final wary glance out to sea, followed.

She found herself in a tight niche, pressed against the Animus. But next moment, the niche opened up.

She was falling, hurtling down on a slide of sea into the depths of the Dragon-King.

Mars

The Memnos Matriarch sat alone in her chamber, scrib-bling upon a scroll, which whirred slowly out from the anti-scribe. Although she wrote busily, the thoughts that she was noting down were inchoate and fragmented: names, dates, ideas… The Matriarch was trying to make sense of what Nightshade might be planning.

There was a faint clicking sound in the direction of the door. The Matriarch did not glance up. Both of her per-sonal excissieres were on guard duty, beyond the small stone chamber that was the Matriarch's sanctuary. From time to time she heard their harsh whispered voices as they conferred with each other.

The Matriarch found it re-assuring. It had been a long time since she had been a war-rior, perhaps fifty years or more since she had worn armor and strode out across the Crater Plain. Now the armor be-longed to another warrior and the Matriarch could barely remember what it had been like to stalk and kill. She had been protected ever since the day that the armor had been returned to the challenge racks and she had climbed the stone stairs of the Memnos Tower naked, to return wear-ing the red-and-black of the Matriarchy. At the time, it had seemed like a fair exchange, but sometimes still, she won-dered.

The clicking sound came again. There was the noise of a door opening, and this time the Matriarch looked up. The excissieres stepped into the chamber, moving as though controlled by the same string.

"Yes?" the Matriarch asked absently. "What is it?"

The excissieres did not reply. Instead, they glided for-ward. Their armor bristled; the moving images of cuts and wounds appeared and vanished across the few inches of exposed flesh, glowing raw and red in the lamplight.

"What?" the Matriarch said again.

Each woman plucked the scissors from her belt with a glittery snick. Their eyes were blank. The Matriarch stood abruptly. Her chair fell to the floor. She dodged behind the desk, reaching for the phial at her throat. The excissieres grabbed the edge of the desk and turned it over. The Ma-triarch fell against the window, which swung open. She reeled over the sill, looking down onto a hundred feet of air. The frosty rim of the sill dug into her back. The ex-cissieres' scissors were the same silvery cold as they came downward, and she felt a tug as they ripped the phial from her neck. The Matriarch saw a single star in the sky above her, and she thought that it might be Earth, but then it was lost behind a fountain of blood.

The excissieres grasped at her, but she was already falling. Her last thought was that the two worlds were the closest now that they had been for a thousand years.

The excissieres watched her fall. When the tumbling body hit the ground, each pressed a careful tongue to the surface of the scissors and licked it clean.

"Go down and bring that body back," said the thing behind them, its possessed and resurrected body sham-bling into the chamber that had once been its own

.

Earth

Yskatarina, gasping, was afloat in green phosphorescent water. Her head pounded and throbbed like a thunder-cloud. She thrashed and sank, kicked out, rose again. She had never been in deep water before. Through the mutable light she glimpsed a drifting shape, a white, terrified face: a woman, perhaps her own age or a little older. Yskatarina cried out to the woman.

"Help me!"

The woman's mouth moved as Yskatarina herself spoke, but there was nothing more than an echo, and it was then that Yskatarina realized it was her own reflection.

"We are in a room," the Animus said, soaring over-head. He swooped, Yskatarina lunged and was lifted to the top of a flight of steps. Water lapped gently against her feet with the rock of the machine.

The mirror filled one wall. Yskatarina's face appeared spectral, a glistening green. The Animus flew in a slow circle. The room was vast, hangar-sized, paneled with rotten wood. Far above there was a cold crystal glitter as a chan-delier caught the sea-light. But the water, though chill, had not been icy, and a warm breath of air made its way through the cracks in the splintered wood.

"Where
are
we?"

"I do not know," the Animus said. "We fell a long way, down a chute—look. You can see the end of it up there." As it folded its wings, Yskatarina saw that one edge was ragged, like a fraying sleeve.

Droplets of black ichor starred the boards beneath their feet.

"You're hurt!" she said, filled with dismay.

"It does not matter. Look there."

Yskatarina looked up and noticed a ragged hole in the paneled wall.