Читать книгу Banner of Souls - Liz Williams - Страница 11

CHAPTER 4

EARTH

Tersus Rhee waddled slowly through the chamber, checking with thick fingers the drip-feeds that led to the growing-skins, monitoring the minor changes and alterations that might token an incipient systems failure. They had already lost the previous children. If this one, too, failed, the Grandmothers had told her, then the project might have to be terminated. And that would be a great shame. The Grandmothers had gone to an immense amount of trouble on behalf of the child in the growing-skin. The services of Tersus Rhee herself had been procured. A Martian warrior was now on her way, at no small difficulty and expense, to guard the child.

Tersus Rhee, for various reasons of her own, did not want the project to be terminated. The Grandmothers had told her little enough about this line of made-humans, this special strain to whose care she so diligently attended. But then, despite her skills, she knew that she was nothing more than the hired help to the Grandmothers, just another kappa, indistinguishable from all the rest of her kind. She did not expect to be told a great deal. She knew only that the child in the bag was known as the hito-bashira, the woman-who-holds-back-the-flood. She had her own suspicions as to what this might mean.

But speculation had already run rife throughout the clans of the kappa when it was learned that she, Tersus Rhee of Hailstone Shore, was to be sent all the way south to Fragrant Harbor to serve the Grandmothers.

“How much do you know about the Grandmothers?” the clan leader had asked Rhee.

“Very little.” Rhee shuffled her wide feet in a supplicatory gesture and spread her webbed hands wide.

“Unsurprising. No one knows anything of them, it seems—who they are, where they come from. Now, they keep to their mansion of Cloud Terrace, but it is not known how long they have been there. They squat above the city like bats. Then, suddenly, they send word to me, asking for a grower, a carer. An expert.”

Rhee frowned. “Why are you telling me this? Am I to be that expert?”

The clan leader gave a slow frog blink. “Just so.”

“But what about my duties here?”

“This is more important.” The puffed eyelids drifted shut and tightened. Rhee knew that she would say nothing further.

“When am I to leave?” Rhee asked in resignation.

“On the third day of the new moon, when the time is auspicious. Take what you need.”

And so, with a hired junk waiting in the harbor below, Tersus Rhee had packed her equipment: the box of scalpels, the neurotoxin feeds that, if carefully applied, would alter genetic development to the desired specifications, and a handful of the starter mulch that had now been in her family for seven generations, nurtured and handed down like a precious yeast. For all else, she would be obliged to rely on the Grandmothers of Cloud Terrace, and the thought did not please her.

The journey south pleased her even less. She would be traveling not as an expert hired by Cloud Terrace, but incognito, as a hired help. This was so commonplace for the kappa as to be unremarked. It was, after all, they who provided most of the world’s drudgery. Rhee traveled in the communal hold of the junk but spent most of the day on deck, watching the peaks of the Fire Islands recede into the distance until they were no bigger than pins against the lowering skies. From then on, the journey was uneventful: only ocean, like so much of Earth, wave after endless rolling wave. Rhee passed her time in the passive, contemplative trance that was the default mode of her people, and made doubly sure that no one noticed her. The kappa spoke little among themselves, anyway, when away from the clan-warrens.

On the third day out, however, there was excitement during a sudden squall. A commotion at the prow of the junk suggested an unusual occurrence, with all the crew rushing to see. Rhee was sitting under a furled sail, just far enough into the rain to be comfortable. She rose to her feet with difficulty on the slick, plunging deck, and ambled toward the prow. Everyone was shouting and pointing, but Rhee was too short to see what they were all looking at. With placid determination, she shoved her way through and stared.

Something was rising on the horizon: a huge, curling shell. From this distance, Rhee estimated, the thing must be hundreds of feet high. Coiling, spatulate tentacles drifted out from the main bulk, forming a nimbus against the stormlight. When it once more sank, the rain had passed, leaving a clear sky in its wake.

“What was that?” Rhee asked a crewmember. The woman, red-clad like all sailors, turned toward the kappa. Her face was wizened with a lifetime of saltspray and wind; she bore the mark of Izanami, creator goddess of ocean, between eyes like black currants.

Rhee thought she already knew what manner of thing it had been, looming up out of the waters, but she wanted to be sure.

“Why, it was a Dragon-King,” the crewmember said. She touched the mark between her brows in respect. “Did you see its whips?”

“I did,” the kappa said. “Are Dragon-Kings common in these parts?”

“Do you not know?”

Rhee shook her head with the affectation of doleful stupidity.

“Why, there are said to be no more than four of the great beasts, which survived the Drowning. Once, the world was full of dragons, so they say—from what are now the Shattered Lands to the islands of Altai and Thibet. But then they raised the wrath of the ocean, of Izanami, and the sea rose up and drowned the world and all the dragons with it. And now there are only the sea dragons left, the great kings who once bore pearls in their claws and jewels in their manes.”

The kappa forbore from saying that the thing they had just seen had neither claws nor mane, and the great polished shell more closely resembled metal than scales, only inclined her head and mumbled, as if in awe. The crewmember moved on and Rhee wandered thoughtfully back belowdeck.

Later, a bandit boat was seen, coming out from one of the inlets, but it veered away after the junk raised a warning, and sped back toward the ruined shores of its home.

After that, there was nothing of note until the towers and typhoon shelters of Fragrant Harbor appeared, with the mansion of the Grandmothers squatting amid the great houses at its summit. They arrived at dusk, with the lights of the city glowing out across the harbor, flickering and changing in the choppy water, mirroring nothing. The kappa chose to take it as a sign.

Once she was actually in Cloud Terrace, immured in the growing-chamber for most of the day, the situation pleased the kappa even less. The mansion—itself in a district filled with the ancient and decaying houses of the long-dead rich—was labyrinthine, full of weir-wards that the kappa constantly had to avoid activating. The Grandmothers had been forced to make some allowance for her inherent clumsiness—it was clear that the mansion had been designed for classical human form and not for the Changed, despite the Grandmothers’ own appearance—but they had been clear in their disapproval. And Rhee, in turn, hated the weir-wards: the forms they conjured up, beings of the distant past and distant deep, all teeth and eyes, swimming through the empty air of the passages and hallways, snapping at things that were not there. But if someone unauthorized had fallen into their path, the kappa knew, then the teeth would have proved all too real.

She hoped for the Martian’s sake that the warrior would retain some grace in the slightly different gravity. Two of them stumbling about the mansion, summoning the lost beasts of the Eldritch Realm, did not bear thinking about.

So Rhee kept mainly to the growing-chamber, whose wards were outside the door in order to avoid disruption to the delicate life-form within the skins, and she slept on a pallet. It suited her to do this, too, for when it came to the moment of hatching, it was vital that she should be present. She hoped the Martian would be there for this new child, as well. The woman should see what manner of thing was to be guarded, right from the start. But for now, the skin was quiescent, dangling from its long feeds like a ripe fruit. Only a small pulse at the base of the stem indicated that there was anything living in it at all. But soon, the kappa knew, it would reach fruition.

And then everything would change.