Читать книгу Banner of Souls - Liz Williams - Страница 12

CHAPTER 5

MARS/EARTH

Dreams-of-War waited impatiently as the ship joined the queue of vessels waiting to dock. There was little traffic from the edges of the system. She gazed out at freighters and passenger craft with lunar markings, the insignia of some of the client factories of Earth: all of it pockmarked, scarred, old.

“Approach,” she heard the ship’s consciousness say, formed, perhaps, of some past pilot or a composite of pilots, haunt-shifted into the ship’s black light system.

The ship was entering the Martian maw of the Chain, ready for the rush. The maw gaped before them, a mile or more in width, lined with rotating spines to keep out intruding traffic—the disaffected of the lesser worlds, who occasionally tried to disrupt the flow of the Chain. At the back of the maw, Dreams-of-War glimpsed the energy spirals that would take them onward: a twisting glint. In the next few minutes they would be passing through the dimensional interfaces that the Chain manipulated to compensate for different planetary orbits and then entering the Eldritch Realm, the dimension of the dead, before once more emerging through another maw into the atmosphere of Earth. Or so one hoped.

Strapped into her seat, Dreams-of-War was uneasily reminded of the experience that she had so recently undergone beneath the black light matrix. She closed her eyes and leaned back. The ship roared and shuddered as it entered the first portals of the maw. Dreams-of-War hoped it would hold up. Often ships did not; rent and sundered by the forces within, they emerged as antiques, or not at all.

Restless, she opened her eyes again and looked around at her fellow passengers. Most were Martian: the bleached women of the north, dressed in elaborate swathes and robes, all overlapping folds. Suitable for the chilly Martian plains, thought Dreams-of-War, but the ship was stiflingly hot. The women showed no signs of discomfort, however. They sat upright, cold and wan as stone.

Other passengers were less easily placed: a woman with dark skin and protruding vertebrae, a too-long neck that continually angled and flexed as if seeking comfort; a squat person with a depression in the top of her head, deep enough to hold liquid. The Changed, thought Dreams-of-War with distaste. She glowered down at her own armored self. The Changed passengers passed by, heading for economy class.

The ship juddered as it began to enter temporal recalibration. A bewildering kaleidoscope of images whirled and wheeled before Dreams-of-War’s eyes.

She saw a small, grublike child lying in a black metal bed in the depths of a tower, ice riming the interior windows . . .

. . . A woman stood on the deck of a ship, staring out at storms . . .

. . . A single dark wing spiraled down from out of the clouds and Dreams-of-War felt rain on her face, before touching her hand to her cheek. Her fingers came away slimy with blood and ichor . . .

Dreams-of-War jumped, filled with sudden dismay.

Possible futures, possible pasts, unskeining as the interior of the Chain folded and refolded time, enveloping it in upon itself, merging and sifting. She could feel time running past and through her, traveling in both directions. Dimly, she was aware of the other passengers. The pale northerners wore identical expressions of deep affront.

The ship was entering the final stages of recalibration. It slid with a shriek into the deeplight web of the Chain. Shadow-space rose up to enfold it. Then memory rose up and engulfed Dreams-of-War as time changed.

She was only just out of the clan house. A warrior was missing; it was assumed that hyenae had taken her, high in the crags. Or perhaps the warrior had slipped and fallen, and now lay at the bottom of one of the sharp ravines. Dreams-of-War hoped it was hyenae. She disliked killing beasts, because of their beauty, but the men-remnants were another matter.

Warriors did not work well together, and it was not expected of them. The women set off in the early morning, just before dawn. It was cold, with a ground frost that snapped at Dreams-of-War’s heels. She was not wearing the armor of Embar Khair, for this was a year before she had earned it. A leather apron, underharness, boots, and a gutting knife were all that she wore, but her dental implants had recently been made. Her gums were sore, and they still bled first thing in the morning. Dreams-of-War recalled looking up from the ice-cracked basin and seeing scarlet running down her chin, reflected in the metal walls of the bathroom. She had borne the pain with pride, nursing it as warriors were encouraged to bear all small anguishes, that they might better be accustomed to pain when it made its first true visits upon them in the combat-ring, or life.

Unlike the other girls, Dreams-of-War chose a difficult route into the mountains: up the face of Mount Haut, which rose in a sheer rock cliff from the stones of the plain. Usually the canyons that led to this cliff were to be avoided; it was known to be a place where Earthbones were found, with pits and traps in the ground leading to the devouring flesh beneath. Dreams-of-War smeared lattice pulp on the soles of her boots to disguise her odor and was careful where she walked, but she could still smell the Earthbones as she slipped through the canyon: a faint trace of rotten meat. She avoided any place where the soil appeared unstable or bloody; the Earthbones exuded a seep of purulence upward into the earth, to form their entrapping webs. But it was still too easy to take a misstep; two warriors had been lost that year alone.

It was a difficult ascent up the cliff. Dreams-of-War was compelled to remove her boots halfway up and climb barefoot, to give herself a better grip. When she reached a ledge a little way below the summit, she was sweating and her mouth was filled with blood from where her new teeth had snagged her lip. She spat in a crimson arc down toward the plain, and looked forth.

The sun was bursting up over the horizon’s edge, casting sharp shadows across the plain. She could see the angular buildings of the clan house, rising up through the nest of trees, half-lost in a haze of smoke from the still-smoldering fires of the previous evening. The Memnos Tower broke the line of the horizon. Beneath the plain ran a labyrinth of tunnels, reaching out from the Tower into the hills. Dreams-of-War looked at the Tower with distaste. It was the place to which all else must defer, the governing seat of Mars and thereby of Earth, a place full of politics and intrigue. Dreams-of-War was not a political being.

She dismissed the view with a curl of the lip. She would be relieved to be free of the clan house, too—free to win her armor and travel the slopes of Olympus, the sands of the Crater Plain. There was no doubt in her mind that the armor would be won, when the time came. Now, however, she turned and looked upward.

The crags towered above her, ochre and rust and blood. She could smell smoke—from the clan house?—but it was surely too distant. A faint trace of burning meat: hyenae, then. Hope rose in her. She started to clamber up, following the scent. As she crested the top of a high ridge, she found them below. Four of the men-remnants were crouched in a hollow in the rock around a fire. They were, indeed, hyenae, from the deep fastness of the mountains; unusual, to find them this far west, away from their caverns and the female remnants with which they bred. Dreams-of-War repressed a shudder at the thought. Coarse, tawny hair spilled down their backs; the long, overshot jaws bore small up-reaching tusks and their eyes resembled black, shiny seeds. Occasionally, one of them gave voice in a grunting bark of satisfaction. They were eating what remained of the missing warrior.

Oh well, thought Dreams-of-War. Not a noble end, but probably she had died fighting and there were enough of the hyenae on which to exact a reasonably satisfactory vengeance. She leaped down from the ridge, slid along a bank of scree, and uttered a roar. The hyenae looked up, startled, with fragments of human flesh raised halfway to their tusks. They had a limb each, she noted. Very equitable, but Dreams-of-War was not about to give them the chance to benefit.

She dispatched one with the gutting knife, another on a backhand swing, kicked the third in the face and crushed his skull. The fourth bolted, still clutching a fire-blackened portion of arm. Dreams-of-War started after him, but he was gone down the ravine, leaping from crag to crag with engineered speed. She retrieved the warrior’s lost insignia from the flames, tucked it into her apron, then made her way sulkily back. She had not even had a proper chance to try out the new teeth.

Dreams-of-War returned to the present with a start. Shadow-space was fading back into deeplight as the Eldritch Realm slid away. She felt it pass through her soul as it left, a cold burn followed by a nausea that was closer to revulsion than motion sickness.

Earth and Fragrant Harbor lay ahead.