Читать книгу Banner of Souls - Liz Williams - Страница 22

CHAPTER 1

MARS

The Animus hovered anxiously overhead, wings beating like a slow fan. It had taken over an hour of bargaining to allow him to have access to the Tower, and even then a squadron of scissor-women had accompanied him up the spiraling stairs.

Beneath lay Yskatarina, strapped to a high couch. A doctor hovered nearby, with the Matriarch. They had removed her limbs, for fear that she might break free and damage herself or the equipment. She was now secured by straps at the waist and the throat. At first, she had protested.

“Surely the treatment cannot be that difficult?”

“It strips your neurons down to the level of the unconscious. It ransacks the pathways that lead to the farthest parts of your mind. Your aunt will, I know, have planted her seeds of affection very deeply.” The Matriarch’s face, looming above her like a pitted Martian moon, grew pinched. “She tends a cold garden, that one.”

Yskatarina was about to ask how well the Matriarch knew Elaki, for the words made her angry with unthinking affront. But then: I will be glad to be rid of this, a loyalty that I neither asked for nor desired.

Let it burn and bleed out into the red night; let it be gone into the shadows of Memnos. She wondered where such emotions went, whether they seeped from the black light matrix to sink into cold stone and colder air. She listened to the walls of the Tower around her, yet heard nothing, only the Matriarch’s harsh breath and the steady beat of the Animus above her, like the heart that anchored her to life.

“This process,” she said, before the doctor began to key the codes into the matrix that covered the wall and which drifted in cobweb filaments through the air. “How precise is it? What damage might it do?”

She did not like this at all. It made her feel trapped and choiceless. Only two cultures had this kind of technology: Memnos and Nightshade. She felt caught between the dark and the deep. She could not have this done at home, but there was always the thought that Memnos might implant something else in her brain, some treacherous seed that would only grow to fruition when the time was right, to burgeon and betray. She had spent the journey here staring out at the spectral images of the Chain and weighing chances in the balance. Thoughts of losing the Animus had driven her to the final decision, but even that had been a close-run thing. If Memnos messed with her mind, Nightshade would have to put the damage right and she would also have to take the risk that Elaki would not notice that anything else had been interfered with. And now the guilt was kicking in with crippling force, whispering inside her head, aghast that she was about to betray Elaki. But the cracks in that loyalty had grown too wide. It was as though there were a second voice inside her head, another self, buried deep: Elaki will take the Animus away. You cannot risk that. You have no choice. Do it. Do it now.

“Very precise,” the Matriarch answered. “There will be no damage. And we will honor our bargain.”

“If I find that you have not,” Yskatarina said, “then you will find that the haunt-tech that I have given you will turn upon you. I have factored in safeguards that only I can activate.”

The Matriarch’s mouth curled in what Yskatarina initially thought to be her habitual sneer. It was only a moment later that she realized it was approval.

“Are you ready?”

“Very well.” Yskatarina gritted her teeth, helpless as a worm in a vise. From the corner of her eye, she saw the doctor run a hand across the generating tubes of the black light matrix. The room sparkled and filled with unnatural sound. Yskatarina blinked. The Matriarch was no longer there. The draft from the Animus’s wings drifted across her face—soft as snowfall, she thought, and wondered where the thought had come from. And then she was the Animus, a whisper in his head, looking down on her own bound form. She saw the black light matrix sweep across her, outlining first sinew and vein, then bone, then nerve and neuron. Her brain pulsed with neon fire. She plunged downward, boring into her own skull. It was like entering the Chain.

Images flashed by. Yskatarina saw herself in a garden filled with glowing leaves, skeins of tangled vines that pulsed with lights, a tower made of glass and water, ebbing and flowing like the tide. She saw the long ragged edge of the Animus’s wing, curling through stormy air. She tasted salt. She saw a girl with luminous gray eyes and long red hair blowing in a wind from the sea.

She knew that it was here somewhere, though she could not have said what it was that she sought.

The landscape changed from the lands of life. She traveled down canyons of meat, over bloody rivers, across bridges made of sharpened bone and tough neural fiber, withered as old whips. Beneath, there was a boil of fire: an inner, private hell. Things clung to the cliffs like ghosts, winged yet spectral. They were horribly familiar, and as one of them looked up, Yskatarina saw its shadowy head change. Her own face looked back at her, and then it was the visage of the Animus, then both at the same time. Something within her shrieked in protest.

Shuddering, she let the vision pass by and glided on. And at last she saw Elaki sitting on a crag with her feet tucked up beneath her. Yskatarina slipped down to stand beside her aunt.

Elaki showed no sign that she saw Yskatarina. Under the tapering cowl her face was at first withered and old, and then it smoothed out into fetal vacuity.

“Aunt?” Yskatarina said. “What is wrong?”

But Elaki only muttered and mumbled, tearing with toothless gums at a long bloody shred.

“Is that my love for you?” Yskatarina asked. She reached out and snatched at the shred, but Elaki shrieked and tore it away. She held it at arm’s length, then clutched it to her. Her eyes were wild; she roared with panic.

“Give it to me!” Yskatarina cried, and reaching out she struck her aunt in the face. Elaki’s cheek tore open, revealing a shadowy hollow behind a fountain of stinking blood.

“Give it to me! You took my limbs. You would take my Animus! I owe you nothing.”

Elaki’s arms flailed. Yskatarina grasped the shred and pulled. It lengthened with unnatural elasticity, until Elaki and Yskatarina stood in a tug-of-war on either side of the crag. The recesses of Yskatarina’s imagination gaped below, the caverns and oceans of the unconscious mind. She did not like the things that she saw within; they disgusted her.

Once more she glimpsed the beings that clung to the sides of the cliff, but now the fire was gone and the place in her vision was bleak and cold and dark. It looked like Nightshade, the region known as the Sunken Plain. The creatures howled and cried and she felt their attention turn toward her: hungry and desperate, a bitter yearning for life and blood and flesh. Their need reeled her in, she understood what it was like to be thus disembodied. She felt herself begin to shiver and melt.

Then a black-winged shape with a scorpion’s tail slid out of the abyss, its eyes glowing with trust. With the last of her strength, Yskatarina ripped at the shred and tore it from Elaki’s grasp. Elaki withered into a twist of smoke and blew away, but Yskatarina felt herself falling backward into pain, which opened with nauseating willingness to let her in.