Banner of souls (16 page)

"But nothing unusual?" Dreams-of-War persisted.

"I have seen something of a Dragon-King on this voy-age."

"A Dragon-King?" Dreams-of-War looked startled.

"But apart from that, nothing unusual. Get in."

Lunae stepped over the side into the scull, which rocked, throwing her forward. Dreams-of-War turned, but it was Sek who caught her. The captain's hands were like gnarled iron, and they lingered.

Lunae pulled away.

"Be careful," Dreams-of-War snapped.

"She'll learn," Sek said without rancor, and cast off. The scull skimmed over the greasy water, to rest beneath the great black hull of the junk. Lunae looked up to see the sails rattling in the breeze. A rope ladder was flung forth. Sek swarmed up it and called to Lunae, "Now you. Hold tight; don't look down."

Lunae hesitated.

"Go on," Dreams-of-War said. "You won't fall. And if you do, the kappa and I will catch you."

Lunae did as she was told. The ladder was slimy with weed, as though it had been towed underwater, and en-crusted with barnacles. She found it difficult to grip, and the rough mouths of the barnacles hurt her hands. She felt weak and ineffectual in front of Sek, who was peering im-patiently over the side. To the captain, she was suddenly sure, Lunae was no more than a pampered passenger. She clambered upward, bracing her feet against the sides of the hull.

Gradually, as she climbed, the air became filled with an unfamiliar sound: a hissing, rushing whisper.

At first Lunae thought that this was no more than the movement of the waves against the hull, but as she reached for the rungs of the ladder, she realized that the noise was com-posed of many voices.

"The sea, the sea…"

"Water filled my lungs; I knew nothing more…"

"The Dragon-Kings took me, swallowed me whole…"

"Lunae!" The voice was sharp and irritated. Lunae looked down. Dreams-of-War stood with hands on hips, glaring upward. "Why have you paused? Are you afraid?"

"I can hear voices."

"What?"

"The boat is speaking to her," Sek spoke softly from above. "She hears the stories of the dead."

Dreams-of-War's mouth opened in surprise. "What?"

Sek did not answer.

Lunae began once more to climb, puzzled. Did this boat, then, use haunt-tech? It appeared entirely antique to her: the wooden boards, the crimson sails. Resolutely, she ignored the voices, filing her questions away for later, and soon they faded to nothing more than the murmur of the waves.

When she reached the top, Sek hauled her onto the deck.

"Well enough."

Lunae looked ruefully at her hands and garments, which were now tinged a faint and gleaming green.

She was reminded of Dreams-of-War's armor, but now she stank of old weed. Dreams-of-War and then the kappa ap-peared beside her on the deck.

"We leave now?" Dreams-of-War demanded.

Sek nodded. "As soon as you are ready. But the girl must go below."

Dreams-of-War nodded. "Very well."

"I should like to stay on deck," Lunae ventured, but the kappa protested.

"No, no, it is not safe; you must do as the captain tells you."

Lunae bit back a sharp reply and followed the kappa down the steps to a cabin. Lunae was immediately re-minded of the litter: no windows, enclosing walls, and only a faintly glowing lamp on the shelf. She sat down dis-mally on a nearby bench and folded her hands in her lap, already beginning to plot escape. The kappa sank into a moist bundle beside her.

Earth

Yskatarina stood before the doors of Cloud Terrace, the Animus at her shoulder. It was dusk. The lamps of the city glowed below. The air was filled with the soft wings of moths, brushing against Yskatarina's arms with a delicacy that she could not feel.

"They will not let us in," the Animus whispered.

Yskatarina smiled. "Of course not. All the weir-wards are up. They suspect something is wrong."

Earlier that day, she had sent a message to the Grandmothers, asking for an audience. She gave an assumed name, not wanting any connection to be made to Nightshade, or Elaki. But the Grandmothers denied her request.

"We are old, and weary," Left-Hand quavered, echoed by her sister. "You can have no reason to wish to see us. We live quietly, in seclusion. We intend to remain there." And then the link was severed with insulting abruptness.

Yskatarina was not surprised. The Grandmothers' intelligence network was both extensive and capable. The assassination attempt by the kappa had suggested that, and Yskatarina was certain that her brush with murder could be traced back to the doors of Cloud Terrace. Noth-ing was secure. However, Yskatarina intended to make sure that the spiders at the heart of the web would spin no more.

"Do as we discussed," she said to the Animus.

The Animus's mandibles opened to their widest ex-tent, revealing a lensed opening. Yskatarina kept well back, out of the way. The lens slid aside, revealing a flicker of teeth. Then a bolt of cold flame shot from the depths of the Animus's throat. When it struck the door, the metal melted, dripping into iron lace.

"Good," Yskatarina said with satisfaction. When the molten metal flow stopped, she stepped through.

The hallway was empty, but Yskatarina did not imme-diately proceed. She stood still and raised her hand before her. A host of stinging things burst from the wall and swarmed up her arm. If it had been flesh, she knew, they would have stripped it from her bones, but they could make no headway on the armored steel. Again, that cold fire, enveloping her arm for the briefest moment, and then the swarm was nothing more than a coating of ash.

"There will be other safeguards," the Animus said.

"Then go before me."

When they reached the end of the hallway, a toxic mist appeared. The Animus consumed it in a single breath, breathed it forth again from the vents in its sides as nothing more than steam.

Going past the tapestries, they encountered a sudden whirling mass of blades, which Yskatarina blocked with a blow of her hand. She lost three fingers, which clattered to the floor and writhed like worms. But the blades ground to a tangle of metal and then she and the Animus were stand-ing before the door of the Grandmothers' chamber.

Yskatarina kicked it open with a whine of servomech-anisms. The Animus sidled through, but met no resis-tance. The Grandmothers stared at Yskatarina from the depths of the bed, eyes bright.

"You are from Nightshade," Right-Hand whispered, echoed by her companion.

Yskatarina grinned. "And you are my aunts. Elaki, you—all sisters from the same skein. Family quarrels…"

"Elaki's child?" The Grandmothers stared at her.

"Exactly so. I have come for the
hito-bashira
. And this, of course, is my Animus." The Animus's mandibles clicked open. "He can blast you to powder with a single breath," Yskatarina said.

"It does not matter what you do to us. You will not find what you are looking for."

"If you don't give the girl to me," Yskatarina said, "I will order the Animus to fry you, as slowly as a pair of prawns. You will sizzle and shriek, my aunts."

The Grandmothers' mouths widened into shark-smiles. "You will not find her. We cannot summon her. She is not here."

"Where is she, then?" Yskatarina asked, feeling a slow temper begin to build, like a thunderhead.

"We have sent her away, to a place where you and Elaki will never find her. She is safe."

"Tell me or die," Yskatarina said.

The Grandmothers looked at Yskatarina, then at the Animus, then at each other.

"We have lived long enough," they said, and before Yskatarina could order the Animus to act, Right-Hand reached down and tugged at one of the tubes that ran be-neath the bed. A thick white fluid flooded out, seeping across the driftwood floor like a tide.

"Wait," Yskatarina said, but the Grandmothers were crumpling and folding, shrinking as though it had been nothing more than the fluid that had animated them, as, perhaps, was the truth. Their eyes remained bright with vindictiveness right up until the moment that Yskatarina, temper breaking at last, shrieked to the Animus, "Do it! Make them burn"—and the joined women vanished be-hind a sheet of ire-palm.

Yskatarina watched until there was nothing left except an ashy slime upon the floor, and then she began to search the room with frantic haste, muttering as she did so—per-haps to the Animus, perhaps to herself. There was no data pertaining to the lost haunt-ship, but there was other in-formation, instead.

When she found it, she sat, crouched on her heels by the antiscribe, staring at the name it bore.

Slowly, her thin smile grew.

Earth

Lunae woke. Light flickered about her. Voices came and went. She thought she heard the kappa, speaking in a low undertone, tense with worry, but she did not recognize the other voice: a woman. She thought back, but could not remember very much. The light fluttered and changed, and suddenly she was somewhere else.

She was standing on the edge of a chasm, looking down. The chasm fell away beneath her, hundreds of feet to a thin river of black water. She knew the place inti-mately, but she could not have said what it was called, or even the world upon which it might lie. She thought that it might have been Mars, for the spongy rocks were all manner of shades of red, from vivid scarlet, to peony-crimson, to rust and garnet, to pale, fleshy rose. It felt like home, but it also felt unhappy. A vast weariness possessed her, as if she had been here for aeons, knew every speck of dust, every pebble. There was a curious, familiar scent: dust and smoke, perfumed with something that she knew to be a kind of wood, but could not have named.

Slowly Lunae walked along the chasm's edge. She knew that she was waiting for someone, but there was no joy in it, only a kind of dreary anticipation. She had done this a thousand times before; she would do it again. There was a cold wind blowing, causing her skin to rise up in goose bumps along her bare arms, and she shivered.

Finally, she saw it: a spinning, whirling dot at the very edge of the horizon, coming in fast over the chasm. It looked like a drop of rain, yet Lunae knew that it had not rained here for centuries. The raindrop grew, hovered for a liquid moment overhead before spiraling down to where Lunae was standing—

—and then she was back on the boat, feeling the tilt and turn of the junk. There was a rattling slide up the boards: the anchor, Lunae surmised, being raised. She waited until she was certain that they were moving, then stole a glance at the kappa. The nurse's chin was sinking toward her breast; her round eyes were closing. Hope leaped within Lunae. She watched until the kappa fell asleep, then rose to her feet.

She stood before the locked door of the cabin, closed her eyes, and shifted time: just a few seconds.

When she opened her eyes again, she was on the other side of the door, standing in the narrow corridor.

She touched the wall: salvaged wood, scrap metal hammered into uneven panels, the roughness of cogs and gears beneath her fin-gers. This whole ship was nothing more than a patchwork, remnants of older vessels, perhaps. The old philosophical conundrum came to her: If the sails, the wood, the nails are all replaced, then can it be the same boat? If so, Lunae thought, then this junk could have been sailing the seas since the Drowning.

She remembered the voices: old ghosts, locked within waterlogged wood. But that was a sign of haunt-tech, not age. It was science that conjured ghosts, rather than na-ture. Turning, she ran along the passage, seeking the stair-well, air, and light.

There was a rolling unsteadiness beneath her feet, a distant hum from deep within the junk. It must be moving under its own power, independent from the wind. Perhaps the sails were nothing more than an emergency measure. At the bottom of the stairwell Lunae paused and listened. Nothing. Holding tightly to the rail, she climbed the stairs and stepped out onto the deck.

It was later than she had thought. The sun had dropped below the horizon, leaving a stain upon a rosy sky. The mirror-lights of the city flashed over the water: tower upon tower, rising up from the sea-walled land. It took her a mo-ment to regain perspective. They were passing the edges of High Kowloon.

Tenements climbed perilously above the water, overhanging the shore. She could see nets and lines cast down from the windows, between the bob of lights from the fishing dhows. A babble of voices floated across the water from the streets: arguments, enticements. After the quietness of the mansion, the world seemed filled with un-necessary sound.

Lunae looked back, but the heights of the Peak were cast in darkness. Cloud Terrace was a line of irregular shadow. She turned her back on it.

A red wall rose before her, gleaming in the lights of the city, and Lunae recognized the Nightshade Mission. She stared at it with wary fascination. It looked like a block of congealing blood, with a curiously waxen quality Up close, the walls appeared gelatinous, more like translucent flesh than stone, a shadowy darkness, shot with fire. Had it been built or grown? She thought of the Kami, the spirits-within, then of the assassin. She could still feel its touch upon her hands, like the last remnants of a scab. She watched the Mission as if hypnotized, until it fell behind.

More tenements, and then the immense bulk of the fortress-temple, Gwei Hei. This, too, rose straight from the water: obsidian and iron, encrusted with the faces of demons to keep away the hungry ghosts of the sea. A/eng shut mirror, some ten feet across and lamp-bright, glared out across the harbor like a baleful eye. Lunae smelled smoke and blood, the sharp tang of industrial pollution, but the night wind was warm on her face and she leaned back against the mast, happy to be outside.

"Well," a voice said. "I see you've found your way on deck."

Lunae, startled, looked up to see Sek. The captain's eyes were sea-dark, narrowed with disapproval, anger, ad-miration—Lunae could not tell. Sek's tattooed arms were clasped behind her. She smelled strongly of something in-congruously flowery, that Lunae finally identified as syn-thetic jasmine.