Banner of souls (29 page)

The faint light had long since died behind the cracks of the shuttered window when they next came for Dreams-of-War. Sek, accompanied by another woman, stood war-ily in the doorway, bearing shields and a prod that snapped and crackled with blue fire. Dreams-of-War stud-ied the stranger. She did not look like either warrior or sailor, though she wore the latter's salt-stained crimson. Her face was flat and closed, pinched in upon itself as though her features were suffering from permanent cold. The tilted eyes spoke of the north, but her hands, encased in fingerless red leather mittens, were as thick and shape-less as a kappas own.
A hybrid
? thought Dreams-of-War, and dismissed the notion with revulsion.

"Here," Sek said. "These are for you."

It was familiar fighting garb: a kilt, boots, underharness.

"This is Martian gear," Dreams-of-War stated, shaking out the kilt. It was almost identical to the one she had worn as a girl: standard battle wear, with a narrow metal waist-strip that was now bare of insignia. If she was to fight, she would be doing so anonymously. No doubt, Dreams-of-War thought with bitterness, it was no more than she deserved.

"Of course." The sour-faced woman spoke with impa-tience. "You are a Martian warrior. This is what they have come to see."

"Who?"

"Your audience."

"This is an arenic fight? Gladiatorial?"

Sek laughed. "A little grandiose, perhaps. Though, ob-viously, it is an arranged form of combat. Get ready; I am sure you are anxious to begin."

Sek was, in fact, right. Dreams-of-War was burning for action of any description. She was not, she thought, well-suited to enforced contemplation.

"Very well." She put on the boots and the kilt, then bound up her breasts while the women watched impas-sively.

"Hold out your hands," Sek said. "Yes, straight in front of you, like that. Good."

When she steps close to me, I will strike
, Dreams-of-War thought. Her mouth was suddenly dry.

The spines along her tongue slid forth, prickling her gums. Mucus welled up from the floor of her mouth, coating the soft parts with a protective, hardening saliva. Claw-implants twinged at the tips of her fingers.

But Sek was taking no chances. She raised the prod and touched a button. Azure fire flicked out and wrapped itself with barbed-wire pain around Dreams-of-War's wrists. She tried to pull free, but the flame sizzled and hissed, singeing her skin until she forced her hands to re-lax within its fiery grip. Then it subsided, to a sharp ache and a band of bright blue.

"Follow me," the woman accompanying Sek said.

Dreams-of-War did so, stumbling a little. Sek kept well out of the way. They stepped out into a filthy passage, luminous with opalescent mold.

"Where are we?" Dreams-of-War asked.

Over her shoulder, Sek said, "This is a very ancient place. It dates back to before the Drowning, before the eruptions. It was buried for millennia; it is known only to a few."

"Is it a temple? A palace?"

"No one knows."

The passage ended in a thick metal door rimmed with rust. Sek pushed it open and Dreams-of-War followed her out into an echoing space. The ceiling was low and made of some kind of artificial stone.

Columns of similar mate-rial ran at regular intervals into the farther reaches of the chamber.

"Those markings. What are they?"

"Letters, in some lost tongue, or numerals, or symbols only. Again, no one knows what they mean."

There were also marks on the floor: thin yellow lines and white squares.

"It is believed they have ritual content," Sek informed her.

"This audience," Dreams-of-War said, impatient. "Where are they?"

The next moment, her question was answered.

People streamed through the metal doors that stood at intervals along the chamber. Most were human women, though some were kappa and some, she was sure, were the Changed. There were a few whom Dreams-of-War was unable to place: faces that were out of proportion to their bodies, arms that ended in clubbed fists rather than hands, eyes set too deeply into the skull. She could have sworn that a handful of them were male. Perhaps these, too, were crossbreeds. It was forbidden, not to mention difficult, but there were all manner of backwoods genetics operations in these distant districts, impossible to regulate.

She stared at them as they formed loose lines, stood unsmiling and silent, but she could feel their avidity.

"Here," Sek said. She gave Dreams-of-War a shove be-tween her bare shoulder blades. The blue flame sizzled around her wrists and disappeared. "This is your weapon."

It was a gutting knife with a scale handle. It fitted Dreams-of-War's palm as though made for it.

"What am I to fight? These folk? I thought they were here to watch." There were at least two hundred of them, too many with which to do battle. Dreams-of-War re-solved to kill as many as she could before she herself es-caped. She would not countenance the possibility of being vanquished; that was the first lesson that she had learned as a warrior.

"No, you are correct. They are the audience."

"Then whom am I to fight?"

"Wait."

Dreams-of-War could hear a low humming note echo-ing throughout the chamber. Minutes later, a glide-car ap-peared, swiveling on low-slung motors so that its back was toward the audience, and sending spirals of dust up from the floor. The vehicle was large, with a high back. As it drew to a halt, something within the enclosed section thudded against the wall. The glide-car rocked on its jets. The crowd sent up a low murmur of pleased anticipation. Sek gave Dreams-of-War another shove.

"Go."

Dreams-of-War moved forward into a crouch, with the gutting knife drawn. A hatch slid open in the back of the glide-car, to reveal a cage. Something stirred heavily within. The cage door rattled up. Two beings leaped out and sprang to either side of the chamber, dodging behind pillars. Dreams-of-War had a fleeting, confused impres-sion of striped skins, gaping mouths, hot yellow eyes, and human hands. The crowd howled. Dreams-of-War glanced from right to left and back again. There was no way out.

The change-tigers closed in, one on each side.

The Crater Plain

Mars

At first, Lunae thought that the long voyage back in time had been no more than an illusion. The place in which they now stood was also small, dark, and filled with smoke. It took her a moment to realize that the smoke was coming from a fire, blazing a little distance from the entrance to a cave. Snatches of muttered conversation came from the di-rection of the flames: harsh voices, abrupt words. The cave was filled with a pungent smell, a bloody, overwhelming odor.

"Someone is cooking meat," the kappa hissed, picking herself up from a bone-strewn floor.

"Is that what it is?" Lunae had never smelled anything like it before. Cautiously, she stepped to the lip of the cave and peered out.

Two slender crescents hung low over the horizon, against a sparkle of stars. After a moment, Lunae recog-nized familiar constellations, angled differently through clear sharp air. A blue star shone in the heavens between two ragged peaks.

"There," the kappa said in her ear. "Earth!"

There was rough sandstone under Lunae's hand, red in the light of the fire. And huddled around the blaze were three figures: squat, maned, licking short-clawed fingers.

"Hyenae."

Very quietly, Lunae and the kappa made their way back into the recesses of the cave.

"What are we to do?"

"Perhaps there's a way out at the back of the cave," Lu-nae said. But investigation proved fruitless.

The cavern ended in a smooth wall of rock. The only exit lay past the hyenae, whose home this all-too-clearly was.

The kappa nudged her. "If worse comes to worst, you must bend time for us."

Lunae shivered. "I wish never to bend time again. Look where it's got-us."

"Yes, but now we are back on Mars, in what I fervently hope to be the present day. And it is thanks to your gift. Or," the kappa amended, "what your gift is to become."

"I don't want to take the risk."

The kappa sighed. "Then we must find another way out."

Lunae returned to the entrance of the cavern. The hyenae still sat, bickering over snatched scraps of gory meat.. The smell of the meat, and of their bodies, was so strong that she hoped they would not be able to detect ei-ther herself or the kappa. But at some point they would surely return to the cave, when the night became danger-ous and colder, and there was nowhere within it to hide. She could almost feel eyes on her back… The sensation was so overwhelming that Lunae whipped around.

There was, indeed, an eye, yellow as a lion's, peering out at her from within the wall.

Lunae sprang away and cannoned uncomfortably into the kappa.

"What is it?"

"Look!"

The kappa stared. The eye rolled around, angry and alarmed.

"Someone is in there. They've walled them up!"

A breath of sound, nothing more. Lunae, after a mo-ment's hesitation, put her ear to the wall. The kappa was already beginning to scrabble at its base, where a small pile of stones had been accumulated.

"Help me, Lunae."

"We must be quieter!" She cast an anxious glance at the cave mouth. The hyenae were still there, but their meal was almost over. A mound of bones, glistening with saliva in the firelight, had grown behind them. Lunae clawed at the stones, placing each one gently on the ground. The kappa's broad hands paddled away, scraping stone and mortar both. The mortar released a clear, gummy sub-stance that clung to Lunae's hands and stank. Soon, bound feet were revealed, then legs. The prisoner was not, Lunae noted, wearing armor. More space was cleared and the prisoner writhed downward, angling her body through the newly made hole and struggling clear. The kappa hacked at the bonds on wrists and ankles with a rock, free-ing her.

There was a high-pitched yell from the mouth of the cavern. Lunae turned to see a hyenae bounding toward them on all fours, jaws gaping. The teeth were like a ba-boon's; claws rasped on the rocky floor.

The prisoner tore a filthy gag from her mouth, gave a yell of her own and rushed forward. Lunae snatched up a rock and threw it at the hyenae. The kappa emitted a war-bling cry like a trapped frog.

Her tongue lashed forth to catch the hyenae underneath the ear. It fell, with a bloody puncture staining the matted mane. Two more entered the cavern, fanning outward. The prisoner kicked up, catch-ing one of the hyenae in the groin. It reeled back, whim-pering. The second creature grasped Lunae around the waist and lifted her up, spinning to avoid the kappas tongue.

The prisoner cried out in Martian, a long and hissing string of syllables. Something—fire-blackened, stained, unnatural—rose up in a liquid column from the floor. It fell upon the hyenae that held Lunae and flowed smoothly about his head and shoulders. Lunae, abruptly released, dropped to the floor. Muffled cries came from within the enveloping mass, but soon were stifled. The mass glided away, to rest at the warrior's feet. The hyenae lay where it had fallen, tongue lolling, quite dead.

Lunae stared at the corpses in fascinated horror. When she next looked up, the prisoner was encased in ar-mor that resembled that worn by Dreams-of-War, except that this was ochre and fawn instead of burnished green. There was a faint facial resemblance, but Lunae could not tell if this might be due to genetics, or simply Martian ar-rogance. Besides, this woman had red hair.

"Who are you?" the kappa gasped.

"I am a warrior!" The voice could have been that of Dreams-of-War: arrogant, irritated. "Who are
you?"
the warrior demanded.

Improvising hastily, Lunae said, "We have come in search of a—kinswoman of yours. We last saw her on Earth. Perhaps she has returned to Mars." As far as she knew, this was far from the truth, but she felt compelled to offer some explanation for their presence.

The warrior frowned. "It was as though you appeared out of the air."

"Not so. We wandered the region and found ourselves in the hands of these creatures. Perhaps you lost con-sciousness for a moment," the kappa remarked smoothly.

"Perhaps," the warrior said reluctantly, clearly uncon-vinced.

"And yourself?"

The warriors face became a rictus of anger and dis-dain,

"I was captured." Having spent months in the com-pany of Dreams-of-War, Lunae could tell what this admis-sion cost her. "They knocked me unconscious and stripped me of the armor. They prize such things, though they do not understand how to use them. They fight and snap and bicker endlessly, trying to coerce our technology to do their bidding. They never succeed."

"But they didn't kill you."

"No. I was with others, who are now dead. The hyenae are not wholly unintelligent. They walled me up, to make sure that I was secure, until they wished to eat me."

"I am surprised," the kappa said with care, "that a meal was all they had in mind for you. I know the reputa-tion of males."

The warrior snorted. "It would have been the worse for them had they tried. I have internal modifications, like all members of the warrior clans."

A short, contemplative silence ensued.

"What manner of creature are you?" the warrior asked at last, scowling at the kappa.

"I am a kappa, from the northern regions of Earth. I am the nurse of this girl."

"You are an amphibian or some such?"

"An amphibian, yes."

The warrior's scowl deepened. "You will not find it easy in this part of Mars. This is the Isidis Reach, the southern part of the Crater Plain. We are far from the Small Sea or the lake lands."

"I will have to manage," the kappa said with a sigh.

"What is your name?" Lunae asked.

The warrior drew herself up with a familiar show of pride. "I am named Knowledge-of-Pain."

"I think I have heard that name before."

"Naturally. I am infamous."

"I think it may have been spoken by my guardian, a woman of Mars—the person we have come here to find."

"Her name?"

"Dreams-of-War."