Banner of souls (34 page)

"Kappa! Run!"

The ground shook. A column of dust rose up, obscur-ing the moving skin of the ship. Lunae doubled up over the unnatural hand, coughing and choking, but then something was rising out of the dust: a pillar with a half-formed head at its summit. It bowed over her, embedding her in a watery coolness. She felt another consciousness slide over her own, just as the armor encased her.

Winterstrike

Mars

The armor of Embar Khair, carrying Lunae with it, marched toward the ship.

"Wait!" Lunae cried. "Turn back! It's attacking us. It—" but the armor paid no attention to its passenger. It strode onward. The scorpion-sting of the ship once more quivered and plunged, sending shivers and reverberations through-out the armor's shell.

"Kappa!" But she was unable to look back. The armor moved swiftly, diving and twisting through the cloud of dust. Lunae felt shock waves travel across her joints. She did not like being at the mercy of the armor. Its strength was horri-fying; the shell moved with forces that seemed far beyond what the human body could normally bear. She remembered its weight from the moment when it had imprinted upon her.

Yet Dreams-of-War had welcomed it. Were Martians so dif-ferent? The armor was bearing her beneath the body of the ship, reaching up to run a hand across the slick surface.

"Ship! Be still. There is no danger," said the disembod-ied voice.

"What are you
doing
?"

The armor did not reply, but she could hear Embar Khair talking to itself, or perhaps to a throng of others, in-side the armors helmet.

The babel grew, a hissing susurrus of inner sound, like the waves on some distant shore. There was a wet click. The side of the ship peeled back, revealing a walkway.

"Upward!" Embar Khair said inside Lunae's mind. It marched her up the walkway and into the ship.

Within, it was dark and quiet. Skeleton-ribs lined each wall, curving inward. The armor had to duck as they moved forward.

"Wait," Lunae said, desperate. "What are you doing? My nurse is back there, she—"

"The duty of my former occupant was to protect you. That duty remains. She who stole me is absent.

The ship prefers a living pilot."

"But where are we going? We cannot leave the kappa!"

"To find she who owns me, where else?" The armor evinced a distant surprise.

"You mean, Dreams-of-War?"

The armor said nothing. It raised a hand and beck-oned. Struts angled down from the ceiling, sealing the ar-mor in a standing web.

"Prepare yourself."

For what
? Lunae was about to ask, but in the next mo-ment, she was suddenly and horribly aware of the mind of the ship. It touched her mind—sly and sidling, somehow harsh and spined, like the scorpion discovered, too late, in the toe of a shoe. It felt ancient, powerful, and perverse.

She could not withstand it. She thought of the kappa in despair.

"Tell it to lift."

Lunae would have disobeyed, but the thought of lift-ing was enough. The ship swayed on its struts.

She could feel the dust rising up around it, was aware of cold air. Then they were up and soaring through the Martian sky.

Voices whispered inside Lunae's head: the ship, the ar-mor—it was hard to differentiate them after a while. Linked to the ship, she could see several dimensions at once: the wheeling heavens above, the Martian terrain be-low, fed back to her with a bewildering onrush of infor-mation. Gradually, she realized that the ship spoke in different tongues, some in languages that she could not understand. She did not think that all the voices were even female.

"Who are these people?" she asked aloud, when the whispers of conflicting advice became too great to heed. It reminded her disquietingly of Sek's boat.

"They are the pilots of past ships," the armor said. "Those who flew spacecraft in and out of Nightshade. They were brought back from the Eldritch Realm to pro-vide the knowledge base of this craft. A mass.of down-loaded souls."

And what, Lunae could not help but wonder, had the ship in mind for her? She longed for Dreams-of-War.

"The one who wore you," she said to the armor. "You said you could find her."

"The ship is scanning the land, even now, for the sig-nature of her being. It will not be long."

"She
is
still alive, isn't she?"

"I would know if she were not," the armor said, with such confidence that Lunae had to believe it. But what about the poor kappa? She thought with horror of the excissieres. The ship swooped downward, crossing a ragged lip of rock. The plains lay before them, rolling to the edge of the world and a rising moon.

"She is near," the armor said, very softly.

The landscape scrolled out before Lunae's linked gaze. She saw a chasm between the rocks, sharply black in the dying sunlight. A tall, pale figure stood at the entrance, and there was something beside it, something flickering and insubstantial.

"What is that?" Lunae asked.

"A ghost."

The ship flew downward, alighting in a puff of dust. Lunae was at the door and opening it before the ship had settled, then was out and running. And as she did so, she saw that the ghost was Essa.

"Lunae!" Dreams-of-War strode forward, held out her hands, let them fall before Lunae could fling her arms around her. "You're alive." She sounded astonished. "I'm— relieved."

"Guardian," Lunae said. "So am I." She stared in hor-ror at the lacerated wounds that covered her guardian's body. Few places remained unbruised or untorn.

"What happened to you?"

"Little of note." Dreams-of-War gave her a razor-edged grin. "Where is the kappa?"

"At the Memnos Tower." Lunae felt her smile fade. "The ship brought me here." She turned to Essa.

"I didn't expect to see you."

The ghost looked puzzled. "You are the
hito-bashira
." She smiled. "I have waited a hundred years for you, and you know who I am. How so?"

"We've met," Lunae said, "but not in this day and age."

She turned to Dreams-of-War. "You should take this back." She gestured to the armor and saw her guardian's face contract with disbelief, relief, a sudden joy, and some-thing else. Unease? She could not tell. But this time, Dreams-of-War held out her hands without hesitation. The armor flowed from Lunae, up and over. Dreams-of-War was again the martial, bristling figure that Lunae remembered so well.

"I need to gain information. I will be back," the ram-horned ghost said, and began to face back into the inter-face of the rock.

"Wait!" Lunae cried, but Essa was already gone.

"Lunae. Come with me." Dreams-of-War made for the ship, Lunae followed.

Mars

Yskatarina stood at the base of the Memnos Tower, lis-tening into the darkness. She could hear nothing.

"Animus? What's happening?"

"Someone is coming," the Animus said.

"Do you know who?"

"They are shod in metal. They have a human weight."

"Excissieres?" Yskatarina said.

"Perhaps the Matriarch has sent them."

"I do not have much faith in the Matriarch," Yskata-rina said. "Kami or not."

"I think she is mad."

"Not surprisingly." She stepped forward as the ex-cissieres reached the bottom of the stairs. The Animus melted back into the shadows.

"The Matriarch wants to see you," one of the women said.

"Very well."

"Your creature? Is it here?" The excissiere sniffed the air suspiciously.

"No," Yskatarina lied. "I told it to stay beyond the perimeter of the Tower. Have you located the ship?"

"It has not left Martian orbit; we are certain of that. But it continues to baffle the sensors."

"It should not," Yskatarina said. "The tech we gave you should be able to detect it."

"But the ship is old," the second excissiere said. "It uses frequencies to which our equipment is not attuned."

"The ship must be found," Yskatarina said in agita-tion. "It is a great prize. I cannot let it slip away"

"It will be found," the excissiere said. "The raven-ships are out looking for it, even now." She shifted impatiently. "Do not keep the Matriarch waiting."

Yskatarina, acquiescing, followed her up the stairs. With every step that she took away from the Animus, it felt as though a link between them was being stretched, an almost physical ache. Eventually, they reached the top of the Tower.

"In there," the excissiere said. Yskatarina stepped through the door and halted.

The study of the former Matriarch had changed. The furniture was gone, leaving bare stone walls and floor. Wires and tubes ran from the center of the room, channel-ing down through the floor, pulsing with pallid fluid. Yskatarina was immediately reminded of the Grandmoth-ers' chamber; this was the same kind of tech, keeping the desiccated corpse of the former Matriarch sufficiently in-tact to permit her spirit to animate it. The results were mixed. The body moved in a series of twitches and jerks, the jaw unhinged and gaping. Yskatarina wondered how long the ghost had to spend hooked up to this apparatus each day. The long head swung up to stare blearily at Yskatarina. The excissieres stood close behind her.

She could feel their breath on her neck, like the edge of a blade.

"Send them away," Yskatarina said to the Matriarch's ghost, without looking behind her.

The ghost gave a soft, whistling exhalation. "Why should I?"

"Because they will not like what we are about to say."

The long head dipped and nodded. Yskatarina saw the knobbed line of vertebrae, now bound together with skeins of slimy wire.

"Go," the ancient voice said. Yskatarina waited until the excissieres had clattered from the chamber, then she closed the door.

"I wonder that you bother with that body," she said. "We could arrange for you to inhabit a new one."

"I could take another body, if I so chose. This one is— interesting."

"It's a mummified corpse. It's falling apart."

"Still, its decay intrigues me. When it finally falls apart, then I shall move on. And it gives me such power. The lightest word from me," the thing went on, "and the excissieres will come running. They will cut you to rib-bons and I will mount your limbs on decorative plaques in this chamber. And there is also your creature."

Yskatarina grew cold and still.

"If you harm him—"

"No one has harmed him yet," the Matriarch said. "And no one will do so. At least, not until the arrival of your aunt Elaki."

Mars

Dreams-of-War was silent once Lunae had finished telling her what had befallen them. She sat frowning, en-cased in the armor, on the deck of the stolen ship. Phobos rose up through the porthole, casting a thin light across the floor. The ship remained on the floor of the canyon; Dreams-of-War did not want to risk orbit just yet. Lunae, racked with fatigue, sat beside her.

"The Kami are the ghosts of the future? Returning to the past to possess the living?"

"This is what I was told by my future-self," Lunae said. "And what I saw—Earth is become a hell.

Mars was a wasteland. My self spoke of other worlds, names I did not know."

"And the Kami control Nightshade now?"

"I believe so."

"It would make a certain degree of sense. Nightshade has always been apart from the rest of the system, first as a renegade colony, now as a powerhouse. It sits at the sys-tem's edge, draining it of life and wealth. It is a vampire planet."

"And it gave the system haunt-tech."

"If haunt-tech is not an old discovery," Dreams-of-War said, "but a discovery that comes from the far future, it ex-plains how it seemed to emerge from nowhere. It is a sci-entific anomaly, an unexpected direction. For thousands of years, the physical sciences held sway. And then, quite suddenly, via Nightshade, the Kami appear. They have no bodies; they tell tales of a place where the dead go—the Eldritch Realm. Superstition is revealed as truth. Ghosts are a reality. Consciousness can be separated from form. Seance is a viable form of scientific methodology and tech-nical development. Once, this would have been seen as delusion." She blinked. "A strange thought."

"And now the Kami are to invade, and I am to be the one who holds them back." Lunae rubbed eyes that were reddened by the Martian dust. "The trouble is, I have no idea how to go about it."

"What did your future-self have to say on the matter?"

"My future-self said that she had failed. Essa was there—the horned ghost with whom you were speaking. They told me that there would be a time when I could act, but she could tell me little about it.

She implied that time could be changed. And this makes me most reluctant to shift time." She looked at Dreams-of-War. "What if I do the wrong thing?"

"There is no way of knowing what the right thing might be," Dreams-of-War said. "And there is another is-sue. That woman, Yskatarina, is here. She is of Night-shade; she and the reanimated Matriarch control Memnos now."

"And the kappa is still at Memnos. If anything has happened to her—"

"Don't worry," Dreams-of-War said, but it was clear to Lunae that she did not believe this. "We will save her, if that's what you wish." She looked around her at the ship. "Do you know what is happening at Memnos?"

"Memnos has been broadcasting," the ship said with startling abruptness. "The woman from Nightshade is rais-ing an army.

"

The approach of twilight saw Dreams-of-War standing at a crack in the cliff face: the entrance to the eastern tunnels. Lunae remained with the ship. Dreams-of-War approached the entrance cautiously, expecting guards, but no one seemed to be there. Dreams-of-War slipped inside.

The tunnels were old, dating back to the foundations of the Matriarchy and perhaps before.

Dreams-of-War walked on smooth, bare stone, mottled with the drop-pings of the small dactylates that lived high in the cavern roof. She could hear them now, twittering and rustling, and this was a good sign.

She would not put it past the Matriarchy to flood the tunnels with gas. But this was only the beginning.