Banner of souls (36 page)

"Do you have weapons?"

"None that will be of use."

The walls of the canyon shot past with barely a hairs-breadth between the sides of the ship and the rock. Lunae was thrown to one side. Looking up, she saw that the amber-black craft had altered course.

"It travels to Memnos," the ship said.

Lunae experienced a moment of relief before she saw that the other ships were splitting in formation.

Most were still following. The ship was filled with a sudden blast of indigo light, sizzling out across the system banks.

"We are struck," the ship said, with such soft gentle-ness that Lunae at first thought she had imagined it. But the craft was plummeting now, the dark surface of Mars coming up fast beneath them, the viewscreen showing the point of impact in merciless detail—

—and in panic, Lunae shifted time, before even think-ing about it. The next minute, the ship was gliding bumpily along the desert floor, hammering the dust into great red clouds. There was daylight outside, walls rising up to meet them… Lunae cried out, but the ship had al-ready stopped.

"Where are we?"

Silence.

"Ship?"

But the voices were still. A sparkle of indigo shim-mered across the system banks and then the ship was quiet. The viewscreens died, one by one. Lunae waited. She could hear nothing. After a few moments, she hauled herself to her feet, walked unsteadily across to the doors, and pressed her hand to the code pad. The door fell open in a musty hiss of air. The ship was canted to one side, with a long drop beneath the opening. Lunae hesitated, then jumped down, landing heavily in the dust. She looked around her.

Red walls rose up before the nose of the ship. The city was a crown of towers, walkways hanging between them and glittering in the harsh sunlight. The air smelled of dust and water. Close by ran the high banks of the Great Chan-nel. Lunae recognized it from her lessons: It was the city known as Winterstrike, first city of the Crater Plain.

She heard the voices of the ghost herd before she saw them. They clustered, murmuring, behind the tail of the ship. Lunae turned, alarmed, to see the gaezelles waiting for her, red-legged and golden-eyed.

The ghost herd flowed around Lunae, surrounding her. She tried to push them away, finding to her surprise that they were solid. Their breath smelled of grass and sagebrush. They made no attempt to touch her, and when she, panicking, moved back, they moved with her. Their eyes were mild. A figure appeared in their midst: a woman with coiled horns.

"Essa!"

"They will not harm you," Essa said. "They seek to keep you safe, on my instructions."

"Safe?" Lunae faltered. "How?"

"My kind herded the gaezelles, once. As for now, the streets of Winterstrike are haunted. The Sown arise and are attacking. Darkness falls from the systems edge. It's time."

Time.

"When is this?" Lunae asked. "I changed time, to bring me here." The memory came in a cold rush of dismay. What if this had been the wrong thing to do, the forerun-ner of failure? She thought of herself and Essa, enduring down thousands of years. What would they find to say to each other, during all that time?

Essa said, "It is the afternoon of the day on which Mars may, or may not fall. You must leave the city, return to Memnos. The Tower is where the flood will rise."

"But have I done the right thing?"

Essa only stared. "1 do not know."

The gaezelles drifted alongside. Lunae could hear them murmuring among themselves, wondered again if they possessed proper speech. They seemed to converse in fragments, quickly losing interest.

The walls of Winterstrike were a solid, ruby stone, un-like the bloodshot walls of the Nightshade mission. Lunae thought of Dreams-of-War and the kappa and fought back agitation. As the ghost herd came near, taking Lunae with it, she saw that the great metal gates of Winterstrike lay open. The clan houses lay beyond: towering constructions of metal and basalt. All that Dreams-of-War had told her of Mars flooded obligingly back. Each house bore an in-signia, hanging before it. The streets were filled with steam-cars and land-boats, all abandoned, without any discernible care.

Then they turned the corner. A crowd of women were racing toward them, screaming in horror. The gaezelles closed around Lunae, jostling her into an alleyway. She was pushed and pulled up a flight of steps to a balcony. The gaezelles milled into the rooms beyond, but Lunae hung back. The balcony afforded an excellent view of the street. She was looking down on the heads of the crowd. Many of them were bleeding from ragged wounds. Close after them came a knot of the Sown, lumbering shapes wielding scissors that were part of their flesh: heavy pincer arms, weapons skittering out from their sides.

They were identical to the creatures that her future-self had shown her in Fragrant Harbor.

"They will become the Kami when the flood is sum-moned through," Essa said beside her. "We have to go."

They had been seen. Two of the Sown broke ranks and clambered after them, but the fragile staircase broke be-neath their weight, sending them tumbling back into the street. They roared with rage and struck about them. A woman crumpled to the ground, her torso severed from her legs. The crowd were being methodically butchered. The air reeked of death and blood.

"Hurry!" Essa tugged at Lunae's arm, drawing her through a pair of ornamental doors and into the depths of a mansion. There was no sign of any inhabitants.

"They have fled," Essa said over her shoulder, "or per-haps they hide in the cellars." She pulled Lunae down a staircase.

"Don't they have guards?" But Lunae did not think that much could withstand the Sown.

"They would have raised their armies and fought, but Memnos has sabotaged the weir-wards of their mansions. If they are wise, they have left Winterstrike for the sanctu-ary of the hills. Folk would rather face awts and vulpen than the armies of earth. You have seen why."

"And if they catch up with us?" Lunae said. "With me?"

"They will tear us all to pieces. They are not like the gaezelles, who once existed in life and lived out their time on the Crater Plain. The Sown are souls who were destined for war, but never born. Their forms lay dormant in the soil, like seeds—much harder to raise, but Nightshade can do it now. Their spirits boil with anger. Now their time has come and they cannot be held back. Ultimately, they will be aimed at Earth and then the lesser worlds. The ships are waiting on the other side of the city. Nightshade will com-mandeer the Chain for the invasion."

They hurried through deserted streets. The cries of the crowd faded and died. Other spirits slunk forth. Some were little more than air, but many were solid flesh. Lunae saw creatures that were formed of bones, covered only by tight red skin, beings that stalked on disjointed legs but had the serene faces of human women. Sometimes they chattered and laughed, speaking either to the air or to that which she was unable to see, but most moved silently, with unknown purpose. Of them, none resembled the Sown. But Lunae thought she could hear the army behind, the march of iron-shod feet.

Then the fortress lay before them, nestling at the heart of the crater: a mass of red metal spires, rising in fretwork lace against the darkening sky. During the Lost Epoch, Knowledge-of-Pain had said, one of the towers had been shattered. The stump still strutted up, never mended. Light flared within it.

"There's someone up there."

"I told you. Folk have taken shelter there."

But the light did not look natural to Lunae: a flicker-ing, wan mist that wreathed around the stump of the spire. She hesitated, but the gaezelles moved her gently onward.

"We go around," the ram-horned woman said.

As Lunae and the herd approached the lip of the crater, something fell shrieking from the spire and bounded up the walls. It fell upon the nearest gaezelle, which uttered a piercing cry and fell bloodily to the ground. The thing surged forward, mouth gaping. Lunae glimpsed teeth within teeth: a humanoid shape moving on all fours, with a stump of a tail. It had no eyes, only a wide, batlike snout and a pair of fanned ears. The gaezelles closed around her in a protective mass of reanimated flesh.

"Awt," the horned woman whispered.

"A ghost?" The gaezelles were pressing her forward, but at the edges of the herd there were shrieks and squeals. The odor of blood was strong in the air.

"Living flesh. As soon as the city gates were opened, the men-remnants came through."

A red limb was flung at Lunae's feet. But before she had time to respond, Essa and the herd were pressing her toward the city gate. She needed no urging. She hurried through the shadows, trying to ignore the cries behind her, and stumbled out into the expanse of the plain.

Mars

Dreams-of-War, accompanied by the hovering form of Yskatarina's companion, raced up the stairs of the Memnos Tower. They encountered resistance only once, in the form of a single excissiere, and she was swiftly cut down. But it was clear that something was occurring in the base of the Tower. They could hear a thrumming, a note that traveled up Dreams-of-War's spine and raised the hair on the back of her neck.

On the third level, a figure stumbled out of the shad-ows, a stout woman clad in crimson.

Dreams-of-War saw a sour moon-face that lolled and rolled on a snapped neck.

"Matriarch?"

"She—" the Matriarch said, through twisted vocal chords. But then she started to fade—no true raised ghost, after all, but a shadow only, the spirit recalled, with all its fleeting memories of form and flesh.

"Haunt-tech," Dreams-of-War said. "That noise below us. It's a haunt-engine."

But the sounds from the basement were themselves drowned out by a greater roar from outside the Tower.

"What's that?" Dreams-of-War hurried to a slit win-dow. An amber-black ship was setting down on the banks of the canal, bristling with weaponry, the star of Night-shade prominent upon its side. Amassed ranks of excissieres stood waiting, explaining the lack of their presence in the Tower.

"The Elder Elaki comes," the Animus said. But Dreams-of-War was already halfway up the next flight of stairs.

By the time they reached the landing of the seventh level, spirits were swarming from the walls of the Tower. The filmy forms of dead excissieres flocked past them, mouths agape. Warriors wearing kilts and armor, or naked save for their battle scars, milled about the stairs. Outside, the Elder Elaki's vessel could be heard, powering down.

"They'll be at the summit," Dreams-of-War shouted. As she stepped onto the landing, however, the armor be-gan to melt from her body, forming an iridescent green pool along the floor. "What are you doing? Stop!"

"I cannot." Embar Khair's shattered face rose from the ichor. "It summons me."

"What, the haunt-engine?"

But Embar Khair's face was already transforming. In the next moment, the armor rose up, resumed its form, and strode down the stairs. "Wait!" But the armor had gone. Dreams-of-War was once more left in her underharness with the gutting knife, still slick with the blood of the excissiere. She swore.

"You will have to do without it," the creature advised, unnecessarily.

"I have done so before," Dreams-of-War snapped. She angled her way through the ranks of spirits, ran up more flights. At last, they reached the final landing. Ghosts watched from the shadows: older things, creatures that were half-human and male, crouched, waiting with a pale-eyed gaze.

Dreams-of-War paid no attention to them, for the double iron doors that led to the Matriarchs chamber were gliding open.

A shambling figure shuffled forth: the Matriarch, with Yskatarina at her elbow. Excissieres stood behind them. Dreams-of-War saw Yskatarina's eyes widen with an un-holy joy as she caught sight of her companion. It flew to her, wrapped her in its spined embrace.

"Take them," a voice commanded from below. Dreams-of-War looked down. A figure stood beneath her on the stairs: black-robed, with a tall hat.

Yskatarina's voice echoed down the stairwell. "Aunt Elaki!"

Yskatarina watched as Dreams-of-War paused, caught between the Matriarch and the Elder Elaki.

Yskatarina per-mitted herself a moment of grim satisfaction. Dreams-of-War had proved irritatingly difficult to kill. But Dreams-of-War was a nuisance, not the primary threat. That stood farther down the stairs, in the form of Elaki herself.

Yskatarina's courage almost failed her at the sight of her aunt, and if it had not been for the presence of the An-imus, she would have faltered when she said, with as con-vincing a pretense at joy as she could manage, "Aunt! You are here!"

"Yskatarina." Elaki's voice was as grating as ever. Isti, Yskatarina was unsurprised to see, hovered at Elaki's heels like a conjured familiar. "This warrior. The woman in the Grandmothers' employ. You told me she was to die.
And where is the girl?
"

"The warrior was supposed to die. There was a hunt. It failed. Blame whoever occupies the Matriarch, not me." The hollow in her head might still be present, but old habits died hard in the face of Elaki's icy disapproval. "The girl is here, on Mars." Best not to tell Elaki what had hap-pened just yet.

"Then kill the warrior now. Your creature may do it"— Elaki clearly regarded this as a concession—"in the time that is still remaining to it. And why is the girl still alive?"

"I'm taking care of it," Yskatarina lied.
Bide your time. Wait
. Besides, she had no argument with the demise of Dreams-of-War. The Animus uncoiled itself from her body and whipped around. Its mandibles opened. Dreams-of-War danced back, but the bolt of ire-palm was already siz-zling out.

It did not, however, strike Dreams-of-War. She threw herself to the floor and rolled. The ire-palm shot overhead, leaving a mottled stain upon the wall of the Tower.

"There!" Yskatarina shrieked. The Animus wheeled, but Dreams-of-War was already up on her feet.

She leaped onto the balustrade of the stairs and threw herself from the edge as another bolt of ire-palm gushed toward her.