Banner of souls (38 page)

"Open the doors," she heard the Matriarch say in its rusty, wheezing voice. An excissiere stepped forward and placed a palm on the side panel. The doors hissed apart. There was a blinding moment of blacklight, and the haunt-engine lay exposed.

The engine was massive, reaching out to the walls of the cavern chamber. From the back of the crowd of ex-cissieres, Dreams-of-War gazed, aghast. She could not, at first, work out how they had gotten it into the Tower, but as the thing shifted and coiled, she realized that they had not. It had been grown down from Memnos's own black-light matrix, and it was still growing. Spirals and sparks of light arced out from the twisting burn of its core, seeking purchase on the stones of the cavern wall. "When a spiral touched the stone, it stuck, merging, transmitting pulses down the light-line into the core. It was drawing on the la-tent tech of the planet, sapping information, learning.

The Elder Elaki strode forward, accompanied by the Matriarch.

"It is working," she said. She put out a black-gloved hand and held it just short of the haunt-engine.

Sparks cracked out and were repelled again, as if by the touch of Elaki's hand. Dreams-of-War watched, mesmerized, as Elaki circled the engine, hands outheld.

"How big will it become?" Dreams-of-War heard the Matriarch say.

"It will encompass the Tower," Elaki replied without turning her head. She continued to stroke the energy com-ing from the haunt-engine, like someone soothing a pet. "The matrix down here will spread and merge, seek infor-mation buried in the walls of the Tower. Already it has brought forth many of the ghosts that are embedded here. They go to feed it."

My
armor
, thought Dreams-of-War. What had hap-pened to the animating spirit of Embar Khair?

Had it been sucked into the vampire-drain of the haunt-engine, leav-ing the armor empty? Or had the armor itself melted away into a pool of nanoenergy? Dreams-of-War reached for the stolen bow that now hung at her side.

"It grows," the Matriarch said. The echo of her whis-pering voice filled the chamber. Dreams-of-War raised the bow and notched the bolt, feeling it quiver, aiming at the figure of the Elder Elaki.

Can you kill these juture ghosts? We shall see.

Her sight was directed on Elaki, but it was becoming hard to see. The air around the blacklight matrix sparkled, and Elaki appeared as through a haze. But Dreams-of-War had trained on men-remnants in the half-light and she had good aim. She raised the bow to fire.

Yskatarina, headless, reached out and clasped the spined claw of the Animus. Her detached and splintered conscious-ness drifted above her shattered body, tied by a thread.

"How badly are you hurt?" She thought the words.

"I am wounded." The Animus twisted across the sword. "But I will live. I am already healing."

And with her fading sight, Yskatarina saw that the flow of ichor was slowing, the space between the Animus's chitinous plates was starting to close and sinews regrow-ing to reattach its head.

"I will not," she whispered. "I cannot heal this. You have to take me inside you." As she thought the words, Yskatarina was conscious of a vast relief. A handful of hu-man years, and an eon before that.

"It will be as before," the Animus said softly. "It will be better. Do you remember now the walls of the world? The crater lip of Nightshade? We had no body then. But now, we will."

"I remember. It was a nightmare. Another life, another self. It will be strange, to return to being a single form."

"I tell you, it
will
be better. At least we will
have
a form."

"Yes, it will be better. Take me. And we will go and look for Elaki."

Mars

Just as Dreams-of-War was about to fire, she was struck from behind in a tangle of spiny black limbs. To-gether, Dreams-of-War and the Animus fell from the steps into the midst of the excissieres.

They hit the floor of the cavern in a tangle of limbs and bowstring. Any illusions that Dreams-of-War might have entertained about the Animus's state of health were now dispelled. The strength that she had earlier discerned during their flight over the sea was back in full force. The thing was hissing, snaking around, spines ripping through her flesh. It was like wrestling with a giant scorpion. Excissieres milled about them, reaching out. The Animus's tail lashed forth and brought two of them sprawling. The tail snaked up and over, striking down at Dreams-of-War's face. She rolled, pinning the creature beneath her. The sense of the Eldritch was redoubled when she looked into its black lens gaze and saw Yskatarina looking back at her.

"That body is dead," the Animus spat. "And we are back together again."

"Congratulations." Dreams-of-War stabbed a thumb into one of the lenses. It shifted beneath her touch, then snapped back again, taking Dreams-of-War's thumb with it. The severed digit vanished into the depths of the Animus's eye. Dreams-of-War swore in mingled pain and fury.

"What is happening?" she heard the Elder Elaki cry. There was a commotion among the excissieres.

They parted. Dreams-of-War had a brief glimpse of black robes as Elaki strode through. The Animus's tail was thrashing about behind her. She felt the side of the sting graze her shoulder, twisted to one side.

Seizing the razor-sharp bow-string, she wrapped it around the Animus's wasp neck and pulled it tight. It lacerated her bloodied hands, but the An-imus's head again parted company from its body.

Dreams-of-War leaped to her feet and kicked the head into the haunt-engine just as an excissiere's scissors plunged into her side. Dreams-of-War doubled up, but as she did so, she saw the still-twitching tail of the Animus beneath her. She grasped it, dragging the body upward, and thrust the sting into Elaki's abdomen.

The sting went through the Elder's robes with ease. Elaki's mouth gaped open. Her hands drifted up, slowly, slowly, to clasp the tail.

"Out…" she said.

But the neurotoxins were already taking effect. Reel-ing back, Dreams-of-War saw black glitter spark through Elaki's veins, lighting her from within. Her eyes fell shut, opened again a moment later. And once more Dreams-of-War saw Yskatarina looking back at her from someone else's eyes.

"I'm here," she heard Elaki say, and then the Elder dropped to the floor. The excissieres stared in mute shock. No one moved. A spinning shape flowed from the Elder's open eyes, bicolored silver and black, and was sucked into the haunt-engine.

"Not wise," Dreams-of-War heard someone say. She could not think who it might be. "Kill her.

Throw the body to the Sown, to feed upon."

Dreams-of-War looked up and saw the swaying shape of the Matriarch standing before her. But the cavern and all it contained were overlaid by somewhere else: a vast caldera of night, filled with stars so small that Dreams-of-War could have reached out and grasped them in her hand. She was standing on the edges of the Eldritch Realm, on the lip of death.

"Dreams-of-War!"

The voice was very distant.
This
, she thought,
cannot possibly be important
.

"Dreams-of-War, listen to me. Open your eyes."

She forced herself to do so. The Matriarch was still standing in front of her, but it, too, had no head.

A little trickle of blood, nothing more, seeped from the severed tendons and arteries of its neck. Then it crashed to the floor. Dust, the color of old iron, gushed out. The kappa stood behind, a sword clasped in thick fingers.

"You!"

"I have been biding my time," the kappa said mildly. "Not a good idea to die, right now. You'd enter the Realm in very bad company."

Stepping to Dreams-of-War's side, she strapped a torn strip of cloth over the wound in the Martian's side. Cold antitoxins flooded through, making Dreams-of-War gasp. "Now your hand," the nurse commanded. Numbly, Dreams-of-War raised her injured hand to the attention of the kappa. The Eldritch Realm was receding, a dark line at the limits of vision. And now that it was going, she saw that the excissieres were standing in a silent crowd, rigid and unmoving.

"Why aren't they doing something?"

"They have no leader, I suspect. The Matriarch is dead." The kappa nodded toward the fallen figure of the old creature, now decaying into ash. "Whatever inhabited it is gone into the engine—I saw it.

They're controlled by the key in that perfume locket. It's tied into their DNA. You're of the Memnos line, aren't you? I'd suggest taking it, once I've attended to your hand."

Dreams-of-War stood watching as the kappa bound her wound and then, stooping, picked up the little phial.

"Here," the kappa said, unstoppering it. She sprayed a mist of perfume onto Dreams-of-War's skin, making Dreams-of-War cough. It stung for a moment, then seeped out through the chamber. The excissieres stirred into life. As one, they turned and looked in the direction of Dreams-of-War. She heard the snick of scissors. She had an army, but behind them, the haunt-engine was still growing.

Mars

Lunae watched as a flood of excissieres poured through the gates of the Tower. The dawn light was glowing rose and white above the distant Olympian cone. Certain that the excissieres were coming to join the ranks of the Sown, Lunae shrank back against the bank of the canal. But the sounds from the foot of the Tower suggested otherwise: shrieks of fury, and the clash of battle. Unable to resist cu-riosity, Lunae slid up over the top of the bank again and looked out. Excissieres and the first rank of the Sown were fighting.

The Sown surged forward, leaving the plain empty be-fore Lunae. Stumbling along the bank of the canal, she ran, skirting the army. The Sown paid no attention to her, but as the light grew, she could see that the excissieres were falling. The Sown moved inexorably onward, surrounding the Tower. Soon, Lunae reached the edges of the lock. The Tower reared up above her. BlackUght poured out of the slit windows, vying with the dawn. Lunae stood in a glittering twilight. Sparks poured from the chitinous carapaces of the Sown, running into the ground, which churned and boiled as the mass of the Sown passed across it.

Then, running up onto the edge of the bank, Lunae saw a woman. Her pale hair streamed out behind her. She wore body harness, carried a bow. Beside her, struggling to keep up, was a familiar squat figure. Lunae almost cried out, but the Sown were too close. She clambered up the lock gate, clinging to wet splintered wood, and dropped down to the other side. She landed painfully on her hands and knees.

The fall knocked the breath out of her and it took a moment for her to haul herself to her feet. When she did so; Dreams-of-War and the kappa had vanished. Gasp-ing, Lunae continued along the bank and looked down.

A glimpse of long blond hair and white skin, like a candleflame through the shadows. The Sown were cutting their way through a line of excissieres. The scissor-women went down as easily as the gaezelles had done. The Sown, trudging forward, caught up with Dreams-of-War and the kappa and surrounded them.

"Dreams-of-War!" Lunae shouted. The Martian whipped around.

"Lunae! Stay on the bank! Don't—" She struck out. There was a swords gleam. Two of the Sown fell. Black-light was still pouring out of the Tower and then, as abruptly as if someone had flicked a switch, it stopped. The Sown turned. In the skull-faces of those nearest to her, just a step down now from the edge of the bank, Lunae saw life stop for an instant, and another consciousness flood through.

The Kami had come, conjured through time. She had failed to stop the Flood.

She paused in indecision at the top of the bank. If she acted now, would it be the right time? If she moved herself through time, what would it accomplish? She might find herself in the very midst of the Sown, about to be cut down. Her future-self had said she could not die, would move forward at the moment of death… But it was not herself that she was worried about.

One of the Sown, perhaps swifter or stronger than the rest, wheeled around from its temporary interruption. A great arm came down upon the kappa's head.

Lunae did not know whether or not she cried out. There was no more room for indecision. Instead, she shifted.

She intended, in that split second, to move only the kappa and herself. But as she made the shift, she felt the presence of the Kami, rank upon rank. The shift attracted their attention. In the smallest space between times, she felt them turn. And she could feel the haunt-engine, too: a great pulsing beat at the edge of the world, a gateway to the Eldritch Realm.

She also saw the scene below her with anguished clar-ity: Dreams-of-War bloody, bandaged, half-naked; the kappa, a second away from death at the Sown's fist, the red Tower, the army… Lunae, still in that space between times, turned her full concentration upon the haunt-engine. She could see it, now, as though she stood in two places at once. It filled the Memnos Tower: a gate of black-light.

Beyond it, she could see what must be the Eldritch Realm itself, a whirling, spinning mass of darkness and light and something in between that she could not de-scribe. A stream of sparks arced out from the mass, half-resolving into faces before fading into smoke and pouring into the haunt-engine.

Before, she had taken the chrysalis through time, and then the kappa. She knew that she could shift solid objects. But that had only been under her own power. The power of the haunt-engine, designed like a smaller version of the Chain, to bring spirits through time, was far greater. Lunae reached out with shifting senses and touched the edges of the blacklight matrix. It surged through her like a released sea.

She looked down into the abyss of the Eldritch Realm itself: the million layers and nations of the dead.

Into that realm she shifted the haunt-engine. She felt Mars turn be-neath her feet-—a terrible sensation. A weight of bodies and souls moved in behind her, drawn in the engine's wake, and finally the gateway itself collapsed inward.

She knew where to take them. She had been there be-fore. This time, it was not the toxic, fungal mountains of Mars, but the very end of the world: the gray plain. She drew everything behind her, skirting the Eldritch Realm, which flashed fast by. She glimpsed things that she could not comprehend; in those glimpses, she saw that the Realm itself was alive. Something was coming to join her, spiraling up from the chaos below: the tiniest spark of light. She did not have time to study it. With a great effort, she set her thoughts on the plain. Then the Realm was falling behind, beyond—and Mars lay below.