Banner of souls (8 page)

"And you shall have one," Yskatarina promised. "We'll help you raise the Sown."

"When we last spoke to Elaki, she seemed well ac-quainted with the notion of the Sown. Nightshade must know a great deal about Mars," the Matriarch said. "Much about its earlier genetic forms and fancies, about the nano-tech that coils and changes beneath the crucible of its sur-face—technology that we have lost over the centuries. I should like to see the records of Nightshade. Your people must have been most meticulous."

"We have had a long time to learn," Yskatarina said, watching the Matriarch's face with care as the truth slowly dawned. "A hundred years of feedback, from the haunt-tech that is already here." Fully aware of the Memnos pro-hibitions about physical contact, she put an iron-and-glass hand on the Matriarch's sleeve in seeming reassurance, and watched with satisfaction as the Matriarch snatched the sleeve away. "Do not worry. I am here to help."

"You are here to sell," the Matriarch hissed.

"Yes, and you knew there would be a price. Just like the previous version of haunt-tech."

"It was a witches' bargain." The Matriarch's face was still as stone. Once more, her hand drifted to the phial at her throat.

"But we are witches, your kind and mine, are we not? We hold the keys, here and now, to a world of transformation. With this new technology, updated, you can mine the past. You can revive ancient forms of being, converse with their unaltered consciounesses, uncover all the secrets that they hold. And you can raise an army, not just spectral fancies."

"And the price," the Matriarch said, bitter as frostbite. It was not a question.

The gaezelles were wheeling away to the north. Yskatarina watched them through the binoculars, the powerful red legs stirring up the dust, the long hair that streamed down their backs, their small curled hands. She sighed to see such grace.

"Ah, the price." Yskatarina drew the Matriarch aside. "Elaki wants information. All the genetic data that you un-earth must go to her. She is true to the original aims of Nightshade: the ultimate perfection of the sentient form."

"She would appear to be some distance away from that," the Matriarch said, with a dubious glance at Yskatarina.

"She wants your help, too, in another, related, matter," Yskatarina said, forcing herself to ignore the slight. "But there is something else that I want." The thought of be-traying Elaki tore at her heart with implanted passion, ar-tificial regret. If it had not been for that small, pure undercurrent of hate, Yskatarina would not have been able to continue. She added, in a gasping whisper, "Something you must do for me."

Earth

Lunae stepped through the door into the shadows of the Grandmothers' chamber. The air was musty with the smell of old lamp oil, pungent with narcotic snuff and a salt-weed odor that reminded Lunae of her single clois-tered visit to the shores of Fragrant Harbor. The walls were made of driftwood, a palace of drowned trees, the beams and rafters black and twisted, as though burned. Yet there was soft fur beneath her feet: a striped dark-and-gold skin, bright as a flame and perhaps fifteen feet in length. She thought of Kamchatka, where the kappa had come from, of the Fire Islands. She studied the knots and the warp of the ancient wood, the striped pelt beneath her feet, not wanting to look toward the bed where her Grandmothers lay.

"Come closer," two voices said, speaking as one. Lu-nae forced herself to glance up. The lamp that hung above the bed had not been lit, so that the voices came from the hidden midst of the drapes. Lunae walked to the foot of the bed and halted. "Stay there, child," the voices said sharply, "where we can see you." Then the lamp flared up and the Grandmothers' faces peered out from between the curtains: one old, one young. Lunae often thought that it was as though Right-Hand, with her sweet voice and ca-ressing manner, was slowly but surely draining the life from her companion until there would be nothing left of old Left-Hand but a husk. She remembered the chrysalis, turning to moth and back again, and shivered.

"Where is she?" Left-Hand asked querulously, though Right-Hand's lips also moved in silent accompaniment, and when Right-Hand answered, "Why, she is standing before you, blind old thing, do you not see her?" Lunae heard a whispered echo of the words from the other side of the bed. She concentrated on their faces, not wanting to glance down and catch a glimpse of the joined flesh. She had seen it once, when the robes that the Grandmothers wore had slipped aside to reveal a mass of scar tissue, al-most as knotted as the wood of their chamber, revealing lumps and bulges.

"Why would anyone want to be linked in such a way?" she had asked Dreams-of-War the next day, fighting back revulsion, and the Martian woman, evidently just as bemused, had replied, "I cannot say.

For me, to touch an-other person is difficult enough."

So Lunae had once asked the kappa why they had been joined, and the kappa had told her that she did not know, but in her opinion, it was more likely that they had not so chosen, but had come connected from the growing-bag and were incapable of separation.

"Such things are not uncommon. Sometimes the chil-dren are returned to the mulch, sometimes not. It depends on the family's wishes, and there are many views on these matters."

As she stood before the Grandmothers, Lunae was suddenly conscious of her own flesh and the boundaries of it, her separateness from everyone else in the room, and she had to force herself to remain where she stood rather than take a shaky step back. She wanted suddenly to re-main just as she was: not to alter, never grow old. She felt a sudden kinship with the kappa, and wondered if this meant that she, too, were nothing more than an inferior kind of human. She supposed that the thought should have made her feel guilty.

"You were disobedient," the Grandmothers said now. "What do you have to say for yourself?"

"I wanted to see the city beyond the mansion. I grew tired of being cooped up." Somehow, she had expected to hear herself sound like a whining child, but to her sur-prise, the voice in which she spoke was adult, a person worthy of consideration. The Grandmothers stared at her, and when they replied, the tone was distinctly more con-ciliatory.

"Perhaps that is understandable. But it was unwise, nonetheless. You were spotted, by one who is an enemy. It is no longer safe for you to remain here."

"Dreams-of-War said that I am to be sent away." Lunae glanced down and saw something beneath the bed: a twist of tubes and glistening fluid. She fixed her gaze on the wall, seeking patterns in the wood.

"Where am I to go?"

"Dreams-of-War and the kappa will be instructed. It is best if you yourself are not told until the day of your de-parture."

"Will they be going with me?"

"Of course," the Grandmothers said. "And you must obey them, and not be so disobedient this time.

Much de-pends upon it."

Lunae, swallowing hard, glanced at the nurse and saw that the kappa was becoming visibly agitated, wringing her thick fingers together as if confronted with a stubborn piece of laundry. The Grandmothers paid the kappa no heed. Their gaze remained fixed on Lunae: two pairs of dark, impenetrable eyes.

It was the kappas distress that prompted Lunae to say, "What if I choose a place to go?" It was a foolish thing to say and she knew it, but suddenly she wanted to see just where the boundaries lay, what smaller victories might be within her grasp.

"Choose?" the Grandmothers said together. Lunae felt as though the air were becoming sluggish and slow, curdling around her. It was suddenly difficult to breathe. The tapestries that hung around the bed loomed larger, so that she could see every detail of the weave, then retreated, as though she peered through the wrong end of a tele-scope.

"There is no choice," Right-Hand said, oil-smooth, amused. "No choice for any of us. The sooner you come to understand this, the easier things will be. Do you not agree?"

Lunae's mouth was too hot and dry for her to answer, so she nodded instead.

"You may go," the Grandmothers told her. "Remember what we have told you."

Lunae bowed and backed away, but as she turned to go through the door, she thought she heard Left-Hand say, "Make us proud."

The kappa was trotting after her, so Lunae dived out into the passage and breathed the stuffy air with relief.

"They did not need to see me! Why couldn't Dreams-of-War tell me all this? They summoned me to torment me."

The kappa seized her arm and hastened her down the passage. "Of course they did," the kappa said into Lunae's ear, surprising her. "But do not say so where they can hear you."

"If that's so, we had best journey to the moon," Lunae said with bitterness, not caring. "I'm sick of hiding how I feel." She could still feel the Grandmothers' presence. It surrounded her, filling her mind, as cloying and sticky as syrup.

"These moments of rebellion do not wholly displease your Grandmothers, you know," the kappa said,

"though they may pretend otherwise. They complained often of the other child—that she was too malleable, too pliant, that she did everything asked of her, with no more protest than a vegetable makes before it goes into the soup."

"Nurse," Lunae said, for this was yet another question without an answer, "who was that other child?

What be-came of her? Was she the
hito-bashira
before me?"

"Yes. She was your sister-in-skin. She was one of the ones who died."

Lunae searched for a flicker of regret in the kappa's face, but there was none.

"Did you look after her, as you care for me?"

"No. The Grandmothers summoned me after her death. I replaced another genetic grower."

"Would you miss me if I died?"

"It is hard to say," the kappa mused. Lunae felt some-thing cold and pulpy rise inside her throat; she stopped walking and stared at the kappa. "Do not think I do not love you," the kappa said in sudden dismay. "I did not mean that. But your Grandmothers are compassionate, and will not let me fully feel. If anything were to befall you, they would extract my emotions, store them safely where I cannot find them.

They are very kind."

Lunae was doubtful. If someone else was the governor of your emotions, then what was the good of having them in the first place? Why not simply have them removed, like an overactive gland? But perhaps it was better for the kappa to believe that the Grandmothers had her best in-terests at heart. If, indeed, she did so believe, and was not merely dissembling.

"And now," the kappa went on, "come with me. There are preparations to be made."

Memnos

Mars

The Animus hovered anxiously overhead, wings beating like a slow fan. It had taken over an hour of bargaining to allow him to have access to the Tower, and even then a squadron of scissor-women had accompanied him up the spiraling stairs.

Beneath lay Yskatarina, strapped to a high couch. A doctor hovered nearby, with the Matriarch.

They had re-moved her limbs, for fear that she might break free and damage herself or the equipment.

She was now secured by straps at the waist and the throat. At first, she had protested. "Surely the treatment cannot be that difficult?"

"It strips your neurons down to the level of the un-conscious. It ransacks the pathways that lead to the far-thest parts of your mind. Your aunt will, I know, have planted her seeds of affection very deeply."

The Matriarch's face, looming above her like a pitted Martian moon, grew pinched. "She tends a cold garden, that one."

Yskatarina was about to ask how well the Matriarch knew Elaki, for the words made her angry with unthink-ing affront. But then:
I will be glad to be rid of this, a loyalty that I neither asked for nor
desired
.

Let it burn and bleed out into the red night; let it be gone into the shadows of Memnos. She wondered where such emotions went, whether they seeped from the black-light matrix to sink into cold stone and colder air. She lis-tened to the walls of the Tower around her, yet heard nothing, only the Matriarchs harsh breath and the steady beat of the Animus above her, like the heart that anchored her to life.

"This process," she said, before the doctor began to key the codes into the matrix that covered the wall and which drifted in cobweb filaments through the air. "How precise is it? What damage might it do?"

She did not like this at all. It made her feel trapped and choiceless. Only two cultures had this kind of tech-nology: Memnos and Nightshade. She felt caught between the dark and the deep. She could not have this done at home, but there was always the thought that Memnos might implant something else in her brain, some treacher-ous seed that would only grow to fruition when the time was right, to burgeon and betray. She had spent the jour-ney here staring out at the spectral images of the Chain and weighing chances in the balance. Thoughts of losing the Animus had driven her to the final decision, but even that had been a close-run thing. If Memnos messed with her mind, Nightshade would have to put the damage right and she would also have to take the risk that Elaki would not notice that anything else had been interfered with. And now the guilt was kicking in with crippling force, whispering inside her head, aghast that she was about to betray Elaki. But the cracks in that loyalty had grown too wide. It was as though there were a second voice inside her head, another self, buried deep:
Elaki will take the Ani-mus
away. You cannot risk that. You have no choice. Do it. Do it now
.

"Very precise," the Matriarch answered. "There will be no damage. And we will honor our bargain."

"If I find that you have not," Yskatarina said, "then you will find that the haunt-tech that I have given you will turn upon you. I have factored in safeguards that only I can activate."

The Matriarch's mouth curled in what Yskatarina ini-tially thought to be her habitual sneer. It was only a mo-ment later that she realized it was approval.

"Are you ready?"

"Very well." Yskatarina gritted her teeth, helpless as a worm in a vise. From the corner of her eye, she saw the doctor run a hand across the generating tubes of the black-light matrix. The room sparkled and filled with unnatural sound. Yskatarina blinked. The Matriarch was no longer there. The draft from the Animus's wings drifted across her face—soft as snowfall, she thought, and wondered where the thought had come from. And then she
was
the Animus, a whisper in his head, looking down on her own bound form. She saw the blacklight matrix sweep across her, outlining first sinew and vein, then bone, then nerve and neuron. Her brain pulsed with neon fire. She plunged downward, boring into her own skull. It was like entering the Chain.