Winterstrike (12 page)

I didn’t get to sleep until a couple of hours later. It’s hard to sleep when people are singing and someone insisted on playing the flute, which whistled and mourned around the
echoing common room like a wind over the marshes.

Eventually there came a shout: ‘Can’t you
shut up
?’

Another argument, resulting in a brief but vocally ferocious intervention by the guards, and peace reigned. Whoever was responsible for the common room dimmed the lights to a faint rosy glow and
I slept, but not for long.

When I woke, it was colder. It struck me, fancifully, that I could feel the winter pressing down on the roof of the common room, hard and final as a fist. Someone was whispering, a quick, urgent
sound. Then a figure flitted past the entrance to my bed-booth and in the lamplight I caught a glimpse of floating brown cloth. There was an almost inaudible chittering.

Infernal curiosity! But I thought I’d rather try to pre-empt an attack, after what had happened to me already. I slid out from under the blanket, bundled my coat around my inadequately
clad self, then peered around the corner of the booth. Old, cold stone pressed against my face. The figure was heading quickly up the steps. Sliding out of the booth, I went around to the brown
women’s booth and lifted a corner of the blanket. The booth was empty.

It was none of my business, I told myself, but I still followed them, up the steps past the silent serving hatch and out into the covered courtyard. Heaters were blasting out warmth from either
side of the courtyard, keeping the frost at bay, but there was still a bite to the air in between the gusts of heat. I kept back, hiding in the shadows. Ahead, I could see movement and hear a
distant whispering. I moved closer, trying to catch what was being said, but when I reached the end of the column of pillars which supported the roof, I found that the voices were not speaking in
the common dialect of Winterstrike, or standard Northern Martian, or indeed any language that I understood. A hissing, clicking language – I wasn’t even sure whether it was an actual
tongue, or some kind of code. But now that my eyes were adjusting to the dim light I could see the brown-clad women. They stood in a huddle like ancient witches, arms about one another’s
shoulders and heads close together. Something was writhing along their linked arms: a smooth, cool-looking body that at first I took to be some kind of snake, until it shifted position and I saw
the myriad carpet of legs gliding underneath. A centipede.

It looked almost like some kind of plastic. I wasn’t sure at first whether it was a real animal, or a machine. Then the head came into sight: stubby twitching antennae and formidably
curved mandibles. I stood a step back and the thing raised its head as though listening. I held my breath and to my intense relief it resumed its movement around the linked bodies of the women. I
melted back the way I had come and returned to my bed. A few minutes later, I heard footsteps and again the three forms flitted past.

I hoped they hadn’t seen me. It was so hard to know what abilities people have these days, what technology. Nothing about the women spoke of haunt-tech. I closed my eyes and tried to sleep
and forget what I had seen, and eventually I did so.

Fatigue must have caught up with me, for when I next woke most of the pilgrims were already up and about, and the air smelled tantalizingly of tea and frying meat. I crawled out of bed, wrapped
myself once more in my coat and went to the washroom. A shower, blisteringly hot, woke me up, but as I washed the water stung my arm. I looked down at the bare skin. Something had bitten me,
producing two deep holes about an inch apart on the underside of my wrist, embedded in raised bumps. Gingerly, I prodded the bumps. The skin felt numb.

I thought at once of the centipede and fought back panic. Had the women detected me, there in the shadows, and sent their familiar to deal with me? Would I die? It seemed ironic that I’d
survived two apparent assassination attempts in Winterstrike only to meet my end as a result of my own stupid curiosity out here on the empty, barren Plains. I dressed, wondering whether to
confront the women or complain to a guard. But what would I say, if it turned out not to be the case? There were all manner of insects living in the countryside: it might have been something else
entirely that had bitten me.

When I went back out into the common room, however, the three women were nowhere to be seen. Already inclined towards paranoia, I saw this as suspicious. I asked a woman where they’d gone
and she replied that she did not know, but someone had told her that they had left shortly after dawn in a great hurry.

This did not, I thought, bode well. I kept an anxious eye on the bite throughout my quick breakfast, but although the numbness seemed to be wearing off to some degree, the bite was not as
painful as it looked and I felt much the same as before. But it was yet another thing to worry about. I was glad when we left the way station and recommenced our journey: it took my mind off
things, although in a manner which was not altogether welcome. Since we had entered the way station the evening before, the weather had taken a turn for the worse, and now a stinging squall of
sleet was washing down from the distant mountains and scouring the Plains before its lash. I bundled my coat closer and kept my head down as we left the huddle of buildings that made up Gharu and
struck out on the open road. If I had not been so intent on avoiding the sleet, perhaps I would have seen what was coming for me, and avoided that, as well.

TEN

I’d noticed before how extensive Caud was, how far it reached beyond its city walls. The barge took me past interminable industrial estates, each with its own dock: some
gleaming and newly framed, others rotting into the water. Occasionally the captain, whose name was Peto, pointed out areas of note and I pretended to take interest in them. I found that I kept
looking back, as if at some level I couldn’t really believe that I’d managed to escape the city, but it was more that I expected pursuit. The warrior of the Library had not returned,
but in the Library’s absence, the excissiere I had killed haunted me instead. I glimpsed her out of the corner of my eye, ghastly and unmoving upon the deck, propped up between boxes, or
hanging from the stairs. I couldn’t put these macabre visitations down to guilt, since I didn’t feel any. I was damn relieved that the Library had managed to dispatch her when she had,
otherwise I’d be dead myself. It struck me, however, that the excissiere might have managed to download some encapsulated element of herself into the Library’s own functionality and the
Library, herself contained, was projecting the excissiere outward in random stress. Peto, to my immense relief, didn’t seem to see her, and this suggested that the appearance of the
excissiere was peculiar to my own visual system.

Either that, or I was simply being over-sensitive as usual. I had no idea whether the excissieres were capable of haunting beyond death: they keep their secrets close and no one outside their
Orders really knew what the hell went on in there. I didn’t even think it was truly accurate to describe them as human any longer. And to think that people still avoided the Changed.

These thoughts occupied me as the bleak hinterland of Caud passed by and we came out onto a series of locks. Then I had no more time for speculation: the captain put me to work on the lock
system and we descended, slowly, creakily, onto the first dark reaches of the Crater Plain.

It was still very cold, but it seemed to me to be a little milder than in Caud. At this time of year, really warm weather would only be found much farther south, towards the lakes. My hands,
even in gloves, fumbled with the lock mechanisms and I could feel the breath freeze in my nose and mouth. I bit down on ice crystals. Finally, we reached the last descent and the barge glided out
onto smooth water.

Civilization, if you could call it that, lay behind. Here, no torches illuminated the canal banks and the only light came from the faint splinter of Phobos, hanging red over the frozen
grassland. When I went to the place in the cabin allotted to me and tried to raise a signal on the antiscribe, I could not get any response out of it. I wondered fruitlessly what was happening back
in Winterstrike. Now that I was away from the game, I had a chance to start thinking about whether I wanted to stay in it, and what the ramifications of leaving it might be. Spies who jump ship are
not popular at any time, and even less so in times of war.

Peto leaped out and tethered the barge to a ring for the night and I slept a fitful sleep, surrounded by the cries of night birds and the rustle of winter insects in the grass along the bank,
until I woke to the white and grey dawn.

When I forced myself to leave the comparative warmth of my bed and go out onto the deck, I found that I had been mistaken: we were not alone after all. Half of Caud seemed to have departed with
us, fleeing the recent strike. A makeshift refugee encampment stretched out across the icy grassland: plastic sheets strung on poles to keep out the winter wind, shelters made of bedsheets and
towels. Dim lights moved between these temporary tents as early risers – probably unable to sleep – sought friends and relatives. The acrid smell of tea drifted across the plain. I felt
suddenly privileged to have the protection of the barge, solid wooden walls and a kettle.

Peto was soon up, walking briskly about the deck as though she’d been awake for hours. She paid no attention to the encampment and I wondered whether she’d even noticed it; but the
people of the Small Sea were known for paying little mind to other people’s business; one of their more endearing traits, as far as I was concerned.

I’d have followed her example, if it had not been for an anomaly amongst the transient shelters: a series of slender spires, rising up in the middle of the encampment. Fragile banners in
green and crimson and black fluttered in the early-morning wind. The spires were in the shape of cones, with a narrow, tapering top.

‘What are those things?’ I asked Peto, who shrugged.

‘How would I know?’

‘Do you mind if I take a look?’ I asked. It might mark me as someone not from the shores, so I added, ‘I’ve seen something like them before. Traders, from the far
south.’

That sparked a flicker of interest in the captain’s flat eyes. ‘As you wish. But don’t be long. I’m looking to set off in the hour. Don’t know what other traffic
might be coming down. We’ll hit Sendar Locks before nightfall and if there’s a clog . . .’

That’s fair,’ I said. I didn’t want to get held up any more than she did. ‘I won’t be long, I promise.’ While she busied herself with securing any cargo that
had come loose on the way down, I stepped onto the bank and strolled through the tents to the spires, with the frost crunching underneath my feet. It was exhilarating just to be out of the city and
into what passed for freedom, though I took careful note of my surroundings, in case any excissieres had come with the refugees.

Those who had fled from Caud were varied, that was for sure. I passed a whole coven of acolytes, shivering around a meagre fire, a family with a flock of pinch-faced children, two little girls
who seemed entirely on their own, a woman with a cage full of hens. As I drew near to the spires, they became even stranger: they looked as though the wood they were made of was moving, alive.

I stopped and blinked. No, definitely moving. Intrigued, I walked closer and saw now that the spires were attached to a long carriage, made of metal and what looked like bone, but which was
probably some plasto-substance. It had wheels, small and with thick black tyres, but also a glide barrier, quite a powerful one, suggesting that the carriage had the ability to rise into the air
and fly for short distances.

All of this meant money. There was a general air of opulence about the carriage, which had tinted windows set high on the sides – too high to look out, surely, and that usually meant that
the occupants had camera access on the outside of the vehicle, to watch their surroundings from privacy within. I searched, and there it was, a shining obsidian eye set into the sinuous decoration
that covered the sides of the carriage. I couldn’t tell what this carving was supposed to represent: it looked like a silver spine, the vertebrae coiling and curving about the sides and up
over the roof. That took my gaze up to the towers again and I saw that the thin struts were not moving at all. Something was crawling up them – many things, pallid, slender bodies with
thousands of legs.
Centipedes.
Each one of them was at least as long as my hands, placed fingertip to fingertip.

The excissiere materialized behind me, so suddenly that I didn’t have time to pretend I’d been looking somewhere else.

‘What do you want?’

‘I was interested.’ Tell the truth, why not? I forced my voice to normality. I pointed to the towers, bending under the weight of their unnatural occupants. ‘Those centipedes.
Why are they here?’

The excissiere said, with pride, ‘They have come with their Queen.’

Their Queen?’ Now that I was looking at her more closely, I saw that she was not, in fact, an excissiere – not of the kind I knew, anyway. The scars were there, along her wrists and
inside the high collar that she wore, but her uniform was the same cream as the bodies of the centipedes, and segmented. A close-fitting helmet confined her hair, spined along the top and back. She
had no visible weapons except a trident-prong, wired up for electrical impact. But I could see cleverly concealed slits in the sleeves of her uniform, suggesting that she had weapons modification
underneath.

Now, the excissiere-guard nodded. ‘The Centipede Queen. She travels south, from Caud.’ Her face, all gaunt ridges of bone, contracted in an expression of distaste. ‘Caud. We
were sent to it by your orbital authorities, not to Winterstrike as we wished and planned. They sought to show her as a freak, not a visiting dignitary as we were promised. We were glad to see it
struck, gladder still to leave.’