Winterstrike (6 page)

Shurr instinctively bowed her head. ‘Of course. She would be.’

‘But there are problems.’

Shurr repressed a smile.
Of course. There would be.

‘What kind of problems?’

‘The girl in question has gone missing. She was mistreated by her family, imprisoned, has disappeared.’

‘Well, then,’ Shurr said. ‘All the more reason for us to rescue her.’

FOUR

Locked once more behind the cell door in the Mote of Caud, I started to hallucinate. I don’t know, now, whether this was a belated result of the haunt-torture or simply
fatigue. I say ‘hallucinate’, but I didn’t see anything that I’d never seen before. The visions that came to me were more like flashbacks, images of childhood from an
adult’s point of view. I didn’t seem to have any control over them, only a distant capacity to reflect. It was distracting, at least, but I could have done without it. I wanted to focus
on getting out of there, not indulge in warmly fuzzy memories.

They weren’t particularly nostalgic ones, however. One moment I was lying on the filthy floor of the cell, and the next I was standing on the sloping lawn that led down to the bank of
Canal-the-Less. It was evening, golden with summer, and the blossoms of the weedwood trees periodically exploded in the heat, sending showers of glistening pollen streamers down into the garden,
dappling the immaculate grass. At the bottom of the slope, the water of the canal, too, was gilded: it looked solid enough to walk upon, a shining molten glaze. I knew what I’d see if I
turned around and sure enough, there it was: the weedwood mansion, the home of my cousins. Calmaretto.

As I stared at this familiar sight, three figures came out onto the veranda. In winter, which was most of the year, the veranda was enclosed behind thick glass panels, etched with seasonal
scenes, but now the panels had been thrown open to let some air into the house, so that the steps that led down to the garden were visible behind the lacing of foliage and so were the people who
stood upon them. The adult was my aunt, Alleghetta Harn, and the two smaller figures were Essegui and Leretui, my cousins. Esse was the taller of the two, already rangy in her traditional
black-and-bone, a ceremonialist’s colours. But Tui was a delicate little thing, held in family lore to be of a weak constitution. My own mother, Alleghetta’s sister, maintained that
this was a myth and that Leretui malingered, in order to get out of her lessons. I have no idea whether this was true. Mother didn’t consider you to be ill unless you were actually on the
verge of death, and sometimes not even then.

Essegui waved. I waved back and she broke away from Alleghetta’s restraining hand – for all that she was being groomed for ceremonial duties, my aunt thought that Esse was unseemly
– and ran down the steps to the lawn.

‘Hestia! Where have you been? We’ve been looking for you.’ A glance over her shoulder. ‘Mother wanted you at tea.’

‘I couldn’t face it,’ I hissed.

Essegui pulled a face. ‘Don’t blame you. It was just as you’d expect. Lots of stuffy old Matriarchs and Tui and I having to serve cake and not eat any of it. Then the baby
started howling. Alleghetta slapped the nursemaid, in front of everyone.’ Essegui’s grey eyes were sparkling wide; she looked delighted, and a bit guilty.

‘Oh dear,’ I said.

Well,
did
you do it?
Did
you take the boat out?’

I longed to say
Yes;
I wanted to impress Essegui, who was a year younger than I. But instead I told her the truth.

‘No. I thought someone might see me. Maybe later, when the weedwood grows to cover the water – it’ll only be another week or so before they’re in full leaf. I went to the
winter garden instead.’ I hid. But I didn’t have to tell Essegui that.

‘Hestia! Where have you been, wicked child?’

‘Sorry, Aunty.’ Alleghetta was angry – she would have loved to have Sulie Mar’s daughter serve tea in her own drawing chamber, and that was largely why I’d hidden
from the tea party – but there were limits to how much annoyance she could express: Mother’s position in the Matriarchy saw to that. I think, if I had been the child of a lesser person,
Alleghetta would not have permitted her daughters to associate with me: not after I’d shown what I could do. Soul-stealing is a majike ability, not appropriate for a Matriarch’s child.
But my mother was who she was, and so Alleghetta swallowed whatever distaste she might have felt. Now, she contented herself with a sour scowl instead and told us all to go and play.

Essegui and I, drawn by a single thought, wandered down to the canal bank, followed by Leretui a few steps behind. Tui always was a dreamy child, the sort of kid who won’t tell you what
she’s thinking, but just shakes her head instead and looks down at the ground, scuffs her feet. Essegui and I left her alone, for the most part, but she trailed after us anyway, as if
compromising between her own company and that of other children. From this now-perspective, I could see the first faint seeds that had led to her becoming shorn of her name, but as a girl, I
thought nothing of her relative muteness. We were all different, after all.

Essegui squinted up into the mirror of the afternoon sky. ‘We
could take
the boat, you know.’ We’d had this conversation before, and would have it again. Together, she
and I ducked underneath the fronds of weedwood, staining our hair with bright strands of pollen so that we were tiger-coloured, and stared down the Curve.

This was the richest quarter of Winterstrike and at that time I’d barely known anything else: sheltered children, my cousins and I, carefully nurtured and with the prospect of suitable
marriages and ceremonial duties and respectable civil service careers lying ahead of us. That afternoon, I did not have any inkling that either my own life or Essegui’s – or, spirits
knew,
Leretui's
– would take the same form as Canal-the-Less: a straight shining line and then, suddenly, unexpectedly, the long sweep of the Curve, throwing us all off the track of
our lives like a skater hurled too swiftly past a turn.

But then the windows of the mansions caught the sun, reflecting it back across the water, and the canal, too, shone. A small boat, a taxi-gondola, glided up the bend of the Curve and broke the
water into a thousand sparkling shards. All the world was lost in light. Behind the towering peaks and gables of the mansions, I could see the mountains, a distant shadow, with Olympus’s
improbable cone seeming as high as the stars.

Then, as Essegui and I were gazing longingly at the boat belonging to Calmaretto – a long thing with a curling moon-bow prow and sleek lacquered sides – Leretui cried out. I
didn’t realize at first what it was: I thought a bird had made some sound from the trees. Essegui and I turned just in time to see Leretui fall, crumpling in slow motion to the emerald
grass.

Tui!’ Essegui shouted. She scrambled up the slope to her sister’s fallen form and I was close behind. Now, in the Mote in Caud, I felt a sense of wonder at the memory: had this
really happened, or was I inventing it, some weird response to the haunt-torment? I didn’t recall this – but even as the thought came to me, something stirred at the back of my mind and
I thought: yes, this was real. But Leretui had fainted before, and afterwards, too – I remembered a dance at which she’d passed out, blaming the heat or too much Tharsis wine, an
occasion at a picnic in the Great Park. And, yes, this had been the first of those fainting fits, I remembered it properly now.

We reached Tui and Essegui dropped to her knees beside her sister. ‘Tui, wake up!’

Leretui’s head lolled and her eyes rolled upward in her head, flashing the whites. She was whispering.

‘What’s she saying? Is she ill?’ Essegui wailed.

‘I don’t
know,’
I snapped. ‘Get me some water.’

Essegui ran up to the garden tap and filled the bowl that was kept beneath it. When she brought it back, we slopped it as carefully as we could over Leretui’s white face. The whispering
was still going on, a murmured litany that I could not grasp. Then she said, quite clearly, ‘We can help you.’ I looked down into her face and her eyes went quite dark, bloomed over
with a glaze of light. Leretui blinked.

‘What—?’ she started to say.

‘You fainted.’ Anxiety made Essegui brusque. ‘Are you all right?’

Leretui frowned. ‘I could
hear
someone.’

‘You’re imagining things.’

‘Sometimes people who faint hear ghosts,’ I said. I’ve no idea where I’d got this notion from, only that I believed it in that unreflective way that you do when
you’re young – possibly it was something I’d overheard from my mother’s servants.

Essegui stared at me. ‘Nonsense,’ she said. ‘Why should she hear ghosts?’

They’re all around,’ I faltered.

‘No, they’re not. They’re in the locks and the machines and the clocks. That’s not “all around”.’

‘It wasn’t a ghost,’ Tui said. Her eyes were shocked and wide. ‘I don’t know what it was.’

You’d better come inside and sit down,’ Essegui told her, with a warning glance at me that said,
Don't encourage her.

We didn’t tell Alleghetta, or my aunt Thea – marginally more sympathetic, but only marginally. I think Essegui and I sensed, without discussing it, that we would be blamed for
Leretui’s collapse. Neither mother was renowned for being fair, so we kept silent, and Tui said nothing, either. Maybe the ‘malingering’ charge had hit home.

I watched her closely, all the same, and I knew that Essegui did, too. I was to stay at Calmaretto that night, despite my mild disgrace for failing to appear at tea, and we were taken to a
performance of a play, one of the first acknowledgements that Essegui and I, at least, were growing up. But Leretui was allowed to come as well and I wondered, now in the Mote, whether this,
combined with her uncertain mood that day, had influenced what was to come: conjured the chancy, dangerous future to her, reeling it in like a fish hooked through the lip.

Impossible to say. I watched now, from the distant viewpoint of my prison, as those long-ago events unscrolled across the screen of my mind’s eye. I saw us come down the steps of the
mansion: it was fully dark now, and the torches flared and sputtered in their holsters all along the front of Calmaretto, sending fractured reflections of fire over the waters of Canal-the-Less. As
daughters of the Matriarchy, we were not allowed to make our way on foot through the streets to the theatre like vulgar people, although Essegui and I, at least, would have preferred to do so,
perhaps Leretui too. Instead we were ushered into a waiting carriage by Alleghetta. I saw her sweep her skirts around her, revealing her long buttoned boots with their ancestral buckles, swishing
into the carriage in a froth of red lace like foam from a bloody sea. Disorientingly, I caught a glimpse of my own face peering out of the carriage window, and then I was back inside its stuffy
velvet confines as we came onto the street that paralleled the Curve.

‘I trust you’ll enjoy the play,’ my aunt said to me. It sounded more like a threat than a wish. ‘It’s supposed to be rather good – by Benaise, you
know.’

I had no idea who this was. Alleghetta had always had literary pretensions, which she presented with a belligerent air, as if defying one to disagree with her. I mumbled something. Beside me,
Essegui fidgeted as she stared out of the window, and Leretui looked simply unhappy.

‘Does your mother attend the theatre very often?’ This was embarrassing, for a number of reasons. Mother had no patience with the arts, and in any case Alleghetta, as her own sister,
should not have had to ask me.

‘No,’ I said, and Alleghetta looked faintly triumphant, as if she’d scored a point. ‘She’s too busy with her official duties,’ I said, unable to resist
temptation, and Alleghetta’s expression soured.

‘I suppose she finds it fulfilling,’ she said, dubiously. Alleghetta would have loved to have that much power. I did not say what – even at that young age – I thought,
which was that my mother’s power had come with a very high price, and crippled her within. I did not want to give my aunt the satisfaction. Instead, I muttered, echoing, ‘I suppose
so.’

‘Look,’ Essegui said suddenly. I think she was trying to rescue me from her mother’s interrogation. ‘Who are
they?
She pointed out of the window. I looked past her
shoulder and saw that we were away from the Curve now and passing the sombre bulk of the official buildings that lined the Great Canal. The water doors had their own magnificence, but these
façades, technically the back entrances, were opulently pillared and carved, made of obsidian and Plains red marble: the black bones and red blood of the city. Now, through the window of the
carriage, I could see that there were people milling about in front of the columns, dressed in flimsy lace that made them look as insubstantial as spirits. They had spidery hands and their heads
were an intricate mass of coils and cones, like many tiny fossils. Their long faces narrowed into muzzles and I saw the glint of their slanted, oval eyes.

‘Demotheas!’ Leretui breathed.

‘Don’t be ridiculous!’ her mother snapped. ‘They are in costume, you silly girl.’

‘Why?’ Essegui asked, casually, as if to defuse the sting of Alleghetta’s words. ‘It’s not Ombre.’

Alleghetta gave an exasperated sigh. ‘Of course not. There are festivals other than Ombre; it is simply that you have not been old enough to attend them. This is one of them, although it
is not widely observed, I must admit.’

‘What’s it called?’ Essegui asked.

‘Phantome. It is supposed to honour the ancient non-human dead.’

Essegui frowned, watching the procession of demotheas form a slow, vague order. ‘I thought demotheas were supposed to be a myth, nothing more?’

There is
some
evidence that they actually existed,’ Alleghetta said grudgingly, ‘although it isn’t certain. Our ancestors created so many things, here in this very city.
Some lived and were real – coyu, aspiths – some did not. Gaezelles, for instance, died out long ago, but were revived in the labs after the fall of the Memnos Matriarchy.’ Her
tone became didactic.