Banner of Souls - Liz Williams

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fingers gingerly touching, and the result was a flooding anxiety, an adrenaline rush that made her gasp. She closed her eyes, and had a sudden disquieting image of the interior of her mind. Normally as dark, hard, and resolute as metal, her inner self now contained a small hole, pink and tender from recent bleeding. The sensation was as compelling as a stolen tooth.

      The door opened. The doctor’s face was disapproving beneath the high scarlet hat.

      “You should not be on your feet! And who told you that you could get dressed?”

      Dreams-of-War took a single stride across the room and seized the doctor by the throat.

      “What have you done to me? What have you put in my head?”

      “Rather,” the doctor said faintly, scrabbling at the hand around her neck, “you should be asking what it is that we have removed. Now let me go.”

       “Removed?”

      The doctor was gasping. The scalpel blade shot out from beneath her fingernail. Desiring answers, Dreams-of-War let go and experienced a curious and unfamiliar sense of relief.

      “This is what I have done,” the doctor said, massaging her neck. “There is a psychological callus that is grown on the mind of a warrior, that increases day by day after your release from the growing-skin. It is that callus that enables you to act fearlessly, to make your goals your only focus, that permits you to go forth and slaughter your enemies with as little compunction as I feel when I swat a weed bug down from the wall at night. That emotional callus makes you everything that you are, and now it is gone. You will feel as a normal made-human feels. You will feel love, affection, need, and anxiety for a child.”

      “I have no intention of having a child!” Sitting by a growing-skin for months while someone congealed within, followed by years of restriction and worry? No thanks.

      “No, but you will be looking after one. An indifferent guardian is no guardian at all. You have to care. And Memnos is determined to make you care. I do not understand you warrior clans. What is wrong with having emotions?”

      Dreams-of-War stared at her. “Nothing at all. Emotions are a fine and necessary thing—pride, aggression, loyalty . . . As for caring,” she added, bristling, “my duty as a warrior should be enough.”

      “It seems Memnos does not think so.”

      “How much have they told you about this child whom I am to guard?” Dreams-of-War asked.

      “They have told me very little. In all probability,” the doctor added, “as little as they have told you.”

      “And what about me?” Dreams-of-War asked uneasily. “If this—this cork in my psyche permitted me to function as a warrior, to kill without qualm, what will happen now that it is gone?”

      “Since you have just recently embarked upon my throttling,” the doctor said, rubbing a bruised throat, “I wouldn’t worry too much about that.”

      CHAPTER 4

      EARTH

      Tersus Rhee waddled slowly through the chamber, checking with thick fingers the drip-feeds that led to the growing-skins, monitoring the minor changes and alterations that might token an incipient systems failure. They had already lost the previous children. If this one, too, failed, the Grandmothers had told her, then the project might have to be terminated. And that would be a great shame. The Grandmothers had gone to an immense amount of trouble on behalf of the child in the growing-skin. The services of Tersus Rhee herself had been procured. A Martian warrior was now on her way, at no small difficulty and expense, to guard the child.

      Tersus Rhee, for various reasons of her own, did not want the project to be terminated. The Grandmothers had told her little enough about this line of made-humans, this special strain to whose care she so diligently attended. But then, despite her skills, she knew that she was nothing more than the hired help to the Grandmothers, just another kappa, indistinguishable from all the rest of her kind. She did not expect to be told a great deal. She knew only that the child in the bag was known as the hito-bashira, the woman-who-holds-back-the-flood. She had her own suspicions as to what this might mean.

      But speculation had already run rife throughout the clans of the kappa when it was learned that she, Tersus Rhee of Hailstone Shore, was to be sent all the way south to Fragrant Harbor to serve the Grandmothers.

      “How much do you know about the Grandmothers?” the clan leader had asked Rhee.

      “Very little.” Rhee shuffled her wide feet in a supplicatory gesture and spread her webbed hands wide.

      “Unsurprising. No one knows anything of them, it seems—who they are, where they come from. Now, they keep to their mansion of Cloud Terrace, but it is not known how long they have been there. They squat above the city like bats. Then, suddenly, they send word to me, asking for a grower, a carer. An expert.”

      Rhee frowned. “Why are you telling me this? Am I to be that expert?”

      The clan leader gave a slow frog blink. “Just so.”

      “But what about my duties here?”

      “This is more important.” The puffed eyelids drifted shut and tightened. Rhee knew that she would say nothing further.

      “When am I to leave?” Rhee asked in resignation.

      “On the third day of the new moon, when the time is auspicious. Take what you need.”

      And so, with a hired junk waiting in the harbor below, Tersus Rhee had packed her equipment: the box of scalpels, the neurotoxin feeds that, if carefully applied, would alter genetic development to the desired specifications, and a handful of the starter mulch that had now been in her family for seven generations, nurtured and handed down like a precious yeast. For all else, she would be obliged to rely on the Grandmothers of Cloud Terrace, and the thought did not please her.

      The journey south pleased her even less. She would be traveling not as an expert hired by Cloud Terrace, but incognito, as a hired help. This was so commonplace for the kappa as to be unremarked. It was, after all, they who provided most of the world’s drudgery. Rhee traveled in the communal hold of the junk but spent most of the day on deck, watching the peaks of the Fire Islands recede into the distance until they were no bigger than pins against the lowering skies. From then on, the journey was uneventful: only ocean, like so much of Earth, wave after endless rolling wave. Rhee passed her time in the passive, contemplative trance that was the default mode of her people, and made doubly sure that no one noticed her. The kappa spoke little among themselves, anyway, when away from the clan-warrens.

      On the third day out, however, there was excitement during a sudden squall. A commotion at the prow of the junk suggested an unusual occurrence, with all the crew rushing to see. Rhee was sitting under a furled sail, just far enough into the rain to be comfortable. She rose to her feet with difficulty on the slick, plunging deck, and ambled toward the prow. Everyone was shouting and pointing, but Rhee was too short to see what they were all looking at. With placid determination, she shoved her way through and stared.

      Something was rising on the horizon: a huge, curling shell. From this distance, Rhee estimated, the thing must be hundreds of feet high. Coiling, spatulate tentacles drifted out from the main bulk, forming a nimbus against the stormlight. When it once more sank, the rain had passed, leaving a clear sky in its wake.

      “What was that?” Rhee asked a crewmember. The woman, red-clad like all sailors, turned toward the kappa. Her face was wizened with a lifetime of saltspray and wind; she bore the mark of Izanami, creator goddess of ocean, between eyes like black currants.

      Rhee thought she already knew what manner of thing it had been, looming up out of the waters, but she wanted to be sure.

      “Why, it was a Dragon-King,” the crewmember said. She touched the mark between her brows in respect. “Did you see its whips?”

      “I did,” the kappa said.

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