"Liz Williams - Banner of Souls" - читать интересную книгу автора (Williams Liz)

"I see no one," Dreams-of-War said.
"Yet someone is here," the armor insisted.
And now Dreams-of-War could, indeed, feel some-thing: an irritation over her guarded skin, like an
insect crawl. She flinched within the protective carapace.
"Look," the armor said.
They were rising out of the ground, formed from dust and solidifying soil, then sharp-edged and real.
There were perhaps twenty or so: women with long horns and backward-slanting legs, but they stood
vertically. Their eyes were red, with narrow pupils that burned goldтАФa flame within coals. They gazed at
Dreams-of-War with a kind of placid curiosity, despite their demon eyes, switch-ing long tapering tails.
Dreams-of-War stood in frozen shock. They were more than illusion. She could smell them: the scent
of long-dead grasslands, woodsmoke, and blood. They smelled like prey. And as if they had seen the
thought in her eyes, the herd turned as one and began to run, loping swiftly along the slope until they were
swallowed by the gathering twilight. Their small hooves made no sound. They moved in silence, and then
were gone.
Dreams-of-War stared after them, feeling foolish. She should at least have made an attempt to
capture one of them.
She said aloud, "There have not been such beings on Mars since ancient times. I have seen the
records. They roamed the Crater Plain. No one knows who created them, what laboratory, or why."
"They were long dead by my day," the armorтАФitself a hundred years oldтАФremarked with a trace of
wistfulness.
"Thousand-year-old ghosts," Dreams-of-War mused. "But why have they appeared now? I suppose
Memnos must be told. We should go back." She spoke with reluc-tance. She disliked setting out on a
hunt and returning empty-handed, and this would be her last opportunity. Soon she would be headed for
Earth, which now shone above her in the heavens, blue as an eye. The maw of the Chain was also visible:
a faint glitter high above the surface of the world. She thought of hurtling into the maw, emerg-ing above
that blue starтАж More alien tech. Dreams-of-War's lip began to curl.
The prospect of that journey, however, was super-seded by the thought of the men-remnants waiting
in the rocks. It irritated Dreams-of-War. She could feel it in the armor, too: a wildness, a need for killing,
for flesh and death. She had spotted no real prey all day, only the ghosts and the small creatures of the
plain, and she had thought that the night would provide her with a chance. The vulpen, at least, slunk out
of their holes after dusk, in search of the dactylate birds that were their staple diet.
With a sigh, Dreams-of-War repressed the impulse to continue. She set off back down the long
stone-strewn slope to the plain, to where the Memnos Tower was waiting.
CHAPTER 2
Nightshade
Yskatarina Iye was named for the sounds she made on her emergence from the growing-skinтАФfirst a
hiss and then a cry. A daughter of the lab clans, grown in Tower Cold, on the world of Nightshade at the
Chain's end and the system's edge, a very long way from the sun.
The nameтАФher child-name, not the appellation of her Nightshade clanтАФproved difficult to dislodge
and Yskatarina retained it into adulthood, along with the Animus that grew beside her from a hatchling no
bigger than a dragon-fly. The Animus, spawned from the ancient genetic lineage of the clan just as
Yskatarina herself had been, possessed no name. Yskatarina tried various permutations, yet none
seemed to fit.
Her aunt Elaki told her from an early age how fortu-nate she was to have an Animus: how women on
other worlds could not be bonded with a male, for there were so few remaining, and those were inferior.
She was lucky, Yskatarina knew, that the Elders of Nightshade still sought to return to the old ways,
when men and women walked the worlds together, when both genders lived in harmony, each seeking
their other self. And the Animus was not a human male, for they had proved too weak, but some-thing
better.
Her Animus whispered to Yskatarina as she slept, throughout the long illnesses that marked her