Free Winterstrike by Liz Williams

were no more than slits high above me, set deep in angled sills. Defensive fortifications, now used for public housing, but the Matriarchy had
made no effort to make them less fortress-like. Wise, under recent circumstances. I passed along the alley and came out onto the banks of a narrow canal: one of the secret waterways of
Winterstrike. A woman was driving a sledge along the silvery ice, invisible beneath a broad-brimmed hat. She did not look up and I, not wishing to be seen for reasons that I did not fully
understand, melted back into the wintry shadows and slipped along the canal, hugging the wall.
    Over a little arched bridge I came into a district smelling strongly of food. Someone was frying batter-cakes in a pan of hot oil and the odour cut through the numbness of the winter air,
comforting and greasy. Apart from the tea, I’d last eaten at breakfast and I was hungry, but I didn’t think I’d be able to keep anything down. Instead, I walked quickly on, down
further alleys and snickets running between the fortress walls, until an insistent, rhythmic banging caught my attention and I realized that I was close to the Temple: someone was beating a gong.
My heart started to beat in time with it and so did the whisper of the geise, though this time I could not understand what it was saying. I felt as though I’d become a seamless whole with the
rest of the world and that world had contracted down to this single hammering pulse. A moment later, I came out into the plaza that led to the crater.
    It looked like the surface of some distant moon, an expanse of stone that was pitted and holed with meteorite strikes. Cracks ran along its length, spreading outward from the crater. They could
have covered it, rendered it anew, but the Matriarchy preferred to remember this single greatest disaster in the city’s history.
    At the far end of the plaza, I could see the Temple of the Changed towering up through the falling snow, its façade mottled to a fleshy pink by winter. The gong had stopped but it seemed
to me that its reverberations continued, striking out the hour across the city and pulling us all in its wake. Beneath my booted feet, the surface of the plaza was icy, the snow that had been
melted by last night’s torchlit procession, to mark the start of Ombre, had pooled and frozen. I had to keep my head down in order to retain my footing and was at the steps of the Temple
almost before I knew it. I looked up. Two pillars marked the entrance, so coiling and curling with entwined figures that it was difficult to distinguish them from one another, but all of them were
representations of the Changed themselves, mythical and real, mainly coyu and aspith, but a few demotheas, cenulae, sultrice, also. Stylized representations of DNA spirals wound amongst them,
celebrating difference.
    They were the last remnants of the Age of Children. They were supposed to be the future of the human race: created by a cult that had originated here in Winterstrike and which held
diversification to be the final product of evolution. Earth had its own peoples: the kappa, the moke, the kajari, and many more. It hadn’t really worked. Genetically unstable, often
physically frail, the majority of the Changed failed to thrive.
    Movement between the pillars attracted my attention. Someone was watching, someone who did not want to be seen any more than I did, but who did not have the skill to remain unobserved. I turned,
pretending that I was heading past the Temple, and slipped along the steps in the snowy shadow of the left-hand pillar. I came up behind the watcher. She was hunched against the stone, clinging to
it as if it could protect her from the cold.
    ‘Hello,’ I breathed. She jumped, and stood shaking. I looked down into a long-muzzled face, the eyes human and sad, the skin covered in a faint fawn down. Her hands were unnatural,
the fingers oddly jointed. If the aspith had been engineered for some particular purpose, I