Braided Path 02 - The Skein Of Lament

by Chris Wooding

  ‘I started this all,’ she said. ‘I let Purloch take that lock of my hair. I let him go back to the Weavers with proof I was an Aberrant. If I hadn’t done that . . . Mother might still be alive . . . nobody would be dying . . .’

  Flen clutched her harder, his own troubles forgotten in the need to reassure her. He stroked her hair, his fingers running onto the burned and puckered skin at the nape of her neck, gliding over its nerveless surface.

  ‘It’s not your fault,’ he repeated. ‘You can’t help what you are.’

  ‘What am I?’ she said, drawing back from him. Had it been any other girl, he would have expected tears in her eyes, but her gaze was fey and strange. Did she feel remorse or guilt as other people did? Did it make her truly sad? Or had what he had taken as self-recrimination simply been a statement of fact? So long he had known her, and he would never understand her properly.

  ‘You said it yourself. You’re an avatar.’

  Lucia studied him carefully, and did not reply, which prompted him to explain himself.

  ‘It’s like you told me,’ he said. ‘The gods don’t want Aricarat back, but they won’t interfere directly. So they put people like you here instead. People who can change things. Remember how the Children of the Moons saved your life when the shin-shin were after you? Remember how Tane gave his life up for you, even though he was a priest of Enyu and he was supposed to hate Aberrants?’ He wrung his hands, not sure that he was articulating himself properly. He imagined that Lucia did not like to be reminded of Tane’s sacrifice, though he told himself that she did not always react as he thought she should. ‘He must have known that his goddess wanted you alive, even though you stood against everything he believed in. Because Aricarat is killing the land, and the Weavers serve Aricarat, and even though you’re an Aberrant – because you’re an Aberrant – you’re a threat to the Weavers. Just like the moon-sisters wanted you alive, so you could help fight against their brother.’

  He took her hands earnestly, trying to make her see what seemed so clear to him. ‘If you hadn’t been born the way you are, there’d be no Libera Dramach. There’d have been no Saran, and we’d have never known about Aricarat at all until it was too late. The gods might have been fighting this war ever since the Weavers first appeared, but it’s only now that we know what we’re fighting about.’

  ‘Maybe,’ she conceded. She smiled faintly, but there was no amusement in it. ‘I am no saviour, Flen.’

  ‘I didn’t say you were a saviour,’ he replied. ‘I just said you were put here for a reason. Even if we don’t know what that reason is yet.’

  She seemed about to reply, her lips forming a response for her friend, when her expression changed. She snapped him the curved-finger gesture for quiet, her eyes wide; at the same moment, there was a sigh and a slump from overhead. Flen looked up, then blinked and flinched as something dripped onto his cheek through the gaps in the floorboards. He wiped it automatically from his face, and gave a tiny noise of terror as he saw blood on his fingertips.

  ‘Weavers,’ Lucia whispered.

  There was another slump from above, then several more. The sound of the guards falling. Flen could only imagine how the Weavers had got here, what dreadful arts they had used to slip into the heart of the Fold while the Aberrants pounded at the perimeter. Had they twisted the minds of the soldiers to make their appearance different? Had they been able to walk with impunity through the streets of the Fold, cloaked in illusion? Who knew what the Weavers could really do, what they had practised for centuries in secret, what particles of knowledge their reawakening god had taught them?

  But speculation was useless. They were here now, and here for Lucia.

  ‘Don’t be scared,’ he said to her, though he was far more frightened than she was. They huddled against the wall opposite the stairs, trapped there in the grille of light with hot darkness crowding all around.

  Something was shifted from above the hatch. A rug was rolled back. Concealment was pointless; they knew exactly where she was.

  A rectangle of light opened at the top of the stairs, silhouetting three figures against the blinding brightness of the day. Motes drifted in the sunbeams that pushed past them, but they were ragged heaps of shadow.

  ‘Lucia . . .’ whispered a hoarse voice.

  She got to her feet. Flen got up with her. His attempt at a defiant posture was laughable; he could barely stand for fear.

  The Weavers came down the steps, moving slowly, their arthritic and cancer-ridden bodies making them ungainly and weak. Gradually she saw them as they moved from the dazzle into the gloom: three Masks, one of coloured feathers, one of bark chips, one of beaten gold.

  ‘I am Lucia tu Erinima,’ she said, her voice low and steady. ‘I am the one you have come for.’

  ‘We know,’ said one of the Weavers; it was impossible to tell which. They had reached the bottom of the stairs now. Flen’s eyes flickered around the cellar, probing the darkness as if searching for escape. He was almost sobbing with fright now. Lucia was a statue.

  The feather-Mask Weaver raised one white and sorepocked hand, unfolded a long fingernail towards Lucia.

  ‘Your time is done, Aberrant,’ he whispered.

  But the threat was never carried out. As one, the Weavers shrieked and recoiled, whirling away from Lucia and Flen. The children backed off as the creatures writhed and spasmed, wailing in sudden torment, their limbs seizing spastically. There was a nauseating crack as a Weaver’s arm broke, the bone pushing a lump through his patchwork robe; a moment later, his legs snapped, the knees inverting with appalling violence and sending him screaming to the floor. One of the others was lying on his side and bending backward, pushed as if by some invisible force, howling as his vertebrae clicked, one by one, until finally his spine gave way. The Weavers jerked and twisted as their bones fractured and broke again and again, over and over in hideous torture. Blood seeped from beneath their Masks and they soiled themselves, but still they screeched, still they lived. It was many minutes before it ended, by which time they were not even recognisable as humanoid, merely bloodied, jagged pulps like piles of sticks beneath their mercifully concealing robes and Masks.

  Flen had turned away in horror, crouching in the corner, his hands over his ears; Lucia had watched the scene dispassionately.

  Cailin tu Moritat stepped into the light from the hatchway, her irises a deep crimson in amid her painted face. From their positions of concealment, the other Sisters emerged: ten of them in total, all with the red-and-black triangles on their lips, the red crescents across their eyes and down their cheeks. All wearing variations of the black dress of the Order.

  Cailin looked down on Lucia, her face half-hidden by shadow, limned in the light from outside. Her expression could not be seen.

  ‘You did well, Lucia,’ she said.

  Lucia did not reply.

  The Weavers had walked into a trap, following Lucia’s Weave-signature. Had they known what the late Weave-lord Vyrrch had known, they would have realised that Lucia was usually undetectable, that her power was too subtle to pick up on their trawls across the infinity of golden threads. But with the Sisters’ help, she had made herself visible to them. It was too tempting for them to resist.

  The Sisters were elated now, casting glances at each other in mutual congratulation. Among them, only Cailin had ever faced a Weaver before. Now they were blooded. The instant of conflict that had ended in them taking control of the Weaver’s bodies and cracking their bones like sticks had been a long and arduous struggle in Weave-time. What had seemed less than a second to Flen and Lucia had been an eternity to them. Even though they greatly outnumbered their foes, it had been by no means an easy match. Yet they had won through unhurt, and the shattered corpses at their feet bore testament to their abilities to face these creatures and win.

  Lucia was listening to the harsh and agitated thoughts of the distant ravens. They had been sent away so that their presence would not reveal Lucia’s position or deter the
Weavers, and were going frantic at what might have happened. She had been forced to command them in this instance, something she rarely did. She sent them a wash of reassurance, and their turmoil eased like water taken off the boil.

  ‘You all did well,’ Cailin said, raising her voice to include the Sisters. ‘But this was not your true test. We kept them from alerting their kind; that means we still have the element of surprise, at least for a short time. Let us not waste it. Now the real battle begins!’

  The Sisters murmured in approval and headed up the stairs, through the hatch. They heard running feet overhead, and voices.

  ‘Zaelis and Yugi are here,’ Cailin said. She glanced at Flen, who was still cowering in the corner, the horror of the Weavers’ death too much for him.

  ‘You have my deepest gratitude, Cailin,’ Lucia said, sounding older than her fourteen harvests. ‘You did not have to stay and fight for the Libera Dramach.’

  Cailin shook her head slowly, then bent down to Lucia’s level, which was not so far now. ‘I fight for you, child,’ she said; and with that, she kissed Lucia on the cheek in a gesture of tenderness utterly at odds with her character. Then she straightened and swept up the stairs and away.

  There were a few words exchanged, out of sight, and Yugi and Zaelis appeared, slowing as they descended the steps, aghast at the ruin of the Weavers below them.

  ‘You’re late, Father,’ Lucia said coldly.

  He had no chance to reply to that, for at that moment the mournful howl of the wind-alarms began for the second time that day. The breath he had drawn to respond was exhaled as an oath.

  The wall had been breached. The Aberrants were inside the Fold.

  THIRTY-THREE

  Kaiku and Tsata had been lost for hours by the time they came across the worm-farm.

  The mine beneath the flood plain was bigger than they had imagined, a maze of tunnels and caverns running off the vast central shaft that looped and split and joined with no rhyme or reason in its structure. Some parts were entirely abandoned, or appeared to have never been inhabited or used at all; other parts were cluttered with stores and tools and all manner of mining equipment, yet they were nowhere near anything that was being mined. They had stolen explosives from these stockpiles, of which there were plenty, piled dangerously high and kept without care, left to sweat volatile chemicals. They had expected to find explosives eventually – indeed, they had relied on it, for it was the only way they had to destroy a witchstone as far as they knew – but not in this state. It would only take a spark in one of those rooms to bring half the mine down. Kaiku did not want to think about that happening while they were inside. They gingerly wrapped what they needed in rags and stowed it in a sack which Tsata carried.

  They saw golneri from time to time, but the diminutive folk always ignored them and went about whatever business they had. They found several dead ones as well, horribly mutilated, victims of the Weavers’ appetites. Other evidence of the Weavers appeared as they descended further and further into the groaning, steaming darkness of the mine. There were strange sculptures chiselled out of the rock, depictions of some inner madness that Kaiku could not guess at. Tunnels were scrawled with pictograms in all kinds of languages and some that appeared to be entirely made up, swirls of gibberish in which sometimes a horrible moment of sense could be made out, hinting at dark and twisted musings. One particularly disturbing cave was hung with dozens of female golneri, swinging by their ankles from a system of pulleys and ropes and eyelets, their throats cut and blood staining the ground below in a flaky brown patina. Kaiku found herself thinking that not only were the golneri forced to see this slaughter every time they passed through the cavern, but that it must have been them who assembled the complex system of ropes in the first place. Like making prisoners tie their own nooses. She wondered what the golneri had once been, and how their pride had been so destroyed that they could suffer atrocities like this and apparently not care.

  They had come across a Weaver not long afterward.

  Kaiku sensed him before they saw him. He was Weaving, though not in any structured way that she could recognise. Instead, his consciousness was streaming like a flag tied to a railing, anchored at one end while the other was tattering and rippling in the flow of the Weave. Later, they heard him mumbling and shrieking, a thin, reedy sound that floated down the tunnels to their ears. Though Kaiku was not sure there was any need, they backtracked to avoid him. She had seen that kind of Weaver at the Lakmar monastery. Their minds had been lost, eroded by their Masks, and they spent their time wandering, their thoughts flapping free in the bliss of the Weave, tethered by one last cruel thread of sanity to their bodies.

  Kaiku was sure it was daylight outside, but they were far underground now, and there was no way to tell. As they descended, they found more mysteries. Great chambers of fuming contraptions that clanked and pistoned. Massive black furnaces that filled the caverns with red light. Golneri scuttled to and fro, feeding the flames with coal, their faces grimed and streaked with sweat. The noise was deafening, abhorrent, and made Tsata and Kaiku cover their ears and flee. They passed immense paternosters leading up into the darkness, splashing water as it tipped over the edge of the bucket-scoops and fell endlessly into the abyss below. The inflammable-gas torches rumbled menacingly at them from the walls of the larger caverns, or from metal posts, belching gouts of smoky flame from their tips. Occasionally they came across mining operations, where golneri stood on metal scaffolds, chipping and chiselling. Chains rattled and pulleys shrieked as the loads were moved around the scaffolding, lowered to the ground or dumped slithering down chutes. Coal to feed the furnaces. But what were the furnaces for?

  Kaiku had wondered why a place so massive should be so empty, but then she reasoned that this place was not a monastery or a stronghold. The Weavers only wanted one thing out of this mine: the witchstone. And that was buried deep, deep under the earth. There were simply not enough uses for all the multitude of caverns and miles of natural tunnels in between. They needed to stockpile the vast amounts of food required to supply their standing army, to house the golneri and the Weavers and the Nexuses, to mine the fuel for the furnaces and to accommodate all the machinery and contraptions; but even that only accounted for a fraction of the total size of the subterranean network. And on top of that, the place appeared to have been virtually deserted when the army headed off north and east.

  But there was one thing she had not accounted for: where had the nexus-worms come from? She found her answer in the worm-farm.

  They came into the cavern on a shadowed metal gallery, little more than a rusting walkway bolted against one wall to form a bridge between two apertures in the stone. The roof of the cavern was low and wide. Illumination came from gas-torch poles linked by strange metal ropelike things that snaked between them. The intruders hunkered down and looked upon the scene below them, the curve of their cheeks and the lines of their forearms and knees lit a soft amber.

  The cavern was carpeted in squirming black, a constant and nauseating movement accompanied by a sound like the wringing of wet and soapy hands. Nexus-worms: uncountable thousands of them. Raised earthen banks cut through the mass with a typically Weaver-esque lack of order or pattern, and along these travelled dozens of golneri, who occasionally plunged into the crush of slimy bodies to sow some kind of powdery food among the worms, or throw buckets of water across them. But the golneri were not the only ones who walked along the banks; there were Nexuses there too, accompanied by loping shrillings, who trilled and warbled softly as they followed their masters at heel like dogs. The flaming poles cast flickering glints on the moist backs of the worms, thousands of reflected crescents like an oily sea at sunset.

  ‘Gods . . .’ Kaiku breathed, mesmerised.

  As they stared, it became apparent that there were not only nexus-worms in amid the crush. From their observations of the Aberrants they had killed, Tsata and Kaiku had determined that the worms were smooth and almost featureless, except for a
round, toothless mouth for ingestion – fringed with little bumps – and an opening for excretion at the other end. The creatures secreted some kind of acid spittle which allowed them to burrow into the skin of their victims, where they affixed themselves with hundreds of hair-thin filaments extruded from the bumps around the mouth. Tsata had discovered that when he tried to pull a dead one free from its host and found it inextricably attached by a thick mass of these fine threads. Saramyr lore was nowhere near advanced enough to understand what they did next; but the result was obvious enough. They subverted the host’s will to their own, which was in turn under the command of something else – the Nexuses.

  Yet now they saw other types of creature. There were several flat, narrow things with short tails. Tiny tendrils waved in the air above them like a cloud, occasionally descending to stroke the worms that clustered around them. They were about the length and width of a man’s forearm, and the worms behaved as piglets to a sow, writhing over one another in an attempt to get close.

  There was a third type, too, much bigger than the other two: sluglike creatures, two or three feet high, with blotchy stripes of venomous orange against the glittering black. These things appeared to be little more than enormous rubbery maws surrounded by a sphincter of muscle, so that they resembled bags with drawstring necks. Some were obesely large while others looked starved and withered. Tsata spotted the flat, narrow creatures oozing into and out of the mouths of the fat ones, though never the thinner variety. They went right inside, deep into whatever passed for its innards, and were later vomited out on a slick of steaming bile. Kaiku witnessed another phenomenon too: one of the thinnest of the sluglike things belched out a thrashing heap of minuscule worms, like black maggots, which immediately began to squirm around in their own fluids and then headed off in search of the powdery food the golneri were sowing.

  They spent some time on that walkway in the shadows, observing, before Tsata spoke quietly.