Braided Path 02 - The Skein Of Lament

by Chris Wooding

  She flailed and screamed soundlessly, fighting to be free, as the Weaver threaded past the last of the obstacles she had laid and sent awful tendrils into her body, into her flesh.

  Then the fibres of the Weave flexed mightily, a tsunami smashing through them, a wordless, idiot cry that swept both Kaiku and the Weaver up in a riptide and left them spinning in the eddies of its aftermath. Kaiku felt the Weaver’s tendrils snapping away from her as she was torn free of her cocoon, all defences blasted aside by the force of the disturbance. She was dizzied and uncomprehending, waiting for her instincts to translate the blare that had stunned them.

  The witchstone. The witchstone!

  It was in distress.

  The Weaver was paralysed, battered by the force of the cry and simultaneously drawn to it. His priority was, and ever had been, the welfare of the witchstone in his keeping. It was more than simply a task, it was the very purpose of his being. He did not understand the source of the compulsion that drove him, did not know the source of the group-mind that directed the Weavers. He did not know that what he guarded was not only the fount of the Weavers’ power, but also a fragment of the moon-god Aricarat. At the witchstone’s cry he was like a mother whose child is threatened, and nothing else but saving it mattered. Not even defending himself.

  He did not even realise Kaiku was attacking him until she had burst through the tatter of his barricades and into his core. She was a spiralling needle that tracked along the diorama of the Weave, blooming inside him, anchoring herself until she had the kind of grip she needed.

  Even from the start, she had always been able to use her power for one basic purpose: to destroy. She rent the Weaver apart.

  Her vision flicked back to reality in time to see the cowled figure explode in a shower of flaming bone and blood on the walkway, burning shreds of robe and Mask and skin sailing through the air to fall hissing into the dark water of the lake. A terrible weakness drenched her, and she was pulled to her hands and knees by its weight, her sodden hair falling across her face, her back rising and falling with heaving breaths. Something felt broken inside her, some remnant damage that the Weaver had managed to cause. The violation of his touch made her vomit, spattering the meagre contents of her stomach across the slick rock between her hands. Dimly, she was aware of the roar of the plunging waterfalls, the echoing moans and howls of the Edgefathers, the clatter of boots on metal as golneri tried to escape up the shaft.

  Then it came to her, a thought that rang with triumph and disbelief equally. She had faced a Weaver, and she had won.

  But the moment of joy was fleeting. She had drained herself in doing so, overextended her power in the way she used to do before Cailin had taught her moderation. Her kana was all but burned out, and her body with it; she was pathetically vulnerable now, and still in the direst danger. She could barely raise her head to gaze at the central island where the witchstone lay, at the foul thing that had unwittingly saved her life.

  It was crawling with Edgefathers, chipping at it with rocks and tools and scraping with bare claws. They had snapped teeth and nails on its surface, and bloodied fists and maws bore testament to the insane fury of their assault. The damage they were doing was far greater to themselves than to the witchstone, which was suffering only negligibly under their attacks. She could still sense its wail, resonating across the Weave, carrying over unguessable distance to summon aid. If there were any Weavers left here, they would be rushing to the chamber even now; and Kaiku could not withstand another one.

  Then she found Tsata. The Tkiurathi was crouched at the base of the witchstone, jamming explosives beneath it and tamping them with mud from below the waterline. The Edgefathers appeared to be ignoring him, and for his part he seemed focused on nothing else. Had he even noticed the struggle she had been through to save his life? Kaiku felt a surge of resentment at that, and she rode it to her feet, using it as a crutch to overcome the tiredness that had settled upon her.

  Somewhere above, Edgefathers and shrillings and Nexuses were fighting on the network of walkways. She was too exhausted to think about anything but stumbling across the bridge towards the central island, towards Tsata. The scoops rotated and the pipes sucked and the furnaces steamed and hissed and rumbled, heedless of her plight, endless in their purpose. The witchstone seethed its foul light, and the very air seemed to crawl as she approached; her stomach shrivelled and began to churn. She staggered to her companion’s side, trusting that the Edgefathers would not hinder her, and knelt heavily down next to him. His pallor was even more jaundiced than usual; it was plain that the vile proximity of the witchstone was affecting him too. He spared her a sideways look, then returned to his task.

  She knew his ways by now. The most important thing for them all was to destroy the witchstone. That made everything else secondary for Tsata. But spirits, did he even realise what she had just done? A word of congratulation, of thanks, even of relief at seeing her . . . that would have been all that was needed. But he was too focused, too rigid in his priorities.

  ‘The fuses are wet,’ he said, as the last of the explosives were put into place. ‘They will not light.’

  Kaiku took a moment to process that, and a further moment for the implication to hit her. What anger she had felt at his uncaring demeanour was swept aside under the force of a new emotion.

  ‘No, Tsata,’ she said, aghast. She knew what he was thinking. She knew what a Tkiurathi would do.

  ‘You have to go,’ he said, looking over at her. ‘I will stay, and make certain the explosives work.’

  ‘You mean you will stay and die here!’ she cried.

  ‘There is no other way,’ Tsata said.

  She clutched him by the shoulders, hard, and turned him towards her. His orange-blond hair lay in wet spikes across his forehead, his tattooed face strangely calm. Of course he was calm, she thought, infuriated. All his choices had been made for him. That same gods-cursed philosophy of self-lessness that had helped to save her life meant that he was going to throw away his, because it was for the greater good.

  ‘I will not let you die this way,’ she hissed at him. ‘A man was killed five years ago because he followed me into something he should not have been involved in, and I still bear his death on my conscience. I will not have yours too!’

  ‘You cannot prevent me, Kaiku,’ he said. ‘It is simple. If I go, we cannot destroy the witchstone, and all this is for nothing. This is not about us. It is about the millions of people in Saramyr. We have the chance to strike a blow, and my life means nothing compared to those it might save.’

  ‘It means something to me!’ she cried, and almost instantly regretted it. But it was said, and could not be unsaid.

  She fell silent immediately. Something in her wanted to go on, to explain what she felt welling up in her, that in this man she saw a person she could trust utterly, one who was incapable of betraying her as Asara had, someone whom she did not need to fear laying herself bare to. But the healing of her heart after so many wounds was not to be completed in a moment, and as much as she knew that she could not stand the pain of letting him sacrifice himself like this, she knew also that she dared not let herself say it.

  He regarded her tenderly. ‘There is no time,’ he said, and there was something like regret in his voice. ‘Go!’

  ‘I cannot go!’ she said, swallowing bile as her stomach reacted to the emanations of the witchstone. ‘I am too weak. I need you to help me.’

  A flicker of doubt crossed Tsata’s pale eyes, then disappeared as resolve firmed them. ‘Then you must stay too.’

  ‘No!’ she shrieked. ‘Spirits, this selflessness you hold so dear sickens me sometimes! I will not sacrifice myself for this, and you will not make that choice for me! You are the only one who can carry the message of the danger the Weavers pose back to your people; they will not believe a Saramyr. To kill yourself here is selfish! You are thinking of my pash, and not of your own, not of your people! If they are not told of this, they will be next afte
r Saramyr falls, and you are the only person alive who can warn them! We do not know what destroying this witchstone will do, but we do know what the Weavers will do to your land when they get there, and if the Tkiurathi are unprepared then they will all die! The world is not so black and white, Tsata. There are many ways to do what you think is right.’

  Tsata’s expression showed that he was wavering, but when he spoke it brought tears of exhausted frustration to her eyes.

  ‘I have to stay,’ he insisted. ‘The fuses are wet.’

  ‘I can do it!’ she screamed at him. ‘I am a gods-damned Aberrant! I can ignite them from a distance.’

  Tsata searched her eyes, probing her. He was wise enough to know that she would say anything to get him away from there.

  ‘Can you?’

  ‘Yes!’ she replied instantly. But could she? She had no idea. She did not know the range of her abilities, nor if there was enough kana left inside her. She had never tried anything like it before, and she was at the lowest ebb of her power. But she gazed into his eyes, and she lied to him.

  I will not lose you. Not like Tane.

  ‘Then we must go,’ Tsata said, springing to his feet and pulling Kaiku up with him. She gasped in both relief and pain – whatever the Weaver had done to her twinged at the movement – and allowed herself to be propelled across to the water and then into it. She had barely the strength to swim, but Tsata supported her with one arm, striking out with the other. She let him take her, not caring where they were going, only that they were getting out, that he had believed her. Whether she could do what she had promised or not was another matter, but she did not allow herself to worry about that now. She clung to him, and he held on to her.

  The sounds of the shrillings were all about as they fought with the rampant Edgefathers across the walkways. Some were almost at the central island now. The roaring of machinery filled her ears, getting louder, and she looked up and saw Tsata’s reckless plan.

  Several metres ahead of them, the massive water-scoops were rising out of the lake, heading upward into the darkness of the shaft. Tsata was swimming right towards them.

  ‘Do not be afraid,’ he murmured, seeing her expression; and then one of the scoops passed right in front of them and up and away, and with a few sturdy strokes Tsata pulled them into the patch of water it had just vacated.

  Kaiku went limp. She trusted him. There was nothing left to do.

  She felt a dip, then something collided with her ankles from beneath, tipping her into the great metal cradle that rose around her. She was submerged and flailed for an instant, banging her hand on something hard, and then righted herself and burst free. They were ascending, the lake falling away beneath them, splashes of water slopping over the lip of the scoop to plunge back to their source. Already, other scoops were following them upward. The awful sinking feeling of being lifted made Kaiku want to panic, but she felt too precarious to dare, and instead she froze.

  They were rising past the webwork of walkways, past Edgefathers fighting with predators, past bellowing constructions and glowing furnaces and enormous cogs rotating. A Nexus fell silently from above to smash into a railing, thence to pitch broken-backed into the lake. A shrilling was savaging a golneri, the creature gone wild after the death of its handler. All was chaos, and nobody noticed the scoop and its passengers heading toward the abyss overhead and the beckoning clouds of distant flame from the gas-torches.

  She felt Tsata next to her, his steadying hand on her shoulder.

  ‘Now, Kaiku,’ he said.

  She closed her eyes, searching inside herself for what energy she had left. She would only need a spark, only that. She racked her burning body, eking out reserves, gathering her kana.

  Just this time, she pleaded, and she realised that it was Ocha she was addressing, Emperor of the Gods, to whom she had sworn the oath that had put her on this road in the first place. I just need a little help.

  And there it was. She found it, felt it burning in her womb and belly, and she forced it up into her chest and free from her body, a meagre glimmer of energy that seared her on its way out. Her eyes flew open and she drew a shuddering breath, and the world was once again the Weave. She saw the convection of the threads in the lake, the swirl of golden, fibrous blood on the walkways, the curling clouds of steam from the machines. She picked a thread and followed it, down into the lake and then along, and there she found the witchstone.

  It was a black, seething knot, a heart of corruption so terrible that she could not bear to look on it. It seemed to writhe in restless anger, and its wail of distress cut across the Weave like a hurricane. And it was alive, malevolently alive, its hate radiating out from it, the rage of a crippled god.

  But it was powerless to stop her. A last swell of courage sent her onward, finding the mud packed at the witchstone’s base, passing through it into the tightly sealed bars of explosive. The threads were coiled and deadly within, throbbing with potential energy.

  She found her spark, and threw it.

  THIRTY-SIX

  The battle in the Fold had been carried into the sky. The ravens had launched from the rooftops, from distant trees, from rookeries among the stony nooks to the east, rising in a cloud as thick as the smoke that billowed from the valley. In their small animal thoughts Lucia’s call was like a clarion. She regarded them as her friends, and until now she would have done nothing to risk them; but matters had changed, and now she called on her avian guardians and sent them with a single, simple command: kill the gristle-crows.

  Black shapes wheeled and shrieked in the ash-darkened afternoon, harrying the much larger and stronger Aberrant birds. The ravens were legion, outnumbering the Aberrants by many times. The gristle-crows slashed and snapped, banking and swooping on their ragged wings; but the ravens were more agile, and they dodged near and raked with talons or beaks before darting away again, reddened with their enemy’s blood. Gory clots of feathers plunged through the air to smash onto the uneven rooftops of the town; and for every three of the ravens went a gristle-crow, falling stunned from the air with a bone-splintering impact as it hit.

  Cailin tu Moritat was peripherally aware of the conflict going on over her head, but her attention was taken up by the greater conflict in the Weave. She stood on the edge of one of the higher tiers, flanked by two of her Sisters and guarded by twenty men who watched anxiously for predators. Below them, the ledges and plateaux of the town cluttered down towards the barricade and the horde beyond, who were senselessly throwing themselves at the eastern fortifications while the fire-cannons and riflemen destroyed them in their hundreds. Smoke rendered the vista in shades of obscurity, occasionally allowing a glimpse of the streets, where more and more Aberrants ran. The western wall was failing, and the creatures leaked in steadily to prey on those women and children who had not yet found sanctuary in the caves.

  The battle in the sky found its mirror in the Weave. The Sisters swooped and struck like comets, evading the Weavers’ more cumbersome attempts to strike back. They spun nets of knots, working in co-operation with an ease and fluidity that their male counterparts could not hope to match. The Sisters outnumbered the Weavers now, and the fight had turned to their advantage.

  The more experienced Weavers had held out desperately until the great disturbance had swept over them. Cailin knew with a fierce joy what that disturbance was: a witchstone’s cry of distress. After that, the Weavers began to make mistakes, distraction ruining the attention to detail that was necessary to keep the Sisters out. Two of them fell in quick succession, erupting into flame as the Sisters dug into them and pulled their threads apart.

  Another Weaver was on the verge of crumbling when Cailin felt a terrible chill upon her, like a presentiment of her own death. She braced herself an instant before the shockwave hit them, an immensity of force that dwarfed the witchstone’s distress-call. The very fabric of reality flexed and warped, a rolling hump of distortion blasting outward from the epicentre, passing over them and leaving them
suddenly becalmed. Instinctively, Cailin quested, tracking the fibres strewn by the blast back to their source.

  West. West, where Kaiku was.

  It hit her in a moment of triumph. The witchstone in the Fault had been destroyed. She sent a rallying cry to her brethren and they plunged in to attack.

  But the Weavers had given up. The souls had gone out of them. Like faint ghosts, their minds drifted, stunned, bewildered by the calamity that had overcome them. The Sisters hesitated, fearing a trick, expecting opposition; but the hesitation lasted only a moment. Like wolves to wounded rabbits, they tore their enemies to pieces.

  And then it was done. The Sisters drifted alone in the Weave, disembodied among the gently stirring fibres. Alone, except for the leviathans that glided at the edge of their perception, their movements strangely agitated now. They had felt the shockwave and been perturbed by it.

  Gradually, Cailin began to feel strange sensations passing along the Weave. It took her some time to understand what this new phenomenon was. Echoes of their alien language as they called to one another, dull bass snaps and pops that reverberated through her being. She listened in amazement. Never before had the distant creatures ever given a hint that they were even aware of humans in the Weave, other than their seemingly effortless ability to stay constantly out of the reach of the inquisitive; but now they were reacting to the death knell of the witchstone.

  Cailin laughed breathlessly as her senses returned to the world of sight and sound. She had wanted to remain there, to listen to the voices of the mysterious denizens of the Weave, but there was far too much to do yet. Though they had defeated the Weavers here in the Fold, it might have been too late to turn the tide.

  She looked at the Sisters to her left and right, saw the barely suppressed smiles on their painted lips, the fiery glint in their red eyes, and she felt pride such as she had never imagined she could. These few in the Fold represented only a fraction of the total strength of the network, for she had kept it scattered and decentralised out of fear for her fragile, nascent sorority. Yet here, they had proven themselves as worthy as she had hoped, finally revealing themselves to the Weavers and beating them at their own game. She felt a true kinship then, to all of them, every child that had been born with the kana, each one rescued from death. She had always believed they were greater than humans, a superior breed, an Aberration that had surmounted the race that spawned them; and now she knew.