Braided Path 02 - The Skein Of Lament

by Chris Wooding

  Kaiku, precious Kaiku. It was she, perhaps, who had saved them all. Cailin’s faith had not been misplaced, in the end.

  She sent a flurry of orders across the Weave, distributing her Sisters to where they would be needed the most, and then she swept away. An insidious worry that was growing in her mind, souring her elation. While she had been fighting, she had not the spare time to notice; but now she realised that the Sister Irilia, whom she had left guarding Lucia, was not communicating any more.

  The last few gristle-crows were being shredded on the wing when Lucia turned to Nomoru and said: ‘What now?’

  Yugi gave her a look of grave concern. She was not reacting at all as a fourteen-winter child should. Her father and her best friend had just died in front of her – spirits, she was still splattered with Zaelis’s blood, which she had made no attempt to wipe off – but her brief tears had dried and her soot-grimed face was an icy mask. Her eyes, so often dreamy and unfocused, were like crystal shards now, piercing and unsettling.

  He cast a quick glance around the street. They were still in the spot where the Weavers had attacked them. The corpses of Flen and Zaelis lay untouched alongside the dead furies, the Weavers, the Sister Irilia and dozens of ravens. Lucia stood in the midst of the charnel-pit. She had ignored Yugi’s pleas to get to a safer place, which had been made half out of sympathy for her loss, half because he could not bear to look on his friend and leader Zaelis lying in the dust. Eventually, other soldiers had arrived and Yugi had stationed them all around her position. If she would not move, then he would have to protect her.

  He had guessed what Nomoru was doing, even though she had been typically reticent when he asked her. The gristle-crows had taken no part in combat until now, always remaining out of reach, circling high above. With hindsight, it was obvious what their purpose was. They were the Nexuses’ eyes. That was the thinking behind Nomoru’s plan, anyway. Blind the Nexuses by tearing out their eyes. Put them at a disadvantage. And then . . .

  ‘Find them,’ Nomoru said flatly.

  Lucia did not respond, but overhead the pattern of the ravens’ flight shifted. Those that were not occupied with mopping up the Aberrant birds scattered in all directions, spreading over the battlefield. Searching for the Nexuses.

  Lucia listened to the jabber of the ravens, her eyes closed. Nomoru watched her anxiously. A runner came from the western wall, reporting that sections of it were on the verge of collapse, weakened by fire and the weight of the corpses leaning against it.

  Yugi bore the news grimly. If the wall fell, it was all over. Even if they could find the Nexuses, he had little hope of getting to them. Perhaps one last, concerted charge might be able to penetrate the Aberrants and reach their handlers, but he doubted it. Still, it would be better than waiting here for death, cowering behind collapsing walls, hiding until the enemy tide came to drown them in a wave of claws and fangs.

  Rifles clattered to shoulders as a black shape emerged at the end of the street, but it was only Cailin, striding as tall and unruffled as ever. The guards lowered their weapons, and Cailin passed them without so much as a glance. She took in the scene and then fixed her red gaze on Yugi.

  ‘Is she hurt?’

  ‘She’s not hurt,’ Yugi said.

  Lucia’s eyes opened.

  ‘Cailin,’ she said, using an imperative mode she had never used before. ‘I need your help.’

  Cailin walked over to her. ‘Of course,’ she said, and just for a moment Yugi looked from one to the other and they could have been mother and daughter, so close were they in voice and posture. ‘How can I help you?’

  ‘I have found something.’

  ‘The Nexuses?’ Nomoru asked eagerly.

  ‘I found them some time ago,’ she said, with a nasty smile that looked shockingly out of place on her beatific features. ‘I have something better.’

  The Nexuses, unlike the Sisters of the Red Order, had no fear of clustering together. They had taken station some way to the south of the Fold, away from the main battle, and surrounded themselves with a bodyguard of a hundred ghauregs that made them unassailable by any force the Fault could muster. Occasional attacks from small, rogue groups were swiftly repelled, and the only army with sufficient number to threaten them was trammelled in the Fold. Nevertheless, they had learned the merits of keeping their distance, and so they hid at the limits of their control-range and directed the battle from afar.

  The loss of the Weavers was not a concern to the Nexuses; they did not have the emotion necessary to respond to the death of their masters. What was more perturbing was the massacre of the gristle-crows, for those beasts had been specialised as lookouts. The Nexuses were not directly linked to the vision of all their beasts, but it was possible to see through the eyes of some of them. They prioritised their links; there was, after all, only so much information it was possible to deal with at a time.

  They had now switched to skrendel and sent them climbing as high as they could to observe the battlefield, but it was a poor substitute for the gristle-crows.

  The spot that they had chosen was a sunken crescent of grassy land banked by a hilly ridge to the west, south and east. They were sheltered from sight from those directions, and as long as they kept their ghauregs off the ridge then they were confident that nobody of importance knew they were here at all. Almost two hundred Nexuses were gathered, an eerie crowd of identical black, cowled robes and blank white faces, looking northward. When the army had first embarked they had been at the limit of their capacity to control the Aberrant predators, for there was only a finite amount that each Nexus could handle. However, as the predators’ numbers had been brutally cut down, so the workload had eased. They were comfortably in command now. The ghauregs prowled restlessly around the silent figures, walking low to the ground with their shaggy arms swinging.

  The ghauregs were not the most sensitive of creatures, and nor were the Nexuses, which was why they did not think to react to the steadily growing rumble from the south until it was too late. By the time the ghauregs began to look to the ridge with quizzical grunts, the sound was already beginning to separate into something discernible, and a moment before a new and unexpected enemy came into view, they realised what it was.

  Hooves.

  The mounted soldiers of Blood Ikati burst over the ridge, a battle-cry rising from their front ranks. Barak Zahn was in the midst of the green and grey mass, his sword held high, his voice rising above the voices of his men. The ghauregs’ lumbering attempts to consolidate some kind of defence were woefully slow. The riders thundered down towards the enemy, firing off a volley of shots from horseback that decimated the Aberrant line. They switched to blades as they swept into the creatures. The two fronts collided: hairy fists smashed riders from their mounts, blades hacked into tough hide and opened up muscle beneath, horses had their legs broken like twigs, rifles cracked, men fell and were trampled. The ghauregs were fearsome opponents, and the attack became a chaos of hand-to-hand fighting, with the massive Aberrants tackling down the riders.

  Zahn danced his horse this way and that, pulling it out of the reach of the beasts and cutting off any hand that came near. In his eyes was a fervour such as nobody had seen in him for years. His gaunt, white-bearded cheeks were speckled with blood, and his jaw was set tight. The riders outnumbered the ghauregs three to one, but the ghauregs held, protecting their black-robed masters who still looked northward as if oblivious to the threat.

  Then the second front crested the western ridge, seven hundred men who swept into the sunken crescent of land and crashed into the flanks of the ghauregs. The beasts were faced with overwhelming odds now, and they had no way of preventing the attackers from circumventing them and reaching the Nexuses. The riders hewed the silent figures down from horseback, beheading them or hacking across their collarbones or chests, and the Nexuses stood mutely and allowed themselves to be killed. The men of Blood Ikati did not question their good fortune: they simply massacred their unresisting victims
, and drenched themselves in their enemy.

  The effect on the ghauregs was immediate and obvious. All coherence in their resistance dissolved. They became frenzied animals, seeking wildly for a way out of the forest of slashing blades and jostling warriors, concerned only for their own survival. It had the opposite effect, making them more vulnerable. They were chopped into bloody meat in minutes.

  Finally the last of them had fallen, and the carnage was done. Barak Zahn sat panting in his saddle, surveying the corpse-littered scene. Then, with a breathless grin, he held his sword to the sky and let out a cheer that all his men echoed in one enormous swell of savage triumph.

  Mishani tu Koli watched from her horse on the ridge, her ankle-length hair blowing in the breeze, her face, as ever, impassive.

  Without the Nexuses, the Aberrants collapsed into disorder. Animals they had been, and animals they became again. On the western side of the Fold, where the stockade wall bowed dangerously inward and where the walkways on the rim were scattered with the dead of both sides, the creatures stopped their suicidal charges and turned on each other, maddened by the smoke and the smell of blood. They left their brethren impaled on the sharp tips of the wall and fell back from the flames, attacking anything that moved in a frenzied panic. The defenders, exhausted and ragged, stared in amazement as the beasts that had been on the verge of breaking through suddenly retreated in the most incredible rout they had ever seen. Someone was hysterically shouting thanks to the gods, and the cry was taken up down the line; for only the gods, it seemed, could have turned back an enemy such as this at the very last minute. They stood on the wall, their swords and rifles hanging on slack arms, and did nothing but breathe, and live, and enjoy the simplicity of that.

  The scene at the eastern edge of the town was much the same, but there the Aberrants were penned in by the valley sides and the upward incline discounted it as an easy escape route in the minds of the maniacal beasts. They had no straightforward place to run, and they were still being pounded by fire-cannons and ballistae and rifles. Without the steadying influence of the Nexuses, they went utterly insane amid the explosions, some of them gnawing at their own limbs, others burying themselves under piles of smoking dead, still others simply lying down as if catatonic and being trampled or ripped to pieces by the horde. Some of them managed to escape up the valley, but most stayed at the bottom, trapped in a whirlpool of death until their turn came, by fire or rifle ball or claw.

  By dusk, the Fold was quiet again. Smoke drifted into the reddening sky, and Nuki’s eye glared angrily over the western peaks of the Xarana Fault. The foul stench in the air had become imperceptible to the survivors of the conflict, so long had they suffered it. Men and women and children wandered the town, battle-shattered and glazed, or roused themselves to slothful and exhausted activity in the knowledge that there was much to be done and little time to do it. Wives wept at the news that their husbands would never return; children screamed for parents who lay sundered in the dust somewhere, and were hastily gathered in by other mothers. Aberrants temporarily adopted non-Aberrants and vice versa, not knowing that their responsibility would become permanent as the dead were identified.

  The predators were all killed or scattered, and hunting parties were chasing those that still prowled in the wilds nearby or who hid in houses within the Fold. Against impossible odds, the town had held out; but there was no sense of triumph here, only a weary and broken resignation, a numbness brought on by more horror than they could have imagined. The valley was drowned in gore, choked in corpses. The cost in grief and misery was appalling. And on top of all that was the knowledge that even in triumph they had won only a pyrrhic victory. They had their lives, but the Fold was forfeit. Nobody could stay here now. The Weavers would be coming again, and next time they would not be so reckless. Next time, all the luck in the world would not be enough to save the town.

  A dozen troops of Blood Ikati rode slowly into town, with Barak Zahn and Mishani tu Koli at their head. They were as weary as the townsfolk, but for different reasons. Their gruelling ride from Zila had been days of hard travel, pushing their mounts to the limit of their endurance. When Xejen tu Imotu had given up the location of Lucia to the Weaver Fahrekh, Zahn had been finally convinced of the truth behind Mishani’s claim. He had taken a thousand mounted men that he had brought to Zila and made all speed to the Fault, following Mishani’s lead. They had passed east of Barask, skirted the terrible Forest of Xu on its northern edge, and entered the Fault south of the Fold, where Mishani took them through trails that their horses could travel. Usually, such ways would have been dangerous in the extreme, guarded as they were by hostile factions; but the Fault had given up its petty territorial squabbles in the face of a more extreme danger, and they had made good speed and arrived, it seemed, just in time.

  Yet there was no hero’s welcome for them in the town. Few even realised that they were responsible for the enemy’s ruin. They passed through stares that ranged from curious to accusatory: why were soldiers on horseback here now? Where were they when they were needed?

  It took all Mishani’s strength to retain her composure. With each new corpse she expected to see Kaiku or Lucia or somebody else that she knew. Several of the dead or bereaved she did recognise vaguely, but she dared not allow them sympathy, for she did not yet know how deep her own hurt would be. The sight of her home town destroyed was bad enough, but to Mishani a place was just a place, and she was not so sentimental. However, she dreaded the thought of asking after her friends, what she might hear in response. If she knew Kaiku, she would have been in the thick of it. She always was a stubborn one, who would not back down from anything. Mishani dared not think of what she would feel if Kaiku was dead.

  She barely knew where she was leading Zahn’s men, only that she had a definite sense of where she should be, a lingering instruction left in her head by Cailin. The shock of having the Sister speak in her thoughts had still not worn off, hours later. She understood how the chain of events had come about – how Lucia’s ravens had spotted them from on high, how Cailin had used her kana to speak to Mishani and tell her where the Nexuses were and what they had to do – but the sheer narrowness of their margin of victory terrified her. Gods, if the Weavers had been a little quicker off the mark in sending their army here, or if Zahn had wasted any more time with doubt and disbelief . . . if Fahrekh had suspected what Zahn was up to and had kept Xejen’s knowledge of Lucia a secret, if Mishani had not been ‘rescued’ by Bakkara from her father’s men . . . if Chien had not insisted she stay at his townhouse in Hanzean . . .

  She shivered at the possibilities.

  Thinking about Chien brought an image of his face back to her, his blocky features and shaven scalp. She felt little more than a passing regret for his death. He had been a good man, in the end, but she had learned that good men died as readily as evil men. She suspected her father’s hand in it, of course; but the assassins were far behind her now, for she had been smuggled out of Zila with all secrecy. At the last, Chien had not managed to fulfil the task she set him, so she did not count herself held to her promise of ensuring his family would be released from their ties to Blood Koli. In other times, she might have been more generous; but she had her mother’s welfare to think about, and for now it was best that the pact died with Chien. The world was cruel, but Mishani could be cruel too.

  They turned onto a dusty street, and there Mishani saw what lay at their destination. The troops halted, and she dismounted and walked slowly onward, through the carpet of dead ravens and past the corpses of Weavers and furies and the body of the dead Sister. Standing in their midst was Cailin, like a black spike at the hub of all this killing. And crouched over the body of Zaelis was Lucia, her burned neck bent downward and her head hung, face in her hands.

  Mishani stopped in front of Cailin and looked up at her, black hair sloughing back from her cheeks as she met the gaze of the taller woman. Cailin’s irises had returned to their usual green by now.

 
‘Mishani tu Koli,’ the Sister said, with the appropriate bow. ‘You have my gratitude.’

  Mishani was too agitated to respond with the correct pleasantries. Instead, she asked: ‘Where is Kaiku?’

  Cailin did not reply for a moment, and Mishani’s heart jerked painfully in her chest.

  ‘I am not sure,’ she said at length. ‘She was on the other side of the Fault. She destroyed the witchstone we found there. It was she, as much as you, that turned this battle around. If the Weavers had still been fighting us, I would not have been able to contact you to direct you to the Nexuses.’

  Witchstone? Mishani thought, but did not say. Much had occurred in her absence.

  ‘I cannot reach her,’ Cailin continued after a moment. ‘She does not respond to my attempts. What that means, I do not know.’

  Mishani digested that, processing the implications and coming out only with uncertainty.

  Cailin glanced towards Lucia. ‘She has not moved for hours. She will not let us take the bodies away. I fear she has taken a wound that she might never recover from.’

  Mishani was about to reply, but then a footstep behind her made her look back, and she saw Zahn there, picking his way through the bodies, his eyes only on one person, on—

  ‘Lucia?’

  She raised her head at his voice, but no more than that.

  ‘Lucia?’ he said again, and this time she turned to him, her face and hair smeared red. He took a shuddering breath at the sight of her. She got slowly to her feet and faced him.