The Skein of Lament

by Chris Wooding

  There! And yet, not there. She found the source of the arrows, but its signature in the Weave was vague and meaningless, a twisted blot of fibres. If she could get a purchase on her attacker she could begin to do them harm, but something was defeating her, some kind of protection that she had never encountered before. She began to panic. She was not a warrior; with her kana out of the equation, she was no match for anyone who could shoot that accurately with a bow. Shucking her rifle from her shoulder, she primed it hurriedly, tracking the hidden assailant with half her attention as they dodged through the undergrowth without a whisper.

  Get away, she told herself. Get into the trees.

  And yet she dared not. The open space around her was the only warning she had of another attack. In the close quarters of the jungle, she would not be able to run and dodge and keep track of the enemy at the same time.

  Who is it out there?

  She raised her rifle and leaned around the edge of the idol, aiming at where she guessed her attacker would be. The rifle cracked and the shot puffed through the trees, splintering branches and cutting leaves apart.

  Another arrow sped from the darkness. Her enemy had gained an angle on her already. She pulled herself reflexively away as the point smacked into the idol near her face, sending her stumbling backward. She noticed the next arrow, nocked and released with incredible speed, an instant before it hit her in the ribs.

  The shock of the impact sent sparkles across her vision and almost made her pass out. She lost control, her kana welling within, all Cailin’s teachings forgotten in the fear for her life. It ripped up out of her, from her belly and womb, tearing along the threads of the Weave towards the unseen assassin. Whatever protection they wore stopped her pinpointing them, but accuracy was not necessary. There was no subtlety in her counterstrike. Wildly, desperately, she lashed out, and the power inside her responded to her direction.

  A long swathe of jungle exploded, blasted to matchwood, rent apart with cataclysmic force and lighting the night with fire. The sheer force of the detonation destroyed a great strip of land, throwing clods of soil into the air like smoking meteorites. The trees nearby burst into flame, leaves and bark and vines igniting; stones split; water boiled.

  In a moment, it was over, her kana spent. The jungle groaned and snapped on the fringes of the devastation. Sawdust and smoke hung in the air, along with the faint smell of charred flesh from the birds and animals that had been unfortunate enough to live there. The surrounding jungle was silent, stunned. The terrible presences of the idols bore down on her more heavily than ever, hating her.

  She teetered for a moment, her hand going to her side, then dropped to one knee in the soil. Her rifle hung limply in her other hand. Her irises were a bright, demonic red now, a side-effect of her power that would not fade for some hours. In past times, when she had first discovered the awful energy within her, she had been unable to rein it in at all, and each use would leave her helpless as a newborn afterward, barely able to walk. Cailin’s training had enabled Kaiku to shut off the flow before it drained her to such a state, but it would be some time before her kana would regenerate enough to allow her to manipulate the Weave again. She had not unleashed it so recklessly for years; but then, it had been years since she had been in such direct danger.

  Kaiku panted where she knelt, scanning the destruction for signs of movement. There was nothing except the slow drift of powdered debris in the air. Whoever had been aiming at her had been in the middle of that. She’d wager there was not much left of them now.

  A movement, down the hill at the treeline. She spun to her feet, snatched up her rifle and primed the bolt, raising it to her eye. Two figures burst into the clearing from the south. She sighted and fired.

  ‘No!’ one of them cried, scrambling out of the way. The shot had missed, it seemed. Ignoring the ache and the insidious wetness spreading across her side, she reprimed. ‘No! Libera Dramach! Stop shooting!’

  Kaiku paused, her rifle targeted at the one who had spoken.

  ‘Await the sleeper!’ he cried. It was the phrase by which the spy was to have been identified.

  ‘Who is the sleeper?’ Kaiku returned, as was the code.

  ‘The former Heir-Empress Lucia tu Erinima,’ came the reply. ‘Whom you yourself rescued from the Imperial Keep, Kaiku.’

  She hesitated a few moments longer, more in surprise at being recognised than anything else, and then lowered her rifle. The two figures headed up the hill towards her.

  ‘How do you know who I am?’ she asked, but the words came out strangely weak. She was beginning to feel faint, and her vision was still sparkling.

  ‘I would not be much of a spy if I did not,’ said the one who had spoken, hurrying up towards her. The other followed behind, scanning the trees: a Tkiurathi man with the same strange tattoos as her guide, though in a different pattern.

  ‘You are hurt,’ the spy stated impassively.

  ‘Who are you?’ she asked.

  ‘Saran Ycthys Marul,’ came the reply. ‘And this is Tsata.’ He scanned the treeline before turning his attention back to Kaiku. ‘Your display will have attracted anyone hunting for us within twenty miles. We have to go. Can you walk?’

  ‘I can walk,’ she said, not at all sure whether she could. The arrow had punctured her shirt and she was certainly bleeding; but it had not stuck in her, and she could still breathe well enough, so it had missed her lungs. She wanted to bind herself up here and now, terrified of the moist stain that was creeping along the fabric under her arm; but something in the authority of Saran’s voice got her moving. The three of them hurried into the forest and were swallowed by the shadows, leaving behind the grim sentinels of the Aith Pthakath, the body of Kaiku’s guide and the smouldering crackle of the trees.

  ‘What was it?’ Kaiku asked. ‘What was it out there?’

  ‘Hold still,’ Saran told her, crouching next to her in the firelight. He had slid off one arm of her shirt, exposing her wounded side. Beneath the sweat-dirtied strap of her underwear, her ribs were a wet mess of black and red. Unconsciously, she had clutched the other half of her shirt across her chest. Nudity was not something that most Saramyr were concerned about, but something about this man made her feel defensive.

  She hissed and flinched as he mopped at her wound with a rag and hot water.

  ‘Hold still!’ he told her irritably.

  She gritted her teeth and endured his ministrations.

  ‘Is it bad?’ she forced herself to ask. There was a silence for a few moments, dread crowding her as she waited for his answer.

  ‘No,’ he said at last. Kaiku exhaled shakily. ‘The arrow ploughed quite a way in, but it only scraped your side. It looks worse than it is.’

  The narrow cave echoed softly with the sussuration of their voices. Tsata was nowhere to be seen, out on some errand of his own. The Tkiurathi had found them this place to hide, a cramped tunnel carved by an ancient waterway in the base of an imposing rock outcropping, concealed by trees and with enough of a bend in it so that they could light a fire without fearing that anyone outside would see. It was uncomfortable and the stone was dank, but it meant rest and safety, at least for a short time.

  Saran set about making a poultice from crushed leaves, a folded strip of cloth and the water that was boiling in an iron pot. Kaiku pulled her shirt tight around her and watched him silently, eyes skipping over the even planes of his face. He caught her glance suddenly, and she looked away, into the fire.

  ‘It was a maghkriin,’ Saran said, his voice low and steady. ‘The thing that tried to kill you. It got here before us. You are lucky to be alive.’

  ‘Maghkriin?’ Kaiku said, trying out the unfamiliar word.

  ‘Created by the Fleshcrafters in the dark heart of Okhamba. You cannot imagine what the world is like there, Kaiku. A place where the sun never shines, where neither your people nor mine dare to go in any number. In over a thousand years since the first settlers arrived, what footholds we have made in th
is land have been on the coasts, where it is not so wild. But before we came, they were here. Tribes so old that they might have stood since before the birth of Quraal. Hidden in the impenetrable centre of this continent, thousands upon thousands of square miles where the land is so hostile that civilised society such as ours cannot exist there.’

  ‘Is that where you have come from?’ Kaiku asked. His Saramyrrhic was truly excellent for one who was not a native, though his accent occasionally slipped into the more angular Quraal inflections.

  Saran smiled strangely in the shifting firelight. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Though we barely made it. Twelve went in; we two are the only ones who came out, and I will not count us safe until we are off this continent entirely.’ He looked up at her from where he was grinding the leaves into a mulch. ‘Is it arranged?’

  ‘If all goes well,’ Kaiku said neutrally. ‘My friend is in Kisanth. She intends to have secured us passage to Saramyr by the time we return.’

  ‘Good,’ Saran murmured. ‘We cannot stay in towns any longer than necessary. They will find us there.’

  ‘The maghkriin?’ Kaiku asked.

  ‘Them, or the ones that sent them. That is why I needed somebody to facilitate a quick departure from Okhamba. I did not imagine I could take what I took and not be pursued.’

  And what did you take, then? Kaiku thought, but she kept the question to herself.

  He added some water to the paste of leaves and then leaned over to Kaiku again, gently peeling her sodden shirt away from the wound. ‘This will hurt,’ he warned. ‘I learned this from Tsata, and in Okhamba there is very little medicine that is gentle.’ He pressed the poulticed cloth against her wound. ‘Hold it there.’

  She did so. The burning and itching began almost immediately, gathering in force and spreading across her ribs. She gritted her teeth again. After a time, it seemed to level off, and the pain remained constant, just on the threshold of being bearable.

  ‘It is fast-acting,’ Saran told her. ‘You only need hold it there for an hour. After you remove it, the pain will recede.’

  Kaiku nodded. Sweat was prickling her scalp from her effort to internalise the discomfort. ‘Tell me about the Flesh-crafters,’ she said. ‘I need to keep my mind off this.’

  Saran hunkered back and studied her with his dark eyes. As she looked at him, she remembered that her own eyes were still red. In Saramyr, it would mark her as Aberrant; most people would react with hate and disgust. But neither Saran nor Tsata had seemed concerned. Perhaps they already knew what she was. Saran had certainly seemed to recognise her; but the fact that she was under the tuition of the Red Order – and hence an Aberrant – was not widely known. Even in the Fold, where Aberrants were welcomed, it was best to keep Aberration a secret.

  ‘I cannot guess what kind of things dwell in the deepest darknesses of Okhamba,’ Saran said. ‘They have men and women there with crafts and arts foreign to us. Your folk and mine, Kaiku, our ways are very different; but these are utterly alien. The Fleshcrafters can mould a baby in the womb, sculpt it to their liking. They take pregnant mothers, captured from enemy tribes, and they change the unborn children into monsters to serve them.’

  ‘Like Aberrants,’ Kaiku murmured. ‘Like the Weavers,’ she added, her voice deepening with venom.

  ‘No,’ said Saran, with surprising conviction. ‘Not like the Weavers.’

  Kaiku frowned. ‘You’re defending them,’ she observed.

  ‘No,’ he said again. ‘No matter how abhorrent their methods, the Fleshcrafters’ art comes from natural things. Herblore, incantations, spiritcraft . . . Natural things. They do not corrupt the land like the Weavers do.’

  ‘The maghkriin . . . I could not . . . I could not find it,’ Kaiku said at length, after she had digested this. ‘My kana seemed to glance off it.’ She watched Saran carefully. Years of caution had taught her that discussing her Aberrant powers was not something done lightly, but she wanted to gauge him.

  ‘They have talismans, sigils,’ Saran said. ‘Dark arts that they trap within shapes and patterns. I do not dare imagine the kind of tricks they use, nor do I know all that the Fleshcrafters can do. But I know they place protections on their warriors. Protections that, apparently, work even against you.’

  He brushed the fall of dirty black hair away from his forehead and poked at the fire. Kaiku watched him. Her gaze seemed to flicker back to his face whether she wanted it to or not.

  ‘Are you tired?’ he asked. He was not looking up, but she sensed that he knew she was staring. She forced her eyes away with an effort of will, flushing slightly, only to find that they had returned to him again an instant later.

  ‘A little,’ Kaiku lied. She was exhausted.

  ‘We have to go.’

  ‘Go?’ she repeated. ‘Now?’

  ‘Do you think you killed it? The one that attacked you?’ he asked, straightening suddenly.

  ‘Certain,’ she replied.

  ‘Don’t be,’ Saran advised. ‘You do not know what you are dealing with yet. And there may be more of them. If we travel hard, we can be at Kisanth by mid-afternoon. If we stay and rest, they will find us.’

  Kaiku hung her head.

  ‘Are you strong enough?’ Saran asked.

  ‘Strong as I need to be,’ Kaiku said, getting to her feet. ‘Lead the way.’

  FOUR

  ‘Mistress Mishani tu Koli,’ the merchant said in greeting, and Mishani knew something was wrong.

  It was not only his tone, although that would have been enough. It was the momentary hesitation when he saw her, that fractional betrayal that raced across his features before the facade of amiability clamped down. Beneath her own impassive veneer, she already suspected this man; but she had no other choice except to trust him, for he appeared to be her only hope.

  The Saramyr servant retreated from the room, closing the folding shutter across the entryway as she left. Mishani waited patiently.

  The merchant, who had seemed slightly dazed and lost in thought for a moment, appeared to remember himself. ‘My apologies,’ he said. ‘I haven’t introduced myself. I’m Chien os Mumaka. Please, this way.’ He motioned to where the study opened onto a wide balcony overlooking the lagoon.

  Mishani accompanied him out. There were exotic floor mats laid there, woven of a thick, soft Okhamban fabric, and a low table of wine and fruits. Mishani sat, and Chien took position opposite. The merchant’s house was set high up on the slope of the basin that surrounded Kisanth, a sturdy wooden structure raised on oak pillars to make its foremost half sit level. The view was spectacular, with the black rocks of the coastal wall rearing up to the left and Kisanth to the right, lying in a semicircle around the turquoise-blue water. Ships glided their slow way from the docks to the narrow gash in the wall that gave out onto the open sea, and smaller craft poled or paddled between them. The whole vista was smashed with dazzlingly bright sunlight, making the lagoon a fierce glimmer of white.

  She sized up her opponent as they went through the usual greetings, platitudes and inquiries after each other’s health, a necessary preamble to the meat of the discussion. He was short, with a shaven head and broad, blocky features matched by a broad, blocky physique. His clothes were evidently expensive though not ostentatious; his only concession to conceit was a thin embroidered cloak, a very Quraal affectation on a Saramyr man, presumably meant to advertise his worldliness.

  But appearances meant nothing here. Mishani knew him by reputation. Chien os Mumaka. The os prefix to his family name meant that he was adopted, and it would stay attached to his natural children for two generations down, bestowing its stigma upon them too, until the third generation reverted to the more usual tu prefix. Os meant literally ‘reared by’, and whereas tu implied inclusion in the family, os did not.

  None of this appeared to have hampered Chien os Mumaka’s part in his family’s meteoric rise in the merchant business, however. Over the last ten years, Blood Mumaka had turned what was initially a small shipping consorti
um into one of only two major players in the Saramyr-Okhamba trade route. Much of that was down to Chien’s daring nature: he was renowned for taking risks which seemed to pay off more often than not. He was not elegant in his manners, nor well educated, but he was undoubtedly a formidable trader.

  ‘It’s an honour indeed to have the daughter of such an eminent noble Blood come visit me in Kisanth,’ Chien was saying. His speech patterns were less formal than Mishani’s or Kaiku’s. Mishani placed him as having come from somewhere in the Southern Prefectures. He had obviously also never received elocution training, which many children of high families took for granted. Perhaps he was passed over due to his adopted status, or because his family were too poor at the time.

  ‘My father sends his regards,’ she lied. Chien appeared pleased.

  ‘Give him mine, I beg you,’ he returned. ‘We have a lot to thank your family for, Mistress Mishani. Did you know that my mother was a fisherwoman in your father’s fleet in Mataxa Bay?’

  ‘Is that true?’ Mishani asked politely, though she knew perfectly well it was. She was frankly surprised he had brought it up. ‘I had thought it only a rumour.’

  ‘It’s true,’ Chien said. ‘One day a young son of Blood Mumaka was visiting your father at the bay, and by Shintu’s hand or Rieka’s, he came face-to-face with the fisherwoman, and it was love from that moment. Isn’t that a tale?’

  ‘How beautiful,’ said Mishani, thinking just the opposite. ‘So like a poem or a play.’ The subsequent marriage of a peasant into Blood Mumaka and the family’s refusal to excise their shameful son had crippled them politically; it had taken them years to claw back their credibility, mainly due to their success in shipping. That Chien was talking about it at all was somewhat crass. Chien’s mother was released from her oath to Blood Koli and given to the lovestruck young noble in return for political concessions that Blood Mumaka were still paying for today. That one foolish marriage had been granted in return for an extremely favourable deal on Blood Mumaka shipping interests in the future. It had been a shrewd move. Now that they were major traders, their promises made back then kept them tied tightly to Blood Koli, and Koli made great profit from them. Mishani could only imagine how that would chafe; it was probably only the fact that they had to make those concessions to her family that prevented them from dominating the trade lane entirely.