The Skein of Lament

by Chris Wooding

  ‘Do you like poetry?’ Chien inquired, using her absent comment to steer her in another direction.

  ‘I am fond of Xalis, particularly,’ she replied.

  ‘Really? I would not have thought his violent prose would appeal to a lady of such elegance.’ This was flattery, and not done well.

  ‘The court at Axekami is every bit as violent as the battle-fields Xalis wrote of,’ Mishani replied. ‘Only the wounds inflicted there are more subtle, and fester.’

  Chien smiled crookedly and took a slice of fruit from the table. Mishani exploited the gap to take the initiative.

  ‘I am told that you may be in a position to do a service for me,’ she said.

  Chien chewed slowly and swallowed, making her wait. A warm breeze rippled her dress. ‘Go on,’ he prompted.

  ‘I need passage back to Saramyr,’ she said.

  ‘When?’

  ‘As soon as possible.’

  ‘Mistress Mishani, you’ve only just got here. Does Kisanth displease you that much?’

  ‘Kisanth is a remarkable place,’ she replied, evading the thrust of the question. ‘Very vibrant.’

  Chien studied her for a long moment. To press her further on her motives for returning would be rude. Mishani kept her features glacial as the silence drew out uncomfortably. He was evaluating her; she guessed that much. But did he know that the front she presented was a charade?

  Her connection to Blood Koli was tenuous at best. Though she was officially still part of the family – the shame in having such a wayward daughter would damage their interests – they shunned her now. Her betrayal had been carefully covered up, and though the rumours inevitably spread, only a few knew the truth of it.

  The story went that Mishani was travelling in the east, across the mountains, furthering the interests of Blood Koli there. In reality, her father had been relentlessly hunting for her since she had left him. She was in little doubt what would happen if he caught her. She would become a prisoner on her own estates, forced to maintain the show of solidarity in Blood Koli, to conform to the lie that they had spun to hide the dishonour she had brought upon them. And then, perhaps, she would be quietly killed.

  Her nobility was a sham, a bluff. And she suspected that Chien knew that. She had hoped that a merchant trader would not have access to the kind of information that would expose her, but there was something odd about the way he was acting, and she did not trust him an inch. Her father would be a powerful friend, and he would be greatly indebted to anyone who delivered his daughter back to him.

  ‘How soon do you have to leave?’ Chien said eventually.

  ‘Tomorrow,’ she replied. In truth, she did not know how urgent their departure really was, but it was best to appear definite when bargaining.

  ‘Tomorrow,’ he repeated, unfazed.

  ‘Can it be done?’ she asked.

  ‘Possibly,’ Chien told her. He was buying himself time to think. He looked out over the lagoon, the sun casting shadows in the hollows of his broad features. Weighing the implications. ‘It will cost me considerably,’ he said at length. ‘There will be substantial unused cargo space. No, three days from now is the absolute earliest we can be outfitted and under sail.’

  ‘Good enough,’ she said. ‘You will be reimbursed. And you will have my deepest gratitude.’ How convenient that a phrase like that, implying that he would be owed a favour by a powerful maritime family, could still be true when it meant literally what it said and nothing more. She did have money – the Libera Dramach would spare no expense to get their spy home – but as far as favours went, she had only what she could give, which was not much to a man like Chien. She almost felt bad about cheating him.

  ‘I’ve a different proposition,’ he said. ‘Your offer of reimbursement is kind, but I confess I have matters to deal with in our homeland anyway, and money is not an issue here. I’d rather not hold a family as eminent as yours in my debt. Instead, I’ve a somewhat presumptuous request to make of you.’

  Mishani waited, and her heart sank as she listened, knowing that she could not refuse and that she was playing right into his hands.

  Later, it rained.

  The clouds had rolled in with startling speed as the humidity ascended, and in the early afternoon the skies opened in a torrent. Out in the jungle, thick leaves nodded violently as they were battered by fat droplets; mud sluiced into streams that snaked away between the tree roots; slender waterfalls plunged through the air as rain ramped off the canopy and fell to earth, spattering boughs and rocks. The loud hiss of the downpour drowned the sound of nearby animals hooting from their shelters.

  Saran, Tsata and Kaiku trudged through the undergrowth, soaked to the skin. They walked hunched under gwattha, hooded green ponchos woven of a native fabric that offered some protection against light rain, but not enough to keep them dry in such an onslaught. Kaiku had been given one by her guide before they set out, and had kept it rolled in a bundle and tied to her small pack; the other two had their own. Setting foot in the jungle without one was idiocy.

  The rain slowed an already slow pace. Kaiku stumbled along with barely the strength to pick up her feet. None of them had slept, and they had been travelling through the night. Under ordinary conditions, Kaiku would have found this endurable; however, the long month of inactivity aboard the Heart of Assantua, the wound in her side and the detrimental effects of unleashing her kana had combined to severely curtail her stamina. But rest was out of the question, and pride forbade her from complaining. The others had trimmed their pace somewhat, but not by much. She kept up miserably, leaving it to Saran and Tsata to look out for any pursuers. Without sleep, her kana had not regenerated and her senses had dulled. She told herself that her companions were alert enough for the three of them.

  She brooded on the fate of her guide as they made their way back to Kisanth. It saddened her that the Tkiurathi woman had never told Kaiku her name. Saramyr ritual dictated that the dead must be named to Noctu, wife of Omecha, so that she could record them in her book and advise her husband of their great deeds – or lack of them – when they came hoping for admittance to the Golden Realm. Even though the woman had most likely not believed at all, it worried at Kaiku.

  Saran and Tsata conferred often in low voices and scanned the jungle with their rifles ready, the weapons wrapped in thick rags and strips of leather to keep their powder chambers dry. The downpour – which would hamper anyone following by obliterating their trail – had not seemed to ease their fears one bit. Despite Saran’s reservations, Kaiku was certain that she had incinerated the assassin at the Aith Pthakath. And if there was a maghkriin still hunting them, Saran seemed to believe its tracking ability was nothing short of supernatural.

  She found herself wondering why this man was so important, what he knew, what was worth risking her life for. She felt galled that her curiosity had not been satisfied yet. Of course, he was a spy, and she should have expected that he would not reveal his secrets easily, but it annoyed her that she should be going through all this without knowing the reason why.

  Kaiku had tried to engage Saran in conversation occasionally throughout the morning, but was frustrated by his distractedness. He was too intent on watching out for enemies and jungle animals, which could be deadly even out near the coast where the land was a little more civilised. He barely listened to her. She found that it piqued her unaccountably.

  By the time they stopped, exhaustion and the rain had combined to make her fatalistic. If a maghkriin was going to come, let it come. They could do nothing about it.

  However, the cause of the halt was not the rest that Kaiku had hoped for.

  It was Tsata who saw it first, a little way up the incline which rose to their left, overlooking their route. He darted back in a flash and pointed through the trees. Kaiku squinted through dewed lashes, but she could only see grey shadows in amid the shifting curtains of rain.

  ‘Who is that?’ Tsata asked her. Saran was at their side in a moment.
/>   ‘I cannot see,’ Kaiku said. The unspoken question: how should she know? She tried to pick out movement, but there was nothing.

  Saran and Tsata exchanged a glance. ‘Stay here,’ Saran told her.

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘Just stay,’ he said, and he disappeared into the under-growth with a light splashing of mud. She caught a few glimpses of him heading up the incline towards where Tsata had pointed, and then he was swallowed.

  She brushed her sodden fringe back and threw off her hood, suddenly feeling enclosed by it. The warm rain splashed eagerly onto her head and dribbled through to wet her scalp.

  When she looked around, Tsata was gone.

  The jolt of alarm woke her savagely out of her torpor. Her earlier fatalism was chased away. She drew a breath to call out for her companions, but it died in her lungs. Shouting would be a foolish thing to do.

  Hurriedly, she scrambled her rifle off her back and into her arms. The lack of visibility terrified her; she would not have time to react against an attack. She had barely survived when she was out in the open back at the Aith Pthakath, and now she did not even have her kana as protection: she was too exhausted to open the Weave.

  The pounding rain and constant, disharmonious sounds of running or dripping water masked all but the loudest noises. She blinked and wiped her eyes, glancing around in agitation.

  They would be back. Any moment, they would be back, and she would be angry at the way they had deserted her with barely a warning. A branch fell behind her, and she started and whirled, narrowly missing tangling her rifle in a hanging vine. Staring intently into the rain-mist, she looked for movement.

  Her sword would be better at close quarters like this, but she had never been much of a swordswoman. Most of the training she had received had built on her natural skills, learned from her constant competition with her older brother back in the Forest of Yuna. They would fight to outride, out-shoot, outwrestle each other, for she always was the tomboy; but swords were never a favourite of either of them, and too dangerous to spar with. The rifle was impractical here, but it was comforting. She shifted her grip on the underside of the weapon and scanned the trees.

  Time passed, drawing out slowly. They did not come back. Kaiku felt a cold dread creeping along her bones. The effort of waiting here, so exposed, was too much for her. She needed to know what was happening.

  Her eyes fell again on the grey shadow that Tsata had pointed out. It still had not moved. She thought on his earlier words. Who is that? What did he mean?

  Action, any action, was better than cowering in the rain. Even crossing the small distance that would bring her close enough to that half-obscured blot to see what it was. With one last look around, she began to tread warily up the incline, her boots sinking into the mud as she went, rivulets of water diverting to fill up the holes that she left.

  The leather wrapped around the powder chamber of her rifle was sodden on the outside. She hoped that none of it had got in to wet the powder, or her rifle would be merely an expensive club. She wiped her hair away with her palm and cursed as it flopped back into her eyes. Her heart was pounding in her chest so hard that she felt her breastbone twitch with each pulse.

  The grey shadow resolved all of a sudden, a gust of wind blowing the rain aside like a curtain parting with theatrical flair. It was revealed for only an instant, but that instant was enough for the image to burn itself into Kaiku’s mind. Now she understood.

  Who is that?

  It was the guide, lashed by vines in a bundle as if she had been cocooned by a spider. She hung from the stout lower boughs of an enormous chapapa tree. Her head lolled forward, eyes staring sightlessly down, the arrow still buried in her throat. Her arms and legs were wrapped tight together, and she swayed with the sporadic assault of the rain.

  Kaiku felt new panic clutch at her. The maghkriin had left it as a message. Not only that, it had predicted exactly the route its prey would take and got ahead of them. She stumbled back from the horror, slid a few inches in the dirt. Intuition screamed at her.

  A maghkriin was here. Now.

  It came at her from the left, covering the ground between them in the time it took her to turn her head. The world seemed to slow around her, the raindrops decelerating, her heartbeat deepening to a bass explosion. She was wrenching her rifle up, but she knew even before she began that there was no way she would get the muzzle in between her and the creature. She caught only a sharp impression of red and blackened skin, one blind eye and flailing ropes of hair; then she saw a hooked blade sweeping in to take out her throat, and there was nothing in the world she could do about it in time.

  Blood hammered her face as she felt the impact, the maghkriin smashing into her and bearing her to the ground in a blaze of pain and white shock. She could not breathe, could not breathe

  – drowning, like before, like in the sewers and a filthy, rotted hand holding her under –

  because the air would not get to her lungs, and there was the taste of her own blood in her mouth, blood in her eyes blinding her, blood everywhere

  – spirits, she couldn’t breathe, couldn’t breathe because her throat had been opened, hacked like a fish, her throat! –

  Then movement, all around her. Saran, Tsata, pulling the weight off her chest, wrenching away the limp corpse of her attacker. She gasped in a breath, sweet, miraculous air pouring into her lungs in great whoops. Her hand went to her neck, and found it blood-slick but whole. She was being pulled roughly up out of the mud, the rain already washing the gore from her skin and into her clothes.

  ‘Are you hurt?’ Saran cried, agitated. ‘Are you hurt?’

  Kaiku held up a hand shakily to indicate that he should wait a moment. She was badly winded. Her eyes strayed to the muscular monstrosity that lay face-down and half-sunk in the wet earth.

  ‘Look at me!’ Saran snapped, grabbing her jaw and pulling her face around roughly. ‘Are you hurt?’ he demanded again, frantic.

  She slapped his arm away, suddenly angry at being man-handled. She still did not have enough breath in her to form words. Palm to her chest, she bent over and allowed the normal airflow to return to her lungs.

  ‘She is not hurt,’ Tsata said, but whether it came out accusatory, relieved or matter-of-fact was lost amid his inexperience at the language.

  ‘I am . . . not hurt,’ Kaiku gasped, glaring at Saran. He hesitated for a moment, then retreated from her, seemingly perturbed at himself.

  Tsata reached down into the mud and hauled the maghkriin over onto its back. This one was more humanoid than the last, its clothing burned away in rags to reveal a lithe body slabbed with lean muscle beneath ruddy, tough skin. Only its face was bestial: what of it there was left, anyway. One side was charred and blistered by fire; the other had splintered into bloody pulp by a rifle ball. In between the damage were crooked yellow teeth and a flat nose, and its hair was not hair at all but thin, fleshy tentacles that hung flaccid from its scalp.

  Kaiku looked away.

  ‘It was the one that you burned,’ said Tsata. ‘No wonder it was slow.’

  ‘You shot it?’ Kaiku asked numbly, trying to make sense of the confusion. Had he said it was slow? The pounding rain had cleansed the blood from her face now, but pink rivulets still raced from her sodden hair. Mud clung to her back and arms and legs. She didn’t notice.

  Tsata tilted his chin up. It took a moment for Kaiku to remember that this was a nod.

  ‘You left me,’ she said suddenly, looking from one to the other. ‘You both left me, and you knew that thing was out there!’

  ‘I left you with Tsata!’ Saran protested, glaring at the Tkiurathi, who returned with a cool green stare, his tattooed features calm beneath his hood.

  ‘It made sense,’ Tsata said. ‘The maghkriin would have hunted for you, Saran, as you went away alone. But if we were all alone, it would choose the most dangerous or the most defenceless prey first. That was her, on both counts.’

  ‘You used me
as bait?’ Kaiku cried.

  ‘I was hidden, watching you. The maghkriin did not suspect that we would willingly endanger one of our own.’

  ‘You could have missed!’ Kaiku shouted. ‘It could have killed me!’

  ‘But it did not,’ Tsata said, seemingly unable to comprehend why she was angry.

  Kaiku glared in disbelief at Tsata, then at Saran, who merely held up his hands to disavow any knowledge or responsibility.

  ‘Is this some Okhamban kind of logic?’ she snapped, her face flushed. She could not believe anyone would casually gamble with her life that way. ‘Some spirit-cursed primitive matter of pash? To sacrifice the individual for the good of the group?’

  Tsata looked surprised. ‘Exactly that,’ he said. ‘You are quick to learn our ways.’

  ‘The gods damn your ways,’ she spat, and pulled her hood up over her head. ‘It cannot be far now to Kisanth. We should go.’

  The remainder of the journey was undertaken in silence. Though Saran’s and Tsata’s alertness had not diminished in the slightest, the danger seemed to have passed now, at least for Kaiku, who nursed her fury all the way to Kisanth. When they emerged again from the jungle it was in front of Zanya’s prayer gate. The sight of the pillars brought a flood of relief and weariness over Kaiku. She walked slowly over to it and gave her thanks for a safe return as ritual dictated. When she was done, she saw that Saran was doing so as well.

  ‘I thought you of Quraal did not give credit to our heathen deities,’ she said.