The Skein of Lament

by Chris Wooding

  Not any more.

  The Weaver must have grabbed her as she came to deliver his midday meal. Pori had always been uncomfortable with his wife having any contact with the Weaver at all, but she had told him not to be silly. She handed out the meals to everyone else on the barge; it was her duty to feed their unwanted guest as well. Perhaps he had just finished Weaving, sending his secret messages or completing some other unfathomable task; Lan had heard that some Weavers became very violent and strange after they used their powers. He could imagine her standing there, ringing the brass chime for permission to enter, and the Weaver appearing, all fury and anger, dragging her inside. The Weaver was small and crooked as most of them were, but Fuira would not dare to fight and besides, they had ways to make people do as they wanted.

  Then, the screams.

  The cabin door was shut, and the bargemen were gathered around it in fear and impotent rage. Lan stood with them, trembling, his eyes fixed on the spilled tray of food on the deck. He wanted to get away from there, to dive off the side of the Pelaska and silence her cries in the dull roar underwater. He wanted to rush in and help her. Instead he was paralysed. Nobody could interfere. It would mean their lives.

  So he listened to his mother’s suffering, numb and detached from the reality of the situation, and did not dare to think what was being done to her in there.

  ‘No!’ came his father’s voice from behind him, and there was a rush of movement as the bargemen hurried to restrain him. ‘Fuira!’

  Lan turned and saw Pori in the midst of four men, who were pulling a rifle out of his grip. He was flailing and thrashing with the strength of the possessed, his face contorted in rage. The rifle was torn free and slid across the deck, and then suddenly there was a scrape of steel and the bargemen fell away from him, one of them swearing and clutching a long, bleeding cut on his forearm.

  ‘That’s my wife!’ Pori screamed, spittle flying from his lips. A short, curved blade was in his hand. He glared at them all, his face a deep red, then he plunged through the crowd and shoved open the door of the cabin with a cry.

  The door slammed shut behind him, though whether by his hand or some other force Lan never knew. He heard his father’s shout of rage, and a moment later something heavy smashed into the inside of the door, splintering the thick wood. There was a beat of silence. Then a new scream from his mother, long, sustained, ragged at the edges. Blood began to seep through the cracks in the door, and crawled slowly down to drip onto the deck.

  Lan stood where he was, immobile, as the Weaver went back to work on his mother. He was watching the slow, dreadful path of the blood. Disbelief and shock had settled in, hazing his mind. At some point, he turned and walked away. None of the bargemen noticed him go, nor did they notice him picking up his father’s rifle on the way. He did not really know where he was heading, motivated only by some vague impulse that refused to cohere into a form he could understand. He was barely aware of moving at all until he found himself standing in front of the door to the cargo hold, hidden in the shade at the bottom of a set of wooden stairs, and he could go no further.

  He raised his rifle and fired into the lock, blasting it to shards.

  There was something in here, something that he was looking for, but whenever he tried to picture it he only saw that insidious blood, and his mother’s face. 71

  His father was dead. His mother was being . . . violated.

  He was here for something, but what? It was too terrible to think about, so he didn’t think.

  The cargo hold was hot and dark and spacious. He knew from memory the dimensions of the place, how high the ribbed wooden ceiling went, how far back the bow wall lay. Crates and barrels were dim shadows nearby, lashed together with rope. Thin lines of sunlight where the tar had worn away on the deck above provided meagre illumination, but not enough to see by until his eyes had adjusted to the gloom from the blinding summer’s day outside. Absently, he re-primed the bolt on his father’s rifle, taking a step into the hold, searching. There were running footsteps overhead.

  Something stirred.

  Lan’s eyes flickered to the source of the sound. He squinted into the gloom.

  It moved then, a slow flexing that allowed him to pick out its shape. The blood drained from his face.

  He staggered backward, holding his rifle defensively across his chest. There were things down here. As he watched, more of them began to creep from the shadows. They were making a soft trilling sound, like a flock of pigeons, but their predatory lope made them seem anything but benign, and they approached with a casually lethal gait.

  Shouts behind him. Bargemen running down the steps to the hold, attracted by the sound of the rifle.

  Fuira shrieked distantly, a forlorn wail of loss and agony and fear, and Lan suddenly recalled what he was here for.

  Ignition powder. The cargo.

  A tidy stack of barrels lay against the stern wall, by the door where the other bargemen had rushed into the hold. They scrambled to a halt, partially because they had remembered the Weaver’s edict, mostly because they thought Lan’s gun was levelled at them. The darkness made it hard to see. He was aiming at the barrels. Enough there to blast the Pelaska to flinders and leave barely a trace of any of them.

  It was the only way to end his mother’s suffering. The only way.

  Behind him, there was the sound of dozens of creatures breaking into a run, and the trilling reached shrieking pitch in his ears.

  He whispered a short prayer to Omecha, squeezed the trigger, and the world turned to flame.

  SEVEN

  The Xarana Fault lay far to the south of the Saramyr capital of Axekami, across a calm expanse of plains and gentle hills. In stark contrast to its approach, the Fault itself was a jagged, rucked chaos of valleys, plateaux, outcrops, canyons and steep-sided rock masses like miniature mountains. Sheer walls abutted sunken rivers; hidden glades nestled in cradles of sharp stones; the very ground was a shattered jigsaw which rose and fell to no apparent geological law. The Fault was a massive scar in the land, over two hundred and fifty miles from end to end and forty at its thickest point, cutting west to east and slanting slightly southwards on its way.

  Legend had made it a cursed place, and there was more than a little truth in that. Once, the first Saramyr city of Gobinda had been built there, before a great destruction – said to be the wrath of Ocha in retribution for the pride of the third Blood Emperor Bizak tu Cho – had wiped it away. Restless things remembered that time, and still roamed the hollows and deeps of the Fault, preying on the unwary. It was shunned, at first as a symbol of Saramyr’s shame but later as a place where lawlessness abounded, where only bandits and those foolhardy enough to brave the whispered terrors within would go.

  But for some, the Fault was a haven. Dangerous though it was, there were those who were willing to learn its ways and make their home there. At first it was a place for criminals, who used it as a long-term base from which to raid the Great Spice Road to the west; but later, more people came, fleeing the world outside. Those under sentence of death, those whose temperament made them too alien to live among normal people, those who sought the deep riches exposed at the bottom of the Fault and were prepared to risk anything to get it. Settlements were founded, small at first but then becoming larger as they amalgamated or conquered others. Aberrants – who would be executed on sight in any lawful town – began to appear, looking for sanctuary from the Weavers who hunted them.

  The home of the Libera Dramach was one such community. It was known to its inhabitants as the Fold, both to imply a sense of belonging and because of the valley in which the settlement was built. It was constructed across an overlapping series of plateaux and ledges that tumbled down the blunt western end of the valley, linked together by stairs, wooden bridges and pulley-lifts. The Fold cluttered and piled up on itself in a heap, a confusing mishmash of architecture from all over Saramyr, built by many hands and not all of them skilled. It was an accretion of dwellings raised over twe
nty-five years to no overarching plan or pattern; instead, newcomers had made their homes wherever they would fit, and in some cases they only barely did.

  Off the dirt tracks that wound haphazardly across the uneven terrain, rickety storefronts sold whatever the merchants could get this far into the Fold. Bars peddled liquor from their own stills, smokehouses offered amaxa root and other narcotics for those who could afford it. Dusky Tchom Rin children in their traditional desert garb walked alongside Newlandsmen from the far northeast; an Aberrant youth with mottled skin and yellow eyes like a hawk’s kissed deeply with an elegant girl from the wealthy Southern Prefectures; a priest of Omecha knelt in a small and sheltered shrine to make an offering to his deity; a soldier walked the streets, lightly tapping the pommel of his sword, alert for any trouble.

  Amid the immediate clutter of houses were the fortifications. Guard-towers and outposts rose above the crush. Walls had been built, their boundaries overrun by the growing town, and newer ones constructed further out. Fire-cannons looked east over the valley. On the rocky rim, which sheltered the Fold from prying eyes, a thick stockade hid between the pleats and dips of the land. In the Xarana Fault, danger was never very far away, and the people of the Fold had learned to defend themselves.

  Lucia tu Erinima stood on the balcony of her guardian’s house, on one of the uppermost levels of the town, and fed crumbs to tiny piping birds from her cupped hand. A pair of ravens, perched on the guttering of the building opposite, watched her with a careful eye. From within the house, sharing a brew of hot, bitter tea, Zaelis and Cailin watched her also.

  ‘Gods, she’s grown so much,’ Zaelis sighed, turning away to face his companion.

  Cailin smiled faintly, but the black-and-red pattern of alternating triangles on her lips made her look like a smirking predator. ‘If I were a more cynical woman, I would think that you engineered the kidnapping of your erstwhile pupil all those years ago just so you could adopt her for yourself.’

  ‘Ha!’ he barked. ‘You think I haven’t been over that in my mind enough times?’

  ‘And what did you decide?’

  ‘That I worry far more since I became her surrogate father than I ever did in all the years since I started the Libera Dramach.’

  ‘You have looked after them both admirably,’ Cailin said, then took a sip from the small green tea-bowl in her hand.

  Zaelis gave her a surprised look. ‘That’s unusually kind of you, Cailin,’ he said.

  ‘I am occasionally capable of being so.’

  Zaelis turned his attention back to the balcony where Lucia stood. Once, she had been the heir to the Saramyr Empire. Now she was just a girl a few weeks from her fourteenth harvest, standing in the sun in a simple white dress, feeding birds. Her blonde hair, once long, was cut short and exposed the nape of her neck, from which terrible burn scars ran down her back. He wished she would grow her hair again; her scars were easy enough to conceal. But when he asked her she would only give him that fey, dreamy look of hers and ignore him. She was pretty as a child, and now that the bones of her face and body were lengthening it was already easy to see that she would be beautiful as a woman, with the same petite and deceptively naïve features that her mother had. But in those pale blue eyes there was a strangeness that made her unfathomable to him, to anyone. He had known her longer than anyone alive, but he still didn’t know her.

  ‘I worry also,’ Cailin said eventually.

  ‘About Lucia?’

  ‘Among other things.’

  ‘Then you mean her . . .’ – Zaelis searched for a word with an expression of faint disgust – ‘followers.’

  Cailin shook her head once, her black ponytails swinging gently with the movement. ‘I will admit they are a problem. It is far harder to keep her secret from those who would harm her when rumour spreads from the mouths of those who would keep her safe. Yet they do not concern me overly, and they may eventually prove to serve a purpose.’

  Zaelis sipped his tea meditatively and stole a glance at Lucia. Several of the birds were perched on the balcony rail now, looking at her like children attentive to a master. ‘What troubles you, then?’

  Cailin stirred and stood. At her full height, she was tall for a woman, and of deliberately fearsome appearance. Zaelis, from where he sat cross-legged on a mat by the low table, followed her up with his eyes. She walked a few paces across the room and stopped, looking away from him.

  ‘We are short of time,’ she said.

  ‘You know this?’ Zaelis asked.

  Cailin hesitated, then made a negative noise. ‘I feel it.’

  Zaelis frowned. It was not like Cailin to be so indefinite with him. She was a practical woman, little given to flights of fancy. He waited for her to continue.

  ‘I know how that sounds, Zaelis,’ she snapped irritably, as if he had accused her. ‘I wish I had more evidence to present you.’

  He got up and stood with her, favouring one leg. His other was weak; it had been badly broken long ago and never quite healed. ‘Tell me what you feel, then.’

  ‘Things are building to a head,’ Cailin replied after a short pause to marshal her thoughts. ‘The Weavers have been too quiet these past years. What have they gained from their alliance with Mos? Think, Zaelis. What moves they had to make, they could have made directly after Mos took power. They had nobody to oppose them then. But what did they do instead?’

  ‘They bought land. They bought land, and shipping companies on the rivers.’

  ‘Legitimate enterprises,’ Cailin said, throwing a slender hand up as if to dash the words away. ‘And none that turn any kind of profit.’ Her frustration was evident in her tone. The Libera Dramach had been unsuccessful at gaining any further information on the Weavers’ curious purchases. The Weavers had defences that ordinary spies could not penetrate, and Cailin dared not use any of the Red Order for fear of revealing them. One captured Sister could bring the whole delicate network down.

  ‘This is old news, Cailin,’ Zaelis said. ‘Why is it bothering you now?’

  ‘I do not know,’ Cailin replied. ‘Perhaps because I cannot see their plan. There are too many unanswered questions.’

  ‘Yours has been the loudest voice arguing for secrecy these past years,’ he reminded her. ‘We have been content to consolidate, to build our strength and hide ourselves while Lucia grows. Perhaps we have been too careful. Perhaps we should have been harrying them every step of the way.’

  ‘I think you overestimate us,’ Cailin said. ‘We hide because we must. To reveal our hand too early would be the death of us all.’ She paused, mused for a time, then went on: ‘The Weavers appear to be consolidating also, but look closer: they knew from the start that their term in power was finite. They knew the very blight their witchstones cause would poison the earth, and they must have known Mos would be blamed for it. Mos is their champion; without him, they will not only be torn from power, but punished for trying to usurp the system. The nobles plot to be rid of him.’

  ‘But who has the strength to do it?’ Zaelis asked. ‘The only one who even might be a contender is Blood Kerestyn, in alliance with Blood Koli. They could stir up an army that would trouble the Blood Emperor. But even they could not defeat him in Axekami, with the Weavers behind him. In a few years, perhaps, but not now. They would not dare attack, no matter what outrages Mos commits. And what chance does an assassin have with Kakre guarding his life?’

  ‘But now there is the famine, and the prospect of poor harvest. The very people will rise against Mos sooner or later,’ said Cailin. She turned to Zaelis, her gaze cool. ‘Do you not see, Zaelis? There was no way that the Weavers could have thought this rise to power was a permanent position, since it is their blight that is undermining their benefactor. They were buying time.’

  ‘They have had hundreds of years to do whatever you suspect they are doing,’ Zaelis argued, his phlegmy voice as persuasive and authoritative as ever.

  ‘But they have only been able to move freely these past
five,’ Cailin said. ‘They are letting the empire slide towards ruin, because they have no interest in maintaining it. They are up to something, Zaelis. And if they do not play their hand now, it may be too late.’

  Zaelis studied his companion. Seeing her so perturbed was profoundly unsettling. She was usually a picture of cold elegance.

  ‘Perhaps our spy from Okhamba will have new insight,’ he said to placate her.

  ‘Perhaps,’ Cailin said, unconvinced. She looked over at Lucia, who had not moved. ‘And in the meantime the spirits in the Fault become more hostile, and we lose more men and women to them than we can afford. They sense the change in the earth and grow bitter. We are being penned in, Zaelis. Soon we will be surrounded by enemies, unable to move within the Fault and unable to leave it.’

  This struck closer to Zaelis’s heart. Two of his best men had disappeared only last week while scouting west along the Fault. He wondered if this place would soon be too dangerous to inhabit, and what they could possibly do if it became so.

  ‘She can help us,’ Zaelis said, following Cailin’s eyes. ‘She can calm the spirits.’

  ‘Can she?’ Cailin mused darkly. ‘I wonder.’

  The world was full of whispers to Lucia.

  It had been that way ever since she could remember. The wind soughed in a secret language, flitting wisps of meaning piquing her attention like catching her name in someone else’s conversation. Rain pattered nonsense at her, teasing her with an incipient form that always washed away before she could grasp it. Rocks thought rock thoughts, slower even than the trees, whose gnarled contemplations sometimes took years to complete. Darting between them were the lightning-fast minds of small animals, ever alert, only relaxing their guard in the safety of their burrows and hidey-holes.