The Skein of Lament

by Chris Wooding

  It was just like last time. She had felt that hunger before.

  ‘No . . .’ she murmured, tears standing in her eyes as she got up. She had gathered her blouse across her breasts protectively. Her fringe fell over her face. ‘No, no, no.’ She whimpered it like a mantra, as if she could deny the magnitude of the betrayal she felt.

  Saran was getting to his feet, his face a picture of anguish.

  ‘Kaiku . . .’ he began.

  ‘No, no, NO!’ she screamed, and the tears spilled over and down her cheeks. Her lip trembled. ‘Is it you? Is it you?’

  Saran did not speak, but he shook his head a little, not in denial but because he was begging her not to ask the question.

  ‘Asara?’ she whispered.

  His expression tightened in a stab of pain, and that was all the answer Kaiku needed. She fell to her knees, her features crumpling as she began to cry.

  ‘How could you?’ she sobbed, then suddenly she found her anger and she shrieked: ‘How could you?’

  His gaze was aggrieved, but they were Asara’s eyes. He opened his mouth to speak, but there were no words. Instead, he picked up his jacket and walked out into the warm night, leaving Kaiku on the floor of the room, weeping.

  THIRTEEN

  Dawn came to the Xarana Fault, a bleak and flat light muted by a blanket of unseasonable cloud that haunted the eastern horizon. Morning mists wisped in the hollows of the Fold, stirring gently among the creases and pits of the valley. The town was eerily silent, and not a soul walked the crooked streets except for an occasional guard, the creak of their hardened-leather armour preceding them along the empty passageways and dirt alleys. Aestival Week had begun two days ago now, and that first night the whole town had celebrated long past the dawn and into the morning. Last night, the festivities had been less raucous: people slept and recovered, and they would still be in bed for a long while yet.

  But there were some whose purpose even Aestival Week could not be allowed to delay. They had gathered on the uppermost tier of the town, where a sheer wall of rock rose up on the western end of the valley, riddled with caves bored by the same ancient and long-dried waterways that had cut the plateaux and ledges below them. Blessings and etchings had been carved into the stone around the cave mouths, and small alcoves had been cut into the rock to serve as shrines. Even now, the musky smell of smouldering kama nuts and incense reached them faintly, the remnants of yesterday’s offerings. Small hanging charms clacked and chimed.

  Kaiku sat on the grass, her face pale and her eyes dark from sleeplessness, and gazed bitterly over the valley and into the east. She was vaguely aware of the other three behind her. They were tightening the belts on their backpacks, chambering ammunition in their rifles, murmuring softly as if loth to disturb the stillness of the dawn: Tsata, Yugi, and Nomoru, the surly scout whose report had inspired this expedition. Today they set out to cross the Fault, heading along it lengthwise to where the Zan cut through near its western end, and there to investigate the anomaly that Nomoru had found. There to seek out the Weavers once again.

  She should have felt something more than this. After so long champing at the bit, the prospect of coming up against the Weavers, the murderers of her family whom she was oath-bound to oppose, should have fired something inside her. If not excitement, then at least fear or trepidation. But her heart felt dead in her breast, an ashen lump like a fire burned out, and she could not even summon the enthusiasm to care.

  How could she not have known about Saran? How could she not have recognised the source of her attraction? Gods, she had stood there on the bow of Chien’s ship and told him about how Asara brought her back from the brink of death, how that act had bonded them on some deep and subtle level, and all the time it had been that very bond that was drawing them together. All the time it had been Asara she had been talking to.

  Spirits, Kaiku hated her. She hated her deceit, her trickery, her unbearable selfishness. Hated how she had allowed Kaiku to believe she was Saran, to dupe her into talking about Asara while Asara herself watched from behind those dark Quraal eyes; and then, worst of all, to allow Kaiku to seduce him, to make love to him, thinking he was a real person and not some cursed counterfeit. It made no difference that they had not completed the act. The betrayal was in the intention, not in the result: and it was total.

  Kaiku knew now that her decision to sleep with him had not been one based on simple lust and the desire to enjoy him; she had been fooling herself there. She had opened herself to him, and in her mind the consummation would have been more than just bedplay but an affirmation of the feeling that she thought had grown between them. Not that she admitted it to herself, of course. She had never been an honest judge of her own emotions. It was only by the savagery of her grief that she realised how much she had secretly invested in Saran, and by then it was too late.

  She had made herself vulnerable, and once again she had been cut to pieces. Staring balefully into the middle distance, she promised herself grimly that it would never happen again.

  ‘It’s time, Kaiku,’ said Yugi, laying a hand on her shoulder.

  She looked up at him slowly, hardly seeming to see him; then she got wearily to her feet, picked up her pack and rifle and shouldered them.

  ‘I am ready,’ she said.

  They passed through the fortifications on the rim of the Fold and headed westward. Nuki’s eye rose above the louring clouds to warm the canyons and valleys of the Xarana Fault. For a long while, nobody spoke. Nomoru led them into narrow pleats that angled down to the lower depths, where they could pass unobserved through the wild land about them. The jagged and bumped horizon was consumed by high walls of scree-dusted rock, rising before and behind and to either side. They passed out of Nuki’s sight, and into the cool shadow.

  The western side of the Fold was guarded by a tight labyrinth of fissures and tunnels known as the Knot. Here, ages ago, the same springs that had flowed east from the lip of the valley to sculpt the land on which the town was built had also flowed westward, gnawing through the ancient stone. As time passed the water would undermine some vital support, or the earth would be shaken by the tremors and quakes that ran through the Fault from time to time, and the rock above it would collapse and divert some of the tunnels elsewhere. Now the water was gone, but the paths remained, a maze of branching dead-ends that led tortuously downward. It was possible, and much faster, to go over the top of the Knot, where there was a bare hump of smooth stone a mile wide, like a horseshoe around the western edge of the Fold; but up there was no kind of cover and anyone attempting to cross it would be visible for miles around. In the Fault, secrecy was the watchword.

  The dawn had grown into a bright morning by the time they emerged from the Knot. They clambered out of a thin crack onto the floor of a ravine, sloping gently upward ahead of them. Kaiku caught her breath as she saw it, and even through the weight of misery that she carried she felt a moment of awe.

  The walls of the ravine rose sheer to over a hundred feet above their heads, a weathered mass of creases and ledges on which narrow swatches of bushes grew where they could find purchase. The floor was an untamed garden of trees and flowers, leaves of deep red and purple mixed in amid the green. A spring fed into a series of small pools. The sun was blazing over the rim at a shallow angle, throwing its light to the far end of the ravine and leaving the near end in shade. Bright birds nested in the heights, occasionally bursting out to swoop and tumble, chattering as they went. The air was still and hazed with a dreamlike glow. They had stepped into a secret paradise.

  ‘This is the edge of our territory,’ Nomoru said. It was the first anyone had spoken since they set out, and her harsh and ugly Low Saramyrrhic vowels jarred against Kaiku’s mood. ‘Not so safe from now on.’

  The Xarana Fault was an ever-shifting mass of unacknowledged borders, neutral ground and disputed areas. The political geography of the place was as unstable as the Fault itself. Like gangs, each faction held their territory jealously, but from
one month to the next entire communities might be sacked or overthrown, or defect to join a more powerful leader. The Fold was at constant war to keep its routes open to the outside world, and bandits preyed upon the cargoes that were smuggled in to supply the Libera Dramach. Other forces had other agendas: some were relentlessly expansionist, pursuing the hopeless ideal of dominating or uniting the Fault; others wanted merely to be left alone, and poured their efforts into defence rather than aggression; still others simply hid. The business of knowing what their neighbours were up to was a perpetual drain on the time and resources of Zaelis and the Libera Dramach, but it was vital for survival in the cut-throat world that they had settled in.

  They headed onward with renewed vigilance. The terrain was hard, and Nomoru seemed to choose difficult routes more often than not, for the most inaccessible ways were often the safest. Within hours, Kaiku had utterly lost her sense of direction. She glared resentfully at the wiry figure leading them, blaming her for their ordeal; then she caught herself and realised how unfair that was. If not for Asara, she would have been glad to come on this expedition. If not for Asara.

  She found herself lapsing into dark thoughts again in the absence of conversation. Yugi was unusually subdued, and Tsata rarely said anything unless it was worth saying, content instead to observe and listen with an alien and faintly unsettling curiosity. Had he known? Had he known that Saran was not who he appeared to be? What about Zaelis and Cailin; surely they had known? Cailin would have, certainly: she could sense Aberrants merely by looking at them. All the Sisters could.

  In the aftermath of her discovery, in the rage that came after grief, she had wanted to face Cailin and Zaelis and demand to know why they had not told her. But it was useless; she already knew their arguments. Asara was a spy, and it was not their place to reveal her. Kaiku had spoken little enough to anyone but Mishani about Asara, and said nothing at all about her attraction to Saran. Why should they intervene? And besides, she would only be feeding Cailin ammunition for her demands that Kaiku apply herself to the teachings of the Red Order. If she had attended to her lessons instead of restlessly combing the land, she would have sensed Asara’s true identity herself.

  And yet she had not suspected. How could she, really? She had no idea of the extent of Asara’s Aberrant abilities. She had witnessed her shift her features subtly, change the hue of her hair, even seen a tattoo on her arm that faded away; she had seen her repair the most horrendous burns to her face. But to change not only the form of her body but her gender . . . that had been beyond even Kaiku’s notion of possibility. What kind of creature could do that? What kind of thing?

  And what kind of thing can twist the threads of reality to shape fire or break minds? she asked herself pitilessly. She is no more impossible than you. The world is changing faster than you imagine. The witchstones are remaking Saramyr, and all that once was is uncertain now.

  ‘You’re brooding, Kaiku,’ Yugi said from behind her. ‘I can feel it from here.’

  She smiled apologetically at him, and her heart lifted a little. ‘Talk to me, Yugi. This will be a long journey, and if someone does not do something to lighten the mood then I do not think I will last the day.’

  ‘Sorry. I’ve been a little remiss as the provider of good humour,’ he said with a grin. ‘I was suffering somewhat from last night, but the walk has cleared my head.’

  ‘Over-indulged yourself, did you?’ Kaiku prodded.

  ‘Hardly. I didn’t touch a thing. No wonder I feel so awful.’

  She laughed softly. Nomoru, up ahead, glanced back at them with an irritable expression.

  ‘You’re troubled,’ Yugi said, his voice becoming more serious. ‘Is it the Mask?’

  ‘Not the Mask,’ she said, and it was true: she had entirely forgotten it until now, obsessed as she was with nursing the hurt Asara had done to her. It lay wrapped in her pack, the Mask her father had stolen and died for. She felt it suddenly, leering at her. For five years it had been hidden in a chest in her house, and she had never put it on again; for she knew well enough the way the True Masks worked, how they were narcotic in nature, addicting the wearer to the euphoria of the Weave, granting great power but stealing reason and sanity. Yet the insidious craving was undiminished, the tickle at the back of her mind whenever she thought of it. Calling to her.

  Sometime in the afternoon, they rested and ate on a grassy slope beneath an overhang. They had passed out of the ravine and were skirting a sunken plain of broken rocks, bordered on all sides by high cliffs. Some of the rocks had thrust their way up from below in shattered formations like brutal stone flowers, their petals lined with quartz and limestone and malachite; others had fallen from the tall buttes that jutted precariously into the sky. The travellers had been darting from cover to cover for over an hour now, and while the progress they made was faster than it had been through the ravines, it was harder on the nerves. They were too exposed for comfort here.

  ‘Why did we come this way? We’re not in so much of a hurry,’ Yugi asked Nomoru conversationally, as he ate a cold leg of waterfowl.

  Nomoru’s thin face hardened, taking umbrage at the comment. ‘I’m the guide,’ she snapped. ‘I know these lands.’

  Yugi was unperturbed. ‘Then educate me, please. I know them too, though not so well as you, I’d imagine. There’s a high pass to the south where—’

  ‘Can’t go that way,’ Nomoru said dismissively.

  ‘Why not?’ said Tsata. Kaiku looked at him in vague surprise. It was the first he had spoken that day.

  ‘It doesn’t matter why not,’ Nomoru replied, digging her heels in further. Kaiku was taken aback by the rudeness of her manner.

  Tsata studied the scout for a moment. Hunkered in the shade of the rock, the pale green tattoo reaching tendrils over his arms and face, he looked strangely at home here in the Fault. His skin, which had been sallow in the dawn light, now seemed golden in the afternoon and he appeared healthier for it. ‘You have knowledge of these lands, so you must share it. To withhold it hurts the pash.’

  ‘The pash?’ Nomoru sneered, uncomprehending.

  ‘The group,’ Kaiku said. ‘We four are now travelling together, so that makes us the pash. Is that right?’ She addressed this last to Tsata.

  ‘One kind of pash,’ Tsata corrected. ‘Not the only kind. But yes, that is what I was referring to.’

  Nomoru held up her hands in exasperation. Kaiku noted Nomoru’s own tattoos on her arms as her sleeves fell back: intricate, jagged shapes and spirals, intertwining through emblems and pictograms symbolic of allegiances or debts owed and honoured. It was the tradition of the beggars, thieves and other low folk of the Poor Quarter in Axekami to ink their history onto their skin; in that way, promises made could not be broken. In poverty, need drove them to perform services for each other, a community of necessity. Mostly, their word was their bond; but occasionally, for more important matters, something greater was required. A tattoo was an outward display of their undertaking. Usually it was left half-drawn, and finished when the task was done. The Inkers of the Poor Quarter knew all faces and all debts, and they would only complete a tattoo once they had word the task had been fulfilled. An oathbreaker would soon be exposed, and they would not survive long when others refused to aid them.

  How strange, Kaiku thought, that the need for honour increased as money and possessions decreased. She wondered if Nomoru had been an oathbreaker; but the meaning of the tattooes was incomprehensible to her, and any words she could see were written in an argot of Low Saramyrrhic which she did not know.

  ‘Territories change,’ Nomoru said, relenting ungraciously at last. ‘But the borders aren’t defined. Between territories, it’s uncertain. Scouts, warriors sometimes, but no proper guards, no fortifications. So I’ve been taking you between the territories. Not so well guarded, easier to slip through.’ She tilted her head in the direction of the rock-strewn plain. ‘This place is a battlefield. Look at the terrain. Nobody owns it. Too many spirits her
e.’

  ‘Spirits?’ Kaiku asked.

  ‘They come at night,’ Nomoru said. ‘Lot of killing here. Places remember. So we come in the day. Keep our heads down, we stay safe.’

  She scratched her knee beneath her trousers, and looked at Yugi. ‘The high pass got taken a month ago. There was a fight; someone lost, someone won.’ She shrugged. ‘Used to be safe. Now you’d be killed before you got a yard into it.’ She raised her eyebrow at Tsata. ‘Satisfied?’ she asked archly.

  He tipped his chin at her. Nomoru scowled in confusion, not knowing that it was the Okhamban way of nodding. Kaiku did not enlighten her. She had already decided that she disliked the tangle-haired scout.

  It was late evening when their luck ran out.

  The sky was a dull and glowering purple-red, streaked with shades of deep blue and ribboned with strips of translucent cloud. Neryn and Aurus were travelling together tonight, and they were already hanging low in the western sky, a thin crescent of green peeping out from behind the vast waxing face of the larger sister. Nomoru was leading them along a high spine of land, rising up above the surrounding miles of thin ghylls and narrow canyons. The ground here was broken into a jigsaw of grassy ledges which rose and fell alarmingly, so that they often found themselves having to climb around dark pits or clamber up thin, dizzying slopes with a terrible drop on either side. As hard as it was, it did have one advantage: they were well hidden within its folds, and nobody was likely to see them unless they ran into them.

  They had almost reached the far end of the spine, where the land loomed glowering to meet them again, when Nomoru suddenly held her hand up, her fingers curved in the Saramyr gesture for quiet. It was something that all children learned, generally from their parents who used it often on them. Tsata either knew or guessed its meaning, but his movements were utterly silent anyway.