The Skein of Lament

by Chris Wooding

  But she had not gone. She knew what Tsata was thinking, and she was surprised to find that she was thinking the same. The flood plains were all but empty now, only a skeleton guard remaining to supervise the Weavers’ base here in the Fault. And they were the only ones in a position to take advantage of such an oversight.

  The only ones who could get to the witchstone.

  Tsata did not even need to talk her round. A chance like this might never come again. Whatever the outcome of the battle to the east, they owed it to their companions to make use of the opportunity that had unwittingly been provided. They were going into the Weavers’ mine.

  ‘There,’ muttered Kaiku, as a deep growl came from within the bowels of the building. There were a series of loud clanks, and a moment later the pipes in the riverbank spewed forth a torrent of brackish water, blasting the hinged upper and lower halves of the grilles open. The torrent continued for several minutes, carrying with it chunks of rock and organic debris and other things impossible to identify in the moonlight, depositing it all for the Zan to sweep away southward towards the falls. Finally, the roar of the water subsided to a trickle, and the grilles swung closed, no longer forced apart by the pressure. There were a few more heavy thumps from within the brooding building, and then the only noise was the steady rush of the river.

  Kaiku and Tsata emerged from the thicket and crawled through the long grass to the water’s edge. The banks of the Zan were not as barren as the surrounding high ground, being provided with a plentiful supply of fresh water, and the foliage was welcome cover. The two of them went on their knees and elbows to where a log lay some distance upstream, a warped thing that corkscrewed midway along its length. They had rolled it there the previous night in readiness. The tree had been weak enough to topple when they wrapped rope around its top and pulled it down. After that they had been able to tear the branches off by hand, and fashion a very good float with which to cross the river.

  They watched the flood plain for some time. There were shapes there in the dark, perhaps a hundred spread over the whole expanse. Some were wandering idly, but most were asleep. The patrols, what few there were now, were largely on the eastern side of the river; the intruders had little fear of the occasional sentry they had encountered on the western side. The cliffs rose behind the plain, a frowning black wall. Kaiku remembered when they had first lain on that edge and looked down at the enormous army the Aberrants had assembled, terrified of the sheer power that had been gathered here. Now the plain seemed so deserted that it was almost ghostly.

  Once satisfied that nothing was paying attention to the river, they waited for Iridima to hide her face behind a cloud. Kaiku was thankful that they had not had to delay any longer than this for the right conditions in which to attempt their infiltration of the mine; the inactivity, combined with her fears for her friends, had frayed her nerves. But the season was with them: though the weather throughout the year in Saramyr did not vary all that much, due to its position close to the equator of the planet, autumn and spring were generally cloudier and rainier than winter or summer. The habit of dividing the year into seasons was something they had brought with them from temperate Quraal and never really shaken off.

  A feathery blanket of cloud slid across the face of the moon. Kaiku and Tsata glanced at each other once for confirmation and then rolled the log quietly into the river and dropped in after it.

  The water was surprisingly warm, heated over and over by the sun during the many hundreds of miles it had run from the freezing depths of the Tchamil Mountains. Kaiku felt its sodden embrace swamp through her clothes and over her skin. She gauged the tug of the current. The river was sluggish here, gathering itself before the rush towards the falls to the south. She got the log under her armpits and waited for Tsata to do the same; then, when they were balanced, they kicked out into the river.

  The crossing was completed in silence and darkness, with only the plangent lap of the water against the log as they glided towards the eastern bank. They had struck out at an angle upstream, trusting the current to carry them down to where the hulking carapace of the mine brooded sullenly. Their estimation was good, and their luck held, for Iridima stayed hidden and the night remained impenetrable. They bumped against the far side a few dozen feet from the mouths of the pipes, and there they grabbed hold of the bars of the grille and let the log drift away. It was too dangerous to tether their float here; it might be seen when the sun rose.

  The weeks they had spent observing the flood plain had borne fruit in the end. Though Kaiku had been frustrated by their inability to get close to a Nexus or the mysterious Weaver building, they had gleaned much about the comings and goings that went on here, and made many theoretical plans. But the one that had obsessed Kaiku the most involved the rhythmic evacuation of water through those pipes. She was unable to gauge exactly how long it was between each deluge, for she had no means accurate enough, but both she and Tsata agreed that it was more or less regular, and that there were several hours at least separating one from the next. The water was coming from somewhere, she reasoned. As long as they timed their entry right, they would be able to crawl up one of the pipes and investigate. Presumably the grilles were there to stop debris or animals from the river getting in; and that meant that there would be somewhere for them to get to.

  It was only now that she looked into the mouth of one of the pipes, sheltered from the sight of the plain by the rise of the riverbank, that the reality of her plan hit home. Once in there, she would be trammelled, hemmed in by the cold sides of the pipe, with nowhere to go but forward or back. She felt a fluttering panic in her belly.

  Tsata put his hand on her wet shoulder and squeezed, sensing her hesitation. She looked back at him, his tattooed face almost invisible in the dark. She could feel the determination in his gaze and took a little of that for her own.

  Between them, they pulled down the lower half of the grille. There was some kind of spring mechanism on it to help it close against the push of the river, but it was weak and rusted from lack of maintenance. Kaiku went first, taking a breath and ducking under the upper grille to emerge on the other side, looking back through the bars at Tsata with her hair plastered across one side of her face. The pipe was big enough to stand in if she hunched over; the river water came up to her waist. Tsata followed her through, letting the grille close behind him after checking that there was no apparent locking mechanism.

  ‘If it comes to that,’ Kaiku said, reading his thoughts, ‘I’ll blow them apart.’

  Tsata knew what she implied. It had been enough of a risk to send the warning to Cailin; even though the Weavers had not caught her, they might well be more alert now if they had detected it. To use her kana in here would be a virtual death sentence; but for all that, she would use it if she had to. She was merely making that clear to him, and to herself. Whatever Cailin advised, her power was her own, to use as she would.

  Tsata found himself smiling. If ever she took the robes of the Red Order, Cailin would have a fight on her hands to keep this one in line.

  They made their way into the pipe, the gentle splashes as they forged the water aside echoing amid the sussurance. Other sounds came to them, distant grindings and irregular clumps and scrapes, made eerie by reverberation. Darkness closed about, utter blackness, with only the faint slitted circle of the pipe mouth providing any kind of touchstone to their location. Once they had gone inward for some way, they stopped. Tsata began unwrapping the candle that he had tied in a waterproof bag on his belt.

  ‘Wait,’ Kaiku whispered.

  ‘You need the light,’ he said. He did not need to point out that he did not, at least not yet. He had vision like an owl’s, an inheritance from the purestrain Okhambans that had bred with the refugees from Quraal all that time ago and produced the Tkiurathi.

  ‘Wait,’ she said again. ‘Give me time.’

  Her eyes were adjusting to the darkness fast enough that she could actually see shapes appearing out of the blackness
: the blank curve the pipe, the shifting contours of the water.

  ‘I can see,’ she said.

  ‘Are you sure?’ Tsata asked, surprise in his voice.

  ‘Of course I am sure,’ she said, amused. ‘Put the candle away.’

  He did so, and they went onward. They had guessed that the pipe would not be very long, since the buildings they fed from were set close to the riverbank, and Kaiku found it was not so much of a trial as she had expected. The claustrophobia of her situation did not bother her as she had thought it might, as long as she did not dwell on the possibility of all those tons of water smashing into them. But she was confident enough in the unwavering regularity of the evacuation, and confident enough in herself that she was not plagued with her usual doubts and fears.

  With a faint hint of wonder, she realised how much she had grown since Aestival Week: since she had been tricked by Asara and outmatched demons in the Weave; since she had healed a dying friend by instinct alone and spent weeks living on her wits, killing Aberrants, relying only on herself and this foreigner with his barely comprehensible ways. She was fundamentally the same as she always had been, but her attitude had changed, matured, bringing with it a selfassuredness that she never knew she had.

  She found that she liked herself that way.

  Presently, the sporadic clanks and groans became louder, enveloping them, and chinks of what seemed like firelight began to appear in the pipe, minute rust-fractures hinting at what lay beyond. Then, as they rounded a bend so slight that they had barely noticed it, they came in sight of the end.

  Kaiku blinked at the brightness. The pipe appeared to widen as it neared its termination, joining with the second pipe that ran alongside it to make one huge oblong corridor. Its floor sloped upward so that it was above the level of the river water that they had been wading through. Beyond it she could only see what looked like a wall of dull, bronzecoloured metal.

  She glanced at Tsata. He murmured something in Okhamban, his eyes on what lay ahead.

  ‘What does that mean?’ she whispered.

  Tsata seemed faintly taken aback that she had heard him. He had not meant to say it aloud. ‘It is like you might say a prayer for protection,’ he replied.

  ‘But you have no gods in Okhamba,’ Kaiku said. ‘And you do not believe in your ancestors living on in anything but memory.’

  ‘It is addressed to the pash,’ he said. For the first time, she saw him embarrassed. ‘I was asking for your protection, and offering you mine. It is merely a custom.’

  Kaiku wiped the sodden hair back from her face. ‘And how am I supposed to respond?’

  ‘Hthre,’ he said. Kaiku repeated it, unsure of her pronunciation. ‘It means you accept the pledge and offer your own.’

  She smiled. ‘Hthre,’ she said, with more conviction this time.

  He looked away from her. ‘It is merely a custom,’ he repeated.

  They crept out of the water and along the widening pipe. After so long in night and darkness, the warm, fiery glow at the end made them feel uneasy. Their progress was wary, hugging the walls as they flattened out, their fingers running over rusting panels fused together by some craft that neither Kaiku nor Tsata knew. As they neared the light, they saw that it was not a wall at the end but a steep slope, like a chute, which they were at the bottom of. They peeked out of the end of the pipe, but there was nobody there. Above them, they could see only darkness, and around them were the walls of the chute that fed into the pipe where they emerged. The source of the glow was similarly obscured.

  But there was a ladder, made of metal, fixed against one side of the chute.

  Kaiku climbed. There was nothing else to do, and no other, more subtle way up. Tsata remained at the bottom, his hide clothes dripping and forming a puddle around his shoes. She wished suddenly that there had been some way to waterproof her rifle and bring it along. It would have comforted her, even if she knew it would be little help in the event that they were discovered.

  She reached the top of the ladder, and her stomach fell away as she saw the true immensity of the Weavers’ mine.

  The humped roof of the building was not, as she had expected, the ceiling of some kind of dwelling; rather, it was the cap of a colossal shaft that plunged down into abyssal depths. The shaft was not a straight drop; the blackness at its bottom was obscured by stone bulges where the sides narrowed and jags of rock that projected into the centre. Vast ledges scarred it, and pillars rose up like blunt needles, made small by comparison to their surroundings.

  The chute that Kaiku had clambered out of was set on the edge of a great semicircular sill. Its lower lip continued up above her to an enormous dump-tank which sat upright in a cradle of curled iron. A pair of spiked wheels rotated slowly behind it, huge cogs dragging up scoops affixed to rattling chains which tipped water into the dump-tank and then headed monotonously downward again to collect more.

  Kaiku, peripherally aware that the immediate vicinity appeared to be deserted, clambered out of the chute and stood there gawking, awed by the sheer size and strangeness of the place.

  The illumination that she had seen from the bottom of the chute was provided by metal torches and pillars which burned with flame; but it was not like any normal flame, being more similar to combusting vapour. They billowed clouds of smoky fire that trailed upward and then dissipated, turning to noisome black fumes which floated away to collect at the top of the shaft. She realised that the darkness above her was not through lack of light, but that it was a churning pall of smoke which slowly vented itself into the clean air outside through pores in the cap.

  The multitude of ledges and pillars were linked with a network of precarious walkways, rope bridges and stairways that hung like spiderwebs across the shaft. Walls were scabbed with props and joists of wood and metal, delineating pathways for mine carts to travel, and caves opened all over the shaft, glowing from within. Paternosters groaned and steamed in the depths, furnaces blazing at their heart as they rotated in idiot procession. Iron cranes jabbed out into nowhere, still carrying loads, abandoned. Thin waterfalls plunged endlessly, issuing from cave mouths to fall into nothingness, or to strike a rock ledge further down in a mist of spray before running off and down again. Kaiku saw small, ramshackle wooden huts clustered together, sometimes built on the tip of a pillar and linked only by a single bridge to the rest of the mine. It was hot in the shaft, and reeked; there was an unpleasant tinny taste that caught at the back of the throat.

  Kaiku stared in wonder and terror at the thing the Weavers had created. She had never seen so much metal in her life, nor seen it wrought in such quantity. What kind of forges must the Weavers have? What had been going on for over two hundred years in the heart of their monasteries where the Edgefathers crafted their Masks? What kind of art had created those strange torches, or those hissing and steaming contraptions that moved without anything apparent to power them?

  She felt a touch on her upper arm and jumped, but it was only Tsata.

  ‘We are too exposed,’ he said, his eyes flickering over the scene with a glint in them that might have been disgust, might have been anger.

  She was glad to tear herself away from it.

  They retreated along the sill to the sides of the shaft, where the enfolding darkness lurked. The huge metal torches were only sparsely placed about the mine, and though the area they illuminated was much greater than a normal torch or lantern would be, it still left areas of deep shadow. From here, Kaiku and Tsata carried out a more thorough observation of their surroundings, looking for movement. There was none. The shaft appeared to be deserted.

  ‘Your eyes,’ Tsata said after a time, motioning at her.

  Kaiku frowned, making a querying noise.

  ‘They have changed. Your irises have more red in them than before.’

  She gave him a puzzled look. ‘Before?’

  ‘Before we entered the pipe.’

  Kaiku thought on that for a moment, remembering the surprise in Tsata’s voice w
hen she had refused the illumination he had offered.

  ‘How dark was it in there?’ she asked.

  ‘Too dark for you to see,’ he replied.

  Kaiku felt a thrill of unease. Had she . . . adapted herself? Had she been using her kana without even knowing it, the tiniest increase in her senses to compensate for her lack of vision? She did not even know how she would go about doing that, but her subconscious certainly seemed to. Just like with Yugi, cleaning him of the raku-shai’s poison. The more she used her kana, the more it seemed to use her, making her a conduit rather than a mistress. Was that what it was like for all the Sisters? She would have to discuss it with Cailin when she returned.

  If there was anything left to return to.

  She strangled that thought as soon as it arrived. There was no time for doubts now. The Aberrant horde would almost be upon the Fold, and there was nothing in the world she could do about it. She could only hope that her warning had given them enough time to prepare or to get away from there.

  They headed along the sill and onto a walkway that hugged the sides of the shaft, curving round to the entrance of a tunnel. The walkway was made of iron, supported by joists driven into the rock and hanging over an unfathomable drop. Kaiku did not want to touch the railing with her bare skin. Railings in Saramyr were made of carved wood, or occasionally polished stone; never a metal like this, rusting and flaking in the updrafts of steam, spotted with brown decay.

  It was a relief when they came to the end of the walkway. Stone she could trust.