Braided Path 03 - The Ascendancy Veil

by Chris Wooding

  Zahn did not want to trouble himself with it. He believed their loyalty towards their kin was genuine – and indeed, he had never prevented them seeing Lucia – but it was also painfully transparent that they were thinking towards the outcome of the war, for if victorious then Lucia was by far the most likely candidate for the throne, and Blood Erinima wanted to ride with her to power again. However, Zahn’s claim on her complicated things immensely, for as the only surviving parent she was legally his child before the family of the deceased mother. If that claim could be proved to be genuine.

  But Zahn was not the biggest problem: Lucia was. She had no interest in such matters. She was happy to acknowledge her relatives, but she would not talk politics with them. Zahn was her father; it was that simple. As far as matters of Blood went, she needed neither Blood Ikati nor Blood Erinima. The Libera Dramach were at her beck and call, an army to rival any of the great houses and independent of them. She did not care about becoming Empress. She did not care about being a leader, or a figurehead, or anything at all of that nature. It was difficult to tell what she cared about. That frustrated women like Oyo immensely, and they fumed and said that the child did not realise what was good for her, and that she should be with her family. But Zahn knew his child, as well as anyone could know her, and he believed her a thing apart from the grubby machinations that Oyo wanted to drag her into. He loved her, and he let her go her own way. But he would not renounce his fatherhood, no matter how Blood Erinima cajoled and promised and threatened.

  A rowboat was sliding across the estuary towards the southern shore; it was time to deal with the second and more recent concern. Zahn spurred his horse through the ranks of his men and trotted down the shallow incline at the base of the hill. Oyo watched him go with an unfriendly gaze. A small guard of twenty fell in behind at the command of one of his generals. A Sister joined them, appearing unobtrusively at his side like a shadow, her face still. They passed through the army to the stretch of clear grass where the water ended, and there they stopped.

  The rowboat had reached the shore now, and the newcomers were dragging it out of the water, all four of them together. Zahn tried to establish which one of them was the leader, but it was hopeless. They were all dressed in simple hemp clothes, their hair varying in colour from blond to black; all had the same yellowish skin tattooed head to foot in curving tendrils of pale green. Tkiurathi, from the jungle continent of Okhamba, so his aides informed him. Savages, they said.

  The question was, what were the savages doing in Saramyr?

  The boat secured, one of them approached Zahn, walking fearlessly towards the forest of soldiers. Zahn glanced up at the junks. They were of Saramyr make. The gods knew how many other Tkiurathi were in there, but they had better hope they could swim: one signal from him and Zila’s fire-cannons would blow them to flinders.

  The stranger stopped a short way from Zahn. His orange-blond hair was smoothed back along his skull and hardened there with sap. Okhamban kntha – called ‘gutting-hooks’ in Saramyrrhic – hung from either side of his belt: double-bladed weapons with a handle set at the point where they met, each blade kinked the opposite way to the other.

  ‘Daygreet, honoured Barak,’ said the Tkiurathi, in near-flawless Saramyrrhic. ‘I am Tsata.’ He bowed in an ambiguous manner, in a style used between men who were unsure of their relative social standing to each other. Zahn could not decide if it was arrogance or accident. The name was faintly familiar to him, however.

  ‘I am the Barak Zahn tu Ikati,’ he said.

  Tsata gave him a curious look. ‘Indeed? Then we have a mutual acquaintance. Kaiku tu Makaima.’

  Zahn’s horse crabstepped with a snort; he pulled it firmly back into line. Now he knew where he had heard the name before. This was the man who had travelled with the spy Saran into the heart of Okhamba to bring back the evidence of the Weavers’ origins; the man who had helped Kaiku destroy a witchstone in the Xarana Fault. He looked down at the Sister who stood to his right.

  ‘Can you confirm this?’

  Her irises had already turned to red. ‘I am doing so.’

  Zahn regarded the foreigner with frank suspicion on his face. ‘Why are you here, Tsata? This is not a good time to be visiting Saramyr.’

  ‘We come to offer you our aid,’ said Tsata. ‘A thousand Tkiurathi, to fight alongside you against the Weavers.’

  ‘I see,’ Zahn said. ‘And what would you do if we did not want your aid?’

  ‘We would fight anyway, whatever your wishes,’ Tsata replied. ‘We come to stop the Weavers. If we can do it together, so be it. If not, we shall do it alone.’

  ‘He is who he says he is,’ the Sister said. ‘I have contacted Kaiku tu Makaima.’ She bowed to Tsata in the appropriate female mode. ‘She sends you greetings, honoured friend. The Red Order are pleased that your path has set you upon our shores again.’

  Zahn felt a twinge of irritation at being undercut. His unfriendly stance was somewhat robbed of force now that Tsata had the Sisters’ approval. The Red Order considered themselves above political loyalty; they knew they were invaluable, and took advantage of it. They might have been easier on the eye than the Weavers were, but they were not so different as they liked to think.

  He slid down from his horse and handed the reins to a nearby soldier. ‘It seems I have been ungracious,’ he said, and bowed. ‘Welcome back.’

  ‘I am only sorry I could not come sooner, or bring more of my people,’ Tsata said, dismissing the apology. ‘Ten times this many would have come, if we had the ships.’

  ‘I had not known the Tkiurathi were a seafaring folk,’ Zahn said, embedding an implied question in an observation.

  Tsata smiled to himself. Such a Saramyr thing to do, to be so indirect. ‘The ships came from Blood Mumaka, as did the crew.’

  ‘I thought they had fled Saramyr when the war began.’ What Zahn thought of that was evident in his voice.

  ‘To Okhamba, yes. They sailed their fleet away. But they still desire to help their homeland in such ways as they can. Mishani tu Koli came to me before I left and asked me to pass on news of Chien os Mumaka’s death to his mother. I found them only hours before they left Hanzean, ahead of the Aberrant armies that were spreading through the northwest. In return for my news they allowed me to travel with them back to Okhamba. I have kept in contact with Blood Mumaka ever since; when the time came, they offered their aid.’

  ‘Four ships?’ Zahn said disparagingly.

  ‘They need the others to conduct their trade with,’ Tsata replied. ‘The rest of the Near World goes on as ever, no matter what the state of matters here. They cannot see that if Saramyr falls, they will be next. But my people can. I have shown them.’

  Zahn considered the Tkiurathi for a moment. On the one hand, any aid was welcome in these times, and he was not such a fool as to turn away a genuine ally; but on the other, it was difficult to believe that a thousand men – ten thousand, if Tsata was to be believed – would willingly sail to another continent to fight for people they had virtually no contact with.

  ‘Our ways are not your ways, Barak Zahn,’ Tsata said, his expression serious. He had guessed the other man’s thoughts. ‘We will not wait at home until it is our turn to be attacked. The Weavers threaten the whole of the Near World. We will stop them at their source, if we can.’

  Zahn was about to reply when the Sister touched him on his arm. She was looking to the north, over the river. The line of the horizon was hazed. Zahn’s eyes went to the junks: they seemed ghosted slightly, blurred at the edges. He blinked, feeling faintly myopic.

  ‘Is it usual for fog to come so quickly in these parts?’ Tsata asked, as the air thickened around them.

  TEN

  The walls of Zila had held back the enemies of the Empire for a thousand years and more. The feya-kori went through them like children kicking over mudcastles.

  They approached under the cover of the fog, but nobody was deceived. Kaiku had warned the Sisters about the dem
ons’ methods, and the murk had gathered too quickly and smelt too foul to be natural. Yet, somehow, knowing that they were coming only made it worse: the sickening inevitability of their arrival weighed on the defenders’ hearts.

  The troops had already begun to prepare the town for evacuation by the time the feya-kori appeared. They lunged suddenly out of the miasma, emerging as if from nowhere within a few dozen metres of the wall. Men howled as the demons loomed up towards them; the sharp slope to the north of the town made them seem as if they were coming from below, surfacing from a sea of mist. They grabbed hold of the lip of the wall, the stump-ends of their arms smashing down onto the stone in a hissing mass of black ooze, crushing and dissolving those soldiers not quick enough to get out of the way. Then, with a long, protracted groan, they hauled, and the top third of the wall gave way in an avalanche of bodies and bricks and mortar.

  Alarm bells clanged from the murk; men fought to decline their fire-cannons far enough to hit the enemy. But the feya-kori were too close. They punched and tore and smashed, their movements slow and massive, destroying a great section of the wall in minutes while rifles and arrows pocked them ineffectually.

  They lumbered into the town, crashing through buildings as if they were made of sticks and paper. The Aberrant predators and Nexuses were not far behind them.

  Tsata raced through the ruined streets left in the demons’ wake. A dozen Tkiurathi were with him, their gutting-hooks held ready, eyes darting about for signs of the enemy. Behind them they could hear the cries of the feya-kori, disembodied moans drifting through the swiftly thinning fog; before them, distantly, was the sound of combat, where the troops of the Empire had knitted across the gash in the wall and were putting up a bloody resistance against the Aberrant horde. Tsata was concerned with neither: his purpose was the area in between, where the smoking, charred trail of the demons had left houses collapsed into rubble, with men and women and children trapped and maimed or out of their wits with fear.

  The Tkiurathi dispersed at his suggestion, fracturing into groups of two and three and hurrying in different directions. They filtered off into the narrow spoke-roads and cross-alleys of the town, heading away from the main swathe of destruction – where nothing was left alive, and the cobbled thoroughfares were a melted quagmire – to the edges, where there were people to be helped.

  Tsata tasted bile: the very air was bad here. The sight of the feya-kori still burned in the forefront of his mind. For the month that it took to cross the sea from his lands, he had been experiencing a steadily growing elation at the thought of returning to Saramyr. Four years he had been gathering his people, tracking them down and persuading them to his cause; four years of hunting through deep jungle, of tireless diplomacy, of bringing together men and women who had scattered over hundreds of miles of nearly impenetrable terrain. And though he might have only managed four ships to carry them, those four could go back and forth as many times as was necessary to transport all the Tkiurathi to Saramyr.

  But he had been here mere hours before he witnessed how much worse things had become in his absence, and now he wished he had listened to his heart instead of his head and got here sooner.

  He scrambled over a slope of rubble, where the dusty guts of a building had spilled out across the street, to where a pair of women were heaving at a beam to uncover the supine man beneath. He did not give them time to react to his appearance, to act on the flicker of fear and uncertainty at the sight of him. He grabbed the beam and lifted, and after a moment’s hesitation the women added their strength to his, and two more Tkiurathi appeared and joined in. The beam moved, and the man scrambled free, delirious with agony, his foot crushed inside his boot. One of the women helped him stand one-legged.

  ‘Find a crutch and get away from here,’ Tsata told them. ‘Through the south gate.’ Then he rapped a few words in guttural Okhamban to his companions and they were running again.

  The mist had faded to a fine haze, burnt off by the sharp light of the winter sun. The demons were abandoning their concealment; they had no need of it now. One of them had reached the town’s keep, the highest and most central point, hub of Zila’s wheel-like layout. Burning and broken buildings traced the creature’s path from the gap in the north wall to where it was smashing into the keep’s brickwork. The other one had rampaged towards the western wall.

  Tsata hoped the ships had got away. There had barely been time for the Tkiurathi to gather their communal belongings and swim for shore; he had last seen the junks turning in the estuary, their prows pointing towards the open sea. A few Tkiurathi men had stayed, along with the crew. They would return and tell others what they had seen today. What the Weavers were now capable of.

  For the Tkiurathi who were on Saramyr, the protection of their pash was now the priority. Okhambans did not think in the way Saramyr did: they had no concept of personal ownership, and their society had evolved around a group dynamic which meant, at its most basic level, that they considered individual needs less important than those of the many. Pash was their name for whichever ‘many’ they were involved with at the time, a fluid and multilayered concept of overlapping priorities which was how the Okhamban people – including the Tkiurathi – assigned importance to a situation. At this moment, at this time, their pash included the people of Zila; and so they had headed into the town without a second thought, to help with the retreat, to save lives when they could, heedless of any risk to themselves.

  A cry for help drew them into a small square where one side had collapsed inward. The façades of the buildings had shaken away from their superstructures and opened the rooms to the sky. Smoke was seeping from beneath the rubble on the ground floor of what had once been a cobbler’s shop, where something was ablaze. An old, bearded man was frantically working to clear away the stones there. He caught sight of Tsata and his companions, wasted a moment on uncertainty, then called to them.

  ‘There’s someone under here!’

  They joined him in his work, hefting the heavy, uneven stones and flinging them away. There was a frantic knocking noise coming from beneath.

  Tsata’s survival instincts kept him fitfully glancing about as he laboured, honed by generation upon generation of jungle life. Without even thinking about it, he knew where the feya-kori were by their dreary, yawning voices; they were too far away to be a threat. He could tell by the cadence and timbre of the battle to the north that the forces of the Empire were still holding out. But there were Aberrant predators loose in the city, those that had slipped through the gap in the wall before it could be sealed. He had seen their handiwork, and one or two of their corpses.

  They had just uncovered the corner of a trapdoor, from which the smoke was coming, when something moved in the square.

  The three Tkiurathi were on their feet, gutting-hooks in hands, before the pair of ghauregs even noticed them. They ran out from the cover of the building and into the square, drawing the eyes of the beasts, leading them away from the old man. The Aberrants snorted at the sight of prey, growling deep in their chests. One of them bellowed a challenge, shaking its head, its grey shaggy pelt flailing with the movement; then slowly they advanced.

  Tsata circled around the square, keeping his gaze on the predators. His companions were fanning away from him, treading soundlessly across the rubble-strewn cobbles. Coherent thought had fallen away, succeeded by the quicker and more direct reactions of a hunter. The ghauregs clacked their jaws together with a bony snap like a crocodile’s, wary of their opponents. Their muzzles were streaked in blood.

  There was a banging from the trapdoor, louder and more urgent than before now that it was not muffled by so much rubble, and the ghaureg’s heads snapped around to fix on the old man who crouched there. He paled.

  The three Tkiurathi moved together, taking advantage of the instant of distraction to cross the distance between them and the predators. Their hide shoes were so soft and their tread so light that the ghauregs did not hear them coming; they turned back only ju
st in time to react to the attack.

  Tsata saw the fist swiping towards him early enough to duck beneath it. He rammed one of his gutting-hooks into the ghaureg’s ribs with as much force as he could muster. It bit deep, but the thick muscles of the beast were too tough to cut easily, and the blade wrenched free of his hand as he darted past. The ghaureg overswung, roaring in pain, and one of the other Tkiurathi took its hand off at the wrist with a brutal downward stroke; but he had been too eager at the sight of an inviting target, and he did not see the ghaureg’s other hand until it grabbed his shin in an unbreakable grip. He slashed across the beast’s muzzle, slicing through its lip, but the blade jarred against bone and glanced off. It flung him away, whipping him by his leg with a cracking of bones to send him flailing through the air. He crashed in a heap against the rubble, but even before he had landed Tsata had made his second strike. Occupied with one enemy, the ghaureg had no time to deal with the other, and Tsata plunged his second gutting-hook into the creature’s back with all his strength.

  This time he found something vital. His enemy lurched away spasmodically for a few steps, trying to paw at its back but unable to reach; then it collapsed, and blood ran over its lower teeth with its last bubbling breath.

  Tsata had never lost sight of the second ghaureg in the time it took to despatch the first one. That one was still engaged with the remaining Tkiurathi. He did not spare a moment to check on his fallen comrade, but instead he carefully approached the body of the ghaureg, ready to leap away if it should move. He wrenched his weapons free and then went to the aid of his beleaguered kinsman.

  That man – his name was Heth – had been fighting tactically. Instead of going up alone against a stronger enemy he had been drawing it after him to allow the others time to finish off the first ghaureg. Now he saw Tsata coming, and the advantage turned his way. He switched to the offensive, ducking in low to hack across his enemy’s knees. The strike was inexact, hitting its calf instead, but it was enough to send a flood of red soaking through the grey fur. Heth pulled back faster than the counterpunch could follow, and in that moment Tsata got in behind the beast, close enough to chop a deep blow into its tricep before retreating out of its reach. Enraged, it swung back to snap at him, and once again Heth slipped inside its guard and raked a cut along its thigh.