Braided Path 03 - The Ascendancy Veil

by Chris Wooding

  Kaiku did not like where this was going. It came uncomfortably close to suggesting that Lucia was divine, and she had thought Phaeca above that. ‘What are you saying?’ she asked.

  Phaeca shook her head. ‘Nothing,’ she replied. ‘Just thinking aloud.’

  Kaiku lapsed into silence, wondering about this. She had tried to talk to Lucia earlier in the day about her late-night excursion into the forest, but alarmingly she found it impossible to get through. Lucia was not only paying no attention, but she could not bring herself to focus enough to make any sense of Kaiku. She stared right through her as if she were some puzzling phantom, then her eyes would slide away elsewhere.

  Whatever was happening to Lucia, she was, as ever, facing it alone. Kaiku was entirely shut out. She could do nothing but worry.

  Another one of them fell by mid–afternoon.

  It was Tsata’s cry to his kinsman that alerted them. They did not catch the meaning, phrased as it was in Okhamban, but they understood the tone. Several men clustered around Lucia; the others hurried into the trees towards the source of the sound. Kaiku directed Phaeca to stay, haste making her peremptory, and then went after them. She clambered up a steep rise of land, using roots as handholds and odd gold-veined rocks as steps, and ducked through the foliage and past a thicket of tall, straight trees to where she could see the soldiers’ backs in a circle. They made way for her as she arrived.

  It was the Tkiurathi woman, Peithre. She lay in Tsata’s arms, breathing in thin, rasping gasps, her skin pale. Heth broke through the circle a moment later, and demanded something of Tsata in their native language. Tsata’s reply was clear without translation: he did not know what was wrong with her.

  ‘Let me,’ said Kaiku. She crouched down in front of Peithre. The ailing woman’s eyes fixed on her, a mixture of desperation and pleading. Tsata looked around, searching for the source of what had done such harm, but nothing was evident.

  ‘Tsata, tell her to be calm. I will help her,’ she said, not taking her gaze from Peithre’s. Tsata did so. Then Kaiku put her hand on Peithre’s bare shoulder, and as the soldiers watched her irises changed from brown to bright red.

  ‘She is poisoned,’ Kaiku said immediately. She held her hand cupped beneath Peithre’s chin, and a dozen tiny flecks, like bee-stings, popped from the skin of the jaw and throat and collarbone and fell into her palm, where they ignited in tiny pyres. ‘That plant,’ she pointed behind her, at where a patch of curved, thin reeds with bulbous tips rose out of the bank of a tiny brook.

  One of the soldiers brandished his sword and took a step towards them.

  ‘Do not touch them!’ Kaiku snapped. ‘You will kill us all. We will not harm the forest, even if the forest harms us.’

  ‘Can you save her?’ Tsata murmured.

  ‘I can try,’ she replied; and for a moment they were back in a fog-laden marsh in the Xarana Fault, and it was Yugi and not Peithre who lay dying. But then she had been a clumsy apprentice; now she was a seamstress of the Weave. She closed her eyes and plunged into the golden world, and the Tkiurathi and soldiers could do nothing but wait. Heth muttered to Tsata in Okhamban. They watched the patient closely, observers to a process too subtle for them to understand. Peithre began to sweat, giving off an acrid stink: Kaiku was hounding the poison from her body. Then gradually her breathing slowed. Her eyes drifted closed. Heth exploded into a guttural tirade, but Tsata held his hand up for silence. Kaiku was concentrating too hard to reassure him. Peithre was not dying, not now; but she would have to sleep.

  Minutes passed before Kaiku’s eyes flickered open again. The soldiers murmured to each other.

  ‘She will live,’ Kaiku said. ‘But she is very weak. The damage the poison has done is too widespread and too deep for me to repair entirely.’

  Heth spoke up in Saramyrrhic. ‘I will carry her.’

  ‘It is not that simple. She needs rest, or she may not survive. Her body is at its limits already.’ She met Tsata’s gaze. ‘The poison was very strong,’ she said. ‘It is a miracle she lived long enough for me to get to her.’

  She looked up, and caught sight of Asara standing there, watching her through the trees with singular interest. Then she turned away and was gone, leaving Kaiku faintly perturbed.

  ‘Make her comfortable,’ Kaiku said to the Tkiurathi. ‘I will speak with Doja.’ She got to her feet.

  ‘You have my gratitude,’ Heth said uncertainly, glancing at Tsata for approval. He found Saramyr customs as difficult as she found theirs.

  ‘And mine,’ Tsata said.

  ‘We are pash, you idiots,’ she said tenderly. ‘No thanks are needed.’

  ‘You mean we’re staying here?’ one of the soldiers called in disbelief. All eyes looked to him. He was a black-haired man around his twenty-fifth harvest. She knew him: his name was Kugo.

  Kaiku fixed him a hard stare, made harder by the demonic colour of her eyes. She could feel the momentary warmth of cameraderie drain from her. ‘That is what I am going to talk to your leader about.’

  ‘We can’t stay here!’ he said. ‘Heart’s blood, four of us are dead already; you yourself were nearly a fifth; she was a hair’s breadth from being number six. This is only our second day! How long do you think we’re going to survive if we just wait around in the forest?’

  Kaiku could feel herself tensing, readying for a confrontation. She should have just walked away from this, swept him icily aside. But something inside her would not allow her to let it go, because she knew where this was coming from, and she wanted to hear him say it.

  ‘What would you have us do, Kugo? Abandon her? What if it were you?’

  ‘It’s not me. And if it were, or if it were any of these men, I’d stay with them whatever the consequence. We would not abandon our own.’ There was a murmur of approval at this. ‘But these are not our own,’ he said. ‘I won’t risk my life for foreigners.’

  Tsata and Heth did not react to this, but Kaiku did.

  ‘Have you learned nothing?’ she cried, walking up to Kugo until she was facing him. ‘Why do you think we are fighting this war, you fool? Because we were so ready to let the Weavers scapegoat Aberrants that we never thought to question them! We let them kill children for more than two centuries because we held jealously onto the prejudices that they instilled in us! People like you joined the Libera Dramach to change that. And now, now that Aberrants like me have saved your empire, now that we are following an Aberrant into the heart of the most gods-damned dangerous place on the continent, now you say that these people who are willing to die alongside us are not our own?’

  She was in a fury now such as she had rarely been, and the air tautened around her, the tips of her hair lifting in the palpable aura of her rage. Kugo’s face was a picture of shock.

  ‘This division is what kills us! Do you not see? You cannot throw away one set of arbitrary prejudices and still maintain another! You cannot decide to accept Aberrants like me and still regard foreigners as lesser than you! Your ignorance condemns us to repeat the same cycle, war after war until there is nothing left! Heart’s blood, if your kind ran out of enemies you would start killing your friends! These people,’ she gestured at Tsata and Heth, ‘could teach you something about unity.’

  She grabbed the side of his head with one hand; he was paralysed with fright now. Her voice dropped.

  ‘You will afford the Tkiurathi the same respect you give these other men, or you will have me to deal with.’

  With that, she shoved him roughly away and stalked into the forest. Silence reigned in her wake. Tsata watched her leave, his tattooed face unreadable; but he stared at the point where she was lost to the undergrowth for a long time after she was gone.

  She went to see Doja when she had calmed down, and he agreed that they should stop here for the night and evaluate Peithre’s condition anew in the morning.

  ‘But if another of my men goes missing, we’re leaving,’ he warned.

  ‘You must do what you will,’ she said. �
��But I am staying. And in the end, it is Lucia’s decision whether you will leave or not: you would not last an hour in this place without her.’

  Doja was angry, she could sense that, though he suppressed it well. He was a square-jawed man with a cleft chin covered in wiry black stubble, a sharp nose and small eyes. Kaiku respected him immensely as a leader, but she had undermined him and he resented that. Threatening one of his soldiers had not done her any favours in his estimation, and now her intransigence was a direct challenge to his authority. The relationship between the Libera Dramach and the Red Order had become more and more strained of late. Whereas before the Red Order had been an extremely useful secret weapon for their cause, now that they were out in the open they were too powerful to be trusted, and there was a general suspicion that they only fought on the side of the Empire because it coincided with their own agenda.

  ‘I give you one night,’ he said. ‘After that, we will ask Lucia.’

  A clamour arose before Kaiku could reply, coming from the direction where she had left Peithre. She broke off their conversation without another word and hurried back to that spot, and there she found the soldiers with their rifles ready, spread in a loose circle, aiming outward between the trees. Someone, made jumpy by his surroundings, sighted on her as she approached; she ducked instinctively, but thankfully he did not fire. She swept past him with a corrosive glare and he cringed away from her.

  ‘What is it?’ she asked Tsata. He and Heth knelt by Peithre, their own guns ready.

  ‘Out in the trees,’ he said, motioning with his head.

  She looked, and as she did so, she glimpsed something. It was a flash of white, darting between the vine-strewn maze of trunks.

  ‘Do not fire on them!’ she said, raising her voice to include the whole group. ‘Remember where we are! Shoot only if they attack.’

  The soldiers muttered sarcastically between themselves. She glanced down at Peithre, still asleep on the forest floor with a blanket as a pillow, and then out into the trees again. Another movement caught her eye, but it was too quick, gone before she could find it.

  ((Are you with Lucia?)) she asked Phaeca, and received an immediate affirmative. ((Bring her here))

  ‘There’s one!’ someone cried.

  ‘Do not fire!’ Kaiku shouted again, fearful of the excitement in the man’s tone, as if he had just spotted game and was about to take it down. Kaiku saw where everyone else was looking, down a corridor of boles and bushes to where one of the things had frozen, caught in their eyes, watching them watching it.

  It was beautiful and terrifying all at once. Its short fur was perfectly white, but for where shadows delineated the hollows of its ribs. It had elements in it of deer and fox – a brush for a tail; stubby, sharp antlers; a certain furtiveness of movement – and yet its musculature and bone structure were disturbingly human, as though it were a lithe and elongated man standing on all fours. Its face had something of the fox’s narrow cunning, and something of the deer’s alarmed docility, but its features were more mobile than either, and when it skinned back its lips it showed an array of close-fitting, daggerlike teeth that betrayed a carnivorous diet.

  ‘Aberrant,’ someone hissed.

  ‘It is no Aberrant,’ Kaiku murmured in reply. Even if she could not sense it by their Weave-signature, she would have known anyway. There was something about these creatures, some linearity of structure that bespoke an entirely natural evolution. They were somewhere between spirit and animal, a hybrid of the two.

  Then it was gone, launching itself back into the trees. Phaeca appeared a few moments later, leading Lucia and a group of soldiers who acted as her bodyguards. Asara arrived, her own rifle ready.

  ‘Lucia,’ Kaiku said. She did not respond: her eyes were far away. ‘Lucia!’

  She focused suddenly, but almost immediately began to drift again. ‘What are these things?’ Kaiku demanded. ‘Can you talk to them? Do they mean to harm us?’ She shook Lucia’s shoulder and said her name again. ‘Listen to me!’

  ‘Emyrynn,’ Lucia murmured, staring over Kaiku’s shoulder into the trees. ‘They’re called emyrynn in our tongue. They want us to follow them.’

  ‘Follow them? Is this some kind of trap?’

  Lucia made a vague negative noise in her throat. ‘We have to follow them . . .’ she said, and then she had slipped beyond rousing again, lost in some dreamwalk where Kaiku could not reach her. Kaiku bit her lip to kill the frustration at seeing her this way. This forest was too much for Lucia, overwhelming her, making her more distant than ever before. It was agony to watch, for Kaiku had no way of knowing if she could ever come back from this, or whether every moment within the borders of the forest was making her worse.

  Doja was quicker to decide than she was, and his faith in Lucia was evidently greater. ‘We can’t move this woman yet. Three men, go with them. Come back and fetch us when you find whatever it is they want us to see. And heart’s blood, be careful.’

  ‘I will go,’ Kaiku said, because she would do anything not to be around Lucia a moment longer.

  ‘And I,’ said Tsata.

  Asara volunteered also. Doja was happy to accept: it meant he did not to have to risk any of his soldiers. Kaiku felt a flicker of uncertainty at the thought of having Asara along, but she had Tsata at least, and in him her trust was total.

  ‘Where are they? Where are you seeing them?’ she asked the group in general, and several men pointed, all in roughly the same direction. They set off into the trees; Tsata warned Asara about the reed that had poisoned Peithre, and she nodded in acknowledgement, not taking her eyes off Kaiku.

  Rifles held close, they forged through the undergrowth, while ahead of them the emyrynn led onward, annoyingly elusive and yet never quite out of sight. None of them spoke; their concentration was bent on seeking out danger, waiting for the jaws of a trap to spring shut, hoping to predict it in time to evade.

  But their journey was not a long one. They had not been travelling for more than ten minutes before they found what it was the emyrynn wanted to show them, and there they stood dumbfounded, and wondered what kind of beings they had stumbled upon in the depths of the Forest of Xu.

  In the upper levels of the Imperial Keep, where the Weavers’ lunacy had made it dangerous to tread, the dust lay thick and spiders webbed the windows.

  Kakre’s preferred room for Weaving was not the Sun Chamber that he had populated with his kites and mannequins of skin. He found the noise of the other Weavers distracting. Instead, he took himself to a section where he could be alone, a morose and silent place too out of the way for the Weavers or the frightened servants to trouble themselves with. The floor was rucked with wide, overlapping trails, paths carved in the powdery dust by the threadbare hem of his robe as he wandered. Weak daylight filtered through the miasma that cloaked the city, and the air was heavy and oily.

  Avun had been here for three hours now, talking with spectres. Seven Governors of the major towns and cities within the Weavers’ territory hung in a circle around the centre of the empty room, blurred apparitions, with Avun the only solid one among them. They were discussing the interminable minutiae of their respective situations, the state of the land, the course of the famine. Kakre was the link that held them all together, a junction through which all eight participants could see each other as murky avatars. Avun had insisted that it be so, for drawing eight people together in a country the size of Saramyr was impractical at best, especially as some lived in the distant Newlands to the east.

  Kakre was getting angry. He had allowed himself to be persuaded to achieve this feat, and yet so far he had heard nothing that could not have been done by individual conferences, which were far less taxing. If he did not believe that Avun had been sufficiently cowed by past punishments, he would have thought the Lord Protector was beginning to take his masters for granted.

  The conference dragged out while the light of Nuki’s eye began to fade. Kakre was the greatest among the Weavers – certainly i
n his own estimation, anyway – but the strain of maintaining so many links for so long was beginning to wear on him. Pride forbade him to buckle, but he cursed Avun’s name inwardly, and began to think of myriad discomforts he might wreak upon the man when this was done.

  Finally, Avun began to wrap up the proceedings, enacting elaborate rituals of farewell to each of the participants in turn. Kakre cut the connection when Avun was finished with them, and the spectres faded away. At last it was over, and only Avun remained. Kakre staggered slightly, his knees weak. Avun’s quick glance indicated that he had noticed, but he wisely forbore to mention it.

  ‘You have my deepest gratitude,’ Avun said. ‘A face-to-face conference, or as near as we can get it, makes all the difference in government. Many valuable ideas can be mined when our heads are put together.’

  Kakre was not convinced anything had come out of that meeting beyond a few status reports and vague allusions to methods of progress, and Avun’s thanks sounded facile. But he was not in a very coherent state of mind at the moment, and he mistrusted himself. The mania would surely strike him after such a long and strenuous period of Weaving; he could already feel himself itching for the knife he kept beneath his robes.

  ‘You would be best to leave now,’ Kakre snarled. ‘If you wish to avoid being harmed. I shall have words for you later. Oh, indeed.’

  Avun bowed and left. Kakre shakily sat down on the floor; dust rose in a languid puff around him. He was thankful now that he had insisted Avun come to him for the conference, instead of holding it in a state room. At the time, it had been a whim, a reminder that Avun was his servant and not vice versa; but now he found his solitude a balm, for there was nobody to see his weakness.

  The post-Weaving mania was spreading slow tentacles through him like blood dripped into water. He wanted to do some skinning, but he felt too weak to procure himself a victim, and he had used up his last canvas a few days ago. The urge and the lethargy were growing at the same pace, putting him in an impossible situation. He breathed a cracked curse and gritted what was left of his teeth. He would have to ride this one out, at least until he had the strength to do something about it. He briefly fantasised about torturing Avun, but in the face of his growing need the visions he conjured seemed pallid and childish.