Braided Path 03 - The Ascendancy Veil

by Chris Wooding

  The river was suddenly alive with a white churning. The Aberrants began to bay and shriek and hoot as their companions were sucked down, and the white froth turned pink. Spectral shapes, sinuous like eels, arced and slid among the Aberrants. They curled and swept and plunged, encircling their victims in the knots of their bodies and dragging them under as they dived. The Aberrants thrashed and twisted, but it did them no good. The river spirits caught them all, and none survived to reach the other side.

  Some of the Aberrants, their fear of the spirits overriding even the urging of the Nexuses, tried to brake themselves at the river bank; but the momentum behind them tumbled them over, tripping those that followed, and in a clutter they slumped into the water. Hundreds more fell in that way, to be drowned in the Ko, until the Nexuses managed to gain control of the horde and check their assault. Gradually, the headlong rush dissipated, and the Aberrant army was still. Their only way to cross now was the Sakurika Bridge, and only a finite amount could cram onto that at once. The artillery, relentless, continued to pound them without mercy; but the animals paid no attention to the carnage being wreaked upon them, and whenever a hole was blown in the horde more simply moved in to fill it.

  Seeing their enemy halted and frustrated, the forces of the Empire raised a triumphant cheer, echoed by the guards who stood on the hilltop with Lucia and Mishani. They gazed at her with fear and wonder and a kind of adoration, and though she did not see it through her closed eyes she sensed their emotion.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered, so quiet that only Mishani heard it; and Mishani felt a chill clutch of trepidation take her.

  The air crawled with invisible conflict as the Sisters and Weavers engaged. The scope of their combat was immense. Not only did they seek to kill each other, and in greater numbers than had ever matched before, but they sought to manipulate the battlefield as well. The Weavers probed tendrils towards Lucia, trying to find her even though she, by dint of her unusual abilities, was invisible to them. They reached towards men’s minds, to persuade generals to make rash choices, soldiers to turn on their brethren, to shift their fire-cannons so that they fired into their own allies. The Weavers were trying to take down the artillery positions that were accounting for so many of their troops, for they had no ranged weaponry to fight back with, but the Sisters worked to foil them, and thus far they had been successful.

  Still, there were too many options, too many possibilities. Sooner or later, something had to get through.

  Yugi, Nomoru and Barak Zahn watched the battle on the bridge from horseback. They were down near the river bank, in the thick of the men but out of reach of the fighting. Here, a circle of soldiers and a Sister was gathered round a sapper who crouched with his lantern at the end of a fuse. The fuse was threaded through a long, thin pipe that was buried just beneath the turf. It emerged from the end of the pipe near the bridge, where it was connected to a package of hidden explosives. Detonating this one would detonate the others that had been placed around the structure, and bring the bridge down. In case anything went wrong, there was another sapper nearby who had a secondary fuse.

  The Aberrants were cramming onto the bridge now, and though they were gaining ground the soldiers made them pay dearly for every inch. The boards of the bridge were slippery with fluids, and the combatants stumbled as they fought. Terrible wounds were sustained on either side as blades and claws chopped through flesh, sometimes severing cleanly, more often not. Men were opened to the bone from armpit to thigh, shrillings tore away faces from skulls, ghauregs were hamstrung and crippled. Up close, the savagery of man against animal was unparalleled.

  ‘Pull them back,’ Zahn said to the Sister. ‘Prepare to blow the bridge.’

  The Sister wordlessly passed on the order to another of her kind, nearer the front, who advised the general that she accompanied. The rising wail of a wind-alarm signalled the retreat, and at once the soldiers on the bridge began to back away, allowing more of the Aberrants to crowd in.

  ‘Light it,’ Zahn said to the sapper, who touched the flame to the fuse. It hissed into life and disappeared into the mouth of the tube, burning its way along the darkness within. Elsewhere, the secondary fuse was also being lit.

  The soldiers had retreated to the south edge of the Sakurika now, and they pressed forward again, bolstered by riflemen who picked off the taller ghauregs with headshots.

  The fuse sparkled its way through the tube, across the arch and up one of the spandrels of the bridge, accompanied by another which burned up a different route. Two tiny lights in the darkness, racing towards a single destination. With the bridge down and the river impassable, they had only the feya-kori to worry about, and the blight demons had yet to make an appearance.

  The second fuse caught up with the first, and they reached the hidden package at the same time.

  And went out, inches short of the end.

  Yugi’s vision was not sharp enough to see the fuses being extinguished, but it was not long before he realised that the bombs had not gone off. He saw the line of soldiers at the far end of the bridge bowing under the press of predators, and knew that it was about to collapse.

  ‘What happened?’ he cried. ‘Where’s our gods-damned explosion?’

  ‘The Weavers,’ said the Sister, her red eyes unfocused. ‘Heart’s blood. The Weavers got to the fuses before we could stop them. They slipped past us. A trick . . . a trick that we did not know they had.’

  Yugi looked back at the bridge in horror, and finally the line broke and the Aberrants surged through. They spread like oil onto the south bank of the river, and there they began to kill.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  ‘Destroy it!’ Yugi cried. ‘We need that bridge down!’

  The Sister to whom he was addressing this barely heard him. She was already immersed in the effort to do just that. Though the fuses might have failed, the Sisters could detonate the explosives themselves easily enough; in fact, they could tear the bridge apart without the need for explosives at all. It had always been intended as another backup in a situation such as this.

  But the Weavers had guessed how crucial the Sakurika was to the Empire’s battle plan, and they had got there first. By spinning false images of themselves, they had duped the Sisters into thinking that all their opponents were accounted for, when in reality several of them were slipping unnoticed through the Weave to the bridge, where they found the explosives and choked their fuses. The Sisters had not expected such deftness and cooperation in their enemy, and it had cost them. Before they could react, the Weavers had stitched a defensive position around the bridge, abandoning their attempts to influence other parts of the battlefield in favour of consolidating there. The Sisters swarmed around them, probing at them, feinting and retreating, but they had meshed solid and they were impenetrable. The Sisters had met their match.

  ‘We cannot,’ said the Sister who stood near to Yugi. ‘We cannot destroy it.’

  Yugi swore, looking over the heads of the soldiers to where the Aberrants were carving bloody swathes into the ranks. Close in, the predators had the advantage of greater strength; the secret to victory lay in keeping them at a distance, where they could be hammered by mortars and fire-cannons. He glanced back at the hill where Lucia stood, but it was too dark to see her now.

  What is she waiting for? he thought angrily. If those river spirits were the best she could do, then they were all doomed.

  ‘The artillery,’ Zahn said. ‘They are making for the artillery.’

  Yugi looked, and saw he was right. The Aberrants were cutting a path towards one of the hills where the artillery positions were steadily massacring Aberrants on the far side of the river. Their push was costing them dear, for it was exposing them to attacks from the flanks, but by sheer weight of numbers they were winning through.

  A portion of the artillery had been turned toward the bridge now; through the Sisters, word had already spread about the failure of the explosives. But any shells that came near were plucked from the
air by the Weavers and fell harmlessly into the river.

  Yugi and Zahn looked at each other stonily. ‘Defend the artillery,’ Yugi said. ‘I’ll take back the bridge. We have to hold them on the north side.’

  Zahn nodded. ‘May Ocha and Shintu favour you,’ he said, and then spurred his horse and rode away, accompanied by his bodyguard. Yugi could hear his rallying cry as he went, and other soldiers began to join him as he raced to intercept the enemy.

  Yugi looked over his shoulder at Nomoru. ‘Can you get a position on the riverbank to hit the explosives?’

  ‘They’re hidden under the bridge. And it’s dark. Won’t be easy,’ Nomoru said. She slid down from the saddle behind him. ‘I’ll try.’

  ‘Don’t forget the Weavers. They can stop a rifle ball.’

  ‘We will be ready,’ said the Sister. ‘They can intercept shells, but a rifle ball is smaller and faster. We could get it through.’

  Nomoru shouldered her rifle, cast a disparaging glance at the painted woman, and then looked up at Yugi. Her eyes were flat.

  His gaze flickered over the radial scars on the side of her face. ‘I’ll send up a signal rocket.’ He patted his belt, from which hung a small and innocuous cylindrical tube. ‘Don’t hesitate.’

  ‘I won’t.’

  They paused a moment longer. There was something left to be said, but neither would say it. Then Yugi spurred his horse towards the pennant of the Libera Dramach, which was raised near the mouth of the bridge.

  As he forged through the troops, smelt the stink of sweat, of cured leather and blade oil and smoke and blood and death from upwind, he could not shed the feeling that he was dreaming all of this. The withdrawal from amaxa root – he had not had the opportunity to smoke any tonight – and the presence of the spirits charging the air suffused everything with a muffling haze. It seemed as if they were all complicit in some sort of game in which the stakes were trivial things instead of lives. He simply could not encompass the sheer number of people who would die here today, who had died already. This kind of slowly settling unreality had threatened him in the past, but he had never been a general in a battle of such scope before. War was too big for him, and his only defence was not to think about it at all.

  He reached the pennant. Faces were upturned in the green wash of moonlight, looking to him. It seemed easier to do what he had to than to consider it any longer. He raised his sword and shouted:

  ‘Libera Dramach! We’re taking back the bridge!’

  The roar of approval, full-throated and bestial, was loud enough to shock him. His senses sharpened, his blood began to pound, and the haze disappeared. Suddenly, he saw everything with an incredible clarity. The wind lashed against him, blowing the rag tied around his forehead like a streamer.

  ‘Forward!’

  The soldiers surged around him in an intoxicating wave, and he was borne along on its crest, unable to stop a fierce cry rising from his own lips. The ranks before them either parted or joined the charge. The Libera Dramach collided with the Aberrants in a brutal smash of bodies and blades.

  Yugi was one of several mounted men, and they rode behind the leading edge with their rifles at their shoulders, using their height advantage to shoot the Aberrants at close range. He primed, fired, primed, fired, drawing the bolt on his weapon with fluid ease between each shot, controlling his mount with his knees. His shots smacked into their targets with shattering force, spewing ribbons of dark blood: a ghaureg went down with a hole in the side of its neck; a feyn took a neat headshot and went limp; he put three in the hump of a rampaging furie before he got something vital and killed it. He did not have time to think about anything but aiming and shooting until his rifle clicked dry and he was forced to break open the powder chamber and refill.

  He was in the midst of doing so when there was a shove from the side, and his horse toppled into a group of men with a neigh of distress. Yugi’s rifle fell from his hand as he fought for balance, but somehow his mount righted itself. Only long enough, however, for the ghaureg that had forced its way through the soldiers to grab the horse’s head in both hands and break its neck with a sharp twist.

  But it had chosen the wrong adversary of the two to attack first. Yugi’s blade flew from its scabbard and he hacked downward with all his weight behind it. The ghaureg’s arms were cut through at the elbows, and it flailed backward, roaring in pain, until someone drove a dagger into the glistening black nexus-worm in its neck.

  Yugi did not see the demise of his opponent. He felt the tip of the horse as it went over, and tried to scramble free of the saddle. By good fortune, he managed to jump aside and tumble as the horse crashed down, and he fetched up against the legs of a soldier who dragged him to his feet before he could be trampled.

  ‘Are you hurt?’ came a gruff demand. He shook his head, and the man patted him roughly on the shoulder. ‘Then come on! We’ve got a bridge to win back!’

  Heartened and strangely touched by the soldier’s bravado, he grinned and shoved his way forward, with the other man closely accompanying him. At the point where the armies met, the battle lines were like liquid, flowing uneasily as men or Aberrants fell and the victors surged into the gap. Down here, in amongst the press instead of above it on horseback, the reek of sweat and the claustrophobia was overwhelming; Yugi was too charged with adrenaline to care.

  He saw a man killed in front of him, and there in his place was a chichaw, a nightmarish thing like a giant four-legged spider, its head thick with curling horns like a ram’s and with a long, beak-like jaw full of tiny teeth. He stepped into the gap left by the fallen man, his sword already sweeping a cold arc in the moonlight, trailing spatters of its last victim’s blood.

  The Aberrant lunged at him, lashing its forelegs, which he belatedly noted were edged with chitinous blades along their length. He pulled his body aside and they glanced across the leather armour on his chest, cutting a deep groove but not getting through; and he turned his sword stroke so that it hacked one foreleg off. The chichaw recoiled automatically at the pain. He used that instant to gather a great lateral swing into the creature’s flank, opening it along the side so that its internal organs crowded out in a great steaming spume. It collapsed, juddering, in the throes of shock and imminent death.

  A flash of movement on his right among the chaos of swords and teeth. He turned in time to see a furie charging him over the bodies of the fallen, a wall of muscle and tusk; but the corpses shifted beneath its weight and it stumbled, and then a great overhand chop from the soldier at Yugi’s side severed it nearly in half. It slid in a broken heap at Yugi’s feet, the sword still stuck in its ribs. Yugi wrenched the weapon out and threw it back to his saviour, who offered him a quick salute of thanks and was then swallowed by the fray.

  Yugi lost track of time after that. His past and future contracted to a single instant in which he was still alive, where the aching of his body was a distant and dull nothing and his muscles and mind were geared only towards his blade. He cut and slashed, not out of conscious desire to kill but because it would make them stop trying to kill him. He moved along lines drawn by years of practice, dodging and slashing and parrying without thought as to where the next strike would go, not daring to imagine how close he had inched by death since this battle had begun, for to do so would break his nerve and crush him. At some point, he became aware of wounds on his body, deep cuts that he had felt as tiny nicks, dribbling warm blood across his skin. He ignored them. He could do little else.

  And then a gap appeared in the moon-drenched phantasmagoria of horrors that faced him, and he saw the end of the bridge, a mere dozen metres away.

  The sight of it caused him to pause. How long had he been fighting? How far had they come? He became aware of the yells and screams of men all around him, but there was a predominant tone which sounded like defiance. Their assault had been bolstered by other troops, men eager to lend their blades to a winning cause, and the rally had multiplied and invigorated the soldiers. Now, as the bridge n
eared and the Aberrants on the south of the Ko were being cut off from their reinforcements, the other soldiers pressed in with new zeal to drive the creatures against the river bank and into the water. The spirits embarked on a fresh frenzy, drowning any living thing that came within their reach. Yugi could taste cold, wet dirt on his lips. The air was becoming tighter still now, seeming to pluck at them, to lift them upwards. The moonstorm would soon be upon them.

  Yugi wanted that bridge. With a cry that was more like a shriek, he fought on, and his men fought with him.

  Nomoru ran low through the dark forest of soldiers on the south bank, careful to stay behind the lines of riflemen that loosed shot after shot over the river. Far behind her, there was the churn of combat on one of the hills, where Zahn was making a stand against the Aberrants that had made for the artillery position. Now that Yugi was steadily advancing to plug the mouth of the Sakurika Bridge, the creatures were finding themselves becoming isolated and were steadily being whittled away on all sides. Nomoru could not see over the heads of the soldiers, but she heard the reports, spreading from the mouths of the Sisters, out through the troops.

  Idiot, she thought. He will get himself killed.

  She was thinking of Yugi. She had not imagined him as one for heroics – and indeed, she suspected that the stories being circulated were more than a little exaggerated for the purposes of morale – but it bothered her. As she slipped along the river bank, accompanied by the clip and stutter of rifle fire, she wondered how she would feel if he did die. Probably very little, she had to admit. Their affair so far had been pleasurable, but no more than that. She was a woman who had grown up amid the depravity and impermanence of the Poor Quarter of Axekami, and her heart was thickly calloused because of it. Death did not really affect her. She did not allow any feeling to dig in deeply. It was not a conscious decision, but it was her way and she had never felt it necessary to examine that or try to change it. She existed on a constant level, untroubled by spikes of wild happiness or terrible sorrow. She was a survivor, and survival was a business best enacted without the luxuries of emotion.