Braided Path 03 - The Ascendancy Veil

by Chris Wooding

  It smashed into existence, its sheer mind-bending immensity crushing her. She hung in the Weave, the centre of a web of millions of straining tendrils all trying to break away from her, stretched as if on a rack; and now she was pierced also by the dread regard of one of the monstrous beings who haunted the Weave. She had gone beyond pain: her mind trembled on the edge of snapping, unable to exist in such conditions. The indescribable torment of continuance was all that had ever been, all there ever would be, a timeless hell with nothing beyond it, and all there was left of her was that slender thread of will that told her to endure, and which would not break.

  The witchstones were dying. One by one they shattered, pulverised from within by the Sisters.

  More singularities sucked and bloomed. More Weave-whales arrived. Kaiku did not even realise. She had gone beyond sense, beyond sight. She was only a force of purpose now, driven far beyond the limits of her body and mind.

  The Sisters were returning. She felt them flow through her, and a tiny sliver of comprehension penetrated. The witch-stones were all gone, all but the one that she held together that was still desperately trying to pull itself to pieces. It would not bear an invader, though all hope of saving the rest of the network had long passed. It would rather have non-existence.

  It is done, Kaiku thought, and she let go.

  Tsata and the remaining Tkiurathi waited in the chamber above, hardly daring to breathe. They feared some kind of trick. The great metal barriers were gradually sliding aside, their mechanism activated at last by the Weavers without; but the scene they revealed was far from the ravening horde that the Tkiurathi had expected.

  There were perhaps thirty Weavers there, and all of them were dead. Behind them, several dozen Aberrants fought among themselves, some of them fleeing away up the corridor, others attacking members of different predator species. A dozen Nexuses stood still, their shoulders slack, and even behind their blank white masks it was evident that something had been extinguished inside them. Tsata watched in disbelief as one of them was knocked down and savaged by a shrilling. The Nexus did not react as the beast tore him apart.

  ‘Fire!’ one of the Tkiurathi cried, and a hail of bullets ripped into the Aberrants and Nexuses alike. Those Aberrants that were not killed ran howling; the Nexuses keeled over silently and lay still.

  Tsata, his broken arm held to his chest, his teeth gritted against the pain, merely stared. Then a cheer rose from the Tkiurathi, a full-throated bellow of victory. They had realised what had happened before Tsata had. The witchstones were destroyed.

  All across the land, the effects were the same. The Weavers died, simply falling over like puppets whose strings had been cut. The Nexuses, bereft of instruction, went still and did not move again. Their minds were void, utterly empty, and most stood where they were until they starved to death, unless they were first eaten by the predators that they had controlled or killed by vengeful townsfolk. It took the people of Saramyr a long time to understand what had happened at that instant when a god had been slain, but when they did they rejoiced, whole cities erupting in scenes such as none in living memory could recall; for their world was theirs again.

  But for Tsata, there was only one thing that concerned him. The great mechanism that had taken the Sisters away was grinding and clanking again, bringing them back. Bringing Kaiku back to him. He walked over to the doorway to the metal edifice in the centre of the chamber. His brethren gathered around him, their gazes expectant. Finally, the elevator settled with a racket of machinery, and the door slid open.

  Five Sisters were there, but they were crouching around a sixth, who lay in the arms of Cailin. Cast aside on the floor of the elevator was a Mask that had split in half. Kaiku’s Mask.

  Cailin looked up at him, and in her red eyes he saw all that he had to know. Numbness clouded him, killing even the pain of his arm. He took a few steps forward and sank to his knees before the fallen Sister. He had not recognised her at first, but he recognised her now.

  Her hair had turned from tawny brown to bright white, and her irises were rich crimson, but it was unmistakably her. Her, and yet not her. She still breathed, but her features were vacant. The life that had animated them had gone. She was not there.

  ‘She gave too much, in the end,’ Cailin said quietly, and there was real grief in her voice. ‘Nobody could master a Weaver’s Mask like that and hope to come out unscathed.’

  ‘Where is she?’ Tsata whispered, his eyes filling with hot tears. ‘Where has she gone?’

  ‘She is lost to the Weave, Tsata. She has lost her mind to the Weave.’

  THIRTY-THREE

  The year that followed was a turbulent one.

  The restoration of the Empire was not to be achieved in a day; nor would the famine that gripped most of the land disappear overnight. Saramyr was like a wounded animal which had licked its injuries clean of infection: it was healing itself, but it was still weak, and the process was slow and painful.

  Against all expectations, there was little civil conflict in the wake of the Weavers’ demise. It had been predicted that riots would occur as the redistribution of limited foodstuffs left some areas hungrier than others, that lack of medical supplies and malnutrition would encourage plague, and this would spark further unrest. It was expected that opportunist leaders, demagogues and bandits would rise up to fill the power vacuum before the Empire could regain what it once had lost. But Saramyr was exhausted. It was tired of war and suffering, and there was little enthusiasm for it any more. Even through their strife, the people were prepared to be patient. They had been given a taste of what an alternative to the Empire might be like, and in the light of that they would endure anything to get back the days that already seemed like a fond dream.

  Though the high families’ armies had been decimated and they barely had enough strength to defend their borders against the roaming Aberrants that were now a feature of the Saramyr wilds, they returned to their lands and were rapturously welcomed. With them went the Sisters. There were few of them left, dangerously few, for despite Cailin’s best efforts they had been brought perilously close to extinction in the war with the Weavers. But those few knitted the continent together. And if there were murmurings of dissent at the idea of replacing the Weavers with women like these, they were drowned out by the acclaim. The Sisters, after all, had saved their country where even the high families and the legendary Lucia had failed. Cailin made very certain that everyone knew that.

  The accession of Emperor Zahn tu Ikati was due in no small part to the support of the Sisters. Cailin could have thrown her weight behind a more tractable candidate, but she knew that Zahn was the strongest, and she wanted to be sure of being on the winning side. His old treaties with the minor families had held firm even through the war, and the generals knew him as a warrior and a tactician. Though his detractors pointed out that the death of his daughter would leave him a broken man – as it had in the past when he had believed her dead – Zahn’s reaction surprised everyone. Though he grieved, he accepted that there was no question this time that Lucia had died and no possibility of her coming back. He became grim and cold, but he did not retreat into himself. Though there was no spark of compassion in him any more, and he was stern sometimes to the point of cruelty, he was in perfect possession of his faculties. The nobles believed a firm leader was what they needed to restore their country. There was the usual squabbling, but Zahn took the throne at the last.

  As to Cailin, she lived in the Imperial Keep and nursed her plans. The reconstruction of Axekami went on around her: the destruction of the pall-pits, the rebuilding of the great temples, the dismantling of the Blackguard. But she had little interest in that. She was thinking, as always, of her Sisterhood.

  The retreat of the blight across the land meant fewer Aberrants, and soon there would be no more born with the power to manipulate kana. The time would come when she would allow the Sisters to breed, under closely controlled conditions and with carefully chosen stock. Without t
he Weavers, they had no competition in the field of the Weave any more, and she could count them relatively safe. But one day, that might change, and she must be ready for it. The Sisterhood would grow and diversify, and their powers would grow also. They would sink into the fabric of society and become inextricable, even more so than the Weavers had. Who knew what might be possible in a century, in ten centuries? Would they be as gods? Or would they wane and fade into history? Perhaps she would not live to see it; perhaps her kana would dry up and she would age and die. Perhaps she would be here until the apocalypse predicted by the Xhiang Xhi would come to pass, engulfing the planet in fire. Or perhaps, even, she would be elsewhere by then.

  She thought of the Weave-whales, and what they had left when they departed, and she knew they would not be safe for ever.

  And so, more and more, her mind strayed to the empty Weaver monasteries, that had been sealed by the Sisters and surrounded by defences. More and more she wondered about what was inside them, what secrets they might hold that she could use to protect herself and her kind.

  More and more, she wondered about the machines.

  Two hundred Tkiurathi were left alive of the thousand that sailed to Saramyr in the winter of the war. Seventy of them went back to Okhamba, to spread the word of what had happened. The rest stayed.

  For their part in the destruction of Adderach, the Emperor Zahn gave them a gift of land. At Mishani’s request, they were mandated a small stretch of the western coast, northeast of Hanzean and just south of Blood Koli’s ancestral territories around Mataxa Bay. The minor noble who had owned it had been one of the many casualties of the war, his property annexed by the Weavers. The Tkiurathi built a small settlement there, of repka and precarious dwellings raised on stilts and poles, with aerial walkways and rope bridges built between the trees. And there they went on with their way of life, puzzling the local Saramyr with their strange and foreign customs and philosophies.

  Mishani was never quite clear why the majority of the Tkiurathi had decided to stay. She suspected, from what she had learned of them, that it was simply a matter of whim, that there was no deeper meaning behind it other than that they wanted to. But for Tsata, it was different. He stayed for a reason.

  Mishani had returned to Mataxa Bay after the high families were restored. She was, after all, still the heir to Blood Koli, and with her mother and father dead she was entitled to inhabit her childhood home again. Blood Koli were much diminished, having had most of their power taken away after the restoration of the Empire began. Much of their army had formed the Blackguard and were executed for their crimes. But Blood Koli still held powerful concessions, not least with Blood Mumaka, who had begun to trade with Saramyr from Okhamba again, transporting much-needed supplies from the Colonial Merchant Consortium to ease the famine. Mishani had once considered freeing Blood Mumaka of their obligations to her family in gratitude for what their scion Chien had done for her in the past, but she decided against it now. Blood Mumaka had weathered the conflict overseas; though they were mighty they had not acted with honour. And Mishani, as the head of a high family, needed all the advantage she could get.

  Though there was grief and pain at the news of her parents’ death, it passed. But there was another source of sorrow that did not heal with time. For Mishani had taken it upon herself to care for Kaiku, and every day the sight of her friend wandering listlessly through the grounds of her house pried open the wound in her heart.

  Tsata visited Kaiku every day, travelling from the Tkiurathi settlement. He walked with her when the weather was fine, and talked with her often, though she never replied. She drifted like a ghost at his side, uncomprehending. Mishani watched them from the house sometimes, two distant figures on the cliff edge. His broken arm had healed clean and he was physically none the worse for his experiences in Adderach. But like Mishani, his wounds were of a different kind.

  She wished sometimes that Kaiku had died on that day when she destroyed the witchstone. Anything would have been better than this torment. Kaiku was aware of her surroundings, and capable of learning ritual and reaction to certain situations, but inside her mind she was a wiped slate.

  Mishani let her roam the house and along the cliffs above the bay on her own. Kaiku had demonstrated that she had enough sensibility to avoid harming herself. She made toilet of her own accord, she ate when she was presented with food, she went to bed and slept when she was tired. But she did not speak, nor did she appear interested in anything, and there was no indication that there was any intelligence left in her beyond the rudimentary logic of an animal. When she was awake, she shuffled around without purpose, or sat and stared at nothing. Her presence was disconcerting, but Mishani tolerated it; and though Mishani was ever busy, she always made time to talk to Kaiku, or read to her. But it had been a long time since she had any hope of bringing her friend back from wherever she had gone. Though Kaiku’s kana still ministered to her, keeping her healthy and strong and fit, it was attending to an empty house waiting for a mistress that would not come home.

  Her hair grew white from the day when she had lost her mind, and her eyes never changed back from their deep crimson hue. The Sisters and Cailin herself did what they could, but that amounted to nothing in the end. Once she had become untethered from her body they had no way to find her in the vastness of the Weave: it was like searching for one fish in all of the oceans.

  ‘She has to make her own way back,’ Cailin said to Mishani. But no one had ever done so, and privately she considered it impossible.

  Tsata travelled from time to time, seeking medicines and physicians. The other Tkiurathi would take turns visiting Kaiku in his place. He sought out remedies both Saramyr and Okhamban, and even managed to arrange for a Muhdtaal from far Yttryx to visit and try his exotic techniques. But his chants and potions and crystals did nothing, and Kaiku remained a shell with no inhabitant. Tsata would only try again. After a year, Mishani wanted to suggest that he not exhaust himself over and over in a futile task when there was a life for him to lead. But she felt unworthy even thinking that, and she knew he would not listen anyway. Whether it was some memory of love that he bore, or loyalty to a companion as dictated by his beliefs, he would not give up.

  But the spring of the second year since the witchstones’ destruction turned to summer, and still Kaiku was not there.

  She slept in a bedchamber near the back of the Koli family house, which faced east over the cliffs to the bay. The sunlight drenched her room in the early morning as it shone low across the land, glowing through the wispy veil that hung across her window, and the sultry heat of midsummer began to ascend. The walls were cool stone and the floor was coral marble. She lay on a simple sleeping mat in the centre of the room, and dreamed of nothing.

  Mishani and her visitor stood in the doorway, looking in on her.

  ‘This is Kaiku,’ Mishani said.

  The woman nodded. She was tall and long-boned, with the narrow, sharp features of the Newlands, coolly elegant and beautiful. Her summer robe was light blue and white, and her skin was pale. Her hair was worn in looped braids, a fashion from the north-east that had never caught on in the west.

  ‘Please, leave us alone,’ the woman replied.

  Mishani agreed without really knowing why. Certainly, this stranger’s appearance at such an early hour was unusual, as was her tale: she was a healer, who had heard of Kaiku’s plight and come to help her. She had arrived on a manxthwa-drawn cart, with her two children in the back, a twin son and daughter aged six harvests by the look of them. They were playing with the servants’ children in the great tiered garden that ran down to the cliff edge, watched over by retainers.

  Mishani felt that she should be suspicious, but could not think of any reason why someone should want to harm Kaiku. And though she did not admit it to herself, she almost hoped someone would. To end this half-life, to release her to Omecha’s care, would be a mercy.

  When Mishani had left, the healer crossed the room and knelt by Kai
ku’s side. The sleeping woman’s cheek was limned in gold in the morning sun, the fine hairs of her skin incandescent. Her face was unlined, her expression peaceful, her mouth slightly open. For a long while, the healer watched her.

  ‘They say you are lost, Kaiku,’ she said quietly. ‘That your mind wanders far from your body and cannot trace its way home.’ She laid the palm of her hand lightly against the side of Kaiku’s jaw, caressing her. ‘I have carried a piece of you for many years, and you a piece of me. Perhaps this will help you.’

  She bent down and put her lips to Kaiku’s, and exhaled. And after a moment the breath became more than breath, a glittering passage of some ephemeral energy crossing between the women, gushing from one mouth to another. It went on for some minutes, longer than lungs could sustain, until finally Asara broke away, drawing her lips softly across Kaiku’s as she did so.

  Still Kaiku slept. From beyond the window came the high laughter of children.

  ‘Do you hear them, Kaiku?’ Asara said. ‘My kind grow fast, it seems. Too soon they will be adults, and I will be a grandmother. I think it appropriate. I am not too far from my first century.’ She smiled sadly, looking down at the woman she had once known. Maybe she had once loved her. She could not say.

  She got to her feet. ‘I have you to thank for them, Kaiku,’ she murmured. ‘You gave them life.’

  Mishani offered her a meal, and they spoke of matters in the distant steppes of the Newlands. She left in the afternoon, taking her children with her.

  Kaiku collapsed later that day.

  It happened towards sunset, as she was walking with Tsata. They were meandering along a path on the cliff edge, and the temperature had diminished to pleasant warmth, leavened by a breeze off the sea. Since Kaiku never replied to him and conversation was impossible, Tsata had developed a tendency towards storytelling, recounting to her the events of the settlement and the tales of the people who lived there. He had become well practised in making even the most mundane of incidents entertaining, though really it was only himself he was keeping amused.