The Ascendancy Veil: Book Three of the Braided Path

by Chris Wooding

  ‘She’s from the Poor Quarter,’ Yugi said. ‘She knows people. I want to test the water there, make contact with our spies. Those poor bastards in the capital have been living under the Weavers for four years now. They were happy enough to rise against Lucia taking the throne; maybe a little taste of the alternative has taught them the error of their ways. Let’s see if the conditions have kindled any of that old fire.’

  ‘A revolt?’ Phaeca prompted.

  He gave an affirmative grunt. ‘Test the water,’ he said again.

  There was a silence for a moment, but for the dull percussion of the rain on the canvas.

  ‘Is that all?’ he asked.

  Kaiku gave Phaeca a look, and Phaeca took the hint. She excused herself and slipped out of the tent.

  ‘Ah,’ Yugi said wryly, scratching under the rag around his forehead. ‘This seems serious. Am I in trouble?’

  ‘I was about to ask you the very same thing,’ Kaiku replied. ‘Are you?’

  ‘Only as much as all of us,’ he replied, looking around the tent at everything but her. He picked up a scroll case and began absently fiddling with it.

  She hesitated, then tried a different approach. ‘We have not seen each other as often as I would like these past years, Yugi,’ she said.

  ‘I imagine that’s true of most of those you once knew,’ he returned, glancing at her briefly. ‘You’ve been otherwise engaged.’

  That was a little too close to the bone for Kaiku. She knew her old friendships had suffered neglect, partly because of the war, mostly because she had devoted herself to Cailin’s tutelage, which allowed time for little else. Lucia had become distant and alien, worse now than when she was a child. Mishani was ever absent, always engaged in some form of diplomacy or another. She had heard nothing of Tsata since he had departed for his homeland just after the war began. And Asara . . . well, best for her not to think about Asara. As much as Kaiku hated her, she was haunted in the small hours of the night by an insidious longing to see her erstwhile handmaiden again. But Asara was far to the east now, and likely would remain there, and that was best for both of them.

  ‘The war has changed many things,’ she said quietly.

  ‘And none more so than you,’ Yugi replied with a faintly snappish edge to his tone, looking her over.

  She was hurt by that. ‘Why attack me so? We were friends once, and even if you do not believe that any more, we are certainly not enemies. What has turned you into this?’

  He laughed bitterly, a sudden bark that made her start. ‘Gods, Kaiku! It’s not as it once was between us. I look at you now and I see Cailin. You’re not the woman I knew. You’re different, colder. You’re a Sister now.’ He waved a hand at her in exasperation. ‘How do you expect me to confide in you when you’re wearing that damned stuff?’

  Kaiku could barely believe what she was hearing. She wanted to remind him that she had become a Sister to fight for his cause, that without the Sisters the war would have been over in a year and the Weavers victorious. But she held her tongue. She knew that if she opened her mouth, she would begin an argument, and she would likely destroy whatever slender bridges still existed between them. Instead, she swallowed her anger with a discipline which the trials of the Red Order had instilled in her.

  ‘I suppose I cannot,’ she said calmly. ‘Please let me know the arrangements for our departure to Axekami.’

  With that she left, stepping out into the rain where Phaeca waited for her, and the two of them walked through the crowded grounds of the songbird-house, back towards the river. For the first time in some while, Kaiku noticed how the soldiers unobtrusively moved aside to let them pass.

  THREE

  The triad of moons hung in a sky thick with stars. Two of them had matched orbits low in the west, descending towards the crooked teeth of the Tchamil Mountains, the flawless green pearl of Neryn peeping out from behind the huge blotched disc of her sister Aurus. Iridima glowered at them from the east, her white skin marbled with blue. Beneath, from horizon to horizon, lay the desert of Tchom Rin, an eternity of languid waves desiccated on the point of breaking. A cool wind brushed across the smooth, shadowy humps, dusting their crests. It was the only sound that could be heard in all the vastness.

  Saramyr was riven north to south by the spine of the Tchamil Mountains, dividing the more populous and developed lands to the west from the wilder places in the east. The south-eastern quadrant of Saramyr was dominated by the continent’s only desert, stretching over six hundred miles from the foot of the mountains to peter out a little short of the eastern coast. It was here that the settlers had come over seven hundred years ago, to begin the colonisation of the eastern territories.

  Stories of those pioneer days were rife in Tchom Rin legend: tales of those who chose to stay while others went on to the more fertile Newlands to the north, those who made a pact with the bastard goddess Suran to live in her realm and worship her in return for being taught the ways of this cruel new world. Suran was kind to her followers, and she showed them how to thrive. In the wasteland of the desert, they built sprawling cities and gargantuan temples, and they chased out the Ugati and their old and impotent gods. The settlers took the desert as their own, and the desert changed them, until they had become like a people unto themselves, and the ways of the west seemed distant.

  One of the greatest of the cities that the early settlers founded was Muia. It lay serene and peaceful in the green-tinged moonlight, in the lee of an escarpment that stretched for miles along its western edge. Tchom Rin architecture, so popular history told, had been invented by a man named Iyatimo, who had based his constructions on the bladed leaves of the hardy chia shrub, one of the few plants capable of surviving in the desert. Whatever the truth of it, the style proliferated, and the buildings of the Tchom Rin became renowned for their smooth edges and sharp tips. Bulbous bases flowed into needle-like spires; windows were teardrop-shaped, tapering upward; the walls that surrounded the city were made impressive and forbidding with rows of knife-like ornamentation. Though the lower levels of the complex, twining streets rose in orderly stepped rows of broad dwellings, the upper reaches were a dense forest of spikes, a multitude of stilettos thrust at the sky. Everything was drawn into the air as if the gravity of the moons overhead had sucked the cities of Tchom Rin out of shape and made them into something new and strangely beautiful to the eye.

  Muia slept beneath the fearsome auspices of a statue of Suran some two hundred feet high. She was seated in an alcove carved out of the cliff face, a lizard coiled in her lap and a snake wrapped around her shoulders to symbolise the creatures that fed her in the desert cave where she was abandoned by her mother Aspinis. The belief in western Saramyr that it was arrogant to depict deities in any way other than through oblique icons or animal aspects had never taken in Tchom Rin, and so Suran was portrayed as the legends told her to be: as a sullen and angry adolescent, her hair long and tangled, with one green and one blue eye picked out in coloured slate. She was dressed in rags and holding a gnarled staff around which the snake had partially wrapped itself.

  Suran did not have the grandeur of the majority of the Saramyr pantheon, nor the benevolence. The people of Tchom Rin had chosen a goddess that needed to be appeased rather than simply praised, a tough and bitter deity who would overcome any adversity and believed vengeance to be the purest of emotional ends. It suited their temperament, and they worshipped her with great fervour and to the exclusion of all others, scorning the passive and elastic religious beliefs of their ancestors. Though those outside the desert saw her as a dark goddess, the bringer of drought and pestilence, those within adored her because she kept those evils from their door. She was the guardian of the sands, and in Tchom Rin she reigned supreme.

  Tonight, the city slept peacefully in the blessed respite from the heat of the day. But here, as anywhere else, there were those who needed the darkness of night for their business, and one such was on his way to assassinate the most important man in Tchom Rin. />
  Keroki flowed like quicksilver along the rope that stretched taut between two adjacent spires, heedless of the fatal drop onto the flagged and dusty streets below. Vertigo was a weakness he could not afford to have, and like the other minor frailties that he had possessed as a child, it had been beaten out of him during his cruel apprenticeship in the art of murder.

  He reached the end of the rope, where it looped around the pointed parapet of a balcony, and slipped onto solid ground again. He allowed himself a flicker of humour: Tchom Rin architecture was pretty enough, but it did provide a lot of places to snag a rope. He left it where it was, strung between the two thin towers and invisible against the night sky. If all went well, he would be returning this way. If not, then he would be dead.

  He was a short and thickset man, his appearance at odds with the grace with which he carried himself. His features were swarthy and his skin tanned dark by the desert sun. He was dressed in light green silks which hung loosely against his skin, tied with a purple sash: the attire of one of the servants of Blood Tanatsua. Often the simplest disguises were the best. He marvelled at how often he had heard of assassins masked and dressed in black, advertising their profession to anyone who saw them. His life had been saved more than once by the simple expedience of an appropriate costume for his task.

  There were three guards inside the tower, but all were dead at their posts. His employer had promised it would be so. He had another man on the inside, for whom poisons were something of a speciality.

  Blood Tanatsua’s Muia residence was not an easy place to get into. In fact, had it not been for the virtually limitless resources of Keroki’s employer and the amount of time they had had to prepare, it would have been impossible. He had already evaded or despatched at least a dozen sentries and avoided numerous traps on his way up the tower from which he had reached this one. The only way he had a hope of getting to his target was via this most circuitous route, and even then he was relying on the removal of some of the obstacles in his path.

  But he was not a man to consider the possibility of failure. No matter what the difficulties and dangers that Keroki had to face, Barak Reki tu Tanatsua would meet his end tonight.

  He slipped into the tower, through the rooms where the guards were slumped, victims of a slow-release venom that was so subtle they had not even realised what was happening to them, much less connected it with the meal they had eaten hours before. In contrast to the unadorned exterior of the tower, the chambers he passed through were lavish and ornate, with lacquered walls, lintels of coiled bronze, and wide mirrors duplicating everything. Globular lanterns of gold-leaf mesh hung from the ceiling, casting intriguing shadows.

  Keroki did not appreciate the subtleties of the decor. His sense of aesthetic appreciation had gone the way of his vertigo. Instead, he listened for sounds, and his eyes roved for clues that things were not entirely as they should be: a pulse at a guard’s temple to indicate he was only faking death; a screen positioned to conceal an attacker; evidence of the bodies being disturbed by someone who had happened upon them and gone to raise the alarm. As an afterthought, he considered cutting the throats of the three men so that suspicion would not fall upon the poisoner, but he reasoned that they would not bleed enough to fool anyone with their hearts long stopped, and he dismissed the idea. Let the poisoner take his chances. He would undoubtedly have covered his own trail well enough.

  Keroki headed down the stairs. The tower was made up of a succession of circular chambers, apparently innocuous, decorated as small libraries, studies, rooms for relaxing in and enjoying entertainment and music. Keroki’s practised eye saw through the disguise immediately. These were false rooms, which nobody used except those guards who had spent weeks learning where the multitude of lethal barbs and alarms were hidden. They were placed here to protect the heart of the residence from thieves entering the way he did. Embroidered boxes on elaborate dressing-tables promised jewellery within, but anyone opening them would have their fingers scored with a poisoned blade or caustic powder puffed into their face to eat their eyes away. Valuable tapestries were attached by threads to incendiary devices. Stout doors – much more common here than in the west, where screens and curtains were used instead – were rigged to explode if they were not opened in a certain fashion. Even the stairs between the rooms were constructed with occasional breakaway steps, where the stone was a crust as thin as a biscuit and concealed spring-loaded mantraps beneath.

  Keroki spent the best part of two hours descending the tower. Even with the information provided by the insider, detailing the location and operation of the traps, he was forced to be excessively cautious. He had not lived to thirty-five harvests by trusting anyone with his life, and he double-checked everything to his satisfaction before risking it. Additionally, there were some secrets which the insider had not been able to obtain, and certain traps which could not be simply avoided but had to be puzzled out and deactivated with his collection of exquisite tools.

  He thought on his mission during that time, picking it over in the back of his mind as he had done for weeks now, examining it for anything which might compromise him. But no, it was as straightforward now as it had been when he first received the assignment. The morning would bring the great meeting of the desert Baraks, the culmination of many days of negotiations, treaties signed and agreements made. Presiding over all would be the young Barak Reki tu Tanatsua. It would be a unification of the Baraks of Tchom Rin; and with it, the cementing of Blood Tanatsua’s position as the dominant family among them.

  But if Keroki succeeded tonight, then the figurehead of the unification would be dead, and the meeting would collapse into chaos. His employer – the son of a rival Barak – believed that it shamed the family for his father to submit to Blood Tanatsua in this matter. And that was where Keroki entered the equation.

  He had just made his way clear of the last of the false rooms when he heard voices.

  His senses were immediately on alert. There should not have been guards here at the foot of the tower: the ones at the top and the gauntlet of lethal chambers in between were more than enough protection. A last-minute doubling of security? A failure on the part of his informant? No matter now; he was committed.

  The men were beyond the door that he listened against. They were static, and judging by the tone of their voices and their conversation they were not particularly alert. But still, they presented something of an inconvenient obstacle.

  He lay down with his eye close to the floor and drew out two tiny, flat mirrors attached to long, thin handles. By sliding them under the door and angling them in sequence he was able to obtain a view of the room. It was a large atrium with a domed and frescoed ceiling and a floor of clouded coral marble, overhung by a balcony which created a colonnade all around its edge. In the day, they would be lit by the light shining through the teardrop apertures in the walls, but at night they were cool and dark. Perfect cover.

  Now that he had judged it was safe to dare, Keroki was able to ease open the door without a sound, lifting it on its hinges so that they would not whine. Once there was enough space to fit his head through, he peered out. Three guards, talking amongst themselves in the centre of the atrium, dressed in baggy silks of crimson and with nakata blades at their belts. The lanterns that hung from slender golden chains in the central space cast a dim and intimate illumination. The edges of the room were brightened with free-standing lamps of coiled brass, but it was not enough to dispel the patches of shadow.

  Deciding that the guards could not see the doorway well enough to notice that it was slightly ajar, he slipped out and behind one of the broad pillars of the colonnade. His heartbeat had barely sped up at all with the proximity of danger; he trod with the calm ease of a jungle cat. The guards’ voices echoed about the atrium as he glided from pillar to pillar, timing his crossings to when their talk would become particularly animated, or one of them would laugh, so as to cover even the slightest noise he might make. He knew how to move in such a w
ay that he could evade the eye’s natural tendency to be drawn to an object in motion, so that unless they were looking directly at him they would not detect him passing along the dim recesses of the cloisters.

  His intention was to skirt the room and leave undetected through the door on the other side, which would bring him near to Barak Reki’s bedchamber. In all probability he would have managed it had he not triggered the pressure plate that was hidden behind one of the pillars.

  He felt the infinitesimal give in the stone beneath his foot, the fractional slide and click as he depressed it. His body froze, his pulse and breath going still.

  Nothing happened.

  He exhaled slowly. He was not foolish enough to think that trap had malfunctioned, but it appeared to be designed in such a way that it triggered when it was released. Standing on it merely primed the mechanism. Stepping off would activate it. Most people would not even have noticed the tiny shift that betrayed its presence; but Keroki was sharper than most people.

  He cursed silently to himself. The colonnade had been left dark to tempt an intruder, and at its most inviting point a trap had been laid. Keroki’s informer had known nothing about it. He should have realised that it was too easy.

  Despite himself, a chill sweat began to form on his brow. He assessed his predicament. He was safely concealed from the guards, but he was also stuck here. Taking the weight of his foot from the pressure plate would undoubtedly not be pleasant for him. But what kind of trap was it? He could not imagine it would be anything fatal or overly dangerous, since this was a functional room and hence visited by people who would not know about the trap. Perhaps it was only rigged at night? Even so, he found it hard to believe that anyone would run the risk of accidentally killing a guest. An alarm, then; most probably a loud chime struck by a hammer that was cocked by putting weight on the pressure plate. But an alarm was just as fatal to him, for he had little chance of escaping alive if his presence was discovered.