The Ascendancy Veil: Book Three of the Braided Path

by Chris Wooding

  That could not be allowed to happen. From the time she had decided to murder her husband, she knew she would have to die too. She had found that knowledge an immensely liberating sensation.

  Thoughts of her daughter brought back words she had spoken during those precious minutes when they were together, a few short minutes in ten terrible years – ten years for which Avun had been responsible.

  We are on two sides of a war now. Mother, and one side or the other must win eventually. Whichever of us is on the losing side will not survive, I think. We are both of us too involved.

  She was right. She always had the gift of cutting to the point. So let it be Muraki on the losing side, then, for she could not bear the thought of her daughter suffering such a fate.

  Avun had indeed been clever in arranging the Weavers’ power base so that so much relied on him. He had carefully guarded his battle tactics, kept them close to his chest, and ensured that there was nobody else in a position to easily succeed him. His death would be a major blow to the Weavers, at the time when they could least afford it. And from what she knew of Kakre, she did not think he would turn back from his assault now, no matter what speculation might arise as to what happened in this room tonight. The Aberrants would move according to plan, and their enemies would be waiting for them.

  Would it be worth it, in the end? Only the gods could say. There were no certainties in the real world.

  She gave a long sigh, and her eyes turned to the night, the impenetrable blackness with no moons and no stars. What a cold and dreary prison her husband had made for her. She much preferred her dreams.

  She drained her glass, and soon she was dreaming once more.

  TWENTY-SIX

  Nuki’s eye was sinking in the west, igniting cottony bands of cloud. The surface of the River Ko glittered in fitful red and yellow. It had been unseasonably hot today, but the folk of Saramyr were glad of it, for winter was drawing to an end and it was their first hint of a spring to come. Now the temperature dropped as Nuki retreated towards the far side of the world, afraid of the tumult that the moon-sisters would bring when they took the sky. For tonight the moons’ orbits would cross at shallow angles, and they would drag screeching fingers across the darkness. There would be a moonstorm, and a particularly long and vicious one.

  It would be a suitably apocalyptic backdrop, Yugi thought, to the battle that was to come. He stood holding the reins of his horse on a rise a little way south of the river, and looked to the north. Waiting for the Aberrants.

  The lands to the north and south of the Ko were rolling downs, a gentle sway of hills that ran from the Forest of Xu twenty miles to their west to peter out on the shores of Lake Azlea, a similar distance to their east. In between was the Sakurika Bridge, a sturdy arch of wood and stone that spanned the river. It was a plain construction, not as grand as many in Saramyr, and little used. Its abutments, spandrels and parapets were painted in faded terracotta to blend with the honey-coloured varnish on the wood, but beyond that there was no decoration. It had been built during a campaign in the far past to facilitate troop movement along the west side of the Azlea, but no road had ever been laid to it. The thin strip of land sandwiched between Xu, Azlea and the Xarana Fault was considered too perilous back then to merit a tradeway. Still, it had been maintained all this time, for it was the only crossing-place for this river east of the forest, and wide enough for twenty men abreast.

  And it was here that the forces of the Empire hoped to halt the advance of the Weavers.

  Yugi felt sick. He wished he could smoke a little amaxa root to take the edge off his fear. Instead he surveyed the scene below him, the sea of armour and blades and rifles. Several artillery positions were dug in on the hilltops to either side of the bridge, densely packed with mortars and fire-cannons and even old trebuchets and ballistae that they had managed to acquire. The flat ground in between was thick with soldiers, representing almost all of the remaining high families and the Libera Dramach. Their banners hung limp in the failing breeze.

  A barricade of spikes had been built along the centre point of the bridge, and behind it soldiers waited. Beneath their feet, well hidden inside the arch, were enough explosives to blow the bridge to matchwood.

  ‘Gods, I can’t stand this waiting,’ Yugi murmured to those nearby: a few generals, a black-haired Sister that might have been a twin to Cailin in her make-up, Barak Zahn, Nomoru, Mishani and Lucia. Horses shifted and whinnyed restlessly; there was the creak of leather armour and subdued coughing.

  ‘Are we certain that they are coming this way at all?’ Mishani asked. It was a measure of how tense she was that she asked such a redundant question; she already knew the reports of the scouts.

  ‘They are coming,’ said the Sister, whose irises were red.

  Yugi glanced down at Lucia. Her expression was bland. The enemy had to be on time. There were better places in which they could have met the Aberrants, places further south where they could mount ambushes and which were far more defensible than this. But they would not win without Lucia, and it was at her insistence that they chose to meet the threat here. This, their scholars promised, was the night of the moonstorm; and it was on this night that the Aberrants – whose steady and unwavering advance had been marked by scouts all along their route – would reach the river. This night, in this place, Lucia would draw the spirits to the defence of their land.

  They could only pray that Lucia knew exactly what she was doing, for without the intervention she had promised their stand would not last for long. Thousands upon thousands of lives were staked on the word of a girl barely into adulthood. Yugi thought they could be forgiven a little nervousness at this point.

  Mishani, not for the first time, was asking herself why she was here at all. For someone who prided herself on her self-control and level-headedness, she seemed to have been remarkably rash of late. First her visit to Muraki and now this.

  But if not for my rashness, we would not have even this chance, she thought. Oh, Mother.

  She took a steadying breath to keep down the tears. No, she would not cry again. The thought of that last meeting still burned her with grief, but she was glad, at least, that she had made amends to Muraki. If she died today, she would have done that much.

  Had she known then that her mother and father had already been dead for weeks, her grief would have been keener still. But the Weavers had been careful to keep that matter secret.

  In the end, Mishani thought, it came down to Lucia. Mishani and Kaiku had been her guardians throughout her childhood in the Fold, and they had acted as elder sisters to her. Though time and circumstances had made them distant, they still had that bond. But Kaiku was needed elsewhere, and Mishani could not bear the notion of leaving Lucia to face this alone. She knew how easily manipulated Lucia was, and there was nobody here who truly cared for her except her father Zahn, but he would be down in the battle. Mishani could not contribute much to war, but she could stand alongside Lucia. She felt that it would be dishonourable to abandon her.

  Once, she had almost killed the young Heir-Empress, when she brought her a nightdress which she thought was infected with bone fever. When it came to it she had backed out; but she still felt responsible for harbouring the intention, and she had come terrifyingly close to executing it. She owed Lucia this, at least. And if Lucia fell, there would soon be little left to live for anyway. As with her visit to her mother, this was something Mishani had to do, no matter what the risks. A moral need that would not be overmatched by sense or logic.

  You are getting impulsive in your old age, Mishani, she told herself wryly.

  There was a cry from somewhere to their left, echoed by another voice closer by. The lookouts with their spyglasses had seen something on the horizon. A few moments passed, during which Mishani felt her blood slowly chill, before the Sister spoke.

  ‘Our enemy has arrived,’ she said.

  Zahn exchanged glances with Yugi and the generals, a grim understanding in their eyes. Zah
n was overall commander of this force, by consent of the council of high families. The generals mounted up and began to disperse to their positions. Yugi looked at Lucia, who did not acknowledge him, then he swung on to his horse, and pulled Nomoru up behind. Zahn put his hand on his daughter’s shoulder, and her gaze shifted to him.

  ‘We will do a great thing this night,’ he murmured. ‘Be strong. I will return to you; I promise you that.’

  She nodded, her face set.

  ‘Keep her safe,’ he said to Mishani, and then he launched himself up onto his horse. He sidled the mount over to Yugi’s, and the two of them clasped arms. Nomoru turned her scarred face to Lucia and Mishani and regarded them with an impenetrable stare, then both Zahn and Yugi spurred their horses and she was carried away, down the hill and towards the front.

  Lucia and Mishani were left together on the hill with the Sister and a group of bodyguards. They watched and waited.

  Night was drawing in as the Aberrants came, pounding through the twilight in a filthy tide of teeth and claws. They swept across the downs like the shadow of an eclipse, at a speed just short of a headlong run. Even at such a pace, they were virtually tireless, and could travel all hours with very little rest. More than once the Weavers’ ability to move armies so quickly had surprised the forces of the Empire.

  There were no gristle-crows in the sky. Like Lucia’s ravens, they were useless at night, for they could not see well without the sun. And so the Weavers had no warning of the army ranged across the south bank of the Ko until they were close enough for the front ranks to be able to see the artillery on the hills.

  The guiding minds of the Weaver forces were safely protected amid the mass of expendable soldiers. Nexuses were scattered about, riding on Aberrant manxthwa. With them rode Weavers, to whom the Nexuses signed when they had information to pass on from their connection to the Aberrants. The Weavers then penetrated deep into their servants’ minds, through conditioned channels that made it an easy process, and learned what the Nexuses knew. They conversed among themselves along the Weave and then gave their orders to the Nexuses, never knowing that they themselves were in turn enslaved by the will of the witchstones and of the moon-god Aricarat. Through such a chain of command were the Weavers’ affairs conducted.

  The passage of information throughout the Aberrant army from the moment that the forces of Empire were spotted took less than a minute. The reaction was immediate, and unexpected. The high families had predicted that the Aberrants would slow, to take stock of the situation. But they did not know that Avun was dead, and that Kakre was in command here. Kakre had a different way of doing things to Avun.

  He sent his orders, and the Aberrants charged.

  Thousands of animals bayed and roared as they were goaded into a berserk rage by their handlers. The colossal swell of noise washed over the downs and reached the soldiers of the Empire. They stood grimly along the riverbank, on the flanks of the surrounding hills or packed thick on the bridge. They would not dishonour themselves by showing fear, but they felt dread settle on their hearts as they saw the hills aswarm with an army that vastly outnumbered theirs. They thought of their families, of moments of joy and pleasure, of things left undone. Some of them felt regret at their mistakes and hoped that the gods would find them worthy when they came to the Golden Realm. Some of them regretted nothing, and waited coldly for the end. Some of them felt the fire in their veins and thirsted for combat. Some felt noble, proud to be part of this; some were angry at throwing away their lives when they could have run and seen another day, another month or year, and honour be hanged.

  But none of them broke ranks, and none of them shed a tear, and none of them showed their weakness. Though some sweated and trembled, though some fought to keep down the contents of their stomachs, they held at the riverbank as the Aberrants raced towards them, each second bringing them closer and closer.

  And closer.

  The air was torn by the scream of a firework as it spat into the twilight, trailing dazzling white fire; then the artillery opened up.

  The first salvo drew a billowing line of fire across the downs, and ripped the leading edge of the Aberrants apart. Broken bodies spewed into the air in clouds of dirt and flame, shrapnel tore away limbs and sliced through hide. Those that survived the concussion and the heat were knocked to the ground where they were crushed by the stampede. The entire front line collapsed and was driven into the earth by the predators behind, who ran on through the blazing slicks left by the fire-cannons. A second salvo followed the first, pitched shorter. Shellshot sprayed burning jelly, mortars maimed and blinded, and heavy trebuchets lobbed bags of explosives that clattered to the earth amid the horde and then erupted, sending flailing corpses in every direction. The Aberrants were a target that was impossible to miss, and each shell or bomb accounted for a dozen or more. Hundreds fell as a result of those initial salvos, but they were a drop in the ocean. And the tide kept on coming.

  The artillery continued firing without cease as the Aberrants reached the Ko. No longer were they aiming at the leading edge of the horde; instead, they placed their strikes carelessly into the heaving mass, confident that it was impossible to miss. The deafening barrage faded into a background noise, a constant roar of slaughter; the ground became a bloody trench of body parts, the soil red and churned and scorched. But the soldiers of the Empire had a greater concern: the Aberrants were upon them now.

  The creatures swarmed onto the Sakurika Bridge or ploughed into the river, not slowing for anything. The spiked barricade across the bridge’s centre took care of the first few dozen Aberrants before it collapsed: they simply threw themselves onto it with nauseating force until it cracked beneath their weight. Their brethren swarmed over their impaled corpses.

  The soldiers of the Empire were ranked across the bridge to meet them. Riflemen stood behind kneeling swordsmen, aiming over their shoulders. A volley of shots cut the first row of Aberrants down like wheat. Then the swords swung, and battle was joined.

  The fury of close-quarters combat was terrible. The huge, shaggy ghauregs tore into the soldiers, flinging them off the bridge into the water, or else picking them up and biting off their heads. Skrendel wound along the parapets of the bridge to insinuate themselves in the ranks of the defenders, scratching and biting, blinding and strangling. Shrillings filled the air with their insidious ululations as they pounced and tore with their claws. Other creatures fought too, nightmare things of bony hide and jagged tooth, beasts that were too strange or uncommon to be recognised as a species.

  The soldiers cut and sliced, but hand-to-hand the Aberrants had a great advantage. The shrillings’ natural armour turned sword blades away; the ghauregs’ tough skin and thick pelt made it hard to cut them deeply, and even then nothing short of a strike in a vital organ would take them down. Skrendel were too fast to hit easily, and the soldiers were crammed too tight on the bridge to make wild swings for fear of hitting each other. The Aberrants pressed forward as the soldiers fought and died. The bridge became greasy with gore and cluttered with bodies as the men of the Empire were pushed back.

  And, in the river beneath, the Aberrants were swimming across.

  ‘It is time, Lucia,’ Mishani murmured.

  Lucia ignored her. She could see what was going on below as well as Mishani could. From their vantage point on the crest of the hill, the battle seemed strangely removed and insignificant in the last of the light, the deaths too distant to be real. Nuki’s eye had gone now, leaving only a soft blue glow in the sky through which the stars were visible. The three moons, all of them full, had risen from the same horizon and were converging slowly. There was something eerily malevolent in their steady movement, heavy with purpose.

  Four guards stood around them, doing their best not to glance at Lucia or the Sister who stood by her. Mishani waited for a reaction to her comment, then turned her head to regard the young woman at her side.

  ‘Lucia, it is time,’ she repeated.

  Lucia slo
wly met her gaze, a deep sorrow in her eyes. For a moment, Mishani was struck by an awful thought: that Lucia would confess it was all a sham, that there were no spirits coming to their aid. But what she said instead was almost as worrying.

  ‘Whatever comes after, Mishani, think well of me,’ she murmured. ‘I made a choice that nobody should ever have to make.’

  Mishani did not reply. She sensed that she did not need to. There was no time to discuss this, anyway, for the Aberrants were almost across the river now. The soldiers on the south bank were riddling them with rifle balls as they swam, but there were too many of them to stop.

  Lucia bowed her head and closed her eyes.

  The change in the atmosphere was swift and immediately noticable. At first, Mishani thought it was the onset of the moonstorm, somehow beginning before the great satellites had aligned. But though it was similar, it was not that. The air tautened, stretching across the senses and bringing with it a sense of dislocation, a faint notion that the eyes and ears had become detached from the mind. The wind began to pick up, at first in sporadic gusts and then rising to a fitful bluster, whipping back and forth. Lucia’s cropped blonde locks, now grown a little wild, began to lash against her cheeks; Mishani’s newly cut hair did the same, escaping the jewelled combs she had used to tame it. She had the impression of movement on the periphery of her vision, slender, shadowy figures darting between the guards that surrounded them. But they were phantoms, and when she tried to catch them with her eye they were not there.

  The surface of the river became a chaos of ripples, coldly glinting frills chasing each other with the switching of the wind. The Aberrants swam through, oblivious, cutting across the slow current of the Ko.

  Then there was a howl, rising above the battlefield, and the first of them disappeared under the water.

  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.