The Braided Path: The Weavers of Saramyr / the Skein of Lament / the Ascendancy Veil

by Chris Wooding

  ‘You must be very cautious, Mistress,’ he gurgled. ‘Very cautious indeed. You have few options if you wish to avert a disaster.’

  The Weave-lord was wearing his Mask, and for that, at least, she was thankful. His horribly deformed features were hidden behind a bronze visage, and though the Mask itself was distressing to look upon, it was far preferable to what lay beneath. It depicted a demented face, its features distorted in what could be pain, insanity or leering pleasure. The very sight of it made her skin crawl. It was old, very old; and where the True Masks were concerned, age meant power. She dreaded to think how many minds had been lost to that Mask, and how much of Vyrrch’s remained . . .

  ‘What do you advise then, Weave-lord?’ she replied, concealing her distaste with a skill born through many years of practice. Silently, she dared him to suggest having her daughter executed.

  ‘You must appear conciliatory, at least. You have deceived them, and they will expect you to acknowledge that. Do not underestimate the hatred that we of Saramyr bear for Aberrants.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous, Vyrrch,’ she snapped. Though slender and willowy, with petite features and an innocent appearance, she could be iron when she wanted to be. ‘She’s not an Aberrant. She’s just a child with a talent. My child.’

  ‘I know well the semantics of the word, Mistress,’ he wheezed, shifting his hunched body. He was clothed in ragged robes, a patchwork of fibres, beads, bits of matting and animal hide cannibalised together in an insane fashion. All the Weavers wore similar attire. Anais had never had the desire to delve deep enough into their world to ask why.

  The Weavers had been responsible for the practice of killing Aberrant children for more than a hundred years. They were gifted at tracking down the signs, searching with their unearthly senses across the Weave to root out corruption in the purity of the human form. Though they were reclusive as a rule, preferring to remain in the comfort of noble houses or in their monasteries in the mountains, they made exception where Aberrants were concerned. Weavers travelled from town to village to city, appearing at festivals or gatherings, teaching the common folk to recognise the Aberrant in their midst, urging them to give up the creatures that hid among them. The visit of a Weaver to a town was an almost religious event, and the people gathered in fear and awe, both repulsed and drawn by the strange men in their Masks. While there, they listened to the Weaver’s teachings, and passed on that wisdom to their children. Though the content of the teachings never varied, the Weavers were tireless, and their word had become so ingrained in the psyche of the people of Saramyr that it was as familiar as the rhymes of childhood or the sound of a mother’s voice.

  Vyrrch waited for Anais’s gaze to cool before continuing. ‘What I think of the matter is not relevant. You must be prepared for the wrath of the families. The child you have borne is an Aberrant to them. They will make little distinction between Lucia and the twisted, blind, limbless children that we of the Weavers must deal with every day. Both are . . . deviant. Until today, they believed the line of Erinima had an heir. Sickly, perhaps – I believe that was your excuse for hiding her away from us? – but an heir nonetheless. Now they find it does not, and many possibilities will—’

  ‘It does, Vyrrch,’ Anais smouldered. ‘My child will take the throne.’

  ‘As an Aberrant?’ Vyrrch chuckled. ‘I doubt that.’

  Anais turned to the fountain to cover the tightening of her jaw. She knew Vyrrch spoke the truth. The people would never suffer an Aberrant as ruler. And yet, what other choice was there?

  Apart from her phenomenal speed at picking up speech, Lucia had displayed few outward signs of her abilities until she reached two harvests of age; but Anais knew. If she was honest with herself, she had known instinctively, early in the pregnancy, that the child in her womb was abnormal. At first she did not dare believe; but later, when she faced the reality of the situation, she did not care. She would not consider telling her doctor; he would have counselled poisoning the child in the womb. No, she would not have given Lucia up for anything.

  Perhaps that would be her downfall. Perhaps, if she had given up Lucia, she would have borne many healthy babies afterward. But she made her choice, and through complications she was rendered barren in giving birth. She could have no more children. Lucia was the only one there would ever be. The sole heir to the realm of Saramyr.

  And so she had hidden her child away from the world, knowing that the world would despise her. They would ignore her gentle nature and dreamy eyes, and see only a creature not human, something to be rooted out and destroyed before its seed could pollute the purity of the Saramyr folk. She had thought that the child might learn to hide her abnormalities, to control and suppress them; but that hope was dashed now. Heart’s blood, how did they learn of it? She had been so careful to keep Lucia from the eyes of those that might harm her.

  This land was sick, she thought bitterly. Sick and cursed. Every year, more children were born Aberrant, more were snatched by the Weavers. Animals, too, and plants. Farmers griped that the very soil was evil, as whole crops grew twisted. The sickness was spreading, had been spreading for decades and nobody even knew what it was, much less where it came from.

  The door was thrown open with a force that made her judder, and her husband thundered in, a black tower of rage.

  ‘What is this?’ he cried, seizing her by the arm and dragging her roughly to him. ‘What is this?’

  She tore free from his grip, and he let her. He knew where the power lay in this relationship. She was the Blood Empress, ruler by bloodline. He was Emperor only by marriage; a marriage that could be annulled if Anais wished it.

  ‘Welcome back, Durun,’ she replied sarcastically, glowering at him. ‘How was your hunt?’

  ‘What has happened while I’ve been gone?’ he cried. ‘The things I hear . . . our child . . . what have you done?’

  ‘Lucia is special, Durun. As you might know, if you had seen her more than once a year. Do not claim that she is our child: you have taken no hand in her parenting.’

  ‘So it’s true? She’s an Aberrant?’ Durun roared.

  ‘No!’ Anais snapped, at the same time that Vyrrch said ‘Yes.’

  Durun gazed in astonishment at his wife, and she, unflinching, gazed back. A taut silence fell.

  She knew how he would react. The Emperor was nothing if not predictable. Most days she despised him, with his tight black attire and his long, lustrous black hair that fell straight to either side of his face. She hated his proud bearing and his hawk nose, his knife-thin face and his dark eyes. The marriage had been purely political, arranged by her parents before their passing; but while it had gained her Blood Batik as staunch and useful allies, she had paid for it by suffering this indolent braggart as a husband. Though he did have his moments, this was not one of them.

  ‘You gave birth to an Aberrant?’ he whispered.

  ‘You fathered one,’ she countered.

  A momentary spasm of pain crossed his face.

  ‘Do you know what this means? Do you know what you’ve done?’

  ‘Do you know what the alternative was?’ she replied. ‘To kill my only child, and let Blood Erinima die out? Never!’

  ‘Better that you had,’ he hissed.

  There was a chime outside the door then, forestalling her retort.

  ‘Another messenger awaits you,’ Vyrrch said in his throaty gurgle.

  Flashing a final hot look at her husband, Anais pulled open the door and strode past the servant before he had time to tell her what she already knew. Durun stormed away to his chambers. For that, Anais was thankful. She still had no idea how she would handle the anger of the high families, but she knew she would do it better without Durun at her side.

  The chambers of Weave-lord Vyrrch were a monument to degradation. They were dingy and dark, hot and wet as a swamp in the heat of early summer. The high shutters – sealed closed when they should have been open to admit the breeze – were draped in layers of col
oured materials and tapestries. The vast, plush bed had collapsed and settled at an angle, its sheets soiled and stained. In the centre of the room was an octagonal bathing pool. Its waters were murky, scattered with floating bits of debris and faeces. At the bottom, staring sightlessly upward, was a naked boy.

  Everywhere there was evidence of the Weave-lord’s terrible appetites when in his post-Weaving rages. All manner of food was strewn about in varying states of decay. Fine silks were ripped and torn. Blood stained the tiled floor here and there. A scourge lay beneath the broken bed. A corpse lay in the bed, several weeks old, its sex and age mercifully unidentifiable now. A vast hookah smoked unattended amid a marsh of spilled wine and wet clothes.

  And in the centre, his white, withered body cloaked in rags, the Weave-lord sat cross-legged, wearing his Mask.

  The True Mask of the Weave-lord Vyrrch was an old, old thing. Its lineage went all the way back to Frusric, one of the greatest Edgefathers that had ever lived. Frusric had formed it from bronze, beaten thin so it would be light enough to wear. It was a masterpiece: the face of some long-forgotten god, his expression at once demented and horribly, malevolently sane, his brows heavy over eyes like dark pits. The face appeared to be crying out in despair, or shrieking in hate, or calling in anger, depending on what angle the light struck it.

  Frusric had given the new Mask to Tamala tu Jekkyn, who had worn it till his untimely death; it was then handed on to Urric tu Hyrst, a master Weaver himself. From Urric, it could be traced through seven subsequent owners over one hundred years, until it had come into the possession of Vyrrch, given to him by his master, who recognised in the boy a talent greater than any he had seen.

  The True Masks took all their owners had, draining them, rotting them from the inside out. They kept a portion of what they took, and passed it on to the next wearer. It changed them, imbuing shreds of its previous owner’s mind and memories and personality. With each owner, it took more and passed more on, until the clash of influences, dreams and experiences became too much for the mind to bear. The older the Mask, the greater the power it gained, and the swifter it drove the wearer to insanity. Lesser apprentices would have died of shock at just putting this Mask on. Vyrrch was laid low three seasons, but he mastered it. And the power it had granted him was nothing short of magnificent.

  What it had taken from him, though, was less glorious. He was nearly forty harvests of age, but he creaked and wheezed like a man of thrice that. His face had been made hideous. A thousand more minor corruptions and cancers boiled in his broken body, and the pain was constant. And though he did not realise it, the Mask had subtly been eroding his sanity like all the others, until he teetered daily on the brink of madness.

  But he felt none of the pains in his body now, for he was Weaving, and the ecstasy of it took him away on a sea of bliss.

  Like all Weavers, he had been taught to visualise the sensation in his own way. The raw stuff of the Weave was overwhelming, and many novices had found its beauty more than they could bear, and lost their will to leave. They wandered forever somewhere between its threads, lost in their own private paradise, bright ghosts mindlessly slaved to the Weave.

  For Vyrrch, the Weave was an abyss, a vast, endless blackness in which he was an infinitesimal mote of light. And yet it was far from empty. Great curling tunnels snaked through the dark, grey and dim and faintly iridescent, like immense worms that thrashed and swayed, their heads and tails lost in eternity. The worms were the threads of the Weave, and he floated in the darkness in between, where there was nothingness, only the utter and complete joy of disembodiment. A creature of sensation alone, he felt the sympathetic vibration of the threads, a slow wind that swept through him, charging his nerves. On the edge of vision, huge whale-like shapes slid through the darkness. He had never understood what they were: a product of his own imagining, or something else altogether? Nor had he ever found out, for they eluded him effortlessly, remaining always out of his reach. Eventually he had given up trying, and for their part they ignored him as being beneath their notice.

  Swiftly he glided between the immense threads, a gnat against their heaving flanks. By reading their vibrations he found the thread he sought and, steeling himself, he plunged into it, tearing through its skin into the roaring tumult inside, where chaos swallowed him.

  Now he was a spark, a tiny thing that raced along the synapses of the thread with dizzying speed, selecting junctions here and jumping track there, flitting along faster than the mind could comprehend. From this thread to that he flickered, racing down one lane after another, a million changes executed in less than a second, until finally he reached the terminator of a single thread, and burst free.

  His vision cleared as his senses reassembled themselves, and he was in a small, dimly lit chamber. It was unremarkable in any way, except for the crumbling yellow-red stone of its walls, and the pictograms daubed haphazardly across it, spelling out nonsense phrases and primal mutterings, dark perversions and promises. The ravings of a madman. A pair of lanterns flickered fitfully in their brackets, making the shadow-edges of the bricks shift and dance. A peeling wooden door was closed before him. Though he was far from any mark by which to recognise his surroundings, the walls exuded a familiar resonance to his heightened perception. This was Adderach, the monastery of the Weavers.

  The room was empty, but he sensed the approach of three of his brethren. While he waited, he thought over the news he had to report.

  He could not imagine how she had stayed hidden for so long. That the Heir-Empress could be an Aberrant . . . how could he have not seen it before? It was only when he began to hear reports from frightened servants of a spectral girl walking the corridors of the Keep at night that he began to suspect something was amiss. And so he had begun to investigate, searching the Keep for evidence of resonances, tremors in the Weave that would indicate that someone was manipulating it, in the way a spider feels the thrashings of the fly through her web.

  He found nothing. And yet something was there. Whatever was causing these manifestations was either too subtle to be detectable even by him, or was of a different order altogether.

  Eventually his searching bore fruit, and he found the trail of the wandering spectre as she prowled the corridors of the Keep, a tiny tremor in the air at her passing that was so fine it was almost imperceptible. Yet though he sensed himself drawing close time after time, he never caught up with her; he was always evaded. Frustration gnawed at him, and his efforts became more frantic; yet this only seemed to make her escapes all the easier. Until one day one of his spies overheard Anais consulting a physician about her daughter’s odd dreams, and the connection was made.

  Like many, he had never laid eyes on the Heir-Empress, but he had spied on her from time to time. The Heir-Empress was far too important for him to abide by her mother’s wish for her to be kept sheltered and secret. He knew at once that she was not so sickly as Anais made out, but he also knew there were many good reasons why a child as important as this one should be kept safe from harm. He had simply attributed it to Anais’s paranoia about her only daughter – the only child she could ever have – and forgotten about it. It had not seemed urgent at the time, and as the seasons came and went he forgot about it, the thoughts slipping through the gauze of his increasingly addled mind and fading away.

  It was his assurance of his own abilities that had led him to discount the little Heir-Empress from his initial investigations concerning the spectre. Surely, he would have sensed something if she had been unusual in any way. He had not looked closer at first, because he should have detected it when he first spied on her.

  The night he heard about the Heir-Empress’s dreams, he had used his Mask to search for her, to divine what she truly was. It was something he should have done a long time ago. Yet when he tried, she was impossible to find. He knew who and where she was, but she was still invisible to him. His consciousness seemed to slip over her; she was unassailable. The rage at his failure was immense, an
d cost the lives of three children. All this time, there had been an Aberrant under his very nose but it had taken him eight years to see it.

  He knew now that he was dealing with something unlike anything he had encountered before. He considered what she was and what it might mean, and he feared her.

  And yet still he needed proof, and it must be a proof that could not be connected to him in any way. So he had sent a message to Sonmaga tu Amacha’s Weaver, who had advised the Barak, who had employed a series of middlemen to obtain a lock of the Heir-Empress’s hair. Anyone who followed the trail would find it led to Sonmaga tu Amacha’s door; the only one who knew of Vyrrch’s involvement was Sonmaga’s Weaver, Bracch.

  The conclusive proof of Aberration could only be carried out by a Weaver if he were physically within sight of the person, or if he had a piece of the person’s body to study. With the lock of hair Bracch was able to convince Sonmaga of the truth.

  The girl was a threat that had to be eliminated. Though the situation was yet far from desperate, she had the potential to become a great danger to the Weavers. With good fortune, the Baraks and high families would deal with her for him, but if not . . . well, maybe then more direct methods would have to be employed.

  The door to the chamber opened then, and the shambling, ragged figures of the three Weavers came inside. To them, he appeared as a floating apparition, barely visible in the dim, flickering light.

  ‘Daygreet, Weave-lord Vyrrch,’ croaked one, whose mask was a tangle of bark and leaves shaped into a rough semblance of a bearded face. ‘I trust you have news?’

  ‘Grave news, my brothers,’ Vyrrch replied softly. ‘Grave news . . .’

  SIX

  The townhouse of Blood Koli was situated on the western flank of the Imperial Quarter of Axekami. The original building had been improved over the years, adding a wing here, a library there, until the low, wide mass sprawled across the expanse of the compound that protected it. Its roof was of black slate, curved and peaked into ridges; the walls were the colour of ivory, simple and plain, their uniformity broken up by a few choice angles or an ornamental cross-hatching of narrow wooden beams. Behind the townhouse was a cluster of similarly austere buildings: quarters for guards, stables, and storage rooms. The remainder of the compound was taken up by a garden, trimmed and neat and severe in its beauty. Curving pebble paths arced around a pond full of colourful fish, past a sculpted fountain and a shaded bench. The whole was surrounded by a high wall with a single gate, that separated the compound from the wide streets of the Imperial Quarter. The morning sun beat down on the city, and the air was humid and muggy. Not too distantly, the golden ziggurat of the Imperial Keep loomed at the crest of a hill, highest of all the buildings in the city.