It did not move, and yet he never for a moment doubted the shrieking report of his senses. The air seemed to whine in his ear.
‘What are you?’ he breathed.
The shape moved then, shifting slightly, an indistinct form that brightness seemed to shy from.
‘Are you a spirit? A demon? Why have you come?’ Unger demanded.
It walked slowly towards him. He took a breath to cry for help, to rouse the guard outside; but a gnarled and withered hand flashed into the shaft of dusk from the window, one long finger pointing at him, and his throat locked into silence. His body locked also, every muscle tensing at once and staying there, rendering him painfully immobile. Panic sparkled in his brain.
The intruder moved into the dim light. He stood hunched there, his small body buried in a mountain of ragged robes and hung with all manner of beads and ornaments. He wore a Mask of bronze, contorted into an expression of insanity; and as Unger watched, he slowly unfastened the latch strap and removed it.
He was like a man, but small and withered and grotesque, his skin white and parchment-dry. And his face . . . oh, there was ugliness such as Unger had never seen. His aspect was twisted so far out of true that the prisoner would have shut his eyes if he could. One side of the sallow face seemed to have melted, the skin becoming like wax and sliding off the skull to gather in folds of jowl and chop, a flabby dewlap depending from his scrawny neck. His eye on that side laboured to see from beneath the overhanging brow; his upper lip flopped over his lower one. But his right side was no less repulsive: there, his lips had skinned back as if they had simply rotted away, exposing teeth and gum in a skeletal rictus; and his right eye was huge and blind, an orb that bulged from the socket, milky with cataract.
‘Unger tu Torrhyc,’ croaked the intruder, his malformed lip flapping. ‘I am the Weave-lord Vyrrch. How pleasant to meet face to face.’
Unger could not reply. He would not have had the words anyway. He felt a scream rise inside him, but there was nowhere for it to go.
‘You’ve served me well these past weeks, Unger, though you didn’t know it,’ the foul thing continued. ‘Your efforts have accelerated my plans tenfold. I had expected it would take so much more than this to set Axekami on its way to ruin. I had to tread carefully, to keep my hand hidden, but you . . .’ Vyrrch wagged a finger in admiration. ‘You stir the people. Your arrest has angered them mightily. I never would have thought it so simple.’
Unger was too terrified to think where Vyrrch was leading this; the sensation of having bodily control robbed from him was overwhelming his reason.
‘It was quite a risk, even the little push it took to make the Guard Commander do what I needed. I had thought there would be outrage, counted on it . . . but even I had underestimated the effectiveness of your secret army of bombers, Unger. I would hate to see them stop the good work they are doing.’
‘Not . . . not . . .’ Unger managed, forcing the words in a squeak past his throat.
‘Oh, of course they’re not yours. They’re mine. But the people and the Empress alike assume you are responsible, so let us not disabuse them of that notion.’
The creature was close enough to touch him now, and Unger could see that it was not wholly real, but faintly transparent. A spectre, after all. It ran a finger down his cheek, and the sensation was like freezing water.
‘Your cause needs a martyr, Unger.’
The spectre seized him savagely by the back of the head, and despite its apparent intangibility, Unger felt its massive strength. His muscles loosened, and he screamed as it propelled him against the wall of the cell, smashing his skull like a jakma nut on a rock, leaving a dark wodge of blood and hair above his corpse.
The gates to the temple of Panazu in the River District of Axekami stood open as dusk set in. Mishani stood beneath them, looking up at the tall, narrow façade that towered over her, its shoulders pulled in tight and sculpted into the form of rolling whirlpools. She was bedraggled, exhausted and suffering from shock, and yet she was here, at the abode of the dream lady. The sounds of Axekami beginning to tear itself apart were audible across the Kerryn. New explosions could be heard, and bright flames rose against the gathering dark. Voices were raised in clamour, mob roars made weak and thin by distance. This night would be an evil one for all concerned.
She walked up the steps to the temple, through the great gates and into the cool sanctuary of the congregation chamber. The interior of the temple was breathtaking. Pillars vaulted up to domed ceilings, painted with frescoes of Panazu’s exploits and teachings. The walls were chased with reliefs of river creatures. The vast curved windows of blue, green and silver in the face of the building dappled the temple in shades of the sea floor, and seemed to stir the light restfully to heighten the illusion. The sound of water was all around: splashing, trickling, tinkling, for the altar was a fountain from which many gutters ran, directing the crystal liquid into artful designs carved into the blue-green lach on the floor. The congregation area, where the oblates came to kneel and pray, was surrounded by a thick trench of water in which swam catfish, the earthly aspect of Panazu, and bridged by short arcs of lach.
There was nobody here. The place was peaceful and deserted. Mishani shuffled in, and did not even turn around when the gates closed behind her of their own accord. She walked listlessly down the central aisle, her mind and body still numb from the tragedy she had witnessed in the Market District.
‘Mishani tu Koli,’ a soft voice purred, echoing around the temple. Mishani looked to the source of the sound, and found her standing to one side of the chamber. The dream lady. She looked more like something in a nightmare, a tall, slender tower of elegant black, her face painted with crescents of red that ran over her eyelids from forehead to cheek. Her lips were marked with alternating triangles of red and black, like teeth. A ruff of raven feathers grew from her shoulders, and a silver circlet with a red gem was set on her forehead.
She crossed the chamber to the central aisle, emerging between the pillars to stand before Mishani. She took in Mishani’s unkempt appearance without a flicker of an expression.
‘My name is Cailin tu Moritat. Lucia calls me the dream lady. She told me you would be coming.’ Cailin took her by the elbow. ‘Come. Rest, and bathe. Your journey has not been easy, I see.’
Mishani allowed herself to be led. She had nowhere else to go.
TWENTY-ONE
Time did not pass in Chaim. Rather, it elongated, stretching itself flat and thin, sacrificing substance for length. Tane had ceased counting the days; they had merged into one great nothing, a relentless, frowning wall of boredom and increasing despair.
The disappearance of Kaiku had hit them hard. At first there was something akin to mild panic. Had something been into the cave and taken her while they slept? Mamak searched and found no sign. It took a short while before Tane remembered the strange things Kaiku had been saying to him while he drowsed:
Perhaps this was not your path to take after all. Perhaps it is mine alone.
The storm kept them in the cave another day. Mamak flatly refused to let them search.
‘If she’s out there, the fool is dead already. When this storm breaks, I go home. You can come with me, or stay in this cave if you wish.’
Tane begged him, offered him triple his fee if he would find her. He told her that Kaiku had money, and lots of it. Mamak’s eyes lit at the prospect, and for a moment Tane saw greed war with sense on his face; but in the end, his experience of mountain travel tipped the balance, and he refused. Asara shook her head and tutted at Tane for his loss of dignity in desperation.
‘I want her back!’ he snapped in his defence.
Asara shrugged insouciantly. ‘But she is gone, Tane. Time for a new plan.’
When the storm gave up the next morning, they accepted the inevitable and returned to Chaim. Tane talked of raising an expedition to search the mountains for Kaiku – or her body – so that they might at least retrieve the Mask. Tane had not forgot
ten that without that Mask he had no hope of discovering who had sent the shin-shin that had massacred the priests of his temple. But the plan was unsound, and everyone knew it. Even Tane knew it. There was not a prayer of finding her in all the vastness of northern Fo, with her tracks erased by rain and wind. By the time they came down out of the mountains and were back on the path to Chaim, he had stopped talking about it.
Tane and Asara found themselves rooms in Chaim’s single lodging house, a bare and draughty construction that catered for the few outside visitors the town received. Neither intended to leave, or even spoke of such.
‘She decided to go on alone,’ Tane said. ‘If she makes it, she’ll come back here.’
‘You are chasing false hope,’ Asara told him, but she did not argue further, nor make any move to depart herself.
There was nothing to do in Chaim. The unfaltering rudeness of the locals began to wear on them after a time, and they talked to nobody but each other. At first, there was little for them to speak of. Too many barriers existed between them, too many deceptions. It was just like it had been with Kaiku.
Gods, do we ever take our masks off, even for a moment? Tane thought in exasperation.
But gradually their enforced solitude bred conversation, as the slow trickle of water through a holed dam will erode the surrounding stone till it cracks. After what might have been a week of waiting and wondering, they found themselves back in the makeshift bar where they had first met Mamak.
‘You know what I am, Tane,’ Asara said.
The statement, put casually in the midst of the conversation, brought the young acolyte up short. ‘What do you mean?’ he asked.
‘No games,’ she said. ‘The time has come for honesty. If you are to walk the same paths as I, as seems increasingly to be the case, then you should face up to what you already know.’
Tane glanced around the bar to ensure they were not being overheard, but it was almost empty. A bleak, wooden, chilly room with a few locals in a corner minding their own business. A scatter of low, rough-cut tables and worn mats to sit on. A grouch-faced barmaid serving shots of rank liquor. Spirits, he hated this town.
‘You are Aberrant,’ he said quietly.
‘Well done,’ she replied, with a hint of mockery in her voice. ‘At last you admit it to yourself. But you are a strange one, Tane. You listen. You are ready to learn. That is why I will tell you this, for you may one day come to my way of seeing. So swallow your disgust for a moment, and hear what I have to say.’
Tane leaned forward over the table, his cheeks flushed. With the lack of anything to do in the town, Chaim’s inhabitants had a lot to drink about, and the potency of the liquor attested to that. Asara was dead sober, as always; her Aberrant metabolism neutralised alcohol before it could affect her, and she did not know how it felt to be drunk.
‘I am old, Tane,’ she said. ‘You cannot guess how old by looking at me. I have seen much, and I have done much. Some memories bring pride, others disgust.’ She turned the wooden tumbler of liquor inside the cradle of her fingers, looking down into it. ‘Do you know what experience is? Experience is when you have handled something so much that the shine wears off it. Experience is when you begin to see how relentlessly predictable people are, how generation after generation they follow the same simple, ugly pattern. They dream of living forever, but they do not know what they ask. I have passed my eightieth harvest, though it does not show on me. Since I reached adulthood, I have not aged. My body repairs itself faster than time can ravage it. That is my curse. I have already lived the span of a normal lifetime, and I am bored.’
It seemed such bathos that Tane almost laughed, a bitter hysteria welling within him; but the tone of Asara’s voice warned him against it. ‘Bored?’ he repeated.
‘You do not understand,’ Asara said patiently. ‘Nor, I think, will you ever. But when so much has become jaded, all that is left is the search for something new, something that will fire the blood again, if only for a short while. I was purposeless for a long time before I met Cailin tu Moritat, seeking only new thrills and finding each less satisfying than the last. When I found her, I saw something I had never seen before. I had thought I was a freak, a random thing; but in her I saw a mirror to me, and I saw a purpose again.’
‘What did you see?’ asked Tane.
‘A superior being,’ Asara replied. ‘A creature that was human and yet better than human. An Aberrant whose Aberration made her better than those who despised her.’
Tane blinked, wanting to shake his head and refute her. He restrained himself. Her words were preposterous, but he would listen. He had learned her opinions on the subject of Aberrancy over the weeks they had spent together, and while he did not agree with much of what she said, it had enough validity to make him think.
‘I saw then the new order of things,’ Asara continued. ‘A world where Aberrants were not hated and hunted but respected. I saw that Aberrancy was not a fouling of the body, but merely a changing. An evolution. And as with all evolution, many must fall by the way for one to emerge triumphant. If I am to live in this world for a long time to come, I will do all I can to make it a more pleasant experience for myself. And that means I must work towards that new order.’
‘I think I see,’ he said, recalling other snatches of conversation they had shared over the period of their self-induced confinement in Chaim. ‘You help the Red Order because they represent Aberrants whose abilities make them greater than human. And the Libera Dramach . . . they work for the same thing you want; so you help them too.’
‘But the Red Order and the Libera Dramach are working together for the time being, with one common goal in mind,’ Asara said, enmeshing her fingers before her.
‘To see the Heir-Empress take the throne,’ Tane concluded.
‘Exactly. She is the key. She is the only one that can reverse the blight on our land. She is the bridge between us and the spirits, between the common folk and the Aberrants.’ Asara grabbed Tane’s wrists and fixed him with an iron gaze. ‘It must be this way. And we must do what we can to make it so.’
Tane held the gaze for a moment, then countered with a question. ‘Why did you watch over Kaiku for so many years?’
He regretted it almost immediately. It had come out without thought, seeming to trip from his subconscious to his tongue without routing through his brain; and yet he knew by some terrible prescience what would be Asara’s reply.
Asara smiled faintly and released him. She sat back and took a sip of liquor. ‘I became her handmaiden at the behest of the Red Order. Her previous one met with an accident.’
Tane let this one pass. When he did not react, Asara continued.
‘They found her through whatever method they have; their ways are a mystery to me. They knew she would manifest . . . powers sooner or later, and they asked me to watch her until she did. There was no way she would be coerced to join until she had her first burning. Who in their right mind would believe they were an Aberrant without any evidence?’
Asara’s words dropped into Tane’s consciousness like a stone into thick honey. The world seemed to slow around him, the whispering of the other denizens of the bar becoming a meaningless susurrus in the background. Across the coarse wooden table he could see Asara’s beautiful eyes watching his face, evaluating the effect of what she had just told him.
‘But you knew that, didn’t you?’ she asked.
Tane nodded mutely, his gaze falling. She relished it, he realised. He had asked her a question he already had the answer to, and she was amused that he still felt her response like a pikestaff in the ribs.
‘Small things,’ he murmured, when he could bear her wry silence no longer. ‘When first I met her, she was raving about a woman named Asara. She told me you had been killed by a demon in the forest. Later you reappeared. No explanation was given, and I didn’t ask for one.’
‘You thought it was not your place to enquire,’ said Asara scornfully. ‘How like a man.’
&n
bsp; ‘No,’ he said. ‘No, I suppose I didn’t want to know. I was cowardly. Then there was you. I suspected you from the start. Add to that the lengths you went to to bring her to the Aberrant woman Cailin, the secrets you held between you that I was not privy to, the way you seemed to change . . .’ He sighed, a strange noise of resignation. ‘I’m not feeble-minded, Asara. I’ve been walking with Aberrants since my journey began.’
‘Yet you believe your journey was ordained by your goddess, that you were spared for a purpose; but there is no greater foulness to Enyu than an Aberrant. Reconcile these things, if you can.’
Tane bowed his head, his shaved skull limned in dim lantern light. ‘I can’t. That’s why I’ve been avoiding them.’
‘Here it is in the open, then,’ said Asara, brushing back the red-streaked fall of her hair behind one sculpted ear and leaning forward. ‘She is Aberrant, gifted with the ability to mould the Weave as the Weavers do. But she is dangerous to herself and others; she needs schooling. I came to Fo for several reasons, but one was to stop her committing suicide. Every day she spends here increases the risk that her powers will break their boundaries again. Eventually, she will either burn herself or be killed by those that fear her.’ She relaxed back, her gaze never leaving Tane, never ceasing to calculate him. ‘I told Cailin I would bring her into the fold, and I will. Assuming she still lives, of course. I will wait in this spirit-blasted wasteland until hope is gone. That may be weeks, it may be months; but age has a way of foreshortening time, Tane, and I am a patient woman.’
Tane was silent. The sensation of drunkenness felt suddenly unpleasant, having soured within him.
‘Join us, Tane,’ said Asara. ‘You and I share the same goals. You may hate Aberrants, but you would see the blight on this land stopped. And the Heir-Empress is the only chance we have.’
The Braided Path: The Weavers of Saramyr / the Skein of Lament / the Ascendancy Veil Page 25
