‘Get out of the way!’ one of the men behind him cried. ‘The place is burning, by the spirits.’
‘Pick up the packs,’ she said quietly over her shoulder. Kaiku obeyed wearily. The burning of the kana was already causing her to spasm in pain, jolts of agony pulsing through her body.
‘What do you want?’ the owner cried. ‘Let me put out the fire! This is my livelihood!’
‘Two horses, from your stables,’ Asara said. ‘We can buy them from you, or we can take them by force. Choose.’
‘Heart’s blood,’ breathed another man suddenly. ‘Look at her eyes!’
It was Kaiku he was referring to.
‘Aberrant!’ somebody hissed.
‘Yes, Aberrant,’ Asara replied. ‘And she will do to you what she has done to that room if you get in our way. The horses, now, or we stay here until this whole place burns down.’
‘I’ll take you,’ the owner snapped. ‘You men, put out that fire!’
With Kaiku in tow, Asara edged down the corridor. The men rushed past her, shying back from Kaiku with mingled disgust and fear, carrying their buckets to the blaze.
‘Good horses,’ said Asara, ‘and we’ll pay you the worth of this place.’
The owner looked at her hatefully, but he knew what it might mean. A new start, in a new place, where life was not so hard and grim. ‘You have the money now?’
Asara nodded.
‘Then let the place burn. Come with me,’ he said.
They rode that night, driving their horses, heading south through the biting wind across Fo, putting as much distance as they could between themselves and Chaim. Kaiku slept lashed to the saddle, for her kana had burned her out from within, and Asara kept by her side to guide her mount.
How strange the ways that the gods take us, Asara thought, and rode on as dawn lightened the east.
TWENTY-FIVE
The Xarana Fault lay far to the south of Axekami, bracketed at its east and west end by the rivers Rahn and Zan. It was a place of dark legend, a vast swathe of shattered land haunted by the ghosts of ill memory and stalked by restless spirits, who had been shaken awake in the tumult of its formation and never quite settled again.
The histories told of how Jaan tu Vinaxis, venerated founder of the Saramyr Empire, had built the first Saramyr city of Gobinda in that place as a commemoration of the defeat of the aboriginal Ugati folk. At that time the land was flat and green, and Gobinda prospered and became a great city on the banks of the Zan. But Torus, Jaan’s son, was usurped by the third Blood Emperor, Bizak tu Cho. Stories speak of the debauchery that Bizak entertained, orgies of godlessness and excess. Then came Winterfall, the day on which all men must give praise to Ocha for the beginning of a new cycle of the year. Bizak, after a three-day celebration, was too exhausted to attend. He sent his daughter in his stead.
At that, Ocha was angered. The histories tell that wise men dreamed of a great boar that night, with breath of fire and smoke and jagged tusks, who stamped the earth and split it asunder. They warned the Emperor to make amends to Ocha, reminding him that he was only Emperor of men, and Ocha was Emperor of the gods. But Bizak in his hubris would not listen, and so they fled.
There were few survivors of Ocha’s mighty retribution, but those who escaped painted a terrifying picture. The ground roared and bucked and split, breaking into sections like stone hit with a hammer and pitching the people of Gobinda howling into the yawning chasms. Magma spewed from the earth, belching ash into the sky and blackening the sun, turning the world to a seething cauldron of fiery red light. Huge sections of the land plummeted suddenly hundreds of feet; rock shattered; lightning flashed; and over it all was a bellowing and screeching, as of a vast, enraged boar. Gobinda fell into the earth and was swallowed, and Bizak tu Cho, his daughter and all his bloodline went with it.
When the destruction was over, the land was buckled and ruined. The Rahn and the Zan, which had previously flowed true, were now kinked with immense waterfalls as they dropped to the newly sunken landscape. The Xarana Fault – as it came to be known, when more was understood of tectonics and the ways of the inner earth – was a maze of folds, juts, plateaux, valleys, moraines and promontories: a landscape of utter chaos. In the many hundred years since the cataclysm, it had grown new grass and trees that smoothed over its edges somewhat; but its lessons had never been forgotten. It was still a place of bad luck and ill fortune, and was seldom visited by the honest folk of the city. Spirits were abundant there; some benevolent, most of them not.
But some dared to make their home in the hard lands of the Xarana Fault. Those who sought solitude, or needed to hide; those who would risk the dangers for the rewards of precious metals and gems unearthed by the ancient upheaval; those who had found nothing for them in the cities and the fields, and wanted a new start. There were as many reasons as there were people living in the lands of the Fault, and amid the turbulent landscape dozens of small communities lived side by side, some in harmony and some in hostility. But all had the single understanding: the business of the Fault stayed in the Fault, and was not the outside world’s to know.
Cailin tu Moritat sat high in the saddle of a black mare, framed against the hot mid-morning sky. Beneath her, the ground fell in massive semicircular steps, irregular plateaux that piled haphazardly on top of each other. On the backs of these plates of earth was built a small town: dense clusters of houses, supply stores, an occasional bar and a smattering of tiny shrines nestling off the dirt tracks that passed as streets. Bridges and stairways linked the disparate levels together. It was a jumble, an accretion of a hundred different styles of architecture; this place had not been planned, but built as necessity dictated, and by many different hands. The angular, three-storey houses of the Southern Prefectures rose out of a clutter of low, broad Tchom Rin dwellings; balconied and ornamented houses that would not have looked out of place in Axekami’s River District were shamed by the crafty austerity of their neighbours. Some of the dwellings had been here twenty years or more – a long time in the turbulent environment of the Fault – whereas others were still being built, wooden ribs and angle joists bristling from the wounds in their exteriors. Most of the building had been done around six years ago, when the Libera Dramach had engulfed the existing dwellings and begun to draw in people from all over Axekami, some of whom were construction engineers of no mean skill.
At the top, where the steps ran up against a mighty flank of stone, there were caves that went far into the hillside, their entrances decorated with whimsical etchings, blessings for those who entered and supplications to the gods. There, hidden within, a labyrinth of chambers lay, a secret network enshrouded in impenetrable rock.
From her vantage point on a nearby ridge, overlooking all, Cailin could see the scale of the industry that went on here. Everywhere there was movement. Workers scuttled back and forth with orders for this and that. Foremen hollered at their men. Towers were being erected, their skeletons aswarm. On one plateau, a score of men and women were being trained in the sword, jabbing and thrusting in unison to their master’s barked commands. The steps were littered with wooden cranes, lifts and bamboo scaffolding. Stacks of crates and bundled supplies were being hauled to and fro by carts that ran on curving tracks. Outposts were perched on the lips of the plateau, and sentries watched within, their eyes ranging out beyond the broken slopes to the short expanse of flat earth that surrounded them and the frowning walls of grim rock beyond. The rise of the neighbouring land sheltered this place from view so efficiently that it was only possible to see it from the edge of the valley that cradled it. There was no kind of organised army here, but the Xarana Fault was a brutal place, and any settlement that did not think and act as a fortress would soon find itself overrun.
Cailin allowed herself a tiny smile, the red and black triangles painted on her lips curving slightly. This was the Fold, the home of the Libera Dramach and, for the time being, also home to a small sisterhood of the Red Order. She could not help but admire
the realisation of their leader’s vision. Few even knew of the existence of the Fold. For years now the Libera Dramach had been recruiting and gathering in secret, drawing from all sources equally. Bandit gangs had been offered the chance to end their hand-to-mouth existence and join; scholars had been persuaded of the rightness of their cause; common folk who had a grudge against the Weavers – and these were legion – came in search of a way of striking back at those who had hurt them. With them came physicians, apothecaries, disenchanted soldiers, wives who had been turned out of home, vagrants, debtors. All found a place here. All were brought into the Fold. At the core were the Libera Dramach themselves, those sworn to the organisation, picked from among the hundreds who came. As to the rest, some believed in the cause, and some did not; but all found themselves a part of a community, self-governed and free of the laws of nobility or the Weavers; and that was a precious thing to many.
She still found it faintly surprising that such a disparate group of individuals might have kept a secret so large for so long, especially as most of the Libera Dramach spent their time away from the Fold, in the cities, going about their daily business. These were the spies, the suppliers, the network. But, though it was a potent rumour among common folk, word of the Fold had yet to reach the nobility – or, which was more likely, they had ignored it. The Xarana Fault was a place of secrets; there were vast illegal farms of amaxa root that supplied the cities without paying their taxes, whole enclaves of people who worshipped forbidden gods, monasteries where contact with the outside world was utterly shunned. Mention of the Fold would scarcely merit the attention of a noble. At least, not one who was not already part of the organisation. For the Libera Dramach had eyes even in the courts of the Empress, and there were many who believed as they did. Aberrants were not evil. The Heir-Empress should sit the throne.
A tribute to the skill and learning of their leader, then, that they had got this far, and were ready when the long-expected crisis came. The Heir-Empress had been discovered by the world at large. Now was the time for the Libera Dramach to take action.
Cailin turned her mount and headed down the grassy ridge towards the Fold. There had been several new arrivals of late, and the moment had come to bring them all together.
‘I can scarcely believe it all,’ Kaiku said. She stood fearlessly at the lip of one of the uppermost plateaux of the Fold, above the main mass of the buildings, and gazed in wonder at the landscape tumbling away from her below, the maze of different-shaped rooftops an overlapping and multi-layered jigsaw. The packed-dirt streets were seething with people from all over Axekami, a collision of makeshift fashions such as Kaiku had never seen. The afternoon sun beat down on her skin, warming her with its rays; birds winged and jagged through the sky overhead. She tilted her face up, closed her eyes, and felt Nuki’s eye looking down on her, a red glow behind her lids. ‘It is perfect.’
Asara sat on a large, smooth rock that towered aslant out of the grassy plateau. She did not know what Kaiku was referring to as perfect: the Fold, the sunlight, or a more general expression of contentment? She dismissed it, anyway. Kaiku’s spirits had been restored with a vengeance since leaving Fo and taking the River Jabaza back towards Axekami. They had disembarked some way north, warned by sailors coming upriver that Axekami was in turmoil and no boats were getting in. Taking the horses they had gained in Chaim, they rode south, crossed the Kerryn by ferry east of Axekami, and then made good time to the Xarana Fault. There, Asara had taken them by one of the few relatively safe routes through the maze of broken land, and thence to the Fold.
The journey had been a strange one. Kaiku appeared to have surmounted her loathing of herself, perhaps because there was nobody left that she cared much about who could leave her or hurt her. Her family were dead; Mishani and Tane had betrayed her by their reactions to the news that she was Aberrant. Rock bottom was a wonderful place in which to re-examine oneself, and she seemed finally to have accepted what she was and made the decision to live with it. Her initial despair at the impossibility of the oath she had sworn to Ocha had warmed and turned to determination, a rigid focus, an unswerving direction she could cling to. By the end of their journey, Kaiku had been urging Asara on, desperate to get to the Fold as quickly as possible and begin to assess what chances she had of avenging her family against the unassailable might of the Weavers.
And yet, though there was this general lightening of heart about her, she had closed up to Asara again, just when she was beginning to feel something like trust in her former handmaiden. Asara told herself that the release of passion in that cold, draughty room in Chaim was a demonstration of Kaiku’s decision to discard the old rules that no longer applied to her as an Aberrant, proof to herself that she had no boundaries left; only that, and nothing more. But she had stirred something between them that refused to go away, and it hid in glances and loaded comments and darted out unexpectedly to sting the other. Kaiku was wary of Asara for another reason as well. She had never asked what had happened in that room, when Asara’s kiss turned to something more than lips and tongues, and she sought to suck the breath from Kaiku’s body; but she had sensed the danger on an instinctive level, and now she would not allow her guard down again.
Still, she was here, in the Fold. Asara had discharged her duty, an agreement taken on more than two years ago now. She felt something of a satisfaction in herself. She lounged on the warm rock, observing Kaiku’s back as she admired the vista before her and soaked in the simple glory of a summer day.
‘You have my deepest thanks, Asara,’ Cailin purred next to her. Asara was quick enough to prevent herself starting and giving away her surprise at the dark lady’s appearance. ‘You have kept her safe. She is quite a precious asset to me.’
‘I am afraid I did not do quite the job of keeping her safe that I could have done,’ Asara replied, not looking up. ‘But we have such things to tell you, Cailin.’
Cailin arched an eyebrow at her tone. ‘Really? These I must hear.’
‘Later. In private,’ Asara said. She would pick the time and place. ‘She has already started to get her kana under control,’ Asara added. ‘It is still wild, but not untameable. That is a rare thing, I understand.’
‘Rare indeed,’ Cailin replied, never taking her eyes off Kaiku. ‘But then, we knew she would be strong. And you have put yourself in great danger for my sake. Once again, I thank you.’
‘Not for your sake,’ Asara corrected. ‘For mine. She interests me. I have watched her lose everything, and become the thing she most despised; and I have watched her fight back and regain herself again. In my time in this world, I have seen the same loves, hates and struggles played over and again in endless monotony; but hers is a rarer story than most, and she still surprises me even now. I almost feel guilty for bringing her into your sphere of influence. You may fool her with your altruism, but not me. What are you planning, Cailin?’
‘I believe you are fond of her, Asara,’ said Cailin, a smile in her voice as she avoided the question. ‘And I thought you too cynical for such fancies.’
‘My heart and soul are not dead yet,’ Asara replied, ‘only dusty and jaded from lack of interest.’
Cailin laughed, and the sound made Kaiku turn and notice them for the first time. She walked over to them, away from the precipice.
‘I am glad to see you are a woman of your word,’ Cailin said, inclining her head in greeting. ‘Did you find what it what it was you were looking for?’
‘In a manner of speaking,’ Kaiku said, and did not elaborate.
‘The time approaches for action,’ Cailin said, studying Kaiku from within the painted red crescents over her eyes. ‘That is partly why I asked to meet you here.’
‘What kind of action?’ Kaiku demanded.
‘Soon,’ Cailin promised. ‘But first, I have some people you might like to meet.’ She waved a hand at where two newcomers were approaching along the plateau.
Mishani and Tane.
For a moment, Kaiku coul
d not find the words to say, nor dare to think what this might mean. But then Mishani approached her, seeming strangely smaller now than before, her immense length of hair tied in a loose knot at her back. She hesitated for an instant, and then put her arms around Kaiku; and Kaiku embraced her in return. She sobbed a laugh, clutching Mishani tight to her. ‘I’m so happy you’re here,’ she said; but the last of the sentence was incomprehensible with the tightening of her throat, and the tears that fell freely from her. Cailin flashed a triumphant look at Asara, who quirked her mouth in a smile.
The two of them held each other for a long time, there in the sun. Kaiku had no idea why she had come, or what had turned her around, but she knew Mishani well enough to realise what it meant. Eventually they released each other, and Kaiku looked to Tane, who smiled awkwardly.
‘I had a little time to think,’ he said, and that was all, for Kaiku embraced him too. He looked faintly abashed by the contact, but he held her also, and was a little disappointed when she withdrew much sooner than she had with Mishani.
Kaiku wiped her eyes and smiled at Cailin, who was watching her benevolently with her deep green gaze.
‘People have a way of turning up when you least expect them to, Kaiku,’ the tall lady told her. ‘The four of you walk a braided path; your routes are intertwined, and they will cross again and again until they are done.’
‘How can you know that?’ Kaiku asked.
‘You will learn how I know,’ said Cailin. ‘If you choose to take the way of the Red Order.’
‘Is there a choice for me?’
‘Not if you want to live to see the next harvest,’ Cailin answered simply.
Kaiku demurred with a shrug. ‘So, then.’
Cailin laughed once again, throwing her head back, her white teeth flashing between the red and black of her lips. ‘I have never had an offer accepted with such poor grace. Do not be afraid, Kaiku; this is not a lifetime commitment you are making. A Sister of the Red Order is nothing if she is unwilling. All I ask is that you let me teach you; after that, you may choose your own way. Is that acceptable?’
The Braided Path: The Weavers of Saramyr / the Skein of Lament / the Ascendancy Veil Page 31
