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

by Chris Wooding

  Nuki’s eye was descending through the thin streamers of cloud that haunted the distant horizon, and Lucia’s eyes flickered periodically from the spectacle before her to the pattern-board and back again. Taking a widespaced, soft-bristled circular brush, she dipped it into one of the china bowls of heavy water that rested on the stone next to her and eased it across the pattern-board, leaving a faint mist of pink suspended there in the picture.

  The pattern-board was an old art form, practised since before the time of many of the newer bloodlines. It involved the use of a coloured blend of water and paint and sap, thickened to a certain consistency, called ‘heavy’ water. This was applied to a pattern-board, a three-dimensional wooden cage that held within it a flattened oblong of transparent gel. The gel was part-baked into shape, after which it would always return to its oblong shape no matter what was done to it. This allowed artists to part the gel and paint inside the oblong, in the third dimension. The use of heavy water gave the pictures a curiously feathery, ethereal quality. When the painting was finished, the gel was baked further, becoming a substance like glass, and then displayed in ornate cradles that allowed the picture within to be viewed from all sides.

  ‘Daygreet, Lucia,’ came a voice from next to her, deep and smooth. She sat back on her heels, shading her eyes with one hand as she looked up.

  ‘Daygreet, Zaelis,’ she said, smiling.

  Her tutor crouched down next to her, his lean frame draped in thin silk of black and gold. ‘You’ve nearly finished, then,’ he observed, making a languid motion towards the pattern-board.

  ‘Another day and I’ll be done, I think,’ she said, returning her gaze to the floating swirls of colour before her.

  ‘It’s very good,’ Zaelis commented.

  ‘It’s all right,’ she said.

  There was silence for a moment.

  ‘Are you angry?’ she asked.

  ‘You’ve been here in the sun all day,’ he said. ‘And I’ve spent most of it trying to find you. You know how protective your mother is, Lucia. You should know better than to disappear like that, and you should really know better than to sit out in the full glare of Nuki’s eye on a day like this.’

  Lucia exhaled slowly in what was not quite a sigh. His tone and mode of address showed that he was not angry, but she was chastened all the same. ‘I just had to get away,’ she said. ‘For a little while.’

  ‘Even from me?’ Zaelis sounded hurt.

  Lucia nodded. She looked back at the sunset, then to the pattern-board, then pushed her fingers a little way into the top of it and pulled open a thin gash in the gel. She made a few quick strokes with a narrow brush, lining the pink of the clouds with red, then withdrew her fingers and let the rift seal itself.

  Zaelis watched her, his face impassive. Of course she needed escape. To a girl as sensitive as Lucia was, the tension in the corridors of the Keep bled through even to here. And though he had kept his own concerns to himself regarding her safety, he was sure that even his best efforts at secrecy were useless against her. She knew full well that all the discord, all the deaths, were down to her in one way or another. Zaelis did his best to dissuade her from feeling guilty, but he was not even sure if she felt guilty. She had talked before of how she had set all this in motion, and wondered how it might have gone if she had tried to stop it instead of embracing the change. But whether there was regret there, Zaelis could not tell. Lucia’s moods were like the deepest oceans, unfathomable to him.

  Her head snapped up suddenly, with an urgency that made Zaelis jump. He followed her gaze, not dreamy and unfocused as it usually was but sharp and intense. She was looking to the north, where the white rim of Aurus was just cresting the horizon, foreshadowing the coming night. Her brow creased into a frown, and it trembled there for a moment. The fierceness of her glare shocked him; he had never seen such a look upon her face. Then she tore herself away, staring back into the heart of her painting, seeming to smoulder sullenly.

  ‘What is it?’ Zaelis asked. When she did not reply, he repeated: ‘Lucia, what is it?’ This second question was phrased in a more authoritative mode. He did not usually push her this way, but what he had witnessed a moment ago concerned him enough to try.

  ‘I heard something,’ she said reluctantly, still not meeting his eyes.

  ‘Heard something?’ Zaelis prompted. He looked back to the northern horizon. ‘From whom?’

  ‘No, not like that,’ Lucia said, rubbing the back of her neck in agitation. ‘Just an echo, a whisper. A reminder. It’s gone now.’

  Zaelis was staring at the edge of Aurus as it glided infinitesimally higher in the distance. ‘A reminder of what?’

  ‘A dream!’ she snapped. ‘I had a dream. I met the Children of the Moons. They were trying to tell me something, but I didn’t understand. Not at first. Then . . .’ She sagged a little. ‘Then I think I did. They tried to show me . . . I don’t know if it was a warning, or a threat . . . I don’t . . .’

  Zaelis was horrified. ‘What did they tell you, Lucia?’

  She turned to face him.

  ‘Something’s going to happen,’ she whispered. ‘Something bad. To me.’

  ‘You don’t know that, Lucia,’ Zaelis protested automatically. ‘Don’t say that.’

  She hugged herself to him in a rush, clutching herself close, taking him by surprise. He hugged her back, hard.

  ‘It was just a dream,’ he said soothingly. ‘You don’t need to be scared of a dream.’

  But over her shoulder, he was looking to the northern horizon and the cold arc of Aurus’s edge, and his eyes were afraid.

  Weave-lord Vyrrch rested, his scabrous white flank heaving, the ribs showing through like a washboard. He was naked, his grotesque, withered body pathetic and repulsive to the eye. His scrawny, misshapen arms were gloved in blood; it spattered the melted skin of his face, his thin chest, pot-belly and atrophied genitalia. He looked like something recently born, curled amid the soiled sheets of his broken bed, panting and gasping.

  For the object of his recent attention, however, there was no breath to be had. She was an old lady, chosen for the sake of variety in a fit of whimsy after he had sent Barak Mos’s requested message to his Weaver. It had vaguely crossed his mind that he was murdering altogether too many people of late; most Weavers only reached that state of frenzy rarely. But then, wherever his servants procured his victims from, they were obviously not being missed. A servant’s life was their master’s or mistress’s to take in Saramyr, and this one lady could not have been anything more than a cook or a cleaner, a servant of the Keep and hence of the Empress. He was sure Anais would not mind, even if she knew. She was aware of the deal when she took on Vyrrch as her Weave-lord; in doing so, she put the low folk of the Keep at his disposal, to satisfy his whims. A small price to pay for a Weave-lord’s powers.

  The old lady lay in a pool of viscous red, her simple clothes plastered to her body with her own vital fluids. He had been in the mood for the knife today, intending to take his time; but when she had arrived, he had flown into an unaccountable rage and stabbed her, hacking and plunging again and again. She died almost instantly, killed by the shock. It had only increased his fury, and he attacked the corpse over and over until it was almost unrecognisable as human.

  Yes, perhaps he had been killing a little too much recently. But he was the spider at the centre of the web, and he needed feeding often.

  The Guard Commander who had arrested Unger tu Torrhyc had been a tough one to crack, but Vyrrch had given himself time. As skilled as he was, he dared not simply seize the mind of a man and take control of him. That would require all his concentration, and confine him to his rooms; and there was every possibility that the Guard Commander might realise he had been meddled with once Vyrrch released him. Hasty operations like that were dangerous; he thought back to his recent attempt to sway Barak Zahn, when he was foiled by Zahn’s Weaver, and wondered why he had not better considered the risk then.

  You’re sli
pping, Vyrrch, he told himself.

  With the Guard Commander he had been forced to take a subtler route, implanting small, hypnotic suggestions in his dreams night after night, poisoning him against Unger, convincing him of the rewards he would gain for arresting the thorn in the Empress’s side. When Unger tu Torrhyc was taken, Vyrrch had made sure he was with the Empress; that way, she could not accuse him of influencing the Guard Commander. How little she knew of the Weavers’ ways.

  The bomb-makers were a labour of months. He had been assembling them ever since his first suspicions about Lucia, long before he had persuaded Sonmaga tu Amacha to send the cat-burglar Purloch to confirm the rumour. Steadily wearing at them, turning them in their dreams, ordinary men and women gradually becoming fanatical. More and more time they began to spend in the study of explosives, more and more they became indoctrinated to the idea that any amount of lives was worth a belief. And all the while, they waited for the subliminal trigger: the discovery that the Heir-Empress was an Aberrant. At that signal, they abandoned jobs, homes, families, and became the single-minded bombers Vyrrch had envisioned. They gathered, and began to assemble their instruments of destruction. And when the preparation was done, Vyrrch gave them a new trigger, one that would set them on their destructive course. The arrest of Unger tu Torrhyc.

  It was a master stroke. The world at large saw the logic in a man of Unger’s charisma and outspoken political views being the leader of a subversive army. Vyrrch had killed Unger himself so he could not contradict the assumption, and that also provided a convenient martyr for the disgruntled citizens of Axekami. Now his own bomb-makers were dead, killing themselves rather than letting themselves be captured, and the circle was closed. There was no evidence to link him to any of it. Axekami was enraged, frightened, maddened; the Empress’s eyes were turned outward to the city, and the stage was set for the final part of his plan.

  There were more bombs yet to come.

  But it had not all been seamless. There was still the niggling itch in the back of his mind that was Ruito tu Makaima, hidden away in some spot where he could not quite scratch it. That the scholar had managed to get into the Lakmar Monastery on Fo was achievement enough. Vyrrch still had no idea how he got hold of a Mask that would get him through the barrier; but he was unlucky enough to trip through one of the invisible triggers on his way out, little Weave-sewn traps that jangled alarm bells in the world beyond human sight. Their agents had shadowed him home, the better to see what his intentions were; but he seemed broken, holed up in the forest, and so they were content merely to keep him there while they decided what to do with him. And so it passed to Vyrrch, as many things did.

  He had intended to capture and interrogate Ruito. If he had been able to do that, then he would not be fretting now. But the scholar had outwitted him. The very night Vyrrch struck, he put poison in his family’s evening meal, and when they drifted to sleep they did not wake again. Ruito had eluded him.

  The shin-shin were hard to entice and harder to control, but it was necessary to ensure no survivors, and no evidence. Human agents were not reliable enough. He needed them to return the Mask without being tempted to use it, and demons told no tales – they could never be traced to him. The employment of such creatures was risky, even for a Weaver of his calibre; but the shin-shin were low demons, and weak, and they had proliferated in the wake of the witchstones’ corruption of the land. They felt the power of the witchstones as some kind of benevolent entity, and when the time came they were content to do as Vyrrch asked them. Not that it was as simple as asking. With demons, as with any other spirits, communication was muddy and uncertain, passed on in impressions and vague emotions. Without the bridging influence of the witchstones, Vyrrch would not have been able to get through at all.

  And then had come the day when the Makaima bloodline met its end. Except, of course, that something went wrong.

  He knew there were a thousand reasons why he should not worry about it, and only one why he should. The Mask had gone.

  The shin-shin were unable to identify who it was that had escaped; their demon minds worked in ways other than humankind. Their perception did not work on the principles of sight, but rather on ethereal scent-trails and auras beyond the register of mammalian creatures. It made them excellent trackers, but it also made them limited. They could no more differentiate between humans by sight than humans could tell a gull apart from a million other gulls. When Vyrrch had demanded to know who had slipped their grasp, they responded with a confusing identification of impossible markers that meant nothing to him. He was left frustrated.

  Who had taken the Mask was yet a mystery, but it had been stolen by two humans. They told him that much. The bodies in the house had been burned to blackened skeletons – making a process of elimination a worthless endeavour – and there were too many servants about the place to make an accurate count, even if Vyrrch had the will to. The shin-shin, at least, had found Ruito’s body before the house fell, so Vyrrch could breathe that bit easier. But still, someone had taken the Mask, and he had no idea who. They had chased the trail to Axekami, but the city was no place for demons, and even the shin-shin dared not set foot in that hive of men. There, they lost it.

  Yes, a thousand reasons not to worry. What were the chances of anyone realising what they had, or knowing how and where to use it if they did? Most likely it had already been sold to some theatre merchant, his eyes gleaming as he bought what the owners thought was simply an exquisite mask. Scenario after scenario ran through Vyrrch’s head, but only one kept coming back to him.

  What if they had realised what the Mask was, and used it for its purpose?

  No matter, he thought resolutely. In days, a fortnight at most, the jaws of the trap he had set around the Imperial Keep would snap shut. A new power would be ascendant, ruling in conjunction with the Weavers instead of over them. An unprecedented alliance, in which the Weavers would truly be the power behind the throne.

  Their time was coming.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  ‘The first step . . .’ said Cailin softly. ‘The first step is the most important. And the most dangerous.’

  The small cave that enclosed them shifted and stirred in the light of a single torch that burned fitfully in its bracket. It was cool here in the bones of the earth, despite the warm summer night outside. Kaiku felt a curiously detached sensation, as if she and Cailin had been cut off from the rest of existence, with this hemisphere of rock forming the limits of their world. The cave was bare and empty, merely a bubble of air within the crushing mantle of stone that pressed in on them. The narrow tunnel that connected this tiny, secluded chamber to the rest of the caves of the Fold was a depthless void, and she wondered what might happen if she were to walk into that blackness, where she might emerge.

  She sat cross-legged on a wicker mat in the centre of the chamber, her feathered brown hair damp and inelegantly ruffled, her eyes closed. Cailin walked slowly around her, looming high overhead, almost touching the ceiling. Her boots tapped hollow on the stone of the cave floor. She was talking, but her voice was somehow hypnotic, and Kaiku barely heard the words, absorbing instead the meaning and instruction within.

  ‘Your kana is like any wild beast. It is uncontrollable, primal, apt to lash out when angered. Before you can begin to train it, you must first muzzle it, leash it, render it harmless. Or at least as harmless as you can make it.’

  Kaiku felt a thrill of unease. For the last week she had been rigorously prepared for this by Cailin; yet now the moment was here, she was afraid. Afraid of what was inside her, of what it might do; afraid of the agony it brought when it boiled up through her veins. Cailin had schooled her in mantras that would calm her mind, warned her of the things she might see and feel, taught her the many things she must not do when the procedure was underway.

  You will be tempted to resist. Every instinct will tell you to attack me, as if I were an invader. If you do so, I will kill you.

  It was not a threat, merely a
fact.

  ‘I will sew myself into you, Kaiku,’ she was saying, her low voice moving around behind as she walked. ‘Were you not talented in the ways of the Weave, you would not even know I was doing it. But you have . . . defences. I am a foreign element, and your mind and body will try and expel me. You must not let it. You must remain passive, and calm, and let me do my work. I will muzzle the beast within you, but I cannot do so while you resist.’

  She had heard it a dozen times before now, but it was all theoretical. Nothing would truly prepare her for the plunge. There was no precedent for this, even in her deepest memories. What if she could not do it?

  She knew the answer to that. And yet it never crossed her mind to turn back and give up.

  Cailin rested her slim, pale hands on Kaiku’s shoulders. ‘Are you composed?’

  Kaiku took a deep breath and let it out, her eyelids fluttering. ‘I am ready,’ she lied.

  ‘Then we will begin.’

  The beast tore free from its lair with a ferocity and suddenness that was overwhelming. It roared and scorched its way up into her breast like a demon, raging and burning. Her eyes stayed shut, but inside the world exploded into an incomprehensible sea of golden threads, an endless, dazzling vista with no sky, no ground, no boundaries at all. For an instant, she knew nothing but terror as pain racked her, the searing wake of her kana fighting to be free.

  Then, suddenly, she reorientated. By what instinct she navigated, she could not guess; but in a moment the unearthly complexity of the dazzling junctions and infinite lengths seemed to make sense to her, to fit in some indescribable way. These were her threads, she recognised. This was herself, her territory within the Weave, the space occupied by her body and mind. She felt the rushing stream of golden blood pumping from the thick knot of her heart, saw it disseminate gradually out through capillaries to feed her flesh. She felt the anxious pre-awareness of incipient life in her ovaries, a cluster of mindless hopes, swarming with potential. She sensed the tide of the air sucking into her lungs, a curling muddle of fine fibres tugged in and spewed out again.