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

by Chris Wooding

  And then she saw a new movement, at the other end of the room.

  She caught her breath at the sight. It was a little girl, dressed in a simple robe. Long, light hair fell in curling tumbles down her back. She had a round face with a curiously lost expression on it. But this was no thing of flesh and blood; she was a spectre, a spirit, that blurred and rippled as she moved as if she were a reflection in disturbed water. She walked across to the man in the trough, heedless of the flames. Kaiku watched, transfixed, as the spectre put her hand in the water, and it stopped boiling instantly like a pan removed from the heat. The man in the trough turned to look at her and on his ravaged face there came an expression of joyous gratitude. Then the spectre laid her small hand on his head, and his eyes closed. With a sigh, he sank beneath the water.

  The spectre turned to Kaiku then, her features settling into those of a wide-eyed and dreamy-looking girl.

  ((. . . help me . . .))

  The words seemed to come from far away and were very faint, arriving seconds after the spectre had mouthed them. The roof creaked above her, and Kaiku looked up in alarm. She darted back through the doorway just before the ceiling beams gave up with a tortured bellow, and a rage of stone and flame thundered down into the room, belching hot smoke through the doorway.

  Kaiku shielded her face, squinting at the room where the spectre had been buried. There was only rock there now; and the weight was making the walls of this room bulge as well.

  ‘Get out of there!’ someone cried, and she turned to see a red-faced man at the other doorway, beckoning her through. He disappeared from sight, leaving a vacant arch; and across that arch, a moment later, walked the spectre.

  Kaiku clambered back through the blazing room and out into the corridor beyond. The spectre was a glimpse through the smoke. Coughing, she followed, running close to the floor to avoid the black river of murk overhead. Other people were shouting now, the general theme being that they should get out before the place collapsed. Kaiku ignored them, intent on following where the spectre led. She had a sense that it was very important she should do that, and she was learning to trust her instincts more and more of late.

  ‘Kaiku!’ came a voice, and Tane grabbed her shoulder. She clasped his wrist to acknowledge he was there, but she did not take her eyes from the girl, nor slow her pace.

  ‘What is it?’ Tane asked, bewildered, hurrying alongside her.

  ‘Can you not see it?’ she asked.

  ‘See what?’

  Kaiku shook her head, impatient. ‘Just come with me.’

  ‘What about the others?’

  ‘They can take care of themselves,’ she replied.

  The spectre was mercifully leading Kaiku away from the worst of the destruction, and after a few corners the air had become clearer and she could breathe again without pain. Tane walked with her, not asking for an explanation, convinced by the determination on her face. Always the translucent figure was ahead of them, just entering a passageway or flitting across the end of a corridor. They never seemed to catch up. Soon the fire was behind them, and the ways they hurried down were more and more trafficked by running Guards and administrative scholars. None of them saw the phantom girl as she passed among them. By their manner, Kaiku guessed there were other commotions in the castle besides the explosions she had felt, but she had no time to care what. Where the spectre went, she followed.

  Cailin, Zaelis and Yugi pushed through the confines of the smoky corridors, away from the fire to where the walls still stood and the fug was thin enough to breathe easily. Most of the servants had fled to whatever imagined shelter they could when the explosions began, so the intruders could travel more quickly here. Cailin found that agreeable enough. Solitude was what she needed.

  ‘In here,’ she said, and they followed her into a cramped, windowless kitchen, where a cauldron of stew simmered over a fire and the stone walls seemed to sweat. Iron pots and pans hung untidily from pegs, some of them having fallen to the floor when the blast dislodged them. Cailin looked about. ‘This will do,’ she said.

  ‘Do for what?’ Zaelis asked. ‘We should get further away from the fire.’

  ‘I need to be undisturbed. Nobody will come here. We are far enough away from the blaze for the moment.’

  ‘Gods, did you see Espyn?’ Yugi coughed, running a hand through his soot-blackened hair. ‘What about the other two?’

  Cailin had indeed seen Espyn, lying twisted in the rubble, his face bloodied and his body broken. He had caught the fringe of the blast by sheer bad luck, and had not survived it.

  ‘Tane and Kaiku must fend for themselves,’ she said coldly. She did not abandon Kaiku lightly, with all the hope she had invested there; but there were more important things to do now.

  Zaelis was frantic with worry. ‘Bombs? Bombs in the Keep? Heart’s blood, what is going on here? This is a disaster.’

  ‘This is Vyrrch’s doing,’ Cailin said.

  She pulled aside some chairs to clear herself a space, and then stood facing the cauldron. They watched silently as she took a breath, relaxing her shoulders. The smell of stew filled the air, and Yugi’s skin prickled from the heat, but neither appeared to bother the Sister. She closed her eyes and splayed her fingers out where her hands hung by her sides. Her head bowed, and she let out a sigh; and when she raised her head again and opened her eyes, her irises were the colour of blood, and they knew she was seeing things beyond the reach of their vision.

  ‘I will deal with the Weave-lord. You two go to the roof gardens. Find the Heir-Empress. We are not defeated yet. This confusion may yet serve to aid us.’

  Zaelis nodded once, and then he and Yugi were gone, the door slamming shut behind them.

  Cailin drifted in an ocean of light, millions upon millions of tiny golden threads shifting in minuscule waves. As always, the euphoria struck her upon entering the Weave, gathering under her heart and lifting it, stealing her breath with the beauty and wonder of this unseen world that surrounded them. She allowed herself a moment to enjoy it, and then her long-practised discipline channelled the feeling away, dispersing it so it could not hook her with its false promises of eternal bliss.

  Clear-headed again, she sent her consciousness out among the fibres, picking between them with infinite care, dancing from strand to strand like the fingers of a harpist. She was seeking those fibres which were being twisted out of true, those lines of light that had become marionette strings to the unwitting puppets in the Imperial Keep. Someone was manipulating events here; someone was coordinating from afar. She could sense the corruption of the Weave that surrounded several people in the Keep, and knew they were under the influence of another. They thought they were the instigators of the confusion they sowed, but the true instigator was out of their sight. And would remain so until Cailin hunted him down.

  And so she darted between the threads, finding this one and that, gathering them up, each string giving her a stronger link to the fingers of the puppeteer. And finally, when she was ready, she began to follow them to their source.

  Vyrrch had not moved since dawn from his customary spot, cross-legged on the floor in the centre of his bedchamber. The old lady whom he had chopped into meat had been heaved to the side of the room, from where the enterprising jackal had sneaked a few mouthfuls when it thought it was out of Vyrrch’s reach. Of course, it was never really out of his reach; nor was the girl who ran loose somewhere nearby. He could have used the Weave to search for them, to simply stop their hearts or shatter their joints. But that was childishly easy, and Vyrrch was not so unsporting. He was impressed that the girl had been wise enough not to try and attack him when he was Weaving or sleeping, for no matter how comatose he looked, she would have been dead before she got within a yard of him. If she was not cheating, then neither would he. Let her go on with her hide and seek. The only key to the door was around his neck; she could not get out. It would be amusing to see how long she lasted.

  Women. They were a crafty breed. Altogether t
oo crafty, if the evidence of the past was to be believed. The Weavers’ membership had been exclusively grown men for a reason: children were too undisciplined, and women too good. It had become very obvious during the earliest days of the witchstones’ discovery that the female talents far outstripped those of men in the manipulation of the Weave. The Weave was the essence of nature, and men could only force nature to their will, clumsily and callously; women were part of it, and it came to them like the cycles of the moons. In those first years of madness, hidden at the settlement in the mountains where the great monastery Adderach now stood, the women had almost surmounted the men in power; but it was a mining village, and women were few in number there. The slaughter was quick. Once the men had felt the witchstones’ touch, what lingering consciences they had were swiftly cast aside. From that day forth, only adult males had been accepted into the brotherhood, men who came seeking knowledge or power or sublimity.

  It had been the same thinking that prompted the practice of killing Aberrant infants these last centuries, when it was suddenly noticed that girl children were being born with a rudimentary ability to control the Weave. Somehow, through the witchstones’ influence on their parents and their parents’ diet through the corrupted soil, the foetuses were gaining an instinct that the Weavers had had to learn. And it was as natural to them as breathing. But the Weavers were already well established by then, and the common folk were afraid of the freakish powers the infants displayed: so the practice of murdering Aberrants began. Not just the ones who could Weave, for that would make the Weavers’ intentions too plain. All of them had to die, to keep the Weavers’ secret.

  But he had no time for such musings now. He scoured the Keep with one portion of his consciousness, searching for the anomaly in the Weave that had so alarmed him before. The bombers were out of the picture, annihilated by their own creations. Vyrrch had been forced to take direct control in those final moments, for there remained the possibility that the cat’s-paws might balk at suicide. Vyrrch saw that their will remained strong until the fiery end.

  The intruder had briefly dropped its guard after the bombs had exploded, but Vyrrch had been busy dealing with other things and, frustratingly, he could not pounce on it. Now he bent all his attention to the task of locating it again. With the Keep in chaos, the rest of the plan would run its course. His most pressing concern was this unknown enemy in their midst.

  But Vyrrch had been a Weave-lord too long; he was too used to moving unchallenged, unaccustomed to opposition. He spun and threaded the loom of the Weave, but he did not notice the black widow creeping up the strands of his web until she was almost upon him.

  Too late, he realised his mistake. This was no clumsy blundering like that of a lesser Weaver; this was an altogether different class. Even the most powerful of Weavers left tears where they went, snapped threads and tangled skeins; but she was like satin, gliding through the Weave and leaving no trace of her passing. This was a woman’s way through that bright world, and Vyrrch saw they had been right to fear it.

  He drew himself back suddenly, in terror, knowing that she was inside his defences. Desperately, he struck at her, but she moved like a breath of wind. She feinted and dodged, plucking threads as decoys and then sliding nearer when his attention was elsewhere. The Weave-lord began to panic, trying to recall the old disciplines he had known so well before he became complacent, the arts that would drive her out of him; but madness had robbed them from his memory, and he could not piece his thoughts together again.

  ‘Get away from me!’ he shrieked aloud into the silence. The jackal started and fled in a scrabble of claws.

  He turned his thoughts inward, feeling her gossamer progress along the threads that linked him with the outside world, the suck and flow of his breath, the touch of his skin against his clothes. Frantic, he began to knot, setting up traps, corrals of fibres that led into labyrinths that would lose her for an eternity. But he could barely feel her, let alone stop her, and all he was doing was delaying the inevitable anyway. He could not afford even the slightest portion of his mind to trace her threads back to their source. He did not know who or where she was; he had nowhere to strike.

  And she seemed to come from all directions at once, darting here and there to nip and tug, sending false vibrations thrumming down the glittering fibres of their battleground. He flitted to and fro in the grip of increasing panic, laying tricks and feits for her; but nothing was effective, and he realised in despair that he had no other methods to use. He saw then how one-dimensional his command of his powers were; he, the greatest among the Weavers. For so long had he enjoyed supremacy that his ability to adapt had rotted and fallen away. He could not beat her.

  With that realisation, he dropped his defences. This, more than anything he had done so far, caused the intruder to hesitate in uncertainty, and it gave him the time he needed. He drew in the Weave as if he was gathering a vast ball of yarn, sucking it into his breast. Too late, his attacker saw what he meant to do, but by then she could do nothing to prevent it. He threw out the spool, putting every ounce of his strength into it, and it unravelled and spawned a million threads that flew away across the landscape of the Weave, curling and spinning randomly and everywhere. A great clarion call, a deafening broadcast to every Weaver and sensitive in Saramyr and beyond. The intruder reeled with the potency of his cry, a wordless shriek of warning to all his brothers. Beware! Beware! For women play the Weave!

  But Vyrrch was clever, and amid the uncountable threads was one that was different, one that was tautly focused and directed. And in the depthless dark where they hid from the daylight, four demons of shadow raised their heads as one, eyes blazing like lamps.

  The message was simple. An image of Lucia tu Erinima, Heir-Empress of Saramyr, layered with impressions of scent, location, the near-imperceptible vibration that was her presence: all the things the shin-shin needed to track her. And with it was a simple command, phrased not in language but in an empathic blaze of intent.

  Kill.

  Then Cailin struck, the bite of the black widow coming from nowhere, and he realised she had slipped past his every wall and reached his core. His senses were paralysed, his control of the Weave gone. He was helpless. There was a moment of utter and abject horror as he felt her coiling in his brain, taking the thread of his life in her fingers, toying with it. Then, with a twist, she snapped it.

  In his chambers, the Weave-lord screamed, spasmed, and slumped forward on to the floor.

  There was silence again. It lasted perhaps an hour before the jackal plucked up the courage to emerge once more from where it had fled. It was another hour or more before the girl appeared, her clothing tattered and torn, her face covered in grime. She peered around the doorway, trembling in fear and hunger. There had been no noise but a soft lapping sound for what seemed an eternity.

  The Weave-lord was face down, naked beneath his rags. Thick blood from his nose, eyes and mouth had pooled inside his Mask and run out on to the filthy tiles. The jackal was licking at it still.

  She stood there watching, hardly daring to hope. She feared a trick. Only when the jackal began to eat Vyrrch’s fingers did she believe it was not. He was dead.

  With a sob, she approached him. The jackal retreated with a growl. Around Vyrrch’s throat, hidden under the rags, was a brass key. She slipped it off him, ready to run at any moment if he should move. He did not. She stared at him for a while, and finally spat upon him. Then, fearing she had gone too far, she ran away, heading for the locked outer door and freedom, while the jackal returned to resume its meal.

  THIRTY-TWO

  ‘Who could do this?’ the Empress demanded of her husband, who strode along the high corridors of the Imperial Keep, his long black hair stirring with the movement of his shoulders. ‘Who could attack us in our own throne room?’

  ‘Whoever it is, they will suffer,’ he said. ‘Now hurry.’

  Anais had a crawling feeling in her belly. They were in the less-travelled areas of
the Keep now, the domain of the scholars and the guest rooms and aged, empty chambers once used for social functions. Six men walked with them, swords drawn, as bodyguards. One, Hutten, she had known for many years, and he was as loyal a retainer as she could imagine. Another, whose name was Yttrys, she did not know so well; but she remembered his face, and she was convinced he was not one of those false guards who had attacked them in the reception room. The rest were familiar also, but she could not remember their names.

  Yet despite the Guards, she was afraid. The riots, the explosions, the sudden assault; it was an orchestrated plan, but a plan to what end? Did they seek her life or Durun’s? Or was it her precious child they were after? Here, with only six Guards, she felt terribly vulnerable. Whoever had started the trouble down in the city had known exactly what they were doing; the Keep had been drained of most of its soldiers, sent to deal with the mobs or to defend the walls against Blood Kerestyn. Blood Batik’s troops would be inside Axekami by nightfall, but it was not yet midday and help seemed a terrifyingly long way off.

  ‘Lucia,’ she moaned, unable to contain her concern. ‘Where is Lucia?’

  ‘I sent Rudrec to get her; didn’t you hear?’ he snapped. ‘She’ll meet us.’

  He was right. It wasn’t safe where Lucia was. She had been hidden, and hidden well; but too many people knew where. If there was an enemy within, as she suspected, then it was best to have her with her parents, hiding somewhere that nobody knew.

  She glanced at her husband. Durun was a boor and a layabout, but in his towering anger he was quite impressive. He had repeatedly sworn elaborate revenge on those who had attacked him – though not her, she noted – as they had been whisked away from the violence. She believed he would do it, as well, if they crossed his path. She felt an inappropriate stir of ardour. Sometimes, in his passions, she almost saw a man she could love; but those passions were rare and burned out fast, and then he was the sluggard she had been wedded to for many long years.