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

by Chris Wooding

  ‘This is idiocy, Zaelis!’ she had cried, a tower of black anger. ‘You know what happened to her last time! Now you would send her up against a spirit unfathomably stronger! What possessed you?’

  ‘Do you think I made my decision lightly?’ Zaelis retorted. ‘Do you think I enjoy the idea of sending my daughter into the lair of that thing? Necessity forces my hand, Cailin!’

  ‘There is nothing so necessary as to risk the life of that girl. She is the lynchpin of everything we have striven for.’

  ‘We will lose everything we have striven for if the Weavers find the Fold,’ Zaelis said, stalking agitatedly around the room. The raised voices seemed to discomfit the still air. Lanterns cast warm shadows across the hardwood floor. ‘It is easy for you to judge: you have the Red Order. You can disappear in a day, go into hiding, leave all of this behind. But I have a responsibility to what I have started! Every man and woman in this town is here because of what I created; even those who are not of the Libera Dramach have come because of the ideals that we represent.’ He dropped his eyes. ‘And they look to me as their leader.’

  ‘The day will come when they look to Lucia as their leader, Zaelis,’ Cailin said. ‘Was that not the plan? How, then, can you dare risk her this way?’ She paused, then added a final barb. ‘Quite aside from the fact that she is, as you say, your own daughter.’

  Zaelis’s bearded jaw tightened in pain. ‘I risk her because I have to,’ he said quietly.

  ‘Wait for the scouts to get back,’ Cailin advised. ‘You may be worrying needlessly.’

  ‘It’s not good enough,’ he said. ‘No matter what they find, the fact remains that the Weavers are in the Fault. They could have been there for years, don’t you see? It is only because Nomoru is so good at what she does that she even noticed the Weavers’ barrier. How many of our scouts have passed through that way and not even realised that they had been misdirected?’ He looked up accusingly at Cailin. ‘It was you that told me how those barriers worked.’

  Cailin tilted her head. The raven feathers on her ruff stirred slightly. ‘You are correct. The nature of the barriers are subtle enough so that most minds are fooled into thinking that they have got themselves lost.’

  ‘Then what else might the Weavers have under our very noses?’ Zaelis asked. ‘We only found this one through blind luck.’ He threw up his calloused hands in exasperation. ‘I have been suddenly and shockingly faced with the fact that we are all but defenceless against the very enemy we have been fighting against. We have relied on hiding from them. But now I realise that they will find us, whether by accident or design, sooner or later. They may already have found us. We have to know what we are up against; and only the spirits can tell us that.’

  ‘Are you sure, Zaelis?’ Cailin asked. ‘What do you know of spirits?’

  ‘I know what Lucia tells me,’ he said. ‘And she believes it is worth trying.’

  Cailin gave him a level gaze. ‘Of course she does. She would do anything you asked of her. Even if it killed her.’

  ‘Gods, Cailin, don’t make this worse for me than it is!’ he cried. ‘I have made my choice. We are going to Alskain Mar.’

  Cailin had not argued further, but as she was leaving she had paused at the threshold of the room and looked back at him.

  ‘What was the purpose of all this in the beginning? What did you do this for? You created the Libera Dramach out of nothing. One man inspired all of that. But who inspired you?’

  Zaelis did not reply. He knew it was a leading question, but he did not wish to be led.

  ‘Which is more important to you now?’ Cailin had asked softly. ‘The girl, or the secret army you lead? Lucia, or the Libera Dramach?’

  The memories echoed bitterly in Zaelis’s thoughts as the company picked its way through the brightening dawn towards the ruined shrine. They had travelled overnight from the Fold for the sake of stealth. The going had been slow, as they had been forced to accommodate Zaelis’s limp, and Lucia – who had never in her life had to walk on a journey of more than a few miles at a time – became exhausted quickly. The clouds that troubled Kaiku far away had not reached this far east, and they had the light of Iridima to guide them through the plunging terrain of the Fault.

  As the first signs of day approached, they had come to a wide, circular depression in the land, a mile or more in diameter. It lay on a long, flat hilltop, thick with dewy grass and shrubs and small, thin trees. On the eastern side, the Fault began a disjointed but steady descent down to the banks of the Rahn. At the centre of the depression was a deep, uneven hole, a toothed shaft into the vast cavern beneath, where Alskain Mar lay.

  They halted at the edge of the dip. Soul-eaters had been set in a rough circle around the perimeter, their surfaces weathered and their paint fading. They made a loud rattling as the wind brushed them, old knucklebone charms and stones of transparent resin tapping against the rock. Several of them were cracked, and moss had grown in the fissures. One had broken in half, and its upper section lay next to the stump.

  Cailin cast a disparaging eye over the soul-eaters. They were superstitious artifacts cannibalised from the Ugati: slender, elliptical stones daubed in a combination of blessings and curses and hung with noisy and primitive jewellery. The stories went that when a spirit came near to a soul-eater, it would be terrified by the sound of the charms, and both repelled by the blessings and disgusted by the curses; then it would flee back to where it had come from and hide. They did not work, and had been dismissed as quaint bits of folklore by the Saramyr for hundreds of years; and yet these examples were recent, no more than fifty years old. Who could guess who had put them there, and what they had hoped to achieve? Maybe they had thought that an ancient method would work to pen an ancient spirit. In the Xarana Fault, the usual rules of civilisation did not apply.

  They rested outside the depression as the sun climbed into the sky. Lucia curled up on a mat and slept. The overnight walk had been hard on her. She may have had plenty of energy, but for that she was still frail, having been sheltered all through her childhood. The guards ate cold food nervously, warily scanning the quiet hilltop. They were safe enough from any human danger here, for no settlements thrived this close to Alskain Mar; but the presence of the spirit could be felt by the least perceptive of men, and it made their skin crawl. Even the heat and light of the day did not dispel the chill. They kept catching flitting movements among the bushes out of the corner of their eyes; but whenever they investigated, there was nothing there.

  Zaelis and Cailin sat together. Zaelis was regarding his sleeping daughter with concern; Cailin was silently studying the hole at the centre of the depression.

  ‘There is still time to turn back, Zaelis,’ the Sister said.

  ‘Don’t,’ he said. ‘The decision is made.’

  ‘Decisions can be unmade,’ Cailin told him.

  Zaelis’s brow was furrowed deeply, his eyes pained as he watched the rise and fall of Lucia’s slender back. ‘Not this one,’ he said.

  Cailin did not reply to that. If she had dared to stop him, she would have; but she could not jeopardise her own position or that of the Red Order by risking it. She found herself wishing that Kaiku or Mishani were with them. Perhaps they could have swayed Zaelis. A wild idea occurred to her, that she might use the Weave to manipulate him subtly; but Lucia would know, even if Zaelis did not, and the act would be a terrible betrayal of trust. She could not afford that.

  So she had to watch as he sent all their hope into Alskain Mar, and wait to see if it came out again.

  ‘What of Asara?’ Zaelis said at length, starting a new subject suddenly. ‘Have you heard from her? We may need her again very soon.’

  ‘She is gone,’ said Cailin. They both still referred to her as Asara, though they had known her as Saran in the brief time she had spent at the Fold. The identity of the spy they had sent away to scour the Near World for signs of the Weavers had always been known to them, but they had not known what guises she might take
. ‘She went just before Kaiku left. I suspect they had something of a disagreement.’

  Zaelis raised an eyebrow.

  ‘I do keep a very close eye on my most errant pupil,’ she said. She looked east, to the autumn morning sky. ‘I do not think we will be seeing Saran Ycthys Marul again, though. She is changing her identity.’

  ‘Have you spoken to her, then? What do you know?’

  Cailin’s black and red lips curled in a faint smile. ‘She is running a small errand for me. I managed to convince her that it was . . . in her interests.’

  ‘An errand?’ Zaelis repeated, his molten voice becoming suspicious. ‘What errand, Cailin?’

  Cailin looked at him sidelong. ‘That is our business,’ she said.

  ‘Heart’s blood! You just sent away my best spy and you won’t even tell me why? What are you up to?’

  ‘She is not your spy,’ Cailin reminded him. ‘If she is anyone’s, she is mine. And she is abroad on matters of the Red Order now.’

  ‘The Libera Dramach and the Red Order are supposed to be working together,’ Zaelis said. ‘What kind of co-operation is this?’

  Cailin laughed quietly. ‘If this were a co-operative effort, Zaelis, then we would certainly not be bringing Lucia anywhere near Alskain Mar. If I had the power, I would veto it. No, the Libera Dramach rule in the Fold, and well you know it. We owe you nothing. We may be helping you, but we are not beholden to you. And I have other interests to attend to before all this is over.’

  Lucia woke in the afternoon, ate a little food, and made her preparations to do what had to be done. She did not speak to anyone.

  After a time, she walked past the ring of soul-eaters to the edge of the hole that lay in the centre of the depression. The afternoon sun warmed her from behind, but on the nape of her neck and upper back – where the scarring was – her dead nerves felt nothing. Her gaze was distant, focused on the speckling of tiny clouds in the eastern sky, where the deep azure blended into shades of purple.

  She let herself relax, and listened. The wind whispered sibilant nonsense at her, and the slow, stirring thoughts of the hilltop grumbled along so slowly as to be incomprehensible. There were no animals here: they had been driven away by an instinct that warned them of whatever lurked at the bottom of that hole in the earth. Lucia felt it too, all around her but concentrated mostly underground; it was like the distant soughing of some enormous animal, asleep but still aware of them. The air seemed taut, and tricked the vision with half-seen movements.

  Zaelis appeared next to her with Cailin, and gave her an entirely unconvincing smile of reassurance. The Sister stroked the hair on the side of her head in a gesture of surprising tenderness.

  ‘Remember, Lucia,’ she said. ‘Nobody is forcing you to do this.’

  Lucia did not reply, and after a moment Cailin gave a slight nod of understanding and retreated.

  ‘I am ready,’ she told them, though she really wasn’t.

  Several of the guards who had travelled with them had brought the components for a cradle, which they had assembled as Lucia slept. It was little more than a lightweight chair made from interlocked pieces of kamako cane, and a system of ropes, both to secure Lucia into the chair and to provide a way of lowering it down into the cavern. They tied her into it awkwardly, for they regarded her with reverence and did not want to hurt her, yet they did not dare make their knots loose in case they should slip. When it was done, two of them picked her up while the remainder of the guards took up the slack of the long rope and secured it at its end to one of the more sturdy-looking soul-eaters. The two guards who carried her slid her gently out over the edge of the pit, allowing their companions to take her weight gradually. They did so without straining; she was slender enough that any of them could bear her without too much trouble. Finally, she was hanging over the shaft, the back of the chair resting against one wall.

  Zaelis looked down on her, a final war of indecision going on behind his eyes. Then he crouched. ‘Come back safely.’

  She merely gazed at him with that strange, distracted look on her face, and said nothing.

  ‘Let her down!’ one of the guards called to his companions, and Lucia’s descent began.

  The first few metres were not easy. The men at the lip of the hole were forced to lean out as far as they dared to lower the rope, and Lucia had to fend off the black, wet rock of the shaft to stop her scraping against the sides. It took only a minute, but in that time Lucia’s hands and legs were bruised and scratched all over.

  Then the shaft opened out and she was hanging in a void above Alskain Mar, a tiny figure in a cradle dangling within the immensity of the subterranean cavern. The reality of her situation crowded in on her then, the terror of her predicament; and worse, the disbelief that her father had allowed it to happen. She realised only then that a part of her had been expecting Zaelis to change his mind, to tell her that she did not have to go, that he would not blame her if she backed away. Yet he had not. He had never even provided her an opportunity for second thoughts. How could he have done that to her? How could he?

  The light of Nuki’s eye was the only illumination here, a dazzling beam that drenched Lucia from above, limning her blonde hair and her back in unbearable brightness and casting her face into sharp shadow. Beneath her was water, a lake that glittered harshly where the sun struck it, so perfectly clear that it was possible to see the debris that cluttered its bottom. There were remnants of ancient stonework there, and hunks of broken rock eroded by time, grown over with lichens and aquatic plants. Islands were scattered about the lake, humps of pale cream rising above the waterline that had once been arches or the flanks of mighty pillars. She could see one wall of the cavern, but its rough curves faded into darkness on either side and left the rest of the chamber an unguessable abyss. Vines and greenery hung from the mouth of the shaft, straggling downward as if seeking the lake below. It was cold and dank here, and the only sound was the echoing drip of water and the occasional splash of a fish.

  Most of the superstructure of the shrine was still standing, a thousand years after the earth had fallen in on it. It rose around Lucia in all its melancholy grandeur, colossal ribs of stone that thrust from the lake and arced up the curved sides of the cavern to broken tips. Huge pictograms were carved on the ribs in a language too old for Lucia to recognise, a dialect left behind in the evolution of society; their shapes suggested to her a grave and serious tone, resonant and wise.

  Other sections of the shrine remained, too. Below her was the skeleton of a domed chamber, its floor raised enough so that the water lapped around its edges but did not swallow it. Fractured pieces of other rooms gave hints to the layout of the building before its destruction. On the wall before her, there was a massive section of stonework supported between two of the ribs, a piece of what had once been the original roof of the shrine. Angular patterns scrawled along its surface, a tiny glimpse of the majesty that this place had once possessed when it was intact. At the periphery of the light, she could see other structures, too dim to make out but evoking an impression of breathtaking size.

  She felt suddenly, awfully small and alone. Alone, except for the presence that waited in Alskain Mar.

  They lowered her towards the ruin of the domed chamber, and her creaking chair descended in steady increments, pausing between each gentle drop. Thankfully, she had no fear of heights, but she was dreadfully afraid of the chair or the rope giving way, even though she had been assured that they had taken every possible precaution and that the cradle was sturdy enough for someone six times her weight. She listened to her heart thumping, and tried to endure as she slowly neared the bottom of the cavern.

  Then, finally, she was passing through the curled, broken fingers of the shattered dome, and her cradle bumped to the stone floor. She untied herself hurriedly, desperate to be out of it, as if they might haul her back up into the abyss again at any moment.

  ‘Lucia?’ Zaelis called from the shaft above, where the heads of the observer
s were dark blots against the blinding sunlight. ‘Are you well?’

  His voice rang like a blasphemy against the eerie peace of the cavern, and the air suddenly seemed to darken, to become thick with an overwhelming and angry disapproval so palpable that it made Lucia shy and whimper. The others felt it too, for she heard the guards exclaiming frightened oaths, and Cailin snapped something at Zaelis, after which he was quiet and did not shout any more.

  The light swelled in the room again gradually, the tension easing. Lucia breathed again, but her hands trembled slightly. She looked back at the tiny, fragile cradle which was her only lifeline out of this place, and realised just how far from help she truly was. Standing on the edge of the slanting sunlight, she was just a willowy girl of fourteen harvests, wearing a scuffed and dirty pair of trousers and a white blouse.

  Lucia, you are not somebody’s sacrifice. Kaiku’s words, spoken to her on the first day of Aestival Week. And yet here she was, in the lair of some unguessable entity, like a maiden offered to a mythical demon by her own father.

  She willed herself to relax once again. The voices of the other spirits that she heard every day – the animals, the earth, the air – were silent here. It made her nervous. She had never been without them before, and it only intensified the loneliness and abandonment that she felt.

  The occupant of the shrine was paying her little more attention now than it had been before. It was dormant and uninterested. If she had to rouse it, she would have to do it very gently.

  The time had come. She could not put it off any longer. She walked to the edge of the platform, facing the darkness, and knelt on the cool stone. She placed her hands flat on its surface and bowed her head. And she listened.

  The process of actively communicating with a spirit was not as simple as language. Animals were easy enough for Lucia, but most spirits were largely ignorant of the world that humans saw and felt. There was no real lexicon through which humans and spirits were capable of understanding each other, since they did not share the same senses. Instead, they had to connect on a level far beneath reason, a primal melding which could only be achieved by becoming one with the nature of each other. A tentative, dim unity had to be formed, like that between a baby in a womb and its mother.