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

by Chris Wooding

  ‘I am at your command, Empress,’ Asara replied.

  ‘Then let me lean on you,’ she said. ‘And we will walk.’

  So they did. Bruised and battered, her nightrobe bloodstained around her thighs, the Empress of Saramyr limped out of her bedchamber on Asara’s arm, out through the Imperial chambers, and into the corridors of the Keep. The servants were too amazed to avert their eyes quickly enough. Even the Imperial Guards who stood station at the doorways stared in horror. Their Empress, well loved by all, reduced to a trembling wreck. It was not the done thing for a woman so abused to show herself in public, but Laranya did not shrink from it. Her pride was greater than her vanity; she would not play the game of the servants’ silence, would not cower in secret and pretend that nothing had happened. She wore Mos’s crimes on her body for all to see.

  The Keep was asleep, and there were few people in the corridors and none that dared to detain her; but even so, the route to the Tower of the East Wind was a long and arduous ordeal. Laranya could barely support herself, and though Asara was uncommonly strong, it was a struggle. Her world was a mass of pain, yet still she was conscious of the eyes that regarded her with fear and disbelief as she staggered through their midst. Asara bore her stoically and in silence, and let Laranya direct her.

  The Tower of the East Wind, like all the other towers, was connected to the Keep by long, slender bridges positioned at the vertices. It was a tall needle, reaching high above the Keep’s flat roof, with a bulbous tip that tapered to a point. Small window-arches pocked its otherwise smooth surface. Far above, a balcony ringed the tower just below where it swelled outward.

  The climb was hard on Laranya. The spiral stairs seemed endless, and she would not pause at any of the observation points where chairs were set by the window-arches to view the city. Only when they reached the balcony and stepped out into the warm night air did Laranya allow herself to rest.

  Asara stood with her, looking out over the parapet. Close by, the city of Axekami fell away down the hill on which the Keep stood, a multitude of lights speckling the dark. Then the black band of the city walls, and beyond that the plains and the River Kerryn, flowing from the Tchamil Mountains which were too distant to see. The night was clear and the stars bright, and Neryn hung before them, the small green moon low in the eastern sky, an unflawed ball floating in the abyss.

  ‘Such a beautiful night,’ Laranya murmured. She sounded strangely peaceful. ‘How can the gods be so careless? How can the world go on as normal? Does my loss mean so little to them?’

  ‘Do not look to the gods for aid,’ said Asara. ‘If they cared in the least for human suffering, they would never have allowed me to be born.’

  Laranya did not understand this, did not know what manner of creature she was talking to: an Aberrant whose form shifted like water, whose lack of identity made her a walking shell, loathsome to herself.

  Asara turned to the Empress, her beautiful eyes cold. ‘Do you mean to do it?’

  Laranya leaned over the parapet and looked down to the courtyard far, far below, visibly only by pinpricks of lantern light. ‘I have no choice,’ she whispered. ‘I will not live so . . . diminished. And you know Mos will not let me leave.’

  ‘Reki would have stopped you,’ Asara said quietly.

  ‘He would have tried,’ the Empress agreed. ‘But he does not know what I feel. Mos has taken from me everything I am. But my spirit will strike at him from beyond this world.’ She took Asara’s arm. ‘Help me up.’

  The Empress of Saramyr clambered onto the parapet at the top of the Tower of the East Wind, and looked down on all of Axekami. With an effort, she stood straight. Her soiled nightrobe flapped about as the breeze caressed her. She breathed, slowly. So easy . . . it would be so easy to stop the pain.

  Then, a gust, rippling the silk against her skin, blowing her newly shorn hair back from her face. It smelt of home, a dry desert wind from the east. She felt a terrible ache, a longing for the vast simplicity of Tchom Rin, when she had not been an Empress and where love had never touched her nor wounded her so cruelly. Where she had never felt her child die inside her.

  And with that scent came a new resolve, a strengthening of her ruined core. It felt like the breath of the goddess Suran, revivifying her, imbuing new life. Why throw herself away like this? Why let Mos win? Perhaps she could endure the pain. Maybe she could survive the dishonour. She could revenge herself upon him in a thousand different ways, she could make him rue the tragedy he had brought upon himself. The worst he could do was kill her.

  If her father declared war, he would be casting himself into a nearly hopeless battle for her sake. Dignity would demand it. All those lives. Yet, if she turned back now, she could send Asara to catch Reki, to stop him. She could seek retribution in ways far more subtle and effective.

  ‘The wind has changed,’ said Laranya, after standing there for some minutes, an inch from that terrible drop.

  ‘Doubts?’ Asara asked.

  Laranya nodded, her eyes faraway.

  ‘I think not,’ said Asara, and pushed her.

  There was an instant when the Empress of Saramyr teetered, a moment of raw and overwhelming disbelief in which the thousands of routes fate held for her collapsed down to one single dead-end thread; then she tipped out into the dark night and her scream lasted all the way until she hit the courtyard below.

  TWENTY-THREE

  One hundred and seventy five miles away from where the Empress was falling from the Tower of the East Wind, Kaiku and Tsata hunted by the green light of Neryn.

  The Tkiurathi slunk along the shadowed lee of a row of rocks, his gutting-hooks held lightly in his hands. Kaiku was some way behind him; she could not move at the speed he could and still remain quiet.

  The cocktail of fear and excitement that Kaiku felt when on the hunt had become almost intoxicating now. For days they had been living on their wits and reactions, staying one step ahead of the beasts that wandered inside the Weavers’ invisible barrier. The paralysing terror that she had experienced almost constantly at first had subsided as they had evaded or killed the Aberrant predators time and again. She had learned to be confident in Tsata’s ability to keep them alive, and she trusted herself enough to know she was no burden to him.

  The shrilling was somewhere to their right. She could hear it, warbling softly to itself, a cooing sound like a wood pigeon that was soft and reassuring and decidedly at odds with the powerhouse of muscle and teeth and sinew that made it. She and Tsata had begun to name the different breeds of Aberrant by now for the sake of mutual identification. They had five so far, and that still left an uncertain number of species that they had only glimpsed. Aside from the gristle-crows and the shrillings, there were the brutal furies, the insidious skrendel, and most dangerous of all, the giant ghauregs. Tsata had named the latter two in Okhamban. The sharp and guttural syllables seemed to suit them well.

  On the other side of the row of rocks, a narrow trench cut through the stony earth, scattered with thorny, blight-twisted bushes and straggling weeds. The shrilling’s paws crunched on loose gravel and shale as it walked. Its steady, casual gait disturbed Kaiku. As with the other creatures they had encountered, she could not get used to the eerie sensation that it was patrolling. Not looking for food or marking its territory or any other understandable animal instinct, but acting as a sentry. It went slow and alert, and if they followed it for long enough Kaiku was certain that it would come back to this spot, treading the same path over and over until it returned to the flood plain and another Aberrant would appear in its stead.

  They were not acting like animals. It should have been carnage down on the plain, with that many violent predators in close proximity, but an uneasy peace existed as of enemies forced to be allies by necessity. Skirmishes and squabbles broke out, but never more than an angry snap or scratch before both parties retreated. And then there were the perfectly regular patterns of the gristle-crows’ flight during the day, and the curiously organised p
atrols at night. No, there was something unnatural here.

  Tonight, Kaiku meant to find out for sure what that was.

  She kept her eyes on the stealthy Okhamban ahead of her. When he was like this, he seemed half-animal himself, a being of primal energy capable of shocking viciousness; it was a bizarre alter-ego to the quiet and contemplative man who had accompanied them across the sea, with his strange and alien mind-set.

  A little way ahead of him, a hazy splash of pallid green moonlight spilled through a gap in the rocks. He looked back at her, making an up-and-over motion with one tattooed arm. She took his meaning. Adjusting her rifle on its strap across her back, she slipped up to the dark face of the barrier to their right. She listened: the gentle trill of the Aberrant drifted back to her, the scrape of its paws. With a deliberate tread, it passed the spot where she crouched.

  In one quick motion, she pulled herself onto the top of the row and jammed her feet into the uneven folds to brace herself. She swung her rifle around and sighted down into the trench. Her ascent was not as quiet as she would have liked, but it made little difference. Shrillings navigated like bats, blatting a series of frequencies which were picked up and sorted by sense glands in their throat, building up a picture according to which frequencies returned to them and how long they took. It made them exceptional night hunters in their element, but it had the side-effect of limiting their field of perception to what was in front of them. Kaiku had her rifle trained on it squarely, but it kept steadily walking away from her down the trench, towards the gap in the rocks where Tsata waited.

  She did not fire. Squatting in the light of Neryn and uncomfortably exposed, she held her nerve and her trigger finger. She was there as a backup only, in case the worst should happen. The report of a rifle would alert everyone and everything within miles to their presence.

  The shrillings were lithe and deadly beasts, an uncomfortable blending of mammal and reptile, preserving the most advantageous aspects of both. Their size, bone structure and movements were like a big cat, but their skin was covered with tough, overlapping scales of natural armour. Elongated skulls curved to a long, smooth crest. Their upper jaws were lipless, and rigid and beaklike, but from beneath them dark red gums sheathed killing teeth. They walked on all fours, though they could stand on two legs for a short time while balancing on their tails, and their forepaws each held a single outsized claw which could unzip flesh and separate muscle effortlessly. They were efficient carnivores who had climbed to the top of their rapidly shifting food chain in the blighted areas of the Tchamil Mountains, using their night-seeing capabilities to pinpoint animals that hid at the sound of their warbling. Fast, streamlined and deadly.

  But so was Tsata.

  He waited until the creature had just passed the gap in the rocks before he sprang. Movement so close to its body was picked up by some peripheral sense, and it curved its spine to meet him, its jaws gaping wide. But he had predicted it, and swung to one side, so that its teeth snapped shut on nothing but air. He rammed one end of his gutting-hook into its outstretched neck, behind its crest. It spasmed once, but in that time Tsata had swung onto its back, using the embedded gutting-hook as a lever, and buried his second blade into the other side of its throat. Its legs collapsed beneath it and it started to thrash before Tsata wrenched both blades upward, tearing them through the muscle of its neck and severing its vertebrae in a gout of blood and spinal fluid. The shrilling flopped. It was all over in an instant.

  Kaiku scrambled down from her perch and slid into the trench. Tsata’s gutting-hooks were laid aside, and he had turned the Aberrant’s head so as to move its crest out of the way. Its black eye reflected his face as he felt amid the pulses of gore that ran down its neck.

  ‘Have you found it?’ Kaiku asked as she hurried up to him. His bare arms and hands were dripping with noxious blood, black in the green moonlight.

  ‘Here,’ he said. Kaiku met his glance. ‘Can you do this?’

  ‘I have to risk it,’ she said. ‘For the pash.’

  He grinned. ‘One day I will teach you how to use that word properly.’

  The fleeting moment of camaraderie was too brief to enjoy. She put her hands where his were, and felt the repellent skin of the black, wormlike creature attached to the arch of the shrilling’s neck, just above the point where Tsata’s blades had cut. This was the fourth Aberrant they had killed between them, and every time they had found one of these nauseating things in the same place, deep in the flesh, dead.

  This one was not dead yet, but it had only seconds left, its body failing as its host’s systems ceased. Seconds were enough.

  Kaiku touched it, and opened the Weave. Tsata watched her as her eyes fluttered closed. The dark gush of the Aberrant’s blood over the wrists and hands became a trickle as the heart stopped pumping.

  The link was easy to follow, once she was inside it. The slug-thing’s fading consciousness was like an anchor in the body of the Aberrant beast. Small tendrils of influence were retreating as it died, the hooks it had buried into its deadly host; but the strongest link arced away across the Fault, connected to some far destination like an umbilical cord. She followed it, and it led her to a nexus where dozens of other similar links converged like ribbons around a maypole, wafting in the flow of the Weave.

  She read the fibres, and the answers came to her.

  The nexus was one of the tall, black-robed strangers. They were not Weavers; they could not shape and twist the Weave. Rather, they were the hands that held a multitude of leashes, and the leashes tethered the Aberrants through the vile entities embedded close to their spines. They were the handlers.

  That was how the Aberrants were under control, she realised. Carefully, she probed further. She was not sure to what extent the link operated: did the handlers actively know what the Aberrants know? Did they see through the beasts’ eyes? No, surely not, for if the handlers were linked mind-to-mind with the beasts then they would know of Tsata and Kaiku’s incursions, and the Weavers would have reacted with much more alarm. She gave up trying to guess; it was useless to speculate at this point.

  Her eyes flicked open, and the irises were deepest crimson. She stepped back.

  ‘As we thought,’ she murmured. Her gaze went to Tsata’s. ‘We should go. They will be coming.’

  The two of them slipped up the trench, disappearing into the shadows. Tsata led with practiced ease; Kaiku followed, alert for danger. Distantly, a yammering and howling had begun, but by the time the other Aberrants arrived at the scene of the death, the perpetrators had long fled.

  Kaiku’s glance strayed to the Mask that lay on the ground beside her. Tsata, hunkered down next to her in the glade, intercepted the look.

  ‘It is wearing you down,’ he said softly. ‘Is it not?’

  Kaiku nodded slightly. She picked up her pack and threw it on top of the Mask, obscuring its mocking expression.

  The night was warm, but a cooler breeze hinted at the promise of distant winter. Chikkikii cracked and snapped like branches in a fire from the darkness, a staccato percussion as they clicked their rigid wing-cases, underpinning the melodic cheeping of other nocturnal insects and the occasional hoot of some arboreal animal. Neryn’s smooth face glowed through the gently swaying network of leaves overhead, dappling the small clearing in restful light, playing across the arches of tough roots that poked out of the ground and the colonies of weeds and foliage that had made their home here. A spray of moonflowers nodded lazily, their petals open in drowsy grey stars, questing up toward the life-giving illumination.

  The glade lay beyond the Weavers’ barrier of misdirection, a mile east of the point where it began. They never rested inside the danger area, especially not now that the enemy was on the alert. Ever since the first Aberrant sentry had surprised them and they had been forced to kill it, the patrols had been more intense, and gristle-crows scoured the sky during daylight hours. They had only barely escaped that time, for they had wasted precious minutes examining the strange
, slimy thing attached to the sentry’s neck, and only Tsata’s instincts had warned them in time to evade the dozen other Aberrants that came running. It had been just another part of the puzzle: how did the creatures know when one of their own had died?

  Since then Kaiku had been forced to shield them more than once from the malevolent attention of a Weaver, hiding them as an unseen presence swept across the domain in search of the mysterious intruders. The Weavers suspected that something was amiss, and the occasional death of one of their creatures must have caused consternation by evidence of the increased security; but they could not find the cause of the disturbance.

  They were limited in their thinking. They imagined a rogue tribesman from elsewhere in the Fault had somehow got inside and was now trapped and causing them minor inconvenience. They had not considered the fact that someone was passing freely through their barrier, and so they never looked outside it. Nor, of course, did the Aberrants stray beyond those boundaries. Kaiku and Tsata took advantage of that, to sleep and plan in relative safety.

  ‘I wish to apologise,’ Tsata said, out of nowhere.

  ‘Yes?’ Kaiku said mildly.

  ‘I was ungenerous in my judgement of you,’ he said. He shifted position to a more comfortable cross-legged arrangement: it was one of the few mannerisms that Saramyr and Okhamba shared.

  ‘I had forgotten about it,’ Kaiku lied, but Tsata knew her people’s ways well enough not to be fooled.

  ‘Among the Tkiurathi it is necessary to say what we think,’ he explained. ‘Since we do not own things, since our community is based on sharing, it is not good to keep things inside us. If we resent someone for taking too much food at every meal, we will tell them so; we do not let it fester. Our equilibrium is maintained by approval or disapproval of the pash, and from that we determine the common good.’

  Kaiku regarded him evenly with dark red eyes.