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

by Chris Wooding

  She glanced at him. His vision was not as good as hers, but he saw enough. He stared down on the scene for a long time in silence, his face still but tears welling in his eyes.

  ‘Is my father down there?’ Reki asked.

  ‘Who can say?’ Asara replied, but she knew that he was, and Reki caught it in her tone. She could only imagine what had happened: how these men had been ambushed by Aberrants, how even this massive force had been outnumbered by the tide of monstrosities pouring from the mountains. Yet how could the Aberrants be so organised, so numerous, so purposeful? Could this, too, be some dark result of the Weavers’ ambitions? It seemed impossible, yet the alternatives were even more impossible yet.

  Reki wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. He did not grieve for his father, to whom he had been a source of endless disappointment; he had enough residual bitterness to pretend that he did not care. He wept instead for the death of his people. He wept at his first sight of the cost of war.

  They made a fire on the summit of the ridge, careless of the consequences, and there Reki took out the sheaf of hair that had been his sister’s, and burned it. The acrid stink carried up on the thin trail of smoke into the morning sky, the ends of the hair glowing, curling and blackening. Reki knelt over it, gazing into the heart of the blaze at the last part of his sister he had as it smouldered into ash. Asara stood at his shoulder, watching, wondering how he would feel if he ever knew that his sister’s murderer was the woman by his side. Wondering what would happen if she was ever on the receiving end of his promised vengeance.

  ‘The responsibility passes to me,’ he said, eventually. ‘What was to be my father’s cause is now mine.’

  Asara studied him. He stood up, and met her eyes. His gaze was steady, and there was a determination there that she had never seen before.

  ‘You are a Barak now,’ she said quietly.

  His gaze did not flinch or flicker. Finally, he turned it eastward, looking over the peaks, as if he could see past them to the vast desert beyond where his home lay. Without a word, he set off that way, heading down the far slope of the ridge. Asara watched him go, noted the new set to his shoulders and the grim line of his jaw; then, with one final look to the west as if in farewell, she followed him.

  THIRTY-TWO

  Yugi sprinted along the barricade, the air a pall of acrid smoke and his face blackened and grimed with sweat. The sharp clatter of rifle fire punctured the cries of men and women. Aberrants roared and squealed as they were mown down in their dozens, and still they kept coming.

  Yugi slung his rifle over his shoulder and drew his sword, leaping over the corpse of someone whose face had been ruined by shrapnel – they had let their weapon overheat and it had exploded – and racing towards where a skrendel had slipped over the barricade and was struggling with Nomoru. She was holding her lacquered rifle between them to fend off its scorpion-like tail-lashes, her head ducking back as the creature bared long, yellowed fangs and snapped at her. It sensed Yugi’s approach and scampered off in a flail of spindly limbs, realising it was outnumbered; but Nomoru was faster, and she caught it by its ankle, tripping it so that it sprawled in the dust. It was all the time Yugi needed to plunge his sword into its ribs. It screamed, spasming wildly, raking claws at the two of them; but Yugi put his weight on the sword and pinned the creature to the ground, and Nomoru got to her feet, aimed calmly and blew its head to fragments.

  ‘Are you hurt?’ Yugi asked breathlessly.

  Nomoru gazed at him for a long moment, her eyes unreadable. ‘No,’ she said eventually.

  Yugi was about to say something else, but he changed his mind. He raced back to the barricade, sheathing his sword and priming his rifle, and joined the rest of the defenders as they shredded the creatures surging up the pass towards them. A moment later, Nomoru appeared alongside him, and did the same.

  But the Aberrants were endless.

  The fighting had begun at dawn. The efforts of Yugi and several other Libera Dramach traps and ambushes had slowed the advance of the Weavers’ army, but only enough to buy them an extra night of preparation. Still, that night had given several clans, factions and survivors of previous Aberrant attacks time to get to the Fold and join the Libera Dramach in their stand. Since sunrise, Yugi had fought alongside some of the very Omecha death-cultists who had tried to kill them several weeks ago. He had also battled next to warrior monks, frightened scholars, crippled and deformed Aberrants from the nearby village in which non-Aberrant folk were not allowed, spirit-worshippers, bandits, narcotics smugglers, and any of three dozen other types of person that had either been cast out from society or had chosen to separate themselves from it.

  The Xarana Fault, for all its diversity and constant infighting and struggles for territorial power, was united in one thing: they all lived in the Fault, and that made them different. And now the factions had put aside their differences to struggle against an enemy that threatened them all, and the Fold was where they would turn back the tide or die trying.

  They had engaged the Aberrants in the Knot, the labyrinth of killing alleys that guarded the Fold to the west. There, the creatures could not get through more than a few at a time, and the spots where the way opened up enough to get more than two or three abreast had been trapped with explosives or slicewires or incendiaries. More defenders were positioned on top of the Knot, to pick off the cumbersome gristle-crows that acted as lookouts for the Nexuses and to cover the horseshoe of flat stone that abutted the western side of the valley, in case the Aberrants chose to forsake the narrow defiles and come over the top. In the Fault, it was necessary to think three-dimensionally in battle.

  By mid-morning, the paths of the Knot were choked with Aberrant dead, but the defenders had been driven back steadily. Reports had come to Yugi of the fight to the north and south of the Fold, where the enemy were trying to circumvent the Knot entirely to attack the valley from the eastern side. It was the first tactical move that they had made. Yugi took a little heart from that. The Weavers did not know the first thing about how to fight a war; they had simply thought to sweep aside everyone in their way, caring nothing for the casualties they sustained. Thousands of Aberrant predators lay as testament to their ineptitude.

  And yet it still seemed that in the end, they would be proved right in their assumption that they could simply trample down the opposition by weight of numbers. Ammunition was running very low now, and it was not getting to some of the places that needed it. The defenders’ death toll had been light thus far, but when they lost the advantage of ranged weapons and had to close in hand-to-hand, the Aberrants would even the balance.

  In all this, there was no sign of the Nexuses, nor of the Weavers. Nor, Yugi noted, the Red Order. Where in the Golden Realm was the help Cailin and her painted kind were meant to provide? Just to have them on hand to facilitate communication between groups of fighters would have been a huge help; but they were nowhere to be found.

  Heart’s blood, if she’s run out on us, I’ll kill that woman myself, he thought.

  They had held this pass for over two hours now. There were only a limited number of ways out of the Knot, and each one had been fortified with one or more fire-cannons, as well as hastily constructed stone walls and earth banks. The sides of the defile rose sheer on either side, and the Aberrants were being forced to crowd uphill along an uneven surface of blood-slick stone to get to the barricade at the top. The sun had been slanting down into the enemy’s eyes all morning, dazzling them, though it had now risen overhead and would soon begin to do the same to the defenders.

  Rifles were fired dry, then swapped with loaders who refilled the chambers of the weapons and then swapped back when the next one was done. A small stack of guns steamed in a shadowed alcove, cooling so that the heat of repeated shooting would not make the ignition powder explode all at once. Three men attended to the fire-cannon behind the barricade, which was fashioned in the shape of a demon of the air, its body streamlined and mouth agape to spit flame. Hal
f of the defile was ablaze from shellshot, sending thick black clouds of smoke up towards the defenders and making them squint. Yugi had been forced to limit use of the fire-cannon for fear of unwittingly providing the Aberrants with too much cover. The hot reek of bubbling fat and blackening flesh had resulted in vomiting behind the barricade, and in the midday heat the stench of warming stomach acids was appalling.

  ‘They’re trying again,’ Nomoru said, setting her rifle stock under her armpit and sighting. She took her eye away to glance at Yugi. ‘Wish I’d stayed with Kaiku now,’ she deadpanned. Yugi laughed explosively, but it came out with a manic and desperate edge to it.

  Despite the fact that the Nexuses had not been seen yet, their presence was still much in evidence in the way the Aberrants acted. They would attack in number, return and regroup in a very military fashion, and their strikes became more careful and organised as the day progressed. Yugi suspected that the Nexuses were hanging back after snipers like Nomoru had taught them that it was dangerous to show themselves, but their influence could still be observed.

  There had been a short pause in the attacks after the skrendel had managed to slip over the barricade. That had been a lucky run, a product of too many people swapping weapons at once, combined with the speed and agility of the creature. Now the Aberrants were coming again, dark shapes running around the flames and through the swirling smoke. Rifles cracked once more, pummelling iron balls into the attackers at high velocity, smacking through flesh and shattering bone.

  But this time, the Aberrants did not fall.

  It took the defenders too long to realise that the creatures were still coming. The riflemen and women had paused, expecting the Aberrants to collapse and provide a clearer shot at the ones behind. By the time Yugi had yelled at the fire-cannon crew, and another salvo of bullets had failed to stop the rush, Nomoru had realised what was going on.

  They were using their dead as shields.

  Out of the smoke came a half-dozen ghauregs, each with another one of their number propelled before them: limp bags of muscle that jerked like dolls as they absorbed the hail of rifle balls. The monstrous, shaggy humanoids were powering over the heaped corpses of their companions, forming a line across the defile behind which a horde of other Aberrants pressed forward. Nomoru picked off two of them by dint of her skill with the rifle, and another one had its legs shot out from under it by some quick-thinking defenders, but they had no sooner stumbled than they were borne up again by another ghaureg, lifted and presented as targets so that the creatures behind could push on. The fire-cannon roared, but it was fired in haste before the operators could decline the elevation enough; it blasted the middle of the horde to flaming ruin and prevented any more from getting through, but that still left too many, who discarded their burdens as they reached the barricade and began to clamber over.

  Guns were thrown aside and swords drawn as the defenders crowded to counter the assault. Yugi saw a ghaureg pick up an Aberrant woman by her leg and fling her into the side of the defile; he heard the breaking of her bones as she hit. Then he was in close, ducking a swipe from the creature’s enormous arm, his blade lashing out to sever the hand at the wrist. The beast roared in pain, then jerked as two men came from behind it and buried their weapons in its back. Its huge jaw went slack and the light went out in its eyes, and it slumped to the ground with a bubbling sigh.

  He cast about for Nomoru, but the wiry scout was nowhere to be seen. The warble of a shrilling warned him an instant before it leaped from the top of the barricade towards him. He dodged the first pounce, but it reared up on its hind legs and slashed a sickle-claw, which cut a furrow through his shirt and missed his skin by the width of a hair. His counterstrike was pre-empted by a rifle shot from his left, which smashed through the creature’s skull armour and dropped it to the dusty ground. He glanced at his saviour, already knowing who it would be. Nomoru had retreated to a nook further up the pass and was crouching there, picking off Aberrants one by one. She was no hand-to-hand fighter; she was much more deadly from a distance.

  Reassured now that he knew where she was, he swung back to the fray. The barricade had collapsed under the weight of the ghauregs that lumbered over it. Already the ground was cluttered with the fallen, attacker and defender alike. The Aberrants were heavily outnumbered, and their reinforcements were cut off by a wall of flame further down the defile, but they took three for every one of them that died. Yugi vaulted a man whose throat had been torn out and ran to the rescue of another who was facing a furie alone. He recognised it from Kaiku’s description: like some demonic boar, its multiple tusks huge and hooked, its trotters like blades, its back tufted with spines and its face warped into a snarl. His attempt at intervention was foiled as something appeared as if from nowhere in front of him, an awful, shrieking creature with tentacles whirling around a circular maw and a body black, hairless and glistening. It was already wounded, maddened with pain; he finished it off in moments, but by the time he returned to his original objective, the man had been stamped underfoot by the furie and lay bloodied and dead in a rising haze of dust.

  He was about to chase after the beast, motivated by some illogical sense of responsibility at allowing the man to be killed, when he heard the rising wail of the wind-alarms from behind him, an eerie, mournful howl coming from the east. More of them joined in, the Libera Dramach lookouts spinning tubes of hollow wood on long ropes around their heads to create a noise that could be heard for miles. It was an idea stolen from the Speakers at the Imperial councils, who used smaller versions to call for order among the assembly. Yugi had been dreading to hear it ever since that morning.

  Somewhere along the defensive line, the enemy had broken through. They were at the Fold, and behind the Libera Dramach positions. The retreat had been sounded.

  He went for the furie anyway. The fight was not yet over here, though the Aberrants were few in number and were being whittled down at great cost to the defenders. If there were going to be any folk left to retreat at all, there would need to be more Aberrant blood spilt. Thinking of the streets of his home being trampled under the feet of these predators, he let his anger and frustration fuel him, and with a cry Yugi threw himself into the battle.

  The rim of the Fold was a mass of fortifications, and no more so than on the western side. Enemies coming down from the north, south or east slopes could be engaged on the valley floor, where the defenders would have the advantage of height, being able to attack from the plateaux and rain death down on any invaders. But anyone surmounting the western end would be above the town, critically negating the Libera Dramach’s ability to use artillery for fear of hitting their own buildings. The invaders could spill over the cave-riddled cliffs like a river over a waterfall, flooding down through the steps and levels of the town. Because of this, the western edge was guarded most fiercely of all; and since it was directly in their way, that was where the Aberrant army struck hardest.

  The primary defence was a stockade wall, a triple layer of tree trunks driven into holes bored into the stone. The effort it had taken to dig out the foundations had been enormous, but in the Xarana Fault security was the most important priority. Kamako cane scaffolding had been built up behind the wall, supporting walkways and small pulleys, a jumble of ladders and ropes. Now it was aswarm with men and women, vibrating beneath the weight of running feet. Fire-cannons bellowed from their positions atop the wall; ballistae threw rocks and explosives, lobbing them in languid and deadly arcs against the clear blue sky. The sound of rifles was a deafening and constant rattle, interspersed with the sinister hum of bowstrings, and the air stank of burnt ignition powder and sweat.

  Zaelis tu Unterlyn clambered up the last ladder to the top of the wall, his lame leg making the climb awkward. His heart was racing: the chaos all around him terrified him. He was no general. He knew little of the arts of combat and had never been this close to conflict before. The defence of the Fold he had left in the hands of men like Yugi, who knew what they were doi
ng. For his own part, he felt suddenly demoted and useless. It was a hard thing for him to surrender the reins of an organisation he had built from the ground up, even temporarily. Between that and his daughter’s sudden and entirely unexpected rebellion against his will, he felt more like an old man than he ever had before. He feared he was not taking it well.

  The last few days he had been either interfering in the battle plans of men who clearly knew their business better than he did, or clashing with Lucia. Having never had to discipline her before, he had no idea what to do. She was not like other children he had tutored in years past. To some extent, he dared not punish her at all because he relied so much on her as the uniting force behind his organisation, and to estrange her would be divisive to the Libera Dramach.

  Were they right, Lucia and Cailin? Did Zaelis truly care for the Libera Dramach more than he cared for his own daughter? Had he adopted her simply to keep his most important asset under his control? Gods, he did not even want to think what that said about him, but he could not wholly dismiss the idea either.

  Alskain Mar. It had all started at Alskain Mar, when he had pushed Lucia into using her powers again, had lowered her into the lair of a creature of unimaginable power and unguessable intent. Because he was afraid of what might happen to the people of the Fold, he had risked her. Heart’s blood, what had possessed him? Even when he had been agonising over his choice, had it been because he had been weighing the danger to his most precious figurehead, not to his daughter as he should have been? She had been so passive and pliable for so long that he had almost forgotten there was a person behind those distant eyes. No wonder she felt betrayed. No wonder she turned on him.

  He could see her drifting closer to Cailin day by day. Since Alskain Mar. But he could not allow the Red Order to have Lucia’s heart; they were too influential by half as it was, and they shared little of the Libera Dramach’s dedication of purpose. They were looking to their own advantage, their own survival. And they were secretive. Cailin had not shared her plans concerning the invasion with Zaelis, and had refused to participate in collaborative strategies. Now she had disappeared entirely when he needed her most.