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

by Chris Wooding

  One thing he feared more than losing Lucia was losing her to Cailin. But once again, the question scratched at him: whom do you love, your daughter or the people you gathered to follow her?

  He was still thinking it as he climbed onto the walkway and looked out over the stockade wall and to the west, but the sight there chased it from his mind as the blood drained from his cheeks.

  The Aberrants were everywhere, a vast black swathe pressed up against the stockade wall, a terrible horde of tooth and muscle and armoured skin that gnashed and raged with bloodlust. They had poured out of the labyrinth of thin defiles and ravines that led down into the Knot and thrown themselves against the stockade walls to be massacred. Black columns of smoke billowed upward, where shellshot had made flaming ruin of the attackers. Explosions scorched the stone and sent broken bodies flying as ballistae found their mark.

  At the base of the wall, hundreds lay crushed and dead, and still more piled on top to add their corpses, forming a steadily growing slope of blood and gristle. They were concentrating their efforts in several spots, seeking to make a mound big enough to get over the wall. Their suicidal singularity of purpose was horrifying; but worse, it was unstoppable.

  Next to Zaelis, four men took a cauldron of molten metal that had been winched up from the ground and tipped it onto those creatures that were clamouring beneath them, but their animal screams only signified new additions to the slippery heap that was already halfway up the stockade.

  ‘Burn them!’ someone was shouting. ‘Bring oil and burn them! Keep them burning!’

  Zaelis looked along the wall at the man who was striding along the walkway towards him. Yugi. He was dirtied and gore-smeared, his hair in its usual disarray behind the rag around his forehead, but he broke into a grin as he saw Zaelis, and greeted him warmly. He sent a runner down the line of the stockade to spread the order, which had come from the general in command of the western defences, and then looked Zaelis over.

  ‘Heart’s blood, you look terrible,’ he said.

  ‘No more than you,’ Zaelis countered. He scratched his bearded neck, which was itching with sweat. ‘I’m glad to see you got back behind the wall in one piece.’

  ‘Zaelis, what’s happening? Where are the Red Order? We need them to organise ourselves. It’s taking too long for word to get from one place to another.’

  ‘I know, Yugi, I know,’ Zaelis said helplessly, moving aside as someone jostled past them with a murmured apology. ‘But you’ve dealt with their kind.’

  Yugi nodded grimly. ‘Where’s Lucia?’ he asked.

  ‘Hidden,’ Zaelis said. ‘Guarded. She would not leave. That was all I could do.’

  ‘She’s your daughter!’ Yugi was aghast.

  ‘I could hardly force her,’ Zaelis replied. ‘She is not like a normal child.’

  ‘That’s exactly what she’s like,’ Yugi said. ‘She’s fourteen harvests of age, and every one of those things out there is baying for her blood! Don’t you think she’s scared? You need to be with her, not out here.’

  Zaelis was about to protest, but Yugi overrode him. ‘Show me where she is,’ he said, grabbing the older man’s arm.

  ‘You have to stay!’ Zaelis said.

  ‘If she’s going to be guarded, I’ll guard her.’ He was propelling them both towards a ladder now. ‘There are Weavers about, Zaelis. If I’ve learned one lesson from this whole mess, it’s that you can’t keep anything hidden from them for long.’

  The cellar of Flen’s house was hot and dark. What light there was came from imperfections in the fit of the floorboards overhead, thin lines of warm daylight spilling through to stripe the faces of the two adolescents that were concealed there.

  As with most Saramyr cellars, the air was too dry for mildew or damp, and though plain it was kept neat and presentable with the same fastidiousness as the rest of the house. The wooden floor and walls were sanded and varnished. Barrels and boxes were neatly stacked and secured with hemp webbing. Bottles of wine lay in racks, half-seen outlines in the gloom.

  A set of steps ran up to a hatch in the ceiling, which had been closed on them an hour ago. Since then, they had sat on floor-mats down here, whispering to each other, taking occasional sips from the jug of berry juice that they had been provided with and ignoring the parcel of food wrapped in wax paper that came with it. Overhead, the creaking footsteps of the guards went to and fro, sometimes blocking the light so that it seemed as if a great shadow crossed the cellar.

  They hid, and waited, and listened to the reverberations of the fire-cannons in the distance.

  ‘I hope he’ll not be hurt,’ Flen said, for the dozenth time. His train of thought had been returning to the same subject over and over again, whenever enough silence had passed.

  Lucia betrayed no sign of impatience, but she did not respond. She had feared he might bring it up again. A few minutes ago Lucia had experienced an unpleasant intuition that Flen’s father – the object of his musing – had been killed. She could not say for sure, but it would be far from the first time her instincts had informed her of something she could not possibly have known otherwise. Perhaps she had unconsciously picked it up from the indecipherable sussurus of the spirit-voices that surrounded her, some half-gleaned shred of intention or meaning that hinted at revelation. She had, after all, been giving Flen’s father a lot of thought on her friend’s behalf.

  Flen looked up at her, expecting her to reassure him; but she could not. Hurt flickered in his eyes. She hesitated a moment, then slid nearer to him and hugged him gently. He hugged her back, looking over her shoulder into the darkness that surrounded them, and the two of them embraced in the dim island of illumination for a time, the lines of sunlight from above moulding to the contours of their shoulders and faces.

  ‘They’re all being killed,’ she whispered. ‘And it’s my fault.’

  ‘No,’ Flen hissed before she had even finished. ‘It’s not your fault. What the Weavers did isn’t your fault. It’s their fault you were born with the abilities you have; it’s their fault. You didn’t do anything.’

  ‘I started this all,’ she said. ‘I let Purloch take that lock of my hair. I let him go back to the Weavers with proof I was an Aberrant. If I hadn’t done that . . . Mother might still be alive . . . nobody would be dying . . .’

  Flen clutched her harder, his own troubles forgotten in the need to reassure her. He stroked her hair, his fingers running onto the burned and puckered skin at the nape of her neck, gliding over its nerveless surface.

  ‘It’s not your fault,’ he repeated. ‘You can’t help what you are.’

  ‘What am I?’ she said, drawing back from him. Had it been any other girl, he would have expected tears in her eyes, but her gaze was fey and strange. Did she feel remorse or guilt as other people did? Did it make her truly sad? Or had what he had taken as self-recrimination simply been a statement of fact? So long he had known her, and he would never understand her properly.

  ‘You said it yourself. You’re an avatar.’

  Lucia studied him carefully, and did not reply, which prompted him to explain himself.

  ‘It’s like you told me,’ he said. ‘The gods don’t want Aricarat back, but they won’t interfere directly. So they put people like you here instead. People who can change things. Remember how the Children of the Moons saved your life when the shin-shin were after you? Remember how Tane gave his life up for you, even though he was a priest of Enyu and he was supposed to hate Aberrants?’ He wrung his hands, not sure that he was articulating himself properly. He imagined that Lucia did not like to be reminded of Tane’s sacrifice, though he told himself that she did not always react as he thought she should. ‘He must have known that his goddess wanted you alive, even though you stood against everything he believed in. Because Aricarat is killing the land, and the Weavers serve Aricarat, and even though you’re an Aberrant – because you’re an Aberrant – you’re a threat to the Weavers. Just like the moon-sisters wanted you alive, so you coul
d help fight against their brother.’

  He took her hands earnestly, trying to make her see what seemed so clear to him. ‘If you hadn’t been born the way you are, there’d be no Libera Dramach. There’d have been no Saran, and we’d have never known about Aricarat at all until it was too late. The gods might have been fighting this war ever since the Weavers first appeared, but it’s only now that we know what we’re fighting about.’

  ‘Maybe,’ she conceded. She smiled faintly, but there was no amusement in it. ‘I am no saviour, Flen.’

  ‘I didn’t say you were a saviour,’ he replied. ‘I just said you were put here for a reason. Even if we don’t know what that reason is yet.’

  She seemed about to reply, her lips forming a response for her friend, when her expression changed. She snapped him the curved-finger gesture for quiet, her eyes wide; at the same moment, there was a sigh and a slump from overhead. Flen looked up, then blinked and flinched as something dripped onto his cheek through the gaps in the floorboards. He wiped it automatically from his face, and gave a tiny noise of terror as he saw blood on his fingertips.

  ‘Weavers,’ Lucia whispered.

  There was another slump from above, then several more. The sound of the guards falling. Flen could only imagine how the Weavers had got here, what dreadful arts they had used to slip into the heart of the Fold while the Aberrants pounded at the perimeter. Had they twisted the minds of the soldiers to make their appearance different? Had they been able to walk with impunity through the streets of the Fold, cloaked in illusion? Who knew what the Weavers could really do, what they had practised for centuries in secret, what particles of knowledge their reawakening god had taught them?

  But speculation was useless. They were here now, and here for Lucia.

  ‘Don’t be scared,’ he said to her, though he was far more frightened than she was. They huddled against the wall opposite the stairs, trapped there in the grille of light with hot darkness crowding all around.

  Something was shifted from above the hatch. A rug was rolled back. Concealment was pointless; they knew exactly where she was.

  A rectangle of light opened at the top of the stairs, silhouetting three figures against the blinding brightness of the day. Motes drifted in the sunbeams that pushed past them, but they were ragged heaps of shadow.

  ‘Lucia . . .’ whispered a hoarse voice.

  She got to her feet. Flen got up with her. His attempt at a defiant posture was laughable; he could barely stand for fear.

  The Weavers came down the steps, moving slowly, their arthritic and cancer-ridden bodies making them ungainly and weak. Gradually she saw them as they moved from the dazzle into the gloom: three Masks, one of coloured feathers, one of bark chips, one of beaten gold.

  ‘I am Lucia tu Erinima,’ she said, her voice low and steady. ‘I am the one you have come for.’

  ‘We know,’ said one of the Weavers; it was impossible to tell which. They had reached the bottom of the stairs now. Flen’s eyes flickered around the cellar, probing the darkness as if searching for escape. He was almost sobbing with fright now. Lucia was a statue.

  The feather-Mask Weaver raised one white and sore-pocked hand, unfolded a long fingernail towards Lucia.

  ‘Your time is done, Aberrant,’ he whispered.

  But the threat was never carried out. As one, the Weavers shrieked and recoiled, whirling away from Lucia and Flen. The children backed off as the creatures writhed and spasmed, wailing in sudden torment, their limbs seizing spastically. There was a nauseating crack as a Weaver’s arm broke, the bone pushing a lump through his patchwork robe; a moment later, his legs snapped, the knees inverting with appalling violence and sending him screaming to the floor. One of the others was lying on his side and bending backward, pushed as if by some invisible force, howling as his vertebrae clicked, one by one, until finally his spine gave way. The Weavers jerked and twisted as their bones fractured and broke again and again, over and over in hideous torture. Blood seeped from beneath their Masks and they soiled themselves, but still they screeched, still they lived. It was many minutes before it ended, by which time they were not even recognisable as humanoid, merely bloodied, jagged pulps like piles of sticks beneath their mercifully concealing robes and Masks.

  Flen had turned away in horror, crouching in the corner, his hands over his ears; Lucia had watched the scene dispassionately.

  Cailin tu Moritat stepped into the light from the hatchway, her irises a deep crimson in amid her painted face. From their positions of concealment, the other Sisters emerged: ten of them in total, all with the red-and-black triangles on their lips, the red crescents across their eyes and down their cheeks. All wearing variations of the black dress of the Order.

  Cailin looked down on Lucia, her face half-hidden by shadow, limned in the light from outside. Her expression could not be seen.

  ‘You did well, Lucia,’ she said.

  Lucia did not reply.

  The Weavers had walked into a trap, following Lucia’s Weave-signature. Had they known what the late Weave-lord Vyrrch had known, they would have realised that Lucia was usually undetectable, that her power was too subtle to pick up on their trawls across the infinity of golden threads. But with the Sisters’ help, she had made herself visible to them. It was too tempting for them to resist.

  The Sisters were elated now, casting glances at each other in mutual congratulation. Among them, only Cailin had ever faced a Weaver before. Now they were blooded. The instant of conflict that had ended in them taking control of the Weaver’s bodies and cracking their bones like sticks had been a long and arduous struggle in Weave-time. What had seemed less than a second to Flen and Lucia had been an eternity to them. Even though they greatly outnumbered their foes, it had been by no means an easy match. Yet they had won through unhurt, and the shattered corpses at their feet bore testament to their abilities to face these creatures and win.

  Lucia was listening to the harsh and agitated thoughts of the distant ravens. They had been sent away so that their presence would not reveal Lucia’s position or deter the Weavers, and were going frantic at what might have happened. She had been forced to command them in this instance, something she rarely did. She sent them a wash of reassurance, and their turmoil eased like water taken off the boil.

  ‘You all did well,’ Cailin said, raising her voice to include the Sisters. ‘But this was not your true test. We kept them from alerting their kind; that means we still have the element of surprise, at least for a short time. Let us not waste it. Now the real battle begins!’

  The Sisters murmured in approval and headed up the stairs, through the hatch. They heard running feet overhead, and voices.

  ‘Zaelis and Yugi are here,’ Cailin said. She glanced at Flen, who was still cowering in the corner, the horror of the Weavers’ death too much for him.

  ‘You have my deepest gratitude, Cailin,’ Lucia said, sounding older than her fourteen harvests. ‘You did not have to stay and fight for the Libera Dramach.’

  Cailin shook her head slowly, then bent down to Lucia’s level, which was not so far now. ‘I fight for you, child,’ she said; and with that, she kissed Lucia on the cheek in a gesture of tenderness utterly at odds with her character. Then she straightened and swept up the stairs and away.

  There were a few words exchanged, out of sight, and Yugi and Zaelis appeared, slowing as they descended the steps, aghast at the ruin of the Weavers below them.

  ‘You’re late, Father,’ Lucia said coldly.

  He had no chance to reply to that, for at that moment the mournful howl of the wind-alarms began for the second time that day. The breath he had drawn to respond was exhaled as an oath.

  The wall had been breached. The Aberrants were inside the Fold.

  THIRTY-THREE

  Kaiku and Tsata had been lost for hours by the time they came across the worm-farm.

  The mine beneath the flood plain was bigger than they had imagined, a maze of tunnels and caverns running off the vas
t central shaft that looped and split and joined with no rhyme or reason in its structure. Some parts were entirely abandoned, or appeared to have never been inhabited or used at all; other parts were cluttered with stores and tools and all manner of mining equipment, yet they were nowhere near anything that was being mined. They had stolen explosives from these stockpiles, of which there were plenty, piled dangerously high and kept without care, left to sweat volatile chemicals. They had expected to find explosives eventually – indeed, they had relied on it, for it was the only way they had to destroy a witchstone as far as they knew – but not in this state. It would only take a spark in one of those rooms to bring half the mine down. Kaiku did not want to think about that happening while they were inside. They gingerly wrapped what they needed in rags and stowed it in a sack which Tsata carried.

  They saw golneri from time to time, but the diminutive folk always ignored them and went about whatever business they had. They found several dead ones as well, horribly mutilated, victims of the Weavers’ appetites. Other evidence of the Weavers appeared as they descended further and further into the groaning, steaming darkness of the mine. There were strange sculptures chiselled out of the rock, depictions of some inner madness that Kaiku could not guess at. Tunnels were scrawled with pictograms in all kinds of languages and some that appeared to be entirely made up, swirls of gibberish in which sometimes a horrible moment of sense could be made out, hinting at dark and twisted musings. One particularly disturbing cave was hung with dozens of female golneri, swinging by their ankles from a system of pulleys and ropes and eyelets, their throats cut and blood staining the ground below in a flaky brown patina. Kaiku found herself thinking that not only were the golneri forced to see this slaughter every time they passed through the cavern, but that it must have been them who assembled the complex system of ropes in the first place. Like making prisoners tie their own nooses. She wondered what the golneri had once been, and how their pride had been so destroyed that they could suffer atrocities like this and apparently not care.