The ascendancy veil bp-3

by Chris Wooding

  Kaiku checked that there was nobody else within earshot. 'What are you saying?'

  'As we go further towards the heart, we will find older spirits,' Lucia replied. 'They will not be so easily pacified.'

  Kaiku was observing the shaken expressions on the faces of the party.

  'Perhaps you had better keep that to yourself for now,' she muttered, hating herself for advocating dishonesty. 'For a while, at least.'

  Lucia made a distracted noise, and seemed to forget that Kaiku was there at all.

  Kaiku had walked with Phaeca for a time: she was affected worst of all of them. It hurt to see her in such a state, but some callous part of Kaiku wished that she had not been so indiscreet about her distress. Heart's blood, she was supposed to be a Sister. These people needed to believe that she was indomitable. Her own weakness was infecting the others, undermining everyone. She was concerned that Phaeca might pick up some of the impatience in her manner, but if she did, she said nothing.

  As the day aged through evening to dusk, the forest became strange.

  The change was slow and gradual. At first it was only an occasional incident: an unfamiliar flower, or a tree that looked odd. Then they found a remarkable rock that poked from the turf, a brilliant silvery lump of some kind of metallic mineral. Later they came across a cluster of dark magenta blossoms which nobody could identify, and a tree whose branches wrapped through the branches of other trees, twisting like vines. The green of their surroundings deepened and became mixed with purple and platinum.

  Heading deeper into the forest, they began to see animals, silent and watchful, some unlike anything they had ever observed before. One of the soldiers swore that he had seen a white creature like a deer, out in the trees. Asara spotted a long-legged spider, carapaced like a crab and as high as a man's knee, sidling from its burrow. The terrain became rougher, hills and cliffs rising, ghylls and ditches deepening into chasms.

  The sky was a sullen crimson when the leader of the party, a middle-aged Libera Dramach man known as Doja, called for a camp. The spot he chose was on the grassy lip of a stony gorge, where the trees drew back and left a fringe of clear ground, a gentle slope between the forest and the dizzying drop, where there was mercifully no canopy to hem them in. Iridima was visible through the translucent veils of colour still hanging across the ceiling of the night. On the other side of the gorge there was a narrow and immensely high waterfall. The water was carved into three uneven streams by red-veined rocks, and plunged in thin, misty strings, joining together again halfway down in their rush to the river below.

  When the camp was made, Kaiku stood on the edge of the precipice and looked down into the gorge. What river was this? A tributary of the Ko? Where was the source, and where did it end? Had anyone in living memory ever looked upon it until now? This river had flowed here, perhaps for thousands of years, and nobody had known it. If not for Lucia, it might have flowed for thousands more, untroubled by humanity.

  She gazed into the middle distance, saddened by the indifference of the world. How small they were in the eyes of creation, how petty their struggles. The spirits guarded their territories, the moons glided through the skies, the seas remained bottomless. Nature did not care for the plight of humankind. She began to wonder if Lucia's task was not an impossible one after all. Could she really rouse the spirits, even to protect themselves? Did even the gods take notice of how they fought and died?

  She turned away from the gorge. Such thoughts would only make her despair. And yet the idea of returning to the camp held no attraction for her, either. The party was subdued, still reeling from how easily they had been overcome. Asara was there; Kaiku was avoiding her as best she could. Phaeca was a wreck that she did not want to deal with. She did not feel like talking to Tsata or the Tkiurathi, either: somehow, what she felt was too private to try to explain to them.

  She was deciding whether to get some rest when she spotted Lucia walking into the trees.

  She blinked. Had she really seen what she thought she saw? She headed up the grassy slope towards the treeline. Her doubt evaporated as she went. Of course Lucia had slipped away on her own: it was just like her to disappear like that. Probably the people in the camp thought she had gone to sleep. Lucia needed solitude more than any of them, and she had the least to fear from the forest spirits.

  The thought did not comfort Kaiku. She skirted the camp and reached the point where she had seen Lucia enter the trees. A pair of sentries were watching her from where the tents were clustered, evidently wondering what she was up to. She let them wonder. Better if she could get Lucia back without anyone noticing. On the heels of that thought came another: how had Lucia got away without being seen?

  The forest seemed funereal in the moonlight. The silence and the still air gave it a tomblike feel, and the unfamiliar foliage put everything subtly off-kilter. Though Iridima's glow rendered everything in monochrome, these plants still reflected a kind of colour, some hue that she found hard to identify. She listened for a moment, and faintly she heard a tread heading away from her.

  She was about to follow when something moved in the darkness, a shifting of some vast shadow. She paled. It was massive, as big as a feya-kori but wider, filling the space between the roots of the forest and its canopy. She could see it only as glimpses, obscured as it was by the boles of the trees in between; but glimpses were enough. Some colossal four-legged thing, there in the forest. Watching her.

  She went cold as she found its eyes. Small and yellow, impossibly bright, and set far apart on a head that must have been bigger than she was.

  It could not be there, her rational mind told her. It would knock over trees whenever it moved. It could not be there because it could not fit.

  But yet she saw it, in defiance of sense, a hulking shape among the trees, wreathed in dark. If she set foot in the forest, it would come for her. And yet, if she did not, she left Lucia to its mercy.

  The sentries were staring at her oddly now, as she stood transfixed on the edge of the clearing. She did not notice. She was caught by the gaze of that dreadful beast.

  Lucia, she thought. She took a step forward, and the beast was on her. Mishani shivered suddenly at her writing desk. She frowned and looked over her shoulder. At the edges of the lanternlight the room was cool and empty. The unease persisted for a moment or two, but Mishani was too level-headed to give much credit to phantoms of the mind, and she was soon immersed in her task once more.

  She was kneeling on a mat in the communal room of the house at Araka Jo which she shared with Kaiku. Before her, spread across the table, were rolls of paper, inkpots and quills and brushes, a glazed-clay mug of lathamri and a stack of books. She was dressed in a warm sleeping-robe and soft slippers, but she had no intention of sleeping just yet.

  Her interest in her mother's books had become an obsession these past weeks. She was desperate to understand, dogged by the certainty that there was something she should know through these words, some message her mother was trying to communicate to her. It had been a growing suspicion for some time now, but with the publication of the last book she had realised that it was indisputably more than fancy on her part. The final lines that Nida-jan spoke were the first half of a lullaby that had been a private song between mother and daughter. Her mother had used it once before, with the merchant Chien, as a way to identify him as an ally to Mishani if all else should fail. Now she was using it again.

  But to what end? That was the puzzle. And no matter how Mishani pored over the books, she could not see what it was she was supposed to work out.

  She took a sip of lathamri and stared at the paper before her. After exploring several theories, she had returned to the area of the books that bothered her the most: the awful poems that Nida-jan had taken to reciting. Their appearance seemed to coincide with the point where her mother had begun producing smaller books at a faster rate, and her exquisite prose had become sloppy. Mishani had written out one of them with a brush on the paper before her, larg
e calligraphic pictograms painted in black ink. As if by increasing their size they would give up their secrets. She had tried making anagrams for hours now, scratching the words she built from the symbols in tiny script at the bottom of the paper, but it all came out as nonsense.

  She tutted to herself. She was getting frustrated, and it was late. She had drunk too much lathamri which was making her jittery, for she had a small frame and was not used to it. And she could not concentrate properly while she had the knowledge in the back of her mind that Kaiku and Lucia had most likely reached the Forest of Xu by now. Gods, she hoped their trust in Lucia was well founded. If she did not come out of there alive, all their hopes were gone. And if she did not come back, then Kaiku would not either…

  Such thoughts bring you no profit, Mishani, she told herself. Make yourself useful.

  Indeed, making herself useful was something she really should have been doing; but she did not want to leave Araka Jo until she had unlocked the mystery of Muraki's books. She had returned from the desert to lend her political skills to the Libera Dramach in the Southern Prefectures, but most of the nobles were in Saraku or Machita, and seldom visited here. She had heard about the assassination attempt upon Barak Zahn during the rout at Zila, and suspicion naturally fell upon Blood Erinima. She wondered what kind of retribution Zahn had in mind, and whether she should go to him and offer her help. Division was the worst thing at this time, and yet it did not surprise Mishani in the least that the nobles could not cooperate even in the face of such an overwhelming enemy. Blood Erinima sought advantage for themselves, just like every other high family. They were not thinking of the wider consequences, only the chance to win themselves the throne. Such was the way of politics.

  She could sense the proximity of an answer in the pages before her. She knew she was close, but the solution still eluded her. Though she did not know what to focus on, where to look, she believed that if she persisted, the picture would gradually become clear. If only through sheer force of will.

  An owl hooted outside. She stared at the paper. For a long time, she did not move; she was entirely consumed by the workings of her mind, turning possibilities over and over. Absently, she picked up her mug, took a sip, and put it back again.

  The slight movement in her peripheral field of vision, the way the mug did not seem to sit quite right against her fingers as she replaced it: these were the tiny warnings that told her she had misjudged where to set it down, that the lathamri was tipping off the edge of the desk. She snatched at it, catching it before it could fall, and in doing so the trailing edge of her other sleeve caught the ink pot and tipped it over. She hurriedly set the drink down and righted the ink pot, but by that time a slick of black had spread in an ellipse over a section of her calligraphy.

  She huffed out a breath, annoyed by the waste of ink. Her sleeping-robe was stained at the cuffs too. She reached to roll up the paper and discard it, but she was arrested halfway. Slowly, she drew her hand back and stared at the paper again.

  The ink had spilled across several lines, but the one that caught her eye had escaped with only minor damage. Only two pictograms in the middle of a four-syllable word had been obscured. But what had caught Mishani's eye was that there was a new word made by taking out those two symbols. The first and the last, when contracted together, created a new meaning.

  Demons.

  Excited, she looked to the book where the original poem had been, identified the missing symbols. Doing so shed no new light, but it did not diminish her sudden momentum. She laid aside the stained parchment and copied out the poem anew, then put two strokes across the two syllables to make demons again. On a whim, she hunted down any other instances of those pictograms. There was only one. She crossed it out, and it made the word senseless. Yet still she refused to believe that the appearance of demons was coincidence. She stared at the word she had mutilated. In its entirety, it meant perhaps. After a moment, she put a stroke through another of the pictograms. Now it said by, in the chronological sense. She studied the word for any other combinations that might make a meaning, but found none. She looked through the poem for other pictograms like this third one she had struck off, but it did not occur again. She examined the other words for symbols she might remove to make new meanings, but the possibilities were too many, and some words could not be contracted.

  She was confounded once more, but the elation of progress would not let her stop. After a moment of listlessness, she began flicking through the books to find other poems, copied them out, and crossed through the three pictograms whenever she could find them. Demons appeared again, formed out of the same word as last time. It was nothing conclusive, but it was the possibility that was tantalising.

  Finally, as night drew on, she found the word she needed. It was five pictograms long, and three of them were the three symbols she had marked for deletion. With quick strokes, she cut them out and looked at the result.

  Mountain.

  She was fractionally disappointed, having hoped for something more definite, something that could not possibly have been a random coincidence of syllables. But the disappointment lasted only a moment. It was a word, at least.

  She needed to know more symbols to strike out. She needed a key to solve the code. Where would she find such a key?

  The answer came to her immediately. She had had it all along; it was only a matter of asking herself the right question. The lullaby.

  Snatching up a new roll of paper, she scribbled the lullaby down, then located the original poem she had been working on. Notes spilled from the edge of the desk, displaced by frantic activity. She went through the poem symbol by symbol, crossing out whenever she found a pictogram that matched a pictogram in the lullaby. And slowly, words began to emerge there. Some of them were nonsense, and some were impossible to contract at all, but these she ignored. She read only those words that she had altered to form a new meaning, and when she did so, she found the message.

  New demons attack Juraka by midwinter.

  She sat back on her heels, gazing at the page. For some time, she was blank, her mind scattered in the aftermath of revelation. Then she began to draw her thoughts together.

  Mother, she thought in disbelief. All this time…

  It had started not long after the war had begun. The poems, the bad writing. She had become sloppy because she was writing too fast. The books were short because she had to distribute them quickly enough for the information contained to be relevant. The poetry was terrible because it was hampered by the need to embed messages in it, and because she wanted to draw attention to it.

  All this time, Muraki had been their spy in the heart of their enemy's camp, and they had not known it till now. Mishani had not known it till now. For it was only she who could have broken the code, only she – and Kaiku, though her mother did not know that – who possessed the necessary knowledge. But Muraki must have noticed that her warnings were doing no good, and finally, in her latest book, she offered a broad hint to her daughter, whom she must have believed was reading. For anyone else to decipher it meant death for Muraki. That was why it was only the first stanza of the poem: without both stanzas, the code was still gibberish.

  Now Mishani thought back. There had been other clues. References to lullabies; Nida-jan's meditations on how his poetry had the cadence of a parent singing to their child; a passage where Nida-jan considered composing a song for his lost son, one that only they would know, which he would sing when he found the boy at last. Heart's blood, how many lives might have been saved, how many battles won, if Mishani had been clever enough to decipher this earlier? It was so obvious in hindsight that she could not believe she had been so dull-witted.

  Her mother had been risking her life to help the Empire, drawing information from her husband the Lord Protector and passing it on through her writing. And nobody had realised.

  Once Mishani had thought her mother weak, weak and uncaring. She felt tears pricking her eyes at the shame of her ungraciousness.<
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  Spurred by that feeling, she went to work on the other poems. There would be no sleep for her tonight.

  SIXTEEN

  Kaiku awoke from a vivid dream of sweat and heat and sex, memory tattering with wakefulness, leaving only the face of the man who had been taking her. Tane.

  She felt suddenly embarrassed as her eyes flickered open, and she saw the others in the tent, kneeling nearby. Asara and Tsata. Had her dream showed outwardly, in moans or in the languid movement of her body? She was still fully clothed, but no blankets had been laid on her, which made her feel exposed. And gods, why Tane? She had not thought of him for a long time.

  Then she remembered the beast.

  She jerked upright in alarm. Tsata held up his hands in a placating gesture.

  'Be calm, Kaiku. No harm has come to you,' he said.

  'No harm?' she repeated. 'And Lucia?'

  'Lucia is perfectly safe. Why would it be otherwise?' Asara said.

  Kaiku stared at her for a moment. She was remembering how the thing had flitted at her, a charge broken up into a thousand tiny and discrete increments: flash impressions of shadow, each one larger than the last as it neared, enacted in a fraction of an instant. It was so fast she had not even time to rouse her kana. It should have battered aside dozens of trees as it came. Then darkness, and dreaming.

  Asara handed her a cup of water. She took it with a suspicious glance at the desert lady. Watching over her while she slept was far too compassionate an act for Asara: she cared only because Kaiku still owed her, and she intended to collect.

  Asara sensed her mood, perhaps, for she rose into a crouch then. 'I am relieved that you are well,' she said. 'I must help with the preparations. We leave soon.' And she left, ducking through the flap.

  Kaiku began to arrange herself, a little self-conscious at being seen straight out of bed with her hair mussed and eyes puffy with sleep; then she remembered the weeks she had spent in the wild with Tsata back in the Xarana Fault, and laughed at herself for her vanity. He had already seen her at her worst; it was scarcely worth concerning herself over.