The ascendancy veil bp-3

by Chris Wooding

  'What is it?' she asked Tsata. He and Heth knelt by Peithre, their own guns ready.

  'Out in the trees,' he said, motioning with his head.

  She looked, and as she did so, she glimpsed something. It was a flash of white, darting between the vine-strewn maze of trunks.

  'Do not fire on them!' she said, raising her voice to include the whole group. 'Remember where we are! Shoot only if they attack.'

  The soldiers muttered sarcastically between themselves. She glanced down at Peithre, still asleep on the forest floor with a blanket as a pillow, and then out into the trees again. Another movement caught her eye, but it was too quick, gone before she could find it.

  ((Are you with Lucia?)) she asked Phaeca, and received an immediate affirmative. ((Bring her here))

  'There's one!' someone cried.

  'Do not fire!' Kaiku shouted again, fearful of the excitement in the man's tone, as if he had just spotted game and was about to take it down. Kaiku saw where everyone else was looking, down a corridor of boles and bushes to where one of the things had frozen, caught in their eyes, watching them watching it.

  It was beautiful and terrifying all at once. Its short fur was perfectly white, but for where shadows delineated the hollows of its ribs. It had elements in it of deer and fox – a brush for a tail; stubby, sharp antlers; a certain furtiveness of movement – and yet its musculature and bone structure were disturbingly human, as though it were a lithe and elongated man standing on all fours. Its face had something of the fox's narrow cunning, and something of the deer's alarmed docility, but its features were more mobile than either, and when it skinned back its lips it showed an array of close-fitting, daggerlike teeth that betrayed a carnivorous diet.

  'Aberrant,' someone hissed.

  'It is no Aberrant,' Kaiku murmured in reply. Even if she could not sense it by their Weave-signature, she would have known anyway. There was something about these creatures, some linearity of structure that bespoke an entirely natural evolution. They were somewhere between spirit and animal, a hybrid of the two.

  Then it was gone, launching itself back into the trees. Phaeca appeared a few moments later, leading Lucia and a group of soldiers who acted as her bodyguards. Asara arrived, her own rifle ready.

  'Lucia,' Kaiku said. She did not respond: her eyes were far away. 'Lucia!'

  She focused suddenly, but almost immediately began to drift again. 'What are these things?' Kaiku demanded. 'Can you talk to them? Do they mean to harm us?' She shook Lucia's shoulder and said her name again. 'Listen to me!'

  'Emyrynn,' Lucia murmured, staring over Kaiku's shoulder into the trees. 'They're called emyrynn in our tongue. They want us to follow them.'

  'Follow them? Is this some kind of trap?'

  Lucia made a vague negative noise in her throat. 'We have to follow them…' she said, and then she had slipped beyond rousing again, lost in some dreamwalk where Kaiku could not reach her. Kaiku bit her lip to kill the frustration at seeing her this way. This forest was too much for Lucia, overwhelming her, making her more distant than ever before. It was agony to watch, for Kaiku had no way of knowing if she could ever come back from this, or whether every moment within the borders of the forest was making her worse.

  Doja was quicker to decide than she was, and his faith in Lucia was evidently greater. 'We can't move this woman yet. Three men, go with them. Come back and fetch us when you find whatever it is they want us to see. And heart's blood, be careful.'

  'I will go,' Kaiku said, because she would do anything not to be around Lucia a moment longer.

  'And I,' said Tsata.

  Asara volunteered also. Doja was happy to accept: it meant he did not to have to risk any of his soldiers. Kaiku felt a flicker of uncertainty at the thought of having Asara along, but she had Tsata at least, and in him her trust was total.

  'Where are they? Where are you seeing them?' she asked the group in general, and several men pointed, all in roughly the same direction. They set off into the trees; Tsata warned Asara about the reed that had poisoned Peithre, and she nodded in acknowledgement, not taking her eyes off Kaiku.

  Rifles held close, they forged through the undergrowth, while ahead of them the emyrynn led onward, annoyingly elusive and yet never quite out of sight. None of them spoke; their concentration was bent on seeking out danger, waiting for the jaws of a trap to spring shut, hoping to predict it in time to evade.

  But their journey was not a long one. They had not been travelling for more than ten minutes before they found what it was the emyrynn wanted to show them, and there they stood dumbfounded, and wondered what kind of beings they had stumbled upon in the depths of the Forest of Xu. In the upper levels of the Imperial Keep, where the Weavers' lunacy had made it dangerous to tread, the dust lay thick and spiders webbed the windows.

  Kakre's preferred room for Weaving was not the Sun Chamber that he had populated with his kites and mannequins of skin. He found the noise of the other Weavers distracting. Instead, he took himself to a section where he could be alone, a morose and silent place too out of the way for the Weavers or the frightened servants to trouble themselves with. The floor was rucked with wide, overlapping trails, paths carved in the powdery dust by the threadbare hem of his robe as he wandered. Weak daylight filtered through the miasma that cloaked the city, and the air was heavy and oily.

  Avun had been here for three hours now, talking with spectres. Seven Governors of the major towns and cities within the Weavers' territory hung in a circle around the centre of the empty room, blurred apparitions, with Avun the only solid one among them. They were discussing the interminable minutiae of their respective situations, the state of the land, the course of the famine. Kakre was the link that held them all together, a junction through which all eight participants could see each other as murky avatars. Avun had insisted that it be so, for drawing eight people together in a country the size of Saramyr was impractical at best, especially as some lived in the distant Newlands to the east.

  Kakre was getting angry. He had allowed himself to be persuaded to achieve this feat, and yet so far he had heard nothing that could not have been done by individual conferences, which were far less taxing. If he did not believe that Avun had been sufficiently cowed by past punishments, he would have thought the Lord Protector was beginning to take his masters for granted.

  The conference dragged out while the light of Nuki's eye began to fade. Kakre was the greatest among the Weavers – certainly in his own estimation, anyway – but the strain of maintaining so many links for so long was beginning to wear on him. Pride forbade him to buckle, but he cursed Avun's name inwardly, and began to think of myriad discomforts he might wreak upon the man when this was done.

  Finally, Avun began to wrap up the proceedings, enacting elaborate rituals of farewell to each of the participants in turn. Kakre cut the connection when Avun was finished with them, and the spectres faded away. At last it was over, and only Avun remained. Kakre staggered slightly, his knees weak. Avun's quick glance indicated that he had noticed, but he wisely forbore to mention it.

  'You have my deepest gratitude,' Avun said. 'A face-to-face conference, or as near as we can get it, makes all the difference in government. Many valuable ideas can be mined when our heads are put together.'

  Kakre was not convinced anything had come out of that meeting beyond a few status reports and vague allusions to methods of progress, and Avun's thanks sounded facile. But he was not in a very coherent state of mind at the moment, and he mistrusted himself. The mania would surely strike him after such a long and strenuous period of Weaving; he could already feel himself itching for the knife he kept beneath his robes.

  'You would be best to leave now,' Kakre snarled. 'If you wish to avoid being harmed. I shall have words for you later. Oh, indeed.'

  Avun bowed and left. Kakre shakily sat down on the floor; dust rose in a languid puff around him. He was thankful now that he had insisted Avun come to him for the conference, instead of holding it in a
state room. At the time, it had been a whim, a reminder that Avun was his servant and not vice versa; but now he found his solitude a balm, for there was nobody to see his weakness.

  The post-Weaving mania was spreading slow tentacles through him like blood dripped into water. He wanted to do some skinning, but he felt too weak to procure himself a victim, and he had used up his last canvas a few days ago. The urge and the lethargy were growing at the same pace, putting him in an impossible situation. He breathed a cracked curse and gritted what was left of his teeth. He would have to ride this one out, at least until he had the strength to do something about it. He briefly fantasised about torturing Avun, but in the face of his growing need the visions he conjured seemed pallid and childish.

  Instead, he was blinded by a rare window of clarity upon himself, a moment in which he saw what he had become, free of delusion and madness. His bladework had been steadily deteriorating for years now. Most of the sculptures that he kept had been cut in the days before the Weavers shattered the Empire. His arthritic hands trembled as they held the knife, and he was more a butcher than a surgeon of late. But it was not only his coordination: his mind had rotted too. The effort of summoning and controlling the feya-kori had battered the frail mush of his physical brain, turned him addled and senile, and he saw now the damage it had wreaked and how much more it would do next time he roused the blight demons from their pall-pits.

  For a short time, he knew what he was, saw the ruin he had visited on his body and mind, and he screamed and cried and clawed himself; but it passed, and the thoughts became too hard to hold on to, and dissipated like smoke.

  Fahrekh found him like that: curled up, a heap of rags and hide, the dead-skin Mask pressed to the floor, caked with grey dust. He stood in the doorway for a time, his angular face of bronze, silver and gold expressionless.

  'Weave-lord Kakre,' he said. 'You seem unwell.'

  'Get out,' Kakre croaked.

  'I think not,' came the reply. He walked into the room, until he was standing over the Weave-lord, who strained his neck to look up at the younger Weaver.

  'Get out!' he hissed again, and was racked with spasms.

  'We have matters to discuss, you and I,' Fahrekh said slowly. 'Matters of succession. Specifically, mine.'

  Kakre's head snapped up, suddenly lucid. Fahrekh's impassive Mask gazed back at him.

  They plunged into the Weave together, and battle was joined.

  It was in the abyss that they met, the endless, watery dark which was Kakre's preferred visualisation of the fabric of reality. Whether by accident or design, it was Fahrekh's too, and he was equally happy with the interpretation. As they attacked each other, their interactions with the Weave took on the form of fish to fit their surroundings. Thousands of individual strings of thought became shoals of piranhas, riding the invisible cross-currents which flowed in mazy twists all around them. On either side of the fray, the masters of the conflict floated, maintaining their positions amid the whip and slide of the Weave. Kakre was a ray, Fahrekh a massive black jellyfish, its tentacles deadly purple streamers. These were the representations of their physical bodies, the core of their presence in the Weave. The piranhas were their fighters, a dizzying multitude of mind-strands that darted through the space between them, seeking for a way through the enemy shoal. They savaged one another, bursting into bright blooms of scrabbling gold threads as they hit, illuminating the darkness with brief globes of light that knotted inward to infinity and collapsed.

  The squabbling of the piranhas was enacted faster than the eye could follow. They arced and looped in squads of dozens, thrusting or retreating or laying decoys. Smaller fish darted around the periphery of the thrashing battlefield, trying to circumvent the conflict and reach the enemy: some would be caught by their opponent's defences, others dashed to pieces in the cross-currents. The Weavers had innumerable tricks: using fish to shield other fish, slingshotting off the edge of invisible whirlpools, laying sluggish bait which would explode into an insoluble labyrinth of tangles when engaged. It was a dizzying tableau of astonishing viciousness, hidden beneath a thin skin of illusion to protect the minds of the combatants from the raw and maddening beauty of the Weave.

  And Kakre was losing.

  Though less than a second had passed in the world outside the Weave, where time was governed by the sun and the moons, the private battle had passed through a multitude of shifts and phases, as of a military campaign enacted at extreme speed. Kakre was canny, and had tricks learned from long experience; gaining mastery of the feya-kori had taught him some things that Fahrekh had yet to fathom. But he was making mistakes. Little slips, infinitesimal blank spots in his mind where once a reaction would have been instinctive, sinister patches of forgetfulness that drifted across his psyche, robbing him of focus. Fahrekh was young and burning with energy; his vigour made up for his relative lack of finesse. Kakre's shoal was losing ground, becoming tattered. Holes were opening in his defences faster than he could stitch them shut.

  But there was worse. Kakre was exhausted. His physical body was tearing itself apart under the stress of the combat. He could feel his systems wrecking themselves in an effort to provide him with the strength to fight, and there would soon be nothing left for him to draw on. Fahrekh, who would have been a difficult opponent even when they were on equal footing, had caught him at his lowest ebb. Kakre could not win; he was only delaying the inevitable.

  Well, if that was so, it was so. Kakre would never relinquish himself. He would fight till his dying breath.

  His moment of defiance was his last thought before Fahrekh outmanoeuvred him totally. His enemy had been gathering forces behind a knitted ball of decoys, and now they suddenly shot out and round, engulfing Kakre's shoal like a hand closing into a fist. Kakre abandoned them immediately, knowing they were lost, and began creating a new shoal; but he had no vitality to give them, and they were sickly and slow. Fahrekh's ravening horde swept them aside and tore towards Kakre's unprotected ray to rip him apart.

  And in that instant, the Weave-whale appeared.

  It burst out of nothingness, filling the black abyss, overwhelming them with its sheer scale. The impact of its arrival blasted across the Weave like a detonation, scattering Fahrekh's shoal, buffeting them with a shockwave. Fahrekh managed to hold his coherence, but Kakre tattered away, losing his grip on the Weave, dissipating back into his physical body again.

  It was sheer insane fury that saved him. There was no confusion as he was wrenched back to the world of human senses, no hesitation, and no conscious thought involved. Riding a wave of rage, a scream ripping from his throat, he lunged at Fahrekh, drawing his skinning knife from his belt. Fahrekh, stunned by the Weave-whale, was not fast enough to react. Kakre drove the blade beneath his metal Mask, ramming it deep into the soft flesh under his chin, through his palate and up into the front of his brain. The force of it took Fahrekh off his feet, and he collapsed to the floor in a billow of dust with Kakre on top of him. Still screaming, Kakre plunged the knife into Fahrekh's throat and chest again and again, drawing spurts of blood into the air, hacking flesh to moist ribbons. Finally, in one last, disgusted motion, he tore off Fahrekh's Mask and buried the knife up to the hilt in his eye; and after that, he was done.

  He slid off the corpse of his enemy, his patchwork robe wet with blood, and lay there for some time, the only sound the laboured wheeze of his breath, slowing and slowing until he fell asleep.

  SEVENTEEN

  There was a village inside the Forest of Xu.

  At least, when they had first laid eyes on it, they had assumed it was a village. They still were not entirely certain even now, as dusk approached on their second day in the forest. It was something so utterly alien to their experience that they had no adequate parallels to draw.

  It was built around the existing trees with no apparent boundaries, sprawling up the trunks into the canopy and spreading along the ground in a curiously organic fashion. The constructions were formed of a glistening
substance, hard as rock and smooth to the touch, predominantly an icy blue-white, but sometimes shaded brown or green. It had a subtle iridescence and a maddening quality that was not quite translucence but more a chameleon-like mimicry of colour: it seemed to change its hue to whatever lay behind it, depending on where the viewer stood. When Kaiku laid her hand on it, she left a hazy pink imprint which faded after a time.

  Tsata, particularly, had been fascinated by how this strange village had been built, and it was he that found the key, and uncovered the secret at least partially. The substance was sap, bled from the trees and hardened through some unknown art into a multitude of shapes. Every construction, no matter how remote, was eventually linked to a tree bole at some point, though no evidence of cutting could be found. And now that they had established this, it was possible to see a certain flow to the architecture, a kind of glacial creep around which offshoots had been moulded with exquisite artistry. Kaiku had the uncomfortable sensation that the village was still growing; indeed, she found evidence of channels in which glistening sap still lay, oozing with excruciating torpidity towards the tips and edges of the existing constructions, which were wet with the stuff. She guessed that this would be moulded and hardened too, in time, to form another offshoot.

  The village was an exhibition of dizzying variety. Wide discs buried in the bark of the trees were set in irregular patterns, sometimes growing in size as they ascended, sometimes diminishing. Spiky sprays erupted into the air. Gossamer threads were stitched through the branches, or formed twisting, unsupported bridges that defied physics. Some of the dwellings were like uneven pagodas, others smooth semicircular domes, still others jagged starbursts of colourful sap. Many of them had no visible means of entry. Some were up in the trees: inverted cones of three-quarter circumference growing out from the trunks. Venous tubes like tunnels ran between them, sometimes fracturing into smaller capillaries that tapered away to nothingness as they ran like shatter-cracks along the bark.