The ascendancy veil bp-3

by Chris Wooding

  Heartened and strangely touched by the soldier's bravado, he grinned and shoved his way forward, with the other man closely accompanying him. At the point where the armies met, the battle lines were like liquid, flowing uneasily as men or Aberrants fell and the victors surged into the gap. Down here, in amongst the press instead of above it on horseback, the reek of sweat and the claustrophobia was overwhelming; Yugi was too charged with adrenaline to care.

  He saw a man killed in front of him, and there in his place was a chichaw, a nightmarish thing like a giant four-legged spider, its head thick with curling horns like a ram's and with a long, beak-like jaw full of tiny teeth. He stepped into the gap left by the fallen man, his sword already sweeping a cold arc in the moonlight, trailing spatters of its last victim's blood.

  The Aberrant lunged at him, lashing its forelegs, which he belatedly noted were edged with chitinous blades along their length. He pulled his body aside and they glanced across the leather armour on his chest, cutting a deep groove but not getting through; and he turned his sword stroke so that it hacked one foreleg off. The chichaw recoiled automatically at the pain. He used that instant to gather a great lateral swing into the creature's flank, opening it along the side so that its internal organs crowded out in a great steaming spume. It collapsed, juddering, in the throes of shock and imminent death.

  A flash of movement on his right among the chaos of swords and teeth. He turned in time to see a furie charging him over the bodies of the fallen, a wall of muscle and tusk; but the corpses shifted beneath its weight and it stumbled, and then a great overhand chop from the soldier at Yugi's side severed it nearly in half. It slid in a broken heap at Yugi's feet, the sword still stuck in its ribs. Yugi wrenched the weapon out and threw it back to his saviour, who offered him a quick salute of thanks and was then swallowed by the fray.

  Yugi lost track of time after that. His past and future contracted to a single instant in which he was still alive, where the aching of his body was a distant and dull nothing and his muscles and mind were geared only towards his blade. He cut and slashed, not out of conscious desire to kill but because it would make them stop trying to kill him. He moved along lines drawn by years of practice, dodging and slashing and parrying without thought as to where the next strike would go, not daring to imagine how close he had inched by death since this battle had begun, for to do so would break his nerve and crush him. At some point, he became aware of wounds on his body, deep cuts that he had felt as tiny nicks, dribbling warm blood across his skin. He ignored them. He could do little else.

  And then a gap appeared in the moon-drenched phantasmagoria of horrors that faced him, and he saw the end of the bridge, a mere dozen metres away.

  The sight of it caused him to pause. How long had he been fighting? How far had they come? He became aware of the yells and screams of men all around him, but there was a predominant tone which sounded like defiance. Their assault had been bolstered by other troops, men eager to lend their blades to a winning cause, and the rally had multiplied and invigorated the soldiers. Now, as the bridge neared and the Aberrants on the south of the Ko were being cut off from their reinforcements, the other soldiers pressed in with new zeal to drive the creatures against the river bank and into the water. The spirits embarked on a fresh frenzy, drowning any living thing that came within their reach. Yugi could taste cold, wet dirt on his lips. The air was becoming tighter still now, seeming to pluck at them, to lift them upwards. The moonstorm would soon be upon them.

  Yugi wanted that bridge. With a cry that was more like a shriek, he fought on, and his men fought with him. Nomoru ran low through the dark forest of soldiers on the south bank, careful to stay behind the lines of riflemen that loosed shot after shot over the river. Far behind her, there was the churn of combat on one of the hills, where Zahn was making a stand against the Aberrants that had made for the artillery position. Now that Yugi was steadily advancing to plug the mouth of the Sakurika Bridge, the creatures were finding themselves becoming isolated and were steadily being whittled away on all sides. Nomoru could not see over the heads of the soldiers, but she heard the reports, spreading from the mouths of the Sisters, out through the troops.

  Idiot, she thought. He will get himself killed.

  She was thinking of Yugi. She had not imagined him as one for heroics – and indeed, she suspected that the stories being circulated were more than a little exaggerated for the purposes of morale – but it bothered her. As she slipped along the river bank, accompanied by the clip and stutter of rifle fire, she wondered how she would feel if he did die. Probably very little, she had to admit. Their affair so far had been pleasurable, but no more than that. She was a woman who had grown up amid the depravity and impermanence of the Poor Quarter of Axekami, and her heart was thickly calloused because of it. Death did not really affect her. She did not allow any feeling to dig in deeply. It was not a conscious decision, but it was her way and she had never felt it necessary to examine that or try to change it. She existed on a constant level, untroubled by spikes of wild happiness or terrible sorrow. She was a survivor, and survival was a business best enacted without the luxuries of emotion.

  She brought her concentration back to the matter at hand. She had gone some way along the river bank now, heading away from the bridge. The explosives had been secreted carefully: that meant that they presented a very tricky target, concealed as they were in the corners of the stonework. Nomoru, with a sniper's instinct, had taken account of where they were and was making for the angle that would present the best shot.

  Well, that was not strictly true: the easiest angle to fire from was right at the side of the bridge, but there was no way she was going to be that close to the Sakurika when it went up.

  Judging that the time was right, she slipped through the riflemen. The bank dipped sharply towards the water, and she clambered carefully down it and settled herself into a crouch, so that she was below the level of the guns firing over her head. The River Ko, a mere foot or two away, was quiet now, though the ripples of its surface still flocked this way and that with the unpredictable wind. Nomoru gave it an uneasy glance. The river spirits were still down there. Nomoru had a suspicion that if she so much as touched the water they would take her too.

  She put it out of her mind and allowed herself to relax. She ignored the threat of the river, the fusillade ripping over her head, the oppressive atmosphere of the oncoming moon-storm. She ignored the endless barrage of artillery bombardment, and the distant sound of swords clashing and the bellow of ghauregs and furies. She set her rifle against her shoulder.

  Gods, it was dark. The greenish, steely light, bright as it was with the clear sky and the three moons out, was barely adequate. When the moonstorm began, she would hardly have a hope. She calculated where she thought the explosives were, sighting past the near spandrels and up into the corner of one of the further ones. There; it had to be there. She shifted her aim slightly, sighting on another spot. There too. She could not see them in the shadow, but unless they had moved somehow, that was where they were. She only had an angle on two of them; the rest were obscured by the architecture.

  Most would have said it was an impossible shot. But Nomoru liked a challenge. The conflict between the Weavers and the Sisters around the bridge was so intense that Yugi could physically feel the atmosphere crawl. He looked more like some golem of the earth than a man now: he was caked and gloved in blood and muck, his muscles fuelled only by animal fury. They had stopped aching now: he had gone beyond tiredness. His strikes were unsubtle and clumsier than before, but enacted with more viciousness than he had believed himself capable of. His ears rang with the cries of men and he felt their burning adulation. Some faint, rational corner of his mind knew that they were inspired by him, but it was not clear why that was. He knew only that he fought in the forefront of a great column of soldiers that had carved its way deep into the clot of Aberrants on the south bank, and that at some point, as he wormed his boot through the slither of c
orpses to find solid ground, his foot came down on wood instead of dirt and he was on the bridge.

  The realisation triggered something hitherto forgotten. Nomoru. He reached for the signal rocket at his belt, but the instant he took his attention away from the battle he almost lost his hand to some whip-tailed creature and was saved only by the intervention of one of the men who fought alongside him.

  'The bridge! The bridge!' someone was crying, and a great cheer went up. Then Yugi felt himself propelled from behind as the soldiers of the Empire surged forward.

  'No! No! Hold here!' he managed to shout, but his voice was overwhelmed. A clot of Aberrants on the bridge collapsed under the force of the surge, pulling one another down as they fell. Yugi tried to resist, but it was too much. He could only ride the crest of the wave.

  He beheaded a ghaureg with a two-handed swipe, then twisted to break a skrendel's jaw with the pommel of his blade. In the frenzy he lost what it was he was trying to remember: there was no time for anything but combat. Trapped in a seething, whirling world of chaos and madness, Yugi managed only swift episodes of sense in among the blur of constant movement, and at some point he realised that they had managed to make it a third of the way across the bridge, and that the Aberrants were being driven back by the soldiers of the Empire, who fought with a primal elation at their own heroism.

  Where would it end? Would they push onward into the Aberrant horde, into certain death, driven by a false sense of invincibility? Yugi did not know, and he could not have resisted it even if that were the case. It had gone too far to stop now.

  But there was another enemy here, one he had not accounted for. He only realised it when the man to his left suddenly keeled over, fitting and spewing blood from his mouth and nose. The man who tried to help him did the same.

  Weavers.

  He felt the wrench as his muscles clamped up on him. He had experienced that agony before, in the Fold when he was forced to watch powerlessly as his friend and leader, Zaelis, shot himself. Then it had unmanned him. Now it was worse. It was no mere paralysis, this; he felt himself juddering, in the preliminary throes of a seizure. Soon the contractions would intensify to a strength sufficient to break bones, to crush organs. He fell, cushioned by the rough hide of his dead enemies, his eyes rolling wildly.

  And suddenly it was gone, the grip loosened. Stamping feet were all around him. Blood dripped from his lips. But he was not dead. Somehow, through some twist of battle in the invisible realm, the Weaver that had been about to kill him had been distracted, forced to divert its attention elsewhere. But he could hear the shrieks around him as other men died, saw someone collapse nearby, milky foam frothing from between clenched teeth.

  He did not need to think. Anything, anything was better than the touch of a Weaver. He wrenched the signal rocket from his belt and tore off the cap of the cylinder. On its top was a strip of coarse paper, which could be struck against another strip on the bottom of the cylinder, lighting the fuse through friction. He struck it.

  A rain of sparks spewed from the cylinder. Lying in an island of burning white light on a shallow heap of corpses, surrounded by the pounding feet of soldiers, he held the rocket out shakily.

  The ignition powder caught, and it shot upwards into the night with a scream, crisping the flesh on his hand with the backwash of heat. Nomoru had observed the troops of the Empire as they battled their way onto the bridge. When she saw the rocket, she saw also that it had come from near the front of those troops, and knew that it had come from Yugi.

  It did not give her an instant's pause. She fired four times in rapid succession, priming in between each shot: two at her secondary target as a decoy, and two at the largest package of explosives, the one which Yugi had intended to detonate in the first place.

  The Sisters were true to their word, and were ready at the signal; but even with the Sister's best defence, the Weavers took out the first two rifle balls, stunning them in mid-air before they reached their target.

  Two, however, was not good enough.

  The Sakurika Bridge exploded, annihilated in a terrific bloom of flame and smoke all along its length. It blasted great tracks of white spume along the river, and sent wheeling planks of wood and lumps of stone high into the night, to splash into the water or to fall amongst the armies on the banks. Those men and Aberrants who were on the bridge when it was destroyed were obliterated instantly, and to either side dozens fell with burns or other injuries, or were thrown down by the concussion. The violence of the eruption rolled over the downs and echoed away into the night.

  The author of that destruction put down her rifle, and looked at the pitiful shreds of wood that were left, their ends ablaze. She considered saying something, a few short words to herself in memory of the man she had just killed. But it would be pointless, and so she kept silent. She slipped up the bank and ducked under the riflemen, and was lost amid the ranks of the soldiers. Zahn had finished off the last of the nearby Aberrants when the river lit up in fire. He reined in his horse, panting and wet with sweat, and looked down the hillside. Behind him, the fire-cannons and mortars still boomed, and the trebuchets creaked, flinging missiles which tore ragged chunks out of the endless expanse of predators on the far shore. It was safe now; the bridge was down at last. The enemy was trapped on the north side of the Ko. They could only retreat out of range and try to find another way around – a journey of many hundred miles, for they faced the Forest of Xu to the west and Lake Azlea to the east – or wait to see how long the spirits of the river would hold against them.

  Then he heard a cry from the men around him, and he saw that the Weavers had unleashed their greatest weapon at last.

  They rose over the crests of the distant hill, shadows against the horizon, but their incandescent eyes could be seen even from miles away, and they shone in the dark. Slowly they lumbered closer, their silhouettes growing as they ascended the hill, towering to the height of great siege-towers.

  Feya-kori. Six of them. Mishani and Lucia stood together on another hilltop. A light rain began to fall, chill droplets brushing against their skin and soaking into their clothes, blooms of darker colour spreading across the fibres.

  'Yugi is dead,' said Lucia, her eyes still closed and her head bowed. Mishani looked questioningly at the Sister, who nodded in confirmation. The news glanced off her. It was mere fact, meaning nothing. She would find time to grieve when she could, but Yugi had never been a great friend of hers.

  'The feya-kori are on their way,' said Mishani, her words caught up and lost in the wind. She looked at the sky, where the moons were drifting together. Clouds were boiling out of the air, sucking inward to the point where they would meet. Mishani felt her senses twining tighter and tighter; the storm was only moments from breaking.

  'I know,' said Lucia.

  The rain gathered in intensity; the wind picked up, keening across the battlefield. The feya-kori's moans drifted through the air as they approached.

  'Lucia…' Mishani murmured.

  'Not yet,' she replied.

  'They are getting close, Lucia.'

  'Not yet.'

  The downs were ripped with a terrible shriek, making Mishani shudder, and a jagged fork of purple lightning split the night. The sky exploded in a thunderous roar. Wind howled, jostling them, and the rain drove down hard enough to hurt. Lucia lifted her face up, tilting it to receive the full force of the downpour. Above them, the moons formed an uneven triangle, scratched with churning clouds.

  Her eyes flickered open.

  'Now.'

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  The men surrounding Lucia fell back from her with oaths of terror as she called, at last, the full force of the spirits to their aid. Even Mishani stumbled away, shocked at the thing she saw in Lucia's place. Nothing physical had changed, but her aspect had warped. No longer were her features pretty and naive in appearance, but sly and evil and chilling. The air became flat, difficult to breathe, tasting of iron. Mishani looked around her and saw that it was
not only Lucia who had changed: the soldiers' faces were narrow and hateful, the Sister's painted countenance was shrewish and full of spite. Subtle whispers, promising half-imagined horrors, hissed in Mishani's ears. Flitting figures massed thickly in the moon-shadows. The presence of the spirits twisted perception, and never had it been so strong as now.

  Lucia was standing still, her arms loose, her face upturned to the barrage of the rain as if it were a balm, blinking rapidly against its fury. She was soaked to the skin. Mishani, small and light as she was, had to fight to keep steady in the wind. She shielded her eyes with her hand and looked on fearfully. Steam was wisping from Lucia's clothes now, thin trails of vapour that congealed and thickened until Mishani realised what she was seeing.

  Something was rising out of her.

  The Xhiang Xhi unfolded from Lucia's body like the wings of some mythical demon, spreading and looming, its impossibly long fingers giving it the appearance of some vaporous and skeletal bat. A thin chalk figure, a shadow cast in mist, it was attached to her lower back like a ghostly incubus, covering her with the parasol of its hands. Its face was a blur, its size defying the eye as it seemed to change with every new angle. The soldiers cringed, and some of them ran, unable to take the overbearing weight of its presence.

  Mishani would have run, too, if not for Lucia. But she had sworn to herself that she would not desert the child she had once thought of as a sister, and so she stayed, caught between honour and dread.

  The feya-kori unleashed a long, discordant drone across the downs, loud enough to rattle swords in their scabbards. They had sensed their adversary and were issuing a challenge.

  The Xhiang Xhi raised its hands, splaying its spindly fingers wide; Lucia opened her mouth, and the answering screech that came from her blasted outward like the concussion of a bomb, making Mishani clamp her hands to her ears, staggering back under the force of it.