The ascendancy veil bp-3

by Chris Wooding

  But the spring of the second year since the witchstones' destruction turned to summer, and still Kaiku was not there. She slept in a bedchamber near the back of the Koli family house, which faced east over the cliffs to the bay. The sunlight drenched her room in the early morning as it shone low across the land, glowing through the wispy veil that hung across her window, and the sultry heat of midsummer began to ascend. The walls were cool stone and the floor was coral marble. She lay on a simple sleeping mat in the centre of the room, and dreamed of nothing.

  Mishani and her visitor stood in the doorway, looking in on her.

  'This is Kaiku,' Mishani said.

  The woman nodded. She was tall and long-boned, with the narrow, sharp features of the Newlands, coolly elegant and beautiful. Her summer robe was light blue and white, and her skin was pale. Her hair was worn in looped braids, a fashion from the north-east that had never caught on in the west.

  'Please, leave us alone,' the woman replied.

  Mishani agreed without really knowing why. Certainly, this stranger's appearance at such an early hour was unusual, as was her tale: she was a healer, who had heard of Kaiku's plight and come to help her. She had arrived on a manxthwa-drawn cart, with her two children in the back, a twin son and daughter aged six harvests by the look of them. They were playing with the servants' children in the great tiered garden that ran down to the cliff edge, watched over by retainers.

  Mishani felt that she should be suspicious, but could not think of any reason why someone should want to harm Kaiku. And though she did not admit it to herself, she almost hoped someone would. To end this half-life, to release her to Omecha's care, would be a mercy.

  When Mishani had left, the healer crossed the room and knelt by Kaiku's side. The sleeping woman's cheek was limned in gold in the morning sun, the fine hairs of her skin incandescent. Her face was unlined, her expression peaceful, her mouth slightly open. For a long while, the healer watched her.

  'They say you are lost, Kaiku,' she said quietly. 'That your mind wanders far from your body and cannot trace its way home.' She laid the palm of her hand lightly against the side of Kaiku's jaw, caressing her. 'I have carried a piece of you for many years, and you a piece of me. Perhaps this will help you.'

  She bent down and put her lips to Kaiku's, and exhaled. And after a moment the breath became more than breath, a glittering passage of some ephemeral energy crossing between the women, gushing from one mouth to another. It went on for some minutes, longer than lungs could sustain, until finally Asara broke away, drawing her lips softly across Kaiku's as she did so.

  Still Kaiku slept. From beyond the window came the high laughter of children.

  'Do you hear them, Kaiku?' Asara said. 'My kind grow fast, it seems. Too soon they will be adults, and I will be a grandmother. I think it appropriate. I am not too far from my first century.' She smiled sadly, looking down at the woman she had once known. Maybe she had once loved her. She could not say.

  She got to her feet. 'I have you to thank for them, Kaiku,' she murmured. 'You gave them life.'

  Mishani offered her a meal, and they spoke of matters in the distant steppes of the Newlands. She left in the afternoon, taking her children with her.

  Kaiku collapsed later that day. It happened towards sunset, as she was walking with Tsata. They were meandering along a path on the cliff edge, and the temperature had diminished to pleasant warmth, leavened by a breeze off the sea. Since Kaiku never replied to him and conversation was impossible, Tsata had developed a tendency towards storytelling, recounting to her the events of the settlement and the tales of the people who lived there. He had become well practised in making even the most mundane of incidents entertaining, though really it was only himself he was keeping amused.

  He was in the middle of such an anecdote when, without warning, she went limp and sighed to the ground. He was so surprised that he was not fast enough to catch her. He squatted down and raised up her shoulders, patting her cheek with his palm and shaking her. She did not respond; her head lolled. He looked around, but there was no one nearby, and the squat shape of Blood Koli's house was far away. He would have to carry her, then.

  He scooped her up easily. Her head hung, her white hair – somewhat longer since the day it had turned that colour – spilling down. He tipped her weight, jogging her head so that it lay against his shoulder.

  She put her arms around him like a child clinging to its parent and held on tight.

  It took him an instant to realise what she had done, what the pressure of her grip could mean. He did not dare to run with her, for to do so would be to break this moment, to shatter the possibility of it.

  'Kaiku?' he said, his tongue thick.

  She clutched him harder, pressing her head into his shoulder.

  'Kaiku?'

  Her body began to shake, and she was making a small sound in her throat. Tsata's heart jumped painfully in his chest.

  She was sobbing, and Tsata was soon crying too, but his tears were of joy. Kaiku's recovery was phenomenally quick. Though for the first few days she was skittish, prone to taking fright at loud noises and sudden movements, it was as if she had merely awoken from a deep sleep. Her mind was fogged, but it cleared rapidly; and though Mishani and Tsata and the entire Tkiurathi settlement celebrated, they managed to restrain themselves from taxing her too much with their visits.

  In less than a week, it was like nothing had ever happened. The bad memories of Kaiku's fugue seemed like some disconnected reality that they had observed but not participated in, and the only reminder of it was Kaiku's hair of pure white and her eyes of deep red, which did not revert to normal even after everything else had.

  She could not explain what had befallen her during the time she was away. She remembered only that she had been lost and searching, thinking that she was dead but unable to find Yoru and the gate to the Fields of Omecha. She had no conception of time, only an endless instant of uncertainty, caught in between one state and another. Then she had sensed something that she recognised, someone she recognised, a blaze in the Weave that had drawn her like a moth to a flame. And there she found herself at last.

  Mishani told her of the healer from the Newlands, but Kaiku could shed no further light on the matter. They could only count her a blessing from the gods. The servants already believed that Kaiku had been visited by Enyu herself, the goddess of nature come to reward the one who had saved her from the Weavers. Others took her icy beauty as a sign that she was in fact an aspect of Iridima, the moon-goddess, who was grateful to Kaiku for slaying her brother Aricarat.

  Kaiku did not know. But deep down, where reason and logic held no sway, she had her suspicions. One evening she sought out Tsata, and found him in the spot where she had woken up, standing a little way off the path at the edge of the precipice. He was gazing out to sea.

  A dull heat was thickening the air. The waters of Mataxa Bay were reddening, and the shadow of the cliff was reaching out to the great limestone islands in the mouth of the bay, their bases narrower than their broad tops, which were shaggy with vegetation. Hookbeaks cawed to each other as they hung on the breeze, watching the tiny junks and fishing boats below.

  'Do you miss home?' she asked as she joined him.

  'Sometimes,' he replied. 'Today I do.' He looked across at her. 'You should come to the settlement with me tomorrow. Many of my kinfolk have not seen you since your recovery, and they are eager.'

  She smiled. 'I would be honoured,' she said.

  They stood together a short while, observing the distant birds, sharing silent company.

  'Mishani has been telling me a great many things,' she said at length. 'How matters have gone in the land while I was absent.'

  'And that troubles you,' Tsata said.

  She made an affirmative noise, brushed back her hair from her face. 'What did we do, Tsata? What did we achieve in all this?'

  'We stopped the Weavers,' he said, but it was unconvincing, for she knew he felt the same as her.
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  'But we changed nothing. We learned nothing. We have merely set the calendar back a little. The Weavers are still here, only wearing a more pleasing form. Like them, the Sisters will one day decide that they no longer need the nobles as much as the nobles need them. The Empire survives, but…' She trailed away. 'After so much, the only winner is Cailin. I cannot help feeling that we followed paths of her making.'

  'Perhaps,' Tsata said. 'And perhaps we are not right to despair. At least the Aberrants no longer have to hide. All fortune is relative, and the future is brighter than it was. You could consider that an ending.'

  Kaiku shook her head. 'No, Tsata. That is what I came to tell you. This is anything but an ending.'

  Tsata turned away from the vista, his full attention on her now. Though he had become used to her new appearance, he was still sometimes taken aback by the otherworldly quality it lent her. Those eyes, that hair, were the marks of a place she had been that nobody but her could ever know.

  'I Weaved today,' she said. 'For the first time since I returned, I Weaved. And I know now something which the Sisters have not told us, which they have not told anyone. The Weave-whales have gone.'

  Tsata's eyes showed his puzzlement. Kaiku had told him of the Weave-whales, but he did not understand the relevance.

  'They have been there, in the Weave, since any of us can remember. They were always distant, unreachable, until we drew them. You and I, Tsata, when we destroyed the first of the witchstones in the Xarana Fault. But now they are not here.'

  'What does it mean?'

  'I do not know,' Kaiku said. 'But they left something behind them. Something in the Weave. A construct, a pattern, a…' She stalled. 'I cannot describe it. It is incomprehensible. But it is active.'

  'Active?'

  'Imagine a leaf that nods into the surface of a still pool, its tip touching the water. That pool is like the Weave, and this thing is sending ripples. The ripples spread, further and wider, far past where we dare go.'

  Tsata frowned. He found always found it hard to follow Kaiku when she talked of the Weave, even when she simplified it with analogies.

  'Then what is it?' he asked, feeling ignorant.

  'It is a beacon, Tsata,' she said, animated. Then she calmed, and looked down to the bay. 'Perhaps it is a message also, though if that is true then I am sure we cannot understand it. But ripples in the pond draw the attention of the fish who swim there.'

  'Kaiku, I still do not know what you are saying.'

  'I am saying that this war will not be remembered as a fight for the Empire,' she said. 'It will be remembered as the time we came of age. Our conflict has attracted the notice of entities greater than we can imagine. The Xhiang Xhi told Lucia how Aricarat's influence changed us. We learned to meddle with forces beyond our understanding long before our due time. We tore the veil of ascendancy when we were but infants.' She met Tsata's gaze. 'And now our presence is being made known.'

  'Made known to whom?'

  'To those who dwell in places impenetrable to us. It may be a day, a year, a thousand years or longer; but sooner or later, something will come looking.' She dropped her eyes. 'What that may mean, whether that will be blessing or catastrophe, I cannot say.'

  Tsata had no response to that. He did not believe in gods, but he knew enough to respect the world beyond the senses, and her words evoked a subtle dread in him that he could not define.

  She laughed suddenly. 'But listen to me. I should be anything but maudlin. Forgive my foolishness. The future is brighter, at least for a time. I will enjoy that for now. Cailin can wait, the Sisters can wait, the Empire can wait. Maybe I will leave it all behind, and maybe I will rail against it; but not today.'

  He caught her grin and was infected by it.

  'I have something to ask,' she said. 'There is one more thing for me to do. I must travel east, to the Forest of Yuna, to a temple of Enyu that sits on the north bank of the Kerryn. Nearby there is a sacred glade, where once I made a promise to Ocha and to my family. I must return there, and offer thanks, and let my family know that they may rest now.' She touched his upper arm lightly, her eyes alive again. 'Come with me.'

  'I will,' he said, without hesitation. Then, his expression faltered, and Kaiku became concerned.

  'What is it?'

  He steeled himself, and asked the question he had been putting off for some days now.

  'After you have made your peace, Kaiku, what then?' he said. 'The war is over. The world goes on, and we go on with it. Where will you go?'

  Her smile returned, and her fingers slid down his arm until her hand lay in his.

  'I will go with you,' she said.

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