Braided Path 02 - The Skein Of Lament

by Chris Wooding

  It was simply an unfortunate moment that Zaelis had caught him at, and despite his annoyance he could not expect Yugi to be ready for action every moment of every day. Eventually, Zaelis decided that he was only mildly intoxicated, and that he would still be sharp-witted enough to understand what was being said to him. He had become adept at judging his friend’s state over the years. And so he began to explain to Yugi what had occurred.

  Shortly afterward, Lucia came back with a brew of lathamri, a bitter black infusion that promoted awareness and stimulated the body. She paused at the threshold of the room, looking at the two men sitting locked in conversation. Her father, white-bearded and rangy beneath his robe, his swept-back hair seeming thinner than she remembered and the lines of his face etched a little deeper. Yugi, scruffy as ever in a shirt and trousers and boots, with the omnipresent rag tied around his forehead, penning the unruly spikes of his brown-blond hair. She was assailed suddenly by a terrible sense of the gravity of the situation, that these two men were discussing life and death for hundreds or even thousands of people, and it was all down to her.

  They are coming for me, she thought. Everyone that dies here will die because of me.

  Then Yugi noticed her, and smiled, and ushered her over. He took the mug from her with a grateful nod and then said to Zaelis: ‘She should hear this. It concerns her.’

  Zaelis grunted and motioned for her to sit down.

  ‘We need to get you to a safe place, Lucia,’ he said, his voice a rumble in the back of his throat. ‘There’s no way we can get the people out of the Fault in any number at short notice, and they would be too many to hide. But a few, a dozen or so . . . an escort . . . we could send you north-east. To Tchamaska. There are Libera Dramach there who can hide you.’

  Lucia barely reacted. ‘And you will stay here and fight,’ she said.

  Zaelis looked pained. ‘I have to,’ he said. ‘The Libera Dramach practically built this place. After we took it over all that time ago . . . well, the stockpiles alone are worth defending. If we can hold off this attack, we can buy time to move them out, to start again.’ He laid his hand on her arm. ‘People came here because we drew them here, even the ones who aren’t a part of the organisation. I’m responsible.’

  ‘You’re responsible for me too,’ Lucia said. Yugi looked at her in surprise. He had never heard Lucia use such an accusatory mode with her father.

  Zaelis was plainly hurt. He drew his hand back from her. ‘That’s why I’m sending you out of harm’s way,’ he said. ‘It will only be for a short time. I will come and find you afterward.’

  ‘No,’ said Lucia, quite firmly. ‘I will stay.’

  ‘You can’t stay,’ Zaelis told her.

  ‘Why not? Because I might be killed?’ She leaned forward, and her voice was a furious hiss that shocked him. ‘You’ll abandon me, but you won’t abandon them! Well, neither will I! All these people, all my friends and my friend’s families, all of them are going to die here! Because the Weavers want me! Most of them will never even know why. And you want me to leave them, to go and hide again until the Weavers hunt me down and more people die?’ She was shouting now. ‘I’m responsible for these people as much as you are. You made me responsible when you promised them a saviour from the Weavers. You tied all their lives to me and you never once asked me if I wanted that!’

  Her last words rang into silence. In all her life, they had never heard her raise her voice in anger. The force of it, coming after fourteen years of placid calm, stunned them.

  ‘I will not go,’ she said, her voice dropping again but losing none of its steel. ‘I will stay here and live or die with you, and with the people to whom you bound me.’

  Yugi looked from Lucia to Zaelis and back again. Suddenly, she no longer looked like a child, and he caught a glimpse of her mother’s fire in her glare. Zaelis was dumbstruck. Finally, he swallowed, and he dropped his eyes from the fierce and unfamiliar girl who had taken the place of his daughter.

  ‘So be it,’ he said, his mode formal and distant. ‘Do as you will.’

  Yugi felt the moment become excruciating, even softened as it was by the pleasant fuzz of the amaxa root.

  ‘Remember that army of Aberrants coming our way?’ he said with forced flippancy. ‘If anybody’s interested, I have a plan.’

  Asara sat with her arms around one knee and the other leg tucked beneath her, and watched the starfall drifting down over Lake Sazazu. The grass was sodden, and the moisture soaked through her clothes to dampen her skin. The water still rocked with the memory of the storm, flashing fitful arcs of moonlight from shore to distant shore. Night-birds swooped back and forth, plucking at fish that were attracted to the surface to nibble at the tiny ice-flakes, thinking them to be food of some kind. The sensation of unreality was fading now, returning the world to normal.

  Alone, she gazed out over the lake, deep in thought.

  Reki slumbered back in the shelter they had made. He was so exhausted he had slept through the chaos. The thought brought a twitch of a smile. Poor boy. His grief and misery had destroyed him, but she still found herself with a strange affection for the bookish young Heir-Barak. Where she would have been disgusted at the weakness of someone else for wallowing so in their agony, for him she made an exception. It was, after all, her fault.

  The last few days had been curious. She had expected pursuit, but Mos’s men were either criminally inept or were not searching for them at all, and she found that very odd. It worried her more than if they had been hot on Reki’s trail. Surely they knew what he carried, and what it meant for the Empire? And yet Asara had stayed effortlessly ahead of the game. Such good fortune was frankly suspicious.

  Reki had not taken the news of his sister’s death at all well, and they had been forced to rest a while here, for he was in no state to go on. His lamentations would draw attention to them. Even when he was silent, he bore such a shattering sorrow in his eyes that people would remember him. In retrospect, Asara thought that she should probably have kept Laranya’s suicide quiet until they were in a safer place; but what was done, was done. He would have felt betrayed if she had kept it from him any longer, and she wanted him smitten.

  She left him to sleep, to heal himself of tragedy. Asara had watched many dramas like this over the course of her long life, and they bored her in the main; but she was curious to see how Reki would fare under this test of his mettle. Though he was as easy to manipulate as any man, he had innocence and inexperience as his excuse, and she found those qualities appealing enough so that she did not have to entirely fake her interest in him.

  But she herself could not sleep. She was thinking of an argument, weeks ago, and of Kaiku.

  After her deception had been revealed, after she had fled from Kaiku in shame, she had gone to Cailin. It was ever her way: to run from what hurt her, to change herself and hide again. Cailin would provide her with an excuse to leave, something that she could tell herself was the real reason she was going, and not Kaiku at all.

  But somehow it had descended into an argument. Cailin was just that little bit too haughty, taking her for granted, telling her that she had to go to the Imperial Keep.

  ‘I am not your servant, Cailin!’ Asara had spat, whirling around the black-and-red conference chamber of the house of the Red Order. ‘You would do well to remember that.’

  ‘Spare me these half-hearted attempts at independence,’ the Sister had replied coldly. ‘You know you can leave at any time. But you will not leave, will you? Because I can grant what you desire most in the world.’

  Asara had glared at her furiously. ‘We had a deal. I did not agree to be your subordinate!’

  ‘Then we are equals, if you prefer,’ Cailin said. ‘It changes nothing. You will do as I ask, or you may break the deal. But until then, you will help me get what I want. And then, I will give you what you want.’

  ‘Can you?’ Asara had accused. ‘Can you do it?’

  ‘You know I can, Asara, and you know I wil
l. You have my promise.’

  ‘And you have my promise,’ she returned savagely, ‘that if you trick me I will be avenged. You would not want me as an enemy, Cailin.’

  ‘Stop these threats!’ Cailin had snapped. ‘The deal stands. It requires a certain measure of trust on both our parts, but you knew that from the beginning.’

  Trust. Asara could have laughed. Trust was an overrated commodity. But Cailin knew what it was that Asara longed for, what she would risk almost anything to get. And so Asara worked for the Red Order, partly because they had the same goals, mostly because it was the only way she could imagine her wish might be granted.

  An end to the loneliness, to the emptiness, to the void inside her. It was almost too precious to imagine.

  TWENTY-NINE

  The sun was setting on the Xarana Fault, igniting the western horizon in clouded bands of red and silver and purple. In the golden light of the day’s end, Yugi and Nomoru crouched on a bluff overlooking a land riven with ghylls and canyons, from which flat-topped plateaux, rocky hills and buttes thrust upward unevenly.

  Below them, hidden within the creases of the Fault, men and women were dying. The sounds of gunfire and occasional detonations echoed into the calm sky. Wisps of smoke seeped like fumes from the cracks. Fleeting glimpses of movement caught their eyes from time to time: swiftly retreating figures, pursued by dark and terrible shapes. At several points over the last few hours, the battle had spilled up out of the shadow and into the open, skirmishes across hillsides or areas of scrubland. Yugi did not recognise half of the factions that he saw, but he was sure they were not Libera Dramach or folk of the Fold.

  ‘Getting close,’ Nomoru said, her tone suggesting that she did not care one way or the other about it.

  ‘We’re not slowing them by much,’ Yugi observed distractedly.

  ‘What did you expect?’

  Yugi shrugged at that. He did not want to deal with Nomoru’s surly pessimism now. He had more pressing concerns.

  Kaiku’s estimation of the Aberrant army’s speed had been accurate. Three days had passed since the night of the moonstorm, and their rate of advance had been steady and rapid. A force of thousands were swarming through the Fault at roughly twice the speed that Yugi and his band of three companions had traversed it in the other direction. In a place like the Fault, that was a recklessness verging on insanity. He wondered if their strength of numbers had been enough to overcome the dangers that they would have faced: the clan armies, the canyons bristling with traps and deadfalls, the swamps that belched poison miasma, the haunted places. For a force so big, there was no safe route. How many had they lost? And would it matter, in the end?

  The Libera Dramach scouts – Nomoru included – had brought back scattered reports, but the army were simply moving too fast. They learned most of what they knew from other friendly clans, driven before the invaders, and the intelligence they had gleaned had come too recently to really do anything about it. The army had smashed through any settlements that had got in their way, overwhelming them in a tide and then ploughing onward. The clans and factions in or near the path of the Aberrants were in turmoil. Some were fleeing eastward, towards the Fold; word had been spread that it would be a last stronghold against the enemy, and it would welcome any clans who would unite with them there. A frankly dangerous gamble, to invite any of the other people of the Fault inside their fortifications, but Yugi knew that Zaelis had no other choice now.

  Other communities – the vengeful remnants of those that the army had passed through, or simply those who recognised the threat – were harrying the flanks and tail of the horde. The Xarana Fault was made for hit-and-run manoeuvres, and these people had lived there the better part of their lives and knew every trick. But the Aberrants ignored the attacks nibbling at their fringes, forging onward unstoppably towards the Fold with no consideration for casualties.

  Yugi’s mood was dark. How did they know? How did they find out where Lucia was? He cursed the Weavers and their ungodly methods. Heart’s blood, it could only have been a matter of time, but why now? In a few more years Lucia would have been of an age to take the throne, and they could have begun to gather real armies to support her, could have come out of hiding and challenged Mos and the Weavers.

  He caught himself, remembering her shocking tirade on the night of the moonstorm. They had so long been used to Lucia being dreamy and passive, like a veil drifting on the winds, that they had not considered what she wanted at all. They had assumed that she would have objected by now if she had any objections to make. Her detachment went so deep that they had ceased to think that opinions were something that applied to her. Yugi felt a solemn guilt at how they had taken her for granted. Whatever else she was, she was also a fourteen-harvest girl, with all the associated complications, and her patience and tolerance were not endless.

  He dared not think what it might mean if she developed a stubborn streak like Kaiku had. So much relied on her.

  A particularly loud explosion, near at hand, brought his mind back to the present. Nomoru rubbed a hand through her thatch of hair and scowled.

  ‘You’re cutting it fine,’ she warned.

  ‘Let’s go,’ he said.

  They headed away from the bluff, down a narrow slope bulwarked on either side by root-split walls of earth. There was a man there at the bottom, tensed to run, looking at them expectantly.

  ‘They’re coming!’ he called. ‘Be ready!’

  The man sketched a salute and fled, scrambling up another slope that looped off to their right. Yugi and Nomoru carried on down without pause, their rifles clattering against their backs. They passed two more runners on the way, despatching them to their respective destinations with orders. Yugi found himself thinking how much easier, how much faster this might be if they had the women of the Red Order as relays; but Cailin had refused to commit them to the advance forces, insisting that the element of surprise was vital in their deployment. She would keep them at the Fold. Privately, Yugi wondered if she would deploy them at all.

  They sprinted out into the open, running low, and the wall to their left fell away to spit them out onto a colossal shelf overlooking a barren, dead-end canyon. Sheer walls of sandy rock, banded with the striations of countless epochs, plunged down hundreds of feet to a dusty floor of churned earth. Birds rode the thermals below them in the slowly reddening light. Yugi felt a vertiginous moment at the sudden exposure to the chasm; the hot wind of the failing day blustered around him. Then they were hunkering down amid dozens of riflemen who hid behind a heap of stone further along the shelf, and he was grateful that the drop was hidden from sight.

  ‘Any activity down there?’ he asked.

  ‘Nothing,’ said a scarred young man named Kihu, whom Yugi had left in charge. ‘Can’t expect it yet though. Sun’s still out.’

  ‘No, you’re right,’ Yugi mused. ‘You, you, and you,’ he picked out two men and a middle-aged woman, all Libera Dramach. ‘Stay here and watch; I want to know if anything moves in this canyon before we get back. Everyone else, into position. They’re on their way.’

  His orders were obeyed immediately and without question. It was what they had been waiting for. With a grim eagerness, they broke cover and headed further along the enormous rock shelf. It slanted down for some way, finally joining a greater outthrust mass that jutted out away from the cliffs they had been hugging to their right.

  The vista broadened dramatically. The canyon they had been watching over was only one branch of a fork, the southernmost arm of a great junction. To the west, there was a breathtaking trench that crooked out of sight amid a clutter of buttes. East, the trench continued on, narrowing slightly. Yugi and the riflemen were running along the divider between the southern canyon and the eastern one, a steadily tapering promontory that collapsed at its tip into a series of ledges fringed with tough bushes and wretched trees.

  As they ran, Yugi caught sight of one of the runners signalling across the canyon, catching the last rays
of Nuki’s eye with a hand-mirror. A moment later, flashes returned in acknowledgement from concealed positions along the opposite ridge. The junction was crawling on all sides with Libera Dramach, hidden among the broken landscape.

  Yugi felt a surge of fierce pride. Nothing had stopped the relentless onslaught of the Aberrants so far, but then nobody had been given a chance to prepare until now. He remembered how he had doubted the wisdom of Kaiku’s decision to stay with the army. Now he had cause to be thankful for it. It was only because of the risk Kaiku took that they had been given enough warning to organise. The Weavers had charged heedlessly through the Fault, oblivious to their casualties; but Yugi planned to give them pause for thought here.

  ‘Gristle-crows!’ someone called, and Yugi looked up to see the first of the huge black Aberrant birds soaring overhead. They scrambled down the sloping tip of the divider, concealing themselves among the ledges and the dry foliage that clung there. Nomoru slid down next to him in a billow of dust, her exquisite rifle clenched in her thin hands, and the two of them crouched together amidst a brake of bushes. The walls of the eastern and western canyon were not so high as the southern arm, and the floor rose up too, so that they were perhaps seventy feet above it by the time they had dug in. They waited motionless, listening to the harsh caws of the gristle-crows as they circled, scouting ahead of the main mass of Aberrants that were pouring towards them.

  ‘Is this going to work?’ Nomoru whispered.

  ‘If it doesn’t, at least there’ll be nobody left alive to tell how we failed,’ he replied.

  Nomoru cackled quietly and primed her rifle. She motioned up at the birds with her eyes. ‘Want me to bring them down?’