The Skein of Lament

by Chris Wooding

  Kaiku strained to hear anything, but all that came to her were distant animal cries and the rising chorus of night insects. They had seen no evidence of human life so far, whether by chance or by Nomoru’s skill, and only the occasional glimpse of a large predator in the distance had kept them from relaxing. Now the presence of danger tautened her, her body flooding with chill adrenaline, sweeping her brooding thoughts away.

  Nomoru glanced back at them, indicating for them to stay. A moment later, she had flitted up the side of the rock wall that faced them and disappeared over the top.

  Yugi crept up alongside her in a crouch, his rifle primed in his hands. ‘Do you sense anything?’ he whispered.

  ‘I have not tried,’ she said. ‘I dare not, yet. If it should be a Weaver, he might notice me.’ She did not express her deeper fears on the subject: that she had never faced a Weaver in the battlefield of the Weave, that no Sister had except Cailin, and that she was terrified that one day the moment might arrive when she had to.

  It was then she noticed Tsata was gone.

  The Tkiurathi kept himself low, hugging close to the stone bulk rising to his left. On a level so basic that it did not even need conscious thought, he was aware of what angles he was exposed from and where he was covered. The thorny brakes to his right guarded his flank, and he would hear anyone coming through them, but there were shadowy spots high up on a thin finger of rock beyond that might provide a hiding place for a rifleman or an archer. He had gone to the right around the rise of stone where Nomoru had gone left, hoping to encircle the bulk and meet her on the other side, or clamber over the top if he could not get past it.

  It was simple sense to him, born of a logic shaped over thousands of years of jungle life. One scout could be bitten by a snake, fall into a trap, break a leg, or be captured and be unable to warn the rest of the pash when enemies inevitably tracked back to where the scout had come from. Two scouts, taking different routes but still watching each other, were much harder to surprise, and if misfortune befell one then the other could rescue them or go for help. Above all, it was safer for the group.

  Tsata was confounded over and over by the incomprehensible thought processes of foreigners, Quraal and Saramyr alike. Their motives baffled him. So much was not said in foreign society, a mass of implications and suggestions meant to hint at private understandings. Their loveplay, for example: he had watched Saran and Kaiku fence around each other for weeks aboard Chien’s ship. How was it that it was somehow unacceptable to say something that both of them knew, to admit their lust for one another, and yet it was acceptable to make it just as obvious through oblique means? Every one of them was so secretive, so locked into themselves, unwilling to share any part of their being with anyone. They hoarded their strength instead of distributing it, building themselves through words and actions for personal advancement rather than using what they had gained to benefit their pash. And so, instead of a community, they had this wildly unequal culture of many social levels in which inferiority was bestowed by birth, or by lack of possessions, or by the deeds of a man’s father. It was so far beyond ridiculous that Tsata did not even know where to begin.

  He felt some affinity with Saran, because Saran had been willing to sacrifice every man that accompanied him into the jungles of Okhamba to get himself out alive. That, at least, Tsata could understand, for he was working for the good of a greater pash, that of the Libera Dramach and the Saramyr people. The others on the expedition were merely interested in monetary gain or fame. Only Saran’s motives seemed unselfish. But even Saran, like all of them, was so hidden in intention, and often tried to tell Tsata where to go and what to do. He had thought of himself as the ‘leader’ of their group, even though Tsata had taken no payment and joined of his own free will.

  It was too much. He put it from his mind. Time to muse on these puzzling people later.

  The stone bulk on his left was not showing any sign of rounding off and allowing Tsata’s path to converge with Nomoru’s, so he decided to chance climbing over it. It would leave him dangerously exposed for a few moments, but there was no help for that. In one lithe movement, he rose from his running crouch and sprang up to grip the rough sides of the rock, using his momentum and his dense muscles to pull himself up. He found a toehold and boosted himself to the top, spreading himself flat on the lumpy roof of stone. In the jungle of his homeland, his jaundiced skin and green tattoos served to camouflage him; now he felt uncomfortably visible. He crawled swiftly over the rock to the other side, staying close to what sparse vegetation grew up here. The waxing moons glared down at him as the light slowly bled from the sky to be replaced by a pale, green-tinged glow.

  He was atop a long, thin ridge. Below and to its left, a ledge ran close, following the ridge’s contours until it dropped away suddenly to a small clearing, which was hemmed in on three sides by other shoulders of land.

  He could hear them and smell them even before he saw the men moving along the ledge towards where Kaiku and Yugi waited.

  There were two of them. They were dressed in a curious assemblage of loose black clothing and dark leather armour, and their faces were powdered unnaturally white, with bruise-coloured dye around their eyes. Their clothes, hair and skin were dirty and striped with a kind of dark blue war-paint, and they were unkempt and stank of an incense that Tsata recognised as ritasi, a five-petalled flower which he understood the Saramyr often burned at funerals. They carried rifles of an early and unreliable make, heavy and grimy things, and there were curved swords at their waists.

  Tsata shifted his own rifle, slung on a strap across his back, and loosed his kntha from his belt. Kntha were Okhamban weapons, made for close combat in jungles where longer weapons were unwieldy and likely to snag on creepers. They comprised of a grip of bound leather with a steel knuckle-guard, and two kinked blades a foot long, protruding from the top and bottom of the grip. The blades bent smoothly the opposite way from each other, about halfway along their length, tapering to a wicked edge. Kntha were used in pairs, one to block with and the other to slash, making a total of four blades with which to attack an opponent. They required a particularly vicious fighting style to use effectively. The Saramyr folk had a name for them that was easier for them to remember than the Okhamban: gutting-hooks.

  He dropped down to the ledge like a cat, his landing soundless. Tkiurathi disdained any kind of ornamentation that might make a noise, for their skill was in stealth. The two men, intent on their own inept creeping, did not hear him come up behind them. They were easy prey.

  He took them by surprise, sweeping at the neck of the rightmost, putting enough of his body weight behind it to behead the man cleanly. With his left hand he slashed out at the other one as he turned into the blow; it caught him square in the throat, not hard enough to decapitate him but enough to plough through thick muscle and lodge in his spine. As the first man fell, Tsata pressed his hide shoe into the second man’s chest and used it as leverage to wrench his gutting-hook free. A spume of steaming blood came with it, followed by a belch of gore from the wound that spilled down his victim’s chest. Tsata stepped back and watched him slump to the ground, his body still not seeming to realise that he was dead, his heart spasmodically pumping as he went.

  Satisfied that the greater part of his pash was safe, his thoughts immediately turned to Nomoru. He wiped the blood off his blades and his sleeveless hemp waistcoat so as not to provide any scent-warning to an enemy, and then headed along the ledge in the direction the men had come from.

  He found her in the sunken clearing at the end of the ledge. She was backed against a wall, facing him. There were two more with her, one with his knife pressed up under her chin, the other wielding a rifle and scanning the rim. In the last light of the day, Tsata was all but invisible as he watched from the shadow of the rocky ridge. He checked quickly for signs of any others nearby, but there was nothing, not even any sentries or lookouts on the high points surrounding the clearing. These were not warriors, however much
they swaggered.

  His priority was the man with the knife to Nomoru’s throat. He would have liked to try and do it in silence, but the risk was far too great. Instead, he waited until neither of them were looking at him, then took aim with his rifle. He was just weighing the possibilities of taking the man out without him reflexively stabbing Nomoru when the scout spotted him with an infinitesimal flicker of her eyes. A moment later, she looked back at him again, hard. Purposefully. The man guarding her frowned as he noticed. She glared wide at Tsata, her eyes urging him.

  Tsata held his fire. Clever. She was trying to turn her enemy’s attention from her.

  ‘Stop mugging, you fool,’ the man hissed. ‘I’m no idiot. You won’t make me look away.’ And with that, he slapped her. But he had to take his knife away a few inches to do it, and the instant he did so Tsata blew his brains out of the side of his head.

  The last man turned with a cry, raising his rifle; but Tsata was already leaping down upon him, driving the butt of his weapon into the man’s jaw. His enemy’s rifle fired wild as he fell, and a second blow from Tsata stove his skull in.

  The echoes of the gunshots rang across the Fault and into the gathering night.

  There was a pause as Nomoru and Tsata looked at each other in the gloom, and then Nomoru turned away and scooped up her rifle and dagger, which had been taken from her.

  ‘They’ll be coming,’ she said, not meeting his eye. ‘More of them. We have to go.’

  FOURTEEN

  The echoes of the hunt floated distantly across the peaks.

  Upon her return with Tsata, Nomoru had led them off the spine of land that they had been following, taking a northwestward route that descended hard. They were bruised and scratched from sliding down steep slopes of shale, and the exertion had tired them, for Nomoru had set a reckless pace for more than an hour. She seemed furious, though whether at herself or at them it was difficult to tell. She pushed them to their limits, guiding them down into the depths of the Fault, until the dark land reared all around them.

  Finally, she called a halt in a round, grassy clearing that seemed to spring out of nowhere amid the lifeless rock that bordered it. A dank mist lay on the ground, despite the night’s warmth, a sad pearly green in the light of the crescent moons. The clearing slid away down a narrow hillside to the west, but whatever was there was obscured by the contour of the land.

  Yugi and Kaiku threw themselves down on the grass. Tsata squatted nearby. Nomoru stalked about in agitation.

  ‘Gods, I could sleep right here,’ Yugi declared.

  ‘We can’t stay here. Just take a rest,’ Nomoru snapped. ‘I didn’t want to go this way.’

  ‘We are going on?’ Kaiku asked in disbelief. ‘We have been travelling since dawn!’

  ‘Why break our backs over this? There’s no hurry,’ Yugi reminded them again.

  ‘They are tracking us,’ Tsata said. When Yugi and Kaiku looked at him, he motioned up to where they had come from with a tilt of his head. ‘They are calling to each other. And they are getting closer.’

  Yugi scratched the back of his neck. ‘Persistent. That’s annoying. Who are they?’

  Nomoru had her arms crossed, leaning against a wall of rock. ‘Don’t know their name. It’s an Omecha cult. Not like in the cities. These are very extreme. They think death is the point of life.’ She waved a hand dismissively. ‘Blood sacrifice, mutilation rituals, votive suicide. They look forward to their own deaths.’

  ‘I expect Tsata was something of a pleasant surprise for them, then,’ Yugi quipped, grinning at the Tkiurathi. Tsata laughed, startling them all. None of them had ever heard him laugh before; he had seemed utterly humourless until now. It was inexplicably strange to hear. Somehow, they had expected his expression of mirth to be different to a Saramyr laugh.

  Nomoru did not appreciate the comment. She was already angry at herself for being captured, and perversely she was also angry with Tsata for rescuing her. ‘They weren’t supposed to be there,’ she said churlishly. ‘There were different ones there a week ago. We could have got past them. They didn’t pay much attention.’

  ‘Perhaps that was why they got driven off,’ suggested Yugi.

  She scowled at him. ‘I didn’t want to come this way,’ she said again.

  Kaiku, who was eating a stick of spicebread from her pack to replenish some energy, looked up at her. ‘Why not?’ she asked round a mouthful of food. ‘What is this way?’

  Nomoru seemed about to say something, a haunted look in her eyes; then she clammed up. ‘Don’t know,’ she said. ‘But I know not to come here.’

  ‘Nomoru, if you have heard something about this place, then tell us!’ Kaiku said. Her reticence was more alarming than if she had spoken out.

  ‘Don’t know!’ she said again. ‘The Fault is full of stories. I hear them all. But there’s bad rumours about where we’re going.’

  ‘What rumours?’ Kaiku persisted, brushing her fringe back from her face and giving Nomoru a hard look.

  ‘Bad rumours,’ said the scout stubbornly, returning the glare.

  ‘Will they follow us in there?’ Yugi asked, trying a different tack.

  ‘Not if they have any sense,’ Nomoru said; then, tiring of questions, she told them to get up. ‘We have to go. They’re getting close.’

  Yugi looked to Tsata, who confirmed it with a grim tip of his chin. He hauled himself to his feet, and offered a hand to Kaiku to help her do the same. Their legs were aching, but not so much as they would be tomorrow.

  ‘We have to go now!’ Nomoru hissed impatiently, and she headed off down the narrow grass slope to what lay beyond.

  The slope tipped gently into a broad, flat marsh; a long, curving alley flanked by walls of black granite that trickled and splashed with thousands of tiny waterways. The air was inexplicably chill; the travellers felt their skin pimpling as they descended. Humps of grass and ragged thickets rose like islands above the dreary, funereal ground mist. Strange lichens and brackens streaked the dark walls or straggled from the mire, swathes of sombre green and red and purple. Under the mournful glow of Aurus and Neryn, it lay dismal and quiet, disturbed only by the occasional shriek or croak of some unseen creature.

  The terrain underfoot became steadily wetter, and water welled up in their bootprints. By the time the slope had levelled off enough to become the marsh floor, Yugi was expressing concerns over whether they could cross it at all. Nomoru ignored him. The sounds of their pursuers calling to each other in some dark, sacred cant provided all the reply she needed to give. Though the air around them seemed to dampen sound and foil echoes, it was evident that the cultists were not far away.

  They forged on into the marsh, and the disturbed mist wrapped around their legs and swirled sullenly up to their knees. Already, the water had found ways in through their boots, and their feet squelched with every step. They trudged in single file, the mud sucking at them in an attempt to rob them of their footwear. Tsata took the rear, his rifle in his hands, glancing often back at the slope to the clearing, where he expected at any moment to see more of the dirty figures appear.

  ‘We are too exposed here,’ he said.

  ‘That’s why we’re hurrying,’ Nomoru said tersely, then stumbled and cursed. ‘They’ll never hit us if we’re too far ahead.’

  It was too late to argue the call now, so they laboured through the doleful marsh as fast as they could, following Nomoru’s lead. She seemed uncannily sure-footed, and though a misstep often landed them in the watery sludge that lay to either side of the paths she chose, as long as they walked in her footprints they found relatively solid ground there.

  Suddenly, Tsata clicked his tongue, a startlingly loud snap that made Kaiku jump. ‘There they are,’ he said.

  Nomoru looked back. On the crest of the slope: four men and a woman, two with rifles. They were calling to companions out of sight. As she watched, one of the riflemen aimed and fired. The sharp crack was swallowed by the thick marsh air. Kaiku and Yugi duc
ked automatically, but the shot went nowhere near them.

  Nomoru slipped back along the line to where Tsata was, unslinging her rifle. For the first time, Kaiku noticed how incongruous the weapon was in comparison with the woman that carried it. Whereas Nomoru was scrawny and scruffy and uncouth, her rifle was a thing of beauty, with a sleek black lacquer on its stock and body, inscribed with tiny gold pictograms, and a swirling silver intaglio along the length of its barrel.

  ‘Stop worrying,’ she told Kaiku and Yugi, as another cultist fired and they cringed from the shot. ‘They’ll never hit us. We’re out of their range.’

  ‘So what are you doing?’ Yugi asked. Standing still in the open while somebody shot at them, no matter how distant, was fundamentally unnerving; yet he did not dare move without Nomoru leading them, for he had already gained a healthy respect for the dangers of the marsh.

  Nomoru settled her rifle against her shoulder, took aim, and squeezed the trigger. A moment later, one of the cultists collapsed, shot through the forehead.

  ‘They’re not out of my range,’ she said. She pulled the bolt back into position to reprime the rifle, swung the barrel fractionally to the left, and fired again. Another cultist went down.

  ‘Heart’s blood . . .’ Yugi murmured in amazement.

  The remaining cultists were hurriedly retreating now, back into the clearing and out of view.

  ‘Now they’ve got something to think about,’ Nomoru said, shouldering her rifle. ‘Let’s go.’

  She made her way to the head of the line and trekked onward. The others followed her as best they could.

  It was not long before Kaiku began to sense a change. At first, it was too subtle for her to identify, merely a feeling of unease. Gradually it grew, until it made the fine hairs on her arms prickle. She glanced at the others to see if anyone shared her discomfort, but nobody showed any sign. She had the slightly unreal sensation of being sealed off from her companions, of existing on a level apart from them, as if she was a ghost that they were powerless to see or touch or interact with. Her kana stirred within her.