The Skein of Lament

by Chris Wooding

  Kaiku waved a hand at him, indicating that he should get to the meat of the issue. ‘How did it end, then?’

  He wandered over to where they sat and looked down on them. ‘They didn’t do anything. Not one. Very few of them even bothered to verify the facts we gave them.’ He laughed bitterly. ‘All this time the Weavers have been kept in check by the fear of what might happen if the high familes rose up against them. Well, we tried to make that happen, and they ignored us.’

  Kaiku was aghast. ‘How can that be? When they can see what the Weavers are doing?’

  Yugi put a hand on Tsata’s bare shoulder. ‘Our foreign friend here is right,’ he said. ‘It’s not in their interest. If one or even a dozen high families acted on the information, they would lose their Weavers, and the other families who did have Weavers would crush them. There are too many enmities, too many old wounds. There’ll always be someone trying to get the upper hand, thinking only about the short-term, seizing any chance they can get. Because people are selfish. The only way anything fundamental will change is if everyone decides to change at the same time.’ He shrugged. ‘And the only way that will happen is if there’s a catastrophe.’

  ‘It is true. You will have to wait until this land is so ruined that it can barely be lived on before it is in everyone’s interest to act,’ Tsata said. ‘And by then, it may well be too late.’

  ‘Is that the way of it, then?’ Kaiku demanded, feeling unfairly outnumbered. ‘That people have to die before anything changes?’

  Yugi and Tsata merely looked at her, and that was answer enough.

  The clouds cleared towards dawn, and they set off again to take advantage of Iridima’s glow. By now Nomoru’s sense of direction seemed to have returned, and by estimating the curvature of the barrier, she established a route inward that would take them towards the centre of the area that the Weavers had cut off from the world. It seemed reasonable to assume that whatever they were looking for lay there.

  They had not travelled far before the land dropped steeply away before them, and they found themselves looking down a boulder-riven slope at the darkly glinting swathe of the River Zan. Its sibilant murmuring drifted up to them through the silence.

  ‘Are we still upstream of the falls?’ Yugi asked.

  Nomoru made an affirmative noise. ‘This way,’ she said, turning them southward. Kaiku doubted if the scout had any more idea of where they were going than she did, but one way was as good as another when they were all lost.

  The sky was beginning to lighten when Yugi stopped them suddenly. They had been on the alert for any signs of life, but nothing had appeared as yet. In fact, it was eerily empty. Even the animals seemed to have deserted this place.

  ‘What is it?’ Kaiku whispered.

  ‘Look,’ Yugi said. ‘Look at the tree.’

  They looked. Standing on a rocky rise above them in silhouette was a crooked tree, its branches bare and warped, its boughs twisted in a corkscrew and curling at strange angles. It hunched there like a foreboding signpost, a warning of things to come if they should proceed.

  ‘It’s blighted,’ Yugi supplied redundantly.

  ‘They have found another witchstone,’ Kaiku said. ‘And they have woken it up.’

  ‘Woken it up?’ Nomoru sneered. ‘It’s a rock, Kaiku.’

  ‘Is that all it is?’ Kaiku returned sarcastically. ‘Then what are the Weavers hiding it for?’

  Nomoru gave a snort of disgust and walked onward, heading downriver. The others went after her.

  It was just past dawn when they found what they had been looking for; and it was far, far worse than they had imagined.

  The ridge of land that they had been following began to curve away from the Zan below, and a great stretch of flat land opened up between the river’s eastern bank and the high ground, a grassy and fertile flood plain. Their view of the plain was obscured, for they had been forced to retreat from the lip of the slope by a suddenly hostile terrain of broken rocks, but finally Nomoru picked them a route back to the edge so that they could command a good view of the land to the west, and that was when they saw what the Weavers had been hiding all this time.

  The slope had steepened into an enormous black cliff overlooking the plain, and when Nomoru reached the precipice she ducked down suddenly and motioned that the others should do the same. The burgeoning daylight was flat and devoid of force, lacking yet the strength to imbue the world with colour. The sky overhead was a drab grey, and the solitary moon was heading towards obscurity behind the jagged teeth of the Fault. They scrambled on their bellies to where Nomoru lay, and looked over.

  Kaiku swore under her breath.

  On the far side of the flood plain, near the river bank, hulked a massive construction, a glabrous hump like the carapace of some monstrous beetle. It was a dull, rusty bronze in colour, formed of immense strips of banded metal. Around its base, smaller constructions clustered like newborn animals clamouring for their mother’s teats. There, strange wheels of spiked metal rotated slowly, chains rattled as they slid on pulleys that emerged from narrow shafts in the earth, and stubby chimneys emitted an oily black smoke. From within came faint clattering and clanking sounds.

  The observers gazed aghast at the edifice. It was like nothing they had ever seen before, something so alien to their experience that its very presence seemed out of kilter with the world. A dirty, seething horror, foul to the eye.

  But that was not all. There was a more immediate and recognisable danger. The plain was awash with Aberrants.

  The sheer number of the creatures that milled down there was impossible to estimate, for they were in no order or formation, and it was difficult to tell where one clot ended and another began. It was made worse by the variety of shapes and forms: a phantasmagoria of grotesqueries that seemed to have spilled whole from the imagination of a maniac. Thousands, perhaps; maybe tens of thousands. The horde carpeted the ground from the foot of the cliffs to the banks of the Zan, clustered in groups or imprisoned within enormous metal pens. Some stalked restlessly along the river, some slept on the ground, some squabbled and scratched.

  Kaiku felt a pat on her shoulder, and she looked to see Nomoru proffering her a spyglass. It was a simple, portable affair – two glass lenses wrapped in a conical tube of stiffened leather – but it was effective enough. She took it with an uncertain smile of thanks. It was probably the first time Nomoru had ever volunteered any good will to any of them. Evidently the scale of what they had discovered had caused her to lay aside her petty surliness for the moment.

  She put it to her eye, and the spectacle below sprang into noisome detail. Everywhere, the forms of nature had been twisted out of true. Dark, loping things like elongated jungle cats snarled as they prowled, their faces curious hybrids of canine and lizard; demonic creatures that might once have been small apes hung from the bars of their pens, lips skinning back along their gums to reveal vicious arrays of yellowed fangs; hunched, boarlike things with furious visages and great hooked tusks rooted in the dirt, compact barrels of tooth and muscle. Kaiku felt an uncomfortable thrill of recognition at the sight of a roosting-pen of enormous birds, with keratinous beaks and kinked, ragged wings with a span of six feet or more: gristle-crows, which she had last seen on the isle of Fo several years ago.

  And yet there was a pattern in amid the chaos. The presence of the gristle-crows had alerted her to it, and now as she scanned the plain again she saw, in the bleak light of the dawn, that each Aberrant was not unique. There were perhaps a few dozen different types, but these types recurred over and over again. The same features cropped up, the same forms. These were not random offshoots of the witchstones’ influence. These were discrete species. Though they were horrible to look at, there were no redundant features, no evolutionary characteristic that might hamper them. No deformities.

  ‘Not there,’ Nomoru said impatiently. She grabbed the end of the spyglass and turned it. ‘There.’

  Kaiku spared her an annoyed glance for her ru
deness before she looked through it again. When she did, her blood ran cold.

  There was a figure walking slowly through the horde, apparently heedless of the predators that surrounded it. At first, she thought it must be a Weaver; but if it was, it was like no Weaver she had ever seen. This one was tall, seven feet at least, and rake-thin. It walked with an erect spine instead of the hunch that Weavers seemed to adopt as their bodies became more riddled with foulness. Its robe was not patchwork like a Weaver’s, but simple black, with a heavy hood; and though it wore a mask, it was a blank white oval, perfectly smooth except for two eye-holes.

  ‘A new kind of Weaver?’ she breathed.

  ‘Don’t know,’ Nomoru replied.

  Yugi took the spyglass and looked.

  ‘What is it I’m seeing here?’ he said, slowly panning across the horde. ‘What are they doing?’

  ‘Some kind of menagerie?’ Kaiku suggested. ‘A collection of Aberrant predator species?’

  Nomoru laughed bitterly. ‘That’s what you think?’

  Tsata’s expression was grim. ‘It is not a menagerie, Kaiku,’ he told her. ‘It is an army.’

  NINETEEN

  At the same time that Kaiku and her companions were gazing down on the horde of Aberrants by the River Zan, Lucia and her retinue were arriving at Alskain Mar.

  It lay almost one hundred and fifty miles away from Kaiku, east and a little south of her position, on the other side of the Xarana Fault near the River Rahn. Once, it had been a magnificent underground shrine, in the days before the cataclysm that rent the earth and swallowed Gobinda over a thousand years ago. Then its entrances had collapsed, and the roof had fallen in on it, and uncounted souls had been buried in the quake. Now it was a haunted place, the abode of something ancient and ageless, and even the most savage of the factions in the Fault stayed well away from there. A great spirit held sway in Alskain Mar, and the spirits guarded their territory resentfully.

  But into that place Lucia was to go. Alone.

  Her escort on the journey from the Fold was a small group of the most trusted warriors of the Libera Dramach, accompanied by Zaelis and Cailin. The leader of the Libera Dramach, the head of the Red Order, and the girl on which all their endeavours rested. It was risky for them to venture out of the Fold together, but Cailin insisted on coming and Zaelis could not let his adopted daughter face this trial without his support. Guilt lay heavy on his heart, and the least he could do was walk with her as far as he could.

  Cailin had been furious when Zaelis had told her what he had done. Though he had implied to Lucia that he and Cailin were in agreement about asking her to go to Alskain Mar, it had in reality been his idea entirely. Cailin was in violent opposition, and not afraid to tell him so. She had faced him at his house, amid the quiet, cosy surroundings of his study.

  ‘This is idiocy, Zaelis!’ she had cried, a tower of black anger. ‘You know what happened to her last time! Now you would send her up against a spirit unfathomably stronger! What possessed you?’

  ‘Do you think I made my decision lightly?’ Zaelis retorted. ‘Do you think I enjoy the idea of sending my daughter into the lair of that thing? Necessity forces my hand, Cailin!’

  ‘There is nothing so necessary as to risk the life of that girl. She is the lynchpin of everything we have striven for.’

  ‘We will lose everything we have striven for if the Weavers find the Fold,’ Zaelis said, stalking agitatedly around the room. The raised voices seemed to discomfit the still air. Lanterns cast warm shadows across the hardwood floor. ‘It is easy for you to judge: you have the Red Order. You can disappear in a day, go into hiding, leave all of this behind. But I have a responsibility to what I have started! Every man and woman in this town is here because of what I created; even those who are not of the Libera Dramach have come because of the ideals that we represent.’ He dropped his eyes. ‘And they look to me as their leader.’

  ‘The day will come when they look to Lucia as their leader, Zaelis,’ Cailin said. ‘Was that not the plan? How, then, can you dare risk her this way?’ She paused, then added a final barb. ‘Quite aside from the fact that she is, as you say, your own daughter.’

  Zaelis’s bearded jaw tightened in pain. ‘I risk her because I have to,’ he said quietly.

  ‘Wait for the scouts to get back,’ Cailin advised. ‘You may be worrying needlessly.’

  ‘It’s not good enough,’ he said. ‘No matter what they find, the fact remains that the Weavers are in the Fault. They could have been there for years, don’t you see? It is only because Nomoru is so good at what she does that she even noticed the Weavers’ barrier. How many of our scouts have passed through that way and not even realised that they had been misdirected?’ He looked up accusingly at Cailin. ‘It was you that told me how those barriers worked.’

  Cailin tilted her head. The raven feathers on her ruff stirred slightly. ‘You are correct. The nature of the barriers are subtle enough so that most minds are fooled into thinking that they have got themselves lost.’

  ‘Then what else might the Weavers have under our very noses?’ Zaelis asked. ‘We only found this one through blind luck.’ He threw up his calloused hands in exasperation. ‘I have been suddenly and shockingly faced with the fact that we are all but defenceless against the very enemy we have been fighting against. We have relied on hiding from them. But now I realise that they will find us, whether by accident or design, sooner or later. They may already have found us. We have to know what we are up against; and only the spirits can tell us that.’

  ‘Are you sure, Zaelis?’ Cailin asked. ‘What do you know of spirits?’

  ‘I know what Lucia tells me,’ he said. ‘And she believes it is worth trying.’

  Cailin gave him a level gaze. ‘Of course she does. She would do anything you asked of her. Even if it killed her.’

  ‘Gods, Cailin, don’t make this worse for me than it is!’ he cried. ‘I have made my choice. We are going to Alskain Mar.’

  Cailin had not argued further, but as she was leaving she had paused at the threshold of the room and looked back at him.

  ‘What was the purpose of all this in the beginning? What did you do this for? You created the Libera Dramach out of nothing. One man inspired all of that. But who inspired you?’

  Zaelis did not reply. He knew it was a leading question, but he did not wish to be led.

  ‘Which is more important to you now?’ Cailin had asked softly. ‘The girl, or the secret army you lead? Lucia, or the Libera Dramach?’

  The memories echoed bitterly in Zaelis’s thoughts as the company picked its way through the brightening dawn towards the ruined shrine. They had travelled overnight from the Fold for the sake of stealth. The going had been slow, as they had been forced to accommodate Zaelis’s limp, and Lucia – who had never in her life had to walk on a journey of more than a few miles at a time – became exhausted quickly. The clouds that troubled Kaiku far away had not reached this far east, and they had the light of Iridima to guide them through the plunging terrain of the Fault.

  As the first signs of day approached, they had come to a wide, circular depression in the land, a mile or more in diameter. It lay on a long, flat hilltop, thick with dewy grass and shrubs and small, thin trees. On the eastern side, the Fault began a disjointed but steady descent down to the banks of the Rahn. At the centre of the depression was a deep, uneven hole, a toothed shaft into the vast cavern beneath, where Alskain Mar lay.

  They halted at the edge of the dip. Soul-eaters had been set in a rough circle around the perimeter, their surfaces weathered and their paint fading. They made a loud rattling as the wind brushed them, old knucklebone charms and stones of transparent resin tapping against the rock. Several of them were cracked, and moss had grown in the fissures. One had broken in half, and its upper section lay next to the stump.

  Cailin cast a disparaging eye over the soul-eaters. They were superstitious artifacts cannibalised from the Ugati: slender, elliptical stones daubed in a com
bination of blessings and curses and hung with noisy and primitive jewellery. The stories went that when a spirit came near to a soul-eater, it would be terrified by the sound of the charms, and both repelled by the blessings and disgusted by the curses; then it would flee back to where it had come from and hide. They did not work, and had been dismissed as quaint bits of folklore by the Saramyr for hundreds of years; and yet these examples were recent, no more than fifty years old. Who could guess who had put them there, and what they had hoped to achieve? Maybe they had thought that an ancient method would work to pen an ancient spirit. In the Xarana Fault, the usual rules of civilisation did not apply.

  They rested outside the depression as the sun climbed into the sky. Lucia curled up on a mat and slept. The overnight walk had been hard on her. She may have had plenty of energy, but for that she was still frail, having been sheltered all through her childhood. The guards ate cold food nervously, warily scanning the quiet hilltop. They were safe enough from any human danger here, for no settlements thrived this close to Alskain Mar; but the presence of the spirit could be felt by the least perceptive of men, and it made their skin crawl. Even the heat and light of the day did not dispel the chill. They kept catching flitting movements among the bushes out of the corner of their eyes; but whenever they investigated, there was nothing there.

  Zaelis and Cailin sat together. Zaelis was regarding his sleeping daughter with concern; Cailin was silently studying the hole at the centre of the depression.

  ‘There is still time to turn back, Zaelis,’ the Sister said.

  ‘Don’t,’ he said. ‘The decision is made.’

  ‘Decisions can be unmade,’ Cailin told him.

  Zaelis’s brow was furrowed deeply, his eyes pained as he watched the rise and fall of Lucia’s slender back. ‘Not this one,’ he said.