The Skein of Lament

by Chris Wooding

  There was a new distance in her pale blue eyes now. Something had been shed, and a new skin grown underneath; something lost, something gained. She had talked to a creature that was one step down from a god. She had died, however briefly, and it had shifted her perspective somewhere that Flen could not follow. She seemed to have aged, not outwardly but in the measure of her responses and her tone. And all Flen could think was that he was losing his best friend, and how unfair it was.

  They sat together for a long time on the edge of that rocky brook, leaning against a boulder. Tall grasses rose all around them, tickling the backs of their knees. The brook trickled through a chicane of broken stone from the valley rim, and dragonflies droned about, moving in jerky little spurts to hover before their faces, studying them uncomprehendingly. The sky was pink, and the cascading tiers of houses to their right had a sinister and brooding quality in that light, no longer homely but a jumble of jagged edges and smoothly rounded blades.

  Below them, on the flat valley floor, a herd of banathi was grazing, watched over by a dozen men and women on horseback. Flen watched them shamble idly about, cropping the grass with their wide, rubbery mouths. They were huge creatures but very docile, beasts seemingly destined to exist only to feed predators. Though the bulls possessed enormous curving horns, they only ever used them in the mating season when competing for females. In ancient times, they had roamed freely across the plains; now they were almost entirely bred for meat and milk.

  It was while Flen was musing on the lot of the banathi that Lucia finally spoke, as he knew she would.

  ‘Forgive me,’ she said quietly.

  Flen shrugged. ‘I always do,’ he said.

  She took his arm and leaned her head on his shoulder. ‘I know what you think. That things are different now.’

  ‘Are they?’

  ‘Not between us,’ she replied.

  Flen adjusted himself so that they were both more comfortable. He had bony shoulders.

  ‘You understand, though,’ she said. ‘There are things I can’t explain. Things there are no words for.’

  ‘You live in a place different to me,’ he said. ‘It’s like . . . you live beyond a door, and I can only see through the cracks around the edges. You see what’s inside the room, but I can only catch a glimpse. It’s always been that way.’ He put a hand on her thin forearm, her delicate wrist. ‘You’re alone, and everyone else is shut out.’

  She smiled a little. How like Flen, to turn around her apology to make it seem as if it were she who deserved sympathy.

  She drew herself upright again. ‘I shouldn’t tell you this . . .’ she said, her voice dropping in volume.

  ‘But you will,’ he grinned.

  ‘This is very important, Flen,’ she told him. ‘You can’t let anybody else hear of it.’

  ‘When have I ever?’ he asked rhetorically.

  Lucia regarded him for a moment. She had a way of seeing into people that was frankly uncanny; but she did not need to doubt him. She knew that Flen counted her the most important person alive, and not because of any expectations of healing the land or ruling the empire. It was simply because she was his best friend.

  There was one thing that she had never quite been able to puzzle out about him, though: why did he want to be with her? Not that she thought herself unpopular: on the contrary, she had a wide circle of friends, who seemingly came to her without any effort on her part, attracted by some magnetism of personality that she did not really understand since she was by no means the most lively or social of people. But Flen had been virtually inseparable from her since the day they had met. He had always sought her out before any others, had always possessed a seemingly endless patience for her quirks and oddities. She had given virtually nothing back for a long time. She enjoyed his company, and allowed him to be with her, but she was in a world of her own and she had learned by then that it was useless inviting anyone to join her there.

  Yet he had persisted. He was a popular boy himself, and she often wondered why he did not spend his time with someone whom he did not need to make such an effort for; but she was always his priority, and gradually, gradually, she became used to him. Of all the people she had ever known, he was the one closest to understanding her, and she loved him for it. She loved his guileless, unselfish heart and his honesty. Though they made a strange pair, they were friends, in the purity of that state that only exists before the complication of adulthood corrupts it.

  ‘I’ll tell you what I learned in Alskain Mar,’ she said.

  ‘Spirits, I thought you’d never get round to it,’ Flen said mischievously. She did not laugh or smile, but she knew it was his way to joke when he was nervous or uncertain, and he was suddenly both. Lucia’s expression was grave. She was remembering the horror on Zaelis’s face as she passed on to him the things the spirit had showed her, the coldness in Cailin’s eyes.

  ‘Maybe learn is the wrong word,’ she corrected herself. ‘I didn’t learn as if someone was teaching me. It was . . . as if I was remembering and prophesying at the same time; as if it was a memory and a prediction of a future that had already come to pass. At first it was hard to understand . . . it still is hard for me to think on it. The things I know now aren’t clear.’ She looked down at the ground and began to fiddle with a blade of grass. ‘It was like hanging onto the fin of a whale, and having it plunge you down further than you can imagine to the wonders at the bottom of the sea. Except that your eyes can’t focus underwater, so it’s all a blur. You can’t open your mouth to speak. And sooner or later you remember that the whale doesn’t need to breathe as much as you do.’

  ‘What did it show you?’

  ‘It showed me the witchstones,’ she said, and her gaze seemed suddenly haunted.

  When she did not elaborate for a time, Flen prompted her: ‘And what did you see?’

  She shook her head slightly, as if in denial of what she was about to say. ‘Flen, I am part of something much bigger than anyone thought,’ she whispered. She clutched his hands and looked up to meet his stare. ‘We all are. This isn’t just about an empire; this isn’t a matter of who sits on the throne, no matter how many thousand lives are at stake. The Golden Realm itself watches us with the keenest intent, and the gods themselves are playing their hand.’

  ‘You’re saying that the gods are controlling things?’ Flen asked, unable to keep a hint of scepticism from his voice.

  ‘No, no,’ Lucia said. ‘The gods don’t control. They’re more subtle than that. They use avatars and omens, to bend the will of their faithful to do their work. There’s no predestination, no destiny. We all have our choices to make. It’s us who have to fight our battles.’

  ‘Then what . . .’

  ‘Kaiku always said that the witchstones were alive, but she was only half right,’ Lucia explained, uncharacteristically hurried. The words were trembling out of her and she could not stop them. ‘They’re not just alive, they’re aware! Not like the spirits of the rocks in the earth; not like the simple thoughts of the trees. They’re intelligent, and malevolent, and they are becoming more so with every passing day.’

  Flen barely knew whether to credit this at all, but he did not have the chance to decide.

  ‘The Weavers are not our true enemies, Flen!’ Lucia cried, her face an unnatural red in the dust-veiled morning sun. ‘They believe themselves the puppet masters, but they are only the puppets. Slaves to the witchstones.’

  ‘This is—’ Flen began, but Lucia interrupted him again.

  ‘You have to hear me out!’ she snapped, and Flen was shocked into silence. For the first time he began to appreciate the depth of Lucia’s terror at what she had found out in Alskain Mar. ‘The witchstones use the Weavers. They make them think that they are operating to their own agenda, but no Weaver really knows who sets that agenda; they believe it part of a collective consciousness. That consciousness is the will of the witchstones. The Weavers are only the foot-soldiers. They are addicts, trapped by their longing fo
r the witchstone dust in their Masks, not even knowing that in gaining their powers they are subverting themselves to a higher master.’

  She looked around, as if fearing someone was listening; and indeed it seemed that way, for the dragonflies had quieted and departed, and the wind had fallen. ‘That first witchstone, the one beneath Adderach . . . it ensnared the miners who found it. It was weak then, starved for thousands of years, but they were weaker. They took the dust, driven by some compulsion they did not understand. They learned to give it blood in the same way. It grew, and as it grew its power grew, and it sent the Weavers out into the world to be its eyes and ears and hands. It sent them to find more witchstones.’

  ‘But what are the witchstones?’ Flen asked.

  ‘The answers were in front of us, but nobody wanted to believe it,’ Lucia whispered. ‘I would not have believed it, except that what the spirit of Alskain Mar showed me was more than truth or lies or fact or fiction. Even that spirit was not old enough to have witnessed what happened all that time ago, but it told me what it knew.’

  She closed her eyes, squeezed them tightly shut, and when she spoke she was using a more formal mode of speech, used when referring directly to the gods.

  ‘The gods fought, in an epoch when civilisation had barely left its cradle. In that time, the entity we call Aricarat, youngest of Assantua and Jurani, made war in the Golden Realm, for reasons lost to history. He almost overthrew Ocha himself, but in a last stand his own parents led an army that slew him, in a battle that tore the skies. At his death, his own aspect in the tapestry of the world – the fourth moon that bore his name – was destroyed, and pieces of the moon rained down onto the world in the cataclysm that Saran told us about.’ She squeezed his hands harder. ‘But he was not dead,’ she whispered. ‘Not while a part of him remained in the tapestry . . . in our world. The moon came down in pieces, and some of those pieces survived. In each of them, a tiny fragment of Aricarat’s spirit remained. Dormant.’

  ‘Fragments?’

  Lucia nodded and released his hands, lifting her head. ‘Fragments of a shattered god. They have lain there for thousands of years, until chance unearthed one again in the spot where Adderach now stands. Now it uses the Weavers to reach out to other fragments, unearthing them, awakening them with blood sacrifice. They are linked, as the Weavers are linked, like a web. Each one that they dig up makes the whole stronger; each one gives the Weavers more power. They are the fractured pieces of Aricarat; and each one they rescue is one step closer to his resurrection.’ Her eyes filled with tears, and her voice became quiet and fearful. ‘He’s so angry, Flen. I felt his rage. Right now he is still weak, only a shadow of his former self, impotent; but his hate burns so brightly. He will dominate this land, and he will dominate all the lands. And when enough of the witchstones have been awoken, he will return, and wreak his vengeance.’

  Flen did not have a response to that. The bloody light of Nuki’s eye seemed infernal, bathing the valley in dread.

  ‘Already his power works against Enyu and her children, the gods and goddesses of natural things,’ Lucia continued. ‘His very existence poisons the land, twists the animals and the people who eat of its crops. If he wins here, he will take the battle to the Golden Realm, against the gods themselves. That is why we have to stop him. For if the Weavers and the witchstones are not destroyed now, they will engulf the world like a shroud. And that will only be the beginning.’

  A single tear slid from her eye and coursed down her cheek. ‘It is a new war of the gods, played out here in Saramyr. And all of Creation is at stake.’

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Over Zila, grey clouds blanketed the sky, turning midday into a muted, steely glower. A horseman in Blood Vinaxis livery rode from the massive south gate of the town, down the hill towards where the lines of troops waited, overlooked by tall siege engines. Behind him, the gate boomed shut.

  Xejen watched him go from the window of his chamber at the top of the keep, hands clasped behind his back, drumming his fingertips nervously on his knuckles. When the rider was out of sight, he swung around to where Bakkara stood scratching his jaw. Mishani reclined on a settee against one wall, her hair spilling over her shoulder, her eyes revealing nothing.

  ‘What do you think?’ Xejen asked them.

  Bakkara shrugged. ‘What difference does it make? They’re going to attack us anyway, whether we give them a “gesture of good faith” or not. They just don’t want the embarrassment of dealing with a bunch of minor noble families who’ll be angry if their sons and daughters get killed during the liberation.’

  ‘Liberation?’ Xejen said, with a high laugh. ‘Spirits, you talk like you’re on their side.’

  ‘They’ll call it a liberation if they win,’ he said equably. ‘Besides, what’s the choice? We can hardly send them out any hostages. The mob had them when we took this town.’

  ‘That news will not win you any friends,’ Mishani pointed out.

  ‘So we just refuse, then,’ Xejen concluded, snapping his fingers at the air. ‘Let them believe we have the hostages. As you say, they’ll attack us anyway, sooner or later. But I have faith in Zila’s walls, unlike you.’ He finished with a sharp look at the grizzled soldier.

  ‘I would not advise that,’ Mishani said. ‘A flat refusal will make them think you are stubborn and unwilling to parlay. Next time, they will not trouble themselves. And you may need to fall back on negotiation if things do not go according to your plan.’

  Bakkara suppressed a smile. For such a small and dainty thing, she was remarkably self-assured. It was evidence of her skill at politics that she had, over the last few days, installed herself as Xejen’s primary adviser while still never giving him a straight answer as to whether she would declare her support for the Ais Maraxa or not. Xejen was pathetically eager for her help, for Bakkara’s help, for anyone who was more decisive than he was. In matters concerning Lucia, his mind was sharp and clear and inflexible; but now he had won himself a town, he appeared increasingly unsure of what to do with it. He may have been a powerful motivator, but he knew nothing of military matters, and left most of it to Bakkara, whom he had declared his second-in-command in Zila after the revolt.

  ‘What would you do, then, Mistress Mishani?’ Bakkara asked with exaggerated reverence. She ignored the tone.

  ‘Send them Chien,’ she said.

  Bakkara barked a laugh in surprise, then shut his mouth. Xejen glared at him.

  ‘Is there some joke I’m missing?’ he asked.

  ‘Apologies,’ Bakkara said wryly. ‘I’m merely touched by the noble sacrifice Mistress Mishani is making. She could have pleaded her own case, after all.’

  Mishani gazed evenly at Xejen, disregarding the soldier’s jibe. She had no intention of pleading her own case. If she went out there, news of her presence would be everywhere within a day, and she would be an easy target for her father’s men. Besides, she knew perfectly well that Xejen would not allow her to leave. She was too precious an asset to him, and she remained so by making him believe that she shared the same goals and beliefs as he.

  ‘Send them one hostage as a gesture of good faith,’ she said. ‘He does not know that the other nobles have died; for all he is aware, there could be many more imprisoned in the donjons of the keep. Chien is useless to you anyway, and what is more, he is very ill and your physician has been unable to do anything to help him.’ She glanced at Bakkara. ‘He is innocent, and does not deserve to be here.’

  ‘He will tell them of the strength of our forces,’ Xejen said, stalking around the room. ‘He will name names.’

  ‘He has barely been outside the room you put him in,’ Mishani replied. ‘He knows nothing of your forces.’

  ‘And as to naming names,’ Bakkara put in, ‘isn’t that what we want to happen?’

  ‘Exactly,’ Mishani agreed. ‘Chien is a major player among merchants and maritime industries. If he starts talking, his ships will carry the word across the Near World.’

&
nbsp; Xejen twiddled the fingers on one hand. He was obviously persuaded, but he was making a great show of deliberation. Evidently he thought someone like Mishani might be fooled by that, and he would not seem quite so eager to agree with her.

  ‘Yes, yes, it could work,’ he muttered to himself. ‘Will you talk to him, Mistress Mishani?’

  ‘I will talk to him,’ Mishani said.

  As it turned out, it was not quite as easy as Mishani had thought.

  ‘I will not leave you alone here!’ Chien raged. ‘You can’t ask me to do this!’

  Mishani was as impassive as always, but inside she was frankly shocked at the sudden fierceness of his emotion. He had been moved to more comfortable quarters after his confinement had ended. It was no different from the rest of the drab keep, comprising a few heavy wall hangings, rugs, a comfortable bed in consideration of his weak state and a few odds and ends like a table and a chest for clothes. She had not exaggerated the severity of his fever to Xejen; but he obviously felt well enough to get angry, even if he was still too weak to stand up.

  ‘Calm yourself!’ she snapped, and the sudden harshness in her voice quieted him. ‘You are acting like a child. Do you think I would not rather come with you? I want you to go because you must do something for me that only you can do.’

  His hair had grown out a little during his confinement, a black stubble across his broad scalp, and he had evidently not been inclined to put a razor to it yet. He gave her a reluctantly mollified look and said: ‘What is it, then, that only I can do?’

  ‘You can help save my life,’ she said. It was calculated to stall the last of his indignation, and it worked.

  ‘How?’ he asked. Now he was ready to hear it.

  ‘I need you to take a message for me,’ she told him. ‘To Barak Zahn tu Ikati.’