The Skein of Lament

by Chris Wooding

  He looked at Avun, his small eyes agleam amid the folds of his face. Avun returned the gaze unblinkingly. As if summoned, the two Weavers rode up alongside, one with the visage of a grimacing demon, one with an insectile face of gemstone, a Mask of incalculable wealth.

  Avun nodded imperceptibly at Grigi. Grigi’s voice was trembling with excitement as he turned to the Weavers and spoke.

  ‘Begin.’

  The rising roar of the armies as they closed on each other floated high into the sky, reaching to where Mos stood on a balcony of the Imperial Keep and looked down over the distant battle. His eyes were hollow and his beard thin and lank; a soft breath of air from the city below stirred his hair where it hung limply against his forehead. His flesh seemed to hang off his broad, stocky frame now, and he held a goblet of dark wine in one hand, nursing it as tenderly as if it were the child he had killed. But his gaze was clear, and despite the grief written so plainly on him, he seemed more his old self than in recent days.

  How ridiculous it seemed, he thought. The plains surrounding Axekami were so flat that there was no real terrain advantage to be had, so Kerestyn had simply marched up to the city, Mos had sent his men out, and they had stood there waiting to kill each other. An idiotic civility. If there had been any passion involved, the enemy forces would have torn into each other on sight; but war was passionless, at least from where he stood. So they lined up their pieces in preparation for a charge, and only commenced when everyone was ready. It was enough to make him laugh, if he had any laughter in him.

  The charge looked strangely surreal, like homing birds released from their cages. The front ranks simply dissolved into a mad dash as the signal to attack was given, and were matched by their counterparts on the other side. The distant report of fire-cannons preceded flashes of flame as sections of the charging troops were immolated. Riflemen were firing, reloading, firing, switching guns when their powder burned out. Horsemen swung out to the flanks. Manxthwa-riders powered through the foot-soldiers, their mounts turned from docile beasts of burden to angry mountains of shaggy muscle in the heat of combat, kicking out with their spatulate front hooves, their sad and misleadingly wise-looking faces turned to snarls. Up here, it was possible to see the formations moving in a slow dance, arranging themselves around the great central mass where the foot-soldiers hacked each other into bloody slabs in a dance of exquisite bladework.

  ‘You do not seem at all concerned, my Emperor,’ Kakre said, stepping out onto the balcony. Mos’s nose wrinkled slightly at the sick-dog smell of him.

  ‘Perhaps I simply don’t care,’ Mos replied. ‘Win, lose, what does it matter? The land is still blighted. Perhaps Kerestyn will kill me, perhaps I will kill him. I don’t envy him the task he takes on with my mantle.’

  Kakre regarded him strangely. He disliked the tone in Mos’s voice. It was entirely too light. Since the death of Laranya, Kakre had ceased twisting the Emperor’s dreams, trusting his own despondency to make him pliable without the risk of manipulating his mind directly. For a time, it had worked: he had barely questioned Kakre when he had advised that an army should be sent to forestall the desert Baraks, had not even checked the size of Kerestyn’s army for himself. And yet now, despite his words, that despondency seemed to have fallen from him. Perhaps he was simply being fatalistic, Kakre reasoned. He had good reason to be, oh indeed.

  Kakre’s mind went elsewhere, to another battle, where at the very same moment the last remaining thorn in the Weavers’ side was about to be removed. How things had shifted in their favour, that the Ais Maraxa should be foolish enough to expose themselves by inciting a revolt in Zila. Kakre had promised Mos that he would deal with the cause of that revolt and he had meant it. He had contacted Fahrekh, Blood Vinaxis’ Weaver, and all the others in the vicinity and given them one simple instruction: take one of the leaders alive, and strip their mind raw. Chance had delivered them Xejen tu Imotu, but it could as easily have been one of a half-dozen others. The Ais Maraxa had been troublesome for so long: they were too well hidden, and Kakre did not have the time to ferret them out, especially as their connection with the Heir-Empress might have been a false lead. But their zeal had been the end of them, and now it would be the end of their divine saviour. For Lucia was alive, and furthermore, Fahrekh had found out where she was.

  The timing was fractionally inconvenient. Kakre would have liked to send an even greater number of Aberrants to the Fold than they had mustered, but the bulk of their force had been needed elsewhere. Even so, there were more than enough; enough to weather the occasional mistakes and setbacks, such as the massacre of the Aberrants in the canyons west of the Fold.

  Kakre did not want to take the risk of simply killing the Heir-Empress and then have the Libera Dramach use her as a martyr. He wanted the Libera Dramach too, to smash that last resistance, to capture their leaders and force them to give up their co-conspirators until all sedition was stamped out. And if he was fortunate, more fortunate than he dared hope, he might even find that Weaving bitch that had killed his predecessor.

  Today, in the span between sunrise and sunset, all the Weavers’ troubles would be removed.

  He had all but forgotten about his suspicious mood when he felt the mental approach of another of his kind. Fast as the flicker of a synapse, he dived into the Weave to meet him, flashing along the currents of the void until the two minds joined in a tangle of threads, knotting and mingling, passing information, then pulling away into retreat. Kakre was back into himself in moments, rage bursting into life inside him. He turned his attention to the battle again, looking hard at the tiny figures that fought and died down there.

  A mile north-west of the combat, a vast clot of red and silver had appeared, moving fast towards the rear of the Blood Kerestyn forces. Eight thousand Blood Batik troops, as if from nowhere. From the Imperial Keep, they could see fifteen miles to the horizon, and there had been no sign of the troops until now.

  ‘Mos!’ he croaked. ‘What is this?’

  Mos gave him a dry look. ‘This is how I beat Grigi tu Kerestyn,’ he said.

  ‘How?’ Kakre cried, his fingers turned to claws on the parapet of the balcony.

  ‘Kakre, you seem discomfited,’ Mos observed, mockingly polite. ‘I’d advise you not to take out your aggressions on me as you did before. I may be Emperor for a very long time yet, despite your best efforts to the contrary, and it would be well not to make me angry.’ He smiled suddenly, a mirthless rictus. ‘Do we understand each other?’

  Kakre had been listening in disbelief, but now he found his voice again. ‘What have you done, Mos?’ he demanded hoarsely.

  ‘Eight thousand cloaks, matched to the colour of the grass on the plains,’ he said. He sounded nothing like the broken man that he had seemed to be only a few short hours ago. Now his voice was flat and cold. ‘I didn’t send my men to meet the desert Baraks. And I didn’t send them after Reki either. I had them all double back. I had something of an intuition that Kerestyn might hear of this opportunity, and that he might come in greater numbers than I expected. Before dawn, I sent them out and had them hide under their cloaks and wait. You’d never see them unless you were close.’

  Kakre’s eyes blazed within the black pits of his Mask. ‘And what about the desert Baraks?’ he hissed.

  ‘Let them come,’ Mos shrugged. ‘They’ll find Kerestyn shattered and me ruling in Axekami with nobody to challenge me. And of course, my loyal Weavers by my side.’ This last was delivered in an insultingly sardonic tone. ‘Sometimes it’s best not to let anyone know everything, Kakre. A good ruler realises that. And don’t forget I helped make Blood Batik great long before I met you.’

  ‘I am your Weave-lord!’ Kakre barked. ‘I need to know everything!’

  ‘So you can turn it against me? I think not,’ Mos said, his voice quiet and deadly. He was a man who had nothing left to lose, and even the terror of the Weavers had no hold on him now. The Imperial Keep had cast them both in shadow, but Mos’s rage made him
seem darker still. ‘I’m no fool. I know what you’re doing. You treat with Koli and Kerestyn to get rid of me.’ His eyes filled with tears of sheer hatred. ‘You should never have let go, Kakre. You should never have stopped the dreams.’ He leaned closer, breathing in the stench of corrupted flesh, showing his enemy that he was not afraid.

  ‘I know it was you,’ he whispered.

  The gaping death-mask of Kakre looked back at him emptily.

  ‘I can kill you in a moment,’ the Weave-lord said, the words issuing from the cavernous black mouth dripping with venom.

  ‘But you daren’t,’ Mos said, leaning back and away from him. ‘Because you don’t know who will be Emperor by nightfall now. And you won’t use your cursed mind-bending power on me, because you can’t be sure it will work. You slipped up once, Kakre. You didn’t cover your tracks when you left.’ He was almost shaking with disgust. ‘I remember. I remember your filthy fingers inside my head. The memories came back; you didn’t bury them deep enough.’

  He turned away, back to the battle, the tears still standing in his eyes. ‘But I still need you, Kakre. Gods save me, I need the Weavers. Without you, there’s no way to get in touch with Okhamba and the Merchant Consortium fast enough to avert this famine. There’s no way to keep this land together when people begin to starve. It will be chaos, and riots, and slaughter.’ He took a shuddering breath, and the tears spilled at last, twin tracks losing themselves in the bristles of his beard. ‘To expose you, to call the noble houses to rise up and throw you out, would cause the death of millions.’

  Kakre’s reaction was unreadable. He faced the Emperor for a long while, but the Emperor would only look at the battle below. Eventually, Kakre turned his attention back that way also.

  ‘Watch closely, Kakre,’ Mos said through gritted teeth. ‘I still have one trick left to play.’

  The noise of the battle was immense, a thuggish, constant bellow underpinned by the boom of artillery and counterpointed by the scrape of steel on steel, the screams of the dead and the dying, the bone-snap reports of rifles. In the killing ground at its centre, men struggled and fought in amidst a crowd of allies and enemies, a world of disorder where every angle could bring a new attack, the survivors owing their continued life to luck as much as skill. Arrows smacked into shoulders and thighs like diving birds plunging after fish. Swords carved through flesh, causing death in ways far more brutal than fiction or history would present. The neat beheadings and swift killing strokes were few; blows glanced, slicing meat from the forearm or hacking halfway through a man’s knee, splitting someone’s face from left cheek to right ear in a spray of shattered bone or chopping into an artery to leave the wounded man bleeding white on the grass of the plains. Flame sprang up in slicks as shellshot burst, burning jelly sticking to skin and cooking it, men flailing and shrieking as their tongues blackened and their eyeballs popped and ran sizzling down their faces. The air was smoke and blood and the sick-sweet smell of charred bodies, and the battle raged on.

  ‘I need the Bloods Nabichi and Gor back here now!’ Grigi was demanding of his Weaver. His high, girlish voice made him sound panicky, but he was far from that. Grigi was very hard to rattle, and the seemingly inexplicable appearance of eight thousand Blood Batik troops behind them was merely a clever move to be countered. Already he had a force moving up to delay them while he could get his fire-cannons turned around and aimed. It was going to make this fight more costly, but he could still win it with shrewd leadership.

  ‘That fool Kakre is going to pay for this,’ he promised, reining his horse around. He did not care that other Weavers were within earshot, both Blood Kerestyn’s and the gem-stone-Masked Weaver of Blood Koli. ‘Why didn’t he warn me about the extra troops? And where’s this intervention he promised?’ He glared at Barak Avun, blaming him for Kakre’s mistakes; after all, it was through Avun that Kakre had contacted him.

  Avun, who had been watching the battle with his hooded, drowsy eyes, turned and gave Grigi a bland stare.

  ‘There will be an intervention,’ Avun said. ‘Just not as you imagine.’ He flicked a gesture at his Weaver.

  The stabbing pain in Grigi’s chest took his breath away. His multitudinous chins bunched up as he gaped, clutching at his leather breastplate. A sparkling agony was spreading along his collarbone to his left arm, numbing his hand. His eyes were wide with disbelief. They flicked to his own Weaver, desperate supplication in their gaze, but the grimacing demon looked at him pitilessly. Grigi gasped half a curse as the strength drained from his limbs.

  ‘History does repeat itself, Grigi,’ Avun said. ‘But it appears that you do not learn from it. You had me betray Blood Amacha last time we were here; you should have known that I cannot be trusted.’

  Grigi’s face had reddened, his eyes bulging as he fought for air that would not seem to come. His heart was a bright star of agony in his chest, sending ribbons of fire through his veins. The sounds of the battle had dimmed, and Avun’s voice was thin in his ear as if from far away. He clutched at his saddle as realisation struck like a hammer: he was dying here, now, surrounded by these three impassive figures on horseback. Gods, no, he wasn’t ready! He hadn’t done what he needed to do! He was within sight of his prize, and it was being snatched from him, and he could not even make a sound to voice his defiance at his tormentor.

  His Weaver. His Weaver was supposed to defend him. They were always loyal, always. The very fabric of their society depended on it. If a Weaver did not serve his master in all things, then the Weavers were too dangerous to exist. They even killed each other in the service of the family that supported them. But this one was letting him die.

  How had Avun won round his Weaver? How?

  ‘You will find that the orders you sent did not get through to their intended recipients,’ Avun was saying languidly. ‘And they will most likely be quite surprised when my troops turn on them, and they are sandwiched between Koli and Batik men to the west and Mos’s main force to the east. It will be quite a slaughter.’ He raised an eyebrow. ‘You, of course, will not live to see it. Your heart gave out in the heat of battle. Small wonder, for one so fat.’

  The pain in Grigi’s body was nothing compared to the pain in his soul, the raw and searing frustration and anger and terror all mixing and mingling to scald him. His vision was dimming now, turning to black, and no matter how he fought against it, no matter how he struggled to cry out and make a sound, he was mute. Men of Blood Kerestyn were only metres away, and yet none of them marked him, none of them saw what the Weavers were doing, reaching an invisible hand inside him to squeeze his heart. To them, he was merely in conference with his aides, and if his expression was distressed and gawping, something like a landed fish, then they were not close enough to notice.

  He looked to Axekami, and it was dark now, the shadowed fingers of its spires reaching out across the carnage to enfold him. Twice he had sought it; twice been denied. Unconsciousness was a mercy. He did not feel himself slump forward and then slide from his saddle, his mountainous body crashing to the earth; did not hear the cries of alarm from Avun, false words to Grigi’s men as they gathered; did not see him and his Weaver slip away from the crowd, to turn the battle with perfidy. There was only the growing golden light, and the threads that seemed to sew through everything, wafting him like fallopian cilia towards what lay beyond oblivion.

  Kakre’s hood flapped about his Masked face in a flurry of wind as he watched the battle unfold. Nuki’s eye had risen overhead now. It was hot in the direct sun, and Kakre’s sweltering robe was entirely inappropriate, but he did not retreat. Neither did Mos. Reports came to them both: to Mos through his runners; to Kakre through the Weave. The morning had passed, and the forces led by Blood Kerestyn were decimated. The armies of some of the most prominent high families in the land had been cut to pieces. Kerestyn themselves, who had dedicated almost all their troops to this venture, would not be able to rise again for decades, if ever. Weakened, they would be unable to continue fighti
ng in the vicious internecine dealings of the nobles, and would be torn apart.

  Avun tu Koli had been clever. Whatever deals he had made, he had managed to execute them without Grigi finding out. It was not only Blood Koli that turned on Kerestyn, but several other families as well, tipping the balance far enough in the Emperor’s favour to make it virtually impossible for Blood Kerestyn to turn the tide back. Ragged armies were fleeing in retreat now, Grigi’s allies deserting him as their cause became hopeless. Kakre noted that Blood Koli troops were almost entirely intact; Avun tu Koli had drawn them out of the conflict, letting the others take care of the battle, content to watch from the sidelines and preserve his men.

  ‘It was you,’ Kakre said at last. ‘I remember now. I had learned of a message to Avun tu Koli, sent from the Keep, but I failed to intercept it.’ He felt a pang of concern that he had forgotten about it until this point.

  ‘Avun tu Koli has always been an honourless dog,’ Mos replied. ‘And that makes him reliable. He’ll always choose the winning side, no matter what his previous loyalties. I just had to convince him that I would win. Look at him, holding his men back. Blood Koli will be the most powerful family behind Batik after this, and he knows it.’ He scratched at his beard, which had gone scraggy and heavily scattered with white as if withered by his grief. ‘You tried, Kakre, and it was a cursed good try. But you are stuck with me, and I’m stuck with you. No matter what you’ve done, we need each other.’

  The words almost caught in his throat: no matter what you’ve done. As if he could dismiss the murder of the woman he loved so easily. As if he could ever love again, or feel anything but sorrow and hatred and shame. Locked with the Weavers in a symbiosis of mutual loathing, he saw nothing but evil in his future; but evil must be endured, for the sake of power. He had lost a son, a wife, and an unborn child now. Such things could drive better men than him to ruin. But he had nephews, and other relations that could take the reins of the Empire when he was gone; and he had a duty to his family, to Blood Batik. He would not give up the throne while he still breathed.