Braided Path 03 - The Ascendancy Veil

by Chris Wooding

Abruptly the battle in the Weave collapsed. The Weavers, as one, faded from the field, drawing back into themselves. The Sisters, bewildered, made to follow, but Cailin forbade them.

  ((Do not be drawn in. We will descend and face them there))

  Adderach was eerily silent. There was no fighting, whether physical or in the Weave. The place was still, but for the pulsing of the witchstone beneath their feet.

  ‘Come,’ said Cailin, and she swept away. Kaiku followed, Tsata and the other Tkiurathi with her. They were somewhere near the centre of the edifice, Kaiku knew that much. Other Sisters were heading for other routes down. The Tkiurathi were draining into them too, leaving Adderach and its surrounds empty. They did not have a large enough force to retain a guard on the surface, in case an enemy army should arrive. If they did not succeed below, then their only chance at survival was to get out and away before the Weavers answered the distress call sent a short while ago.

  Otherwise, they would be trapped down there.

  Asara fired, primed, fired again. It took two more shots to get through the latchjaw’s thick skull, but eventually she hit the brain. It slumped to the ground, its great porcupine-like quills shivering as it settled.

  Grimed with sweat and dust, she took quick stock of her surroundings and located Reki. He was in the midst of a crowd of men, his nakata drawn but unbloodied; he was well protected. They struggled with another pair of latchjaws, squat monstrosities with fanged snouts, covered in deadly spines. They had stubby feet that protruded before them, their three digits stumpy and clawed; they had no back feet at all, only a short tail which they dragged behind them. Though they were cumbersome, they were fast enough in a lunge and their spiky armour meant that they were incredibly dangerous at close quarters.

  She looked around. The floor of the pass was thick with fighting, but the desert warriors’ core still held strong, due in no small part to the fact that most of the Aberrants had already left. At first the overwhelming tide of predators had taken a great toll on them, but Reki’s generals had wisely kept up the defensive until their reprieve came. At some unseen signal, which Asara guessed had come from the Weavers at Adderach, the larger proportion of their attackers had broken away and headed northward up the pass. But they had left enough to keep the desert warriors busy for quite some while, and the battle continued on. Their situation was not quite so desperate now, but it was far from comfortable.

  Reki was casting about for a sight of his wife, and relief showed on his face when their eyes met. She had become separated in the melee; now she slung her rifle across her back, drew a dagger and began to make her way to him, shying away from the swell of conflict as it loomed close to her.

  The latchjaws had succumbed at last to their wounds, after taking down three of Reki’s men, and his Blood Tanatsua bodyguards were regrouping around their Barak. They parted to allow Asara through. Reki regarded her for a moment, then unexpectedly he embraced her, driving the breath from her. He recoiled with a grunt, looking down at his hand.

  Asara took it, concern on her face. There was a deep scratch along his palm, where the tip of the dagger she held had caught him. Blood welled up from within. ‘Careful, my Barak,’ she muttered. ‘You will hurt yourself.’ She turned the hand over, then looked up at him with a smile. ‘I pray that is the worst of the wounds you sustain today.’

  ‘These men will see to that,’ he grinned. ‘I even find myself eager to join in at times, but they will not hear of it.’

  Asara brought out a bandage from a pocket in her travel clothes and expertly bound his hand. He flexed it; there was still perfect freedom of movement.

  ‘Where did you learn to do that?’

  ‘Don’t,’ Asara warned, her eyes hardening a little, and the moment of tenderness between them was gone.

  Reki opened his mouth to speak, then closed it again and looked away. Now was not the time. He would have answers from her, whatever it took; but that would come later.

  A shout of alarm made him snap his head round in time to see five ghauregs powering their way through a group of soldiers, heading for him and his men.

  ‘Get back!’ he cried, pushing Asara behind him. His bodyguards arranged themselves to tackle the menace. One of the creatures was taken down by rifles before it reached them; the other four crashed bellowing into their midst.

  Reki’s bodyguards were the best warriors Blood Tanatsua had to offer, but even they could not easily kill a ghaureg. Reki stumbled and fell as his men were driven back into him. He scrambled to his feet, looking around for Asara but unable to see her in the press. Blades sang: one of the ghauregs lost the fingers of its hand, another one had its leg cut off at the knee and fell. Someone split its face with their sword. Suddenly Reki’s bravado seemed ridiculous: he was no fighter, and had no wish to be anywhere near combat if he could help it. But he was no coward either, and he would not run.

  The battle had suddenly grown around him. Everything pressed in closer. He cast about for the enemy, but he could not see over the jostle of his bodyguards. A man screamed somewhere. There was a volley of rifle shots. A gap opened in the crush, and he saw a ghaureg on its knees, being hacked to pieces by his soldiers.

  Then the army flexed and flowed away from him, and there was space again. The battle was no longer so near. His bodyguards moved to surround him. The ghauregs were dead, and shortly afterward a runner told him that the Sisters had begun to overcome the nearby Weavers and were killing the Nexuses that plagued them. The battle was turning.

  Reki listened with half an ear: he was searching, becoming increasingly frantic.

  ‘Where is your Barakess?’ he demanded of the people around him. ‘Where is Asara?’

  But they could not answer him, and he himself had not seen her since the ghauregs had attacked.

  In the end, he did not find her. Not even after the battle was over, and the remainder of the army – almost half its size now – forged on to Adderach in the hope of saving their allies there. Grief-stricken, he stayed with a small retinue and walked the corpse-strewn pass, praying to Suran that she might still somehow be alive.

  Perhaps he would have found her, if he had been given time. He would have hunted for her over every inch of Saramyr if there was but the faintest shred of hope. Maybe, when he found her, he would have found her with the child that was his.

  But Asara knew that. It was the reason she had disappeared into the mountains, and it was the reason she had smeared her dagger in poison. She had taken the unguent from the master poisoner who had collaborated with the assassin Keroki in an attempt to kill her husband months ago. It would be almost two hours before it would be felt, and by the time it struck it would be too late to remove it and too sudden for even a Sister of the Red Order to do anything but watch.

  Barak Reki tu Tanatsua spent the last of his life looking desperately for the woman he loved, not realising that she had already murdered him, as she had murdered his sister long ago.

  THIRTY-ONE

  Cailin, Kaiku and the Tkiurathi emerged from the end of a sloping shaft, and into the sub-levels of Adderach.

  Kaiku looked down the corridor that lay before them. It had once been a mine tunnel – that much was evident by the glimpses of rough stone that could occasionally be found – but its surface was almost entirely covered in metal. The walls were thick with black pipes that dripped a noxious liquid; the floor was of iron or some alloy of that. Gas-torches burned with smoky flames, connected by cables that ran along the ceiling.

  The Tkiurathi were eager to be on with their task, distrusting their surroundings. They took point, with Cailin and Kaiku just behind and Tsata with them. Kaiku caught his nervousness and laid a hand on his forearm when nobody was looking.

  ‘Hthre,’ she murmured to him, offering the Tkiurathi pledge of mutual support.

  Surprised, he grinned at her. ‘Hthre,’ he replied. It did not matter that she had got it wrong, that hthre was supposed to be the response and not the offer. The sentiment was what co
unted, and he found it heartened him immensely in this dark and horrible place.

  They hurried down the corridors, following Cailin’s directions. Kaiku suspected that the Pre-Eminent did not know exactly where she was going: the witchstone’s influence was overwhelming and made it hard to navigate. But that was a double-edged sword, for it also gave them a very definite target. They merely had to head for the epicentre of that influence, and there would be the witchstone.

  But they saw no sign of their enemy at all. There were small rooms, like cells, some of them full of noisy devices and others standing empty and apparently without purpose. They looked into them as they passed by, but did not stop. They had other priorities.

  They met up with another group of Tkiurathi and a half-dozen Sisters at a junction, swelling their numbers. Keeping in contact was harder now: it was like trying to shout over a hurricane. The brooding energy beneath them was confusing the Weave, sending it into disarray. Kaiku hoped it would hamper the Weavers as much as it would the Sisters, but somehow she doubted it.

  The Sisters and the Tkiurathi were descending from above, spreading out through the tunnels of the old mine, an army of ants invading an enemy nest. But still the enemy would not meet them.

  Cailin’s force was the first to come out of the corridors. The claustrophobic tunnels opened into a massive room, bigger than any great hall ever built in Saramyr. It was circular in shape and flat-roofed, and as the invaders poured in from the tunnel they gradually faltered and stood there, aghast, at the sight.

  It was stultifyingly hot and oppressive. The air was tinged with a coppery taste and thick with steam and smoke. There were two upper levels to the room: wide, ringed platforms that ran around the edge, walkways of metal. At ground level, furnaces roared from within their casings, glowing red through the vents at their sides and spewing strange gases. Contraptions clattered and jerked, chattering through cycles of activity incomprehensible to the observers.

  Placed in concentric rows around the room were elaborate metal cradles. Hanging amid the cradles’ frames were veiny, transparent sacs of flesh that looked like the stomach of some huge animal. Within, there were dark shapes suspended in liquid, lit by a greenish inner glow, visible only as smears from a distance.

  Kaiku walked up to one, dazed by the scale of what they had discovered, and knelt down to look inside it.

  It was a child, an infant, perhaps three harvests old but out of proportion, its bones too long. Its tiny chest sucked in and out as it breathed the liquid. It was on its side, facing her, and on top of its bald head there was the glistening diamond shape of a nexus-worm female embedded in its flesh. Kaiku could see a face tracked with ridges where the tendrils ran just beneath the skin, reaching to its eyes and mouth and nose, around which thin purple capillaries showed through. Its eyes were open, but they did not follow Kaiku as she moved. They were purest black.

  A young Nexus. They grew them here, in these wombs.

  Kaiku stared at the thing in the tank, numb. Cailin came up next to her.

  ‘Is this what knowledge their god gives them?’ Kaiku said. ‘They blaspheme against Enyu herself.’

  ‘That is not all,’ Cailin said, motioning across the room.

  Kaiku got to her feet and went to where a trio of larger cradles stood. The Tkiurathi were gathered around them, talking in hushed tones. She caught a word she knew: maghkriin. It was the name they gave to the beings created by the Fleshcrafters in Okhamba, who shaped babies in the bellies of their captured enemies to make them monstrous killers.

  As she neared the cradles, she understood.

  It was difficult to tell what the things that hung in the sacs had originally been, nor what they might become. But they moved fitfully, here twitching a leg, there curling a claw. They were baby Aberrants, three of the same species but each one different from the other. One was growing little fins along its arms, another was developing outsize teeth, while the last was a true horror with two three-quarter heads fused together in the centre, its animal features colliding and merging. The sacs glowed from within with the same nauseating light which Kaiku recognised as that given off by witchstone.

  She had seen what happened to the Edgefathers who were in contact with the witchstone for too long. She knew how the Weavers changed through even the tiny dose of dust in their Masks. The Weavers were using witchstone to mutate these creatures, who were probably themselves the offspring of mutants. Like the Fleshcrafters, they were shaping their troops. Designing Aberrants through forced mutation and selective breeding. Was this where the latchjaws had come from? The nexus-worms? The golneri?

  To Kaiku, the noise of the room faded until she could hear only the sound of her own breathing. The hate in her was choking all else. She wanted to lash out, to ruin this place, to kill every one of the Weavers and eradicate their practices from a world she had once loved. She thought suddenly of Tane, the priest of Enyu who had died to save Lucia, a man who had dedicated himself to understanding nature. How this would have destroyed him. All this time, these two and a half centuries, the Weavers had been learning the dark art of subverting Enyu’s plans, using these poisonous devices to imitate her processes and turn them to their advantage.

  She felt a hand on her shoulder.

  ‘We must go,’ Tsata said. Behind him the Tkiurathi were beginning to move again. They crossed the room and out through the far doorway, the Sisters following behind. Kaiku paused beneath the coiled-iron frame, her shoulders tight.

  ‘Cailin,’ she said, and the Pre-Eminent, who had been just ahead of her, stopped. She saw the look in Kaiku’s eyes, and nodded.

  When the last of the Tkiurathi had left the room, the two of them remained in the doorway, like estranged twins, their appearance uniting them in ways that they did not feel. The only thing between them now was a common goal.

  Kaiku waved a dismissive hand, and the sacs detonated from within, spewing a green flood. Those that lined the upper levels burst at the same time, slopping forth their embryonic cargo like rough abortions. A great deluge of the amniotic liquid came splashing over the edge of the walkways and washed around the boots of the Sisters.

  ‘I wish you would change your mind, Kaiku,’ Cailin said at length. ‘Stay with us. We have need of your strength. And there is so much more you could learn from me.’

  But Kaiku turned away and stalked down the corridor after the departing Tkiurathi, and Cailin, after appraising the destruction for a few moments more, followed her.

  The first attack on the intruders occurred not long afterward.

  It was Cailin who sensed it. She was somehow able to filter through the baffling effect that the witchstone produced, at least to a better extent than Kaiku could. Kaiku’s kana was limited to her line of sight now; the very walls seemed infused with the stuff of the witchstone, and it was extraordinarily hard to try and Weave through it. She had only been given hints of how much greater Cailin’s mastery of her kana was than her own, for Cailin kept her secrets close; but she was becoming more and more assured that the Pre-Eminent and some of the most proficient Sisters operated in an entirely different league.

  What Cailin sensed she rebroadcast with greater clarity for those nearby, and that was how Kaiku learned of it. Garbled empathic impressions of surprise, pain, and combat. Then silence, and the soft ache of death.

  Cailin said nothing, but she continued on and the others went with her.

  It happened again later, as they hunted through another empty series of rooms. This time it was a bigger group of Sisters and Tkiurathi, and there was a clearer picture. Aberrants, swamping into the corridor, bolstered by Weavers. They were systematically assaulting the Sisters, group by group, taking advantage of the fact that they had to split up to search the complex. This was what they had lured them down here for. They knew their best chance for survival lay in picking the Sisters apart.

  But that was not a usual Weaver tactic, Kaiku thought. If they had the strength of numbers, they would have attacked outright
. They were delaying until their reinforcements could arrive. They were on the defensive.

  As Cailin had hoped, they had been drawn off by Reki’s men, and had not left enough of their forces behind to protect themselves from something like this.

  As it turned out, the second group of Sisters were not taken down so easily. The Tkiurathi put up a vicious fight, and it was still ongoing by the time Cailin and Kaiku were ambushed.

  The Aberrants boiled out of a side-corridor, filling the junction with their bodies and ploughing towards the Tkiurathi, howling. They almost caught the front line by surprise: they had been virtually soundless in their approach, and the Weavers had cloaked themselves from the Sisters well enough that, in this difficult environment, not even Cailin had detected them. But the soft warbling of the shrillings had given them away at the last moment. The Tkiurathi met the charge with their gutting-hooks sweeping.

  The two groups crashed together. The corridors were wide enough for seven or eight to fight at a time, but the Aberrants in their frenzy clambered over the top of the combatants to reach those behind. Most found themselves eviscerated as they did so, their exposed underbellies ripped open and their steaming innards spilling out. The front line of the Tkiurathi collapsed under the weight of the creatures and were either dragged free or savaged. But the Okhambans were taking down the Aberrants faster than they themselves were dying. Their twin-bladed weapons, one in each hand, hacked and plunged and parried. The warriors, men and women both, were possessed of an uncanny harmony of movement that kept their blows from interfering with their neighbour’s even when they were packed tight like this.

  The Weavers had made one bad mistake. The Tkiurathi were born for close combat. Their weapons were adapted to its purpose and their fighting technique tailored to those conditions. Life in the jungle had meant that they had evolved short, fast, controlled movements so that they would not tangle their blades in vines or trees, and they had reactions honed by generations of living in one of the most hostile places in the Near World. Here in the confines of the tunnels they outclassed the Aberrants, who were used to the open spaces of the mountains.