Braided Path 03 - The Ascendancy Veil

by Wooding, Chris

  At one point, Kaiku dropped back to talk to Phaeca. She had somehow managed to imbue even her drab travelling clothes with a touch of flair, and her red hair was as immaculately arranged as ever. Small details like this gladdened Kaiku; they helped to stave off the steadily growing sense of hostility and isolation.

  ‘Why don’t they get it over with?’ she hissed, as soon as Kaiku was nearby.

  ‘Have faith, Phaeca,’ Kaiku said. ‘Lucia will protect us.’

  Phaeca gave her a quick look of disgust. ‘Don’t spin me such platitudes,’ she snapped. ‘You’re as afraid as I am.’ Almost immediately, the anger was gone, and she was aghast at her own reaction. ‘Forgive me,’ she murmured. ‘This place is hard on my nerves.’

  Kaiku nodded. Phaeca’s particularly sensitive nature was both a blessing and a curse here. She wondered whether Cailin had been wise to send her; she suspected the Pre-Eminent had done so only because Kaiku was going, and Phaeca was her closest companion within the Red Order.

  Phaeca, Asara, and possibly Tsata and the two other Tkiurathi were all here because she had come. And she had come because she could not let Lucia make this journey without her. Both she and Lucia, by risking themselves, had dragged others in their wake and put their lives in danger. Selfishness out of selflessness. There was no way to win. She thought she understood a little of Lucia’s sense of being crushed by responsibility now.

  The change, when it came, was sudden.

  Phaeca cried out in fear at the sensation. It was like a thick tar that gathered in from all directions to engulf the mind. The Sisters spun defences automatically to preserve themselves; but the other members of the party had no such recourse. They were swamped by a glowering prescience of doom that manifested all around them. The sunlight that leaked through the leaf canopy thinned and died as if a cloud had passed before Nuki’s eye; but then it began to darken beyond even the drabbest day, blackening to deepest night and worse, until all light was excluded and even those with the ability to see in the dark were rendered blind.

  Panic ensued. The darkness was bad enough, but the terror they felt was out of proportion even to that. Their senses screamed danger at them: there were things nearby, and while their eyes were useless their imaginations took charge. Monstrous, fanged beings, hanging in the air or slinking along the ground, black creatures who could only be envisioned by the gimlet gleam of their claws and teeth. The only sound was the desperate voices of the party, somebody shouting that they must protect Lucia, men who wanted to run but did not dare.

  It took Kaiku a few paralysed seconds before she had the presence of mind to switch her vision into the Weave. The darkness was merely physical, and had no power there. The world blazed into light again, the stitchwork contours of golden threads outlining the forest and the people within. She could see them stumbling, their arms out, eyes open but unseeing, pupils like saucers. Some had drawn swords, and were standing rigidly, listening for the approach of the enemy. The Tkiurathi had dropped into crouches, making themselves small targets; they appeared calm, though the pounding of their hearts and the rush of blood around their bodies told a different story. The threads of the Weave were churning, confirming Kaiku’s suspicion: this terror was an artificial thing, a projection.

  But it was not without cause. For the spirits were coming, manifesting in the air all around them, forming into shapes that mimicked the party’s fears. They were vague and indistinct yet, but gaining coherence with every passing moment, their blurred forms separating into limbs, jaws, talons. Dozens of them. She and Phaeca could not hope to fight them all.

  ‘Lucia!’ she cried, but Lucia was not listening. She was kneeling on the ground, her hands buried into the grassy dirt, her head hung. Somebody shrieked, a voice that faded rapidly as if carried away at speed; Kaiku tried to locate them, but it had happened too fast for her. She cast about helplessly, unable to act. Lucia was talking to them. She could only hope that whatever she said was enough.

  The spirits were bleeding from the air, slinking from the treetops, knotting and sewing into shape with deadly purpose. The blinded humans in their midst flailed, aware that something was coming for them and having no way to prevent it. Kaiku’s kana was raging within her, desperate for release; but the enemy were too many, and there was nowhere to send it that would have any effect. She felt Phaeca across the Weave, felt her struggle to keep control against the choking terror. She could see, as Kaiku could. One of the Libera Dramach narrowly missed impaling a companion on the point of his drawn sword as he staggered about; another almost tripped over Lucia, his hands held out before him, eyes unfocused.

  ‘Stand still, all of you!’ she shouted, putting as much authority as she could muster into her voice. They did so, clinging to her words as a lifeline to control.

  ‘What’s happening?’ someone called to her, fraying with hysteria.

  ‘Lucia will see us through,’ she replied, with more conviction than she felt. ‘Wait.’

  She glanced back at where Lucia knelt. There was another shriek somewhere among the trees, cut short. She squeezed her eyes shut – which did nothing to block her Weave-vision – and prayed. The spirits were looming now, nightmare caricatures of childhood terrors, prowling between the trunks of the trees, stalking the humans. Kaiku desperately wanted to lash out; maybe she could ward them off, make them think twice about their prey. But to do so would mean the death of them all, for whatever Lucia was saying to them, her negotiations would collapse at the first sign of hostility from Kaiku.

  ‘Stand still and wait!’ she said again, because she could not bear the silence. The Tkiurathi had not moved. Asara was nowhere to be seen. And seeping towards them like mist came the spirits, their forms now shifting and warping as they moved, bending perspective to become elongated, then suddenly two-dimensional, now folding around a tree at an angle that had not seemed possible a moment before.

  Closer, closer. Close enough to kill any one of them.

  Something slackened, some constriction in the air that went loose. The oppressive hatred of the spirits seemed to retreat. Kaiku looked to Lucia, but there was no outward reaction from her. The spirits hung where they were. Some of them had risen up by their intended victims like malevolent shadows about to snatch the bodies that formed them. She dared not breathe. Here, at this instant, was the balance. If it tipped one way, they would all live; if the other, she would have no option but to fight, and there would be no hope for them then.

  Then the forest sighed, and the spirits began to float backwards and away, bright eyes still fixed on the humans as they slipped between the trunks of the trees. Kaiku let out the breath she had been holding. The horrifying shapes were losing coherence now, dissipating into the Weave. And with their passing, the sense of malice and danger faded and the light returned. Slowly and by degrees, vision returned to them. It was like waking from a dream.

  They stared at one another gratefully, their eyes thirsty for sight. Guilt and confusion flickered across their faces as they were revealed: some were caught still cringing, others brandished swords inches from their companions. All were ashamed of their fear. Those who had moved about or fallen over reoriented themselves, blinking. The Tkiurathi rose slowly to their feet. Asara reappeared, stepping into view from where she had hidden herself.

  The forest had lightened back to normal now; Nuki’s eye glowed through the canopy, and the world was green and brown and sane again. The silence was as great as before, but the spirits were gone.

  Lucia stood up slowly, her hands still dirty. She looked around, but her gaze passed over them as if they were not there.

  ‘They will give us passage,’ she said simply.

  Phaeca began to cry.

  They went on, for there was little else to do; but their fragile confidence was shattered, and they crept like skulking children beneath the louring boughs of the forest.

  Two of the soldiers had been lost in the darkness, vanished without trace. Had Lucia not been there, none of them wo
uld have been alive now. Far from reassuring them of their faith in their appointed saviour, the incident had reminded them of just how slender their chances really were. Even the Weavers were better than this: at least they were a physical enemy. In the Forest of Xu, they were allowed to survive only because the spirits chose not to kill them. If anything happened to Lucia, they would never leave this place.

  Kaiku’s thoughts were darker still. For she knew something the others did not, and it made matters worse than they already were.

  ‘We’re still not safe here,’ Lucia had said in response to her prompting, once they were back on their way. ‘These spirits suffer us to pass, but there are others that won’t.’

  Kaiku checked that there was nobody else within earshot. ‘What are you saying?’

  ‘As we go further towards the heart, we will find older spirits,’ Lucia replied. ‘They will not be so easily pacified.’

  Kaiku was observing the shaken expressions on the faces of the party.

  ‘Perhaps you had better keep that to yourself for now,’ she muttered, hating herself for advocating dishonesty. ‘For a while, at least.’

  Lucia made a distracted noise, and seemed to forget that Kaiku was there at all.

  Kaiku had walked with Phaeca for a time: she was affected worst of all of them. It hurt to see her in such a state, but some callous part of Kaiku wished that she had not been so indiscreet about her distress. Heart’s blood, she was supposed to be a Sister. These people needed to believe that she was indomitable. Her own weakness was infecting the others, undermining everyone. She was concerned that Phaeca might pick up some of the impatience in her manner, but if she did, she said nothing.

  As the day aged through evening to dusk, the forest became strange.

  The change was slow and gradual. At first it was only an occasional incident: an unfamiliar flower, or a tree that looked odd. Then they found a remarkable rock that poked from the turf, a brilliant silvery lump of some kind of metallic mineral. Later they came across a cluster of dark magenta blossoms which nobody could identify, and a tree whose branches wrapped through the branches of other trees, twisting like vines. The green of their surroundings deepened and became mixed with purple and platinum.

  Heading deeper into the forest, they began to see animals, silent and watchful, some unlike anything they had ever observed before. One of the soldiers swore that he had seen a white creature like a deer, out in the trees. Asara spotted a long-legged spider, carapaced like a crab and as high as a man’s knee, sidling from its burrow. The terrain became rougher, hills and cliffs rising, ghylls and ditches deepening into chasms.

  The sky was a sullen crimson when the leader of the party, a middle-aged Libera Dramach man known as Doja, called for a camp. The spot he chose was on the grassy lip of a stony gorge, where the trees drew back and left a fringe of clear ground, a gentle slope between the forest and the dizzying drop, where there was mercifully no canopy to hem them in. Iridima was visible through the translucent veils of colour still hanging across the ceiling of the night. On the other side of the gorge there was a narrow and immensely high waterfall. The water was carved into three uneven streams by red-veined rocks, and plunged in thin, misty strings, joining together again halfway down in their rush to the river below.

  When the camp was made, Kaiku stood on the edge of the precipice and looked down into the gorge. What river was this? A tributary of the Ko? Where was the source, and where did it end? Had anyone in living memory ever looked upon it until now? This river had flowed here, perhaps for thousands of years, and nobody had known it. If not for Lucia, it might have flowed for thousands more, untroubled by humanity.

  She gazed into the middle distance, saddened by the indifference of the world. How small they were in the eyes of creation, how petty their struggles. The spirits guarded their territories, the moons glided through the skies, the seas remained bottomless. Nature did not care for the plight of humankind. She began to wonder if Lucia’s task was not an impossible one after all. Could she really rouse the spirits, even to protect themselves? Did even the gods take notice of how they fought and died?

  She turned away from the gorge. Such thoughts would only make her despair. And yet the idea of returning to the camp held no attraction for her, either. The party was subdued, still reeling from how easily they had been overcome. Asara was there; Kaiku was avoiding her as best she could. Phaeca was a wreck that she did not want to deal with. She did not feel like talking to Tsata or the Tkiurathi, either: somehow, what she felt was too private to try to explain to them.

  She was deciding whether to get some rest when she spotted Lucia walking into the trees.

  She blinked. Had she really seen what she thought she saw? She headed up the grassy slope towards the treeline. Her doubt evaporated as she went. Of course Lucia had slipped away on her own: it was just like her to disappear like that. Probably the people in the camp thought she had gone to sleep. Lucia needed solitude more than any of them, and she had the least to fear from the forest spirits.

  The thought did not comfort Kaiku. She skirted the camp and reached the point where she had seen Lucia enter the trees. A pair of sentries were watching her from where the tents were clustered, evidently wondering what she was up to. She let them wonder. Better if she could get Lucia back without anyone noticing. On the heels of that thought came another: how had Lucia got away without being seen?

  The forest seemed funereal in the moonlight. The silence and the still air gave it a tomblike feel, and the unfamiliar foliage put everything subtly off-kilter. Though Iridima’s glow rendered everything in monochrome, these plants still reflected a kind of colour, some hue that she found hard to identify. She listened for a moment, and faintly she heard a tread heading away from her.

  She was about to follow when something moved in the darkness, a shifting of some vast shadow. She paled. It was massive, as big as a feya-kori but wider, filling the space between the roots of the forest and its canopy. She could see it only as glimpses, obscured as it was by the boles of the trees in between; but glimpses were enough. Some colossal four-legged thing, there in the forest. Watching her.

  She went cold as she found its eyes. Small and yellow, impossibly bright, and set far apart on a head that must have been bigger than she was.

  It could not be there, her rational mind told her. It would knock over trees whenever it moved. It could not be there because it could not fit.

  But yet she saw it, in defiance of sense, a hulking shape among the trees, wreathed in dark. If she set foot in the forest, it would come for her. And yet, if she did not, she left Lucia to its mercy.

  The sentries were staring at her oddly now, as she stood transfixed on the edge of the clearing. She did not notice. She was caught by the gaze of that dreadful beast.

  Lucia, she thought. She took a step forward, and the beast was on her.

  Mishani shivered suddenly at her writing desk. She frowned and looked over her shoulder. At the edges of the lanternlight the room was cool and empty. The unease persisted for a moment or two, but Mishani was too level-headed to give much credit to phantoms of the mind, and she was soon immersed in her task once more.

  She was kneeling on a mat in the communal room of the house at Araka Jo which she shared with Kaiku. Before her, spread across the table, were rolls of paper, inkpots and quills and brushes, a glazed-clay mug of lathamri and a stack of books. She was dressed in a warm sleeping-robe and soft slippers, but she had no intention of sleeping just yet.

  Her interest in her mother’s books had become an obsession these past weeks. She was desperate to understand, dogged by the certainty that there was something she should know through these words, some message her mother was trying to communicate to her. It had been a growing suspicion for some time now, but with the publication of the last book she had realised that it was indisputably more than fancy on her part. The final lines that Nida-jan spoke were the first half of a lullaby that had been a private song between mother an
d daughter. Her mother had used it once before, with the merchant Chien, as a way to identify him as an ally to Mishani if all else should fail. Now she was using it again.

  But to what end? That was the puzzle. And no matter how Mishani pored over the books, she could not see what it was she was supposed to work out.

  She took a sip of lathamri and stared at the paper before her. After exploring several theories, she had returned to the area of the books that bothered her the most: the awful poems that Nida-jan had taken to reciting. Their appearance seemed to coincide with the point where her mother had begun producing smaller books at a faster rate, and her exquisite prose had become sloppy. Mishani had written out one of them with a brush on the paper before her, large calligraphic pictograms painted in black ink. As if by increasing their size they would give up their secrets. She had tried making anagrams for hours now, scratching the words she built from the symbols in tiny script at the bottom of the paper, but it all came out as nonsense.

  She tutted to herself. She was getting frustrated, and it was late. She had drunk too much lathamri which was making her jittery, for she had a small frame and was not used to it. And she could not concentrate properly while she had the knowledge in the back of her mind that Kaiku and Lucia had most likely reached the Forest of Xu by now. Gods, she hoped their trust in Lucia was well founded. If she did not come out of there alive, all their hopes were gone. And if she did not come back, then Kaiku would not either . . .

  Such thoughts bring you no profit, Mishani, she told herself. Make yourself useful.

  Indeed, making herself useful was something she really should have been doing; but she did not want to leave Araka Jo until she had unlocked the mystery of Muraki’s books. She had returned from the desert to lend her political skills to the Libera Dramach in the Southern Prefectures, but most of the nobles were in Saraku or Machita, and seldom visited here. She had heard about the assassination attempt upon Barak Zahn during the rout at Zila, and suspicion naturally fell upon Blood Erinima. She wondered what kind of retribution Zahn had in mind, and whether she should go to him and offer her help. Division was the worst thing at this time, and yet it did not surprise Mishani in the least that the nobles could not cooperate even in the face of such an overwhelming enemy. Blood Erinima sought advantage for themselves, just like every other high family. They were not thinking of the wider consequences, only the chance to win themselves the throne. Such was the way of politics.