But there was no rest for her. She felt herself gripped from behind, and there was Asara, dragging her upright. She shrieked incoherently, but Asara was merciless.
‘I know a safe place,’ she said. ‘Come with me. They are not far behind.’
Then they were running again, plunging headlong through the trees, stumbling and slipping as they went. The air plucked at them, trying to lift them up, charged with a strange energy by the storm. It played tricks on their senses, making everything seem a little more or less than real. Grandmother Chomi used to warn her granddaughter that if she jumped too high in a moonstorm she might never come back down, but drift into the sky. Kaiku pushed the thought away, remembering instead the scream she had heard earlier. Her grandmother was gone. All of them were gone.
They came out of the trees at the edge of a rocky stream, which was swollen and angry with the rains. Asara looked quickly left and right, her long hair soaked to deepest black and sluggish with moisture. She made her decision in moments, heading downstream, tugging Kaiku after her. The latter was almost at the limit of exhaustion, and it told in her staggering steps and lolling head.
The stream emptied into a wide clearing, a shallow bowl of water from which humped several grassy islands and banks, scattered with the bald faces of half-buried rocks and taut clusters of bushes. The largest island by far was the pedestal for a vast, ancient tree, overwhelmingly dominating the scene by its sheer size. Its trunk was twice as thick as a man was tall, knotted and twisted with age, and its branches spread in a great fan, leaves of gold and brown and green weeping a delicate curtain of droplets across the water below. Even in the rain, the clearing seemed sacred, a place of untouched beauty. The air here was different, possessed of a crystalline fragility and stillness, as of a held breath. Kaiku felt the change, the sensation of a presence in this place, some cold and slow and gentle awareness that marked their arrival with a languid interest.
The sound of a breaking twig alerted Asara, and she spun to see one of the shin-shin high up in the trees to their right, moving with impossible dexterity between the boughs while its lantern eyes stayed fixed on them. She pulled Kaiku into the water, which came up to their knees and soaked through their robes. They splashed across to the largest island, and there they clambered out. Kaiku collapsed on the grass. Asara left her there and raced to the tree. She put her palms and forehead against it and murmured softly, her lips rapid as she spoke.
‘Great ipi, venerated spirit of the forest, we beg you to grant us your protection. Do not let these demons of shadow defile your glade with their corruption.’
A shiver ran through the tree, shaking loose a cascade of droplets from the leaves.
Asara stepped back from the trunk and returned to Kaiku’s side. She squatted down, wiping the lank strands of hair from her face, and scanned the edge of the glade. She could sense them out there, prowling. Three of them, and maybe more, stalking around the perimeter, hiding in the trees, their shining eyes never leaving their prey.
Asara watched, her hand near her rifle. She was no priest, but she knew the spirits of the forest well enough. The ipi would protect them, if only because it would not let the demons near it. Ipis were the guardians of the forest, and nowhere was their influence stronger than in their own glades. The creatures circled, their stiltlike legs carrying them to and fro. She could sense their frustration. Their prey was within sight, yet the shin-shin dared not enter the domain of an ipi.
After a time, Asara was satisfied that they were safe. She hooked her hands under Kaiku’s shoulders and dragged her into the protection of the tree’s vast roots, where the rain was less. Kaiku never woke. Asara regarded her for a moment, soaked as she was and freezing, and felt a kind of sympathy for her. She crouched down next to her mistress and stroked her cheek gently with the back of her knuckles.
‘Life can be cruel, Kaiku,’ she said. ‘I fear you are only just beginning to learn that.’
With the moonstorm raging high overhead, she sat in the shelter of the great tree and waited for the dawn to come.
TWO
Kaiku awoke to a loud snap from the fire, and her eyes flickered open. Asara was there, stirring a small, blackened pot that hung from an iron tripod over the flames. A pair of coilfish were spitted on a branch and crisping next to it. The sun was high in the sky and the air was muggy and hot. A fresh, earthy smell was all about as damp loam dried from last night’s downpour.
‘Daygreet, Kaiku,’ Asara said, without looking at her. ‘I went back to the house this morning and salvaged what I could.’ She tossed a bundle of clothes over. ‘There was not a great deal left, but the rain put out the blaze before it could devour everything. We have food, clothes and a good amount of money.’
Kaiku raised herself, looking around. They were no longer in the waterlogged clearing. Now they sat in a dip in the land where the soil was sandy and clogged with pebbles, and little grew except a few shrubs. Trees guarded the lip of the depression, casting sharply contrasting shadows against the dazzling light, and the daytime sounds of the forest peeped and chittered all about. Had Asara carried her?
The first thing she noticed was that her bracelet was missing.
‘Asara! Grandmother’s bracelet! It must have fallen . . . it . . .’
‘I took it. I left it as an offering to the ipi, in thanks for protecting us.’
‘She gave me that bracelet on my eighth harvest!’ Kaiku cried. ‘I have never taken it off!’
‘The point of an offering is that you sacrifice something precious to you,’ Asara said levelly. ‘The ipi saved our lives. I had nothing I could give, but you did.’
Kaiku stared at her in disbelief, but Asara appeared not to notice. She made a vague gesture to indicate their surroundings. ‘I thought it best not to start a fire in the ipi’s glade, so I moved you here.’
Kaiku hung her head. She was too drained to protest any further. Asara watched her in silence for a time.
‘I must know,’ Kaiku said quietly. ‘My family . . .’
Asara put down the spoon she had been using to stir the pot and knelt before Kaiku, taking her hands. ‘They are dead.’
Kaiku’s throat tightened, but she nodded to indicate she understood. ‘What happened?’
‘Would you not rather eat first, and compose yourself?’
Kaiku raised her head and looked at Asara. ‘I must know,’ she repeated.
Asara released her hands. ‘Most of you were poisoned,’ she said. ‘You died as you slept. I suspect it was one of the kitchen servants, but I cannot be sure. Whoever it was, they were inefficient. Your grandmother did not eat at the evening meal last night, so she was still alive when the shin-shin came. I believe that somebody sent the demons to kill the servants and remove the evidence. With no witnesses, the crime would go unsolved.’ She settled further on her haunches.
‘Who?’ Kaiku asked. ‘And why?’
‘To those questions I have no answers,’ she said. ‘Yet.’
Asara got up and returned to the pot, occasionally turning the fish. It was some time before Kaiku spoke again.
‘Did I die, Asara? From the poison?’
‘Yes,’ replied the handmaiden. ‘I brought you back.’
‘How?’
‘I stole the breath from another, and put it into you.’
Kaiku thought of Karia, her other handmaiden, who she had seen lying dead on the floor of her room.
‘How is that possible?’ she whispered, afraid of the answer.
‘There are many things you do not understand, Kaiku,’ Asara replied. ‘I am one of them.’
Kaiku was beginning to realise that. Asara had always been the perfect handmaiden: quiet, obedient and reliable, skilled at combing out hair and laying out clothes. Kaiku had liked her better than the more wilful Karia, and often talked with her, shared secrets or played games. But there had always been the boundary there, a division that prevented them from becoming truly close. The unspoken understanding that the two of th
em were of a different caste. Kaiku was high-born and Asara was not, and so one had a duty to serve and obey the other. It was the way in Saramyr, the way it had always been.
And yet now Kaiku saw that the last two years had been a deception. This was not the person she thought she knew. This Asara had a steely calm, a core of cold metal. This Asara had saved her life by stealing another’s, had burned down her house, had taken her most valuable token of her grandmother’s love and given it away with impunity. This Asara had rescued her from demons.
Who was she, truly?
‘The stream is nearby, Kaiku,’ Asara said, pointing with her spoon. ‘You should wash and change. You will catch a chill in that.’ It had not escaped notice that since last night she had ceased to call Kaiku ‘mistress’, as was proper.
Kaiku obeyed. She felt she should be ashamed of the state of herself, half undressed with her thin white sleeping-robe mussed and filthy. Yet it seemed insignificant in the wake of what had gone before. Weary despite her sleep, she went to the stream, and there she threw away the soiled robe and washed herself clean, naked in the hot sunlight. The feel of the water and warmth on her bare skin brought her no pleasure. Her body felt like only a vessel for her grief.
She dressed in the clothes Asara had brought her, finding that they were sturdy attire for travelling in. Leather boots, shapeless beige trousers, an open-throated shirt of the same colour that would belong better on a man. She had no complaints. She had always been a tomboy, and she fitted as easily into the trappings of a peasant as those of a noble lady. Her elder brother had been her closest companion, and she had competed with him at everything. They had fought to outride, outshoot and outwrestle each other constantly. Kaiku was no stranger to the gun or the forest.
When she returned to the campfire, the air was alive with sparkling flakes, drifting gently from the sky like snow. They glittered as the sun caught them, sharp flashes of light all about. It was called starfall: a phenomenon seen only in the aftermath of a moonstorm. Tiny, flat crystals of fused ice were created in the maelstrom of the three sisters’ conflict, thin enough to float on their way down. Beauty after chaos. Much prose had been written of starfall, and it was a recurring theme in some of the finest love poetry. Today, it held no power to move her.
Asara handed her a bowl of coilfish, vegetables and saltrice. ‘You should eat,’ she said. Kaiku did so, using her fingers in the way she had as a child, barely tasting it. Asara arranged herself behind, and gently untangled Kaiku’s hair with a wooden comb. It was an act of surprising kindness, in the face of everything; a gesture of familiarity from a girl who now seemed a stranger.
‘Thank you,’ Kaiku said, when Asara was done. The words meant more than simple gratitude. There was no need to thank a servant for a duty that was expected to be rendered. What seemed a mere pleasantry was a tacit acceptance that Asara was no longer subservient to her. The fact that Asara did not correct her proved it.
Kaiku was unsurprised. Asara had altered her mode of address towards Kaiku, and was now talking to her as if she was social equal, albeit one who was not close enough to be called a friend. It spoke volumes about the new state of their relationship.
The Saramyrrhic language was impenetrably complex to an outsider, a mass of tonal inflections, honorifics, accents and qualifiers that conveyed dense layers of meaning far beyond the simple words in a sentence. There were dozens of different modes of address for different situations, each one conveyed by minute alterations in pronunciation and structure. There were different modes used to speak to children, one each for boys, girls, and a separate one for infants of either sex; there were multiple modes for social superiors, depending on how much more important the addressee was than the speaker, and a special one used only for addressing the Emperor or Empress. There were modes for lovers, again in varying degrees with the most intimate being virtually sacrilegious to speak aloud in the presence of anyone but the object of passion. There were modes for mother, father, husband, wife, shopkeepers and tradesmen, priests, animals, modes for praying and for scolding, vulgar modes and scatological ones. There were even several neutral modes, used when the speaker was uncertain as to the relative importance of the person they were addressing.
Additionally, the language was split into High Saramyrrhic – employed by nobles and those who could afford to be educated in it – and Low Saramyrrhic, used by the peasantry and servants. Though the two were interchangeable as a spoken language – with Low Saramyrrhic being merely a slightly coarser version of its higher form – as written languages they were completely different. High Saramyrrhic was the province of the nobles, and the peasantry were excluded from it. It was the language of learning, in which all philosophy, history and literature were written; but its pictographs meant nothing to the common folk. The higher strata of society was violently divided from the lower by a carefully maintained boundary of ignorance; and that boundary was the written form of High Saramyrrhic.
‘The shin-shin fear the light,’ Asara said in a conversational tone, as she scuffed dirt over the fire to put it out. ‘They will not come in the daytime. By the time they return we will be gone.’
‘Where are we going?’
‘Somewhere safer than this,’ Asara replied. She caught the look on Kaiku’s face, saw her frustration at the answer, and offered one a little less vague. ‘A secret place. Where there are friends, where we can understand what happened here.’
‘You know more that you say you do, Asara,’ the other accused. ‘Why won’t you tell me?’
‘You are disorientated,’ came the reply. ‘You have been to the Gates of Omecha not one sunrise past, you have lost your family and endured more than anyone should bear. Trust me; you will learn more later.’
Kaiku crossed the hollow and faced her former servant. ‘I will learn it now.’
Asara regarded her in return. She was a pretty one, despite the temporary ravages of grief on her face. Eyes of brown that seemed to laugh when she was happy; a small nose, slightly sloped; teeth white and even. Her tawny hair she wore in a feathered style, teased forward over her cheeks and face in the fashionable cut that young ladies wore in the capital. Asara had known her long enough to realise her stubborn streak, her mulish persistence when she decided she wanted something. She saw it now, and at that moment she felt a slight admiration for the woman she had deceived all this time. She had half expected the grief of the previous night to break her, but she was finding herself proven wrong. Kaiku had spirit, then. Good. She would need it.
Asara picked up a cured-leather pack and held it out. ‘Walk with me.’ Kaiku took it and slid it on to her back. Asara took the other, and the rifle, from where it had been drying by the fire. The previous night’s rain had soaked the powder chamber, and it was not ready to use yet.
They headed into the forest. The branches twinkled with starfall as it gently drifted around them, gathering on the ground in a soft dusting before melting away. Kaiku felt a fresh upswell of tears in her breast, but she fought to keep them down. She needed to understand, to make some small sense of what had happened. Her family were gone, and yet it did not seem real yet. She had to hold together for now. Resolutely, she forced her pain into a tight, bitter corner of her mind and kept it there. It was the only way she could continue to function. The alternative was to go mad with sorrow.
‘We’ve watched you for a long time,’ Asara said eventually. ‘Your house and family, too. Partly it was because we knew your father was one who was sympathetic to our cause, one who might be persuaded to join us eventually. He had connections through his patronage in the Imperial Court. But mostly it was because of you, Kaiku. Your condition.’
‘Condition? I have no condition,’ Kaiku said.
‘I admit I had my doubts when I was sent here,’ replied her former handmaiden. ‘But even I have noticed the signs.’
Kaiku tried to think, but her head was muddled and Asara’s explanation seemed to be throwing up more questions than answers. Instead, s
he asked directly: ‘What happened last night?’
‘Your father,’ Asara said. ‘You must have remembered how he was when he returned from his last trip away.’
‘He said he was ill . . .’ Kaiku began, then stopped. She sounded foolish. The illness he had feigned had been an excuse. She did remember the way he had seemed. Pale, quiet and lethargic. There had been a haunted look about him, a certain absence in his manner. Grandmother had been that way when Grandfather died, seven years ago. A kind of stunned disbelief, such as soldiers got when they had been too long exposed to the roar of cannons.
‘Yes,’ she agreed. ‘Something happened, something he would not speak of. Do you know what it was?’
‘Do you?’
She shook her head. They trudged a few more steps in silence. The forest had enshrouded them now, and they walked a zigzagging way through the sparsely clustered trees, stepping over roots and boulders that cluttered the uneven ground. A dirt ridge had risen to waist-height on their right, fringed with gently swaying shadowglove serviced by fat red bees. The sun beat down from overhead, baking the wet soil in a lazy heat that made the world content and sluggish. On any other day Kaiku would have been lost in tranquillity, for she had always had a childlike awe of nature; but the beauty of their surroundings had no power to touch her now.
‘I watched him these last few weeks,’ Asara said. ‘I learned nothing more. Perhaps he wronged someone, a powerful enemy. I can only guess. But I am in no doubt that it was he who brought ruin on you last night.’
‘Why? He was just a scholar! He read books. Why would someone want to kill him . . . all of us?’
‘For this,’ Asara said, and with that she drew from her robe the mask Kaiku had seen her take from the house. She brandished it in front of Kaiku. Its red and black lacquer face leered idiotically at her. ‘He brought it with him when he returned last.’
‘That? It’s only a mask.’
The Braided Path: The Weavers of Saramyr, The Skein of Lament and the Ascendancy Veil Page 2