The settlement was silent for years. Remote as it was, buried in the trackless mountains, it faded into memory. The initial flurry of excitement in the markets diminished and the witchstone artefacts were forgotten.
What happened during that time is a matter of speculation.
At some point, the decision was made to introduce witchstone dust to the craft of mask-making, and during that period some experimenter must have discovered the other powers of witchstone dust. There is no telling how the process began, or how it went on. Perhaps, at first, they used it as a narcotic, for long-term exposure to witchstone caused disorientation and euphoria. Later they discovered that having it close to the face – and hence the brain – was the most effective method of attaining that feeling. From there, small and rudimentary effects in the physical world were noticed. While under the delirium of the witchstone, a cup would be moved without anyone touching it; a flame would flare or gutter; a man might know the thoughts of his friend and be suddenly aware of his innermost secrets. It can only be guessed how arduous the path was from simple addiction to an unknown substance to gaining control of it. How many of them stumbled unwittingly into the full light of the Weave, and lost their minds and souls to its glory? How many atrocities of rape and murder and mutilation were committed in the agonies of post-Weaving withdrawal? History does not recall. But when they emerged again from that settlement after their long silence, no women and children were left.
Two centuries ago, the first Weavers appeared in the towns and cities of Saramyr. Their powers were weaker then, and cruder; but they already moved with one purpose, operating to a master plan. Subtly, they infiltrated the homes of the noble classes, making themselves invaluable. In those days, the people of Saramyr were naïve to the Weavers, and those that proved an obstacle to them were simply influenced, their minds and opinions changed to suit the plan. In a matter of a decade, they were integrated; and from there they began to grow, and build, and scheme.
In a firelit chamber somewhere in the depths of Adderach’s convoluted arteries, an apparition of Weave-lord Vyrrch hung in the air. It was a dim and blurred ghost, a mottled smear of brown and grey and orange, approximating the colours of his patchwork robe. Curiously, the form seemed to gain definition the closer it came to his Mask, as if the Mask was the focus of the phantom. It was the only thing sharply defined, a translucent bronze face amid the ether of Vyrrch’s body.
The three Weavers that Vyrrch faced were different to the last three, and they had been different to the three before. Lacking a hierarchy, the Weave-lord had no superiors to report to; instead the three Weavers present would disseminate the information throughout the network using the Weave. They, in turn, spoke for the others.
‘The Empress is being less than cooperative,’ observed one, whose name was Kakre. His Mask was of cured skin stretched over a wooden frame, and made him look like a corpse.
‘I expected no less,’ said Vyrrch, his croaking voice seeming to come from the walls around them. ‘But the situation turns to our advantage. It would be . . . inconvenient if she abdicated now.’
‘Explain yourself,’ demanded Kakre. ‘Is not the Heir-Empress’s claim to the throne a great threat to the Weavers?’
‘Indeed,’ Vyrrch replied. ‘And as things stand, the forces on either side are evenly matched. But I have not been idle in the Imperial Keep. The Baraks dance to my tune.’
‘And what advantage for us?’ whispered a fat Weaver, his face a blank oval of wood with a long, braided beard of animal hair depending from it.
Vyrrch turned his gaze to that one. ‘Brother, I have plans in hand to rid us of the Empress and her troublesome brood. I have struck a pact with the most powerful player in this game; and when he becomes Blood Emperor, we will be raised up with him. We will no longer be merely an accessory to government; we will be the power behind the throne!’
‘Be careful, Vyrrch,’ warned Kakre. ‘They do not trust us, do not want us here. They will turn on us if they can. Even your Barak.’
‘They suspect,’ added the third weaver, whose black wooden Mask wore a snarl. ‘They suspect what we are about.’
‘Then let them suspect,’ Vyrrch replied. ‘By the time they realise the truth, it will be too late.’
‘Perhaps,’ said Kakre, ‘you had better explain to us your intentions.’
Vyrrch returned to himself shortly afterward, his consciousness flitting down the synapses of the Weave to arrive back at his physical body. His breathing fluttered, and his eyes, which had been open and glazed, focused sharply. He was sitting in his usual place, amid the stench and rank squalor of his chambers. For a time he composed himself, awaiting the backlash of withdrawing himself from the sheer bliss of the Weave. Recollection slotted into place around the usual patches of amnesia, and he looked around quizzically. He vaguely remembered having a girl brought to him yesterday, a particularly spirited little thing as it turned out. He’d had her trussed up, like a spider with a fly, intending to keep her and feed her and use her as necessary. The motive behind it eluded him; perhaps he had wanted instant relief for his next post-Weaving psychosis rather than having to wait for the servants to bring him what he needed on request. The clever bitch had slipped her bonds somehow and was loose in his chambers, hiding. She was trapped in here with him, for he wore the only key to the heavy door that would give her freedom, and he never took it off. He liked that. A little game.
He felt no desire for her now, though. Instead, he felt a sudden and overwhelming compulsion to rearrange his surroundings. An alien and quite dazzling logic had settled on him, a way things should be done, and he saw as if in a vision from the gods how he should alter his living space. He got up to do so, knowing it to be just another form of mania, but powerless to prevent it anyway. The girl could wait. Everyone could wait.
Then when he was ready, he’d have them all.
SIXTEEN
They travelled north along the great Dust Road that curved from the south-east to the north-west of Fo, terminating in the mining town of Cmorn on the far coast. The sun was barely up in the east as they set off, and Neryn was still doggedly high in the sky and would have remained visible until the afternoon, clouds permitting. They did not. By midday, what had begun as a few wisps of cirrus had marshalled into a humped blanket that muted the sun, slowly cruising overhead. The heat did not diminish in proportion to the light, but Tane found himself glad of the shade anyway. Life under a forest canopy had not prepared him for the exposure of recent days, and he still found himself becoming woozy if he stood in the glare of Nuki’s eye for too long.
Their caravan was pulled by a pair of manxthwa, whose enormous strength powered a train of seven carts. The hindmost five were covered with tarpaulin and lashed down, packed with a wide variety of supplies for the isolated village of Chaim. The foremost two were for passengers, fitted with a narrow bench on the inner lip of each side so that six people could sit in each cart. A further seat was provided at the front for the driver, a withered, crotchety-looking old man who wore a thin shirt over his ropy frame, and the fat caravan master. Kaiku, Asara and Tane sat in the front passenger cart; the one behind them was full of guards, muttering between themselves and leaning on their rifles.
Tane studied the manxthwa idly as they travelled the Dust Road. They were seven feet high at the shoulder, with short back legs and long front ones in the manner of apes. Their knees crooked backwards, and ended in spatulate black hooves to take the weight of their immense frame. Their bodies were covered in a thick and shaggy fur of a dull red-orange, a legacy of their arctic origins; and yet the heat of Saramyr seemed not to bother them one bit. Their wide faces were drooping and sad and wrinkled, lending them a misleading impression of aged wisdom, and two stubby tusks protruded from beneath their lower lips, jutting out from squared chins.
What odd creatures they were, Tane thought; and yet perfect. Enyu’s creations were each a wonder, even those things that preyed on man. A shadow seemed to settle on his
heart as he thought of the Aberrant lady they had met in Axekami. She may have been outwardly unblemished, but inside she was a corruption of Enyu’s mould, a horror. The goddess of nature created her children each for a reason, and Aberrants were a mockery of that.
Towards the end of the day, they turned off the thoroughfare, leaving behind the traffic of rickety carts and painted carriages to head northward. The Dust Road had been aptly named, for each step of the manxthwa stirred up the stuff, powdered stone blown off the surrounding land. Most of Fo was a vast, flat waste of rock and scree, with little vegetation but the hardiest, thorny scrubs. It was high above sea level, higher than the mainland, and its soil was unforgiving. Its bones had been bared by millennia of wind and rain, and made it stark and bleak.
Once the Dust Road was behind them, they travelled on rougher paths, barely more than shallow ruts worn into the ground by the passage of caravans like theirs. They had not gone more than a mile along that way when the driver turned them off the track and circled the caravan.
The caravan master bustled round to help Asara down from the passenger cart. He was bald and rubber-lipped, with tiny eyes and a nose buried in a mass of corpulent, blubbery features. There was a slightly fish-like aspect to his face. His name was Ottin.
‘Why are we stopping?’ she asked, as she accepted his hand. His skin was clammy and cold.
‘It’s best not to travel too near the mountains at night,’ he replied. ‘Dangerous. We will reach Chaim tomorrow, you’ll see.’
A fire was made, and Kaiku was surprised to feel the temperature begin to drop hard as the sun fled the sky. The guards took shifts in walking the perimeter of the circle of caravans, while the others sat in the restless light of the blaze. The unfamiliarity of this land, the strangers surrounding her and the promise of danger had combined to make Kaiku feel quite intrepid. She relaxed and listened to the talk at the fireside, and a strange contentment took her.
‘There’s a blight on the isle, no doubt of that,’ the driver was saying. It was a common complaint in Saramyr, but they had never heard it applied to Fo. ‘Cancer in the bones of the earth.’
‘It’s the same on the mainland,’ Tane said. ‘A malaise for which we can’t find a source. Once the forests were safe to walk; now we know better than to be caught out at night. The wild beasts are becoming more aggressive; and the spirits that haunt the trees are cold and unfamiliar.’
‘I don’t know from forests, but I can tell you the source all right. Up in the mountains. That’s where it’s coming from.’
‘Such superstitious nonsense!’ declared Ottin, glancing at Asara to see if she approved of his outburst.
‘Is it?’ the driver replied sharply, fixing him with a wrinkly squint. ‘You tell me if we don’t start to see it in the land, the further north we go. North is the mountains. Makes sense to me.’
About that, at least, the driver was right. By midday it was difficult not to notice. Bare trees thrust out of the soil, their limbs crooked and misshapen, oozing sap from some places where the bark was thin as human skin, and in others bowed down by a tumescent surplus of it. They saw one whose branches grew in loops, straggling out of the trunk at one point only to curve back and bury themselves into it elsewhere. Thin, hooked leaves stood out like spines along the tangle of boughs.
The guards were more alert now. Kaiku noted how they faced outwards from their cart with their rifles ready, and never stopped scanning. She began to pick up on their wariness, and fiddled with her hair nervously. Ottin, apparently oblivious to it all, continued his inane attempts at banter with Asara. She bore it with remarkable patience. It seemed that the discounted fare the caravan master had offered came with a hidden price: taken with Asara’s beauty, he tried ceaselessly to insinuate himself into her affections. Kaiku and Tane exchanged glances and smiled in amusement.
But Tane’s amusement was only fleeting. Nowhere in the Forest of Yuna had he ever seen the signs of the corruption in the earth as obviously as here. His tanned brow furrowed as he looked out over the empty landscape towards the ghostly peaks of the Lakmar Mountains in the distance. A sudden flurry of movement among the guards drew his attention to their right, where something darted among an outcrop of rocks, making a throaty cackling sound that echoed in the still air. They kept their rifles ready, but it made no further appearances.
‘See?’ said the driver suddenly, pointing up. ‘Those things are so common, they even have their own name. Gristle-crows, we call them.’
The passengers looked, and saw above them a trio of black birds, swooping and turning. Indeed, they did seem like crows at first glance, but it was only when Tane asserted his perspective that he realised they were much higher than he thought, and therefore larger.
‘How big are they?’ he asked, unable to credit the evidence of his senses.
‘Six feet wing-tip to wing-tip,’ the driver croaked back.
Kaiku swore under her breath, an old habit borrowed from her brother and one she had often been reprimanded for as unladylike. It scarcely seemed to matter out here.
Tane peered up into the clouded sky at them. It was difficult to make out details, but the more he looked the more he reconsidered their likeness to their namesakes. Their beaks were thick and malformed, more like keratinous muzzles with a hooked lip at the front. Their wings were sharply kinked in the middle, in the manner of bats’ wings, though they were thickly shagged with untidy black feathers. He grimaced and looked away, hoping never to be any closer to them than he was now.
‘Interesting,’ said Asara. When she said nothing else, Kaiku took the bait.
‘What is interesting?’
‘This is not the first type of Aberrant that has become so common as to constitute a species,’ she said, gazing pointedly at Tane, who ignored her. ‘In amongst all the freaks of nature produced by this . . . corruption in the land, there are many that have flourished. For every hundred useless aberrations there may be one that is useful, that provides its bearer an advantage over its kin. And if that one survives to breed, and pass on its—’
‘There’s nothing new in what you’re saying, Asara,’ Tane snapped. ‘Those ideas have been part of Jujanchi’s teachings for decades.’
‘Yes,’ said Asara. ‘He was one of Enyu’s priests, wasn’t he? A great thinker, by all accounts. He used his theories to explain diversity in animals. Strange how his teachings apply to Aberrants, then, when your creed dictates that they are not children of Enyu.’
‘Aberrants follow the laws of nature,’ Tane replied, ‘because they are corruptions of the same basic root. It doesn’t make them natural, or any less foul.’
What about me, Tane? Kaiku thought. What would you think of me, if you knew what I was? In truth, she wondered that Tane did not suspect Asara of being an Aberrant, but it seemed that he would rather not know.
‘But perhaps this corruption is not corruption at all,’ Asara posited. ‘Maybe it is only accelerated change. Those things up there may be foul to your eyes, but as big as they are they will rule the skies. Does that not make them a superior breed? Consider, Tane: more new species have probably arisen in the last fifty years than in the last five hundred.’
‘Change in nature is slow,’ Tane countered angrily. ‘It is that way for a reason: so that everything around it can adapt. And besides, this is not just a matter of animal speciation. Crops are dying, people are dying. Not only that, but the spirits are changing, Asara. They grow hostile. The guardians of natural places are fading, being overrun by things like . . . like the shin-shin.’
‘The shin-shin were summoned,’ Asara replied. ‘To get back that Mask. Or to get Kaiku. That was not the random anger of the spirits that killed your priests. They followed the trail to your temple. If they could get across the Camaran Channel, they would follow it here too; but I suspect we lost them in the city, and the trail is cold now.’
‘Then whoever summoned the shin-shin knows how to treat with the dark spirits,’ Tane said, suddenly calming
and becoming contemplative. ‘Could it be that they’re also responsible for the sickness in the land?’
The reply that Asara was about to give was swallowed in a sudden riot of movement and noise. Kaiku yelped in surprise as she saw a blur of black lunging out from the stony soil of the roadside, and then their cart was tipped violently and they were flung to one side of it. Tane and Asara were thrown into Kaiku, and the three of them pitched over on to the road as the cart toppled with a loud splintering of wood. Tane rolled away out of instinct as the cart was dragged towards them, but mercifully it did not tip again, or it might have crushed the passengers beneath it. They scrambled clear amongst the shouts and chaos of the guards, who had been similarly surprised, and there they saw what had befallen them.
The Aberrant thing was huge, an ungodly fusion of teeth and limbs that had lain in a burrow by the roadside, disguised by a thin covering of shale, until it had sensed their approach. It was still half in the burrow, with only the foremost part of its body visible. Kaiku caught a horrified impression of a blind, eyeless face that was all jaw and teeth, a mouth stuffed with yellowed, crooked fangs amid a multitude of spiderlike legs that had crammed out of the burrow and enwrapped one of the manxthwa at the lead of the caravan. Both the manxthwa were lowing and bellowing in fear. Ottin had pulled himself clear, but the driver was screaming, trapped and entangled in the tethering ropes that served as bridles for the great beasts.
‘Heart’s blood, shoot it!’ Ottin shrieked at the guards, but they already had their rifles up and ready. A volley of gunfire tore into the Aberrant creature and it squawked in fury, but it would not let go of its prize. It was dragging the manxthwa closer to its burrow, with the driver and the rest of the caravan pulled in by the force. Those spider limbs that were not engaged with the manxthwa waved tremulously in the air, seeming poised to strike at anything that came near.
The driver screamed again, begging incoherently as the Aberrant made another effort and dragged its prey another foot closer.
The Braided Path: The Weavers of Saramyr, The Skein of Lament and the Ascendancy Veil Page 19