But a cold dread was settling slowly on to Mishani as she spoke to the Empress. Was her mask slipping, and her own fear and trepidation showing through? Certainly it seemed as if the Empress was procrastinating, unwilling to show Mishani through to Lucia’s chambers. She seemed frankly nervous. The package pressed against Mishani’s lower back burned with the heat of the shame it bore. Could the mother sense she meant harm to the child? She felt perspiration prickle her scalp.
Then Anais was inviting her through, up to the gardens that nestled among the confusing maze of the Imperial Keep’s top level. The temple to Ocha that was the centre point of the roof rose magnificently against the midday sky, and the four thin needles at each corner of the Keep reached higher still. The uppermost level of the sloping edifice was a labyrinth of gardens, small buildings, waterways and stony trenches which served as thoroughfares between them, like sunken streets. From below it was impossible to see there was anything up here, and Mishani had always borne the assumption that the roof was flat and featureless apart from the temple which was easily visible from anywhere in Axekami. Now she realised she was wrong; it was like a miniature district of the city. Mishani noticed also several squat guard towers around the gardens, and soldiers with rifles watching within.
‘I apologise for all the guards,’ Anais said as they came out into the blinding sunlight. She had noticed Mishani’s furtive glance. ‘The security of Lucia is paramount, especially now.’
‘I understand,’ Mishani said, feeling her throat tighten. She had hidden her package because she had little knowledge of how closely Lucia was guarded, and did not want to risk it being opened and checked. Though it would be a grave insult to imply that she meant the Heir-Empress harm, she did not dare take the chance. She wanted to give her gift to Lucia in secret if possible; but she doubted now that the opportunity would arise.
Anais seemed about to speak, thought better of it, then changed her mind again. ‘I learned that someone had . . . got close to Lucia recently,’ she intimated. ‘Someone who could have done her harm.’
‘How awful,’ Mishani said, but inside she felt the tension slacken like an exhaled breath. So that was why she was nervous. She did not suspect Mishani.
They came across Lucia in the company of a tall, robed man with a close-cropped white beard. They were standing in a small square that formed a junction between several paths, and were playing some kind of learning game that involved arranging black and white bead-bags in different formations on the flagstones. Trees rustled around them with the activity of squirrels and the stirring of the hot, sluggish air. As the Empress and Mishani arrived, they looked up and bowed in greeting.
‘This is Mishani tu Koli,’ she said to the group at large. ‘And here is Lucia, and Zaelis tu Unterlyn, one of her tutors.’
Zaelis bowed. ‘It’s an honour to meet you, Mistress,’ he said in a throaty bass.
Mishani acknowledged him with a nod, but she had barely taken her eyes off the Heir-Empress since she arrived. Lucia, in turn, was regarding her steadily with her pale blue, dreamy gaze, an almost fey expression on her face. Her blonde hair stirred in a soft gust of warm wind.
‘Come and walk with me, Mishani,’ Lucia said suddenly, holding her hand up.
‘Lucia!’ Anais exclaimed. She had never behaved in such a way before with guests; usually she was the model of politeness. Such an imperative request from a child to an adult was nothing short of impertinent.
‘Lucia, remember your manners,’ Zaelis cautioned.
‘No, it’s quite all right,’ Mishani said. She looked to Anais. ‘May I?’
Anais hesitated a moment, caught between her desire to have the child where she could see her and winning over Mishani. In the end, she did the only thing she really could. ‘Of course,’ she smiled.
Mishani took Lucia’s hand, and it was as if some spark passed between them, a minute current that trembled up Mishani’s arm. Her face creased slightly in puzzlement, but Lucia beamed innocently and led her away from the others down a paved path, across an immaculate lawn bordered by a dense row of tumisi trees, hemmed in from the rest of the gardens.
They walked in silence a short way. Mishani felt a creeping nausea in her stomach. The child next to her seemed only that: a child. Like Kaiku, she was physically unmarred by her Aberrance.
I am to murder a child, she thought. And by the foulest means imaginable. It was what she had been thinking ever since her father asked her to do this, but now the reality of the situation crowded in on her and she began to suffocate.
‘You must get tired of seeing people like me,’ she said, feeling the sudden need to talk to distract herself. ‘I expect you have met a lot of nobles over these past weeks.’ It was an inanity, but she felt disarmed and it was all she could find to say.
‘They think I’m a monster,’ Lucia said, her eyes placid. ‘Most of them, anyway.’
Mishani was taken aback to hear such words from an eight-harvest child’s mouth.
‘You don’t, though,’ she said, turning her face up to Mishani’s.
She was right. It was different with her than it had been with Kaiku. She could not even consider this child as being Aberrant; not in the sense that she knew it, anyway. She felt the nausea in her gut become painful.
Spirits, I cannot do this.
They turned from the lawn into a shaded nook, where there was a simple wooden bench. Lucia turned them into it and sat down. Mishani sat next to her, smoothing her robe into her lap. They were away from the sight of anyone, but for a single raven perched on a distant wall of the garden, watching them with disconcerting interest.
I cannot . . . cannot . . .
Mishani felt her control teetering. She had almost hoped the Empress would stay with them, that the opportunity to give Lucia the parcel would not present itself; but the child was unwittingly making it easy for her.
‘I have a gift for you,’ she heard herself say, and her voice sounded distant over the blood in her ears. She felt the package slide free from her sash as she tugged it out, and then it was in her hands. Flat and square, gold-embroidered paper and a deep blue bow.
Lucia looked at it, and then at her. A sudden surge of emotion welled inside Mishani, too fast for her to suppress; she felt her lip quiver as she took a shuddering breath, as if she were about to weep. She forced it down, but it had been an unforgivable breach in her façade. Two years she had been practising the stillness and poise of court, two years of building her mask; but now she felt as a young girl again, and her confidence and poise had fled. She was not as strong as she had thought she was. She flinched and railed at her responsibility.
‘Why are you sad?’ Lucia asked.
‘I am sad . . .’ Mishani said. ‘I am sad because of the games we play.’
‘Some games are more fun than others,’ Lucia said.
‘And some are more serious than you imagine,’ Mishani answered. She gave the child a strange smile. ‘Do you like your father, the Emperor?’
‘No,’ Lucia replied. ‘He scares me.’
‘So does mine,’ Mishani said quietly.
Lucia was silent for a time. ‘Will you give me my gift?’ she asked.
Mishani’s blood froze. The moment that followed seemed to stretch out agonisingly. A sudden realisation had hit her: that she was no more prepared now to kill the child than she ever had been. She thought of her father, how proud she had always made him, how he had taught her and how she had loved him.
She shook her head, the tiniest movement. ‘Forgive me,’ she said. ‘I made a mistake. This gift is not for you.’ She slid it back into her belt.
Lucia gazed at her blankly with her strange, ethereal gaze. Then she slid along the bench and laid her head on Mishani’s shoulder. Mishani, surprised, put her arm around the child.
Do not trust me so, she thought, burning with shame, for you do not know what kind of creature I am.
‘Thank you,’ Lucia whispered, and that destroyed the last of her composur
e. She felt the swell of tears expand behind her eyes, and then she wept, as she had not wept for years. She cried for Kaiku, and for her father, and for herself and what she had become. She had been so sure, so certain of everything, and yet all the certainties had been shattered. And here was the daughter of the Empress thanking Mishani for choosing not to murder her, and—
She looked up and into Lucia’s eyes, her weeping suddenly arrested. It hit her then. She knew. The child knew. And yet Mishani wondered if she would not have taken the gift anyway, and worn it, and died if it were offered. She had the sudden prescience of being at the fulcrum of some terrible balance, that uncounted futures had depended on that single instant of decision.
Lucia gave her a shy smile. ‘You should go and see the dream lady,’ she said. ‘I think you would like her.’
The crowd in Speaker’s Square that evening was immense.
The square was a great flagged quad, bordered by tall rows of grand buildings. Its western side was almost entirely taken up by the enormous Temple of Isisya, the façade a mass of swooping balconies, mosaics and carvings, its lowest storey shaded by an ornamental stone awning that encroached on to the square, supported by vast pillars. The other buildings were similarly impressive: the city library – ostensibly public, but whose volumes were illegible to the peasantry, written as they were in High Saramyrrhic; the central administrative complex, where much of the day-to-day running of Axekami took place; and a huge bathhouse, with a bronze statue of a catfish resting on a plinth set into its broad steps, the earthly aspect of Panazu.
In the very centre of the square was a raised platform over which a carven henge was raised, its two upright pillars elegantly curving up to support the bowed crossbeam, on which was written in languid pictograms a legendary – and historically dubious – quote from the Blood Emperor Torus tu Vinaxis: As painting or sculpture is art, so too the spoken word.
The crowd crammed around the speaker’s podium and spread all the way to the edges of the square, clogging the doorways of the surrounding buildings and spilling out into the tributary streets. Its mood was ugly, and it told in the scowls on people’s faces and the frequent scuffles that erupted as patience ran out and fuses burned down. Its cheers in support of the speaker – and these were often and heartfelt – had a savage edge to them. Most of the crowd knew what they felt about the matter of the Heir-Empress already; they had come to hear someone who could articulate the rage and frustration and revulsion they nursed in their breasts, and agree with him. That someone was Unger tu Torrhyc.
Zaelis watched from beside one of the marble pillars of the city library, scanning the throng. They milled in the slowly declining heat of the evening, when the sun’s light had reddened and the shadows of the buildings to the west stretched across the convocation, a sharp border dividing them into light and darkness. As Unger delivered a particularly barbed comment about the Heir-Empress, the crowd erupted in a roar, and Zaelis saw the glimmer of primal fury in the city folk’s eyes, age-old hatred rooted so deep that they did not even remember its origins. Barely any of them knew that it was the Weavers who had planted that seed, the Weavers who had instigated and encouraged humankind’s natural fear of Aberrants, and had been doing so for two centuries or more.
On the central platform of the square, Unger stalked between the red wooden pillars of the henge, prowling here and there while he orated, his voice carrying to all corners of the gathering as his hands waved and his wild hair flapped. He was not a handsome man, a little too short for his frame and his features large and blocky; but he had charisma, nobody could deny that. The passion was plainly evident in his voice as he harangued the multitude of the dangers that would beset Saramyr with an Aberrant on the throne. He used the stage like a master theatre player, and his tone and manner rode the swell of the crowd, becoming louder and louder until he was almost screaming, whipping his audience to fever pitch. What he was saying was nothing new, but the way in which he said it was so persuasive, the arguments he posited so unassailable, that he was impossible to ignore. And as his fame had grown over these past weeks, so his listeners had multiplied.
Zaelis felt a cold foreboding as he looked out over the crowd. The tension in the air was palpable. Axekami teetered on a knife-edge, and its Empress appeared to be doing nothing about it. Zaelis wondered in despair if Anais had even listened to her advisors as they explained the growing discontent in the streets of the capital, or if she had still been thinking of ways to win the high families round to her side. She was so preoccupied by the reports of Blood Amacha and Blood Kerestyn massing their forces that she had no time to consider anything else; and as much as he respected and admired her, he had to admit that she was guilty of the arrogance of nobility. Deep down, she did not believe that the underclasses were capable of organising themselves enough to hurt her. She saw Axekami as a creche, swarming with unaccountably wilful children who had to be kept in line to prevent them from harming themselves. The idea that they might throw off their loyalty to her over this matter had occurred to her on a superficial level, but no more. She suffered from a lack of empathy; she could not understand the level of hatred they bore for her beloved child. She underestimated the dread the word Aberrant still evoked in the common man.
But Zaelis’s real concern was for Lucia. With two factions already building their forces against her, Anais could not afford to fight on a third front, this one inside the walls of her city. If any of the forces opposed to her won the victory, then Lucia’s life would be forfeit. No matter that she was not the monster they imagined her to be – though he had to admit she frightened even him at times, and the gods only knew what kind of power she would wield in adulthood if she continued developing at the rate she was going. She would have to be killed because of what she represented.
Zaelis thought about that for a time, ignoring the rhetoric that Unger tu Torrhyc threw out to the crowd like bloody bones to baying hounds. Then he left, his thoughts dark, pushing his way through the throng and back towards the Imperial Quarter.
He did not notice the man in grubby baker’s clothes as he passed by on the outskirts of the gathering. Nor would he have troubled himself about it if he had noticed; he had more important things on his mind than that. Perhaps he would have puzzled over the man’s odd expression – a combination of furtiveness, defiance and feverishness. He might have noticed the heavy pack the baker carried, triple-strapped shut. And if he had waited long enough, he might have seen the second man arrive, also carrying a heavy pack, and the grim mutual recognition passing between them, as of two soldiers meeting on a battlefield over the carnage of their dead companions.
None of that would have meant anything to Zaelis, had he not simply walked on by. And besides, it was only one of many similar meetings across the city that had been going on ever since the news of the Heir-Empress broke. Only a seed, another small part of one of Axekami’s endless intrigues.
The baker and his new companion – neither of whom had met before – slipped away from the crowd without a word, towards a place that both of them knew but neither had ever been to. A place where others of their kind were gathering, each carrying another deadly load in their packs.
NINETEEN
In the mountains, the snow fell thick, carried on a wind that blew down from the peaks and whipped the air into a whirling chaos of white, a blizzard that wailed and blustered along the troughs and passes.
A solitary woman walked in the maelstrom wearing a red and black Mask, using her rifle as a staff to support her exhausted body. She staggered through the knee-deep crust, beneath a skeletal cluster of trees that rattled their snow-laden branches violently at her. She slipped and fell often, partly from the treacherous, uneven floor of stone under the crust, but more because her legs were failing, her strength eroded with every gust of wind that buffeted her. Yet each time she fell, she rose again and forged onward. There was little else she could do. It was that, or lie down and die there.
The mountains had b
ecome one endless, featureless ascent; a blanket of white delineated only by the lines, ridges and slopes where the black rock of the mountains poked through. Some distant part of her told her it was unwise to be trudging up this shallow trench, a wide furrow in the mountainside with stone banks rising to shoulder-height on either side. Something about snowdrifts. But the voice was fractured, and she could not piece it together enough to make sense of it.
Kaiku barely knew where she was any more. The cold had numbed her so much that she had lost sensation in her extremities. Exhaustion and incipient hypothermia had reduced her to a zombie-like state, slack-jawed and clumsy, pushing herself mechanically onwards with no clear idea of where she was going. She was a being entirely of instinct now, and that instinct told her to survive.
She had lost count of the days since she had left the cave where she had sheltered with Tane, Asara and Mamak. Five? Six? Surely not a week! A miserable week spent in this forsaken wilderness, starving, frightened and alone. Each night huddled and shivering in some hole, each day a torture of frustration and terror, searching for paths while cringing at every sound, and hoping that whatever made it might be something she could catch and eat rather than something that would catch and eat her.
How much longer would Ocha test her so?
Back in the cave, she had been visited by the same dream every time she closed her eyes. In it she saw a boar, and nothing more. It was huge, its skin warty and ancient, its tusks chipped and yellowed and massive. The boar said nothing, merely sat before her and looked at her, but in those animal eyes was an eternity, and she knew she was looking at no mere beast but an envoy of Ocha. She was struck by awe, filled with an ache and a wonder more potent than any meditation she had ever been able to achieve, a vast sorrow mingled with a beauty so enormous, so overwhelming and fragile that she could not help but weep. But there was something else in the boar’s eyes, in its doleful face. It expected something of her, and it mourned because she was not doing it, and its grief tore her heart apart.
The Braided Path: The Weavers of Saramyr, The Skein of Lament and the Ascendancy Veil Page 22