And what kind of thing can twist the threads of reality to shape fire or break minds? she asked herself pitilessly. She is no more impossible than you. The world is changing faster than you imagine. The witchstones are remaking Saramyr, and all that once was is uncertain now.
‘You’re brooding, Kaiku,’ Yugi said from behind her. ‘I can feel it from here.’
She smiled apologetically at him, and her heart lifted a little. ‘Talk to me, Yugi. This will be a long journey, and if someone does not do something to lighten the mood then I do not think I will last the day.’
‘Sorry. I’ve been a little remiss as the provider of good humour,’ he said with a grin. ‘I was suffering somewhat from last night, but the walk has cleared my head.’
‘Over-indulged yourself, did you?’ Kaiku prodded.
‘Hardly. I didn’t touch a thing. No wonder I feel so awful.’
She laughed softly. Nomoru, up ahead, glanced back at them with an irritable expression.
‘You’re troubled,’ Yugi said, his voice becoming more serious. ‘Is it the Mask?’
‘Not the Mask,’ she said, and it was true: she had entirely forgotten it until now, obsessed as she was with nursing the hurt Asara had done to her. It lay wrapped in her pack, the Mask her father had stolen and died for. She felt it suddenly, leering at her. For five years it had been hidden in a chest in her house, and she had never put it on again; for she knew well enough the way the True Masks worked, how they were narcotic in nature, addicting the wearer to the euphoria of the Weave, granting great power but stealing reason and sanity. Yet the insidious craving was undiminished, the tickle at the back of her mind whenever she thought of it. Calling to her.
Sometime in the afternoon, they rested and ate on a grassy slope beneath an overhang. They had passed out of the ravine and were skirting a sunken plain of broken rocks, bordered on all sides by high cliffs. Some of the rocks had thrust their way up from below in shattered formations like brutal stone flowers, their petals lined with quartz and limestone and malachite; others had fallen from the tall buttes that jutted precariously into the sky. The travellers had been darting from cover to cover for over an hour now, and while the progress they made was faster than it had been through the ravines, it was harder on the nerves. They were too exposed for comfort here.
‘Why did we come this way? We’re not in so much of a hurry,’ Yugi asked Nomoru conversationally, as he ate a cold leg of waterfowl.
Nomoru’s thin face hardened, taking umbrage at the comment. ‘I’m the guide,’ she snapped. ‘I know these lands.’
Yugi was unperturbed. ‘Then educate me, please. I know them too, though not so well as you, I’d imagine. There’s a high pass to the south where—’
‘Can’t go that way,’ Nomoru said dismissively.
‘Why not?’ said Tsata. Kaiku looked at him in vague surprise. It was the first he had spoken that day.
‘It doesn’t matter why not,’ Nomoru replied, digging her heels in further. Kaiku was taken aback by the rudeness of her manner.
Tsata studied the scout for a moment. Hunkered in the shade of the rock, the pale green tattoo reaching tendrils over his arms and face, he looked strangely at home here in the Fault. His skin, which had been sallow in the dawn light, now seemed golden in the afternoon and he appeared healthier for it. ‘You have knowledge of these lands, so you must share it. To withhold it hurts the pash.’
‘The pash?’ Nomoru sneered, uncomprehending.
‘The group,’ Kaiku said. ‘We four are now travelling together, so that makes us the pash. Is that right?’ She addressed this last to Tsata.
‘One kind of pash,’ Tsata corrected. ‘Not the only kind. But yes, that is what I was referring to.’
Nomoru held up her hands in exasperation. Kaiku noted Nomoru’s own tattoos on her arms as her sleeves fell back: intricate, jagged shapes and spirals, intertwining through emblems and pictograms symbolic of allegiances or debts owed and honoured. It was the tradition of the beggars, thieves and other low folk of the Poor Quarter in Axekami to ink their history onto their skin; in that way, promises made could not be broken. In poverty, need drove them to perform services for each other, a community of necessity. Mostly, their word was their bond; but occasionally, for more important matters, something greater was required. A tattoo was an outward display of their undertaking. Usually it was left half-drawn, and finished when the task was done. The Inkers of the Poor Quarter knew all faces and all debts, and they would only complete a tattoo once they had word the task had been fulfilled. An oathbreaker would soon be exposed, and they would not survive long when others refused to aid them.
How strange, Kaiku thought, that the need for honour increased as money and possessions decreased. She wondered if Nomoru had been an oathbreaker; but the meaning of the tattooes was incomprehensible to her, and any words she could see were written in an argot of Low Saramyrrhic which she did not know.
‘Territories change,’ Nomoru said, relenting ungraciously at last. ‘But the borders aren’t defined. Between territories, it’s uncertain. Scouts, warriors sometimes, but no proper guards, no fortifications. So I’ve been taking you between the territories. Not so well guarded, easier to slip through.’ She tilted her head in the direction of the rock-strewn plain. ‘This place is a battlefield. Look at the terrain. Nobody owns it. Too many spirits here.’
‘Spirits?’ Kaiku asked.
‘They come at night,’ Nomoru said. ‘Lot of killing here. Places remember. So we come in the day. Keep our heads down, we stay safe.’
She scratched her knee beneath her trousers, and looked at Yugi. ‘The high pass got taken a month ago. There was a fight; someone lost, someone won.’ She shrugged. ‘Used to be safe. Now you’d be killed before you got a yard into it.’ She raised her eyebrow at Tsata. ‘Satisfied?’ she asked archly.
He tipped his chin at her. Nomoru scowled in confusion, not knowing that it was the Okhamban way of nodding. Kaiku did not enlighten her. She had already decided that she disliked the tangle-haired scout.
It was late evening when their luck ran out.
The sky was a dull and glowering purple-red, streaked with shades of deep blue and ribboned with strips of translucent cloud. Neryn and Aurus were travelling together tonight, and they were already hanging low in the western sky, a thin crescent of green peeping out from behind the vast waxing face of the larger sister. Nomoru was leading them along a high spine of land, rising up above the surrounding miles of thin ghylls and narrow canyons. The ground here was broken into a jigsaw of grassy ledges which rose and fell alarmingly, so that they often found themselves having to climb around dark pits or clamber up thin, dizzying slopes with a terrible drop on either side. As hard as it was, it did have one advantage: they were well hidden within its folds, and nobody was likely to see them unless they ran into them.
They had almost reached the far end of the spine, where the land loomed glowering to meet them again, when Nomoru suddenly held her hand up, her fingers curved in the Saramyr gesture for quiet. It was something that all children learned, generally from their parents who used it often on them. Tsata either knew or guessed its meaning, but his movements were utterly silent anyway.
Kaiku strained to hear anything, but all that came to her were distant animal cries and the rising chorus of night insects. They had seen no evidence of human life so far, whether by chance or by Nomoru’s skill, and only the occasional glimpse of a large predator in the distance had kept them from relaxing. Now the presence of danger tautened her, her body flooding with chill adrenaline, sweeping her brooding thoughts away.
Nomoru glanced back at them, indicating for them to stay. A moment later, she had flitted up the side of the rock wall that faced them and disappeared over the top.
Yugi crept up alongside her in a crouch, his rifle primed in his hands. ‘Do you sense anything?’ he whispered.
‘I have not tried,’ she said. ‘I dare not, yet. If it should be a Weaver, he might notice
me.’ She did not express her deeper fears on the subject: that she had never faced a Weaver in the battlefield of the Weave, that no Sister had except Cailin, and that she was terrified that one day the moment might arrive when she had to.
It was then she noticed Tsata was gone.
The Tkiurathi kept himself low, hugging close to the stone bulk rising to his left. On a level so basic that it did not even need conscious thought, he was aware of what angles he was exposed from and where he was covered. The thorny brakes to his right guarded his flank, and he would hear anyone coming through them, but there were shadowy spots high up on a thin finger of rock beyond that might provide a hiding place for a rifleman or an archer. He had gone to the right around the rise of stone where Nomoru had gone left, hoping to encircle the bulk and meet her on the other side, or clamber over the top if he could not get past it.
It was simple sense to him, born of a logic shaped over thousands of years of jungle life. One scout could be bitten by a snake, fall into a trap, break a leg, or be captured and be unable to warn the rest of the pash when enemies inevitably tracked back to where the scout had come from. Two scouts, taking different routes but still watching each other, were much harder to surprise, and if misfortune befell one then the other could rescue them or go for help. Above all, it was safer for the group.
Tsata was confounded over and over by the incomprehensible thought processes of foreigners, Quraal and Saramyr alike. Their motives baffled him. So much was not said in foreign society, a mass of implications and suggestions meant to hint at private understandings. Their loveplay, for example: he had watched Saran and Kaiku fence around each other for weeks aboard Chien’s ship. How was it that it was somehow unacceptable to say something that both of them knew, to admit their lust for one another, and yet it was acceptable to make it just as obvious through oblique means? Every one of them was so secretive, so locked into themselves, unwilling to share any part of their being with anyone. They hoarded their strength instead of distributing it, building themselves through words and actions for personal advancement rather than using what they had gained to benefit their pash. And so, instead of a community, they had this wildly unequal culture of many social levels in which inferiority was bestowed by birth, or by lack of possessions, or by the deeds of a man’s father. It was so far beyond ridiculous that Tsata did not even know where to begin.
He felt some affinity with Saran, because Saran had been willing to sacrifice every man that accompanied him into the jungles of Okhamba to get himself out alive. That, at least, Tsata could understand, for he was working for the good of a greater pash, that of the Libera Dramach and the Saramyr people. The others on the expedition were merely interested in monetary gain or fame. Only Saran’s motives seemed unselfish. But even Saran, like all of them, was so hidden in intention, and often tried to tell Tsata where to go and what to do. He had thought of himself as the ‘leader’ of their group, even though Tsata had taken no payment and joined of his own free will.
It was too much. He put it from his mind. Time to muse on these puzzling people later.
The stone bulk on his left was not showing any sign of rounding off and allowing Tsata’s path to converge with Nomoru’s, so he decided to chance climbing over it. It would leave him dangerously exposed for a few moments, but there was no help for that. In one lithe movement, he rose from his running crouch and sprang up to grip the rough sides of the rock, using his momentum and his dense muscles to pull himself up. He found a toehold and boosted himself to the top, spreading himself flat on the lumpy roof of stone. In the jungle of his homeland, his jaundiced skin and green tattoos served to camouflage him; now he felt uncomfortably visible. He crawled swiftly over the rock to the other side, staying close to what sparse vegetation grew up here. The waxing moons glared down at him as the light slowly bled from the sky to be replaced by a pale, green-tinged glow.
He was atop a long, thin ridge. Below and to its left, a ledge ran close, following the ridge’s contours until it dropped away suddenly to a small clearing, which was hemmed in on three sides by other shoulders of land.
He could hear them and smell them even before he saw the men moving along the ledge towards where Kaiku and Yugi waited.
There were two of them. They were dressed in a curious assemblage of loose black clothing and dark leather armour, and their faces were powdered unnaturally white, with bruise-coloured dye around their eyes. Their clothes, hair and skin were dirty and striped with a kind of dark blue war-paint, and they were unkempt and stank of an incense that Tsata recognised as ritasi, a five-petalled flower which he understood the Saramyr often burned at funerals. They carried rifles of an early and unreliable make, heavy and grimy things, and there were curved swords at their waists.
Tsata shifted his own rifle, slung on a strap across his back, and loosed his kntha from his belt. Kntha were Okhamban weapons, made for close combat in jungles where longer weapons were unwieldy and likely to snag on creepers. They comprised of a grip of bound leather with a steel knuckle-guard, and two kinked blades a foot long, protruding from the top and bottom of the grip. The blades bent smoothly the opposite way from each other, about halfway along their length, tapering to a wicked edge. Kntha were used in pairs, one to block with and the other to slash, making a total of four blades with which to attack an opponent. They required a particularly vicious fighting style to use effectively. The Saramyr folk had a name for them that was easier for them to remember than the Okhamban: gutting-hooks.
He dropped down to the ledge like a cat, his landing soundless. Tkiurathi disdained any kind of ornamentation that might make a noise, for their skill was in stealth. The two men, intent on their own inept creeping, did not hear him come up behind them. They were easy prey.
He took them by surprise, sweeping at the neck of the rightmost, putting enough of his body weight behind it to behead the man cleanly. With his left hand he slashed out at the other one as he turned into the blow; it caught him square in the throat, not hard enough to decapitate him but enough to plough through thick muscle and lodge in his spine. As the first man fell, Tsata pressed his hide shoe into the second man’s chest and used it as leverage to wrench his gutting-hook free. A spume of steaming blood came with it, followed by a belch of gore from the wound that spilled down his victim’s chest. Tsata stepped back and watched him slump to the ground, his body still not seeming to realise that he was dead, his heart spasmodically pumping as he went.
Satisfied that the greater part of his pash was safe, his thoughts immediately turned to Nomoru. He wiped the blood off his blades and his sleeveless hemp waistcoat so as not to provide any scent-warning to an enemy, and then headed along the ledge in the direction the men had come from.
He found her in the sunken clearing at the end of the ledge. She was backed against a wall, facing him. There were two more with her, one with his knife pressed up under her chin, the other wielding a rifle and scanning the rim. In the last light of the day, Tsata was all but invisible as he watched from the shadow of the rocky ridge. He checked quickly for signs of any others nearby, but there was nothing, not even any sentries or lookouts on the high points surrounding the clearing. These were not warriors, however much they swaggered.
His priority was the man with the knife to Nomoru’s throat. He would have liked to try and do it in silence, but the risk was far too great. Instead, he waited until neither of them were looking at him, then took aim with his rifle. He was just weighing the possibilities of taking the man out without him reflexively stabbing Nomoru when the scout spotted him with an infinitesimal flicker of her eyes. A moment later, she looked back at him again, hard. Purposefully. The man guarding her frowned as he noticed. She glared wide at Tsata, her eyes urging him.
Tsata held his fire. Clever. She was trying to turn her enemy’s attention from her.
‘Stop mugging, you fool,’ the man hissed. ‘I’m no idiot. You won’t make me look away.’ And with that, he slapped her. But he had to take his knife aw
ay a few inches to do it, and the instant he did so Tsata blew his brains out of the side of his head.
The last man turned with a cry, raising his rifle; but Tsata was already leaping down upon him, driving the butt of his weapon into the man’s jaw. His enemy’s rifle fired wild as he fell, and a second blow from Tsata stove his skull in.
The echoes of the gunshots rang across the Fault and into the gathering night.
There was a pause as Nomoru and Tsata looked at each other in the gloom, and then Nomoru turned away and scooped up her rifle and dagger, which had been taken from her.
‘They’ll be coming,’ she said, not meeting his eye. ‘More of them. We have to go.’
FOURTEEN
The echoes of the hunt floated distantly across the peaks.
Upon her return with Tsata, Nomoru had led them off the spine of land that they had been following, taking a north-westward route that descended hard. They were bruised and scratched from sliding down steep slopes of shale, and the exertion had tired them, for Nomoru had set a reckless pace for more than an hour. She seemed furious, though whether at herself or at them it was difficult to tell. She pushed them to their limits, guiding them down into the depths of the Fault, until the dark land reared all around them.
Finally, she called a halt in a round, grassy clearing that seemed to spring out of nowhere amid the lifeless rock that bordered it. A dank mist lay on the ground, despite the night’s warmth, a sad pearly green in the light of the crescent moons. The clearing slid away down a narrow hillside to the west, but whatever was there was obscured by the contour of the land.
Yugi and Kaiku threw themselves down on the grass. Tsata squatted nearby. Nomoru stalked about in agitation.
‘Gods, I could sleep right here,’ Yugi declared.
‘We can’t stay here. Just take a rest,’ Nomoru snapped. ‘I didn’t want to go this way.’
‘We are going on?’ Kaiku asked in disbelief. ‘We have been travelling since dawn!’
The Braided Path: The Weavers of Saramyr, The Skein of Lament and the Ascendancy Veil Page 60