The Braided Path: The Weavers of Saramyr, The Skein of Lament and the Ascendancy Veil

by Chris Wooding

  He only wished his wife Muraki would see sense and do the same, but it was a minor annoyance.

  Footsteps from behind him heralded the arrival of the Weave-lord Kakre, and he finished his round of mantras and stood to bow deeply to the altar. When he was done, he turned to face his new master.

  ‘Prayers, Lord Protector?’ Kakre rasped. ‘How quaint.’

  ‘The gods have favoured me,’ Avun replied. ‘They deserve my gratitude.’

  ‘The gods have deserted this land,’ Kakre said. ‘If ever they existed to begin with.’

  Avun raised an eyebrow. ‘The Weavers bow to no gods, then?’

  ‘From this day, we are your gods,’ the Weave-lord said.

  Avun studied the corpse-faced grotesquerie in front of him, and made no response.

  ‘Come,’ said Kakre. ‘We have much to talk about.’

  Avun nodded. There was plenty to be done. Even the Weavers could not conquer a land as vast as Saramyr in a day, or a year. They had cut the head off the empire, and seized its capital and several major cities, but the nobility and populace were too widely scattered to easily subjugate, even with the overwhelming numbers that the Weavers possessed and the armies of most of the high families destroyed. The north-west quarter of the continent would be entirely under Weaver control within the month. After that, it would be a matter of sweeping away the disoriented remnants of the nobility, powerless without their Weavers, blinded and crippled. Consolidating and then pushing southward, until all the land was theirs and there was no one to oppose them.

  Whether it would be as easy as that, Avun had no idea; but he had a knack for picking the winning side, and in this case he would far rather be with the Weavers than against them.

  Kakre’s own concerns ran deeper than troops and war and occupation. His thoughts were on what might have happened in the Fault, the loss of so many Weavers, and most abhorrently the destruction of a witchstone. He felt its death like a physical wound, and it had aged him, making him more bent and pain-racked than ever before. What had become, then, of the Fold, and of Lucia?

  And what of the entities that had fought his Weavers, the women who dared oppose them in the realm beyond the senses? That was a danger beyond anything he had yet encountered, the most potent threat he could imagine now. If he had been able to spare enough of his forces, he would have sent them rampaging toward the Xarana Fault; but even then, he suspected he would find that his targets had gone back into hiding. How long had they been there? How long had they spread and grown? All these years of killing Aberrant children had been precisely to prevent something like this from happening, and yet despite their best efforts it had happened anyway. How strong were they now? How many did they number?

  He thought of the Sisters, and he feared them.

  They walked slowly down the raised path across the pool towards the entrance to the temple, where blinding sunlight shone through the doorway. They spoke as they went, of triumph and failure, their voices echoing in the silence until they faded, leaving the house of the Emperor of the gods empty and hollow.

  The sun was setting in the west as Cailin watched, a sullen red orb glaring through the veil of smoke that still rose from the valley of the Fold. She stood on a high lip of land, a grassy shelf jutting out over a splintered hillside of dark rock. She had been here for some time now, thinking. There were many plans to make yet.

  The remainder of the Sisters were scattered around the Fold, helping in the dispersal. The Libera Dramach was breaking up, spreading out, making itself an impossible target; they would regroup at a rendezvous in several weeks’ time. The people of the Fold were doing what they could: most were intending to rejoin the others, putting their trust in the leaders who had seen them through good times and tragedy. Others were going their own way, amalgamating into other tribes and factions or heading out of the Fault altogether. The unity of the Fold was shattered, and would never be regained.

  Messages had been flashing across the Weave all day, from other cells of the Red Order elsewhere. News of Axekami, of massacres in the northern cities, of the Weavers’ daring and unstoppable coup. News of the fall of the Emperor, and with him the empire. The Sisters knew that the game was up now, that the Weavers were aware of them at last, and their silence was broken.

  There was a soft tread behind. Cailin did not need to turn to know it was Phaeca. The red-headed Sister walked to the edge of the precipice and stood beside her. She was clothed in black, as all the Sisters were, and she wore the intimidating face-paint of the Order; but her dress was a different cut to Cailin’s, her hair worn in an elaborate style of braids and bunches that bore testament to her River District upbringing.

  For a time, they were silent. Nuki’s eye was slipping towards the horizon, turning the sky to coral pink and purple, marred by the drifting smoke.

  ‘So many dead,’ Phaeca said at last. ‘Is this how you planned it?’

  ‘Hardly,’ Cailin said. ‘The Weavers finding out about the Fold was an unfortunate happenstance brought about by a mob of foolish and misguided zealots.’

  Phaeca’s silence was response enough. Cailin let it drag out.

  ‘Did we cause all this?’ Phaeca persisted at length. ‘Hiding, refusing to act, all these years when we could have done something . . . is this the price we pay?’

  Cailin’s voice was edged with annoyance. ‘Phaeca, stop this. You know as well as I why we have not acted these long years. And the lives lost here will be nothing to the lives that will be lost in the months to come.’

  ‘We could have stopped them,’ Phaeca argued. ‘We could have stopped the Weavers taking the throne. If we had tried.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ Cailin conceded doubtfully. She turned her head slightly, looking sidelong at her companion. She was seeking a salve to justify herself. Cailin had none to give. ‘But whyever would we do that? There is no sacrifice too high, Phaeca. Do not let your conscience prick you now; it is too late for regrets. This is only the beginning. The Sisters have awakened. The war for Saramyr has commenced.’ A sultry breeze stirred the feathers of her ruff. ‘We wanted the Weavers to take the throne. That is why we have held our allies back, that is why we preached secrecy and told them to hide, that is why we refused to use our abilities to aid them. They can never be allowed to know that. They would call it a betrayal.’

  Phaeca nodded in reluctant understanding, her gaze fixed on the middle distance.

  ‘If this is only the beginning,’ she said, ‘I fear what is to come.’

  ‘As well you should, Sister,’ Cailin told her. ‘As well you should.’

  They said no more, but neither did they leave. The Sisters stood together for a long while in the fading light of the dusk, watching the rising smoke from the valley as the colours bled from the sky and darkness covered the land.

  THE ASCENDANCY VEIL

  ONE

  They loomed through the smoke, shadows in the billowing murk. In the instant before they came charging into the hall, they seemed as demons, their forms huge and vaporous. But they were not demons. The demons were still outside.

  The pitiful scattering of defenders met the assault with grim stoicism. Some had taken up station on the balcony that ran around the room, but most were arranged at ground level behind a barricade they had assembled from toppled statues, plinths and the few small tables they had found. The Saramyr tendency towards minimal furniture had not worked to their advantage here. Still, they took what cover they could, aimed their rifles, and filled the air with gunfire as the ghauregs came pounding towards them.

  Once, the entrance hall had been exquisite, a cool and echoing chamber intended to impress dignitaries and nobles. Now it had been stripped of its finery and ornaments, and the walls were scorched. The floor had been cracked by the same explosion that had set fire to the hangings and tapestries near the doorway. A dozen or so monstrous corpses were scattered there. One well-timed bomb had dealt with the first wave of creatures; the rifles would take care of a portion of the n
ext. But beyond that, the defenders’ cause was hopeless.

  The ghauregs thundered across the wide open space at the centre of the hall and were cut down, their thick grey pelts ribboning with red as the rifle balls punched through them. But for each one that died there was another behind it, and several that fell got up again, their wounds only enraging them further. Eight feet high at the shoulder and apelike in posture, they were savage ogres of fur and muscle. Pain and death meant nothing to them, and they raced through the crossfire with suicidal fury.

  The defenders managed to reprime fast enough for a second volley before the creatures crashed into the barricade and began tearing it apart, clambering over the top to reach the men behind. Rifles were dropped and swords drawn, but against the sheer size and power of the ghauregs there were too few blades. They knew this, and still they fought. They had been ordered to hold the administrative complex and they would do so with their lives. Saramyr soldiers would take death before the shame of disobeying orders.

  The ghauregs punched and grabbed at their targets. Where the defenders were not quick enough to evade, they were bludgeoned to pulp or snatched up to be flung through the air like broken mannequins. Those who dodged away struck back with their swords, slashing at tendons and hamstrings. In moments, the floor was slippery with blood, and the cries of men were drowned by the bellowing of the beasts.

  The soldiers on the balcony picked their targets as best they could in the melee, but they had problems of their own now. For behind the ghauregs had come several skrendel: slender, nimble things with long, strangling fingers that swarmed up the pillars. What little support the soldiers could give the men below dissipated swiftly as they struggled to keep the newcomers away.

  The beasts had destroyed the barricade now and were sowing mayhem. Outsize jaws bit and snapped, crunching through bone and gristle; enormous shoulders strained as they rent apart their small and frail prey. In less than a minute, the remaining half-dozen ghauregs had decimated the tiny force holding the entrance hall, and only a few soldiers were left, their deaths merely an afterthought. But as the ghauregs’ small yellow eyes fixed on the final, defiant dregs of resistance, one of their number burst into flames.

  The two Sisters of the Red Order swept into the hall from the back, an arrogant lethality in their stride. Both wore the sheer dark dress of the Order, both the intimidating face-paint of their kind: the black and red shark-tooth triangles across their lips, the twin crimson crescents curving over their eyes from forehead to cheek. Their irises were the colour of smouldering coals.

  The other ghauregs shied away from the heat of their burning companion, and in that moment of hesitation the Sisters took them apart. Two of the beasts fell, spewing blood from every orifice; two more burst into white flames, becoming pillars of fire and smoke and bubbling fat; the last was picked up as if by some invisible hand and pulverised against the wall with enough force to shatter the stone. The skrendel began to scatter, winding back down the pillars and making for the entranceway. One of the Sisters made a casual gesture with a black-gloved hand and maimed them, popping and cracking their thin bones and leaving them flailing weakly on the floor.

  In seconds, it was done. All that was left in the wake of the conflict was the restless industry of the flames, the mewling of the dying skrendel and the cries of wounded men. The remnants of the defenders regarded the Sisters with ragged awe.

  Kaiku tu Makaima surveyed the scene before her. Her vision was poised on the cusp of the world of natural light and that of the Weave, overlaying one on top of the other. She looked past the battered and bloodied figures gazing at her, past the corpse-strewn hall to the doorway where smoke from the fire plumed angrily into the room. But beneath that veneer of reality she saw a golden diorama of threads, the stitches and fibres of existence: the whole hall rendered in millions of tiny, endless tendrils. She saw the inrush and exhalation of the stirred air as the living drew it into their lungs; the curl and roll at the heart of the smoke; the stout, unwavering lines of the pillars.

  She flexed her fingers and tied up the frantic threads of the flame, wrapping it tighter and tighter until it choked and extinguished itself.

  ‘Juraka has fallen,’ she said, her voice ringing out across the hall. ‘We retreat south-west to the river.’

  She felt their disappointment like a wave. She had not wanted to tell them this. Their companions lay dead around them, dozens of lives sacrificed to defend this place, and she was the one who had to inform the survivors that it was all for nothing. Perhaps they hated her for doing so. Perhaps, in their breasts, they harboured a bitterness that she had arrived and made their struggles meaningless, and they thought: filthy Aberrant.

  She cared little. She had greater concerns.

  She left her companion, Phaeca, to explain matters in more sensitive terms while she walked through the dispersing smoke of the snuffed-out fire and out into the warm and bright winter’s day.

  Juraka had been founded on a hillside overlooking the shores of the colossal Lake Azlea, an ancient market town that had begun as a stop-off point for travellers making the long trek from Tchamaska to Machita along the Prefectural Highway. In time, it had evolved a fishing and boatmaking industry, and sometime during the bloody internecine wars following the death of the mad Emperor Cadis tu Othoro it had been fortified and garrisoned. Latterly, it had become a vital part of the line which the remnants of the Empire had held for years against the Weavers and the hordes at their command.

  But by the time Nuki’s eye sank below the horizon today, it would be in the enemy’s hands.

  Kaiku swore under her breath, an unladylike habit picked up from her long-dead brother and never shed. She knew that the stalemate would have to end sooner or later, that eventually one side would devise an advantage over the other. She just wished the Weavers had not got there first.

  The administrative complex was a sprawling, walled enclosure of several grandiose buildings in a circular formation. To her right, houses ran up the hill to the fringe of a small forest; to her left, streets and tiny plazas fell away in a clutter of ornamental slate rooftops to the vast expanse of the lake, which glittered sharply in the crisp daylight until it was lost to the haze of distance. Ships were battling out there in a slow dance, the sporadic crack of gunfire and the bellow of cannons drifting up to her. The shore was crowded with jetties and warehouses, most of which were smashed and burning now. Smoke rose in indistinct columns, cloaking the lower streets in a fug.

  Kaiku’s gaze roamed across the town, across the broken shrines and sundered houses, the streets where men and women fought running skirmishes with shrillings and furies and worse. Gristle-crows soared high on the thermals overhead, providing a literal birds-eye view for their Nexus masters. But these were enemies she knew, creatures she had dealt with many times in the four years since this war had begun. She turned her attention to the authors of the town’s downfall.

  There were two of them, one down by the shore and another rearing over the treeline on the hilltop. Feya-kori: ‘blight demons’ in the Saramyrrhic mode used for speaking of supernatural beings. They were forty feet high: drooling, lumbering, foetid things in a mocking approximation of human shape, distorted figures with long, thick arms and legs, that walked on all fours and seethed a dire miasma as they moved. They were formed of some kind of noisome, roiling sludge that dripped and spattered, and where it touched it spread fire and rot, causing leaves to crinkle and wood to decay. They had no faces, merely a bulge between their shoulders, in which burned incandescent orbs that trailed luminous gobbets. They moaned plaintively to each other as they went about their destruction, their mournful cries accompanying the slow, idiot savagery of their actions.

  As Kaiku watched, one of them waded out into the lake. The waters hissed and boiled, and a black patina began to spread from where its limbs plunged. She felt her stomach sink as she saw its intention. It forged its way towards one of the Empire’s junks, and with a doleful groan it raised one s
tump of a hand and brought it crashing down onto the vessel, breaking it in half and setting men and sails aflame. Kaiku closed her eyes reflexively and turned away, but even then she could feel the force of the demons’ presence through the Weave, a blasphemous dark pummelling at her consciousness.

  The other feya-kori was surging out of the forest, leaving a vile scar of browning foliage and collapsing trees in its wake. It smashed an arm into the nearest rooftops, wanton in its malice. Five of Kaiku’s Sisters had already died attempting to tackle the feya-kori. All over Juraka the order to retreat was spreading, and the forces of the Empire were pulling back to the south-west.

  Then she sensed the spidery movement of a Weaver down in the streets below, heard the distant screams of soldiers, and the rage and sorrow in her heart found a target.

  If I cannot stop this, she promised herself, I will at least take one of them in payment.

  She stalked away from the administrative complex, out through the prayer gate with its eloquent paean to Naris, god of scholars, and into the narrow, sloping streets beyond.

  Blood ran in chain-link trickles between the cobbles, inching slowly downhill from the bodies of men and women and the foetally curled corpses of Aberrant predators. Kaiku experienced a moment of bitter humour at how Aberrants, which were created by the Weavers in the first place, were simultaneously their greatest resource and their greatest opponents. She and all the other Sisters were a product of the same process that had spawned monstrosities like the ghauregs. She was certain that the gods, watching from the Golden Realm, never tired of laughing at the way events had turned out.