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

by Chris Wooding

  He had spent the morning making inspections, conferring with his ur-Baraks and generals, giving speeches to the troops. His decision to make them train without a break all through the hottest part of the day was heartily approved of by his subordinates, for the soldiers needed to be able to fight under any conditions. Not that the Barak had expected any dissent even if they had disagreed; the discipline of the Saramyr armies was legend, and Sonmaga was not accustomed to having his orders questioned.

  Seized by a suddenly poetic mood, he spurred his horse and angled through the rows of soldiers towards the keep that sat distantly to the east, made pale and half real by graduated veils of sunlight. But it was not the keep that was his destination; instead, after a short ride, he reined in some way up the hillside that looked out over the dusty plains, and there he dismounted.

  He was standing on a low bluff, where a short flap of rock had broken through the even swell of the hillside to provide level ground. Behind him and a little way upward were the first dry-stone walls that marked the edge of his orchards, and beyond that the grassy soil was subsumed in a mass of leaves and trunks and roots and fruit. He left his horse to crop the grass and walked out on to the bluff, and there he surveyed the arrayed masses of his troops.

  The size of the spectacle took his breath away, but more humbling was the vastness of the plains that made even his army seem insignificant. The massive formations of men seemed antlike in comparison, their magnificence outshone by the world around them. The sky was a perfect jewel-blue, untroubled by cloud. The flow of the Kerryn was a blinding streak of maddening brightness, twinkling and winking in the fierce light of Nuki’s eye, tracing its unstoppable path towards Axekami, which was hidden beneath the horizon. The plains were dotted with clusters of trees, dirt roads, the occasional settlement here and there; Sonmaga fancied he could see a herd of banathi making its slow way across the panorama, but heat haze made his vision uncertain.

  Sonmaga offered a silent prayer of thanks to the gods. He was not a tender man, but what softness he had he reserved for moments like these. Nature awed him. This land awed him, and he loved it. His gaze swept over the tiny formations of his troops below, and he felt his doubts dissipate. Whatever came of this, he would know that he had done what his heart dictated. There were greater matters at play than thrones here.

  He did not deny to himself that he wanted power. To elevate Blood Amacha to the ruling family would enshrine his name forever in history, and the honour would be immense. But a coup would be enacted on his terms, his way. He did not want a civil war, not now. The time was not right; it was too precipitate. Events had conspired to force his hand.

  But there was a higher motive for victory than simple power. Sonmaga’s deep, abiding love for the land made him sensitive to it, and the blight he saw creeping into the bones of the earth scarred him deeply. He saw the evidence even in his own orchards, the decline that was too gradual to spot until he compared tallies over the years and saw that more and more fruit was spoiling on the branch, more trees withering or coming up twisted. Though the blight had barely brushed his lands when compared to some other, less fortunate areas, he felt an unholy abhorrence of it, as if the corruption crept slowly into him as well as the soil. And then there were the Aberrants, children of the blight, born to peasants on his land; and he feared that if the time should come that he would marry and father a child, it might turn out like them, mewling and deformed and terrible. He would snap its neck himself if he saw a child of his born Aberrant.

  And now, Lucia. The Heir-Empress, an Aberrant? There could be no greater affront to the gods, to nature, to simple sense. Now was not the time for tolerance of these creatures – a tolerance that would surely increase if Lucia reached the throne. They were symptoms of an evil that was killing Saramyr, and to encourage them to thrive was lunacy.

  No, the desire for power would not have been enough to make Sonmaga war against his Empress, not at this juncture. But to arrest the progress of the poison in the land? For that, he would dare almost anything.

  He brought out the letter in his pocket and read over it again, the letter that had been sealed with the stamp of Barak Avun tu Koli, and wondered if he might not be able to turn things around yet.

  THIRTEEN

  The isle of Fo lay off the sloping north-western coast of Saramyr, a day’s travel across the red-tinged waves of the Camaran Channel. The wind had freshened as the afternoon wore on, and it cooed and whistled through the ratlines of the enormous junk, rippling the sails that sprouted from its back like the spined fins of some magnificent sea creature. The Summer Tide was a merchant vessel belonging to the wealthiest trading consortium in Jinka, and it showed. Her gunwale was moulded into the likeness of stormy waves, chasing each other from bow to stern, and in amongst them frolicked seals and whales, sea-spirits and imaginary beasts of the deep. The sails were a magnificent array, with polished wooden ribs holding great fans of beige canvas between them, and painted with the red sigil of the consortium. It was a thing of beauty, carrying a cargo of beautiful things: silks, perfumes, spices; and several passengers, two of whom were watching the desolate isle draw ever closer.

  Kaiku was lounging against the thick oaken rail on the foremost deck, her feathered hair whipping restlessly against her tanned cheeks. It was not especially ladylike; but then, neither were her clothes, and she had ever been a tomboy. She wore trousers of heavy, baggy fabric and soft boots wound around with leather to keep them tight. In addition, she had on a light shirt of blue, wrapped right over left – men wore their shirts the opposite way – and belted around her waist with a sash of red. She felt the sun on her skin and flexed like a cat, luxuriating in the warmth. Tane, standing nearby, watched her with a hungry eye.

  A week had passed since they had left Axekami and taken a barge upriver to Jinka. Upriver travel was necessarily slower on craft that had no sails, but the Jabaza’s current was not strong at this time of year, and the barge had plenty of wheelmen hired. These swarthy folk rarely came up on deck; their journey was spent in the treadmills at the hot heart of the barge, turning the massive paddle-wheels that powered the craft against the flow. For three days they had watched the flattened peak of Mount Makara rise slowly from the horizon, until it bulked vast among the surrounding mountains, a pale blue-green, and they could see the wisps of smoke that issued from its volcanic maw.

  That leg of the journey, from Axekami up the Jabaza, had been easy and pleasant, and the weather was good; yet Tane’s recollection of it was polluted with disgust. For it had not been an entirely uneventful trip. Among the passengers on the Summer Tide had been a Weaver on his way to Jinka.

  The Weaver had a separate cabin at the back of the boat, where he spent almost all his time. There was a cabin boy who saw to his needs, a fresh-faced lad of twelve years or so that brought in his food and took out his chamberpot. His name was Runfey, and he was an ever-smiling presence aboard the barge, his high laugh often heard across the deck.

  One day, as dusk approached, Kaiku was stricken with a sudden faintness. Tane was with her at the time; Asara was elsewhere, alone, as she usually preferred.

  Kaiku had moaned aloud as her head went light; then she seemed to notice Tane, and fell quiet. Tane could not help feeling galled at the way she clammed up, hoarding whatever secret she kept. He did not pretend to understand her, but he sat with her until the faintness passed. Twenty minutes later, the noises began.

  Kaiku had gone to lie down, and Tane was out alone, watching the moons rise as the darkness deepened. The river was a peacefully undulating abyss picked out in Iridima’s light. The only sound was the sighing lap of the water against the hull of the barge, and the creak of her timbers. Tane had felt strangely peaceful then, calmer than he had been for a long time, even back in the forest when he had been trying to master his meditations.

  The shrieking and raging started all of a sudden, coming from the Weaver’s cabin. Tane moved closer, curious. The Weaver seemed to be in a fit of terribl
e anger, smashing things and throwing himself around inside. Two guards posted at his door made no attempt to disperse the small crowd of sailors that gathered at the noise, but they would let no one in. No one except Runfey.

  He was brought by another guard, led by the arm to the Weaver’s door. He was not struggling, but the naked fear in his eyes as they met Tane’s would haunt him for a long time afterward. The guards opened the door, and all went quiet inside, a predatory kind of silence that made Tane cold. Then they put Runfey in there, and closed the door behind him.

  Tane and six of the sailors stood there that night, and heard the screams of Runfey as the Weaver vented his anger on the boy. They heard him beg and plead as he was battered, heard him shriek and wail as other tortures were visited on him that Tane could only guess at, heard him cry out as he was raped repeatedly. Two hours they stood there as witnesses to the horrors that were carried out in that cabin, while their vile guest’s post-Weaving rage exhausted itself. None would move, for it would be an unpardonable shame to turn their backs; and yet none dared intervene, either.

  Only when silence fell did Tane leave to pray. He was still praying in the dead of night, when he heard the splash of something heavy tipped overboard. They saw no more of Runfey. Nobody spoke of it again. The next day it was business as usual, and Kaiku was still not even aware anything had happened. Tane had elected not to tell her; it would do no good to anyone.

  After that, they had turned west into the Abanahn Canal. Tane felt an unfamiliar sweep of patriotic pride at the sight. He had heard of it only in tales: a vast man-made waterway that connected the Jabaza with the coast, one of the mightiest feats of engineering in Saramyr. Enormous walls of white stone rose on either side, dotted with towers and gates and locks. Immense mechanisms with cogs that were half the size of their barge lay dormant, but Tane had heard how they could be used to raise impenetrable gates to prevent enemies sailing up the canal from the sea and reaching the interior of Saramyr. They passed beneath a curved prayer gate of monolithic size, arcing from one side of the canal to the other, its inscription offering the blessing of Zanya, goddess of travellers. In both directions sailed such a profusion of gaudy boats and barges that Tane spent all his daylight hours on the deck, watching them in amazement as a child watches a procession. Moments like this reminded him how painfully limited his life had been until now, spent almost exclusively in the Forest of Yuna.

  What he saw of Jinka was even more hectic than the streets of Axekami. They disembarked at the docks amid the babble of hundreds of labourers, the creak and groan of pulleys and thick ropes as they unloaded crates and bales, the raucous laughter of sailors in the taverns. The Weaver had gone about his business elsewhere, while Asara took them to a boat master she professed to know. The boat master did not appear to remember her, but after a few words in private, he beamed and said he would be delighted to arrange them transport. Asara kept her silence.

  And so they had stayed the night in a clean and respectable temple inn. Temple inns were resting places owned by the priesthood of one god or another, and the only place they were unlikely to be bothered by prostitutes or drunks or cut-throats while staying in the docks. Tane had fretted to himself about the shin-shin, unable to dispel their memory and remembering Asara’s comment about how the demons might track them when they left the safety of the capital. But they had entered Axekami by water and left by water, and it seemed that their trail had gone cold. Nothing disturbed them that night.

  When dawn came they were taken to the Summer Wind, and set sail for Fo.

  Tane leaned against the railing now, next to Kaiku. She was radiant in the westering light. Not so beautiful as Jin – Asara, he corrected himself – but possessed of some different kind of attraction, and one that was stronger. Perhaps it was something to do with the way he had met her, her total vulnerability. She had appealed to his need to heal, and he had nursed her strength back. Perhaps it was their similarities: both had lost their families, both had their secrets. Or perhaps it was something altogether different.

  Lucia dreamed.

  Her dreams had always been strange, informed as they were by subconscious nonsense-whispers emanating from the life that surrounded her. When she dreamed, she heard the slow, childlike thoughts of the trees in the roof garden, the rapid and unintelligible gibber of the wind, the obsessively focused ravens and the impossibly ancient ruminations of the hill upon which the Keep stood, for whom the completion of a single thought would take longer than a human lifetime. It was never silent for Lucia, and the sounds all around her translated into strange images when she slept.

  She had stopped dream-walking entirely of late. The unseen presence that had suddenly begun to stalk her was too frightening, and too dangerous. She felt its monstrous attention gnawing at the edges of her consciousness even now, however. It was ravenous, hungry, frustrated by her elusiveness. She would not let it catch her.

  Over the year since she had begun exploring the Keep in her dreams, she had learned to control her abilities somewhat. Whereas at first she had no say over where she would find herself when she closed her eyes, and was only a spectator to her own wanderings, she had soon divined how to guide herself, and how to choose which places to visit. More importantly, she learned how not to dream-walk, so that she could suppress it if she wanted and sleep untroubled. She rarely felt rested after a night wandering the Keep’s corridors in her mind; but in those early days, her curiosity about the world outside her prison kept her going back again and again. By day, she was a rumour among the folk of the Keep; by night, she was a ghost.

  But other things had changed, too. Whatever it was that she had set in motion when she had given a lock of her hair to the man in the garden, it was gathering pace, and she felt it daily.

  She dreamed that she stood on the edge of a high, rocky crag, a great promontory that dropped away hundreds of feet to jagged rocks below. The landscape spread out and away beneath her, an impossible chaos of ridges and shattered stone, tree-choked valleys and plateaux. It was thick with spirits down there, invisible in their hollows, and they cooed and whispered to each other in the night.

  The night. The three moons hung before her in a velvet sky, so close that they were overlapping. Aurus seemed near enough to touch, looming immense in the star-pocked darkness. She was not in the least perturbed by the impossibility of the three moons being in such close proximity without the howling maelstrom of a moonstorm lashing the land. With the easy logic of sleep, she knew that it was simply not the right time yet.

  She sensed the dream lady watching her before she turned to look. The sloping table of rock she stood on jutted out from a thick wood, and in the shadows of the treeline she could see the blurred, unclear shape of the mysterious stranger. She was a smear of black and white, a child’s charcoal drawing, stretched thin and tall with a cloak folded close around her like a bat’s wings. Always too far away to see clearly, always evading Lucia’s sight. This one had found her when the unseen monster could not; but Lucia was not afraid of the dream lady. There was no malice there, only an unsettling intensity. Often she was simply present on the sidelines of Lucia’s dreams, watching silently from some distant point, a rooftop or a cavern, her gaze unwavering as she followed the Heir-Empress. Sometimes she spoke, and though Lucia did not like her voice, her words were very clear and she told Lucia things about the world outside. Lucia, desperately curious, would converse whenever she could with the dream lady; but often the newcomer would not reply, would simply watch her disconcertingly, always from far away. Lucia did not know what to make of it all, but she had the impression that the dream lady told Lucia exactly as much as she wanted the young Heir-Empress to know, and nothing more.

  Still, as time went on, she learned who and what the dream lady was, and she began to think of her as a strange kind of friend.

  Tonight she was not talking, it seemed. She hung in the shadows, a half-seen haze, and stared. Lucia ignored her. She had learned by now that it was pointless
doing anything else. Distractedly, she sensed the unseen malevolence, hunting for her again. It was far away, and no threat to her here.

  There was no sound but the sigh of the cool wind and the calling of the spirits in the cracked landscape below. Lucia wandered to the edge and looked down, her blonde hair tumbling over her shoulder. When she turned back, the dream lady was gone.

  It gave her a fright. She was quite accustomed to the dream lady’s visits, but her sudden disappearances were always a surprise. Before, she had only ever vanished when the dark presence that stalked her had become too strong, got too close. She had told Lucia she must stay away from the presence, must not let herself be detected. Lucia had accepted that, but when she asked what the presence was, the dream lady would not say.

  Now, however, the air seemed to become light, taking on a coppery taste, and the fine hairs on Lucia’s skin stood up. She felt as if she was being lifted, dragged upward towards the sky, though her feet remained firmly on the ground. The atmosphere had become charged, and the spirits hidden in the panorama beneath her had gone silent.

  She felt a hand touch her on her shoulder, far bigger than any human hand, thin white fingers tipped with hooked nails. Her heart seemed to slow to a stop. She did not dare turn around. She could feel them, their presence making her consciousness crawl. Ageless, endless, mad things, the three sisters that stalked the earth when the three satellites shared space in the night sky. The Children of the Moons.

  The touch was both dreadful and divine, filling her with terror and awe in equal measure. She squeezed her eyes shut, knowing that behind her there was no ground to stand on, that the spirits hung in the air over the precipice, massive and cold and fearful. She could not bear to look at them, could not face the depthless void of their eyes, where motivations boiled that were as alien to humanity as the gods were. And though some part of her knew this to be a dream, it brought her no comfort; for dreams were no refuge from beings such as these.