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

by Chris Wooding

  She clamped down on her sorrow as soon as it bunched to spring. Mishani. That was a name forever in her past now. If she must live on, she must prepare herself to be shunned and despised, even by the ones she held most dear. Perhaps she was merely being obtuse, unwilling to accept what seemed the obvious truth: that Cailin tu Moritat and her Red Order were the only ones who would accept her now, the only ones who wanted her. Though she suspected their motives, she could not deny that. To everyone else, she was simply an Aberrant, and no different from the foul things which attacked their caravan.

  Mamak seemed a capable guide, and they felt as safe in his hands as it was possible to feel in such an alien place. Many times he made them backtrack to avoid a bluff, or to take advantage of an overhang. Rarely did he explain why – one of the few things he was not overly vocal about – but whenever they wondered about the absence of the dangerous creatures they had been warned of, they thought of these detours and suspected it was thanks to him they had not met any. They did see smaller breeds, however: some whole and strange, and some malformed. These latter flopped inefficiently about, searching for food. They were usually cubs or chicks, for they would not survive to adulthood before becoming a meal for some superior predator. The evidence of these predators came at night, when the whistling wind was joined by eerie baying and yelping from unnatural throats. On the second night they had stayed awake, listening to the cries come closer and finally encircle them. But Mamak had not allowed a fire that night, and though they shivered, the creatures passed them by.

  On the third day, the weather worsened.

  They were caught out on a long, slanted table of bare rock when the storm hit, seemingly out of nowhere. Kaiku was shocked at the speed that the cloud cover darkened to glowering black, and the ferocity with which it unloaded on them. She was used to the slow, ponderous buildup of humidity on the mainland, when it was possible to sense precisely when a storm was about to break; here, there were no such indications. Mamak cursed and increased the pace, leading them up the exposed tilt of the rock towards shelter; but it would take several hours to traverse the open ground, and they feared the storm would overwhelm them by then.

  Kaiku had never felt anything like it. The rain, icily cold, battered and smashed at her with such force that it stung the skin of her face. Lightning flashed and tore the air, and thunder blasted them and rolled through the creases of the mountains. It seemed that by being this high they were disproportionately closer to the cloud, and the violence of the storm’s roar was enough to make them cringe. The wind picked up steadily until it pushed at them with rough shoulders, snapping from different directions in an attempt to tip them and send them tumbling away. As Mamak had advised, they had bought heavy coats for the journey, and they were never more glad than now; but even with their hoods pulled over their heads, the wind and rain slashed them with brutal force.

  They bowed to the fury of the elements, forging on with their packs tugging at their backs. Their teeth chattered and their lips and cheeks were numb, but they wearily forced one foot in front of the other and hurried up the rocky slope, slick with rain. And each time Kaiku thought she could take no more, that she must somehow stop this assault immediately or just curl up and collapse, she looked up at the steep cliff they were heading towards and moaned in misery at how little ground they seemed to have made.

  Eventually, the unendurable ended, and they stumbled into a cave, frozen and soaking and shivering. It was a good size for the four of them, its walls a ragged mess of black stone, shot through with scrappy veins of quartz which glistened as if moist. The floor was tilted slightly upward from the mouth, so it had mercifully stayed dry, even though they would still have taken shelter there if it had been inches deep. Mamak stalked to the back of the cave and angrily pronounced it unoccupied. Then he shouted and swore and stamped, profanities echoing off the uneven walls, cursing the gods in general and Panazu specifically for the storm.

  ‘He seems annoyed,’ Asara deadpanned, and Kaiku was so surprised that she started laughing, despite it all.

  ‘I’m glad you two are in such good spirits,’ Tane said morosely, and by his tone Kaiku guessed that the black mood which had been hovering over him of late had finally descended.

  Mamak was leaning against the cave wall, his head rested on his forearm, breathing hard to relax himself. ‘Warm yourselves as best you can,’ he said. ‘I’ll make a fire.’

  ‘With what?’ Tane snapped, depression making him thorny. ‘There’s no wood on this damned mountain!’

  It was not strictly true, but Mamak did not bother to correct him. ‘There are other ways of making fire in the mountains,’ he said. ‘I have done this before, you know.’

  Tane flashed him a sullen glare and marched to the entrance of the cave, where he sat alone, looking out at the lashing rain, with the fur lining of his hood rippling as stray gusts found their way in. Kaiku sat dripping against one of the walls, hugging her coat close around her, her jaw juddering from the cold. Asara sat down next to her. Kaiku gave her a look of vague puzzlement, for she had expected the other to sit alone; then Asara opened her coat, and put one arm around Kaiku, gathering her into the voluminous furred folds. Kaiku hesitated a moment, then relented, curling up into Asara with her hooded head on her companion’s breast. Asara’s damp coat enfolded her completely, like a wing, and Kaiku burrowed into the warmth of her body. In the hot, dark place that Asara had provided for her, she felt the shivering recede to the rhythm of Asara’s heartbeat in her ear, and before she drowsed and slept she felt safer and more content than she had for a long time.

  When she awoke, it was to a new heat. A fire was burning in the cave. Asara sensed her stirring and unfolded her wing; Kaiku blinked muzzily and relinquished Asara’s body with some reluctance. She sat upright, meeting Asara’s gaze, and gave her an awkward smile of thanks. Asara inclined her head in acceptance. Tane was watching them from the other side of the blaze, with undisguised disapproval in his eyes and something that he was loathe to admit as jealousy. Outside, the sky boomed and the storm raged unabated, but here in the cave there was a pocket of warmth and light that robbed its thunderous threats of potency.

  ‘Awake then?’ Mamak said cheerily. ‘Good. We’re going to have to sit this out. No telling how long it will be.’

  Kaiku squinted at the flames. The fire burned with an amber hue, and at its base was not wood but a black, crinkly skeleton of thin fibres like spun sugar.

  ‘Fire-moss,’ Mamak said, anticipating her question. He held up a handful of the stuff; it was a black, soggy puffball. ‘Weighs almost nothing, burns for hours. It secretes an inflammable residue, but its structure is extremely tough and takes a lot of heat to burn through. Useful tip if you don’t have any wood to hand, and extremely portable.’

  Inevitably, they talked. The storm showed no sign of abating, and so Mamak produced a jar of a sharp, murky liquor and passed it around to them. They had brought provisions for two weeks’ travel, and so there were plenty of ingredients for a pot of vegetables and cured meat. Once their stomachs were full and their tongues loosened, they discussed and laughed and argued over a range of subjects. But it was Asara who introduced the one that occupied them most of the night: the affair of the Heir-Empress and the rising unrest in Axekami. The argument that ensued was not new to them, pitched between Asara, who was intent on challenging Tane’s religious prejudice, and Tane, who was intent on defending it. Kaiku stayed out of it, unsure of her own feelings on the subject, and Mamak didn’t care one way or another about Aberrants as long as they didn’t try and eat him. Tane was in the midst of an assertion that the Heir-Empress could not possibly be good for the country because the country would never have an Aberrant as leader when Asara stopped him dead with a single question.

  ‘Do any of you know what the Heir-Empress can actually do?’

  There was silence. Tane fought for an answer, and found none. The fire was eerily silent, for there was no snapping of wood. Outside, the storm
raged on, and if there were any Aberrants brave enough to venture out in it, they heard none.

  ‘I thought not. Let me educate you, then, for you may find this very interesting. You especially, Tane. Have you heard of the Libera Dramach?’ Before any of them could answer, she went on, ‘No, you won’t have. Their name is known among the people of Axekami, but they are only a rumour at present. That will soon change, I think.’

  ‘What are they, then?’ Kaiku asked, the shadows of her face wavering in the light of the burning fire-moss.

  ‘In the simplest terms, they are an organisation dedicated to seeing the Heir-Empress take the throne.’

  Tane snorted, making a dismissive motion with one hand. ‘It’s been scarcely a month since anyone even knew the Heir-Empress was an Aberrant at all.’

  ‘We have known for years,’ Asara replied levelly.

  ‘We?’ Mamak inquired, passing her the jar of liquor.

  Asara sipped. ‘I belong to no master or mistress,’ she said. ‘But as much as I can be said to be part of something, I am part of the Libera Dramach. Their aims and mine coincide, and have from the start.’

  ‘And what are their aims?’ Tane demanded.

  ‘To see the Heir-Empress on the throne,’ she repeated. ‘To see the power of the Weavers destroyed. To stop the slaughter of Aberrant children. And to stop the blight that encroaches on the land.’

  ‘How will the Heir-Empress’s succession have any bearing on the malaise in our soil?’ Tane asked. This had caught his interest.

  Asara leaned forward so that her face was underlit in orange flame. ‘She can talk to spirits, Tane. That is her gift. Spirits, animals . . . she is an element of nature, closer to Enyu than any human could be.’

  ‘That’s blasphemy,’ Tane said, but not angrily. ‘An Aberrant can’t be anything to Enyu. And besides, her priests can talk to spirits. I can, to some degree.’

  ‘No,’ Asara corrected. ‘You can listen. You can feel the spirits of nature, sense their mood; even the greatest among you has little more that a rudimentary understanding of them. They are to humans like the gods are: distant, unfathomable, and impossible to influence. But she can talk to them. She is eight harvests of age, yet already she can converse with a skill far beyond the best of Enyu’s priests. And she gets better ever day. This is not something she has learned, it is something she was born with that she is learning to use. It is her Aberrant ability, Tane.’

  Tane was silent for a time, head bowed. Mamak and Kaiku, sensing that this was between Asara and the acolyte, stayed out of it and waited to see what his reaction would be. Presently he stirred. ‘You’re suggesting that she could be a bridge to the spirits? Between us and them?’

  ‘Exactly,’ Asara said. ‘For now, she is kept at the Imperial Keep, in the city, where men and women rule. But you know and I know that there are places in our land where the great spirits dwell, places where people such as us dare not go. But she could go. She is an ambassador, don’t you see? A link between our world and theirs. If there is any hope of turning back the tide that is slowly swallowing us, then she is it.’

  ‘How do you know?’ Tane asked. He sounded . . . overwhelmed. Rather than the stoic denial Kaiku had expected from him, he seemed to be listening. Truly, he was an unpredictable soul. ‘How did you know of it, before the rest of us?’

  ‘That, I cannot tell you,’ said Asara, with a soft sigh. ‘I wish I could do so, to make you believe me. But lives are at risk, and loose talk can still undo what has been done.’

  Tane nodded slightly. ‘I think I understand,’ he replied. He said nothing further for the rest of the night, merely stared into the fire, meditating on what he had been told.

  The storm did not abate by the morning, nor the morning after that. They did not speak again of the Heir-Empress or the Libera Dramach; in fact, they spoke little of anything at all. Kaiku was becoming worried; she had never seen a storm that lasted so long, never imagined the sky could sustain such fury. And despite Mamak’s assurance that such storms were not unheard of, the atmosphere in the cave became strained. When Tane suggested that Mamak might have been unwise to curse Panazu, god of storms, the two men nearly came to blows. Asara cleaned her rifle for the twentieth time and watched them owlishly.

  As the day waned on the third night in the cave, Mamak announced that they had to turn back.

  ‘This storm can’t hold much longer,’ he said, throwing another wad of fire-moss from their diminishing supply on to the small blaze they had going. ‘But it’s a good two days’ journey yet to the site of the monastery, and that makes five to return to Chaim. If everything went perfectly to plan, if we left tomorrow and we found the monastery immediately and came right back, we would still only have a day’s margin of food. You don’t take risks like that in the mountains. I don’t, anyway.’

  ‘We cannot turn back!’ Kaiku protested. ‘I swore an oath to Ocha. We have to go on.’

  ‘The gods are patient, Kaiku,’ said Asara. ‘You will not forget your oath, and nor will Ocha; but you cannot rush blindly at this. We retreat, and try again.’

  ‘You’ll die if you don’t, besides,’ Mamak put in.

  Kaiku’s brow was scored with a line of frustration. ‘I cannot turn back!’ she reiterated. Asara was puzzled at the desperation in her voice.

  ‘But we must,’ she said. ‘We have no choice.’

  Tane awoke several hours later. The storm howled and boomed outside, its tumult now a background noise. Kaiku was sitting at the fire, staring into its heart. She had been banking it up with fire-moss. Tane, still lying on his side, blinked at her and frowned. He had been withdrawn since his conversation with Asara, fiercely preoccupied with his own thoughts; now he noticed that Kaiku had lapsed into a similar attitude.

  She jumped slightly when he spoke.

  ‘Kaiku?’ he observed. ‘Why aren’t you asleep?’

  ‘When I sleep, I dream of boars,’ she replied.

  ‘Boars?’

  ‘You turn back so easily, Tane,’ she said, her voice soft and contemplative. ‘I swore to the Emperor of the gods, yet you turn back so easily.’

  He was still barely awake, and his eyes drowsed heavy. ‘We will try again,’ he mumbled. ‘Not giving up.’

  ‘Perhaps this was not your path to take after all,’ she murmured to herself. ‘Perhaps it is mine alone.’

  If she said anything else Tane did not hear it, for he was drawn back into oblivion once more.

  The next morning, Kaiku was gone. She had walked into the storm with only her pack and her rifle. And with her went the Mask.

  EIGHTEEN

  Mishani wore a robe of dark green for her audience with Lucia, and a wide sash of blue around her slender waist. The sash was more than decorative, for pressed against her lower back was the gift she had been charged to deliver. The slight bulge it made was hidden by her thick, ankle-length hair, which she had bound with blue strips of leather. A flat square of elegant wrapping paper, and within it the nightdress that would be the Heir-Empress’s death.

  It took every ounce of her carefully cultivated self-control to keep herself calm as she was escorted into the presence of the Empress. Quite aside from anything else, the prospect of having a garment riddled with bone fever pressed close to her skin was terrifying. Her father had assured her that the package was sealed tight, and its wrapping treated with odourless antiseptics to keep the disease inside; and besides, it was a very low-grade infection, and it would only take effect if breathed in over a period of time, such as in sleep. Mishani sneered inside at his words; it was bitterly obvious that he knew nothing about bone fever, that he was merely parroting the blithe assurances of Sonmaga. What had the Barak of Blood Amacha promised, that had turned her father into his lapdog, and her into his cat’s-paw?

  She was taken aback by her own vehemence. Before all this, she would never have allowed herself to think so uncharitably about her father. But as she was shown into the room where Anais was waiting, she was still certai
n that everything she felt was justified. He knew she could not refuse him, and he betrayed her by using that assurance for his own ends. She did not want to be party to murder; and to make her an assassin of the lowest kind, the sort of filth who would use disease as a weapon . . . The raw shame if she was caught would drive her to suicide.

  And what of the shame if I succeed?

  Her father was full of meaningless words: she would be averting a civil war, saving many lives, doing a great service for Saramyr. She heard none of them, knew them for the empty platitudes they were. She wanted to weep, to hug him and then shout in his face: Do not do this, Father! Can you not see what will happen to us? It is not too late; if you change your mind now, I can still be your daughter.

  But he had not changed his mind. And she felt the bonds between them sawn apart so brutally that she could barely look at him. Suddenly she saw every annoying tic, every blemish on his face, every unpleasant quirk of his character. She did not respect him any longer, and that was a terrible thing for a daughter to admit.

  She would murder for him, because she must. But after that, she was no longer his. She suspected he knew that, but he sent her anyway.

  Sonmaga. Her hatred for him knew no bounds.

  Mishani talked with Anais for some time, though afterward she hardly remembered what was said. The Empress was trying to divine Mishani’s standpoint on Lucia’s accession to the throne, but Mishani revealed nothing in her pleasant responses. Anais inquired after her father also, obviously hoping to learn why Mishani had come when the Barak was such a staunch opponent to her. Mishani said enough to assure Anais that she was approaching the situation with an open mind, and she did not believe in judging somebody she had never met.