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

by Chris Wooding

  Sharp eyes guided their slow way through the eerie half-light. Minute adjustments to the rudder were made as instructions were hollered from the prow. Dozens of men stood on the decks with long push-poles, ready to use their combined weight to avert the course of the bulky junk if it should drift too close to the sides. For a few long minutes, they passed through the strange, enclosed world that linked the port and the ocean; and then the end of the tunnel slipped over them and they were out, the blue sky above them again. The lagoon was still two-thirds in the shadow of the rock wall, but its western side was drenched in light, and there lay Kisanth, and the end of a long journey.

  The port sprawled gaudily along the edge of the lagoon and up the steep incline of the forested basin that surrounded it. It was a heady riot of wooden jetties, gangways, brightly painted shacks and peeling warehouses, countinghouses and cathouses. Dirt tracks had been planked over and were lined with inns and rickety bars. Stalls sold foodstuffs from Saramyr and Okhamba in equal measure or combination. Small junks and ktaptha glided out from the beaches on the north side, cutting through the wakes of the larger vessels that lumbered towards the spidery piers of the dock. Shipwrights hammered at hulls on the sand. Everything in Kisanth was daubed in dazzling colours, and everything was faded from the scorching rays of the sun and the onslaught of the storms. It was a vivid world of warped boards and steadily flaking signs that tried to disguise its constant state of decay by distracting the eye with brightness.

  The Heart of Assantua spread its smaller sails for the last, leisurely stretch across the lagoon, found an empty pier and nosed alongside it. The push-poles were gone now, and thick ropes came snaking down to the waiting dockhands, who made them fast to stout posts. The junk came to a standstill and furled itself like peacock.

  The disembarkation formalities took most of the morning. Kisanth being a Saramyr colony, there were rigorous checks to be carried out. Robed officials and clerks logged cargo, checked passengers against the list, recorded any dead or missing in transit, asked what the travellers’ purpose in Kisanth was and where they were staying or going. Routine though their questions were, the officials carried themselves with a fierce zeal, believing themselves the guardians of order in this untameable land, bastions against the brutal insanity that reigned outside the perimeter of their town. When all was accounted for to their satisfaction, they returned to the dock-master, who would check the list again and then hand it to a Weaver. At the end of the week, the Weaver would pass the information on to a counterpart in Saramyr, bridging the gulf between continents in the span of a thought, and the receiving Weaver would inform the dock-master there of the safe arrival of their dependant merchants’ vessels. It was an eminently well-structured and effective system, and typically Saramyr.

  Not that it concerned two of the passengers, however, who were travelling under assumed names with falsified papers, and who passed through the multitude of checks without raising the suspicions of anyone.

  Kaiku tu Makaima and Mishani tu Koli walked amongst the crowd of their fellow travellers, exchanging goodbyes and empty promises of further contact as they dispersed at the end of the pier and headed away into the wooden streets. After a month aboard ship, legs were unsteady and spirits were high. The journey from Jinka on the north-western coast of Saramyr had shrunk their world to the confines of their luxurious junk. Largely ignored by the busy sailors, and with little else to do, the passengers had got to know each other well. Merchants, emigrants, exiles, diplomats: they had all found common ground in their journey, forming a fragile community that had seemed precious at the time, but which was already collapsing as their world expanded again and people remembered the reasons that they had crossed the sea in the first place. Now they had their own affairs to attend to, affairs that were important enough to spend a month in transit for, and they were forgetting hasty friendships or ill-advised trysts.

  ‘You are far too sentimental, Kaiku,’ Mishani told her companion as they wandered away from the pier.

  Kaiku laughed. ‘I might have known I would hear that advice from you. I suppose you feel no regret at seeing any of them go?’

  Mishani glanced up at Kaiku, who was several inches the taller of the two. ‘We lied to them the entire journey,’ she pointed out dryly. ‘About our lives, our childhoods, our professions. Did you honestly entertain the hope of meeting them again?’

  Kaiku tilted her shoulder in what might have been a shrug, a curiously boyish gesture from a lithe, pretty woman nearing her twenty-sixth harvest.

  ‘Besides, if all goes well we will be away from here within a week,’ Mishani continued. ‘Make the most of your time.’

  ‘A week . . .’ Kaiku sighed, already dreading the prospect of getting aboard another ship, another month back across the ocean. ‘I hope this spy is worth it, Mishani.’

  ‘They had better be,’ Mishani said, with uncharacteristic feeling in her voice.

  Kaiku took in the sights and sounds of Kisanth with fascination as they made their way up steps and along boardwalks, losing themselves in the belly of the town. Their first steps on a foreign continent. Everything around them felt subtly different and indefinably new. The air was wetter, somehow more fresh and raw than the dry summer they had left behind at home. The insect sounds were different, languid and lugubrious in comparison to the rattling chikikii she knew. The hue of the sky was deeper, more luxuriant.

  And the town itself was like nowhere she had ever visited before, at once recognisably Saramyr and yet indisputably foreign. The hot streets creaked and cracked as the sun warmed the planking underfoot, which had been laid to keep the trails navigable when the rain turned the sides of the basin to mud. It smelt of salt and paint and damp earth baking, and spices which Kaiku did not even have a name for. They stopped at a streetside stall and bought pnthe from the wizened old lady there, an Okhamban meal of de-shelled molluscs, sweetrice and vegetables wrapped up in an edible leaf. A little further on, they sat on a broad set of steps – having observed others doing the same – and ate the pnthe with their hands, marvelling at the strangeness of the experience, feeling like children again.

  They made an odd pair. Kaiku projected vibrancy, her features lively; Mishani’s face was always still, always controlled, and no emotion registered there if she did not desire it. Kaiku was naturally attractive, with a small nose and mischievous brown eyes, and she wore her tawny hair in a fashionable cut that hung in an artfully teased fringe over one eye. Mishani was small, plain, pale and thin, with a mass of black hair that hung down to her ankles in a careful arrangement of thick braids and ornaments tied in with strips of dark red leather, far too impractical for anyone but a noble and carrying all the attendant gravitas. Kaiku’s clothes were unfeminine and simple, whereas Mishani’s were elegant and plainly expensive.

  They finished their meals and left. Later, they found a lodging-house and sent porters to fetch their luggage from the ship. Their time together in Kisanth would be short. In the morning, Kaiku would be leaving to head into the wilds while Mishani stayed to arrange their return to Saramyr. Kaiku hunted down a guide and arranged for her departure.

  They slept.

  The message that had come to the Fold eight weeks earlier had been of the highest priority and utmost secrecy, and neither Kaiku nor Mishani were even aware of it until the two of them had been summoned by Zaelis tu Unterlyn, leader of the Libera Dramach.

  With Zaelis was Cailin tu Moritat, a Sister of the Red Order and Kaiku’s mentor in their ways. She was tall and cold, clad in the attire of the Order – a long black dress that clung to her figure and a ruff of raven feathers across her shoulders. Her face was painted to denote her allegiance: alternating red and black triangles on her lips and twin crescents of light red curving from her forehead, over her eyelids and cheeks. Her black hair fell down her back in two thick ponytails, accentuated by a silver circlet on her brow, and where it caught the light it glinted blue.

  Between the two of them, they had told Kaiku an
d Mishani about the message. A coded set of instructions, passed through many hands from the north-western tip of Okhamba, across the sea to Saramyr, and thence to the Xarana Fault and the Fold.

  ‘It comes from one of our finest spies,’ Cailin said, her voice like a blade sheathed in velvet. ‘They need our help.’

  ‘What can we do?’ Mishani had asked.

  ‘We must get them off Okhamba.’

  Kaiku had adopted a querying expression. ‘Why can they not get themselves off it?’

  ‘Travel between Saramyr and Okhamba has been all but choked by the Emperor’s ruinous export taxes,’ Mishani explained. ‘After he raised them, the Colonial Merchant Consortium responded by placing an embargo on all goods to Saramyr.’

  Kaiku made a neutral noise. She had little interest in politics, and this was news to her.

  ‘The crux of the matter is, our spy cannot get across the ocean back to Saramyr,’ Cailin elaborated. ‘A small trade still exists from Saramyr and Okhamba, since the scarcity of Saramyr goods has driven up the price enough for a tiny market to survive there; but next to no ships pass the other way. The merchants tend to travel on from there to Quraal or Yttryx. They are weathering the storm abroad, where the money still flows.’

  Mishani, ever the quick one, had second-guessed them by now. ‘You have passage over to Okhamba,’ she stated. ‘But you have no ship back. And for that, you need me.’

  ‘Indeed,’ said Cailin, studying her intently for a reaction and getting none.

  Kaiku looked from one to the other, and then to Zaelis, who was thoughtfully running his knuckles over his close-cropped white beard. ‘You mean she would have to go to the coast? To show her face in a port?’ she asked, concern in her voice.

  ‘Nothing so simple,’ Mishani said with a wan smile. ‘Arranging it from this end would be next to impossible. I would have to travel to Okhamba.’

  ‘No!’ said Kaiku automatically, flashing a glare at Cailin. ‘Heart’s blood! She is the daughter of one of the best-known maritime families in Saramyr! Somebody else can go.’

  ‘That is exactly why she must go,’ said Cailin. ‘The name of Blood Koli carries great weight among the merchants. And she has many contacts still.’

  ‘That is exactly why she must not go,’ Kaiku countered. ‘She would be recognised.’ She turned to her friend. ‘What of your father, Mishani?’

  ‘I have evaded him these five years, Kaiku,’ Mishani replied. ‘I will take my chances.’

  ‘I cannot impress upon you enough the importance of this person,’ Zaelis said calmly, squaring his shoulders. ‘Nor the information they carry. Suffice to say that since they asked for assistance from us at all, there must have been no other option left to them.’

  ‘No other option?’ Kaiku exclaimed. ‘If this spy is as good as you seem to think they are, then why can they not make their own way back? There must be some ships, even if they are only running passengers. Or why not take the Quraal route? It would take a few more months, but—’

  ‘We do not know,’ Zaelis interrupted her, raising a hand. ‘We only have the message. The spy needs our help.’

  Mishani laid a hand on Kaiku’s arm. ‘I am the only one who can do it,’ she said quietly.

  Kaiku tossed her hair truculently, glaring at Cailin. ‘Then I am going with her.’

  The ghost of a smile touched the taller lady’s lips. ‘I would hardly expect otherwise.’

  THREE

  The pre-dawn twilight on Okhamba was a serene time, a lull in the rhythms of the jungle as the nocturnal creatures quieted and slunk away to hide from the steadily brightening day. The air was blood-warm and still. Mist hazed the distance, stirring sluggishly along the ground or twining sinuously between the vine-hung trunks of the trees. Moonflowers which had turned in the night to track the glow of bright Iridima now furled themselves to protect their sensitive cells from the blazing glare of Nuki’s eye. The deafening racket of the dark hours trailed away to nothing, and the silence seemed to ache. In that hour, the land became dormant, holding its breath in tremulous anticipation of the day.

  Kaiku left Kisanth in that state of preternatural peace, following her guide. The port was surrounded by an enormous stockade wall on the rim of the basin where the lagoon lay, with a single counterweighted gate to let travellers in and out. Beyond there was a wide clearing, where the trees had been cut back for visibility. A dirt road crawled off along the coast to the north, and a thinner one to the north-west, their edges made ragged as the undergrowth encroached on them. A prayer gate to Zanya, the Saramyr goddess of travellers and beggars, stood in the midst of the clearing. It was a pair of carved poles without a crossbeam, their surfaces depicting Zanya’s various deeds in the Golden Realm and in Saramyr. Kaiku recognised most of them at a glance: the kindly man who gave his last crust to a fellow beggar, only to find that she was the goddess in disguise and was richly rewarded; Zanya punishing the wicked merchants who flogged the vagrants that came to the market; the ships of the Ancestors leaving Quraal, Zanya sailing ahead with a lantern to light the way. The gate was too weathered to make out what detail had once been there, but the iconography was familiar enough to Kaiku.

  She offered a short mantra to the goddess, automatically adopting the female form of the standing prayer posture: head bowed, cupped hands held before her, left hand above the right and palm down, right hand palm up as if cradling an invisible ball. The guide – a leathery old Tkiurathi woman – stood nearby and watched disinterestedly. Once Kaiku was done and had passed through the gate, they headed into the jungle.

  The journey to the rendezvous was only a day’s walk, a spot chosen – Kaiku guessed – because it lay almost equidistant from three towns, one of which was Kisanth while the other two lay alongside a river that led shortly thereafter to another sea port. The spy had selected this place to be deliberately vague about their place of departure, in case anyone decoded all or part of the message that had been sent to the Fold. Kaiku found herself wondering about this person she was meant to meet. She did not know their name, nor whether they would be male or female, nor even if they were Saramyr at all. When she had protested at being kept in the dark by Zaelis and Cailin, they had merely said that there were ‘reasons’ and refused to speak further on it. She was not used to having her curiosity frustrated so. It only piqued her interest further.

  From the moment they left the perimeter of man’s domain, the land became wild. The roads – heading away to other settlements and to the vast mountainside crop fields – were going in the opposite direction to that in which Kaiku wanted to go, so they were forced to travel on foot and through the dense foliage. The way was hard, and there were no trails to speak of. The terrain underfoot was uncertain, having been moistened by recent rains. Kaiku’s rifle snagged on vines with annoying regularity, and she began to regret bringing it at all. They were forced to scramble their way along muddy banks, clamber up rocky slopes that trickled with water, hack their way through knotted walls of creepers with knaga, a sickle-like Okhamban blade used for jungle travel. But for all that, Kaiku found the jungle breathlessly beautiful and serene in the quiet before the dawn, and she felt like an intruder as she went stamping and chopping through the eerie netherworld of branches and tangles.

  The land warmed about them as they travelled, bringing with it a steadily growing chorus of animal calls, creatures hooting at each other from the meshed ceiling of treetops high above. Birds, with cries both beautiful and comically ugly, began to sing from their invisible vantage points. Frogs belched and croaked; the undergrowth rustled; fast things flitted between the trunks of the trees, sometimes launching themselves across the travellers’ path. Kaiku found herself unconsciously dawdling, wanting to soak up the sensations around her, until her guide hissed something sharp in Okhamban and she hurried to catch up.

  Kaiku had harboured initial doubts about the guide she had found, but the old woman proved far stronger than she looked. Long after Kaiku’s muscles were aching from tr
udging along cruel inclines and chopping the omnipresent vines that hung between the trees, the Tkiurathi forged unflaggingly onward. She was tough, though Kaiku guessed she must have been somewhere past her fiftieth harvest. Okhambans did not count years, nor keep track of their age.

  Conversation was limited to grunts and gestures. The woman spoke very little Saramyrrhic, just enough to agree to take Kaiku where she wanted to go, and Kaiku spoke next to no Okhamban, having learned only a few words and phrases while at sea. In contrast to the excessive complexity of Saramyrrhic, Okhamban was incredibly simple, possessing only one phonetic alphabet and one spoken mode, and no tenses or similar grammatical subtleties. Unfortunately, the very simplicity of it defeated Kaiku. One word could have six or seven discrete applications depending on its context, and the lack of any specific form of address such as I, you or me made things terribly hard for one who had grown up speaking a language that was unfailingly precise in meaning. Okhambans traditionally had no concept of ownership, and their individuality was always second to their pash, which was roughly translatable as ‘the group’; but it was a very slippery meaning, and it could be used to refer to a person’s race, family, friends, those who were present, those they were talking to, loved ones, partners, or any of a dozen other combinations with varying degrees of exclusivity.

  As the heat climbed and the midges and biting insects began to appear, Kaiku sweltered. Her hardwearing and unflattering clothes – baggy beige trousers and a matching long-sleeved shirt with a drawstring collar – were becoming itchy with sweat and uncomfortably heavy. They stopped for a rest, during which time the guide insisted that Kaiku drink a lot of water. She produced a leaf-wrapped bundle of what seemed to be cold crab meat and a spicy kelp-like plant, and shared it with Kaiku without her asking. Kaiku brought out her own food and shared it with the guide. They ate with their hands.