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

by Chris Wooding

  As the final touches were being made to his outfit, he stole glances at Laranya, who pretended not to notice. How strange the ways of the gods, that they should have brought him a creature as fine as her at this time in his life, approaching his fifty-fifth harvest. Surely divine approval for his assumption of the role of Blood Emperor. Or, he reflected with a twinge of his former black mood, perhaps it was merely redressing the balance for taking his son Durun from him.

  It had begun as a simple matter of politics. With his only heir dead and Blood Batik as the high family, Mos needed a child. His first wife, Ononi, was past child-bearing age, so Mos annulled his marriage with her and sought a younger bride. There was no acrimony on either side, since there had been no passion there in the first place; it had been a marriage of mutual advantage, as were most amid the high families of Saramyr. Ononi remained to oversee the Blood Batik estates to the north, while Mos moved into the capital and began to look for potential matches.

  He found one in Laranya tu Tanatsua, daughter of Barak Goren of Jospa, a city in the Tchom Rin desert. Forging ties with the eastern half of Saramyr was a sensible move, especially when the mountains that divided them were becoming ever more treacherous to cross and increasingly the only way to communicate between the west and the east was through Weavers. Laranya was eminently eligible and beautiful with it, dark-haired and dusky-skinned, curvaceous and fiery. Mos had liked her immediately, better than the slender, demure and subservient women he had been offered up until then. In a move of outrageous audacity, Laranya had made him come to her, had made him travel all the way to Jospa to assess her suitability for marriage. Even when he had done so, intrigued by her brazen nerve, she had acted as if it were she choosing him for a suitor, much to her father’s chagrin.

  Perhaps it was then that she had captured his heart. She had certainly captured his attention. He took her back with him to Axekami, and they were married amid great ceremony and celebration. That was three years ago, and at some point over the intervening time he had fallen in love with her, and she with him. It was unusual, but not unheard of. That she was over twenty harvests his junior was not an issue. Both of them were stubborn, passionate and used to getting their own way; in each other, they met their match. Though their arguments were legendary among the servants of the Keep for their violence, so their affection for each other was immeasureable and obvious. Despite the misfortune that had dogged every step of his way as Blood Emperor, he felt blessed to have her.

  There had been only one shadow over their marriage these past years, and the root of most of their fights. Though the physical attraction between them made for energetic and frequent bedplay, no child had come of it. Laranya wanted nothing more than to bear him a son, but she could not conceive, and the bitterness and frustration began to pool like oil beneath their words over time. Unlike his son Durun – who had gone through the same ordeal with his own wife, the murdered former Blood Empress Anais tu Erinima – Mos knew that he was not barren of seed. Yet he knew also that an heir was needed, and Laranya would not graciously step aside as Ononi had to allow him to remarry again. Even if he had wanted to.

  Then, miraculously, it had happened. Two weeks ago, she had told him the news. She was pregnant. He saw it already in her manner, the new flush to her cheeks, the secret smiles she kept to herself when she thought he was not looking. Her world had turned inward, to the child in her womb, and Mos was at once mystified and entranced by her. Even now, though she was far from showing her condition, he watched her unconsciously lay a hand on her pelvis, her eyes distant while the handmaidens chattered and worked around her. His child. The thought brought a fierce and sudden grin to his face.

  He straightened himself as a horn lowed outside the Keep, and the handmaidens scattered, leaving the Emperor and Empress standing on a low platform at the top of a set of three steps, facing down an aisle of immaculately presented retainers and Guards. The hall whispered with the shuffle of people arranging themselves in their places. The red-and-silver pennants of Blood Batik rippled softly in the hot breeze from the window-arches above the gold-inlaid double doors. Reki had arrived.

  Laranya took Mos’s hand briefly and smiled up at him, then let it drop to assume the correct posture. The Blood Emperor’s heart warmed until it was like a furnace. He thought of the gruelling day ahead, and then of the life growing in his wife’s belly.

  He was to be a father again, he thought, as the double doors swung open and let in the blazing light from outside, silhouetting the slight form of Laranya’s brother at the head of his retinue. For that, he would endure anything.

  The coals in the fire-pit at the centre of Kakre’s skinning chamber bathed the room in arterial red. Deep, insidious shadows lay all around, cast by the steady glow. At the Weave-lord’s insistence, the walls had been stripped down to naked stone and the black, semi-reflective lach chiselled away from the floor to reveal the gullied, rough bricks beneath. Overhead, the octagonal chamber rose high above in a lattice of wooden beams, its upper reaches lost in darkness. Chains and hooks hung from there, appearing out of the lofty shadows and hanging down to the level of the floor, where they brushed this way and that in the rising warmth, quietly clinking.

  Strange shapes swayed gently between the beams, half-seen things turning slowly and silently. Some of them were hung close enough to the firelight to make out details, underlit in glowering red. Kites of skin, human and animal, stretched across wicker frameworks of terrible ingenuity. Some were mercifully unrecognisable, simple geometric shapes from which it was difficult to determine the donor of the material that surfaced them. Others were more grotesque and artistic. There was a large bird stitched from the skin of a woman; distorted, empty features were still appallingly identifiable over the head and beak, hollow breasts pulled flat between the outspread wings, long black hair still spilling from her scalp. Something that had once been a man hung in a predatory pose, outstretched bat-wings of human skin spread behind him and his face constructed of sewn-together strips of snake scales. A mobile of small animals rotated next to him, each one skilfully peeled on the left side of its front half and the right side of its rear, particoloured sculptures of fur and glistening striations of muscle.

  Closer to hand, placed on the walls like trophies, were works in progress or pieces that Kakre was particularly fond of. Black pits that were once eye sockets stared blindly across the chamber from wicker skulls. No matter how changed the form of the being, it was impossible to forget where that dry, stretched surface had been robbed from, and each horror was magnified by the memory. An iron rack stood near the firepit, diabolical in its craftsmanship, capable of being adapted to suit any type of body shape and any size. The stones beneath it were dyed a deep, rusty brown.

  Kakre sat cross-legged by the fire-pit, a ragged heap of clothes with a dead face, and Weaved.

  He was a ray: a flat, winged shape, infinitesimal in an undulating world of black. He hung in the darkness, rippling slightly, making the tiny adjustments necessary to maintain his position while he probed out along the currents in search of his route. Above and below him and to either side were whorls and eddies, riptides and channels, currents that he could only feel and not see, a violent, lethal churning that could pick him up and dash him apart. He sensed the vast and distant leviathans that haunted the periphery of his senses, the inexplicable denizens of the Weave.

  He was blind here in this sightless place, but the water rushed around and through him, over his cold skin and into his mouth, out past his gills or down to his stomach, diffusing into his blood. In his mind, he saw how the currents twisted and corkscrewed and curled in ways impossible for water or wind, tracing each one to where it intersected another, junctions in the chaotic void.

  In an instant he had plotted a route of staggering mathematical complexity, a three-dimensional tunnel of currents that flowed in his favour, leading him to where he had to go in the shortest time and with the least effort. Not that physical distance had any bearing in th
e world of the Weave, but it was a human trait to impose order on the orderless, and this was Kakre’s way of understanding a process that could not be understood.

  The raw stuff of the Weave was too much for a man’s sanity to bear, too alluring and enticing. A proportion of apprentice Weavers were lost every year to the terrifying ecstasy of being opened to the bright fabric of creation, the sheer and overwhelming beauty of it. It was a narcotic beyond anything that the organic world could provide, and in that first rush only the strongest were resilient enough to avoid being swept away, lost to the Weave, mindless phantoms blissfully wandering the stitchwork of the universe while their vacated bodies became vegetative. Weavers were taught from the very first to visualise the Weave in a way that they could cope with. Some thought of it as an endless series of spider’s webs; some as a pulsing mass of branching bronchioli; some as a building of impossible dimensions in which any door could lead to any other; some a sequential dream-story in which the process of getting from the start to the finish mirrored the effect that their Weaving was intended to accomplish.

  Kakre found it most accommodating like this. More fluid, more dynamic, and never once letting him forget how dangerous the Weave was. Even now, after so many years, he found himself having to rattle hypnotic mantras around in the back of his mind to ward off the constantly encroaching sense of wonder and awe at his surroundings. He knew well that such feelings were merely a sly route to the addiction that would follow if he relaxed his self-control, and once lost he would never be regained.

  Now he had the route mapped in his consciousness, and with a tilt of his wings he dropped down into the current beneath him. It threw him forward with a breathless rush, accelerating faster than thought, swifter than instinct. Into a cross-current he dived, riding the maelstrom smoothly, and was flung out again at even greater velocity. Now switching again, more cross-currents, dozens of them coming so rapidly that they were virtually continuous. He was flicking like a spark through the synapses of the human brain, seeing every ebb and flow and countering or riding them with exhilarating grace, quicker and quicker until—

  —the world blossomed outwards, sight returning to him, crude human senses replacing the infinitely more subtle ones employed in the Weave. A room; a room built with uneven walls, lines measured by an idiot’s hand in a mockery of symmetry. Thin needles of sculpted rock broke through the floor like stalagmites, a forest of strange obelisks marked in nonsense-language. Lamps rested in sconces, some new and burning sullenly, some cold and webbed over. It was dark and shadowy and steeped in an ancient awareness that bled from the walls. He felt the shift and stir of the abominations that haunted the mines far beneath. He sensed the strange delirium of the other Weavers. Here at Adderach, mountain monastery, stronghold and founding-place of the Weavers, the colossal singularity of purpose that united all the wearers of the True Masks resonated more powerfully than ever.

  He was a ghost in the chamber, hanging in the air, a hunched and blurred comma. Only his Mask appeared in sharp focus; the hood and rags that surrounded it became progressively less clear with distance. Three other Weavers stood before him, a random trio whom he had never met before. All wore their heavy patchwork robes, their clothing made unique by the lack of rhyme or reason in its construction. They had responded to his summons and awaited him here. They would listen, and advise, with the voice of the entity that was the Weavers, the guiding gestalt presence that even the Weavers themselves, in their insanity, could not identify. These three would then disseminate what information he had to give across the network.

  It was time to set things in motion.

  ‘Weave-lord Kakre,’ began one them, who wore a Mask of leather and bone. ‘We must know of the Emperor and his actions.’

  ‘Then I have much to tell you,’ Kakre said hoarsely, his ruined throat making his voice raw and flayed.

  ‘The harvest fails again,’ said the second of the trio, whose face was shaped from thin iron, in the shape of a snarling demon. ‘Famine will strike. How do we stand?’

  ‘The Blood Emperor Mos loses patience,’ Kakre replied. ‘He is frustrated at our lack of progress in stopping the blight that twists his crops. He still has no inkling that it is we who are causing it. I had hoped that the harvest would hold for longer than this, but it seems the change in the land is more rapid than even we had guessed.’

  ‘This is grave,’ said the first Weaver.

  ‘We cannot disguise this,’ Kakre said. ‘The damage is becoming too pronounced to ignore, and too obvious to hide. Several have already traced the blight to its source; more do so with each passing year. We cannot continue to silence them all. Questions are being asked, and by people that we do not dare to coerce.’ Kakre shifted in the air, blurring in and out of focus.

  ‘If it were known that the famine is our doing, it would be the excuse that all Saramyr has been waiting for to destroy us,’ said the Weaver with the iron Mask.

  ‘Could they? Could they destroy us?’ demanded the first.

  ‘Unlikely,’ Kakre croaked. ‘Five years ago, maybe.’

  ‘You are overconfident, Kakre,’ whispered the third Weaver, wearing an exquisite wooden Mask with an expression of terrific sadness. ‘What of the Heir-Empress? What of the presence that Vyrrch warned us of, the woman that could play the Weave? You have not found either, in five years of searching.’

  ‘There is no indication the Heir-Empress is alive at all,’ Kakre replied slowly, his words crossing the Weave and arriving as a sonorous echo. ‘There remains the possibility that she perished in the Imperial Keep and was burned. She may have died after she escaped. I am under no illusion as to how dangerous she is, but she is considerably less dangerous now that we have disposed of her mother and she no longer stands to inherit the throne.’

  ‘She is still a rallying point for discontent,’ argued the first and most vocal Weaver. ‘And the people may even prefer an Aberrant on the throne to Mos when the famine begins to bite.’

  ‘We would not allow that,’ Kakre said calmly. ‘The Heir-Empress, and the woman that beat the Weave-lord Vyrrch, are dangers that we can do nothing about now, and unquantifiable. They have evaded our best attempts to find them. Put these matters aside. We must decide what to do now.’

  ‘Then what do you propose?’ murmured the third Weaver.

  Kakre’s ghost-image turned to face the one who had spoken. ‘We cannot afford to wait any longer. We must embark upon our schemes in earnest. Mos’s unpopularity will bring civil war again, and we cannot stand with him without revealing our hand. That we will not do. He has served his purpose; he is worthless to us now.’

  There was a murmur of agreement from those assembled.

  ‘Mos’s time as Blood Emperor is becoming short,’ Kakre continued. ‘Blood Kerestyn are rebuilding their forces, and forming secret alliances with the other high families. The people stir in discontent, and superstition is rife. Some believe that the Weavers should never have been given power, that the gods have cursed the land because of it. It is a movement that is gaining much sympathy in the rural areas beyond the cities.’ He swept them all with his gaze. ‘We must see to our own survival.’

  ‘You have a plan, then?’ prompted the bone-and-leather Mask.

  ‘Oh, indeed,’ replied Kakre.

  SIX

  Screams.

  Lan hadn’t imagined anything so awful could emerge from a human throat, never believed that such a naked shriek of animal terror could be made by an intelligent being. Never dreamed he would be hearing it from his own mother.

  It was a perfect day, the occasional sparse train of tiny, puffy clouds freckling what was otherwise a clear blue sky, blending to a turquoise hue near the horizon. The Pelaska lazed down the centre of the Kerryn, the huge paddle-wheels at either side idle while the current took the lumbering barge westward from the Tchamil Mountains, heading towards Axekami. They were ahead of schedule, perhaps a half-day east of the fork where the river split and its southward channel became
the Rahn, flowing into the wilds of the Xarana Fault. It had begun to seem that nothing would go wrong.

  The journey had been a nervous one. Lan had wanted to beg his father not to take the Weaver and his cargo, but he would have been wasting his breath. They had no choice.

  And now his mother was screaming.

  They had been moored up in the tiny town of Jiji, at the feet of the mountains, loading in metals and ores and surplus equipment from the mines to deliver to Axekami. It was their bad luck that theirs was the only barge there with sufficient capacity for the Weaver’s needs.

  The Weavers ran their own fleet of barges, which plied the rivers of western Axekami and were viewed with mistrust by all. The barge-masters were cold-eyed, taciturn and strange, and tales circulated up and down the waterways about these damned men who had made pacts with the Weavers in return for riches and power. Exactly where the riches and power came from was unclear: the barges hardly turned a profit, trading enough only to cover their operating costs. For the rest of the time, they passed silently by the ports and rarely docked, running secret errands of their own.

  The Weaver commandeered the craft and crew and demanded passage, declaring that he had an urgent delivery to make and that none of the Weavers’ own barges were near. Lan’s father, Pori, accepted his fate stoically. Their patron would be furious at having one of his barges commandeered; but being of the peasant class, the barge-folk’s lives were a Weaver’s to command, or to take.