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

by Chris Wooding

  ‘Shall we go inside?’ he offered, after they had left. Mishani acquiesced politely, and went with him, more aware than ever now that she was alone, and very likely walking into a trap.

  NINE

  Mos sat in the Chamber of Tears, and listened to the rain.

  He had never been to this room before. That was not unusual; many of the upper levels of the Imperial Keep were almost entirely empty. It had been built as a somewhat impractical gesture of appeasement by the fourth Blood Emperor of Saramyr, Huita tu Lilira, in recompense to Ocha for the hubris of his predecessor. But not even the Imperial Family needed a building of the sheer size and complexity of the Keep. Even if Mos had summoned all his distant relatives to live there – which was hardly possible, since it was always necessary to have bloodline scattered about the country to oversee the diverse affairs of Blood Batik – they would have had trouble filling all the rooms. When the great fire of five years ago had destroyed large areas of the interior, the inhabitants had simply moved to new sections and carried on quite comfortably while the repairs were made.

  The upper levels, where Mos had found the Chamber of Tears, were the least practical to get to, and their lach corridors held only hollow echoes. Laranya had said once that there could be people living up here, a whole community of lost wanderers that might have gone undiscovered for centuries. Mos had laughed and told her that she was being fanciful. Though they were deserted, they were not covered in dust or neglected, and he suspected that one of his advisers’ duties was to ensure that servants did not let any part of the Keep go to ruin.

  The sound of falling water had brought him here as he wandered, seeking solitude, carrying his third bottle of wine. It was a wide, circular chamber with a domed roof, in the centre of which was a hole through which the rain fell onto the tiled floor and drained away through small grilles. The floor was slightly slanted towards the centre to keep the water there, so that it was possible to sit just outside the curtain of droplets and remain dry. A crafty system of guttering on the roof funnelled water down through secret channels to the statues that stood in alcoves at the periphery of the chamber, and tears ran from their eyes and down their faces, collecting in stone basins at their feet.

  It was dusk, and no lanterns had been lit. The room was gloomy and sultry with the remainder of the day’s heat. The rain was unusual for this time of year, but it suited Mos’s mood, and he was drawn to it. He sat in one of the many chairs that formed a circle around the room, and watched the column of droplets come down, the carpet of tiny explosions they made as they struck the shallow pool in the middle of the chamber. The only light was the fading glow of Nuki’s eye, coming through the hole in the dome, outlining Mos’s brow and bearded jaw and the edge of the bottle he held. He took another swig, without finesse, a bitter and angry draught.

  ‘You should not be alone,’ croaked Kakre from the doorway of the chamber, and Mos swore loudly.

  ‘Gods, you are the last person I want to see now, Kakre,’ he said. ‘Go away.’

  ‘We must talk,’ the Weave-lord insisted, coming further into the room.

  Mos glared at him. ‘Come closer then. I’ll not talk to you while you’re lurking over there.’

  Kakre obliged, shambling into the light. Mos didn’t look at him, watching the rain instead. The vaguely cloying scent of decay and animal fur reached him even through the haze of the wine, like the smell of a sick dog.

  ‘What must we talk about?’ he sneered.

  ‘You are drunk,’ Kakre said.

  ‘I’m never drunk. Is that what you had to say to me? I have a wife to scold me, Kakre; I don’t need you for it.’

  Kakre bridled, a wave of anger emanating from him that made the hairs of Mos’s neck stand on end.

  ‘You are too insolent sometimes, my Emperor,’ Kakre warned, loading the title with scorn. ‘I am not one of your servants, to be dismissed or mocked as you choose.’

  ‘No, you’re not,’ Mos agreed, taking another swig from his bottle. ‘My servants are loyal, and they do what they’re supposed to. You don’t. It makes me wonder why I even keep you around at all.’

  Kakre did not reply to that, regarding him in malicious silence instead.

  ‘What do you have to tell me, then?’ Mos snapped, casting Kakre an irritated glance.

  ‘I have news from the south. There has been a revolt in Zila.’

  Mos did not react, except that his frown deepened and his brow clouded.

  ‘A revolt,’ he repeated slowly.

  ‘The Governor has been killed. It was a mob, mainly peasants and townsfolk. They stormed the administration plaza. One of my Weavers sent me the news, before he too was killed.’

  ‘They killed a Weaver?’ Mos exclaimed in frank surprise.

  Kakre did not see any need to answer that. The spatter of the rain filled the void in the conversation while Mos thought.

  ‘Who is responsible?’ the Emperor asked eventually.

  ‘It is too early to say,’ rasped the Weave-Lord. ‘But the peasants were organised. And my agents in Zila had been reporting a rise in sympathy for that somewhat persistent cult that has been a constant diversion of our resources these past few years.’

  ‘The Ais Maraxa? It was them?’ Mos cried in sudden fury, flinging his bottle across the room. It smashed against one of the weeping statues, mixing red wine into the rainwater that collected in the basin at its feet.

  ‘Perhaps. I have warned you often that they would manage something like this eventually.’

  ‘You were supposed to prevent this kind of thing from happening!’ The Emperor stood up violently, knocking his chair away behind him.

  ‘They know about the harvests,’ Kakre said. He was not intimidated, even though he was physically dwarfed by the larger man. ‘Here in the north-west we can disguise the damage somewhat, but Zila lies on the edge of the Southern Prefectures. Down there, they see the blight destroying their crops before their very eyes; and all bad news travels through Zila on its way up the western coast. The Weavers are powerful, my Emperor, and we have many subtle ways; but we cannot see all plans, not when the very country turns against us. You should have let me tackle the Ais Maraxa when we first heard of them.’

  ‘Don’t shift the blame, Kakre!’ Mos raged. ‘This is your fault!’ He grabbed the Weaver roughly by his patchwork robe. ‘Your fault!’

  ‘Do not touch me!’ Kakre hissed, and Mos felt his body seized, his chest gripped as if by an iron hand. The strength flooded out of him, replaced by sudden panic. His hands spasmed open, releasing the Weave-lord, and he staggered backward, his throat bubbling with phlegm and his breath short. Kakre seemed to loom, becoming huge and terrifying in his mind: a hunched figure with emaciated white hands clenched into claws, held over him like the hands of a puppeteer over a marionette. Backing away, Mos slipped and fell into the column of rain, splashed into the shallow pool where he cringed, whimpering. Kakre seemed to fill the room, his Mask shadowed and cadaverous, and the very air seemed to crush Mos down to the floor.

  ‘You overstep your boundaries,’ said the Weave-lord, his voice dark and cold as the grave. ‘You will learn your place!’

  Mos cried out in fear, unmanned by Kakre’s power, his natural courage subverted by the insidious manipulation of his body and mind. The rain fell, soaking him, dripping from his beard and plastering his hair.

  ‘You need me, Mos,’ Kakre told him. ‘And I, regrettably, need you. But do not forget what I can do to you. Do not forget that I hold the power of life and death over you at every moment. I can stop your heart with a thought, or burst it within your breast. I can make you bleed inside in such a way that not even the best physicians could tell it was not natural. I can drive you insane in the time it takes for you to unsheathe your sword. Never touch me again, or perhaps I shall do something more permanent to you next time.’

  Then, gradually, Kakre seemed to diminish, and the terrible energy in the air slackened. Mos found his breath again, gasping. The room
returned to what it once had been, gloomy and spacious and echoing, and Kakre was once again a small, twisted figure with a bent back, buried in badly sewn rags and hide.

  ‘You will deal with the revolt in Zila. I will deal with its causes,’ he rasped, and with that he departed, leaving Mos lying on his side in the rain, overlit by the fading dusk, angry and fearful and beaten.

  The Empress Laranya and her younger brother Reki collapsed through the elliptical doorway, wet and breathless from laughing. Eszel raised a theatrical eyebrow as they blundered into the pavilion, and said wryly to Reki: ‘Anyone would think you had never seen rain before.’

  Reki laughed again, exhilirated. It was not far from the truth.

  The pavilion lay in the middle of a wide pond, joined to the rest of the Imperial Keep’s roof gardens by a narrow bridge. Its sides were carved wood, a thin, hollow webwork of leaf shapes and pictograms that allowed those inside to look through them and out over the water. Baskets of flowers hung from the drip-tiles on the sloping roof, and at each corner were stout stone pillars painted in coral red. Eszel had lit the lanterns that hung on the inner sides of the pillars, for night had newly fallen outside. It was small, but not so small that eight people could not sit in comfort on its benches, and with only the three of them there was plenty of room.

  Reki flopped down and looked out through the wooden patterns, marvelling. Laranya gave him an indulgent kiss on the cheek and sat beside him.

  ‘Rain is something of a novelty where we come from,’ she explained to Eszel.

  ‘I gathered as much,’ Eszel replied, with a quirk of a grin.

  ‘Spirits!’ Reki exclaimed, his eyes flickering over the dark and turbulent surface of the rain-dashed pool. ‘Now I know what Ziazthan Ri felt when he wrote The Pearl Of The Water God.’

  Eszel looked at the young man with newly piqued interest. ‘You’ve read that?’

  Reki became shy all of a sudden, realising that he had been boasting. Ziazthan Ri’s ancient text – containing what was generally recognised as some of the greatest naturalistic writing in the Empire – was extraordinarily rare and valuable. ‘Well . . . that is . . .’ he stammered.

  ‘You precious thing! You must tell me about it!’ Eszel enthused, rescuing him. ‘I’ve seen copied extracts, but never known the whole story.’

  ‘I memorised it,’ said Reki, trying to sound as modest as possible. ‘It is one of my favourites.’

  Eszel practically squealed: ‘You memorised it? I would die to hear it from beginning to end.’

  Reki beamed, the smile lighting up his thin face. ‘I would be honoured,’ he said. ‘I have never met anyone who has even heard of Ziazthan Ri before.’

  ‘Then you haven’t met the right people yet,’ Eszel told him with a wink. ‘I’ll introduce you around.’

  ‘Now wait there,’ Laranya said, springing from Reki’s side to sit next to Eszel. She grabbed his arm possessively, dripping all over him. ‘Eszel is mine! I’ll not have you stealing him away from me with your dry book-learning and conversations about dead old men.’

  Eszel laughed. ‘The Empress is jealous!’ he taunted.

  Laranya looked from her brother to Eszel and back. She held great fondness for both of them. The two could not be more different, yet they seemed to be getting on better than she had hoped. Reki was grey-eyed and intense, his features oddly accentuated by a deep scar that ran from the outside of his left eye to the tip of his cheekbone. His chin-length hair was jet-black, with a streak of white on the left side from the same childhood fall that had marred his face. He was quiet, clever, and awkward, never seeming to quite fit the clothes that he wore or to feel comfortable in his own skin.

  Eszel, in contrast, was flamboyant and lively, very handsome but very affected; he seemed like he belonged in the River District rather than the Imperial Keep, with his bright eye make-up and his hair dyed in purple and red and green, tied with ornaments and beads.

  ‘Perhaps a little jealous,’ she conceded mischievously. ‘I want you both to myself!’

  ‘Rank has its privileges,’ Eszel said, standing up and making an exaggerated bow. ‘I am yours to command, my Empress.’

  ‘Then I demand that you recite us a poem about rain!’ she said. Reki’s eyes lit up.

  ‘I do so happen to have one in which rain forms something of a key element,’ he said. ‘Would you like to hear it?’

  ‘I would!’ said Reki. He was somewhat awed by Eszel, who Laranya had told him was a brilliant poet. He was a member of the Imperial Court on the suggestion of Mos’s Cultural Adviser, who believed that with a few years’ patronage Eszel would be turning out poems good enough to make him a household name in Axekami, and a prestigious figure to be associated with the Imperial family.

  Preening himself outrageously in the lantern-light, Eszel took up position in the middle of the pavilion and cleared his throat. For a few moments, the only sound was the hiss and trickle of the rain, and he basked in the rapt attention of his audience. Then he began to speak, the words flowing across his tongue like molten silver. High Saramyrrhic was a wonderfully complex language, and lent itself well to poetry. It was capable of being soft and sibilant or jarring and sharp, layered with meanings that could be shifted and manipulated in the mouth of a wordsmith to make them a sly puzzle to unlock and a joy to hear. Eszel was extremely talented, and he knew it; the pure beauty of his sentences entranced the listener.

  The poem was only obliquely about rain, being rather the story of a man whose wife had been possessed by an achicita, a demon vapour that had stolen in through her nostrils as she slept and was turning her sick inside. The man’s heartbreak made him mad, and in his madness he was visited by Shintu, the trickster god of luck, who persuaded him to carry his wife outside their house and lay her in the road for three days, at the end of which time Shintu would drive out the demon. Then Shintu asked his cousin Panazu to bring three days of rain, to test the man’s faith, for his wife was already weak and would likely not survive three days of being soaking wet. After the first day of sitting by his wife in the rain, the villagers, thinking the man insane, locked him up and put his wife back to bed, where she continued to sicken.

  Shintu, having played his trick, thought it was over and promptly turned his attention to something else. He forgot about the whole affair, at which time it came to the attention of Narisa, goddess of forgotten things, who saw how terrible and unjust it was that this couple should suffer so. She appealed to Panazu to put things right, since he too had played a part in this. Panazu, who loved Narisa – and whose love would later draw Shintu’s attention and result in the birth of the bastard child Suran by Panazu’s own sister Aspinis – could not refuse her, and so he relieved the wife of the achicita and sent lightning to break open the man’s jail cell. Freed and reunited, they were both pronounced cured, and found their happiness together once again.

  Eszel was just coming to the end of his tale, and was gratified to see tears standing in Reki’s eyes, when suddenly Mos came stamping in out of the rain. The poet faltered at the sight of the Blood Emperor, whose face was like a thunderhead. He stood there dripping, surveying the scene before him. Eszel fell silent.

  ‘You all seem to be enjoying yourselves,’ he said, and even Eszel could tell that he was spoiling for a fight, and wisely remained quiet. The Blood Emperor did not like him, and made no disguise of the fact. Eszel’s somewhat effeminate ways and showy appearance offended a man of his earthy nature. In addition, it was plain that Mos resented the friendship between Eszel and Laranya, for she often sought him out when Mos was too busy with affairs of court to attend to her.

  ‘Come and join us, then,’ said Laranya, getting up and holding out her hands for Mos to take. ‘You look like you need some enjoyment.’

  He ignored her hands and glowered at her. ‘I have searched for you, Laranya, because I thought I might find some solace from my wife after the ordeal I have suffered. Instead I find you . . . soaking wet and playing childish games in th
e rain!’

  ‘What ordeal? What are you talking about?’ Laranya asked, but in amid the concern there was already the spark of anger that had ignited in response to the Emperor’s tone. Eszel sat down unobtrusively next to Reki.

  ‘Don’t concern yourself,’ he snapped. ‘Why is it that whenever I have to track you down, I find you with this abhorrent peacock of a man?’ He waved a dismissive gesture at Eszel, who took the insult meekly. He could scarcely do any different. Reki looked in horror from Mos to Eszel.

  ‘Do not take out your frustrations on your subjects, who cannot answer you back!’ she cried, her cheeks becoming flushed. ‘If your grievance is with me, then say so! I am not at your beck and call, to wait in your bedchamber until you decide you need solace.’ She twisted the word to mock him, making him seem needy and ridiculous.

  ‘Gods!’ he roared. ‘Am I to face hostility from all sides? Is there not one person with who I can exchange a kind word?’

  ‘How persecuted you are!’ she retorted sarcastically. ‘Especially when you blunder in here like a banathi and begin insulting my friend, and embarrassing me in front of my brother!’

  ‘Come with me, then!’ Mos said, grabbing her wrist. ‘Let me speak to you in private, away from them.’

  She pulled her arm back. ‘Eszel was reciting a poem,’ she said, her voice taut. ‘And I will stay to hear it finished.’

  Mos glared balefully at the poet, almost shaking with rage. Reki could almost feel Eszel’s heart sink. His sister meant well, but when incensed she was not subtle. In providing a reason to refuse Mos, she had turned his wrath back onto her defenceless friend.

  ‘And how would you feel if your treasured poet was suddenly to find himself without a patron?’ he grated.

  ‘Then my treasured husband would find himself without a wife!’ Laranya fired back. Once she had dug her heels in, she would give no ground.

  ‘Does he mean so much to you, then?’ Mos sneered. ‘This half-man?’