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

by Chris Wooding

  Kaiku was mildly taken aback, both by his bluntness – which verged on rude – and his eloquence. She had rarely heard Tsata say more than a few sentences at a time; but his evident passion for this subject seemed to have overridden his usual quiet reticence.

  ‘When the Weavers came, your ancestors took them in,’ he said at length, his pale green eyes steady in the darkness. ‘They were dazzled by the power they might command with a Weaver at their side. Your nobles had so long been accustomed to treating lesser men like tools, that they thought they could use the Weavers in the same way, not knowing how dangerous a tool they were. For to accept the Weavers into your world was to make a pact; a pact that your ancestors made knowing full well the terms that they were agreeing to.’ His head hung in sorrow. ‘Greed ruined them. Perhaps they had noble causes at first; perhaps they thought that with the Weavers on their side, they could expand the empire and make it greater and more invincible. But sometimes the price is too high, no matter what the reward.’

  Kaiku noticed that his hands were clenched in fists, the yellow skin taut around his knuckles.

  ‘You invited the Weavers into your homes, and you fed them with your children.’

  That shocked her. But though she drew breath to protest, she found that she could not. He was right, after all. It was a noble family’s duty to supply their Weaver with whatever they wanted during their post-Weaving mania. She knew well enough some of the awful perversions that those creatures were capable of. As the backlash from using their Masks set in, like the withdrawal symptoms of a narcotic, they had no conscience in the face of their irrational, primal lusts and needs. Nothing was too depraved where the Weavers were concerned. Rape, murder, torture . . . these were only some of the desires that the Weavers demanded be satisfied. She knew of others. Blood Kerestyn’s Weaver was reportedly a cannibal. Blood Nira had one who ate human and animal faeces. The current Weave-lord apparently had a penchant for skinning victims alive and making sculptures from them. Though not every Weaver’s mania was harmful to others – some would do things as mundane as painting or merely hallucinate for hours – a lot of them were, and while they did not need to sate themselves every time they went Weaving, most Weavers still accounted for dozens of lives each. And as they become more insane and addicted and raddled with disease, the quantity increased.

  She felt suddenly ashamed, remembering the simple joy she had felt in Hanzean at returning to her homeland from Okhamba. Saramyr was a place of beauty and harmony that she felt lucky to live in, and yet it was built on the bones of so many. Before the Weavers, there had been the systematic extermination of the native Ugati, a death toll that must have reached into millions. None of this was new to Kaiku – and still, it seemed so distant and so unconnected to her that she could not really identify with it – but hearing it put in such a straightforward way reminded her what a thin veneer civilisation was, a crust on which the dainty feet of the highborn walked, while beneath their soles a sea of disorder and violence seethed.

  But Tsata was not finished. ‘You are not to blame for the crimes of your ancestors,’ he said, ‘though often your society punishes sons for their fathers’ mistakes, it seems. But now the Weavers despoil the very land you live on. That is the final joke. Your people have come to rely on them to the extent that you cannot bring yourselves to get rid of them, even though they will destroy all the beauty that you once loved. You have invested so much in making your empire bigger and better that you are destroying the very foundation that it is built on. You have built a tower so tall and so high that you have begun to take bricks from the bottom to put at the top.’ He leaned closer to Kaiku. ‘You are killing the earth with your selfishness.’

  ‘I know that, Tsata,’ Kaiku said. She was becoming angry; this seemed a little too much like a personal attack at her. Even though she was aware that Tsata did not subscribe to the evasions and politenesses of her society, she still found his manner of speaking too confrontational. ‘What do you think we are doing here now? I am trying to fight them.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘But are you fighting them for the right reasons? You fight for vengeance. Saran told me that much. Now the people of your land rise up, for their food is becoming short; but until then, they were content to let the blight creep, thinking that somebody else would deal with it. None of you fight for the good of the many. You only decide to struggle when it is in your personal interest.’

  ‘That is the way people are,’ Kaiku snapped.

  ‘It is not the way my people are,’ Tsata countered.

  ‘Perhaps, then, that is why you still remain living in the jungle, and your children eaten by wild beasts,’ she returned. ‘Perhaps civilisation is built on selfishness.’

  The Tkiurathi took the implied insult without offence. ‘Perhaps,’ he said. ‘But I am not intending to compare my culture to yours, to judge the merits of one against the other.’

  ‘That is what you seem to be doing,’ Kaiki told him sullenly.

  ‘I am telling you how your land looks through my eyes,’ he said simply. ‘Does honesty make you so uncomfortable?’

  ‘I do not need to have you pointing out the failings of my people. Perhaps my reasons are not selfless enough to fit your taste, but the fact remains that I am doing something about the Weavers. I choose not to accept the way things are, for I know they are wrong. So do not lecture me on morality.’

  Tsata watched her quietly. She calmed a little, and scuffed her heel in the dirt.

  ‘I have nothing to teach you about the Weavers,’ she admitted eventually. ‘Your understanding of the situation is correct.’

  ‘Is it a product of your culture, then?’ Tsata asked. ‘Because each of you strives for personal advancement rather than for that of the group, you will not act against a threat until it is in your interest to do so?’

  ‘Possibly,’ said Kaiku. ‘I do not know. But I do know that much of our acceptance of the Weavers is born of ignorance. If the high families had proof that the Weavers were the ones responsible for despoiling the land, they would rise up and destroy them. That is what I believe.’

  ‘But it’s not true, Kaiku,’ said Yugi. They looked over at him, and saw him sit up. He adjusted the rag around his brow and gave them an apologetic smile. ‘Difficult to sleep with you two setting the world to rights,’ he explained.

  ‘What do you mean, it is not true?’ Kaiku asked.

  ‘I probably shouldn’t tell you this, but I suppose it doesn’t matter,’ he said, getting to his feet and stretching. ‘There are a lot of dealings high up in the Libera Dramach that we don’t reveal; we made sure we checked your father’s theory about the witchstones. When we were sure he was right, we . . . well, we made it known to some of the nobles. Subtly. Hints here and there, and when those didn’t work, we actually presented them with proof and challenged them to check it themselves.’ He scratched the back of his neck. ‘Obviously, this was all through middlemen. The Libera Dramach was never really exposed.’

  Kaiku waved a hand at him, indicating that he should get to the meat of the issue. ‘How did it end, then?’

  He wandered over to where they sat and looked down on them. ‘They didn’t do anything. Not one. Very few of them even bothered to verify the facts we gave them.’ He laughed bitterly. ‘All this time the Weavers have been kept in check by the fear of what might happen if the high familes rose up against them. Well, we tried to make that happen, and they ignored us.’

  Kaiku was aghast. ‘How can that be? When they can see what the Weavers are doing?’

  Yugi put a hand on Tsata’s bare shoulder. ‘Our foreign friend here is right,’ he said. ‘It’s not in their interest. If one or even a dozen high families acted on the information, they would lose their Weavers, and the other families who did have Weavers would crush them. There are too many enmities, too many old wounds. There’ll always be someone trying to get the upper hand, thinking only about the short-term, seizing any chance they can get. Because people are selfish.
The only way anything fundamental will change is if everyone decides to change at the same time.’ He shrugged. ‘And the only way that will happen is if there’s a catastrophe.’

  ‘It is true. You will have to wait until this land is so ruined that it can barely be lived on before it is in everyone’s interest to act,’ Tsata said. ‘And by then, it may well be too late.’

  ‘Is that the way of it, then?’ Kaiku demanded, feeling unfairly outnumbered. ‘That people have to die before anything changes?’

  Yugi and Tsata merely looked at her, and that was answer enough.

  The clouds cleared towards dawn, and they set off again to take advantage of Iridima’s glow. By now Nomoru’s sense of direction seemed to have returned, and by estimating the curvature of the barrier, she established a route inward that would take them towards the centre of the area that the Weavers had cut off from the world. It seemed reasonable to assume that whatever they were looking for lay there.

  They had not travelled far before the land dropped steeply away before them, and they found themselves looking down a boulder-riven slope at the darkly glinting swathe of the River Zan. Its sibilant murmuring drifted up to them through the silence.

  ‘Are we still upstream of the falls?’ Yugi asked.

  Nomoru made an affirmative noise. ‘This way,’ she said, turning them southward. Kaiku doubted if the scout had any more idea of where they were going than she did, but one way was as good as another when they were all lost.

  The sky was beginning to lighten when Yugi stopped them suddenly. They had been on the alert for any signs of life, but nothing had appeared as yet. In fact, it was eerily empty. Even the animals seemed to have deserted this place.

  ‘What is it?’ Kaiku whispered.

  ‘Look,’ Yugi said. ‘Look at the tree.’

  They looked. Standing on a rocky rise above them in silhouette was a crooked tree, its branches bare and warped, its boughs twisted in a corkscrew and curling at strange angles. It hunched there like a foreboding signpost, a warning of things to come if they should proceed.

  ‘It’s blighted,’ Yugi supplied redundantly.

  ‘They have found another witchstone,’ Kaiku said. ‘And they have woken it up.’

  ‘Woken it up?’ Nomoru sneered. ‘It’s a rock, Kaiku.’

  ‘Is that all it is?’ Kaiku returned sarcastically. ‘Then what are the Weavers hiding it for?’

  Nomoru gave a snort of disgust and walked onward, heading downriver. The others went after her.

  It was just past dawn when they found what they had been looking for; and it was far, far worse than they had imagined.

  The ridge of land that they had been following began to curve away from the Zan below, and a great stretch of flat land opened up between the river’s eastern bank and the high ground, a grassy and fertile flood plain. Their view of the plain was obscured, for they had been forced to retreat from the lip of the slope by a suddenly hostile terrain of broken rocks, but finally Nomoru picked them a route back to the edge so that they could command a good view of the land to the west, and that was when they saw what the Weavers had been hiding all this time.

  The slope had steepened into an enormous black cliff overlooking the plain, and when Nomoru reached the precipice she ducked down suddenly and motioned that the others should do the same. The burgeoning daylight was flat and devoid of force, lacking yet the strength to imbue the world with colour. The sky overhead was a drab grey, and the solitary moon was heading towards obscurity behind the jagged teeth of the Fault. They scrambled on their bellies to where Nomoru lay, and looked over.

  Kaiku swore under her breath.

  On the far side of the flood plain, near the river bank, hulked a massive construction, a glabrous hump like the carapace of some monstrous beetle. It was a dull, rusty bronze in colour, formed of immense strips of banded metal. Around its base, smaller constructions clustered like newborn animals clamouring for their mother’s teats. There, strange wheels of spiked metal rotated slowly, chains rattled as they slid on pulleys that emerged from narrow shafts in the earth, and stubby chimneys emitted an oily black smoke. From within came faint clattering and clanking sounds.

  The observers gazed aghast at the edifice. It was like nothing they had ever seen before, something so alien to their experience that its very presence seemed out of kilter with the world. A dirty, seething horror, foul to the eye.

  But that was not all. There was a more immediate and recognisable danger. The plain was awash with Aberrants.

  The sheer number of the creatures that milled down there was impossible to estimate, for they were in no order or formation, and it was difficult to tell where one clot ended and another began. It was made worse by the variety of shapes and forms: a phantasmagoria of grotesqueries that seemed to have spilled whole from the imagination of a maniac. Thousands, perhaps; maybe tens of thousands. The horde carpeted the ground from the foot of the cliffs to the banks of the Zan, clustered in groups or imprisoned within enormous metal pens. Some stalked restlessly along the river, some slept on the ground, some squabbled and scratched.

  Kaiku felt a pat on her shoulder, and she looked to see Nomoru proffering her a spyglass. It was a simple, portable affair – two glass lenses wrapped in a conical tube of stiffened leather – but it was effective enough. She took it with an uncertain smile of thanks. It was probably the first time Nomoru had ever volunteered any good will to any of them. Evidently the scale of what they had discovered had caused her to lay aside her petty surliness for the moment.

  She put it to her eye, and the spectacle below sprang into noisome detail. Everywhere, the forms of nature had been twisted out of true. Dark, loping things like elongated jungle cats snarled as they prowled, their faces curious hybrids of canine and lizard; demonic creatures that might once have been small apes hung from the bars of their pens, lips skinning back along their gums to reveal vicious arrays of yellowed fangs; hunched, boarlike things with furious visages and great hooked tusks rooted in the dirt, compact barrels of tooth and muscle. Kaiku felt an uncomfortable thrill of recognition at the sight of a roosting-pen of enormous birds, with keratinous beaks and kinked, ragged wings with a span of six feet or more: gristle-crows, which she had last seen on the isle of Fo several years ago.

  And yet there was a pattern in amid the chaos. The presence of the gristle-crows had alerted her to it, and now as she scanned the plain again she saw, in the bleak light of the dawn, that each Aberrant was not unique. There were perhaps a few dozen different types, but these types recurred over and over again. The same features cropped up, the same forms. These were not random offshoots of the witchstones’ influence. These were discrete species. Though they were horrible to look at, there were no redundant features, no evolutionary characteristic that might hamper them. No deformities.

  ‘Not there,’ Nomoru said impatiently. She grabbed the end of the spyglass and turned it. ‘There.’

  Kaiku spared her an annoyed glance for her rudeness before she looked through it again. When she did, her blood ran cold.

  There was a figure walking slowly through the horde, apparently heedless of the predators that surrounded it. At first, she thought it must be a Weaver; but if it was, it was like no Weaver she had ever seen. This one was tall, seven feet at least, and rake-thin. It walked with an erect spine instead of the hunch that Weavers seemed to adopt as their bodies became more riddled with foulness. Its robe was not patchwork like a Weaver’s, but simple black, with a heavy hood; and though it wore a mask, it was a blank white oval, perfectly smooth except for two eye-holes.

  ‘A new kind of Weaver?’ she breathed.

  ‘Don’t know,’ Nomoru replied.

  Yugi took the spyglass and looked.

  ‘What is it I’m seeing here?’ he said, slowly panning across the horde. ‘What are they doing?’

  ‘Some kind of menagerie?’ Kaiku suggested. ‘A collection of Aberrant predator species?’

  Nomoru laughed bitterly. ‘That’s wha
t you think?’

  Tsata’s expression was grim. ‘It is not a menagerie, Kaiku,’ he told her. ‘It is an army.’

  NINETEEN

  At the same time that Kaiku and her companions were gazing down on the horde of Aberrants by the River Zan, Lucia and her retinue were arriving at Alskain Mar.

  It lay almost one hundred and fifty miles away from Kaiku, east and a little south of her position, on the other side of the Xarana Fault near the River Rahn. Once, it had been a magnificent underground shrine, in the days before the cataclysm that rent the earth and swallowed Gobinda over a thousand years ago. Then its entrances had collapsed, and the roof had fallen in on it, and uncounted souls had been buried in the quake. Now it was a haunted place, the abode of something ancient and ageless, and even the most savage of the factions in the Fault stayed well away from there. A great spirit held sway in Alskain Mar, and the spirits guarded their territory resentfully.

  But into that place Lucia was to go. Alone.

  Her escort on the journey from the Fold was a small group of the most trusted warriors of the Libera Dramach, accompanied by Zaelis and Cailin. The leader of the Libera Dramach, the head of the Red Order, and the girl on which all their endeavours rested. It was risky for them to venture out of the Fold together, but Cailin insisted on coming and Zaelis could not let his adopted daughter face this trial without his support. Guilt lay heavy on his heart, and the least he could do was walk with her as far as he could.

  Cailin had been furious when Zaelis had told her what he had done. Though he had implied to Lucia that he and Cailin were in agreement about asking her to go to Alskain Mar, it had in reality been his idea entirely. Cailin was in violent opposition, and not afraid to tell him so. She had faced him at his house, amid the quiet, cosy surroundings of his study.