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

by Chris Wooding

  She studied him closely, trying to find an answer in the broad angles of his face. He muttered and turned away from her, rolling over on his mat and gathering the blankets around him tighter. He was shivering despite the warmth of the night.

  ‘What is your secret, Chien?’ she murmured. ‘Why are you here?’

  After a time, she got up and extinguished the lantern, undressed in the moonlight and slipped beneath her own covers. She was just drowsing when Chien began to sing.

  She felt a smile touch the corner of her lips. He was dreaming, his voice a tuneless drone, too soft to vocalise the words properly. She listened, and listened, and then suddenly she sat up in bed, staring across the dark room at him.

  He continued, oblivious, singing his fevered song.

  Mishani’s breath was a shudder. She felt her throat close up, and then she slowly sank down to her pillow and faced the wall, stifling her sobs with her blanket. Tears came and would not be held back, sliding over the bridge of her nose and dripping into the fabric.

  She knew that song, and it all made sense now.

  TWENTY-TWO

  The Blood Emperor Mos tu Batik stormed through the marbled corridors of the Imperial Keep, his brow dark with fury. His beard, once close and tidy, had grown unkempt, the patches of grey more pronounced. His hair was a mess, hanging in draggles over his eyes and damp with sweat. Wine had spilled on his tunic, and his clothes were wrinkled and pungent.

  There was madness in his eye.

  Days and nights had blended into one, an endless half-consciousness swamped in alcohol. Sleep brought him no rest, only terrible dreams in which his wife rutted with faceless strangers. His waking hours were spent in a constant state of suspicion, punctuated by sporadic outbursts of rage, directed either at himself or at anyone else near him. He was spiralling slowly and inexorably into mania, and the only escape from the torture was intoxication, which provided a small surcease but only made him more bitter afterward.

  He had taken enough. Now he meant to have it out, once and for all. He would not stand by while he was cuckolded.

  There would be a reckoning.

  It had started long ago, before Eszel the flamboyant poet. He had come to realise that, in the long nights he had spent alone while spite gnawed at his soul. He remembered other times, when Laranya had wanted to pursue her interests and he his, and how he had indulged her in whatever she wished. Times when he had been disappointed that she was not waiting for him when he returned from a particularly harrowing day in the council chamber. Times when she had laughed and joked with other men, who seem attracted like moths to a candle, drawn by the brightness and vivacity of her. He remembered the jealousy then, the seeds of resentment burrowing into a soil made moist by his natural inclination for domination. Among the delusions and venomous slanders that he had persuaded himself to believe in those lonely hours, he had found nuggets of truth.

  He had come to realise that he wanted Laranya as two different people, and that she could not be both. On the one hand was the fiery, wilful and entirely insubordinate woman he had fallen in love with; on the other, the dutiful spouse, who would be there when he wanted her and be absent when he did not, who would make him feel like a man because a man should be able to control his wife. One of the reasons he had fallen in love with her – and stayed in love with her – was because she would not bend to his will, would never be meek and submissive; it was because she galled him that she challenged him and kept his interest. His first wife Ononi had been the model of how a woman should be, but he had not loved her. Laranya was impossible, would never be tamed no matter how he tried, and she had both captured his heart and poisoned it.

  It was the child that had turned things bad. For years, Mos had forgotten those fleeting moments of mistrust and disappointment, the feelings erased as soon as he saw Laranya’s face again. But now he brought them all back to pick over them like a vulture at a carcass. All that time, and no child; but now, suddenly, she was pregnant.

  He remembered when she had told him, what his first reaction had been, an instant of doubt that he had swept away, feeling guilty for ever having thought it.

  Just like Durun. Just like my son, and his scheming bitch wife, letting him raise a child that wasn’t even his own.

  History was repeating itself. But this time, Mos was ahead of the game.

  It was late as he stalked towards the Imperial chambers. His sleep patterns were erratic and took no account of the sun or the moons, and he had begun to fear the nightmares so much that he would do anything to put them off. He had been awake for more than forty hours now, dosed up with herbal stimulants to counteract the soporific lull of the wine, thinking in tighter and tighter circles until there was nothing left but a white-hot ball of fury that demanded release.

  Oh, she had come to him to plead, or to demand, or to shout. Different approaches to the same end: she wanted to know what had possessed him, why he was acting this way. As if she did not know.

  There were others, too. Kakre loomed in and out of his memory, croaking reports and meaningless observations. Advisers came and went. In some dim fashion, he had been aware of the other affairs of state which he was supposed to be attending to, but everything had become transparent to him in contrast to the one overwhelming matter of Laranya. Until it was resolved, he could not care about anything else. Reason had failed. The spies he had set to watch his wife had failed.

  But there was another way; the only resort he had left.

  He threw aside the curtain and stamped into the Imperial bedchamber. The violence of his entrance startled Laranya out of sleep. She sat up with a cry, clutching the sheets to her chest in the warm dark of the autumn night. Something moved in the pale green moonlight, by the archway that led to the balcony beyond: a figure, blurred, gone in an instant. Mos blundered across the room in pursuit, roaring in anger.

  ‘What is it? Mos, what is it?’ Laranya cried.

  The Blood Emperor’s hands were clutched on the stone balustrade; he was glaring down the north-eastern side of the Imperial Keep where it sloped away in a clutter of interlocking sculptures and carvings. He cast about, looking up, then to his left and right, then leaning far out as if he might see underneath the balcony. It was no good. There were too many folds and creases in the ornamentation, too many looming effigies and archways where the intruder might have hidden himself. Gods, he was so quick! Mos had barely even seen him.

  Laranya was at his elbow, in her nightdress, her touch fearful on his arm. ‘What is it?’ she asked again.

  ‘I saw him, whore!’ Mos bellowed, flinging her arm away. ‘You can’t pretend any more! I saw him with my own eyes!’

  Laranya was backing away into the room. Some emotion midway between enragement and fear had taken her, and did not seem to know which way to resolve itself. There was a new edge to Mos tonight, and she was not at all sure what he might do.

  ‘Who? Who did you see?’

  ‘Shouldn’t you know? Was it that effeminate poet? Or is there someone else I should know who enjoys my bed?’

  ‘Mos, I have told you . . . I cannot prove it to you any more than I already have! There is no one!’

  ‘I saw him!’ Mos howled, stumbling after her, his face distorted and haggard. ‘He was just here!’

  ‘There was nobody here!’ Laranya cried. Now she was afraid.

  ‘Liar!’ Mos accused, advancing, looming in the green-tinted shadows.

  ‘No! Mos, you are drunk, you are tired! You need sleep! You are seeing phantoms!’

  ‘Liar!’

  She reached the dresser, knocking into it and tipping bottles of perfume and make-up brushes over. There was no further she could retreat.

  ‘A man cannot rule an empire when he cannot rule his wife!’ Mos snarled. ‘I will teach you obedience!’

  She saw in his eyes what he meant to do, even before he had raised his fist.

  ‘Mos! No! Our baby!’ she pleaded, her hand going defensively to her belly.

 
‘His baby,’ Mos breathed.

  Laranya did not have time to ask who he meant before the first blows fell; nor did she find out afterward, when he left her alone on the floor of the bedchamber with her body aching and her face bruised and blood seeping from between her legs as their child died inside her.

  Reki was woken by a servant calling his name outside the curtain of his room. Asara was already awake, watching him. She lay next to him in his bed, and as he saw her it seemed that the pallid green moonlight caught her at an odd angle, and her eyes were two saucers of reflected illumination, like a cat’s. Then she looked to the curtain, and the moment passed.

  His gaze lingered on her shadowed face for an instant, unable to draw away from the beauty there. She had indeed, as she had promised, given him an experience unlike any he had had before; but though he had repaid her with a flawless rendition of The Pearl Of The Water God, she had not gone away as he had feared, never to see him again. To his delight, she had barely left him since the moment they had met. A sweet recollection of lazy days and passionate nights flitted across his consciousness. And if it seemed too good to be true, then he was loth to shatter his fragile happiness by questioning it.

  ‘What is it?’ he called, his throat tight from sleep.

  ‘The Empress!’ the servant replied. ‘The Empress!’

  The tone in her voice made him sit up with a jolt of alarm. ‘A moment,’ he said, and slid naked out of bed to put on a robe. Asara did the same. He was too preoccupied to even glance at her sublime form. Though she had shared his bed for several nights now, and he already worshipped her like a goddess, it was all dashed away in that dreadful instant.

  ‘Enter,’ he called, and the servant hurried in, speaking as she came. It was one of Laranya’s handmaidens, a servant of Blood Tanatsua rather than one of the Keep servants.

  ‘The Empress is hurt,’ she babbled. ‘I heard her . . . we all heard them fighting. We went in after the Emperor had gone. We—’

  ‘Where is she?’ Reki demanded.

  ‘The Imperial chambers,’ the servant said, but she had barely finished before Reki swept past her and out of the room.

  He ran barefoot through the corridors of the Keep, the lach floor chill on his soles, heedless of how ridiculous he looked sprinting in a bedrobe.

  The Empress is hurt.

  Imperial Guards in their blue and white armour stood aside for him; servants hurried out of his way.

  ‘Laranya,’ he was murmuring breathlessly to himself, his voice like a whimper. ‘Suran, let her be all right. I will do anything.’

  But if the desert goddess heard his plea, she did not answer.

  His quarters were not far from his sister’s bedchamber. The life of the Keep went on all around as if nothing had happened. Cleaners were polishing the lach and dusting the sculptures, night-time activities carried out unobtrusively when most people were asleep. By the time he reached the door to the Imperial chambers, he knew that all the servants here must have heard what the handmaiden heard; yet they pretended otherwise. Since Saramyr houses rarely ever had interior doors due to the need for breezes in the scorching summers, codes of privacy had arisen in which it was extremely rude to eavesdrop or to pass on anything that was inadvertently learned. That Laranya’s handmaiden had broken that silence was an indication of how serious she felt it was.

  He heard Laranya sobbing before he shoved the curtain aside, and though the sound made him feel as if his heart would break, he was desperately relieved that she was still capable of making it.

  She was on the bed, on her hands and knees, in amid a tangle of golden sheets stained with thin smears of blood that looked black in the moonlight. She was weeping as she pawed through the sheets as if searching for something.

  She looked up at him, framed between the curving ivory horns that were the bedposts, and her eyes were blackened and swollen.

  ‘I cannot find him,’ she whispered. ‘I cannot find him.’

  Reki’s eyes welled. He rushed over to hold her, but she shrieked at him to stay back. He shuddered to a halt in uncomprehending misery.

  ‘I cannot find him!’ she howled again. Her battered face was made ugly by bruises and tears. He had never seen her this way before. Whenever she had cried in the past, it had been only a cloud across the sun; but suddenly she seemed like a shade of herself, all the vigour and spirit gone from her. She looked like someone he did not know.

  ‘Who are you searching for?’

  She grubbed around in the bloodied sheets again. ‘I felt him come out, I felt him leave me!’ she cried. ‘But I cannot see him!’ She picked up something tiny that looked like a dense clot of blood, holding it up to the light. Threads of sticky liquid ran through the gaps in her fingers. ‘Is that him? Is that him?’

  With a sickening wrench, Reki realised where all the blood had come from, and what she was looking for. He felt suddenly dislocated from reality, one beat out of time with the world. He could barely breathe for the horror of seeing his sister this way.

  ‘That is not him,’ Reki said. The words seemed to come from elsewhere. ‘He is gone. Omecha has him now.’

  ‘No, no, no,’ Laranya began to whine, rocking back and forth on her knees. She had discarded the clot. ‘It is not him.’ She looked up at Reki, her eyes imploring. ‘If I find him, I can put him back.’

  Reki began to cry, and the sight brought Laranya to new grief. She reached out for him with bloodied hands, and he slumped onto the bed and embraced her. She flinched as they hugged and he let her go reflexively, knowing that he had hurt her.

  ‘What did he do to you?’ Reki said, and Laranya wailed, clutching herself to him. He dared not hold her, but he let his hands rest lightly on her back, and tears of fury and grief angled down his thin cheeks.

  After a time during which they did not speak, Reki said: ‘He needs a name.’

  Laranya nodded. Even the unborn needed names for Noctu to record them. It did not matter that they had no idea of the sex of the child. Laranya had wanted it to be a son, for Mos.

  ‘Pehiku,’ she muttered.

  ‘Pehiku,’ Reki repeated, and silently commended the nephew he would never see to the Fields of Omecha.

  That was how Asara found them when she arrived. She had taken a little time to dress, though she wore no make-up and her black hair hung loose over one shoulder. She slipped inside the curtain without asking permission to enter, and stood in the green moonlight silently until Reki noticed her.

  ‘I will kill him,’ Reki promised, through gritted teeth. His eyes were red and his nose streaming, forcing him to sniff loudly every so often. Ordinarily he would have been mortified to be seen like this by a woman he found so attractive, but his grief was too clean, too justifiable.

  ‘No, Reki,’ Laranya said, and by the steadiness in her voice he knew that sense had returned to her. ‘No, you will not.’ She raised her head, and Reki saw a little of the old fire in her gaze. ‘Father will.’

  Reki did not understand for a moment, but Laranya did not wait for him to catch up. She looked to Asara.

  ‘Look in that chest,’ she said, motioning to a small, ornate box laced in gold, that lay against one wall. ‘Bring me the knife.’

  Asara obeyed. She found amid the folded silks a jewelled dagger, and brought it to the Empress.

  Reki was faintly alarmed, unsure what his sister intended to do with the blade.

  ‘You have a task, brother,’ she said, her swollen lips making repulsive smacking noises as she spoke. ‘It will be hard, and the road will be long; but for the honour of your family, you must not shirk it. No matter what may come. Do you hear?’

  Reki was taken aback by the gravity in her voice. It seemed appallingly incongruous with the disfigured woman who knelt on the bed with him. He nodded, his eyes wide.

  ‘Then do this for me,’ she said, and with that she twisted her long hair into a bunch at the back of her head and put the knife to it.

  ‘Don’t!’ Reki cried, but he was to
o slow; in three short jerks it was complete, and Laranya’s hair fell forward again, cut roughly to the length of her jaw. The rest had come free in her hand.

  He moaned as she held the severed hair up in front of him. She tied it into a knot and offered it.

  ‘Take this to Father. Tell him what has happened.’

  Reki dared not touch it. To take the hair would be to accept his sister’s charge, to be bound by an oath to deliver it which was as sacred as the oath she had made by cutting it off. To the folk of Tchom Rin, the shearing of a woman’s hair meant vengeance. It was done only when they were wronged in some terrible way, and it would take blood to redress the balance.

  If he gave this to his father, Blood Tanatsua would be at war with the Emperor.

  For the briefest of instants, he was dizzyingly aware of how many lives would be sacrificed because of this one act, how much agony and death would come of it. But an instant was all it was, for there were higher concerns here than men’s lives. This was about honour. His sister had been brutally beaten, his nephew murdered in the womb. There was no question what had to happen next. And in some cowardly part of his soul, he was glad that the burden ultimately would not fall to him, that he was only a courier.

  He took his sister’s hair from her, and the oath was made.

  ‘Now go,’ she said.

  ‘Now?’

  ‘Now!’ Laranya cried. ‘Take two horses and ride. Switch between them; you’ll go faster that way. If Mos finds out, if Kakre hears of this, they will try and stop you. They will try and cover this up with lies, they will play for every moment and use it to arm themselves against our family. Go!’

  ‘Laranya . . .’ he began.

  ‘Go!’ she howled, because she could not bear the parting. He scrambled off the bed, cast one last tearful look at her, then stuffed the hair into the pocket of his bedrobe and fled.

  ‘Not you,’ Laranya said quietly, even though Asara had shown no sign of leaving. ‘I need your help. There is something that must be done.’ Her tone was dull and flinty.