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

by Chris Wooding

  Though the journey between her house and Zaelis’s was a short one, the rain had stopped and the skies quieted by the time she got there. The moons were gliding apart again, and the raging clouds now drifted listlessly, thinning and dispersing. The storm had been quick and savage, and its ending was as abrupt as its beginning.

  The dwelling that Zaelis shared with his adopted daughter Lucia was an unremarkable one, nestling on one of the Fold’s upper tiers amid several other houses that had been built to the same design. It was a simple, two-storey building of polished wood and plaster, with a balcony on the eastern side to look out over the valley, and a small shrine by its door with carved icons of Ocha and Isisya surrounded by burnt incense sticks and crushed flowers and smooth white pebbles. A single paper lantern burned outside, illuminating from within the pictograms of welcome and blessing it offered to visitors. Next to it hung a chime, which Cailin struck with the small hammer that hung alongside it.

  Zaelis was at the door almost immediately, inviting her inside. It was a humble room, with a few mats and tables, potted plants nodding drowsily on stands, some ornamental weapons on the wall and an oil-paint landscape from a Fold artist whose work Zaelis seemed to admire, though the appeal had always escaped Cailin. A single lamp hung from the ceiling, putting the epicentre of illumination overhead and casting flattering shadows on everyone within. Lucia sat cross-legged on a mat in her nightgown, drinking a herbal infusion from a ceramic mug. She looked up as Cailin came in, her eyes blandly curious.

  ‘She couldn’t sleep,’ Zaelis explained. He noted absently that Cailin’s twin ponytails should have been dripping with water, the raven feathers of her ruff lank with moisture, her make-up smudged; yet none of these things were true. ‘The moonstorm.’

  Cailin did not have time for niceties. ‘Kaiku has contacted me across the Weave,’ she said. Zaelis’s face fell at her tone. Lucia, unperturbed, continued to regard the Sister over the rim of her mug, as if she was merely relating something that the girl had known all along.

  ‘Is it bad?’

  ‘It is very bad,’ she replied. ‘The Aberrants are most certainly under the Weavers’ control, through the medium of those beings that Yugi reported, which she calls Nexuses. Several nights ago most of them departed northward by barge up the Zan, but thousands were still left. Now all but a few of those have departed as well. The Weavers have dropped their barrier, and the Aberrants are on the move.’

  ‘Where?’ Zaelis demanded.

  ‘East. Across the Fault. Towards us.’

  Zaelis felt a pit open in the bottom of his stomach. ‘How long?’

  ‘They travel fast,’ Cailin said. ‘Very fast. She estimates we have four days and nights before they are upon us.’

  ‘Four days and nights . . .’ Zaelis repeated. He looked dazed. ‘Heart’s blood.’

  ‘I have matters to attend to in the wake of this news,’ Cailin said. ‘I imagine you do too. I will return in a few hours.’ She gave Lucia a peremptory tilt of her head. ‘I doubt any of us will sleep tonight.’

  With that, she was gone as fast as she had come, walking back towards the house of the Red Order, where she would prepare for the arrival of her brethren. Around her, the first gently glittering flakes of starfall had begun, tiny crystals of fused ice drifting down in the green-tinted light of the triple moons. It would fall sporadically for the next day or so. She ignored it, for her mind was on other things. She did indeed have matters to attend to, and a decision that might well be the most important she ever had to make.

  The Fold had been compromised, and the Weavers were coming. She knew as well as Zaelis that four days and nights was not enough time to try and evacuate the population of the Fold across the hostile Fault, and even if he did, they would be caught on the run and killed. Where would they go? What would they do? He would not abandon all he had worked for, all his weapons and supplies and fortifications; nor would he abandon the townsfolk. He would be forced to make a stand here, at least until an alternative could be made feasible.

  Her choice was simple. Zaelis and the Libera Dramach were bound to this place, but she was not. Should the Red Order stand with them against the Weavers, or should they leave them to their fate?

  Yugi arrived at Zaelis’s house shortly afterward. Lucia had dressed, and returned to her spot on the mat. She should have been asleep by now, but she did not appear to be tired in the slightest.

  Zaelis had been too preoccupied to disapprove. His mind was full of dark musings in the wake of Cailin’s news. He was thinking of Weavers, and gods, and Alskain Mar. Did the Libera Dramach even stand a chance, if what the spirit had shown Lucia was true? If this was indeed some conflict of the gods, what hope did they have of resisting the tides? Were they like some cork bobbing on a stormy ocean, powerless to act, merely staying afloat? He had a depressing sense that his life’s work had been merely an illusion, an old man’s folly, creating a resistance that could not, in the end, resist anything. He blamed Cailin, bitterly, for bringing them to this: for holding them back, for advising secrecy when action was needed. And now, finally, their cover had been somehow torn away, and they were exposed. They were not strong enough to fight the Weavers head-on, Zaelis knew that. Yet the alternative was to give up, and that he could never do.

  He realised immediately that Yugi had been smoking amaxa root. It was in the sheen of his eyes and his dilated pupils, and the pungent smell still clung to his clothes.

  ‘Gods, Yugi, I need you clearheaded!’ he snapped in lieu of a greeting.

  ‘Then you should have called for me in the morning,’ Yugi retorted cheerily. ‘As it is, I’m here. So what do you want?’ He saw Lucia and gave her a little bow. Lucia returned it amiably with a dip of her head.

  Zaelis sighed. ‘Come inside and sit down,’ he said. ‘Lucia, would you brew something strong for Yugi?’

  ‘Yes, Father,’ she replied, and obediently went to the kitchen.

  Zaelis sat opposite Yugi on the floor mat and studied him, gauging how far gone he was and whether he would take in anything that was said. Yugi’s recreational use of amaxa root had always been a source of worry, but he had been doing it ever since Zaelis first knew him, and despite the dangers it had never bloomed into addiction. Yugi seemed to possess an unusual resistance to its withdrawal symptoms, and he insisted that he was able to take it or leave it as he chose. Zaelis had been sceptical for a long time, but he had been forced to accept after a while that Yugi was right. He was able to go without for weeks and months at a stretch, and it had never affected his reliability. He said that he used it to ‘cope with the bad nights’. Zaelis was unsure what this meant, and Yugi would never talk about it.

  It was simply an unfortunate moment that Zaelis had caught him at, and despite his annoyance he could not expect Yugi to be ready for action every moment of every day. Eventually, Zaelis decided that he was only mildly intoxicated, and that he would still be sharp-witted enough to understand what was being said to him. He had become adept at judging his friend’s state over the years. And so he began to explain to Yugi what had occurred.

  Shortly afterward, Lucia came back with a brew of lathamri, a bitter black infusion that promoted awareness and stimulated the body. She paused at the threshold of the room, looking at the two men sitting locked in conversation. Her father, white-bearded and rangy beneath his robe, his swept-back hair seeming thinner than she remembered and the lines of his face etched a little deeper. Yugi, scruffy as ever in a shirt and trousers and boots, with the omnipresent rag tied around his forehead, penning the unruly spikes of his brown-blond hair. She was assailed suddenly by a terrible sense of the gravity of the situation, that these two men were discussing life and death for hundreds or even thousands of people, and it was all down to her.

  They are coming for me, she thought. Everyone that dies here will die because of me.

  Then Yugi noticed her, and smiled, and ushered her over. He took the mug from her with a grateful nod and then said to Zaelis: ‘
She should hear this. It concerns her.’

  Zaelis grunted and motioned for her to sit down.

  ‘We need to get you to a safe place, Lucia,’ he said, his voice a rumble in the back of his throat. ‘There’s no way we can get the people out of the Fault in any number at short notice, and they would be too many to hide. But a few, a dozen or so . . . an escort . . . we could send you north-east. To Tchamaska. There are Libera Dramach there who can hide you.’

  Lucia barely reacted. ‘And you will stay here and fight,’ she said.

  Zaelis looked pained. ‘I have to,’ he said. ‘The Libera Dramach practically built this place. After we took it over all that time ago . . . well, the stockpiles alone are worth defending. If we can hold off this attack, we can buy time to move them out, to start again.’ He laid his hand on her arm. ‘People came here because we drew them here, even the ones who aren’t a part of the organisation. I’m responsible.’

  ‘You’re responsible for me too,’ Lucia said. Yugi looked at her in surprise. He had never heard Lucia use such an accusatory mode with her father.

  Zaelis was plainly hurt. He drew his hand back from her. ‘That’s why I’m sending you out of harm’s way,’ he said. ‘It will only be for a short time. I will come and find you afterward.’

  ‘No,’ said Lucia, quite firmly. ‘I will stay.’

  ‘You can’t stay,’ Zaelis told her.

  ‘Why not? Because I might be killed?’ She leaned forward, and her voice was a furious hiss that shocked him. ‘You’ll abandon me, but you won’t abandon them! Well, neither will I! All these people, all my friends and my friend’s families, all of them are going to die here! Because the Weavers want me! Most of them will never even know why. And you want me to leave them, to go and hide again until the Weavers hunt me down and more people die?’ She was shouting now. ‘I’m responsible for these people as much as you are. You made me responsible when you promised them a saviour from the Weavers. You tied all their lives to me and you never once asked me if I wanted that!’

  Her last words rang into silence. In all her life, they had never heard her raise her voice in anger. The force of it, coming after fourteen years of placid calm, stunned them.

  ‘I will not go,’ she said, her voice dropping again but losing none of its steel. ‘I will stay here and live or die with you, and with the people to whom you bound me.’

  Yugi looked from Lucia to Zaelis and back again. Suddenly, she no longer looked like a child, and he caught a glimpse of her mother’s fire in her glare. Zaelis was dumbstruck. Finally, he swallowed, and he dropped his eyes from the fierce and unfamiliar girl who had taken the place of his daughter.

  ‘So be it,’ he said, his mode formal and distant. ‘Do as you will.’

  Yugi felt the moment become excruciating, even softened as it was by the pleasant fuzz of the amaxa root.

  ‘Remember that army of Aberrants coming our way?’ he said with forced flippancy. ‘If anybody’s interested, I have a plan.’

  Asara sat with her arms around one knee and the other leg tucked beneath her, and watched the starfall drifting down over Lake Sazazu. The grass was sodden, and the moisture soaked through her clothes to dampen her skin. The water still rocked with the memory of the storm, flashing fitful arcs of moonlight from shore to distant shore. Night-birds swooped back and forth, plucking at fish that were attracted to the surface to nibble at the tiny ice-flakes, thinking them to be food of some kind. The sensation of unreality was fading now, returning the world to normal.

  Alone, she gazed out over the lake, deep in thought.

  Reki slumbered back in the shelter they had made. He was so exhausted he had slept through the chaos. The thought brought a twitch of a smile. Poor boy. His grief and misery had destroyed him, but she still found herself with a strange affection for the bookish young Heir-Barak. Where she would have been disgusted at the weakness of someone else for wallowing so in their agony, for him she made an exception. It was, after all, her fault.

  The last few days had been curious. She had expected pursuit, but Mos’s men were either criminally inept or were not searching for them at all, and she found that very odd. It worried her more than if they had been hot on Reki’s trail. Surely they knew what he carried, and what it meant for the Empire? And yet Asara had stayed effortlessly ahead of the game. Such good fortune was frankly suspicious.

  Reki had not taken the news of his sister’s death at all well, and they had been forced to rest a while here, for he was in no state to go on. His lamentations would draw attention to them. Even when he was silent, he bore such a shattering sorrow in his eyes that people would remember him. In retrospect, Asara thought that she should probably have kept Laranya’s suicide quiet until they were in a safer place; but what was done, was done. He would have felt betrayed if she had kept it from him any longer, and she wanted him smitten.

  She left him to sleep, to heal himself of tragedy. Asara had watched many dramas like this over the course of her long life, and they bored her in the main; but she was curious to see how Reki would fare under this test of his mettle. Though he was as easy to manipulate as any man, he had innocence and inexperience as his excuse, and she found those qualities appealing enough so that she did not have to entirely fake her interest in him.

  But she herself could not sleep. She was thinking of an argument, weeks ago, and of Kaiku.

  After her deception had been revealed, after she had fled from Kaiku in shame, she had gone to Cailin. It was ever her way: to run from what hurt her, to change herself and hide again. Cailin would provide her with an excuse to leave, something that she could tell herself was the real reason she was going, and not Kaiku at all.

  But somehow it had descended into an argument. Cailin was just that little bit too haughty, taking her for granted, telling her that she had to go to the Imperial Keep.

  ‘I am not your servant, Cailin!’ Asara had spat, whirling around the black-and-red conference chamber of the house of the Red Order. ‘You would do well to remember that.’

  ‘Spare me these half-hearted attempts at independence,’ the Sister had replied coldly. ‘You know you can leave at any time. But you will not leave, will you? Because I can grant what you desire most in the world.’

  Asara had glared at her furiously. ‘We had a deal. I did not agree to be your subordinate!’

  ‘Then we are equals, if you prefer,’ Cailin said. ‘It changes nothing. You will do as I ask, or you may break the deal. But until then, you will help me get what I want. And then, I will give you what you want.’

  ‘Can you?’ Asara had accused. ‘Can you do it?’

  ‘You know I can, Asara, and you know I will. You have my promise.’

  ‘And you have my promise,’ she returned savagely, ‘that if you trick me I will be avenged. You would not want me as an enemy, Cailin.’

  ‘Stop these threats!’ Cailin had snapped. ‘The deal stands. It requires a certain measure of trust on both our parts, but you knew that from the beginning.’

  Trust. Asara could have laughed. Trust was an overrated commodity. But Cailin knew what it was that Asara longed for, what she would risk almost anything to get. And so Asara worked for the Red Order, partly because they had the same goals, mostly because it was the only way she could imagine her wish might be granted.

  An end to the loneliness, to the emptiness, to the void inside her. It was almost too precious to imagine.

  TWENTY-NINE

  The sun was setting on the Xarana Fault, igniting the western horizon in clouded bands of red and silver and purple. In the golden light of the day’s end, Yugi and Nomoru crouched on a bluff overlooking a land riven with ghylls and canyons, from which flat-topped plateaux, rocky hills and buttes thrust upward unevenly.

  Below them, hidden within the creases of the Fault, men and women were dying. The sounds of gunfire and occasional detonations echoed into the calm sky. Wisps of smoke seeped like fumes from the cracks. Fleeting glimpses of movement caught their eyes
from time to time: swiftly retreating figures, pursued by dark and terrible shapes. At several points over the last few hours, the battle had spilled up out of the shadow and into the open, skirmishes across hillsides or areas of scrubland. Yugi did not recognise half of the factions that he saw, but he was sure they were not Libera Dramach or folk of the Fold.

  ‘Getting close,’ Nomoru said, her tone suggesting that she did not care one way or the other about it.

  ‘We’re not slowing them by much,’ Yugi observed distractedly.

  ‘What did you expect?’

  Yugi shrugged at that. He did not want to deal with Nomoru’s surly pessimism now. He had more pressing concerns.

  Kaiku’s estimation of the Aberrant army’s speed had been accurate. Three days had passed since the night of the moonstorm, and their rate of advance had been steady and rapid. A force of thousands were swarming through the Fault at roughly twice the speed that Yugi and his band of three companions had traversed it in the other direction. In a place like the Fault, that was a recklessness verging on insanity. He wondered if their strength of numbers had been enough to overcome the dangers that they would have faced: the clan armies, the canyons bristling with traps and deadfalls, the swamps that belched poison miasma, the haunted places. For a force so big, there was no safe route. How many had they lost? And would it matter, in the end?

  The Libera Dramach scouts – Nomoru included – had brought back scattered reports, but the army were simply moving too fast. They learned most of what they knew from other friendly clans, driven before the invaders, and the intelligence they had gleaned had come too recently to really do anything about it. The army had smashed through any settlements that had got in their way, overwhelming them in a tide and then ploughing onward. The clans and factions in or near the path of the Aberrants were in turmoil. Some were fleeing eastward, towards the Fold; word had been spread that it would be a last stronghold against the enemy, and it would welcome any clans who would unite with them there. A frankly dangerous gamble, to invite any of the other people of the Fault inside their fortifications, but Yugi knew that Zaelis had no other choice now.