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

by Chris Wooding

  Kaiku wiped the sodden hair back from her face. ‘And how am I supposed to respond?’

  ‘Hthre,’ he said. Kaiku repeated it, unsure of her pronunciation. ‘It means you accept the pledge and offer your own.’

  She smiled. ‘Hthre,’ she said, with more conviction this time.

  He looked away from her. ‘It is merely a custom,’ he repeated.

  They crept out of the water and along the widening pipe. After so long in night and darkness, the warm, fiery glow at the end made them feel uneasy. Their progress was wary, hugging the walls as they flattened out, their fingers running over rusting panels fused together by some craft that neither Kaiku nor Tsata knew. As they neared the light, they saw that it was not a wall at the end but a steep slope, like a chute, which they were at the bottom of. They peeked out of the end of the pipe, but there was nobody there. Above them, they could see only darkness, and around them were the walls of the chute that fed into the pipe where they emerged. The source of the glow was similarly obscured.

  But there was a ladder, made of metal, fixed against one side of the chute.

  Kaiku climbed. There was nothing else to do, and no other, more subtle way up. Tsata remained at the bottom, his hide clothes dripping and forming a puddle around his shoes. She wished suddenly that there had been some way to waterproof her rifle and bring it along. It would have comforted her, even if she knew it would be little help in the event that they were discovered.

  She reached the top of the ladder, and her stomach fell away as she saw the true immensity of the Weavers’ mine.

  The humped roof of the building was not, as she had expected, the ceiling of some kind of dwelling; rather, it was the cap of a colossal shaft that plunged down into abyssal depths. The shaft was not a straight drop; the blackness at its bottom was obscured by stone bulges where the sides narrowed and jags of rock that projected into the centre. Vast ledges scarred it, and pillars rose up like blunt needles, made small by comparison to their surroundings.

  The chute that Kaiku had clambered out of was set on the edge of a great semicircular sill. Its lower lip continued up above her to an enormous dump-tank which sat upright in a cradle of curled iron. A pair of spiked wheels rotated slowly behind it, huge cogs dragging up scoops affixed to rattling chains which tipped water into the dump-tank and then headed monotonously downward again to collect more.

  Kaiku, peripherally aware that the immediate vicinity appeared to be deserted, clambered out of the chute and stood there gawking, awed by the sheer size and strangeness of the place.

  The illumination that she had seen from the bottom of the chute was provided by metal torches and pillars which burned with flame; but it was not like any normal flame, being more similar to combusting vapour. They billowed clouds of smoky fire that trailed upward and then dissipated, turning to noisome black fumes which floated away to collect at the top of the shaft. She realised that the darkness above her was not through lack of light, but that it was a churning pall of smoke which slowly vented itself into the clean air outside through pores in the cap.

  The multitude of ledges and pillars were linked with a network of precarious walkways, rope bridges and stairways that hung like spiderwebs across the shaft. Walls were scabbed with props and joists of wood and metal, delineating pathways for mine carts to travel, and caves opened all over the shaft, glowing from within. Paternosters groaned and steamed in the depths, furnaces blazing at their heart as they rotated in idiot procession. Iron cranes jabbed out into nowhere, still carrying loads, abandoned. Thin waterfalls plunged endlessly, issuing from cave mouths to fall into nothingness, or to strike a rock ledge further down in a mist of spray before running off and down again. Kaiku saw small, ramshackle wooden huts clustered together, sometimes built on the tip of a pillar and linked only by a single bridge to the rest of the mine. It was hot in the shaft, and reeked; there was an unpleasant tinny taste that caught at the back of the throat.

  Kaiku stared in wonder and terror at the thing the Weavers had created. She had never seen so much metal in her life, nor seen it wrought in such quantity. What kind of forges must the Weavers have? What had been going on for over two hundred years in the heart of their monasteries where the Edgefathers crafted their Masks? What kind of art had created those strange torches, or those hissing and steaming contraptions that moved without anything apparent to power them?

  She felt a touch on her upper arm and jumped, but it was only Tsata.

  ‘We are too exposed,’ he said, his eyes flickering over the scene with a glint in them that might have been disgust, might have been anger.

  She was glad to tear herself away from it.

  They retreated along the sill to the sides of the shaft, where the enfolding darkness lurked. The huge metal torches were only sparsely placed about the mine, and though the area they illuminated was much greater than a normal torch or lantern would be, it still left areas of deep shadow. From here, Kaiku and Tsata carried out a more thorough observation of their surroundings, looking for movement. There was none. The shaft appeared to be deserted.

  ‘Your eyes,’ Tsata said after a time, motioning at her.

  Kaiku frowned, making a querying noise.

  ‘They have changed. Your irises have more red in them than before.’

  She gave him a puzzled look. ‘Before?’

  ‘Before we entered the pipe.’

  Kaiku thought on that for a moment, remembering the surprise in Tsata’s voice when she had refused the illumination he had offered.

  ‘How dark was it in there?’ she asked.

  ‘Too dark for you to see,’ he replied.

  Kaiku felt a thrill of unease. Had she . . . adapted herself? Had she been using her kana without even knowing it, the tiniest increase in her senses to compensate for her lack of vision? She did not even know how she would go about doing that, but her subconscious certainly seemed to. Just like with Yugi, cleaning him of the raku-shai’s poison. The more she used her kana, the more it seemed to use her, making her a conduit rather than a mistress. Was that what it was like for all the Sisters? She would have to discuss it with Cailin when she returned.

  If there was anything left to return to.

  She strangled that thought as soon as it arrived. There was no time for doubts now. The Aberrant horde would almost be upon the Fold, and there was nothing in the world she could do about it. She could only hope that her warning had given them enough time to prepare or to get away from there.

  They headed along the sill and onto a walkway that hugged the sides of the shaft, curving round to the entrance of a tunnel. The walkway was made of iron, supported by joists driven into the rock and hanging over an unfathomable drop. Kaiku did not want to touch the railing with her bare skin. Railings in Saramyr were made of carved wood, or occasionally polished stone; never a metal like this, rusting and flaking in the updrafts of steam, spotted with brown decay.

  It was a relief when they came to the end of the walkway. Stone she could trust.

  The tunnel led inward and down, and they took it warily. It was scattered with debris – rocks and pebbles, mouldering bits of food and broken hafts and chips of wood – but it was as empty as the rest of the place appeared to be, and there was little evidence here of any actual mining being done. The walls were uneven and ancient.

  ‘This is natural,’ Tsata said quietly, with a short indicative sweep of his hand. ‘Like the shaft. There is no artificial framework here, nor any shoring up of the sides. What they have built, they have built on top of what was already there.’

  ‘Then they did not mine all of this out?’ Kaiku asked. Her clothes had dried in the heat now, and rubbed her uncomfortably.

  ‘No,’ he agreed. ‘This place had stood for a long time before the Weavers came to it and built their devices.’

  Kaiku found some comfort in that. Initially she had been stunned by the thought that the Weavers could have carved out something so massive in only a few years. Tsata’s observation made th
e Weavers seem a fraction more mortal.

  But still, as they descended, and the tunnel branched and led them through chambers that were makeshift kitchens and storerooms piled with food in barrels and sacks, they found the place eerily, utterly deserted.

  ‘Do you think they have gone?’ Kaiku whispered. ‘All of them?’

  ‘What about the small men?’ Tsata asked. ‘Would they have left?’

  The small men: it took Kaiku a moment to realise that Tsata was talking about the diminutive servants of the Weavers. He had taken the name she had given them – golneri – and mistranslated it with the incorrect gender.

  His Saramyrrhic was excellent, but he was not beyond making mistakes now and then. It was not his mother tongue, after all.

  The golneri. That was another mystery, to go with the Nexuses, the Edgefathers and the imprisoned, intelligent Aberrants that she had witnessed in the monastery on Fo. Heart’s blood, this was all connected somehow. For so long, the Weavers had been such a dreadful and inextricable part of the people of Saramyr, and yet so little was known about them. How many more surprises had they been keeping in the depths of their monasteries these past centuries, stewing in their own black insanity while they hatched their plots?

  What had the people of Saramyr allowed to happen, right under their noses?

  Kaiku shook her head, as much to dismiss the enormity of her own question as to reply to Tsata’s. ‘The golneri will still be here.’ A thought struck her. ‘I think it is so empty because the Weavers did not expect the army to have to leave,’ she said. ‘That would explain the stockpiled food also. Most of the army went north, and the rest remained to guard this place. But the Weavers here found out about the Fold somehow, after the main mass had left. Whatever the barges are doing is too important to turn back from; instead, the Weavers sent all that they had left here to the Fold. There are still enough Aberrants outside to deter casual attackers, and remember: nobody knows this place is here. The Weavers believe it is an acceptable risk. The second army will be gone for two weeks at the most – time to get to the Fold, decimate it, and come back – and when it returns the barrier will be up again and this place will be impregnable once more.’

  ‘Kaiku, they may not take the Fold,’ Tsata muttered. ‘Do not give up yet.’

  ‘I am simply guessing what they are thinking,’ Kaiku told him, but there was a tightness to her voice that told him he had struck a nerve. She closed herself off to the visions of what might be happening even now in her adopted home.

  ‘Their forces are stretched,’ Tsata said. ‘That gives us hope. If they had to leave themselves all but defenceless to get at Lucia, then they must have their attention elsewhere, on something more important.’

  Kaiku nodded grimly. It was small comfort. She could venture a guess where those barges were headed: to Axekami, to the aid of Mos’s troops. The Weavers were going to use Aberrants to secure Mos’s throne, and to keep themselves in power throughout the oncoming famine. Shock troops that would make men’s hearts quail and their knees buckle just before they were ripped to pieces. A show of force to bring the nobles and peasantry of Axekami back into line.

  The Weavers were making their move in the game for control of Saramyr, and Kaiku could not imagine anything that could stand against them. The coup that had been brewing ever since Mos had allowed the Weavers to hold rank and land like one of the high families was destined to fail. Gods, it was as if everything had been set up just to make it harder for the Libera Dramach. If the Weavers consolidated themselves around the throne they would become immovable.

  Kaiku found herself becoming angry. If only Cailin had not been so cursedly paranoid, keeping the Red Order reined and secret, not allowing them to challenge the Weavers. Because of that, the Weavers had spread unchecked, and the secrets they held remained secret, so that nobody could plan against them.

  Cailin. So in love with her precious organisation, like Zaelis was with his. So afraid to endanger herself, to fight for her cause. She would not commit the Red Order against the Weavers; she was selfish, like Zaelis was, like everyone was, hoarding her power, biding her time, waiting until it was too late. Why had she held back so long? Why had a woman so shrewd, so commanding, allowed matters to get so out of hand?

  Kaiku caught herself. Where was all this coming from?

  But the answer had presented itself almost as soon as she posed the question. She suspected Cailin. She had suspected her from the beginning, from their very first meeting, when she had mistrusted her Sister’s apparently altruistic invitation to join the Red Order. So much time had passed, and she had almost forgotten, almost become used to Cailin’s ways; but nothing had changed, not really.

  It was her encounter with Asara that had reminded her, the deep and fundamental deception that she had been subjected to. Cailin knew who Saran really was, and yet she had kept the secret, even though she must have suspected Kaiku’s feelings for him. It had been Asara that had watched her for two years in the guise of her handmaiden, waiting for Kaiku to manifest her kana. Asara who had brought her to Cailin. Now Asara who had given five years of her life to glean clues buried by thousands of years of history all over the Near World.

  Yet no matter what Tsata thought, Asara was not working for the greater good; she was selfishness personified. Whatever she was up to, it was for her good and hers alone. She and Cailin, locked in a conspiracy of two, hidden behind veils of misdirection and always, always working towards something. Something that Kaiku had not been let in on.

  Machinations, wheels turning within wheels. She was not like Mishani. She sickened of deceit.

  They were forced to cross the shaft again as they descended, for the tunnel branches that they chose looped around and spat them back out into the open. They endured a passage across an immeasurable void on a thin metal bridge anchored by spidery struts to the surrounding rock. On the way, they came so close to one of the curiously beautiful waterfalls that Kaiku might have reached out and touched it if she were not unreasonably afraid that her interference in the flow might trigger some sort of alarm.

  When they regained the safety of the tunnels, and the massive weight of the stone closed in around them once more, they began to come across the long-expected signs of life. This tunnel had been adapted from its original form, which was probably too uneven or obstructive to be viable as a corridor, and it was braced with a metal framework. The torches that burned here were of the usual kind, not the strange contraptions belching inflammable gas that were present in the enormous dark of the shaft.

  It was the golneri. The smell of cooking meat and the sound of muttering voices alerted the intruders. They instinctively drew back into shadow, listening to the jabber of the golneri’s incomprehensible dialect. Kaiku wondered where they had come from, how they had come to be so enslaved by the Weavers. A pygmy tribe, hidden in the depths of the Tchamil Mountains, subjugated all those years ago when the first Weavers’ baptism of slaughter was over and they disappeared into the uncharted peaks of Saramyr? Certainly, it was not beyond possibility. Between her home in the Forest of Yuna and the Newlands to the east, the mountain range was three hundred miles wide. From Riri on the southern edge to the northern coast which abutted them, they stretched for over eight hundred miles, dividing Saramyr into west and east with only two major passes along that whole length. There were unexplored areas of the Tchamil Mountains so vast that an entire civilisation could have thrived there and nobody in Saramyr would be the wiser. Even after more than a thousand years of settlement, the land was simply bigger than they could swell to fill it; and in those empty places the spirits still held sway, and resented the encroachment of humankind.

  She would probably never know. Whatever the golneri were or had been, now they were merely appendages to the Weavers, to feed them and care of them when their masters’ insanity took hold. Kaiku tried to pity them, but she had precious little pity left, and she saved it for her own kind.

  They crept onward until the tunnel b
ecame a small cavern, hot and smoky and redolent with the scent of crisping flesh. The tunnels were by no means smooth and straight, their sides a mass of folds and natural alcoves, and the haphazard placement of torch brackets throughout the mine left enough gaps between the light for them to conceal themselves to some extent. They crouched near the mouth of the cavern and looked in.

  Animals turned on spits; vegetables boiled in vats. Strips of red meat hung on hooks over smoking embers, and elsewhere great fires blazed. Fish were being decapitated and eviscerated, their guts tossed aside to slither in the accumulated filth that carpeted the floor. Dozen of the tiny beings were here, their faces screwed up into wrinkled clutters, eyes vacuous and expressions strangely immobile. They were swarthy and skinny, looking like resentful children, their features set in permanent scowls as they rapped orders at one another in their unfamiliar language. Kaiku watched them with a fascination, mesmerised by their ugliness, until with a start she noticed that several of them were looking back at her. The shock of being discovered made her heart leap in fright.

  ‘Tsata . . .’ she murmured.

  ‘I know,’ he said quietly. ‘They have sharp eyes.’

  They kept very still. Now the first ones who had spotted them were returning to their work, and others were noticing them. Their presence did not seem to excite any kind of alarm. After a time, they were entirely ignored. Kaiku breathed again. She had half-expected that reaction from her experiences with them when she had penetrated the Weavers’ monastery on Fo, but her relief was still profound.

  ‘They do not seem concerned,’ Tsata observed, wary of a trick.

  Kaiku swallowed against a dry throat. ‘Then that is our good fortune,’ she said. ‘The Weavers have never had much need for guards. Their barriers have kept everything and everyone out for hundreds of years. They have not needed to fear for so long, they have forgotten how to.’

  She stood up, and walked out of hiding. The golneri paid her no attention. Slowly, Tsata joined her, and they crossed the underground kitchen together, expecting at any moment for a clamour to be raised. But the golneri’s indifference was total.