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

by Chris Wooding

  ‘Down there,’ he said, pointing. There was a gash in the rock at ground level, through which something was moving, throwing back his torchlight in rapid firefly glimmers. It took Kaiku a moment to realise that it was water.

  The tightness of the cleft made her hesitate, a moment of claustrophobia assailing her; but then the trilling of their pursuers sounded again, closer than ever, and her mind was made up. Leaving the sack of explosives, she slid feet-first into the gap. It was too dark to see what was below, but the water hinted at where the ground would be. She slipped as far into the cleft as she could, until her legs were dangling through, and then dropped.

  There was a blaze of pain as something ripped up her lower back, and then a moment of falling. She hit the ground with a jarring impact that buckled her knees. The water was only an inch deep.

  ‘Kaiku?’ Tsata’s voice came through from above.

  She put her hand to her back, and it came away wet.

  ‘It is safe,’ she said. ‘Put out the torch. And watch the rocks; they are sharp.’

  Tsata carefully handed the sack of explosives to her and then slipped through. Once there, he doused the torch in the water, plunging them into darkness. The sound of the shrillings and hurrying feet seemed suddenly louder.

  ‘Can you see?’ Tsata whispered.

  ‘No,’ Kaiku said, wondering if her eyes would adjust as they had last time. ‘Lead me.’

  She felt his hand in hers, the clasp wet and warm. Blood trickled over his wrist and into their grip, across the gullies of her palm, welling between her slender fingers. He was using his good arm to carry the explosives; this was his wounded one. The sensation did not repulse her. Instead it seemed a strange intimacy, cementing their link with his life fluids. She felt an entirely inappropriate rush of pleasure at the sensation.

  Then they were moving. He led her into the blackness, splashing softly as he went. The air was cold and dank down here, the breath of the deep earth, and it took Kaiku a moment to realise that there was a breeze, and that Tsata was heading into it. She was surprised to find that her lack of vision did not perturb her. She was not alone here, and she trusted Tsata absolutely. Once, she would not have even entertained the idea of putting her faith in this man, this foreigner with his foreign ideas, who had once used her as bait for a murderous hunter without a second thought. She wondered if he would do the same thing now. Would the closeness that had grown between them make him loth to risk her life so casually again? She could not say. But she understood his ways better now, his subordination of the individual to the greater good, and she knew that as things stood he would never abandon her down here, would give his own life for hers if it was better for the both of them. There was something touching in the raw simplicity of that.

  She began to make out the edges of the tunnel, and the rippling of the water that ran past their feet. At first it was so gradual that she could not tell whether her mind was tricking her, but then it became too pronounced to discount. The world took shape steadily in a flat monochrome, until she could see as well as if Aurus were in the sky above them.

  After a time, when the sounds of pursuit had faded behind them and it seemed as if they were all alone in the mine again, Tsata drew to a halt at a spot where the tunnel wall pulled away from the stream and the floor rose above the level of the water. Kaiku could feel the Weaver still searching for them, but his probing was far away.

  ‘There is a dry section here,’ he said.

  ‘I can see it,’ Kaiku replied.

  Tsata looked back at her, then for an instant glanced at their linked hands. Kaiku belatedly realised that for some while he had been leading her when she had been perfectly capable of leading herself. She had simply not wanted to surrender that reassuring touch.

  ‘I need to treat this wound,’ he said. ‘It is not closing.’

  The next few minutes, more than any other, taught Kaiku how different the stock of their two continents were, how the Okhamban environment had bred tough and resilient folk while in Saramyr luxury had made the nobles soft. She watched him perform surgery on himself in the darkness, biting her lip as he used the tip of his gutting-hook to scrape out a shard of claw that had broken in the wound, cringing as he used a thin needle of smooth wood and some kind of fibrous thread to stitch the edges together. He refused her help – though she had made the offer with no idea how she could help – and efficiently sewed himself up, with no indication of the pain beyond an occasional hiss of breath across his teeth.

  When he was done, he took a tiny jar of paste from a pouch at his waist and applied it to the still-bleeding slash. His body tensed violently, making Kaiku jump. His features screwed up in an expression of intense pain; the veins of his arm and throat stood out starkly against his skin. A faint wisp of evil-smelling smoke was rising from the wound.

  Kaiku was suddenly reminded of Asara’s words, coming from the lips of Saran Ycthys Marul: in Okhamba there is very little medicine that is gentle. The paste seemed to be literally scorching the wound shut.

  She watched helplessly, listening to Tsata gasp at the shocking agony of the healing process, but finally his breathing steadied. He washed off the paste with water from the stream. His wound no longer bled, instead there was an ugly, puckered scar.

  Kaiku was about to offer some words of comfort when they heard the warbling cry of a shrilling echo down the tunnel. The Nexuses had not given up the pursuit. They had found their quarry again.

  Kaiku hauled Tsata to his feet, hefted the sack of explosives, and they ran once more.

  The tunnel curved downward, and the water gathered pace on its descent, making the floor slippery. The noise of the shrillings had multiplied now. Evidently they had followed Tsata’s trail of blood to the gash where she and the Tkiurathi had slipped through, and surmised where the intruders were. Suddenly, the Weaver’s attention roved over them again, like a cruel and terrible glare; she was almost caught unawares, and she concealed them only just in time. It was because she was so intent on keeping them hidden that she barely noticed the new light at the end of the tunnel, and it was only when the Weaver’s mind was elsewhere that she came back to herself and realised that Tsata was slowing.

  The tunnel ended in a grille, bronzed with rust, an impassable line of thick square columns through which the water sluiced away to the cavern beyond. A foul, uneasy glow bled through from the other side, bathing them in strange light. They could hear the clanking of the Weavers’ contraptions. On either side of the tunnel there were several vertical cracks and openings, all of them barred and dark.

  Tsata had stopped, casting a look back up the tunnel, where the clamour of the chase continued to grow. Kaiku ran past him to the grille. She knew that appalling, unnatural illumination. It was branded on her memory, a nightmare that refused to fade.

  She looked through the grille, and there was the witchstone.

  They had been brought at last to the bottom of the shaft, the hub of the network of subterranean corridors which the Weavers had taken for their own. The tunnel mouth opened high in the shaft wall, over a massive underground lake, its surface still and black. Two narrow waterfalls plunged from above, throwing up low clouds of mist that hazed the scene. Bare, rocky islands hunched sullenly there, and tapering skewers of limestone thrust upward towards the dizzying heights, where distant fires burned at the tips of the metal gas-torches.

  The noise of the machinery was all about, and everywhere was movement. Huge cogs, half-submerged, drove scoops which rotated steadily, drawing the water from the lake to dump it in catch-tanks somewhere above. Pipes were set vertically in the shaft walls, rising from beneath the surface to disappear into boxy buildings of black iron which steamed and roared, blazing an infernal red from slats in their sides. From there, further pipes went upward, into the darkness. Sluice-gates had been built into the sides of the shaft. Small huts sat on the flatter islands. Everywhere there were walkways of metal, a precarious three-dimensional web that connected the islands and
the machines, and the golneri scuttled around between them on incomprehensible errands.

  In the centre, on an island of rock all its own, the witchstone lay. It was vaguely spherical, perhaps twenty feet in diameter, heavily scarred with deep pits and pocks and lined with thousands of tiny gullies. But like the one she had seen before, this one appeared to have sprouted in a way that no rock could have done. Dozens of thin, crooked arcs of stone reached from its side into the water, or drove like roots into the surrounding earth; they branched out towards the distant walls of the shaft, questing, or formed bridges to the nearby islands. It looked grotesquely like a rearing spider, and its luminescence made Kaiku queasy and cast disturbing shadows onto the walls.

  She understood now. The great scoops descending and ascending, the pipes that evacuated into the river, the machinery and the furnaces and the horrible, oily smoke. Nomoru had unwittingly struck on the answer long ago, but it was only now that Kaiku looked upon the lake that she realised it.

  How do you dig a mine on a flood plain? It would flood.

  This mine was not about mining, it was about water. The Zan was constantly leaking into the shaft through the thin wall that separated it from the river; when it flooded, the leakage was even worse. This whole place had probably been underwater for thousands of years, ever since it was formed. These machines were a massive drainage system, a way to move the water up the shaft and back out into the river so the Weavers could get to the witchstone that had been down here all this time. It was a constant battle to pump the river out of the shaft faster than it could leak through or flood over, to keep the witchstone above water where they could feed it blood sacrifices. Those furnaces and clanking contraptions had to be what gave power to the process, through some evil art that Kaiku did not understand.

  Gods, the sheer scale of their determination staggered her.

  ‘Kaiku . . .’ Tsata murmured.

  She looked back at him, and followed his gaze.

  In the side-tunnels, behind the bars, figures were moving. Distant howls and moans had begun, and strange cackling and gurgling noises. From the direction in which they had come, the shrillings were calling louder than ever, nearly upon them now. And at their backs was the grille.

  ‘Kaiku,’ he said softly. ‘We are trapped.’

  THIRTY-FOUR

  The defenders were losing the battle for the Fold.

  Though the western end still barely held out, the fortifications on the northern side of the valley had been overwhelmed. What little chance they had of keeping back the Aberrant army was lost when the Weavers appeared on the battlefield. They spread their insidious fingers of influence among the men and women of the Fault, twisting their perceptions so that they saw enemies wherever they looked. The defenders began to fight among themselves. Brothers slew one another; members of different clans and factions fractured and became embroiled in bloody internecine squabbles. Some fled in fear, thinking that the Aberrants had already breached the fortifications. It was not long before their mistaken assumption became fact.

  With the defenders in disarray, the nimble skrendel swarmed over the stockade wall and began to kill and maim with their long, strangling fingers and vicious teeth. Somewhere in amid the chaos, a few of them found their way to the small northern gate, where most of the guards already lay dead. With their nimble digits they filched the keys from a corpse and opened the gate. The ghauregs were first through, roaring mountains of muscle, and they tore the remaining defenders limb from limb in a frenzy of bloodlust terrifying to behold.

  The Aberrants flooded down into the valley, and the Fold’s real artillery opened up.

  The advantage of having the town of the Fold built on a narrow slope of steps and plateaux was that it was highly defensible on three sides out of four. The landscape funnelled the invaders to the valley floor, which lay east of the buildings, and an enemy attacking from that direction was at a disadvantage, for they were fully exposed to the Fold’s entire battery of weapons.

  The slaughter was breathtaking.

  Several dozen fire-cannons released a fusillade into the horde as they pooled at the bottom of the valley, igniting the flammable oil that had been spread there. A section of the valley floor erupted in an inferno, turning everything within it into a flaming torch. The air resounded with a cacophony of animal screams. The charge became a blazing wreck of bodies squirming and thrashing as flesh cooked and blood bubbled. Twenty ballistae fired, flinging loose packets of explosives that came apart in mid-flight and fell randomly on to the horde, geysering broken corpses in all directions.

  The Aberrants came up against the eastern edge of the town, where the rise of the bottommost steps formed a natural and impenetrable wall, cut through only by gated stairways. The lifts that were used for transporting things too large for the narrow stairs were raised up and out of the predators’ reach. Two hundred riflemen and women were arrayed along the lip of the massive semicircular steps, and they cut the Aberrant predators down like wheat. The Aberrants threw themselves at the wall, at the gates, but the wall was too high, and the gates were so solid that they would not give under any amount of weight. A black pall of smoke churned into the sky, rising out of the valley, as the fire-cannons and ballistae smashed burning holes in the ranks of the Aberrants. Gristle-crows circled and swooped overhead, cawing raucously. At some point, the defences on the southern edge of the Fold collapsed too, and even more Aberrant creatures swarmed in to be massacred.

  But the Fold was surrounded now, and still they kept coming.

  The Weavers, from their vantage points, extended their influence once again. They did not care about the losses they were suffering. The creatures were expendable, and they were confident that any barrier could be overcome from within by turning the minds of the defenders as they had earlier.

  But their confidence was misplaced. This time they were met by the Sisters of the Red Order.

  The first contact was nothing short of an ambush. The Weavers were brazen, accustomed to a lifetime of moving unopposed through the Weave. In fact, were it not for the strange and distant leviathans that glided on the edge of consciousness, always out of reach, then they might have believed that the glittering realm was their domain alone. But they were arrogant. Their control of the Weave was clumsy and brutal in comparison to the Sisters, wrenching nature to their will through their Masks, leaving torn and snapped threads in their wake. In contrast, the women were like silk.

  Cailin and her Sisters had spiralled along the Weavers’ encroaching threads, tracing them to their source, and were unravelling the stitchwork of defences before the Weavers even knew what was happening. They frantically withdrew, marshalling their powers to repel this new enemy, but the Sisters had struck in force and were at them like piranhas, nibbling from every direction at once, feinting and tugging, unravelling a knot here, picking loose a thread there, seeking a way through into the Weavers’ core where they could begin to do real, physical damage. Cailin darted and jabbed, dancing from fibre to fibre and leaving phantom echoes of her presence to confuse and delay the enemy. She cut threads, excised knots, opened pathways for her brethren to exploit.

  The Weavers desperately repaired the rents that the Sisters opened, batting them away, but it was hopeless. The Sisters worked as if they were one: an effortless communication existed between them that allowed them to co-ordinate themselves perfectly. They were aware of each and every ally in the battle, where they were and what they were doing. Several of them would mount attacks on unassailable positions so that others could quietly work at boring through less protected spots while the Weavers were distracted. Others harried the enemy by confusing them with ephemeral vibrations while their brethren knotted nets to catch the Weavers out.

  Cailin evaded the grasping tendrils of the Weavers’ counterattacks with disdainful ease, slipping away from them like an eel. She struck at them fearlessly: she had killed one of their number before, and these were no comparison to him. Yet she spared a concern for h
er Sisters, whose experience was less than hers. She would defend them from the Weavers’ attacks, spinning barriers of confusion or clots of entanglement to slow them if the enemy assault should chance to come too near.

  The collapse, when it came, was total. Cailin had been carefully weakening sections of the Weave, so carefully that the enemy was not even aware of her, and at her command the Sisters hit those sections all at once. The Weave gave way before them, opening gaping maws in the Weavers’ defences. The Sisters swarmed through the Weavers’ sundered barricades, sewing into the fabric of their bodies, ripping apart the bonds that held them together. The Weavers shrieked as they burst into flame, a half-dozen new pyres lighting simultaneously across the battlefield to join the blaze that was consuming sections of the valley floor.

  But the Sisters’ advantage of surprise had been used up now. At least two of the dead Weavers had had the foresight to send calls of distress across the Weave, flinging threads that were too scattered to intercept. A silent plea for help to their brothers who fought elsewhere in the Fold, and a warning.

  The swell of outrage was almost palpable, a fury among the remaining Weavers that there should exist anything to challenge their authority in the Weave. Fury, and fear. For they remembered the final cry of the Weave-lord Vyrrch before he died, five years ago and more:

  Beware! Beware! For women play the Weave!

  Threads snaked out across the invisible realm, seeking, seeking. And while men and women and Aberrants both human and animal fought and struggled and died all along the valley, battle was joined in a place beyond their senses. The Red Order had revealed itself at last.

  On the western side of the Fold, the stockade wall groaned under the weight of the corpses piled against it.

  It was hard to breathe for the stench of burnt and burning meat. Nomoru’s eyes teared as she aimed her rifle; she blinked several times and finally gave up. The air was a fog of black smoke and flakes of carbonised skin. The Aberrants’ attempts to create ramps of their own dead had been stalled for a time when the folk of the Fold had begun pouring oil over them and setting them alight, but the pause had not lasted for long. The creatures resumed their climbing, squealing and howling as they were immolated. Some of the corpse-heaps were high enough for the invaders to get over the wall now; they burst through in flames and fell off the walkway to smoulder on the ground below, or came flailing onto the swords of the Libera Dramach. But their sheer relentlessness was keeping the defenders occupied, and the oil was not getting to the fires where it was needed. Blazes were already dying, and some Aberrants were beginning to surmount the wall without setting themselves alight in the process.