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

by Chris Wooding

  Further down the line, several dozen creatures had managed to overwhelm some of the men and escape into the streets of the Fold before more swords arrived to seal the gap, and other breaches were happening more and more frequently. The Aberrant army seemed to have no interest in fighting the men and women on the wall: they only wanted to get into the heart of the town.

  The line would not hold for long. Nomoru sensed that with a chilling certainty.

  She knew what the key to this was. The Nexuses. She remembered how the beasts had stampeded back in the canyons when she had shot several of their handlers. But the Nexuses had learned their lesson from that, and they stayed out of sight now, co-ordinating the battle from afar. Shooting these foot-soldiers was a waste of her ammunition. She had to get to the generals.

  An Aberrant man with a bulbous forehead and nictitating membranes across his eyes rushed past her, paused, and turned back. She gave him a rudely expectant look.

  ‘Why aren’t you fighting? Out of ammunition? Here, take some.’ He handed her a pouch of rifle balls, then ran on without waiting for the thanks she was not going to give anyway.

  Nomoru followed him with her eyes, ignoring the constant din of gunshot and screams and the crackle of flames. Aberrants fighting against Aberrants. If only the people in the cities and the towns might see this, then they might think twice about the deep and ingrained prejudices they bore for the victims of the Weaver’s blight. The Weavers, the very ones who had instilled that hatred in the first place, were now using the fruits of their creation to kill other Aberrants. The defining line was not between human and Aberrant, it was between human and animal. The only ones that did not qualify as either were the Weavers. They might have been human once, but they had sloughed off their humanity when they put on their Masks.

  Nomoru had no special love for Aberrants, but nor did she hate them. She hated the Weavers. And through that hatred, she rejected all of their teachings, and that made the Aberrants and the Libera Dramach her natural allies. Had she only known it, she had a lot in common with Kaiku, and many other men and women throughout the Fold. She fought for revenge.

  Her body was inked with many tattoos, marking moments of a childhood that was as dirty and ragged as she herself was. A baby born to a gang in the Poor Quarter of Axekami, her mother an amaxa root addict, her father uncertain. She was brought up by whoever was around, part of a community of violence in which members came and went, where people were recruited or killed daily. Stability was not a part of her life, and she learned to lean on no one. Everyone she had let herself care about died. Her first love, her friends, even her mother to whom she had some illogical loyalty. It was a vicious, insular world, and only her talents for travelling unobserved and exceptional sharpshooting kept her from becoming another victim of the narcotics, the inter-gang wars, the illness and starvation that led people to thievery and the donjons.

  The tattoos marked deals she had made, debts she was owed and had collected, and denoted solidarity with the members of her gang. They sprawled in complex profusion all up her arms, across her shoulders, down her calves and shins. But there was one more prominent than all in the centre of her back, more important to her than anything before or since. That one represented a loathing so pure it burned her every day, a promise of vengeance more powerful and binding than the most sacred lover’s oath.

  A True Mask, half-completed, with one side inked only as an outline to be filled in when she had completed her vendetta against the Weavers. The bronze visage of a demented and ancient god. The Mask of the Weave-lord Vyrrch.

  And had she but known it, the face of Aricarat, the long-forgotten sibling of the moon sisters.

  She had been only a little older than Lucia was now when she had been abducted. Those kind of disappearances happened all the time in the Poor Quarter. They were a part of life, and usually went unnoticed except by those close to the one who was taken. The nobles had to feed the monsters that lived in their houses, to keep them appeased, and so they chose the destitute, the poor, the people they saw as worthless. She had believed she was clever enough to stay ahead of them, but that night she had overindulged in amaxa root – little caring that she was going the way of her mother – and she had been shopped to the Weavers’ agents by a man she thought she could trust. She had awoken bound up in the chambers of the Weave-lord Vyrrch, deep in the Imperial Keep.

  She had no idea what kind of fate had been planned for her. But the knots had been badly tied, and she had slipped free and spent day after terrifying day evading the Weave-lord, searching for a way out of his chambers. Competing for discarded food with the hungry jackal that prowled the rooms, scrabbling a feral existence to prevent herself starving to death or dying of thirst in the swelter. And all the time listening for the key in the door, the only door, knowing that if the Weave-lord caught her she would be subjected to unimaginable tortures. She had never known such constant and unrelenting fear.

  It had only ended when the Weave-lord dropped dead in amidst the explosions that rocked the Imperial Keep. She later discovered that his death had been the work of Cailin tu Moritat, but that had not concerned her then. She had taken the key from his corpse and escaped the Keep in the confusion of the coup, while Lucia was being rescued by Kaiku and her companions.

  Nomoru had gone back to the Poor Quarter only once after that, but she was unable to locate the man who betrayed her. Instead she went to see the Inker, who had put the Mask on her back, and a smaller symbol on her upper arm for the man that had sold her to them.

  She left Axekami, shunning the people she had once known. Being delivered to the Weavers had been the last straw. She would not trust anyone again. And so she had wandered, and heard rumours, and eventually followed them to the Libera Dramach and the Fold, where people lived who wished harm to the Weavers. That, at least, was a common cause.

  She blinked rapidly as a choking cloud of smoke wafted across her face, her quick mind flitting over options and discarding them. She’d be gods-dammed if she was going to die here in the Fold with so much left undone. There had to be an answer, some way to get to the Nexuses and disrupt their hold over their army. But they were simply too far away, and too well hidden.

  A gust of heated air blew aside the smoke and let the sun shine through. She shaded her eyes and looked up. In the sky above the Fold, wheeling and turning, the gristle-crows cawed. She stared at them for a long moment.

  The gristle-crows. They were the key.

  Slinging her rifle over her shoulder, she ran along the walkway and began to clamber down the ladders towards the ground. The western wall could not stand for much longer. She only hoped it might stand for long enough.

  Yugi hurried through the Fold, his rifle at the ready. Every crooked alleyway, every curve in the packed-dirt lanes was a threat to them now. Behind him went Lucia, Flen and Irilia, one of the Sisters of the Red Order, a narrow-faced, blonde-haired woman left by Cailin as an escort. Bringing up the rear was Zaelis, limping awkwardly on his bad leg, a rifle of his own in his hand.

  Predators ran loose in the streets. They had met and killed one already, and passed several maimed and wounded men and women who bore further testimony to the news. Though the defences had not fallen, the creatures had leaked in over the western wall, and that meant there was no sanctuary any more among the plateaux and ledges of the town.

  Contingency plans had been laid, but they were being put into effect far too late. The children were being herded into the caves at the top of the Fold, where a network of tunnels housed stockpiles of ammunition and supplies. Yugi had argued that they should have done this before the attack even began, but Zaelis would not hear of it. There were too many entrances and those too large; it was impossible to defend, and once inside the children would be trapped. He had wanted to keep the option open to flee along the valley to the east and scatter into the Xarana Fault, hoping that the army would be content with taking the town and would not disperse to hunt individuals. That in itself was dange
rous enough, for the Fault was not a place for children to wander alone; but it was better than the certainty of being massacred. It was a measure of their desperation that they were considering last resorts like these.

  The breaching of the barricades to the north and south had made that plan impossible now, for the Fold was surrounded. Sending the children to the caves was only delaying the inevitable, but they had to do something to protect their young.

  Yugi led them across a wooden bridge that arched over the rooftops of a cramped huddle of Newlands-style buildings, passing a family of Aberrant townsfolk who were inexplicably going the other way. The otherwise clear sky was almost totally hidden by roiling clouds of dark smoke. Lucia coughed constantly, hiding her mouth with her hand, while Flen hung close to her and gave her worried glances. The Sister followed with half her attention elsewhere: the air around her was crawling with the resonance of the battle being fought by her companions, and she was both afraid and yet longing to join them. Cailin would have guarded Lucia herself, but she was needed to lead the fight against the Weavers, so she had left one of her less experienced brethren to look after the disenfranchised Heir-Empress. Irilia was fresh from her apprenticeship, but she had talent, and it would be easily enough to deal with any Aberrant creatures that came their way.

  They hurried up a wide stone stairway to a higher tier, turning into a thin and winding street where the haphazard clutter of dwellings leaned in close. Shrines smoked gently with incense and were piled with offerings. Most of them had a small cluster of people praying around them, looking to divine deliverance as the only way to avert the inevitable.

  As they headed down the street, a long-limbed, six-legged thing sprang from an alleyway before them, a spidery, emaciated horror with a face that was at once simian and disturbingly human. Yugi had levelled and fired in an instant, but his shot went wide, and the Aberrant disappeared into another alley as quickly as it had come. The people at the shrines scattered, running for what shelter they could find.

  Zaelis looked about in dismay, a great weight settling on his heart. For the first time, he was faced with the utter ruin of all he had worked for. All these years spent gathering people, organising and uniting them; all the years those people themselves had spent, building these houses, living their lives. Aberrant folk worked side-by-side with those who were predisposed to hate them, yet the differences had been overcome, prejudices had been torn down, and the Fold had thrived. The people here were fiercely proud of what they had done, the community they had constructed, and Zaelis was too. This place was a monument to the fact that there was another way outside of the Weavers and outside of the empire.

  But it was all coming down around him. Even if they survived this day, the Fold was over. Now that the Weavers knew where it was, they would be back again and again until it was destroyed. The thought brought a lump to his throat that was painful to swallow.

  And then there was Lucia. He felt her actions as a betrayal. How could she have conspired with Cailin to lay a trap like that for the Weavers, to use herself as bait? She would listen to the Red Order, but she would not listen to the man who had brought her up these past years. She could very well die here, all because she had refused to be taken to safety. Was she doing it only to torment him? Was this merely the rebellion of an adolescent girl? Who could tell with Lucia? But he knew this much: she was punishing him for sending her into Alskain Mar, punishing him because she believed he valued the Libera Dramach above her, that he saw her as a means to an end rather than as a daughter.

  Did he deserve that? Maybe. But by the spirits, he had not imagined it would hurt so much.

  They made their way up to another tier, nearing the top where the caves were. Women were hurrying their children along frantically, on the edge of panic. As if the caves would provide succour when the walls fell . . .

  The Sister came to a sudden halt in the middle of the street, and Zaelis almost went into the back of her. Yugi stopped as well, holding out a hand to indicate that the younger ones should do the same. They were smoke-grimed and sweaty, and all but Yugi were panting with exertion.

  ‘What is it?’ Yugi asked, sensing something in the Sister’s manner that made him uneasy.

  She was scanning the balconies of the houses on either side, their dirtied pennants flapping. The very air seemed to have stilled and quieted, the din around them fading to a distant buzz.

  ‘What is it?’ Yugi hissed again. A dreadful foreboding was building within him.

  The Sister’s eyes fell upon a ragged woman and a child walking slowly towards them, and her irises darkened to red.

  Zaelis never even saw the furies. They cannoned out of an open doorway and charged right through him, butting him aside and knocking him off his feet to crash in a heap on the ground. Yugi whirled on them with a cry, his rifle already levelled. The massive, boar-like monstrosities were bearing down on him; he squeezed the trigger and took one of them directly between the eyes. Its charge turned into a roll as its legs went limp, but its momentum was too great to check and it barrelled into Yugi. He tried to jump it, but he was not fast enough; it clipped his boots and he somersaulted, landing on his back with a force that winded him.

  The second furie was not going for Yugi. It went for Flen instead. The boy was paralysed, too late to run, too weak to fight. The creature was many times his weight and almost as tall as him at the shoulder. It thundered into him, a compact mass of brutality fronted by a tangle of long, hooked tusks, and smashed him down. He went skidding across the dusty street in a chaos of loose limbs, rolling over and over and coming to rest with his unkempt brown hair covering his face.

  The furie turned its small, black eyes to Lucia. Lucia looked back at it calmly.

  The air erupted in a screaming, shrieking mass of movement, feather and beak and claw. The ravens tore into the Aberrant beast, diving out of the smoky sky and bombarding it, latching on with their talons and stabbing with their beaks. The creature had a thick hide, but its eyes were ripped out in moments and its snout plucked to bloody ribbons. It thrashed and squealed as it was buried beneath a mass of beating wings, finally slumping to the earth where it lay wheezing.

  And then, as one, the ravens dropped dead.

  Yugi was stunned. He could not credit what his eyes had seen, even as the last few birds hit the ground. They had all died instantaneously, simply falling out of the air. As the breath returned to his lungs and he got up, he took in the scene: Zaelis, struggling to his feet; Flen, lying motionless on the ground; two furies, one dead and one flayed to point of death; Lucia, standing there with a calmness on her face that was somehow worse than the horror she should have been showing; and scattered around, dozens of raven corpses.

  Then he looked for Irilia, and he realised that it was not over yet.

  She was sprawled a short distance away, her head twisted backwards on her neck. Next to her lay a filthy-looking child, blood streaming from its eyes and nose. And coming towards Yugi now was the woman that he had seen moments ago, a shuffling, hobbling beggar.

  As he watched, something happened to his vision, a sudden and violent shift of perspective; and he saw in the woman’s place a Weaver, his Mask a shimmering mass of lizard scales that sheened like a rainbow. The dead child had become a Weaver too. Irilia had been overmatched by the two of them, but she managed to take one of them with her. One, however, was not enough, and not even Lucia’s ravens could save them now. The people in the street – who had not reacted fast enough to intervene when the furies attacked – ran at the sight of the figure in their midst.

  Yugi’s blood turned to ice. The Red Order were not infallible, it seemed, and the Weavers were cleverer than they imagined. Somehow these two had slipped past the Sisters.

  He heard Zaelis’s indrawn breath. Lucia, standing amid all that death, was watching the Weaver.

  The Weaver looked back at her, a hidden gaze beneath his patchwork cowl.

  Yugi saw Zaelis move on the periphery of his vision. The
older man’s rifle swung up.

  ‘Zaelis, no!’ he cried, but it was much too late. The Weaver’s Mask turned to the leader of the Libera Dramach, and one hand thrust out, white fingers curled into a claw. Zaelis’s attempt to aim was arrested as suddenly as if someone had grabbed the end of the barrel. Yugi felt his muscles lock rigid at the same time. Every part of him cramped agonisingly, rooting him to the spot. His eyes were wide and staring, but his body would not respond, not even to scream.

  Zaelis was turning the rifle towards himself. It was clear by the expression of utter and awful horror on his face that the movement was not of his volition, but the muzzle of the weapon was slowly and steadily turning towards him anyway. Yugi, frozen, could do nothing but watch. Lucia stood there, her gaze faraway, and did not move.

  The pulse at Zaelis’s throat was jumping with the effort of resisting, but it was no good. He had angled the rifle so that the muzzle was pressed into his bearded throat, beneath his chin.

  He can’t reach the trigger, Yugi thought, with a flicker of futile hope. The rifle’s too long.

  The trigger began to move slowly of its own accord. The Weaver’s fingers curled into a fist.

  ‘Gods curse you, you inhuman bastards,’ Zaelis croaked, and then the rifle fired and blew his brains out.