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

by Chris Wooding

  The shot rang across the streets and was lost in the distant sounds of battle. The cry of grief that sounded in Yugi’s mind was trapped in his throat. Lucia was still and silent. Flecks of her adopted father’s blood had ribboned her face. She was trembling, her eyes welling, her mouth open a little.

  Zaelis fell to his knees, and then pitched sideways to the ground. A tear broke from Lucia’s lashes and raced down her grimy cheek.

  The Weaver ignored Yugi, turning his scaled face back to the girl now.

  ‘Tears, Lucia?’ he croaked. ‘No good. No good at all.’

  Yugi made a strangled noise: Not her! Take me! But no amount of will could undo the Weaver’s power. He wanted to shriek at his own helplessness, but he was not even permitted to do that.

  The Weaver took a step towards her; and his Mask shattered.

  The report of a rifle reached them an instant later. The Weaver stood blankly for a few seconds, thin blood welling through the cracked fractions of his face, and then he tipped backward and collapsed in a heap.

  Yugi’s muscles unknotted themselves at once, sending him gasping to his knees. A gust of wind blew a thick cloud of smoke over him, turning the street to a fuggy pall, and he coughed ralingly; but the sheer relief from the pain of the Weaver’s grip brought tears to his eyes that were nothing to do with the polluted air. He sobbed once, the shock and terror and grief of the last few moments swamping him; then he swallowed, hitched a shuddering breath, and wiped his eyes with the edge of the rag around his forehead.

  Lucia.

  The wind changed then. The smoke blew up and away as if sucked back skyward, and there was Nomoru, slowing to a halt from a run as she neared Lucia, her ornate rifle cradled in one arm. She surveyed the scene dispassionately and raked a hand through her messy hair.

  Yugi went slowly over to them, his body and mind numb and aching. He met Nomoru’s gaze as he came.

  ‘Followed the ravens,’ she said.

  He stared at her, unable to find words; then he crouched down in front of Lucia, put his hands on her shoulders. She was shaking like a leaf, looking past him, tears running down her face.

  ‘Is that Zaelis?’ Nomoru said.

  Yugi flinched at her insensitivity. ‘The boy. See if he’s alright.’

  Nomoru did as she was asked. Other people were coming down the street now, running to help, gasping at the sight of the dead Weavers, far too late to do anything. Where were they when we needed them? Yugi thought bitterly.

  ‘Lucia?’ he prompted. She did not look at him, nor did she appear to have heard. ‘Lucia?’ he said again.

  Then Nomoru was back. He looked up at her: she shook her head. Flen was gone.

  Yugi bit his lip; the grief was almost too much to keep inside. He got up and turned away, fearful of losing control in front of Lucia. He was no stranger to murder; there were many things in his past he would rather forget. But gods, all this killing . . .

  He heard Nomoru behind him.

  ‘Lucia? Lucia, can you hear me? Are there more birds? Are there more ravens?’

  He was about to whirl and shout at her to leave the poor child alone, she’d suffered enough; but then he heard a small voice in reply.

  ‘There are more.’

  Yugi turned back, saw the scout standing there awkwardly, and the slender, beautiful girl looking up at her with a depth of sorrow written on her features that made him want to cry.

  ‘We need them.’

  ‘Nomoru . . .’ Yugi began, but she held up a hand and he subsided.

  Lucia pushed gently but forcefully past Nomoru. She walked over to where Zaelis lay and looked down on him. Then she stepped over the corpses of birds to where Flen’s broken body was, now turned face-up and staring sightlessly into the afterlife. For a long time, her eyes roamed him, as if expecting him at any moment to get up again, to breathe, to laugh.

  She looked over her shoulder, her tear-streaked face unnaturally calm, as if a glaze had been painted over her expression.

  ‘The ravens are yours,’ she said, and her voice was chill as a knife. ‘What would you have me do?’

  THIRTY-FIVE

  ((Let us out))

  Kaiku looked automatically towards the source of the sound, before realising that there had been no sound. The voice was coming from inside her head, a form of Weave-communication alike to the sort that the Red Order practised, but much cruder.

  Tsata stanced ready to receive the approaching shrillings, which were coming down the tunnel, their warbling preceding them. He could see only a dark, stony maw: his night vision had been destroyed by the putrescent light of the witchstone that glowed through the grille at their backs.

  ‘Kaiku, if you have any ideas, now is the time,’ he said with a hint of black humour.

  ((let us out))

  The voice was an insistent whisper, hoarse and cracked. It was coming from the creatures that moved behind the bars in the side-tunnels. They stayed just on the edge of the light, allowing hints of their form but no more. The hints were disturbing enough. There was no regular form to them: their shapes were asymmetrical, twisted, some with many limbs and some with tentacles or claws, some with spines or vestigial fins. Most of them had appendages she could not even recognise.

  I know them, she thought to herself. I have seen them before.

  In the Weavers’ monastery, deep in the Lakmar Mountains, she had come across creatures similar to this, and similarly imprisoned. They had tried to attack her, thinking she was a Weaver, for she had been disguised as one. Much speculation had been made in the Fold as to what these things were, but theories were all anyone could come up with.

  She backed away instinctively from the creature that spoke to her. Her Weave-sense had allowed her to pinpoint the direction. It was coming closer.

  But in retreating from one side, she neared the other, and the tunnel was narrow here. Something cold and slimy wrapped around her hand in a tight grip.

  She shrieked and spun; the grip loosened, and a thin tendril retreated between the bars. Tsata turned at the sound, to see her staring at the place where it had disappeared. Something was moving closer to the bars now, some small, wrecked thing.

  The light fell across it, and Kaiku went pale.

  It was a monstrosity, a warped clutter of legs and arms attached around a central torso that was barely recognisable as such. Its yellowed skin was stretched across a hopelessly mangled skeleton, and it jerked and move spasmodically, its multiple limbs waving. There was a kind of neckless head somewhere in the middle of it, little more than a bulbous lump, upon which something like features sat.

  But the face it wore was Kaiku’s.

  The shock of it made her stagger. It was like looking in a distorted mirror, or a sculpture of herself that had been pulled out of shape and half-melted. Flesh drooped from the eye sockets, the mouth was tugged to one side as if by an invisible hook, her teeth in multiple rows . . . but it was still, unmistakably, an approximation of her.

  ((let us out)) the voice came again, insistent.

  ((What are you?)) she responded, disgust making her forget about the dangers of using her kana.

  The thing that had copied her face had retreated into the shadows now, and she turned back to the one who was somehow speaking to her. It had come up to the bars, a pathetically runty thing with a flaccid sail of spines and all of its limbs drastically different in size. Gummy odd-coloured eyes fixed her from within a lopsided face.

  ((What are you?)) she demanded again, needing to make some sense of this.

  ((Edgefathers)) it replied, and Kaiku was bombarded with images, sights and sensations that hit her all in a disorientating mass, flashing through her mind in an instant.

  Edgefathers. The ones who created the Masks for the Weavers to wear. She picked up confused recollections of forges and workshops, deep underground in the monasteries, built to the Weavers’ insane ideas of architecture; then, further back, a memory of a family – gods, this had once been a man, an artisan �
� and he was taken, the Weavers coming in the night like evil spirits, stealing him away from his tiny village in the mountains; now he was working, working, crafting the Masks alongside other men – never women – artists and woodworkers and metalsmiths, and always the dust, the dust, the witchstone dust which they put into their work to give it the power the Weavers wanted; and looking around him and seeing what the dust was doing to all those men, what it was doing to him, beginning as a scaly patch on the heel of his hand, and then some kind of growth on his back, and the changes, the terrible corruption that came from handling raw, untreated witchstone dust day after day; and when they had changed too much they were taken away and not killed – heart’s blood why weren’t they killed? – but imprisoned while they kept changing, even away from the dust; and sometimes like now their prisons overflowed and they were taken elsewhere to be imprisoned because too many together was dangerous, because some like this one could do things, strange things brought on by the relentless and unending mutation, and others like that one could steal parts from others and copy them and couldn’t help it and

  ((LET US OUT!!!))

  The mental force of the sending made Kaiku reel. Torment flooded her in an empathic wave.

  ‘Kaiku!’ Tsata said urgently. The shrillings were almost upon them.

  She made her decision. Her irises darkened to deep red with the full and unshielded release of her kana, her hair stirring around her face as if by some spectral wind. Power leaped eagerly from her, knitting through the golden threads of the air, sewing into the metal of the grille that separated them from the witchstone. With a wrench, two of the columns tore away and went spinning into the lake below, making a gap big enough for a person to pass through. The Edgefathers began to howl.

  ((NO! NO! LET US OUT!!!))

  ‘Tsata! This way!’

  The Tkiurathi had turned at the sound of the tearing metal; now, seeing an escape route, he ran to it, pausing for a moment in front of Kaiku. Their eyes met; his pale and green, hers a demonic Aberrant red. She shoved the sack of explosives into his arms.

  ‘You first,’ she said.

  He did not question. He simply jumped out into the air, trusting to luck that the water beneath would be deep enough to receive him.

  Kaiku heard the splash as he hit. The first of the shrillings raced around the corner of the tunnel, sprinting towards her with its catlike gait. Several more followed a moment later.

  She waved her hand, and the bars of the side-tunnels ripped off, clattering to the stone floor. The Edgefathers howled in exultation, pouring out of their prisons; but by that point, Kaiku had already jumped, and was falling towards the lake. The shrillings tore into the Edgefathers, who responded with a mob savagery and overwhelming numbers, careless of their own lives, a furious and insane mass. The rest of the shrillings and the Nexuses that arrived after them found themselves facing dozens of grotesqueries baying for blood.

  Their end was as unpleasant as the Edgefathers’ lives had been.

  The victors rampaged up the tunnel, spreading out into the caverns, sowing havoc where they went. They sought death and vengeance in equal measure, and left destruction in their wake.

  The temperature of the water drove the breath from Kaiku’s lungs. The cries of the Edgefathers became suddenly bassy and dim as she plummeted into the lake, and her ears were filled with the roar of bubbles; then, as her downward momentum dissipated, she kicked upward towards the foul luminescence of the witchstone. She broke the surface with a gasp, her hair plastered across one side of her face. The tumult seemed suddenly deafening again.

  Tsata was already swimming away from her, one arm clutched around the sack of explosives. She called his name, but he did not stop, and so she struck out after him. Behind her, the shrillings were wailing as they were torn apart by the things she had released. Some of the grotesqueries were spilling out from the sundered grille, falling gracelessly through the air into the lake where they swam or sank, depending on the severity of their mutation and the configuration of their bodies. Two of them had clambered out and were crawling up the sides of the shaft like spiders. Golneri were fleeing in all directions, terrified by the sight of the Edgefathers, their boots clattering on the walkways that crisscrossed overhead. What Nexuses and Aberrants there had been here at the bottom of the shaft had gone, following the alarms raised by the sighting of Tsata and Kaiku back in the worm-farm; nobody was here to protect the diminutive creatures, and they panicked. Pandemonium reigned.

  Kaiku was a better swimmer than Tsata was, and she caught him as he was clambering out onto a small, rocky hump from which a precarious bridge crossed the water to the central island, where the witchstone lay glowering. Huge scoops continued their procession into and out of the lake in the background, and massive pipes sucked water nearby. She grabbed his good arm as he made to run, and he turned back to her, his tattooed face grim in the eerie light.

  ‘We’ve got to—’ she began, but he shook his head. He knew what she would say: they had to hide, to get away from this place before the Weavers arrived, drawn by her kana. But there was no hiding for him.

  He clicked his tongue and pointed. Hobbling along a walkway high overhead, a cowled and Masked figure in ragged robes.

  ‘Hold him off,’ Tsata said, and then he sprinted across the bridge, towards the witchstone, carrying with him the sodden bag of explosives.

  Kaiku had no time to protest, not even time to consider whether the warped Edgefathers that splashed in the water were as much a threat to her and Tsata as they were to anyone else. The Weaver, seeing the Tkiurathi approaching the dreadful rock, sent out a mass of tendrils across the Weave to rip him apart. Kaiku reacted without thought, and her kana burst forth to intercept. Their consciousnesses collided, and all became golden.

  She was a spray of threads, crashing and entangling with the Weaver’s own, using the fractional advantage of surprise to penetrate as deep as she could before the Weaver twisted and closed up like a fist, burying them both in a ball of scurrying combat. Knots appeared before her as she sought to untangle herself and drive onward, insoluble junctions that she sometimes picked at, sometimes avoided. Her mind had split into a jumble of countless consciousnesses, an army of her thoughts each fighting a personal battle amid the churning tapestry of light. The Weaver’s fury swamped her, not as intense as the unfathomable malice of the ruku-shai but more personal: woman had invaded man’s realm, and her punishment would be extraordinary.

  And then suddenly, shockingly, her vision inverted and the diorama went dark. She was in a corridor: a long, shadow-laden corridor. Purple lightning threw bright and rapid illumination through the shutters, flashing strange patterns onto the wall. Moonstorm lightning, like there had been on the last day she ever saw this place. Vases of guya blossoms stood on tables, dipping and nodding in the stir of the breeze. It was raining, though she knew it not by the sound but by the warm moisture in the air. The silence ached in her ears; only the roar of blood could be heard in its stead.

  It was her father’s house in the Forest of Yuna. The house where her family had died, and where the demon shin-shin had stalked her. She had never quite shed the nightmares from which she would wake up sweating with a diminishing memory of corridors and unseen, stilt-legged things hiding behind doorways and around corners.

  But this was no dream; this was impossibly real.

  She looked down at herself, and she confirmed what she already knew: she was a child again, in a nightgown, alone in an empty house. And something was coming for her.

  She felt its black presence approaching, nearing her rapidly, a thing of rage and wrath. Something that would be on her in moments, a beast so enormous it would engulf her and swallow her whole.

  She was a child, and so she ran.

  But the night was like tar, thick and cloying, dragging her limbs down. She could not run without turning her back on the approaching monstrosity, but she could not outpace it. And yet she fled anyway, for the terror of that invisible
malice was beyond belief, making her want to beg and weep and plead for it to go away, yet suffocating her with the knowledge that nothing she could do would avert it.

  Her barefoot sprint was agonisingly slow. The guya blossoms turned their petal-hooded faces towards her, watching her pass with sinister interest. The end of the corridor seemed to be retreating one step away from her for every two she took. Behind her, the creature was coming closer and closer, thundering through the dream-maze of her house, and it seemed perpetually that it must take her at any moment, that it could not get any closer without reaching her, yet always the sensation of awful nearness grew, until tears streaked her face and she screamed without noise. And still she fled, and the corridor’s end neared with a patience intended to thwart her of her life.

  The Weaver! It is the Weaver!

  Her thoughts freed themselves from the child-form where they had become momentarily muddled. She reminded herself forcefully that she was in the Weave, that her body stood dripping wet on an island in an underground lake at the bottom of a great shaft in the earth. And yet where was the golden world she had known, the landscape that her kana navigated by? Where were the threads?

  It struck her then. The Weaver had changed the rules of play. Cailin had told her how the Weavers chose visualisations of the Weave, adapting it to some form that they could understand and deal with, because unlike the Sisters they could not handle the raw element without losing their minds to the dangerous, hypnotic bliss. Her opponent had jacketed her in a visualisation of her own nightmare, had picked up the leaking subconscious fears she was too inexperienced to curb and turned them to his advantage. She was trapped here, a weak and helpless child facing a monster of unimaginable potential.

  How could she fight him here? How could she beat a Weaver? It was suicide to face one of them! They were masters of this realm, whereas she had only a few rudimentary techniques and her instinct to guide her. How could she beat her enemy when it was he that was setting the game, he that made the rules?