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

by Chris Wooding

  Despair took her, despair at being a little girl lost in a nightmare, an adult trapped in a hopeless battle. The Weaver would catch her, and it would kill her or worse. And after that, it would kill Tsata.

  It was that thought and no other that braked her downward slide into submission.

  I cannot run. It is not only my life at stake here.

  The purity of that realisation strengthened her. It was no mere attempt at self-persuasion; it was a matter of what she utterly, unarguably had to do. Sometime over these last days she had stopped thinking of herself and Tsata as a team, as companions, even as friends; in fact, she was not sure that friendship was entirely accurate to describe the bonds that had grown between them, the strange and tentative understanding of each other, the unthinking trust necessary to survive the deadly Aberrant predators that they had hunted and been hunted by. Some subtle osmosis of words and actions had bled from him to her, and she had begun to think of them as a symbiote, a state of existence in which one could not do without the other – a single entity, fused of two independent beings. If she died here, he died. He had placed his life in her hands when he had charged her to hold off the Weaver while he tried to destroy the witchstone. Kaiku had no idea how much time had passed in Tsata’s world – she was too deeply immersed in this one – but every moment she could give him might make the distinction between his life and death, between completing their task and failing.

  This was pash, the Okhamban concept of togetherness and unselfish subversion of personal desires to the greater good. She understood it now, and it put steel in her spine.

  She slowed to a stop. The end of the corridor seemed to spring towards her invitingly, urging her onward. The Weaver’s advance faltered, and now she was conscious of his presence directly behind her, close enough to touch, making the fine hairs of her back and neck prickle with the intensity of its hunger. She was nearly there, nearly at the corner that would obscure her from that hateful gaze.

  But she turned away from it. And as she turned she grew, passing through twenty years in an instant, and it was an adult Kaiku with her irises an arterial red that looked upon the creature the Weaver had become.

  It filled the whole of the corridor, an enormous, slavering, six-armed man-beast that loomed over her, its hot and rotten breath stinking of carrion. Its feet and hands were clawed, but the rest of its body was humanoid, lumpen with muscle and covered with thick black hair across the chest and groin. Its skin was red and glistening with sweat, and its face was all snout and horn and fang. Noxious vapours leaked from between its sharp teeth, wreathing it in smoke. Small eyes glimmered fiercely.

  It was a demonic exaggeration of one of her most prominent childhood fears, based on the icon of Jurani her father had kept in his study. The six-armed god of fire had two depictions, and statuettes of him were always crafted in pairs – one as a benevolent life-giver, source of light and warmth, and one as a raging creature of destruction. Kaiku had been scared of the latter statuette as an infant, ever since her mother had told her that Jurani lived in Mount Makara and its perpetual smouldering was the steam from the god’s nostrils.

  It was the Weaver’s mistake. Fear of the gaping dark, of empty corridors filled with nameless dreads . . . that was something that had always been with her, a subtle and primal instinct that followed children into adulthood and old age. But she had surmounted her fear of Jurani when she was young, and his appearance here was incongruous and jarring. The Weaver was manipulating her fears, but it was only picking up resonances and memories, and this was one that was long dead.

  She threw herself into the beast, grappling it, and the world burst into a rush of golden fibres again. The Weaver’s illusion was shattered.

  But she saw now what her enemy had been doing while she was distracted by his ploy. He had used the time she had wasted in fleeing to press the advantage, sewing through her defences, gnawing away knots until the barrier holding him from Kaiku’s physical body was threadbare and ready to break. Frantically, she shored them up, spinning new stitches across the battlefield, dancing from strand to strand. The Weaver pressed aggressively, a flurry of jabs and feints intended to distract her from the real damage he was doing; but Kaiku guessed its trick and ignored the false vibrations, skipping rapidly here and there, rebuilding, fashioning knots and traps and tangles to tire and confuse her opponent.

  The world shifted again, becoming a long, dark tunnel at the end of which something was tearing towards her, but she knew it now for what it was and she wrenched her perception back into the Weave again, dispelling the scene. Here, she was not hampered by the need to interpret the realm as the Weaver was. She could deal with the raw stuff instead. It gave her an advantage, made her faster than her opponent.

  But she was still woefully inexperienced in her art, and the Weaver was clever. She was on the defensive, and quick as she was she could not keep him out indefinitely. The idea of counterattacking was unfeasible while he dogged her like this.

  You need only buy time, she thought.

  Then she saw it: an opening, a gap in the Weaver’s barrier that had frayed from lack of maintenance, pulled apart by the stretching of the strings around it. The Weaver’s attention was fixed firmly on her, heedless of defending himself. He was worrying his way towards an insoluble labyrinth that Kaiku had set up to delay him. That would keep him busy long enough for Kaiku to—

  She had no time for further consideration. Marshalling her consciousness to a point, she arrowed it past the glittering tendrils of the Weaver’s influence and into the gap.

  By the time she saw that it was a snare, she was too late. The gap closed behind her, dropping a curtain of chaotic tangles to prevent her from pulling out. The surrounding fibres pulled tight like a net, constricting her. She struggled desperately, but the bonds were slow to break, and new ones were enwrapping her all the time, like a spider cocooning a fly. In another part of her mind, she sensed the Weaver dodging out of the trap she had set, and realised that he had sensed it all along and had been merely giving her an opportunity to rush into his own trap. He began to bore into her defences again, unpicking them steadily, and she could not disentangle herself to deal with it. She had gone in too eagerly, fallen for an amateurish trick, and there was no way she could get out in time to stop him now. It was a mistake that would cost her her life.

  She flailed and screamed soundlessly, fighting to be free, as the Weaver threaded past the last of the obstacles she had laid and sent awful tendrils into her body, into her flesh.

  Then the fibres of the Weave flexed mightily, a tsunami smashing through them, a wordless, idiot cry that swept both Kaiku and the Weaver up in a riptide and left them spinning in the eddies of its aftermath. Kaiku felt the Weaver’s tendrils snapping away from her as she was torn free of her cocoon, all defences blasted aside by the force of the disturbance. She was dizzied and uncomprehending, waiting for her instincts to translate the blare that had stunned them.

  The witchstone. The witchstone!

  It was in distress.

  The Weaver was paralysed, battered by the force of the cry and simultaneously drawn to it. His priority was, and ever had been, the welfare of the witchstone in his keeping. It was more than simply a task, it was the very purpose of his being. He did not understand the source of the compulsion that drove him, did not know the source of the group-mind that directed the Weavers. He did not know that what he guarded was not only the fount of the Weavers’ power, but also a fragment of the moon-god Aricarat. At the witchstone’s cry he was like a mother whose child is threatened, and nothing else but saving it mattered. Not even defending himself.

  He did not even realise Kaiku was attacking him until she had burst through the tatter of his barricades and into his core. She was a spiralling needle that tracked along the diorama of the Weave, blooming inside him, anchoring herself until she had the kind of grip she needed.

  Even from the start, she had always been able to use her power for one basic purpose: to
destroy. She rent the Weaver apart.

  Her vision flicked back to reality in time to see the cowled figure explode in a shower of flaming bone and blood on the walkway, burning shreds of robe and Mask and skin sailing through the air to fall hissing into the dark water of the lake. A terrible weakness drenched her, and she was pulled to her hands and knees by its weight, her sodden hair falling across her face, her back rising and falling with heaving breaths. Something felt broken inside her, some remnant damage that the Weaver had managed to cause. The violation of his touch made her vomit, spattering the meagre contents of her stomach across the slick rock between her hands. Dimly, she was aware of the roar of the plunging waterfalls, the echoing moans and howls of the Edgefathers, the clatter of boots on metal as golneri tried to escape up the shaft.

  Then it came to her, a thought that rang with triumph and disbelief equally. She had faced a Weaver, and she had won.

  But the moment of joy was fleeting. She had drained herself in doing so, overextended her power in the way she used to do before Cailin had taught her moderation. Her kana was all but burned out, and her body with it; she was pathetically vulnerable now, and still in the direst danger. She could barely raise her head to gaze at the central island where the witchstone lay, at the foul thing that had unwittingly saved her life.

  It was crawling with Edgefathers, chipping at it with rocks and tools and scraping with bare claws. They had snapped teeth and nails on its surface, and bloodied fists and maws bore testament to the insane fury of their assault. The damage they were doing was far greater to themselves than to the witchstone, which was suffering only negligibly under their attacks. She could still sense its wail, resonating across the Weave, carrying over unguessable distance to summon aid. If there were any Weavers left here, they would be rushing to the chamber even now; and Kaiku could not withstand another one.

  Then she found Tsata. The Tkiurathi was crouched at the base of the witchstone, jamming explosives beneath it and tamping them with mud from below the waterline. The Edgefathers appeared to be ignoring him, and for his part he seemed focused on nothing else. Had he even noticed the struggle she had been through to save his life? Kaiku felt a surge of resentment at that, and she rode it to her feet, using it as a crutch to overcome the tiredness that had settled upon her.

  Somewhere above, Edgefathers and shrillings and Nexuses were fighting on the network of walkways. She was too exhausted to think about anything but stumbling across the bridge towards the central island, towards Tsata. The scoops rotated and the pipes sucked and the furnaces steamed and hissed and rumbled, heedless of her plight, endless in their purpose. The witchstone seethed its foul light, and the very air seemed to crawl as she approached; her stomach shrivelled and began to churn. She staggered to her companion’s side, trusting that the Edgefathers would not hinder her, and knelt heavily down next to him. His pallor was even more jaundiced than usual; it was plain that the vile proximity of the witchstone was affecting him too. He spared her a sideways look, then returned to his task.

  She knew his ways by now. The most important thing for them all was to destroy the witchstone. That made everything else secondary for Tsata. But spirits, did he even realise what she had just done? A word of congratulation, of thanks, even of relief at seeing her . . . that would have been all that was needed. But he was too focused, too rigid in his priorities.

  ‘The fuses are wet,’ he said, as the last of the explosives were put into place. ‘They will not light.’

  Kaiku took a moment to process that, and a further moment for the implication to hit her. What anger she had felt at his uncaring demeanour was swept aside under the force of a new emotion.

  ‘No, Tsata,’ she said, aghast. She knew what he was thinking. She knew what a Tkiurathi would do.

  ‘You have to go,’ he said, looking over at her. ‘I will stay, and make certain the explosives work.’

  ‘You mean you will stay and die here!’ she cried.

  ‘There is no other way,’ Tsata said.

  She clutched him by the shoulders, hard, and turned him towards her. His orange-blond hair lay in wet spikes across his forehead, his tattooed face strangely calm. Of course he was calm, she thought, infuriated. All his choices had been made for him. That same gods-cursed philosophy of selflessness that had helped to save her life meant that he was going to throw away his, because it was for the greater good.

  ‘I will not let you die this way,’ she hissed at him. ‘A man was killed five years ago because he followed me into something he should not have been involved in, and I still bear his death on my conscience. I will not have yours too!’

  ‘You cannot prevent me, Kaiku,’ he said. ‘It is simple. If I go, we cannot destroy the witchstone, and all this is for nothing. This is not about us. It is about the millions of people in Saramyr. We have the chance to strike a blow, and my life means nothing compared to those it might save.’

  ‘It means something to me!’ she cried, and almost instantly regretted it. But it was said, and could not be unsaid.

  She fell silent immediately. Something in her wanted to go on, to explain what she felt welling up in her, that in this man she saw a person she could trust utterly, one who was incapable of betraying her as Asara had, someone whom she did not need to fear laying herself bare to. But the healing of her heart after so many wounds was not to be completed in a moment, and as much as she knew that she could not stand the pain of letting him sacrifice himself like this, she knew also that she dared not let herself say it.

  He regarded her tenderly. ‘There is no time,’ he said, and there was something like regret in his voice. ‘Go!’

  ‘I cannot go!’ she said, swallowing bile as her stomach reacted to the emanations of the witchstone. ‘I am too weak. I need you to help me.’

  A flicker of doubt crossed Tsata’s pale eyes, then disappeared as resolve firmed them. ‘Then you must stay too.’

  ‘No!’ she shrieked. ‘Spirits, this selflessness you hold so dear sickens me sometimes! I will not sacrifice myself for this, and you will not make that choice for me! You are the only one who can carry the message of the danger the Weavers pose back to your people; they will not believe a Saramyr. To kill yourself here is selfish! You are thinking of my pash, and not of your own, not of your people! If they are not told of this, they will be next after Saramyr falls, and you are the only person alive who can warn them! We do not know what destroying this witchstone will do, but we do know what the Weavers will do to your land when they get there, and if the Tkiurathi are unprepared then they will all die! The world is not so black and white, Tsata. There are many ways to do what you think is right.’

  Tsata’s expression showed that he was wavering, but when he spoke it brought tears of exhausted frustration to her eyes.

  ‘I have to stay,’ he insisted. ‘The fuses are wet.’

  ‘I can do it!’ she screamed at him. ‘I am a gods-damned Aberrant! I can ignite them from a distance.’

  Tsata searched her eyes, probing her. He was wise enough to know that she would say anything to get him away from there.

  ‘Can you?’

  ‘Yes!’ she replied instantly. But could she? She had no idea. She did not know the range of her abilities, nor if there was enough kana left inside her. She had never tried anything like it before, and she was at the lowest ebb of her power. But she gazed into his eyes, and she lied to him.

  I will not lose you. Not like Tane.

  ‘Then we must go,’ Tsata said, springing to his feet and pulling Kaiku up with him. She gasped in both relief and pain – whatever the Weaver had done to her twinged at the movement – and allowed herself to be propelled across to the water and then into it. She had barely the strength to swim, but Tsata supported her with one arm, striking out with the other. She let him take her, not caring where they were going, only that they were getting out, that he had believed her. Whether she could do what she had promised or not was another matter, but she did not allow herself to worr
y about that now. She clung to him, and he held on to her.

  The sounds of the shrillings were all about as they fought with the rampant Edgefathers across the walkways. Some were almost at the central island now. The roaring of machinery filled her ears, getting louder, and she looked up and saw Tsata’s reckless plan.

  Several metres ahead of them, the massive water-scoops were rising out of the lake, heading upward into the darkness of the shaft. Tsata was swimming right towards them.

  ‘Do not be afraid,’ he murmured, seeing her expression; and then one of the scoops passed right in front of them and up and away, and with a few sturdy strokes Tsata pulled them into the patch of water it had just vacated.

  Kaiku went limp. She trusted him. There was nothing left to do.

  She felt a dip, then something collided with her ankles from beneath, tipping her into the great metal cradle that rose around her. She was submerged and flailed for an instant, banging her hand on something hard, and then righted herself and burst free. They were ascending, the lake falling away beneath them, splashes of water slopping over the lip of the scoop to plunge back to their source. Already, other scoops were following them upward. The awful sinking feeling of being lifted made Kaiku want to panic, but she felt too precarious to dare, and instead she froze.

  They were rising past the webwork of walkways, past Edgefathers fighting with predators, past bellowing constructions and glowing furnaces and enormous cogs rotating. A Nexus fell silently from above to smash into a railing, thence to pitch broken-backed into the lake. A shrilling was savaging a golneri, the creature gone wild after the death of its handler. All was chaos, and nobody noticed the scoop and its passengers heading toward the abyss overhead and the beckoning clouds of distant flame from the gas-torches.

  She felt Tsata next to her, his steadying hand on her shoulder.

  ‘Now, Kaiku,’ he said.

  She closed her eyes, searching inside herself for what energy she had left. She would only need a spark, only that. She racked her burning body, eking out reserves, gathering her kana.