Braided Path 02 - The Skein Of Lament

by Wooding, Chris

  There were not enough to keep the enemy at bay over such a perimeter.

  ‘Bakkara!’ someone cried, and he turned to see a dishevelled man come racing along the walkway towards him. He knew the face, but memory failed at the name.

  ‘Give me some good news,’ Bakkara warned, but at the man’s expression he knew what news he had to give would certainly not be good.

  ‘They’ve got in through the north gate! They’ve taken the north wall. The peasants are surrendering . . . some are even helping them in the streets up there. Our men are fleeing south, towards the centre.’

  That was it. There was no more time for procrastination.

  ‘We fall back to the keep,’ Bakkara said, the words like ashes in his mouth. ‘The town is lost. Meet at the rally point. We go from there.’

  Hruji and the messenger both saluted and ran to spread the order. Bakkara turned flat eyes to the scorched and damaged building that rose above the burning streets of Zila, and wondered if his decision would do them any good at all, or if he was merely delaying the inevitable. He suspected the latter.

  A moment later, a horn sounded a shrill, clear note that echoed into the battle-tainted night: the signal to give up the wall.

  The retreat was as disorganised as the rest of the defence had been. The Ais Maraxa had been the last to give up their posts, but not all of them were soldiers, and the withdrawal turned into a rout as enemy troops began pouring over the vacated wall and into the town. Booted feet splashed through streets that had turned into shallow rivers of murky water, fearful glances were cast over shoulders at the tide of swords and rifles and armour cresting Zila’s parapets. The Ais Maraxa ran headlong through the glow cast by the street lanterns, flicking from shadow to light and back again, fleeing to gather in a dour square that stood at the crossing of a spoke-road and a side street.

  Bakkara stood at the square’s north end as the ragged fighters poured in from all sides, surveying them bleakly. Their expressions were disbelieving, their faith in their cause tattered. For so long they had worked in secret, and they had thought themselves invincible, righteous crusaders for a cause blessed by the gods. But the moment they had stepped into the light they had been smashed by the power of the Empire. It was a cruel lesson, and Bakkara considered what would become of the Ais Maraxa if they managed to get themselves out of this.

  Now sufficient numbers had crammed into the square for him to call the order to head for the keep. Through the fires of the shellshot that were still bursting all around them, he led the crowd at a run up the steep, cobbled spoke-road that headed towards the looming structure at Zila’s hub. Maybe there they could at least give the enemy pause. New strategies could be mooted, new plans made.

  But who would make them?

  He dashed the rain from his eyes, casting his doubts away as he did so. Regroup and defend. That was the next thing he had to do, and he did not think beyond that. He had never thought beyond his next objective. That was his nature.

  They came to the end of the spoke-road, and it opened out into the great circular plaza that surrounded the keep. Bakkara slowed to a halt, and so did the men who ran with him. The stillness spread backwards, until even those at the rear of the crowd who could not see had ceased jostling, subdued by a dreadful trepidation.

  Ranked before them, at the foot of the keep, were more than a thousand men; double the amount that Bakkara had mustered.

  Bakkara took a breath and assessed the amount of trouble they were in. The space between the Ais Maraxa and the enemy troops was all but empty, a dark, slick expanse of crescent-shaped flagstones. A pair of large fires to their left – where shellshot jelly still burned against the downpour – cast multiple yellow glints across the divide. The troops were a mixture of all the Bloods who had arrayed themselves against the revolt; but he also saw peasants there, townsfolk of Zila, eager to buy their own lives by abetting the invaders. He tried to feel disgust, but he could not. It seemed petty now.

  There above them, on the steps leading to the keep, he picked out the dimly shining Mask of a Weaver. The face of precious metals was an obscenity against the ragged robes that he wore. Bakkara did not need to look up any further to know that the keep had already been breached.

  Men were murmuring in fear behind him. The very thought of facing a Weaver was enough to make them balk. Yet the enemy forces that had scaled the southern wall were catching up to them with every wasted moment. Bakkara sensed that he had to act now, or he would lose them.

  Their lives were forfeit if they were captured. He knew that, with the certainty of a man who had seen war over and over. He also knew that there were worse things than dying.

  ‘Ais Maraxa!’ he roared, his voice carrying over the crowd. It sounded like someone else’s voice, someone else’s words. ‘For Lucia! For Lucia!’

  With that he raised his sword high and cried wordlessly, and as one the men that followed him did the same, their instant of weakness passing at the sound of Lucia’s name, reminded of the faith that had brought them here in the first place. Bakkara’s chest swelled with an emotion so glorious that he could not put a name to it, and he swung his sword forward to point at the enemy who waited to receive them with better weapons, better guns, and greater numbers.

  ‘Attack!’ he bellowed.

  Rifles cracked and swords rang free of their scabbards as the last of the Ais Maraxa surged forward to the death that awaited them, and in his final moments Bakkara knew what it was like to be a leader at last.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  When Nuki’s eye rose over the eastern horizon, it looked down on a very different Zila.

  The Surananyi in Tchom Rin, the rage of the pestilent goddess of the desert at the murder of the Empress, had blown itself out by now, and left the successive mornings with a brittle and crystalline quality. It was such a light that fell across the broken crown of Zila, its rooftops blackened and timbers open to the sky, trailing dozens of streamers of thick smoke into the air where the gentle wind blew them northward. No longer grim and defiant, it was a carcass of its former pride, and those townsfolk that walked its streets went shamefaced and terrified of the consequences of their insurrection.

  Everywhere was the slow, lazy movement of an aftermath, like tired revellers cleaning up after a festival. As the sun climbed to its zenith, camps were being broken and repitched closer to the hill. Some troops were departing altogether, their presence urgently needed elsewhere. Corpses of the shot, impaled or incinerated were cleared away from the foot of the town wall, and a steady stream of carts rolled from the south gate carrying the dead from within.

  The process of restoring order and meting out punishment would not be short. Zila had defied the Empire, and an example had to be made. That was Xejen’s downfall, in the end. He had not accounted for the Baraks’ ruthless determination to keep the status quo in these times. A famine was coming, was already biting at the edges of Saramyr and gnawing its way inward. Society teetered on the brink of chaos. In such a climate, any dissent had to be stamped on as hard as possible. Only with rigid order could the Empire make its way through the hard times ahead. The peasants had to learn that revolution was impossible. And so the high families had assaulted Zila with force far beyond anything Xejen or the townsfolk had expected, caring nothing for the sanctity of non-combatants or the structural damage to one of Saramyr’s most important settlements. If they had not been able to breach the wall, they would have burned Zila to embers or smashed it flat with explosives.

  Rebellion was unacceptable. The people of Zila had learned that now, and they would learn it again and again over the next few weeks. The message would carry. The Empire was inviolable.

  But to the Barak Zahn tu Ikati, it felt like trying to blow life into a cadaver. The Empire, to him, had died long ago. He had been instrumental in the planning of last night’s attack, but his contribution had been emotionless. He did not burn with zeal for the preservation of their way of life like Barak Moshito tu Vinaxis did, or the
generals sent by the other high families.

  Yet he had felt that way once. Before Mos usurped the throne, before Anais tu Erinima was killed. Before his daughter died.

  It was midday when he walked from the doors of the scorched keep, down into the plaza where the last of the Ais Maraxa dead were being cleared away, their slack limbs and gaping faces sundered by scabbed wounds. The congealed blood on the crescent flagstones was cooking in the fierce heat, a sticky and sickly-sweet odour that cloyed in the back of the throat. The grey and shattered streets of Zila had dried already, and now they were dusty and quiet, a maze of bright sunlight and harsh black shadow in which cowed men and women skulked and would not meet his eye.

  He was a lean, rangy man, with spare features and pox-pitted cheeks that had become lately gaunt and hollow. His trim, prematurely white beard hid most of it, but not around his eyes, where the toll of his long suffering was easy to see. Over fifty harvests had passed him by, but none had been as hard as the last few. Not since Lucia was lost.

  The moment of their meeting was engraved upon his memory as if it had happened yesterday. He had lived it every day since, recalling over and over the fundamental shift that he had experienced when he first laid eyes on the Aberrant child. Suddenly he had been aware of a level of feeling that he had not known existed, something deeply primal and irresistible in force, and he knew then what a man must know when he watches his wife give birth: an overwhelming introduction into the mysteries of the wonderful and terrible bond between parent and child. He saw her, and he knew. Every instinct blared at him at once: she is yours.

  She knew, too. It was in the way she threw her arms around him, and he saw it in those pale eyes, and in the gaze of pure betrayal she gave him as tears welled in them.

  Where were you? they asked, and they tore his heart into pieces.

  The fact that he had not known he had a daughter did not make it any easier for him. Of course, her age and the time of her birth corresponded with the short, tempestuous affair he had conducted with the Blood Empress all those years ago, but then he had known that Anais had still been sleeping with her husband during that period, and when it was announced that she had become pregnant it had simply seemed impossible that it might be his. The idea had occurred to him only briefly, and then been dismissed. If she suspected it was Zahn’s issue, he was certain that she would have either told him, or poisoned it in the womb without ever letting anyone but her physician find out that she was with child. They were the only politically expedient courses of action. When she did neither, Zahn reasoned that it was nothing to do with him: he had already surmounted the bitterness that he had felt when she had broken off their dangerous relationship, and was happy to be out of it now that an heir had become involved. Children were simply something that Zahn had no interest in. Or so he thought.

  But in that instant when they had met, the grief and loss and regret crushed him. He felt like he had abandoned her at birth.

  He had retreated from the Imperial Keep, stunned by what had happened, but he had not intended to retreat for long. He would have confronted Anais, even amid all the civil unrest that was going on at the time, even though he had no proof beyond the simple certainty that he was right. He would have demanded to know why she kept Lucia from him. He would have done all sorts of reckless things, like a hot-headed youth, if Anais and their daughter had not been killed first.

  Something had withered inside him at the news, and had never grown back. Some crucial part of his soul had shrivelled and blackened, and robbed the colour from the world. He tried to tell himself that it was ridiculous for him to be so affected by this. After all, he had been content in ignorance for years, and he had only known his true connection to Lucia for a very short time. How could he feel loss for something he had had so briefly?

  But the words were hollow, and their echoes mocked him, and he stopped trying to apply sense to senselessness.

  Misery spread like a cancer, killing other parts of him. Food no longer gave him joy. His companions found him saturnine and melancholy. He took little interest in the affairs of his family and his estates, delegating many tasks that should have been his to younger brothers and sisters. He was no less competent as a Barak, but he was disinterested, stripped of ambition. He maintained his family’s holdings well enough, but he had no passion for the political games and the jostling for status that were an integral part of Saramyr high society. He was merely treading water.

  But something was to happen this morning that would ignite a flicker of something long forgotten in his breast, something so foreign to him now that he struggled to recall its name.

  Hope. Foolish hope.

  A woman had been detained by Blood Ikati troops after she had been found unconscious in the ruins of a building, having been struck on the head by a falling beam as the ceiling above her came down. That same beam had saved her life, for it had collapsed at an angle and sheltered her from the bricks raining around her. She had been uncovered by peasants who had begun to dig for survivors, and turned over to Zahn’s men along with a much greater prize: Xejen tu Imotu, whom the peasants eagerly denounced as the leader of the Ais Maraxa.

  Though nobody knew who she was, her noble attire and hair were enough to mark her as not being of Zila, and her proximity to Xejen when she was found was damning. She was kept under guard and nursed until she awoke, at which point she demanded to see Barak Zahn tu Ikati, claiming that she was Mishani tu Koli.

  ‘I will see her,’ he had told the messenger who brought him the news. Then, remembering himself, he added: ‘Have my servants bathe and dress her first, if needs be. She is highborn. Treat her as such.’

  And so he strode through the newly hushed streets of Zila, to where Mishani waited for him.

  Mishani met him by her sickbed, but not in it. She was weak from breathing dust and badly bruised all over, and she had suffered a terrible blow to the back of her head that was causing her eyes not to focus properly. The physicians would not let her leave her room; indeed, they hovered about in case she should faint from the exertion of getting out of bed. The knowledge that she was noble and important to their Barak had turned them from imperious and haughty men into fawning servants. When Zahn chimed and entered, he dismissed them with a flick of his hand.

  The physicians had commandeered a row of undamaged houses for their base of operations, and filled the beds with injured soldiers and townsfolk. Mishani, whether by chance or by virtue of her dress, had been put in the master bedroom of some wealthy merchant’s abode. The bed was plainly expensive, and the walls were decorated with charcoal sketches and elegant watercolours. In an ornate bone cradle there was a pattern-board depicting a seascape, the washes of colour suspended within a three-dimensional oblong of hardened transparent gel. Zahn idly wondered if the person who possessed all of this had been killed at the hands of the townsfolk during the revolt, in last night’s bombardment, or if they were still alive now and simply thrown out on the street. Revolution was an unpleasant business.

  Mishani tu Koli was standing by her bed, dressed in borrowed robes with her voluminous hair combed and loose. She appeared to be entirely unhurt, but Zahn knew well enough that she was simply not letting it show. There were clues: she was wearing her hair in a style that covered her cheeks, to hide scratches on her ear; there was a faint patch of blue on the back of her wrist where the cuff of her robe did not hide it; then there was the telling fact that she had not strayed far from the edge of her bed, in case her strength failed her. He had met her several times before in the Imperial Court when she was younger, and her poise had always been remarkable.

  ‘Mistress Mishani tu Koli,’ he said, performing the correct bow for their relative social rank. ‘It grieves me to hear that you have been injured in this calamity.’

  She returned the female form of the same bow. ‘By Ocha’s grace, I have not suffered as much as I might have,’ she said. None of the weakness of her condition bled into her voice.

  ‘Would
you like to sit?’ Zahn offered, gesturing at a chair. But Mishani was not about to take any concessions.

  ‘I prefer to stand,’ she said levelly, knowing that there was only one chair and no mats in the room. He was well over a foot taller than her; if she sat then he would be looking down on her at a steeper angle than he already was.

  ‘My servants have told me that you wished to see me,’ he said.

  ‘Indeed,’ came the reply. ‘I have been wanting to see you ever since I was detained in Zila by the Ais Maraxa. Though in the end you had a somewhat violent way of bringing our meeting about.’

  Zahn gave her a hint of a smile.

  ‘May I ask you a question?’ she said.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘What has become of Xejen tu Imotu?’

  Zahn considered that for a moment. ‘He lives, barely.’

  ‘Might I know where he is?’

  ‘Are you concerned for him?’

  ‘I am concerned, but not for the reasons you imagine,’ she told him.

  Zahn studied her for a moment. She was a sculpture in ice.

  ‘I let Barak Moshito deal with him,’ Zahn said. He linked his hands behind his back and walked over to the pattern-board, studying it. ‘Moshito will undoubtedly turn him over to his Weaver. I cannot say I feel sympathy. I have little love for the Ais Maraxa.’

  ‘Because they remind you of your daughter,’ Mishani finished. ‘They make you believe in the possibility that she is still alive, and that is a raw wound indeed.’

  Zahn’s head snapped around, his eyes flashing angrily.

  ‘Forgive my bluntness,’ she said. ‘I was heading to Lalyara to find you with the intention of divining your feelings towards her. Now I cannot afford the time to be delicate.’ She fixed him with a steady gaze. ‘Her life hangs in the balance. Xejen tu Imotu knows where she is.’