The ascendancy veil bp-3

by Chris Wooding

  He responded to her laughter with a look of bewilderment. 'You seem in good spirits,' he observed.

  She sighed. 'No, it is not that,' she said. She thought about explaining, but decided it was not worth the effort. Tsata would not understand.

  He let it drop. 'What happened to you?' he asked.

  So Kaiku explained about the beast in the trees. She made no mention of why she had strayed from the camp. She meant to have a word with Lucia about her dangerous wanderings as soon as circumstances would permit.

  Tsata listened as she talked. In contrast to Lucia, he had a wonderfully grave expression when listening, as if the object of his attention was the only thing in the world. Kaiku had found it mildly intimidating at first, but now she enjoyed it. When she spoke, she knew he thought her words important. It made her feel better about herself.

  When she was done, he shifted himself so that he was sitting cross-legged. Tkiurathi could never kneel for long; it became excruciating for them after a while, unlike the folk of Saramyr.

  'It appears that you were fortunate indeed. We lost two more soldiers last night. We can presume that they met the same creature that you did.'

  'We lost them? How do you mean?'

  'They are gone. Tracks lead into the forest, but beyond that all trace has disappeared.'

  Kaiku rubbed her hands over her face. 'Gods…' she murmured. 'Lucia said that the spirits' agreement to let us pass was no guarantee of safety. I had hoped to keep that from the rest of the group, at least until our morale was better.'

  'That was foolish,' said Tsata. From anyone else, it would have been rude, but Kaiku knew how he was. 'Perhaps we would have been more careful if we had been told.'

  'More careful than we were? I doubt it.' She would not shoulder the responsibility for their deaths. 'Everyone was frightened last night; they were watchful, despite what Lucia had told them.'

  'They are more frightened now,' Tsata observed.

  'As well they should be,' Kaiku replied.

  There was a beat of silence between them.

  'You were writhing in your sleep. Who were you dreaming of?' he asked suddenly.

  Kaiku blushed. 'Heart's blood, Tsata! There are some politenesses my people employ that you would do well to learn.'

  He did not look in the least abashed. 'I apologise,' he said. 'I did not realise you would be embarrassed.'

  She brushed her hair behind her ear and shook her head. 'You should not ask a lady such things.' She met his gaze, his pale green eyes devoid of guile, strangely like a child's. For a moment she held it; then she looked away.

  'Tane,' she said with a sigh, as if he had forced it out of her. 'I dreamt of Tane.'

  Tsata tilted his chin upward: an Okhamban nod, in understanding. 'I appreciate your honesty. It is important to me.'

  'I know,' she murmured. Then, feeling she needed to apologise herself, she took his hand in both of hers. 'It was only a dream,' she said.

  He seemed surprised by the contact. After a moment, he squeezed her hand gently and let go. 'We all dreamed last night,' he said. 'But you, it seems, were the only one who dreamt anything pleasant.'

  'I am not so sure it was pleasant at all,' she said. Though she could remember nothing for certain except that Tane was in it, she was unsure whether the dream-congress was entirely consensual on her part. In fact, she had an uneasy intuition that he had been raping her. She looked up. 'What did you dream of?'

  Tsata seemed uncomfortable, and did not reply. 'We should go; the others will be waiting for us.'

  'Ah! You will not get away so easily,' she said, grabbing his arm as he made to rise. 'Where is your honesty now?' she chided playfully.

  'I dreamt of you,' he said, his tone flat.

  'Of me?'

  'I dreamt I was gutting you with a knife.'

  Kaiku stared at him for a moment. She blinked.

  'I see your studies of Saramyrrhic have not yet encompassed the art of telling a woman what she wants to hear,' she said, and then burst out laughing at his expression. 'Come. We should be on our way.' When he still seemed uneasy, she said again: 'It was only a dream, Tsata. As was mine.'

  They emerged from the tent to a crisp dawn. It was early yet, but from the faces of the group Kaiku guessed that few had slept well, if at all. They were wearily taking down the camp, wandering in pairs or eating cold food – no fires were allowed in the forest, on Lucia's advice. The silence that surrounded them was as oppressive as it had been the day before. It made the whole forest seem dead. Asara had packed her tent up and was sitting on the grass, watching Kaiku across the camp. Kaiku dismissed her with a glance. She did not want to worry about that one for now.

  A sudden commotion from the treeline drew her attention. People were getting to their feet, running up towards where two men were emerging with a third being dragged between them.

  'Spirits, what now?' Kaiku muttered, and she headed that way herself, with Tsata close behind.

  They had dumped the man face down on the grass by the time she arrived, and soldiers were jabbering over the corpse. 'Who is this?' she demanded, putting enough of the Red Order authority into her tone to silence them. 'What happened to him?'

  'He's one of those who went missing last night,' came the reply. 'We went to look for them. Didn't find the other.' He exchanged glances with his companion. 'As to what happened to him, your guess is as good as ours.'

  With that, he tipped the body over with his boot, and it came to lie on its back with one arm awkwardly underneath it. The soldiers swore and cursed.

  Though he seemed otherwise untouched, his eyes were milky white, no pupil or iris visible. The skin around them was speckled with burst blood vessels, and brilliant blue veins radiated out from the sockets, starkly protuberant. The man's expression was slack, his jaw hanging open in an idiot gape.

  'I think you were more fortunate than we had guessed,' Tsata muttered, 'if this is what your beast does to its victims.'

  Kaiku turned away, crossing her arms over her stomach, hugging herself. 'Then why did it spare me?'

  She began to walk; the sight of the dead man was more than she could take at the moment. They travelled round the gorge and onward, following Lucia's directions. She was their compass, for she could sense the Xhiang Xhi and headed unerringly towards it. The group were jumpy now. The forest had a way of tricking the eye, inventing movement from nothing, so that people would start violently and look down at their feet, or out into the trees, thinking something had scurried past. They began to hear noises in the silence now, strange taps and clicks from afar. The first time they occurred, Doja – the leader of the soldiers – called a halt and they listened for a while; but the sounds were random and monotonous, and eventually they tried to ignore them. It did little good. The tapping began to wear at them, much as the silence had before it.

  The forest continued to change, darkening as they penetrated further. Purple was predominant now, as of deciduous leaves on the late edge of autumn, and the canopy thickened overhead so that they walked in twilight. A strange gloom hung in the air. The taps and clicks echoed as if they were in a cavernous hall, unnaturally reverberant.

  The group threaded its way through terrain that became increasingly hard, up muddy slopes and through tangled thickets with branches they dared not hack aside for fear of retaliation. They went with swords and rifles held ready, in the faint hope that they would be any use.

  Kaiku and Phaeca walked together, keeping close to Lucia. Phaeca seemed better today, despite having barely slept. Whenever she had closed her eyes she had been pitched into the same nightmare, something so horrible that she refused to speak of it. Still, she had artfully made herself up and disguised the shadows under her eyes, and it did not show on her. Kaiku had been concerned about how well she might hold up in this environment, but she felt a small relief at seeing her friend recovered.

  'How is she?' Phaeca murmured, gesturing at Lucia.

  Kaiku made a face that said: who can tell? 'I do n
ot think she even knows where she is at the moment.'

  They observed her for a time, and indeed, she had the look of a sleepwalker. She drifted along without paying attention to anything or anyone nearby.

  'She is listening to them,' Phaeca said. 'To the spirits.'

  'I fear for her, Phaeca,' Kaiku admitted. 'She said things to me, back at Araka Jo…' She trailed off, deciding that to speak of it to Phaeca would be breaking a confidence. 'I fear for her,' she repeated.

  Phaeca did not pry. 'What is she, truly?' she mused.

  'She is an Aberrant, the same as you and me.'

  Phaeca looked unconvinced. 'Is that all she is, do you think? I'm not so sure. It's her nature more than her abilities. And her uniqueness.' She glanced at Kaiku. 'Why aren't there more of her? There were many with our powers: the Sisterhood only accounts for a fraction of the total, those that were not killed or who did not kill themselves. Yet have you ever heard of anyone with Lucia's talent?'

  Kaiku did not like where this was going. It came uncomfortably close to suggesting that Lucia was divine, and she had thought Phaeca above that. 'What are you saying?' she asked.

  Phaeca shook her head. 'Nothing,' she replied. 'Just thinking aloud.'

  Kaiku lapsed into silence, wondering about this. She had tried to talk to Lucia earlier in the day about her late-night excursion into the forest, but alarmingly she found it impossible to get through. Lucia was not only paying no attention, but she could not bring herself to focus enough to make any sense of Kaiku. She stared right through her as if she were some puzzling phantom, then her eyes would slide away elsewhere.

  Whatever was happening to Lucia, she was, as ever, facing it alone. Kaiku was entirely shut out. She could do nothing but worry. Another one of them fell by mid-afternoon.

  It was Tsata's cry to his kinsman that alerted them. They did not catch the meaning, phrased as it was in Okhamban, but they understood the tone. Several men clustered around Lucia; the others hurried into the trees towards the source of the sound. Kaiku directed Phaeca to stay, haste making her peremptory, and then went after them. She clambered up a steep rise of land, using roots as handholds and odd gold-veined rocks as steps, and ducked through the foliage and past a thicket of tall, straight trees to where she could see the soldiers' backs in a circle. They made way for her as she arrived.

  It was the Tkiurathi woman, Peithre. She lay in Tsata's arms, breathing in thin, rasping gasps, her skin pale. Heth broke through the circle a moment later, and demanded something of Tsata in their native language. Tsata's reply was clear without translation: he did not know what was wrong with her.

  'Let me,' said Kaiku. She crouched down in front of Peithre. The ailing woman's eyes fixed on her, a mixture of desperation and pleading. Tsata looked around, searching for the source of what had done such harm, but nothing was evident.

  'Tsata, tell her to be calm. I will help her,' she said, not taking her gaze from Peithre's. Tsata did so. Then Kaiku put her hand on Peithre's bare shoulder, and as the soldiers watched her irises changed from brown to bright red.

  'She is poisoned,' Kaiku said immediately. She held her hand cupped beneath Peithre's chin, and a dozen tiny flecks, like bee-stings, popped from the skin of the jaw and throat and collarbone and fell into her palm, where they ignited in tiny pyres. 'That plant,' she pointed behind her, at where a patch of curved, thin reeds with bulbous tips rose out of the bank of a tiny brook.

  One of the soldiers brandished his sword and took a step towards them.

  'Do not touch them!' Kaiku snapped. 'You will kill us all. We will not harm the forest, even if the forest harms us.'

  'Can you save her?' Tsata murmured.

  'I can try,' she replied; and for a moment they were back in a fog-laden marsh in the Xarana Fault, and it was Yugi and not Peithre who lay dying. But then she had been a clumsy apprentice; now she was a seamstress of the Weave. She closed her eyes and plunged into the golden world, and the Tkiurathi and soldiers could do nothing but wait. Heth muttered to Tsata in Okhamban. They watched the patient closely, observers to a process too subtle for them to understand. Peithre began to sweat, giving off an acrid stink: Kaiku was hounding the poison from her body. Then gradually her breathing slowed. Her eyes drifted closed. Heth exploded into a guttural tirade, but Tsata held his hand up for silence. Kaiku was concentrating too hard to reassure him. Peithre was not dying, not now; but she would have to sleep.

  Minutes passed before Kaiku's eyes flickered open again. The soldiers murmured to each other.

  'She will live,' Kaiku said. 'But she is very weak. The damage the poison has done is too widespread and too deep for me to repair entirely.'

  Heth spoke up in Saramyrrhic. 'I will carry her.'

  'It is not that simple. She needs rest, or she may not survive. Her body is at its limits already.' She met Tsata's gaze. 'The poison was very strong,' she said. 'It is a miracle she lived long enough for me to get to her.'

  She looked up, and caught sight of Asara standing there, watching her through the trees with singular interest. Then she turned away and was gone, leaving Kaiku faintly perturbed.

  'Make her comfortable,' Kaiku said to the Tkiurathi. 'I will speak with Doja.' She got to her feet.

  'You have my gratitude,' Heth said uncertainly, glancing at Tsata for approval. He found Saramyr customs as difficult as she found theirs.

  'And mine,' Tsata said.

  'We are pash, you idiots,' she said tenderly. 'No thanks are needed.'

  'You mean we're staying here?' one of the soldiers called in disbelief. All eyes looked to him. He was a black-haired man around his twenty-fifth harvest. She knew him: his name was Kugo.

  Kaiku fixed him a hard stare, made harder by the demonic colour of her eyes. She could feel the momentary warmth of cameraderie drain from her. 'That is what I am going to talk to your leader about.'

  'We can't stay here!' he said. 'Heart's blood, four of us are dead already; you yourself were nearly a fifth; she was a hair's breadth from being number six. This is only our second day! How long do you think we're going to survive if we just wait around in the forest?'

  Kaiku could feel herself tensing, readying for a confrontation. She should have just walked away from this, swept him icily aside. But something inside her would not allow her to let it go, because she knew where this was coming from, and she wanted to hear him say it.

  'What would you have us do, Kugo? Abandon her? What if it were you?'

  'It's not me. And if it were, or if it were any of these men, I'd stay with them whatever the consequence. We would not abandon our own.' There was a murmur of approval at this. 'But these are not our own,' he said. 'I won't risk my life for foreigners.'

  Tsata and Heth did not react to this, but Kaiku did.

  'Have you learned nothing?' she cried, walking up to Kugo until she was facing him. 'Why do you think we are fighting this war, you fool? Because we were so ready to let the Weavers scapegoat Aberrants that we never thought to question them! We let them kill children for more than two centuries because we held jealously onto the prejudices that they instilled in us! People like you joined the Libera Dramach to change that. And now, now that Aberrants like me have saved your empire, now that we are following an Aberrant into the heart of the most gods-damned dangerous place on the continent, now you say that these people who are willing to die alongside us are not our own?'

  She was in a fury now such as she had rarely been, and the air tautened around her, the tips of her hair lifting in the palpable aura of her rage. Kugo's face was a picture of shock.

  'This division is what kills us! Do you not see? You cannot throw away one set of arbitrary prejudices and still maintain another! You cannot decide to accept Aberrants like me and still regard foreigners as lesser than you! Your ignorance condemns us to repeat the same cycle, war after war until there is nothing left! Heart's blood, if your kind ran out of enemies you would start killing your friends! These people,' she gestured at Tsata and Heth, 'could teach you
something about unity.'

  She grabbed the side of his head with one hand; he was paralysed with fright now. Her voice dropped.

  'You will afford the Tkiurathi the same respect you give these other men, or you will have me to deal with.'

  With that, she shoved him roughly away and stalked into the forest. Silence reigned in her wake. Tsata watched her leave, his tattooed face unreadable; but he stared at the point where she was lost to the undergrowth for a long time after she was gone. She went to see Doja when she had calmed down, and he agreed that they should stop here for the night and evaluate Peithre's condition anew in the morning.

  'But if another of my men goes missing, we're leaving,' he warned.

  'You must do what you will,' she said. 'But I am staying. And in the end, it is Lucia's decision whether you will leave or not: you would not last an hour in this place without her.'

  Doja was angry, she could sense that, though he suppressed it well. He was a square-jawed man with a cleft chin covered in wiry black stubble, a sharp nose and small eyes. Kaiku respected him immensely as a leader, but she had undermined him and he resented that. Threatening one of his soldiers had not done her any favours in his estimation, and now her intransigence was a direct challenge to his authority. The relationship between the Libera Dramach and the Red Order had become more and more strained of late. Whereas before the Red Order had been an extremely useful secret weapon for their cause, now that they were out in the open they were too powerful to be trusted, and there was a general suspicion that they only fought on the side of the Empire because it coincided with their own agenda.

  'I give you one night,' he said. 'After that, we will ask Lucia.'

  A clamour arose before Kaiku could reply, coming from the direction where she had left Peithre. She broke off their conversation without another word and hurried back to that spot, and there she found the soldiers with their rifles ready, spread in a loose circle, aiming outward between the trees. Someone, made jumpy by his surroundings, sighted on her as she approached; she ducked instinctively, but thankfully he did not fire. She swept past him with a corrosive glare and he cringed away from her.