The ascendancy veil bp-3

by Chris Wooding

  Lucia was swaying slightly as Kaiku came to stand near her. She did not dare get too close, afraid of breaking whatever spell held the beast in check. Lucia's eyes were rolled up in her head and flickering with movement.

  'Gods, what has happened here?' she whispered, though she said it more to herself than to anyone else, and expected no response.

  Lucia surprised her. 'It is an emissary,' she said, the words barely formed as if she spoke them in a dream.

  Kaiku thought for a moment. 'Of the Xhiang Xhi?' she asked.

  'Leave our dead,' Lucia murmured, 'and follow.'

  Kaiku closed her eyes. She had been sure to memorise the names of each and every man and woman in the party before they set off into the forest, for she had believed that many would not live to leave it and they would need to be commended to Noctu after their deaths. As long as she had their names, the place where their bodies lay meant little.

  She raised her head and met the expectant faces of the survivors, Doja was among the fallen, and those who believed in leaders looked to her now.

  'We leave our dead,' she said, her voice almost breaking as she spoke. 'We leave our dead and follow.' It was several hours later that they came across the entrance to the Xhiang Xhi's lair.

  Kaiku remembered little of the intervening time. She trudged dazedly through the forest with the rest of them, in something like a state of shock. The beast led them, always ahead, a colossal shadow that was never quite seen, a fraction too distant to make out in detail.

  She wept as she went, mainly for Phaeca but also for the other men who lay behind them and Peithre, whose body Heth carried and refused to leave. She had kept herself at a distance from the soldiers, out of habit – she was a Sister, and she could no longer easily mix as she had in the past – but the suddenness of their deaths, the frightening savagery of the emyrynn, had shaken her badly. She knew enough of war and killing, but she was not inured to it entirely.

  Other thoughts had briefly intruded on her misery. Thoughts of the beast that they followed, and how it had not been attacking her that day but that it had for some reason been protecting her from the spirit that had taken Lucia's shape. It had prevented her from being lured away; her, and her only, for the other soldiers had been left to their fate. Why was that? Why had she been treated differently?

  Then there were the memories of the moment she had shared with Tsata, and her argument with Asara. Both were decisions she had to face, matters of huge importance to her; and yet for now she could not bring herself to care about them. All she wanted to do was to get away from this gods-cursed forest and never look back.

  But there was one more challenge yet, and it was Lucia who had to face it.

  They would have known when they came to the boundary of the Xhiang Xhi's domain even if Lucia had not told them. The air was thick with the presence of the great spirit, a charge in the air that made the fine hairs on their bodies stand on end. It came from a tunnel mouth sunk into a hillock, on either side of which stood twisted old trees like pillars. The beast crouched atop the hillock, obscured by undergrowth, sapping the day's light from the air.

  'You can go no further,' Lucia said to them all. She appeared sharper now, her mind clear. 'It is up to me now.'

  Nobody argued, not even Kaiku. She knew it would come to this. Lucia made no ceremony about it, merely looked over her shoulder at the seven ragged figures that remained of the twenty-four that had followed her into the forest. Her eyes lingered on Kaiku's for a moment, and she tried a smile; but it felt false, and it faltered, so she turned away and walked into the tunnel. They watched as the darkness consumed her, and then she was gone.

  At first they were listless, unsure what to do or what to say. Then they began to settle themselves to wait: the three surviving soldiers together, Tsata and Heth with their burden, Kaiku and Asara both sitting alone.

  After a time, Kaiku got to her feet and joined the Tkiurathi.

  NINETEEN

  There was no light in the tunnel, and Lucia was forced to feel her way along it. Her fingers trailed over the moist soil of the tunnel wall, bumping occasionally against protruding roots. It was silent. The babble of the spirits and the animals was quiet. Nothing existed except the Xhiang Xhi.

  She wished she could stay here, in the peaceful dark, where there were no voices to plague her. To rest, to sleep in this precious hush just for a single night, would be a prize beyond anything she could ask for. To be this clear-headed forever, not to be burdened with the knowledge that outside this oasis of calm lay chaos, and that even if she survived this she would have to return to it. A place where her thoughts were fogged and a thousand whispers clamoured for her attention, and to even interact with humankind was a struggle to focus.

  But it was only a wish. There was no sanctuary for her. She went on through the tunnel, until a short way onwards she saw a ragged oval of grey, with roots hanging across it like a curtain. She pushed through them and stepped into the domain of the great spirit.

  It was a gloomy dell that she found on the other side, a hollow surrounded by thick forest which leaned overhead to make a roof of tangled branches. The ground was marshy; ridges of turf rose out of the water, dividing it into brackish pools full of weeds, and thin mists hung in the cold, still air or slunk close to the earth. An occasional tree grew in the dell, ancient and knotted, its leaves brown and dead.

  She could sense the spirit here, a vast and brooding melancholy, its attention fixed upon her. The force of its presence was oppressive, the magnitude of its power beyond comprehension. She had spoken with many of the land's oldest spirits since that day when she had descended into Alskain Mar, deciphering the ways of their kind; but this was a thing apart, older than the rocks, older than the rivers, older than the forest it dwelt in.

  She waited. Though she was afraid, she was armoured by fatalism. Her life had led to here, and she was as ready as she could possibly be. If it all came to nothing, then that was the way it would go. She could do no more.

  Nothing stirred.

  After a time, she took off her shoes and walked forward, picking her way from the edge of the dell along a bank of earth towards a tuffet that poked out of the marsh. Chill water welled up between her toes as the soft grass sank beneath her feet. When she reached the tuffet, she knelt there, and laid her hands upon the ground. She bowed her head and let her breathing slow, readying herself to enter the trance-like state necessary for communication with the spirits.

  ((There is no need, Lucia. I am not as the others are))

  She tensed. The voice had been like the sigh of a dying man, a breath of air through a dusty temple. In all her life, a spirit had never spoken to her before. Contact had always been achieved without language, a primal, empathic exchange. It was a meeting on the most basic of levels, because it was the only way beings utterly alien to each other could reach some sort of understanding.

  ((I understand you)) said the Xhiang Xhi. Her thoughts were as transparent to it as if she had said them out loud. ((They are as children to me, and lack wisdom. They do not know how to think as you do))

  She felt dizzied. Children? Heart's blood, this being saw the other spirits as children? What kind of fool had she been, thinking that she was ready for the Xhiang Xhi? She dared not consider what might happen if she had tried to meld with it as she had with the others.

  Slowly, she opened her eyes and looked upon the spirit. It hung in the air before her, a slender wraith of mist, an elongated wisp of humanoid form like a shadow cast at sunset. It had hands, with spindly, attenuated fingers, and something that might have been a head, but it shifted and blended with the stir of the murk, so that Lucia could see only impressions of it. Perspective was skewed: it appeared near and far all at once, tiny and massive, and its aspect shifted with its movements and frustrated her efforts to decide. It was ever the way with the spirits: they could not manifest themselves in ways that human senses were entirely comfortable with.

  ((Stand)) it said to her.
((Do not abase yourself before me. I have no need of worship or respect))

  She did so.

  ((You need not fear to speak, Lucia))

  And indeed she did not fear it, not in the way she had some of the other spirits, the ones who were angry and capricious and who had met her with malice or resentment. What she did fear was its terrible sorrow, the heartbreaking sense of tragedy that seeped from it. She was afraid that it might let her know the source of that sorrow and pass its grief on to her, and that was something she would not be able to bear.

  'How old are you?' she said eventually. She wanted to test its responses before she asked what she had come to ask, even though she was sure it already knew her purpose. But there was a way for things to be done, and she would bow to that.

  ((I existed before the first of you stood upright, before the land was formed, before the moons were born. I existed when this world was but dust, and before that. There is no measurement I can give you that would have meaning. I am not like the other spirits you know: they were formed of this land, but I was not. I came from elsewhere, and I will go elsewhere once again when this world is swallowed in fire and its moons turned to ash))

  Its voice, like the stirring of dry leaves in her skull, arrived amid fleeting images, spectral glimpses of star-studded void with gargantuan spheres of breathtaking colour turning slowly, and bright, bright flame swelling to consume them. Then, as quickly as they flitted across her consciousness, they were gone, leaving her wide-eyed, her breathing quick, her pulse fluttering. The Xhiang Xhi swirled restlessly in the mist.

  'Are you a god?' Lucia asked at last.

  ((I am not a god)) it replied. ((What now you call gods you may come to call by other names. Some you will lose to myth; others may be more real than you imagine. It is not my place to reveal them. There can be no understanding for you of the things you speak of, though that may come with the passing of ages. For now, you have only interpretation, and that will change as you change, sometimes taking you closer to truth, sometimes further away. Your race is young, Lucia; and like infants you cannot fully comprehend what you see))

  Lucia accepted this with a slight nod of her head. Her mind had gone blank. Now that she was here, in the presence of the great spirit, she found that words were eluding her. For long seconds she stood mute, a slight figure in torn and muddied travelling clothes, her blonde hair in disarray.

  ((There are things you need to know, Lucia)) the spirit said at last. ((You seek to make war to save your homeland, but you do not yet realise the threat. I will show you))

  'Show me,' Lucia murmured, and the dell and everything around her disappeared.

  She was standing on a vast plain of black rock, rucked with ridges of shattered stone and scattered with smouldering rubble. The air rippled with heat, scorching her lungs, shrinking her flesh. Wind screamed past her, throwing dust and pebbles and pushing boulders end over end, making her clothes flap furiously against her body. It stank of sulphur and poison. At her feet, a massive chasm roiled with magma, underlighting the contours of her face in infernal red. Other chasms scratched their way across the plain, and the earth shook sporadically like the shivers of some sleeping leviathan.

  Lucia was shocked by the panorama and the chaos of the gale. She knew, somehow, that she was not really here, and she believed it had no power to harm her; but her instincts said otherwise, and she stumbled away from the chasm, gazing wildly around for a rescuer.

  The lava ran from a distant range of volcanoes, so broad and high that their tips were lost above the thick blanket of brown vapours that roofed the world. Muted red glows blazed up there, amid thunderous concussions as the volcanoes erupted endlessly. Other mountains, seemingly dead and cold but just as gigantic, loomed around her, and where she could see across the plain to the horizon it seemed much too near. Lightning flickered in the clouds and struck the earth, faster than she had ever seen, a dozen times a second and more.

  'What is… what is this place?' she said against the howl of the wind.

  ((This is the home of your enemy, thousands of years ago, before it was destroyed. This is the moon which you call Aricarat))

  The Xhiang Xhi's voice came from inside her head like a rattle of twigs.

  ((It is not a place for your kind. The air here would choke you. The temperature would melt the flesh from your bones. The wind would pick you up and dash you to pieces. The very atmosphere would crush you like an egg))

  'Why have you brought me here?' Lucia gasped, her eyes beginning to tear in horror.

  ((To show you)) the spirit said again.

  'Show me what?'

  ((Your enemy))

  Lucia looked around helplessly. 'I see nothing.'

  ((You are hampered by the limits of your senses. Use the ability that makes you unique. Listen))

  And so she did. With some effort, she began calming herself, sinking slowly down into a trance of stillness. Practice had made it possible, even amid the maelstrom that whipped around her, to turn herself inward and create a core of quietude to retreat to. She sank to her knees, only now noticing that her feet were still bare. She laid her hand on the hot rock, and listened to the heartbeat of the moon.

  As careful as she was, the sheer violence of Aricarat was still overwhelming: the burning veins of lava tubing, the swirling core, the constantly changing surface that crumbled and was remade by earthquakes and volcanoes. The raging fury of creation stripped raw and made terrible. She retreated, drawing herself away in fear of being destroyed by the power of the sensation. She could not allow herself to be subsumed in that.

  Delicately, she sank back into the trance and began again, and this time she was more tentative. Among the roar and screech of this awful place, she began to make out thoughts. Thoughts as slow and massive as continents, drifting beneath her, processes too colossal and complex for her to even begin to fathom. The ruminations of a god.

  'I hear him…' she said hoarsely, tears spilling from her eyes. 'I hear him…'

  ((Now, look)) the Xhiang Xhi urged, and she cast her eyes upward to where a white glow was growing rapidly behind the clouds, speeding from horizon to horizon, growing from dim to unbearably bright in the span of a second.

  'The spear of Jurani,' Lucia whispered to herself. Then something burst through the clouds, a sun flung from the sky, and there was a sound like the end of the world. Lucia screamed as the fireball of its impact hit her. When she came to her senses, she was lying on the tuffet in the Xhiang Xhi's dell, her face and hair dirty where she had fallen. After a moment to orient herself, she stood shakily, facing the spirit once again. It still hung in the mist before her, veiled from clear sight, a long-fingered wisp like some childish sketch of a nightmare. Drifting, shifting, its dreary emanations oppressing her.

  She took a few breaths to compose herself, then raised her head.

  'That was the moment when the gods destroyed Aricarat,' she said. 'When the army led by his parents, Assantua and Jurani, made war on him; and his own father, the god of fire, destroyed him with his spear.'

  ((That is your interpretation. Muddled with myth, but holding a core of truth, as many legends do))

  She frowned. 'But I was told of it by the spirit of Alskain Mar.'

  ((The spirit of Alskain Mar is not old enough to remember nor wise enough to understand. Spirits know much, but their experience is narrow))

  This was new. It had never occurred to Lucia that spirits could be wrong. She knew them to be wilful liars at times, but she had always had faith in their superior lore. To hear that even they were deemed benighted by this entity shook her deeply.

  'And what is your interpretation?' she asked, almost fearing an answer.

  ((You would not understand mine. Your knowledge is built on the knowledge of your ancestors, slowly accreting towards truth. That is the way of your species. At all times you believe you know all there is to know, and that which you do not know you explain in other ways. Yet later generations will laugh at your ignorance, and d
o the same, and be laughed at in their turn. Understanding must be reached gradually, Lucia. What answers I would have for you, you would not believe even if you could comprehend them))

  'Then what can you tell me?' Lucia asked, spreading her hands in supplication. 'What is it I must know?'

  ((You have learned much already, but not enough)) the spirit replied. ((You know that the fragments of Aricarat that fell onto your planet carried with it fragments of the entity that resided there. You know that this being had enough remnant influence to create the Weavers, and that they carry out its work with no knowledge of what controls them. But you do not understand the Weavers' intentions. You think they want to conquer. But conquest is not their aim, merely a stage in Aricarat's plan. They will not spread beyond Saramyr. They will not have to))

  Lucia waited in dread. So many certainties were falling into ruin around her. The Xhiang Xhi loomed in the mist, becoming darker.

  ((They are changing your world, Lucia. They are making it more like their master's home. They are preparing it for his arrival))

  Lucia saw again, suddenly, the blasted plain and brown clouds, tasted the sulphur in the air, and a weakness swept her. The buildings that the Weavers had erected, the machines, the pall-pits: these were the tools by which they would make the world dark and poisonous. From Saramyr they would spread a miasma over the whole of the Near World, and across the great oceans that none had ever crossed except the mysterious explorers of Yttryx; then even the strange and distant lands beyond would be swallowed, and Nuki's eye would never again gaze down on the world, for it would be forever concealed from his sight.

  ((There is no word in your language for what they are doing)) the Xhiang Xhi was saying. ((Other cultures in other places far, far, from here have a name for the process, but it would be meaningless to you. You need know only this: if you do not stop the Weavers, one way or another, your world will end))