The Ascendancy Veil (52 page)

Kaiku felt something buck painfully in her chest at that. She found that she could not meet his eye, and that if she stayed any longer under the intensity of that gaze then she would begin to cry. She was so terribly fragile, and she hated herself for it.

‘I will not be long,’ she said, and left; but whether she meant it in answer to Tsata or in relation to fetching her pack, even she did not know.

It took them six days to reach the Weavers’ barrier. Six days before Kaiku put the Mask on again, and for the first time in what seemed like forever, she was happy.

The hooves of Reki’s manxthwa crunched steadily over the loose gravel on the floor of the pass. He was watching the gristle-crows circling overhead in the flat light of the dawn, his eyes tight with distrust. The air was dead and still.

He rode with his hand near the hilt of his nakata. His hair was tied back in a short queue to keep it out of his face in battle; it made his scar more obvious. The beige leather of his armour creaked as he moved, and his expression was grim with concentration.

Reki had been keeping in contact with the Tkiurathi force since landfall, and in that time the tension in his men had grown unbearable. The Aberrants had all but disappeared, except for the gristle-crows that shadowed them from high above, out of rifle range. In less than an hour, if the Sisters’ estimations were correct, they would be coming up against the Weavers’ barrier. The Tkiurathi had already successfully penetrated it during the night, and were lying in wait in the mountains just inside the perimeter. But there was no sign of any opposition. Even the skirmishes that had whittled at his army in those first weeks had ceased.

It was too easy. And this pass was too dangerous: a shallow-sided valley of shale and granite, bulwarked on either side by peaks. After so many days of struggling to find navigable trails through the hostile heights, he should have been glad that they at last had a few smooth miles to walk. His men had been taxed to their limits by the journey, and they needed a rest, but the pressures of time would not allow it. The longer the day wore on, the more chance that the Tkiurathi would be discovered by roaming gristle-crows within the perimeter of Adderach, and their deceit would be revealed.

So they had to come through this eerily silent pass.

All the scouts he had were scouring the surrounding land, but they reported nothing. He asked the Sisters that travelled with him, but they had no answer. Perhaps the Weavers were consolidating around Adderach. Perhaps even inside it. That would make things extremely problematic. It would be much harder to winkle the Weavers out of their lair if they had settled in to a defensive position, and it would give them time to destroy their own witchstone if it came to a last resort. That, as far as Reki understood, would be disastrous.

Asara rode alongside him, in the midst of the army of desert warriors that moved uneasily down the narrow route through the mountains. Her manxthwa murmured and snorted and shook its head as it plodded, apparently oblivious to the prevailing mood of foreboding.

She was trying to reconcile the man at her side with the boy she had first seduced, long ago, in her capacity as a spy for the Libera Dramach. It was no good. He was no great warrior – his skills lay in tactics, and he never fought in the frontline like some Baraks did – but he certainly looked like one now. Once he had been shy and uncertain of himself; now he was lordly and assured, and people responded to that and followed him.

Asara had watched that change, due in no small part to her. Having a lover and later a wife of such staggering beauty did wonders for his self-esteem. She had been unfailingly supportive and loyal, guiding him towards strength, and he had done whatever she suggested. When he was with her, he believed he could achieve anything, and believing made it so. Four years had passed swiftly for her. At her age, time was accelerating faster and faster. She had the body and face of a twenty-harvest goddess, but the soul of a woman of ninety.

However, things were not as they were. A cloud had gathered over their relationship and was darkening rapidly. He was asking about her past, and he would not let it lie. His love for her was poisoning him. His imagination fashioned dozens of different scenarios that he tested her with to see her reaction: desperate suggestions as to how she might have lived her childhood, as if she might give away some signal when he struck on the right one. It had become an obsession, a worm of doubt that had grown into something monstrous and gnawed him inside, feeding on the magnitude of his passion for her. Had she not won him so utterly, he might have managed to be content with ignorance; but she had long experience of men and their ways, and she knew that this would consume him until he was either satisfied or driven to some mad act. She had known men slay their partners in frustration when in the throes of such torment, or cast themselves from cliffs.

Even a lie would not be enough, now. Soon it would be time to leave.

Her whole life had been a sequence of transitory episodes, always forced to move on as her nature became apparent. Eventually people noticed that she did not become old, or that she healed from wounds uncommonly fast, or that people had a strange tendency to die in any place where she settled. The Sleeping Death had struck several times in the last few weeks, causing consternation among the men and fears of a plague. It was unwise, but Asara was hungry. Hungrier, in fact, than she had ever been. And she knew exactly why; had suddenly, unequivocably understood when she woke in the night less than a week past.

She was pregnant with Reki’s child.

Even the Libera Dramach, where her Aberrancy was acceptable and known to some, she must leave behind now. Cailin would learn in the end that Kaiku had been persuaded into completing her part of the bargain struck with Asara long ago. Asara was beholden to Cailin no more. She had what she wanted. But Kaiku’s misgivings at allowing her to become pregnant would be shared by Cailin. It was simply not politic to let Asara breed, to run the risk of allowing her to become the first of a race of beings that could change their outward shape at will.

Asara believed that Cailin would kill her if she ever knew. And kill her children too. So she would never return to Araka Jo, nor ever have any part of the Libera Dramach or the Sisters again.

Then why not go now?
said the new voice in her mind, the voice that thought of her child first and only and always.
You have what you want from him. If you make yourself part of this battle, you could die; and what you carry is too precious to lose. You have a duty to survive now
.

But as much as she believed that, she could not leave. There was one thing left to do.

A cry from somewhere in the army brought her attention sharply back to her surroundings, and, seeing that everyone was looking up, she followed their gaze, and saw the Aberrants.

They were swarming down one side of the pass, a heaving mass of claws and fur and hide and teeth; and there, on the other side, more of them, coming from behind as well.

‘How did we not see them?’ Reki cried, unsheathing his sword. He turned to the Sister that rode nearby. ‘How did you not know?’

Her expression was grim; she did not seem surprised or horrified, but resigned. ‘They have learned to disguise themselves well,’ she said.

Reki shot her a look of disgust and dismissed her with a snort. The sound of rifles was crackling along the flanks of the army as they arranged themselves defensively. The gods only knew what chance they would have against this. The Aberrants kept coming, thundering down the sides of the pass.

‘Stay with me, Asara,’ he said; then he muttered a quick prayer to Suran, and the first of the Aberrants reached them.

The pale light of Nuki’s eye grew over Adderach, illuminating madness.

The oldest monastery of the Weavers was a testament to the insanity that saturated their kind. Though the other monasteries were similarly chaotic in their architecture, nothing came close to the nightmarish creation that they had raised on the spot where they had first found a witchstone, where Aricarat had ensnared them and turned them, unknowing, to his will.

It towered at the foot of Mount Aon, built primarily of stone the colour of sand, a bewildering agglutination of forms fused together in a pile that possessed a fractured logic all its own. Domes like bubbles poked out at odd angles from brickwork that varied wildly in size and shape. Walls slumped or curved, perhaps once intended to encircle something but never completed. Surreal statues, dream-images both fascinating and terrifying, were frozen in place, scattered randomly about the surroundings or growing out of the monastery itself. Walkways jabbed from the main body of the structure, half-completed. Spires tipped crazily, corkscrewing along their length.

The monastery sprawled in all directions. Half of the place was derelict, as were the majority of the outbuildings, which were themselves incredible demonstrations of caprice. Most of them looked ridiculous, but some showed hints of genius in their construction that the best sane minds in the Empire had never come close to matching.

Where the Weavers’ ideas came from, even they did not know. But just as the Masks took pieces of their owners and passed them on, so did they possess pieces of their progenitor. The knowledge they contained – most of it far beyond the grasp of the Weavers’ minds – would reveal itself in dreams and visions and moments of insight that the Weavers could not possibly have attained by themselves. Through the addle of benighted understanding, revelations were glimpsed like lanterns in the fog, some so incomprehensible that they sent their witnesses further into madness, and others lying just on the cusp of reason, that the Weavers might act on. Strange mathematics, unheard-of techniques of manufacture, combinations of reagents that would produce astounding results, patterns of logic: ideas, ideas, ideas.

The Weavers were inefficient conduits for their unseen master, but eventually the results leaked through. For every thousand misfires there was one moment of shocking clarity, and the Weavers built on these. Beneath the anarchy of Adderach there was cold, hard purpose.

The Tkiurathi attacked in the early morning, not long after they received the news that Reki’s forces had been ambushed. They had crept inward from the perimeter as the dawn broke, their progress cloaked by the power of the Sisters. When the first of the gristle-crows began to appear, the Red Order deflected them so that they turned away and looked elsewhere. Once a Weaver surveyed their area, his attention crackling over them, but he was easily blinded by his skilful opponents. The Weavers were evidently not on any alert: after all, they had been steadily tracking the progress of Reki and his men for days now, and knew exactly where they were. They were confident of having their enemy safely within their grasp.

As Cailin had hoped, they did not expect an assault from the north.

When the moment came, the Tkiurathi broke cover at a run, howling battle-cries. Kaiku ran in the rearguard with some of the other Sisters. There were perhaps two hundred Aberrants, scattered across the rocky surrounds of Adderach as guards. As soon as they noticed the enemy, they raced to intercept.

Two hundred Aberrants could have done a lot of damage, even to such consummate warriors as the Tkiurathi, but they did not coordinate themselves, instead rushing at the army in clots and drabs. The Tkiurathi took them to pieces.

Kaiku felt a surge of fierce joy at the sight of Adderach, revealed there before her as the incline bottomed out and they rounded an outthrust root of the colossal Mount Aon, which rose into the insipid sky to her right. The proximity of their target and the battle ahead served to stir her from the maudlin reverie she had sunk into ever since she had removed the Mask the night before. Gods, even now she could remember the awful joy of it, and half her mind was telling her to take it from inside her dress and put it on, that she would seem so much more fearsome and formidable wearing it over her face. But she was already wearing one mask, that of the Red Order. She told herself that it was enough to serve her, and held onto that one to stave away the temptations of the other.

She caught sight of Tsata at the fringe of the horde, but then he was gone again. She had only a glimpse of him, his face fiercely intense as he swept toward a rampaging group of furies, and then the Weavers attacked.

The force of it was staggering. The Sisters had not expected such
rage
. Their enemies came through the Weave like demons, with a vigour beyond anything Kaiku had ever faced from them. They were angry at being duped, that much was evident; but more, they were angry that women were here, that they had penetrated the sanctuary of man this way and appeared, uninvited, so close to the heart of them. And under that anger they were desperately afraid, because they knew now that they had made a mistake and that their adversaries were close enough to reach their most precious treasure.

That first clash was a brutal one, and the Sisters almost buckled under the power of it, for they could not devote all their resources to the combat while they were still attending to the physical world in some degree. They were hampered by the necessity of running towards the monastery, and were fighting on the fly. But the Weavers’ rage worked against them and made them clumsy, and after the shock of the initial impact the Sisters rallied and fought back, spinning traps and tricks into their path.

Kaiku was guarded by several Tkiurathi, as were the other Sisters, and she took her cues from their movements as to where to place her feet while she looked into the Weave. She was darting and shuttling, meshing with the efforts of her companions, as if she were one of a dozen needles working in perfect unison to knit fabric. She felt a blaze of satisfaction as the Weavers ran into their traps, or pulled up short to avoid them. Those that were too slow became ensnared and were pulled to pieces by the Sisters, or lost themselves in closed labyrinths, leaving their bodies in a drooling, vegetative state while their minds ceaselessly wandered.