The Ascendancy Veil (14 page)

‘I am here,’ she said.

There was a silence for a time. ‘You faded away for a while.’

‘It takes more than that to kill a Sister,’ she replied, with a faint chuckle that hurt too much to continue. Then, because the bravado felt good, she added: ‘I told you to trust me.’

‘You did,’ Phaeca agreed.

Kaiku swallowed against a dry throat. ‘Where are we?’

‘The building belongs to a gang. I don’t know their name.’

‘Are we prisoners?’

‘No.’

‘Not even . . . did they see our eyes?’

‘Of course,’ Phaeca said. ‘They know we’re Aberrants. I could scarcely conceal it from them.’

Kaiku sat up slowly and felt lightheaded. Phaeca put out a hand to help her, but Kaiku waved her off. She steadied herself, took a few breaths, and raked her tawny hair back.

‘What will they do? What did you tell them?’

‘I told them the truth,’ said Phaeca simply. ‘What they will do is up to them. We’re in no state to do anything about it.’

Kaiku frowned. ‘You are very calm.’

‘Should I be scared of
men?
After what we saw in the pallpits?’ Phaeca’s face was wry. ‘I think they already knew of us. I believe they believed me. Aberrants are the least of their worries here in the Poor Quarter. And now we are not the scapegoat for all the world’s ills, people like these have found somewhere new to put their hate.’

Kaiku looked around the room. It smelt of mildew. The wooden walls were greened with mould, and the beams were dank. A few dirty pillows were thrown in one corner, and a heavy drape hung across the doorway. No lantern burned here; they must have been sitting in the dark.

Kaiku noticed then the bandages around her friend’s legs, beneath the bloodied tatters of her trousers. ‘Spirits, Phaeca, you’re hurt too.’ She remembered what had happened as she said it.

‘Not as badly as you were,’ she replied, and there was something in her eyes, some depth of gratitude that words were inadequate to express. She looked away. ‘I’ll deal with it later. Until then, you rest.’

Kaiku sagged, and Phaeca put her arm round her friend again, letting her rest her head. ‘I am tired,’ Kaiku murmured.

They heard footsteps, and the drape was pulled back. Kaiku did not even rouse herself from Phaeca; her muscles were too heavy. Two men came in: one was very tall and thickly bearded; the other had shaggy brown hair and a rugged, pitted face, and when he spoke Kaiku saw that his teeth were made of brass.

‘We’ve been talking,’ he said, without introduction or preamble.

Phaeca looked at him squarely. ‘And what have you decided?’

The brass-toothed man squatted down in front of them. ‘We’ve decided that you look like you need a hand.’

Yugi tu Xamata, leader of the Libera Dramach, awoke in his cell at Araka Jo to find Lucia standing at the window, looking out onto the lake. His head was thick with amaxa root. His hookah stood cold in the corner, but the sharp scent remained in the air, evidence of another night of over-indulgence. He sat up on his sleeping-mat, the blanket falling away from his bare shoulders. It was chilly in winter at these altitudes, and there was no glass in the windows, but he had been burning up with narcotic fever last night.

He blinked, frowning, and squinted at Lucia. Whether by a trick of the morning light or his own mind, she looked ethereal, her slender form transparent, her thin white-and-gold dress a veil. Yugi had never known Lucia’s mother, but he was told that she resembled Anais strongly in her petite, pretty features and the pale blonde colour of her hair. But there the similarity ended: the hair was cut short and boyish, revealing the appallingly trenched and rucked scar-flesh at the back of her neck, and her light blue eyes told a story that nobody else could share. She was eighteen harvests of age, and the child he had watched grow had gone, replaced by something beautiful and alien.

He coughed to clear his throat of the taste of last night’s excesses. When Lucia did not react, he dispensed with politeness. ‘What are you doing here, Lucia?’

After a long moment, Lucia turned her head to him. ‘Hmm?’

‘You’re in my room,’ Yugi said patiently. ‘Why are you in my room?’

She seemed puzzled by that for a moment. She glanced around the cell as if wondering how she got there: great blocks of weathered white stone draped with simple hangings, a wicker mat covering the floor, a small table, a chest, other odds and ends scattered about. Then she gave him a smile as innocent as an infant’s.

‘We want to see you.’

‘We?’

‘Cailin and I.’

Yugi sighed and sat up further, the blankets sloughing to his waist. His upper torso was almost smooth of hair, but several long cicatrices tracked over the skin, old wounds from long ago. He did not like the way she phrased her words, the implication that Lucia and Cailin had decided to summon him together. Cailin was held in altogether too high a regard by this girl, and that was dangerous. He knew what Cailin was like.

‘What’s this about?’

‘News from Axekami,’ she said, and did not elaborate. ‘We’ll be by the lake.’

Yugi decided not to bother asking her any more questions. ‘I’ll come and find you.’

Lucia gave him another smile, and turned to leave. As she did so, the hookah overturned with a crash, spilling ash and charred root onto the mat. Yugi jumped.

‘He doesn’t like the way you make his room smell,’ Lucia said, and then went out through the drape.

Yugi got up and dressed himself. The cold chased off the tatters of sleep. He set the hookah back upright and tidied the ash away, annoyed. The spirit had never managed anything quite so violent before. He could sense it there, a tall black smudge just on the edge of his vision, but he knew that if he looked at it directly, it would be gone. It was a peripheral thing, seen only from the corner of the eye. A weak ghost, like the hundreds of others that haunted Araka Jo, clots of congealed memory that dogged the present.

Outside his cell was a walkway of the same ubiquitous white stone that formed the bones of the complex. On one side was a long row of cells like his own, simple rectangular doorways; the other was open to the view.

It was something to wake up to, he had to admit that, even though the dregs of last night were somewhat blunting his appreciation. The ground sloped down to a wide road, again of white and aged stone, and beyond that it swept up, to where the scalloped slate roofs of the temples showed among the jagged green treetops. The swoop and swell of the mountainside hid dozens of them, all linked by dirt paths or flagged walkways that wound through the pines and kijis and kamakas. They were solid and crude in comparison to modern temples, but their form gave them a gravity that was primal and brooding, and the bas-relief friezes on their entablatures depicted scenes heavy with forgotten myth.

Araka Jo was ancient and in partial ruin, several of the temples little more than outlines of their original floorplan surrounded by mossy rubble. Despite the unfamiliar presence of inhabitants again – it had become the Libera Dramach’s home these past few years – it still felt as if they were intruders there. The spirits never let them forget it.

There was a stone basin near his doorway, from which he splashed icy water on his face to wake himself. Once he was done, he removed the dirty rag from his forehead and wet his hair, smoothing it back into untidy spikes before reattaching the rag. He had slept in it, as usual.

That done, he went to find some lathamri. People were up and about even at this early hour, travelling to and fro along the roads of the complex, on visits and errands and business. Several people he greeted on his way, the cheery façade snapping into place automatically. Everyone knew him as the leader of the community. Unlike their previous hideout in the Fold, the Libera Dramach did not operate in secret in Araka Jo. Everybody here knew about Lucia, and the organisation that had been built around her. Everybody here was Libera Dramach by allegiance. Anybody who had not been able to stomach that had gone elsewhere in the Southern Prefectures.

He turned off the thoroughfare to where a side-road was lined with wooden stalls, feeling exhausted even by that short journey. The tiredness was not physical – he had always been healthy as a mule – but a weariness of spirit that weighed him down. His smile felt false now, more so than ever before: he was forced to use it too much. The people needed him to be positive, looked to him as an indicator of their fortunes. He could not afford to show weakness. He could not afford to let them know that he did not want to lead them any more.

Between the stalls were rows of stone idols, strange crouching things that had been smoothed by centuries of rain and wind. Their slitted, blank eyes stared across the side-road at each other, over the heads of the people who milled between them. Some kind of guardian spirits? Nobody knew. Araka Jo had been built in the early years after landfall, the result of a splinter religion taking advantage of the new freedom to explore their beliefs. They must have been particularly numerous and industrious to have created a complex of temples the size of a small town. Perhaps it was a mountain retreat, a place of prayer and meditation. But its purpose and its creators had been lost to history, and it had been abandoned. The folk of Saramyr were not interested in ruins.

Yugi bought a mug of lathamri from a merchant and drank it while staring at the statues. Frightening how easily the past could be forgotten. He wondered how the previous inhabitants might have felt, labouring towards what they thought was a great work, if they knew that mere centuries later nobody would know or care what they had done it for.

Perhaps they would have appreciated the irony, he thought. It was Saramyr’s blithe ignorance of its past that now threatened its future.

The hot, bitter drink awakened him enough to face dealing with Cailin and Lucia, so he returned the mug to the merchant with a coin inside it and left. It was an old tradition: if the drink was not drained then the coin would be wet, so it was only polite to finish it all. Strange, Yugi thought as he walked away, that traditions linger long past the time that their origins had been lost to memory, yet the lessons of history can fade in a generation.

He headed back towards the building where his cell was, and over to the other side, where the lake lay. It was a bracingly cool and crisp day, and while there was no dew on the grass the air felt moist. He slept in what had once been the living-quarters of the worshippers who had built the place. There were about twenty of that type of building scattered around the complex, identically white and rectangular, differentiated by the carvings and sculptures on their corners. They were spartan and austere inside, being merely corridors and cells with a central atrium for cooking and washing, but Yugi did not overly mind. Some days he thought about moving down into the village that had been built around the lower slopes of the complex to house the overflow, but to do so would cause gossip, and now was not the time for rumours. Everything he did was political, whether he wanted it or not. He wished he had Mishani’s faculty to enjoy that kind of life.

Beyond the building there was a long, grassy slope down to the shore of Lake Xemit. A dirt path led to a large boathouse from which fishermen issued across the water. Trees encroached in copses here and there, but not enough to obscure the magnificent view. Folk were scattered about, some talking, others on their way from one place to another. It was easy to forget the famine even existed here, in the heart of the Southern Prefectures. Life went on, regardless.

Yugi spotted Cailin and Lucia and made his way towards them. As he went, he looked out over the lake to the horizon. Lake Xemit was colossal: forty-five miles across and nearly two hundred and fifty long. It was the second largest inland body of water in Saramyr after Lake Azlea, cradled between two mountain ranges.

He had been to the other side once before, during the assault on Utraxxa. It had been one of the most famous victories of the last four years. An ancient Weaver stronghold, deep in the heart of the Southern Prefectures. Though cut off from the other Weavers after the forces of the Empire had consolidated, it still exuded its foulness into the earth, still spawned more Aberrant predators to harry the troops of the Empire from within. Protected by the mountains, it took two years before the high families, led by Barak Zahn, managed to penetrate the monastery. Though the Weavers destroyed everything of value, even the witchstone itself, it was a triumph in the eyes of the people.

It was that, more than any other incident, that gave the men and women of the Empire the strength to fight on through the long years of war. The Weavers, who for so many generations had been held as mysterious and unfathomable beings by the common folk, were only mortal. They could be beaten. The fight could be won.

They needed another victory like Utraxxa, Yugi thought. He needed one.

Lucia and Cailin were walking together slowly, talking. It irked him that Cailin was the only one whom Lucia ever seemed attentive to; with most people she had a frustrating air of distraction. Yugi could not help noticing the odd behaviour of the wildlife as he approached: the way the ravens in the trees never stopped watching her, the cat that unobtrusively tracked her from downslope, the rabbits who would hop and hide, hop and hide, yet always keeping abreast of her. Natural enemies, yet with Lucia about they were not interested in each other.

Cailin noticed him coming and they stopped to let him catch up. She was a little taller than he was, her face painted like those of all the Sisters, her black hair drawn back through a jewelled comb into twin ponytails and a thin silver circlet set with a red gem placed around her forehead. Her sheer black dress and ruff of raven feathers lent her a somewhat predatory aspect, adding to the air of cool superiority she exuded. Yugi wondered how well her arrogance would stand up in bed, whether her icy exterior would shatter in the throes of orgasm; then he caught himself, and forced the thought away.