The Ascendancy Veil (2 page)

Kaiku’s gaze roamed across the town, across the broken shrines and sundered houses, the streets where men and women fought running skirmishes with shrillings and furies and worse. Gristle-crows soared high on the thermals overhead, providing a literal birds-eye view for their Nexus masters. But these were enemies she knew, creatures she had dealt with many times in the four years since this war had begun. She turned her attention to the authors of the town’s downfall.

There were two of them, one down by the shore and another rearing over the treeline on the hilltop.
Feya-kori
: ‘blight demons’ in the Saramyrrhic mode used for speaking of supernatural beings. They were forty feet high: drooling, lumbering, foetid things in a mocking approximation of human shape, distorted figures with long, thick arms and legs, that walked on all fours and seethed a dire miasma as they moved. They were formed of some kind of noisome, roiling sludge that dripped and spattered, and where it touched it spread fire and rot, causing leaves to crinkle and wood to decay. They had no faces, merely a bulge between their shoulders, in which burned incandescent orbs that trailed luminous gobbets. They moaned plaintively to each other as they went about their destruction, their mournful cries accompanying the slow, idiot savagery of their actions.

As Kaiku watched, one of them waded out into the lake. The waters hissed and boiled, and a black patina began to spread from where its limbs plunged. She felt her stomach sink as she saw its intention. It forged its way towards one of the Empire’s junks, and with a doleful groan it raised one stump of a hand and brought it crashing down onto the vessel, breaking it in half and setting men and sails aflame. Kaiku closed her eyes reflexively and turned away, but even then she could feel the force of the demons’ presence through the Weave, a blasphemous dark pummelling at her consciousness.

The other feya-kori was surging out of the forest, leaving a vile scar of browning foliage and collapsing trees in its wake. It smashed an arm into the nearest rooftops, wanton in its malice. Five of Kaiku’s Sisters had already died attempting to tackle the feya-kori. All over Juraka the order to retreat was spreading, and the forces of the Empire were pulling back to the south-west.

Then she sensed the spidery movement of a Weaver down in the streets below, heard the distant screams of soldiers, and the rage and sorrow in her heart found a target.

If I cannot stop this
, she promised herself,
I will at least take one of them in payment
.

She stalked away from the administrative complex, out through the prayer gate with its eloquent paean to Naris, god of scholars, and into the narrow, sloping streets beyond.

Blood ran in chain-link trickles between the cobbles, inching slowly downhill from the bodies of men and women and the foetally curled corpses of Aberrant predators. Kaiku experienced a moment of bitter humour at how Aberrants, which were created by the Weavers in the first place, were simultaneously their greatest resource and their greatest opponents. She and all the other Sisters were a product of the same process that had spawned monstrosities like the ghauregs. She was certain that the gods, watching from the Golden Realm, never tired of laughing at the way events had turned out.

She passed swiftly between the newly scarred buildings, little fearing the creatures that ran amok in the alleys. Wooden balconies and shop-fronts gaped emptily as if in shock at how they had been deserted. Carts and rickshaws were left where they had been abandoned in the rush to evacuate the townsfolk. A crackle of rifle fire sounded up the hill as dozens of soldiers wasted their ammunition in a futile attempt to hurt the demon that was battering its way towards the lake from the treeline.

The screams she had heard were louder now. She sensed the stirring of the Weave like coiling tentacles, the Weaver’s ugly manipulation of the invisible fabric beneath the skin of the waking world. She hated them, hated their clumsiness in comparison to the Sisters’ elegant sewing, hated their brutal way of forcing nature to their will. She fed her rage as she approached, concealing her presence from the Weaver with a few deft evasions.

The street opened out into a junction of three major thoroughfares. The heart of the junction was a cobbled area in which stood a bronze statue of a catfish, depicted as if swimming upward towards the sky, its torso curved and fins and whiskers trailing. It was the animal aspect of Panazu, god of rivers, storms and rain and – by extension – lakes. An appropriate choice for a town on the shore of the greatest lake on the continent. Two-storied buildings leaned in close, their shutters hanging open, cracked plant pots outside and wooden walls riven by holes from rifle balls.

This had been one of the critical defensive points of Juraka, and had been fortified accordingly with barricades and a pair of fire-cannon. But such measures were useless against Weavers. Without a Sister of the Red Order to counter him, the Weaver had muddled the soldiers’ minds and thrown them into rout. Aberrants had overrun the unmanned positions and were tearing into their panicking prey. The Weaver was nowhere to be seen.

Kaiku did not waste time considering how this predicament had come about. There should have been a Sister here to protect the soldiers, but the Red Order was in dis-array across the town. Instead she stood brazenly at one end of the junction and opened up the Weave. The air stirred around her, rippling her dress and ruffling her tawny hair where it lay across one side of her face. She surrendered herself to the ecstasy of Weaving.

The pure joy of disembodiment, of witnessing the raw stuff of creation in an endless profusion of glittering threads, was enough to drive the untrained to madness. But Kaiku had been there many times, and she had mantras and methods of self-control that anchored her against that first tidal wash of narcotic harmony. She saw the tears and rents left by the Weaver’s passing, felt his influence extending into the golden stitchwork dolls that were the soldiers, twisting their perceptions, making them confused and helpless.

He was unaware of her yet, and she used that. She slipped closer, winding along fibres, darting from strand to strand so that the emanations of her approach would be subtle and widely spread, faint enough to be missed in amongst the throb of the demons’ presence. She could locate him with ease: he was in the upper storey of an old cathouse overlooking the junction. This Weaver was young and careless, for despite his power he did not notice her until she was close enough to strike him.

She did not strike him, however. Even angry as she was, she knew the risks that facing a Weaver entailed. Instead, she slid into the fibres of the beams that held up the roof of the cathouse, securing herself along their length to obtain the necessary mental leverage. The best way to kill a Weaver, she had found, was to do it indirectly.

In one violent twist, she ripped the beams apart.

The explosive detonation caused by shredding the fibres of the Weave created enough concussion to blow the shutters of the cathouse off their hinges. Flame billowed from the topmost windows; boards splintered and went spinning end over end through the air. The roof caved in, crushing the Weaver beneath it. The reverberations of the death flashed out across the Weave in a frantic pulse and slowly faded away.

One less of you, then
, Kaiku thought, as the Weave faded from her vision.

The soldiers were coming to their senses, disorientated at finding themselves in the midst of an attack. Some were too slow to react, and were cut to pieces by the Aberrants that swarmed among them; but others were faster, and they brought their swords to bear. There were enough remaining to put up a resistance yet, and they did so with sudden and fierce anger.

Kaiku walked among them, slaying Aberrants as she went. With a wave of her hand she burst organs and shattered bone, tossed the creatures away or burned them to tallow and char. The soldiers, shouting hoarse rallying cries to one another, fought with renewed heart. Kaiku joined the cry, venting a deep and nameless hatred for what had been done to her, to her land, to these people; and for a time she steeped herself in blood.

Presently, there were no more enemies to fight. She came to herself as if from a vague and shallow trance. The junction was quiet now, a charnel house of bodies rank with the stink of gore and ignition powder. The soldiers were congratulating themselves and watching her warily, suspicious of their saviour. One of them took a step towards her, as if to offer her thanks or gratitude, but his step faltered and he turned aside, pretending that he was shifting his feet. She could see them arguing quietly as to who should do the honourable thing and acknowledge her help, but the fact that no one would do it of their own free will rendered it hollow. Gods, even now she was
Aberrant
to them.

‘We should go,’ said Phaeca, who had appeared at her shoulder. When Kaiku did not respond, the Sister laid a hand gently on her arm.

Kaiku made a soft noise of acknowledgement in her throat, but she did not move. The feya-kori from uphill was coming closer, its funereal moans preceding the jagged sounds of the destruction it was wreaking.

‘We should go,’ Phaeca repeated, quietly insistent, and Kaiku realised that she had tears standing in her eyes, tears of raw fury and disappointment. She wiped them with the back of her hand and stalked away, overwhelmed by a prescient feeling that the desperate war they had been fighting for their homeland had just turned fundamentally, and not in their favour.

Sasako Bridge lay a little over thirty miles south-west of Juraka, spanning the Kespa as part of the winding Prefectural Highway. The terrain was hilly and forested right down to the banks of the river, and the road skulked its way between great shoulders of land that, in days gone by, had provided perfect points of ambush for bandits and thieves preying on the trade caravans which used this route in times of peace. The bridge itself was a hidden treasure: an elegant arch of white, supported by a fan of pillars that emerged from the centre of the river on either side of the thoroughfare like the spokes of two skeletal wheels. It had been worked from an extremely hard wood that had weathered little with time, and the careful etchings and votive iconography on the pillars and parapets were still clear after many centuries, though some of the scenes and characters and beasts they depicted had been lost to all but the most scholarly minds.

Now, with the retreat at Juraka, Sasako Bridge had become the key point in holding the eastern line against the armies of the Weavers.

The rain began at dusk, soaking the canvas tents of the army of the Empire. Sasako Bridge was the fallback point if Juraka was lost. A defensive infrastructure had been built here long ago against just this eventuality. Stockade walls and guard-towers were already in place; fire-cannons and mortars lay hidden among the folds of the hills. Sasako Bridge was the only spot where an army could cross the Kespa, unless they cared to head seventy miles south to Yupi Bridge – similarly guarded – or even further into the swamps, where the city of Fos watched over the Lotus Arch. If they were coming – and they undoubtedly were – then they would be coming through here.

Kaiku stood in the songbird-house, high up on the flank of a forested slope, and looked out over the hills to the river. The embroidered wall-screens had been opened to the west, for the cool breeze was blowing the rain against the opposite side, and the pale light of the moon Neryn bathed the view in spectral green. Lanterns glimmered down there among the glistening boughs, evidence of the sprawling camp hidden below the canopy of the foliage. The Kespa was just visible through the overlapping flanks of land, making its way steadily from Lake Azlea in the north towards the swamplands in the south and the ocean beyond. The air was alive with the restful hiss and patter of the downpour, and the insects had fallen silent under the barrage.

The troops of the Empire had found the songbird-house abandoned when they first began to set up fortifications here, and taken it as their own. It was a tender memory of days that already seemed impossibly distant, when the high families’ domination of the Empire was unchallenged, as it had been for a thousand years until the Weavers had usurped them and thrown them into a savage war to preserve their own existence. Then, noble families often owned a songbird-house, a secluded love-nest bedecked with romantic finery – including songbirds – which was employed by newlyweds or young couples, or parents who wanted a little peace from their offspring.

Kaiku gave a small, involuntary sigh. It had been four years since the war began; but her war had begun almost a decade ago. Would she have even recognised herself if she had met the woman she was to become? Would she have ever imagined she might be wearing the make-up of the Red Order? She remembered a time when she had found it ghoulish. Now she enjoyed painting it on. It gave her a new strength, made her feel as fearsome as she appeared. Strange, the effect that wearing such a Mask could have; but if she had learned one thing in these ten years, it was that there was power in Masks.

She thought of the True Mask that had once belonged to her father, its leering face blazing in her mind like the sudden appearance of the sun. It came to her unbidden, as it always did, but as she forced it away it tugged at her with promises that would not easily fade.

Needing to distract herself, she turned back to face the room, where others were gathering for conference. It was wide and spacious, empty of furniture but for a low, oval table of black wood in its centre, upon which vases of guya blossoms and silver trays of refreshments were set. The screens were adorned with depictions of birds in flight and landscapes of lakes and mountains and forests, and mats for sitting on were laid across the polished wood floor. Servants hovered in the corners of the room, where twisting pillars cut from tree boughs held charms and superstitious knickknacks. Even at a hurriedly assembled meeting such as this the rules of etiquette were not ignored.