The Ascendancy Veil (35 page)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

‘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?’

Lucia looked around helplessly. ‘I see nothing.’

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.’

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

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.

‘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.

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))

Lucia’s pale eyes were cold as she looked into the mist. ‘Whether by Aricarat’s plan, or by that of the other gods.’

Lucia’s jaw clenched. It took some time for her to realise that she was furious.

‘Then the gods are spiteful,’ she said, ‘that they should make us pay for their ineptitude. They should have made certain of their enemy the first time.’

((Even gods make mistakes))
the Xhiang Xhi replied.
((Your people have a story, of the Grey Moth and the Skein of Lament, that attests to your belief in that))