The Ascendancy Veil (54 page)

Reki listened with half an ear: he was searching, becoming increasingly frantic.

‘Where is your Barakess?’ he demanded of the people around him. ‘Where is Asara?’

But they could not answer him, and he himself had not seen her since the ghauregs had attacked.

In the end, he did not find her. Not even after the battle was over, and the remainder of the army – almost half its size now – forged on to Adderach in the hope of saving their allies there. Grief-stricken, he stayed with a small retinue and walked the corpse-strewn pass, praying to Suran that she might still somehow be alive.

Perhaps he would have found her, if he had been given time. He would have hunted for her over every inch of Saramyr if there was but the faintest shred of hope. Maybe, when he found her, he would have found her with the child that was his.

But Asara knew that. It was the reason she had disappeared into the mountains, and it was the reason she had smeared her dagger in poison. She had taken the unguent from the master poisoner who had collaborated with the assassin Keroki in an attempt to kill her husband months ago. It would be almost two hours before it would be felt, and by the time it struck it would be too late to remove it and too sudden for even a Sister of the Red Order to do anything but watch.

Barak Reki tu Tanatsua spent the last of his life looking desperately for the woman he loved, not realising that she had already murdered him, as she had murdered his sister long ago.

Cailin, Kaiku and the Tkiurathi emerged from the end of a sloping shaft, and into the sub-levels of Adderach.

Kaiku looked down the corridor that lay before them. It had once been a mine tunnel – that much was evident by the glimpses of rough stone that could occasionally be found – but its surface was almost entirely covered in metal. The walls were thick with black pipes that dripped a noxious liquid; the floor was of iron or some alloy of that. Gas-torches burned with smoky flames, connected by cables that ran along the ceiling.

The Tkiurathi were eager to be on with their task, distrusting their surroundings. They took point, with Cailin and Kaiku just behind and Tsata with them. Kaiku caught his nervousness and laid a hand on his forearm when nobody was looking.

‘
Hthre
,’ she murmured to him, offering the Tkiurathi pledge of mutual support.

Surprised, he grinned at her. ‘
Hthre
,’ he replied. It did not matter that she had got it wrong, that
hthre
was supposed to be the response and not the offer. The sentiment was what counted, and he found it heartened him immensely in this dark and horrible place.

They hurried down the corridors, following Cailin’s directions. Kaiku suspected that the Pre-Eminent did not know exactly where she was going: the witchstone’s influence was overwhelming and made it hard to navigate. But that was a double-edged sword, for it also gave them a very definite target. They merely had to head for the epicentre of that influence, and there would be the witchstone.

But they saw no sign of their enemy at all. There were small rooms, like cells, some of them full of noisy devices and others standing empty and apparently without purpose. They looked into them as they passed by, but did not stop. They had other priorities.

They met up with another group of Tkiurathi and a half-dozen Sisters at a junction, swelling their numbers. Keeping in contact was harder now: it was like trying to shout over a hurricane. The brooding energy beneath them was confusing the Weave, sending it into disarray. Kaiku hoped it would hamper the Weavers as much as it would the Sisters, but somehow she doubted it.

The Sisters and the Tkiurathi were descending from above, spreading out through the tunnels of the old mine, an army of ants invading an enemy nest. But still the enemy would not meet them.

Cailin’s force was the first to come out of the corridors. The claustrophobic tunnels opened into a massive room, bigger than any great hall ever built in Saramyr. It was circular in shape and flat-roofed, and as the invaders poured in from the tunnel they gradually faltered and stood there, aghast, at the sight.

It was stultifyingly hot and oppressive. The air was tinged with a coppery taste and thick with steam and smoke. There were two upper levels to the room: wide, ringed platforms that ran around the edge, walkways of metal. At ground level, furnaces roared from within their casings, glowing red through the vents at their sides and spewing strange gases. Contraptions clattered and jerked, chattering through cycles of activity incomprehensible to the observers.

Placed in concentric rows around the room were elaborate metal cradles. Hanging amid the cradles’ frames were veiny, transparent sacs of flesh that looked like the stomach of some huge animal. Within, there were dark shapes suspended in liquid, lit by a greenish inner glow, visible only as smears from a distance.

Kaiku walked up to one, dazed by the scale of what they had discovered, and knelt down to look inside it.

It was a child, an infant, perhaps three harvests old but out of proportion, its bones too long. Its tiny chest sucked in and out as it breathed the liquid. It was on its side, facing her, and on top of its bald head there was the glistening diamond shape of a nexus-worm female embedded in its flesh. Kaiku could see a face tracked with ridges where the tendrils ran just beneath the skin, reaching to its eyes and mouth and nose, around which thin purple capillaries showed through. Its eyes were open, but they did not follow Kaiku as she moved. They were purest black.

A young Nexus. They grew them here, in these wombs.

Kaiku stared at the thing in the tank, numb. Cailin came up next to her.

‘Is this what knowledge their god gives them?’ Kaiku said. ‘They blaspheme against Enyu herself.’

‘That is not all,’ Cailin said, motioning across the room.

Kaiku got to her feet and went to where a trio of larger cradles stood. The Tkiurathi were gathered around them, talking in hushed tones. She caught a word she knew:
maghkriin
. It was the name they gave to the beings created by the Fleshcrafters in Okhamba, who shaped babies in the bellies of their captured enemies to make them monstrous killers.

As she neared the cradles, she understood.

It was difficult to tell what the things that hung in the sacs had originally been, nor what they might become. But they moved fitfully, here twitching a leg, there curling a claw. They were baby Aberrants, three of the same species but each one different from the other. One was growing little fins along its arms, another was developing outsize teeth, while the last was a true horror with two three-quarter heads fused together in the centre, its animal features colliding and merging. The sacs glowed from within with the same nauseating light which Kaiku recognised as that given off by witchstone.

She had seen what happened to the Edgefathers who were in contact with the witchstone for too long. She knew how the Weavers changed through even the tiny dose of dust in their Masks. The Weavers were using witchstone to mutate these creatures, who were probably themselves the offspring of mutants. Like the Fleshcrafters, they were shaping their troops. Designing Aberrants through forced mutation and selective breeding. Was this where the latchjaws had come from? The nexus-worms? The
golneri?

To Kaiku, the noise of the room faded until she could hear only the sound of her own breathing. The hate in her was choking all else. She wanted to lash out, to ruin this place, to kill every one of the Weavers and eradicate their practices from a world she had once loved. She thought suddenly of Tane, the priest of Enyu who had died to save Lucia, a man who had dedicated himself to understanding nature. How this would have destroyed him. All this time, these two and a half centuries, the Weavers had been learning the dark art of subverting Enyu’s plans, using these poisonous devices to imitate her processes and turn them to their advantage.

She felt a hand on her shoulder.

‘We must go,’ Tsata said. Behind him the Tkiurathi were beginning to move again. They crossed the room and out through the far doorway, the Sisters following behind. Kaiku paused beneath the coiled-iron frame, her shoulders tight.

‘Cailin,’ she said, and the Pre-Eminent, who had been just ahead of her, stopped. She saw the look in Kaiku’s eyes, and nodded.

When the last of the Tkiurathi had left the room, the two of them remained in the doorway, like estranged twins, their appearance uniting them in ways that they did not feel. The only thing between them now was a common goal.

Kaiku waved a dismissive hand, and the sacs detonated from within, spewing a green flood. Those that lined the upper levels burst at the same time, slopping forth their embryonic cargo like rough abortions. A great deluge of the amniotic liquid came splashing over the edge of the walkways and washed around the boots of the Sisters.

‘I wish you would change your mind, Kaiku,’ Cailin said at length. ‘Stay with us. We have need of your strength. And there is so much more you could learn from me.’

But Kaiku turned away and stalked down the corridor after the departing Tkiurathi, and Cailin, after appraising the destruction for a few moments more, followed her.

The first attack on the intruders occurred not long afterward.

It was Cailin who sensed it. She was somehow able to filter through the baffling effect that the witchstone produced, at least to a better extent than Kaiku could. Kaiku’s
kana
was limited to her line of sight now; the very walls seemed infused with the stuff of the witchstone, and it was extraordinarily hard to try and Weave through it. She had only been given hints of how much greater Cailin’s mastery of her
kana
was than her own, for Cailin kept her secrets close; but she was becoming more and more assured that the Pre-Eminent and some of the most proficient Sisters operated in an entirely different league.

What Cailin sensed she rebroadcast with greater clarity for those nearby, and that was how Kaiku learned of it. Garbled empathic impressions of surprise, pain, and combat. Then silence, and the soft ache of death.

Cailin said nothing, but she continued on and the others went with her.

It happened again later, as they hunted through another empty series of rooms. This time it was a bigger group of Sisters and Tkiurathi, and there was a clearer picture. Aberrants, swamping into the corridor, bolstered by Weavers. They were systematically assaulting the Sisters, group by group, taking advantage of the fact that they had to split up to search the complex. This was what they had lured them down here for. They knew their best chance for survival lay in picking the Sisters apart.

But that was not a usual Weaver tactic, Kaiku thought. If they had the strength of numbers, they would have attacked outright. They were delaying until their reinforcements could arrive. They were on the defensive.

As Cailin had hoped, they had been drawn off by Reki’s men, and had not left enough of their forces behind to protect themselves from something like this.

As it turned out, the second group of Sisters were not taken down so easily. The Tkiurathi put up a vicious fight, and it was still ongoing by the time Cailin and Kaiku were ambushed.

The Aberrants boiled out of a side-corridor, filling the junction with their bodies and ploughing towards the Tkiurathi, howling. They almost caught the front line by surprise: they had been virtually soundless in their approach, and the Weavers had cloaked themselves from the Sisters well enough that, in this difficult environment, not even Cailin had detected them. But the soft warbling of the shrillings had given them away at the last moment. The Tkiurathi met the charge with their gutting-hooks sweeping.

The two groups crashed together. The corridors were wide enough for seven or eight to fight at a time, but the Aberrants in their frenzy clambered over the top of the combatants to reach those behind. Most found themselves eviscerated as they did so, their exposed underbellies ripped open and their steaming innards spilling out. The front line of the Tkiurathi collapsed under the weight of the creatures and were either dragged free or savaged. But the Okhambans were taking down the Aberrants faster than they themselves were dying. Their twin-bladed weapons, one in each hand, hacked and plunged and parried. The warriors, men and women both, were possessed of an uncanny harmony of movement that kept their blows from interfering with their neighbour’s even when they were packed tight like this.

The Weavers had made one bad mistake. The Tkiurathi were born for close combat. Their weapons were adapted to its purpose and their fighting technique tailored to those conditions. Life in the jungle had meant that they had evolved short, fast, controlled movements so that they would not tangle their blades in vines or trees, and they had reactions honed by generations of living in one of the most hostile places in the Near World. Here in the confines of the tunnels they outclassed the Aberrants, who were used to the open spaces of the mountains.

The Tkiurathi were as animals themselves when they fought, primal and ferocious, and they dodged and slashed and killed until they were drenched in the blood of their enemies.

Kaiku and the Sisters dealt with the Weavers. There were only four of them, and the Sisters in Kaiku’s group outnumbered them two to one. It was no contest. The Sisters attacked in a whirling chaos of threads and the Weavers’ defences could not stand it. They held out briefly and then collapsed. The Sisters ripped into the fibres of their enemy’s bodies, and the force released by the sundering turned the Weavers to pillars of fire.

With the Weavers gone, they broke the necks of the three Nexuses who were controlling the Aberrants, and the predators collapsed in disarray, some of them fleeing or attacking each other. The Tkiurathi made short work of the rest.

Kaiku caught sight of Tsata nearby. He was breathing hard, flecked in blood, his eyes sharp with an intensity that she only saw when he fought. A quiet and introspective man in the main, his flipside was this feral killer. She wondered briefly what that meant for the future, how deeply that ferocity was suppressed and whether it might one day be turned on her, if she should stay with him. Was he capable of that? How could she tell? How well, in the end, did she know him?