The Ascendancy Veil (41 page)

‘Without exception,’ Heth said on her other side.

‘There was little doubt they would. It is a matter of pash,’ Tsata explained.

‘Gods, it seems such a short time since we came back,’ Kaiku mused, then she glanced at Heth. ‘How are you?’

‘I grieve,’ he said. ‘But Peithre has been returned to her people. I am thankful for that.’

Kaiku nodded, closing her eyes. In the Forest of Xu, Heth had refused to relinquish Peithre’s body until he had brought her back to the village. In the end, he and Tsata had gone separately from the others, for her corpse, even wrapped as it was, had begun to reek of decay. But still Heth would not bury her or burn her. Kaiku did not know what the rites of honouring the dead were in Tkiurathi culture, but she was sure that there had been something beyond mere companionship between Heth and Peithre.

‘Our course is set, then,’ she said. ‘One way or another, I think we come to the last movement of our war.’

The meeting of the day before had been coordinated, via the Sisters, with Barak Reki tu Tanatsua and several other desert Baraks in Izanzai. Mishani’s information had been shared among all, though its source had been kept carefully secret for fear of compromising Muraki. Its most pertinent and pressing aspect was this: that the Weavers planned a massive surprise assault upon Saraku in the near future. Saraku, the centre of debate and administration, formed the heart of the Empire’s resistance as well as being where most of the nobles and high families resided. If Saraku were to fall then the Weavers would have an all but unassailable foothold deep behind the frontline. From there, they could strike at Machita or Araka Jo, or demolish the marshland cities to the east. Once the Prefectures were secured, they could overwhelm Tchom Rin at their leisure.

But there was hope as well. For if the Weavers could be kept out of the Prefectures until the harvest could be gathered, then the tide might turn.

‘But we will not be able to keep them out,’ Cailin had said. ‘Not even with the information we have. We may be able to turn back the assault on Saraku, but they will strike at us again elsewhere before the summer. Unless they are forced to devote some of their forces to defending their territories. We must prove to them that nowhere is safe. We must attack Adderach.’

Cailin had been the loudest voice advocating an attack on Adderach since Kaiku’s visit to Axekami, but now she found she had support at last. Lucia’s return had given them hope, a belief that they could face down the previously invincible feya-kori. And with their morale so restored, they were a little more inclined to consider the prospect, however uncertain or unlikely, of ending the war in one strike. They knew now that the Weavers’ forces did not number as many as they had believed, and that the Aberrants and Nexuses were disastrously overstretched: the Weavers were using them as an attacking force and relying primarily on the Blackguard to keep order in the cities. It was entirely possible that Adderach would only be lightly defended, for it sat deep in enemy territory and was undoubtedly protected by the Weavers’ shields of misdirection. The Weavers had consistently shown themselves to be inept at tactical thinking, and Adderach was one place they would certainly not have let the Lord Protector look after. Cailin had cleverly slanted her pitch so that the chance to get at the Weavers’ witchstones – which was her primary concern – was barely mentioned. Whether they were successful in that or not, the idea of destroying their enemy’s most prized fortress was too tempting to pass up. And there was an even sweeter aspect to the plan for the high families of the western Empire. None of their troops would be going.

Thus the decision was made and agreed: a three-pointed attack upon the Weavers. The forces of the Libera Dramach and the western Empire would deal with the Saraku assault. Meanwhile, the warriors of Tchom Rin and the Tkiurathi, along with a number of Sisters, would make their way to Adderach. The desert folk would have the most arduous task: a trek along the mountains lengthwise to reach Adderach from the south. The Tkiurathi and Sisters would go by sea, passing through enemy-held waters to land north of Mount Aon. If all went well, the Weavers would be looking south, to the army of desert warriors; and they would not see the attack from the north until it was too late.

But first there was the problem of getting the ships. Lalyara, to the west, was the only feasible option if they wanted to get to Adderach at roughly the same time as the desert folk. There were ships there enough for the Tkiurathi. But a week ago, the port had been blockaded by Weaver vessels. They made no move to attack, only to prevent anything entering or leaving. The Libera Dramach had guessed what the Weavers were up to even before Mishani confirmed it.

The Weavers’ next target was Lalyara. And if they got there before the Tkiurathi did, then half of the assault on Adderach had failed before it had begun.

Later, Kaiku and Tsata walked together in the forest. Kaiku needed some activity to keep her mind off their imminent departure. She knew that time was short, and she was chafing to be away; but organising supplies and equipment to send nearly a thousand men and women to war was not an easy matter, and would take more than a few hours.

It was bright and still and cool, and their feet crunched on twigs as they wandered. They talked idly about things of little importance. Kaiku was trying not to think about the possible consequences of making Asara capable of breeding, and she had fretted about Lucia for so long that she was getting tired of her own voice. They did touch on her feelings about Mishani’s disappearance and her subsequent revelations, but Kaiku was not overly concerned about her friend. Since she had not known Mishani was in danger until she was out of it, she experienced nothing more than a vague sense of relief. It certainly went against Mishani’s character to do something like that, but the fact that Kaiku had not seen it coming only served to remind her how little contact she had had with her friend these past few years, and that saddened her.

Kaiku was acutely aware that this was the first time that she and Tsata had been together alone since their kiss in the Forest of Xu. After that, the death of Phaeca and Peithre and the terrible events surrounding them had made any amorous notions seem wan and forceless amid all the grief. But there was something in Tsata’s manner today, some coiled tension, that expressed itself in quick glances and half-taken breaths to start sentences that never came. There was an urgency in the air, a sense that this might be the last few moments of peace before the storm broke and swallowed them all, and there were things that had to be said between them that would not wait.

Eventually they found a spot where the land humped up and met the lake shore, dropping a dozen rocky feet to the water, which glittered in the sharp winter light. Distant junks cut slowly towards the horizon, and hookbeaks hovered on the thermals, questing for fish. Kaiku and Tsata sat side by side on a fallen tree that had been partially claimed by moss, and beneath the gently waving leaves of the evergreens they came to the moment they had been putting off.

Tsata looked at his hands, caught in an agony of indecision that was so plain that Kaiku had to laugh a little. It broke the tension: he smiled in answer.

‘Your kind are never good at hiding your feelings,’ Kaiku said. ‘Say it, then.’

‘I am afraid to,’ he replied, then looked up at her uncertainly as if to gauge her reaction to this. ‘I fear I still do not know your ways, and you Saramyr place such store by etiquette.’

‘Most of us do. I seem to find it less important than they. Mishani is always telling me how uncultured I am.’ She looked at him with tenderness in her eyes, both wanting and not wanting to hear what he would say. ‘Honesty is better.’

‘But that is one of the things I cannot understand about your people. Though you say you want honesty, you seldom do. You are so in love with evasions that honesty makes you uncomfortable.’

‘Stop hedging, Tsata,’ she said, not unkindly. ‘It does not suit you.’

Eventually he shook his head, as if ridding himself of some annoyance, and clasped his hands together. Kaiku noticed how the pale green tendrils of tattoo that ran along his fingers meshed beautifully when he did so.

‘I cannot do this your way,’ he said. ‘If this were—’

Kaiku ran out of patience. ‘Tsata, do you want me or not?’

The bluntness of this surprised even him. He turned towards her, and in the instant before he spoke she fixed the image of him there, preserving the final moments of flux before certainty solidified their relationship one way or another. This picture she would keep in her mind, as insurance against his reply.

But the reply, when it came, was: ‘Yes.’

A breath passed.

‘Yet it is not that simple for you,’ he continued. ‘Is it?’

Kaiku’s head bowed a little, her hair hanging down across the left side of her face, screening her from him. ‘Simplicity is something that my people do not do well,’ she said.

She felt betrayed by herself, suddenly angry. Gods, had she not waited for this moment for long enough? She knew how she felt about him. She had known it, without admitting it to herself, since those weeks they had spent together in the Xarana Fault four years ago, hunting Aberrants and spying on the Weavers. It had not been a sudden thing, but something so gradual that she had trouble identifying it. In the time he had been away across the sea, she had almost managed to dismiss it as a fancy. Almost. Since he had come back, since that kiss in the forest, she knew it for what it was. Yet in some matters he was so hard to read, and she could never be certain if that feeling was reciprocated. Not until now.

But it was nothing like she had imagined. Instead of a flood of joy, relief,
release
, she felt only an awful weariness, a sour negation of possibilities. Now she knew beyond doubt that he wanted her, she came up against all the barriers that she had carefully constructed in her heart over the years, shoring them up each time she had been wounded. She found that she had built them so well that they would not come down easily.

‘Tsata, I am sorry,’ she said. ‘You deserve a better response than this.’

He looked down at his hands again. She straightened, brushed her hair back behind her ear and turned to him, taking one hand and clasping it in both of hers. She tried to find words that would not be mawkish or hurtful, but she had never been good at expressing herself in this way.

‘I want you also, Tsata,’ she said. ‘I do. That is small comfort to you now, I think, but I want you to know it. Do not doubt that, whatever else.’ She was lost again for a moment, before beginning on a new tack. ‘Since the beginning, everything I thought good and stable has collapsed. My family, my friends, my . . . relationships. The Sisterhood has failed me, too. Perhaps even the Libera Dramach cannot be trusted now; I cannot let myself be sure.’ She gripped his hand harder, willing him to understand. ‘I was beginning to feel love for Tane when he was taken from me; I was betrayed by Saran – by Asara – just as I had allowed myself to believe that there could be something between us. There were men in between, whom I did not love so fiercely, but they, too, ended in betrayal or disappointment.’

He had raised his head now, and was looking at her.

‘Each time I let something or someone close to my heart I am left with a new scar,’ she said, a pleading note in her tone, seeking to make him forgive her. ‘I want to be alone, to need nobody; and yet I see Asara, and what that has made of her, and I know that is no way to go either. But I cannot bear another wound, Tsata. I cannot bear to let myself love you, and then have you killed in the conflict to come, or to return to your homeland and leave me, or to find another woman. Your people do not believe in exclusive pair-bonding.’

‘No,’ he murmured. ‘But you do. And for me, that would be enough.’

She frowned. ‘What do you mean by that?’

‘It is hardly unheard of,’ Tsata said. ‘My people have lived near Saramyr settlements for a thousand years. Tkiurathi have paired monogamously with Saramyr before. Some have even married. It is a matter of personal choice, of redefining the pash.’

‘And you would do that for me?’

‘I would,’ he said. He stared out across the lake. ‘I had been . . . unsure for a long time. I would have spoken of these feelings then, even when I did not know if I wished to do anything about them. But that is our way, and it is not yours. I knew it would cause you confusion and in all probability would have driven you away, so I stayed silent. I did not know if we could ever be together; I thought our cultures too fundamentally different. But then, in the forest, when I saw you defend us against the soldier, when you refused to leave Peithre fallen . . .’ he trailed away, and then turned and looked back at her. ‘That was when I knew.’

And now she felt it, like a physical pressure spreading outward from her chest, a warm swell that filled her. It struck her so suddenly that she had to exhale, a short huff of air that turned into an involuntary smile. But it lasted only a moment, for she forced it down again, knowing what it meant, knowing what it would lead to.

She bit the inside of her lip gently and closed her eyes. Could she live that way, ever guarded, secure and numb? Or was that the beginning of a downward slope from which there was no return? If she came through this war she faced a long, long span of years. Not even the Sisters knew how long. Maybe forever.

She would not face that question now. It had occurred to her before in a more general sense, but it was too vast to deal with. What was the alternative? Again, there could be only one: to shut herself off, to be alone forever, barriered against the world. Cloistered, with the Red Order the only safe company, who would be similarly ageless. That was no option, either. All ways led to pain in the end; it was only a question of time.