The Ascendancy Veil (53 page)

Cailin had schooled the Sisters ruthlessly in the tactics they would employ, and Kaiku sensed several of the Order tracing away under cover of the battle to find Nexuses. With the Weavers distracted, the Sisters were free to hunt the masters of the Aberrants through the links that were strung between the nexus-worms embedded in both Nexus and predator. It was a discipline that they had learned from Kaiku. She had been able to do it intuitively the first time she tried, back in the Xarana Fault, but it had proved oddly difficult for most of the other Sisters. Now they had the art of it, and the Weavers were too busy to prevent them. They followed the links back to where the Nexuses were and burst their internal organs. The controlling minds behind the Aberrants faded, and those beasts that the Tkiurathi had not killed ran into the safety of the mountains.

At some point during the conflict, Kaiku noted a diffuse spray of threads heading away from them across the golden vista that she operated in. A call for help, directed south. Just as Cailin had planned.

The Sister to Kaiku’s right stumbled, fell with a strangled cry. The Tkiurathi behind her caught her, bearing her up, but Kaiku knew it was useless. The Weavers had got to her. Her essence was destroyed now, and her body was an empty husk, which would soon wind down and stop without the spark of life to empower it.

There were many Weavers here, more than there were Sisters; but the Sisters were better, even with the new tricks that their opponents seemed to learn with every conflict. It would be a hard fight, but it was one they could win. At least until the other Weavers that had been occupied with Reki’s forces joined in.

Time was against them. They had to find and penetrate the witchstone before then, or they would be overwhelmed.

Obsessed with the fight, Kaiku barely noticed the deafening tumult of the Tkiarathi, the thudding of feet and the giddy rush of the charge. The Aberrants had all but ceased to be a threat now, and it was only the Weavers that concerned her. But as she neared the monastery, its baroque and twisted spires reaching high above, she began to notice something else. The witchstone. She could feel it, all the way out here, throbbing through the earth. Its power dwarfed the other witchstones she had come across before, a venomous and malevolent strength like nothing she had ever encountered. If they could sense it all the way out here, what must it be like to stand before it? For the first time, doubts began to creep in.

I will ease your mind
, promised the Mask that was hidden in her dress, close to her breast.

For an instant she faltered, stumbled a little, and in that moment a Weaver slid at her along the Weave like the thrust of a rapier. It was only by Cailin’s intercession that the strike was turned aside: she wrapped the point of the attack in threads like swaddling a hot poker in towels, and thrust it away.

((Kaiku, concentrate!))
came the swift admonishment. Kaiku felt a surge of resentment at being scolded so, and used it to clear her mind of the Mask’s whisperings. Hatred was her ally here, no matter whom it was directed at.

Then they were at one of Adderach’s many walls, a spot between two wings that snaked away like angular tentacles on either side on them. It was curved and bowed inwards, constructed of uneven layers of brick and what looked like whole boulders suspended in a matrix of mortar. The Tkiurathi were bunching around it expectantly.

((With me))
came the order, and Kaiku and several other Sisters broke off portions of their consciousness from the front line of the battle in the Weave and sent them spinning in Cailin’s wake. They sewed themselves along the length of the wall, and it detonated in a blast of sandy powder. It slumped inward on itself, leaving a wide hole, strewn with rubble.

The Tkiurathi headed for the breach and poured inside. Kaiku followed, pulling out of the Weave as she clambered over the shifting chunks of stone amid the flood of tattooed folk. Several Weavers had already fallen, and there were enough Sisters to do without her now.

The morning light brought unbearable brightness to the shadowy interior of the monastery, and it echoed with the sound of the Tkiurathi’s feet and voices. Much of the room was covered in debris, but she could see that it was cavernous, and that its walls were built at drastically uneven angles, higher at one end than the other. A great semicircular opening fringed with what looked like human hair led out of the room. There were other doorways, but they were too small for anything bigger than a dog. The twisted perspective made her head hurt.

Then Tsata was at her side, scrambling up from behind and taking her arm. She welcomed the sight of him; together they ran through the debris and onward, where the Tkiurathi were spreading through the building. Small clashes began as they came across those Aberrants that were still trapped inside.

Adderach was just as demented within as without. Rooms narrowed to nothing; doors had been built but no doorways; corridors were like mazes. Every room brought some new strangeness. They came across a chandelier of crystal hanging incongruously over what looked like a butcher’s table, with fresh and bloody meat strewn everywhere. There was a sculpture twice the height of a man that was shockingly hideous and yet masterfully crafted, standing in a room that had been built with no doors. It was only revealed when one of the Sisters blasted a hole in the wall. One room was round and sloped down towards a circular pit, and from the blackness came hungry howls. There was little they came across that had any obvious purpose, and certainly there seemed to be nothing like dining rooms or other places of gathering. There was only the evidence of a speedy evacuation: food and rubbish everywhere, fires left burning while stew bubbled over, torches still blazing where they had been dropped. Kaiku had expected to find golneri everywhere, the diminutive servants of the Weavers, but while the presence of cooking equipment and their footprints in the dust suggested that they were around, there were none to be seen.

There were, however, dead Nexuses. Their elongated bodies, freakishly tall and thin and clad in black robes, were twisted in the throes of death. They lay in various contortions, blood weeping through the eyeholes of their blank white masks. Kaiku’s stomach turned as she remembered what she had seen when they had looked beneath those masks. Tsata, who had shared her experience, gripped her shoulder reassuringly; she laid her hand on the back of his in acknowledgement.

These, then, were the Nexuses who had been coordinating the small defence force outside. And yet still it all seemed too easy, and there were too few of them.

She rushed from room to room with Tsata and several other Tkiurathi, often backtracking as they were foiled by the Weavers’ architecture, sometimes blasting through the wall when it was possible to do so without bringing the upper levels down on them. She could sense other Sisters there, scouring the corridors above her, hunting their way up to the spires.

Presently, she came face-to-face with Cailin, who stalked into the room from another doorway. Semicircular discs of metal had been embedded in the walls and floor and ceiling of this chamber, their edges etched with markings that Kaiku could not identify. Cailin picked her way across to Kaiku, accompanied by the Tkiurathi that were guarding her.

‘This is wrong, Cailin,’ Kaiku said.

‘Indeed,’ she replied. ‘Where are they all? Where is the resistance? They are not in the levels above; that much I am certain.’

Kaiku tapped her foot on stone. ‘They are below. They have retreated and they are waiting for us to come to them.’

Cailin met her eyes, and it was clear that she had thought the same. The conflict in the Weave buzzed around them, tickling their senses. Kaiku was keeping sporadic checks on it, but the Sisters had matters in hand.

‘Can you sense it?’ Kaiku asked. ‘The witchstone. Already it hampers my Weaving; I cannot see the layout of this cursed place, nor see a way down.’

‘There are many ways down,’ said Cailin. ‘It does not foil me as it does you, but I think that will change as we get nearer.’ And Kaiku saw the ways as Cailin broadcast a blaze of knowledge to all her brethren. The answering mesh of information came smoothly back: the Sisters all knew their place, whether it be continuing to fight off the the Weavers, checking the remainder of the upper levels, keeping in contact with the Sisters who fought with Reki or heading downward to whatever lay beneath Adderach.

Abruptly the battle in the Weave collapsed. The Weavers, as one, faded from the field, drawing back into themselves. The Sisters, bewildered, made to follow, but Cailin forbade them.

Adderach was eerily silent. There was no fighting, whether physical or in the Weave. The place was still, but for the pulsing of the witchstone beneath their feet.

‘Come,’ said Cailin, and she swept away. Kaiku followed, Tsata and the other Tkiurathi with her. They were somewhere near the centre of the edifice, Kaiku knew that much. Other Sisters were heading for other routes down. The Tkiurathi were draining into them too, leaving Adderach and its surrounds empty. They did not have a large enough force to retain a guard on the surface, in case an enemy army should arrive. If they did not succeed below, then their only chance at survival was to get out and away before the Weavers answered the distress call sent a short while ago.

Otherwise, they would be trapped down there.

Asara fired, primed, fired again. It took two more shots to get through the latchjaw’s thick skull, but eventually she hit the brain. It slumped to the ground, its great porcupine-like quills shivering as it settled.

Grimed with sweat and dust, she took quick stock of her surroundings and located Reki. He was in the midst of a crowd of men, his nakata drawn but unbloodied; he was well protected. They struggled with another pair of latchjaws, squat monstrosities with fanged snouts, covered in deadly spines. They had stubby feet that protruded before them, their three digits stumpy and clawed; they had no back feet at all, only a short tail which they dragged behind them. Though they were cumbersome, they were fast enough in a lunge and their spiky armour meant that they were incredibly dangerous at close quarters.

She looked around. The floor of the pass was thick with fighting, but the desert warriors’ core still held strong, due in no small part to the fact that most of the Aberrants had already left. At first the overwhelming tide of predators had taken a great toll on them, but Reki’s generals had wisely kept up the defensive until their reprieve came. At some unseen signal, which Asara guessed had come from the Weavers at Adderach, the larger proportion of their attackers had broken away and headed northward up the pass. But they had left enough to keep the desert warriors busy for quite some while, and the battle continued on. Their situation was not quite so desperate now, but it was far from comfortable.

Reki was casting about for a sight of his wife, and relief showed on his face when their eyes met. She had become separated in the melee; now she slung her rifle across her back, drew a dagger and began to make her way to him, shying away from the swell of conflict as it loomed close to her.

The latchjaws had succumbed at last to their wounds, after taking down three of Reki’s men, and his Blood Tanatsua bodyguards were regrouping around their Barak. They parted to allow Asara through. Reki regarded her for a moment, then unexpectedly he embraced her, driving the breath from her. He recoiled with a grunt, looking down at his hand.

Asara took it, concern on her face. There was a deep scratch along his palm, where the tip of the dagger she held had caught him. Blood welled up from within. ‘Careful, my Barak,’ she muttered. ‘You will hurt yourself.’ She turned the hand over, then looked up at him with a smile. ‘I pray that is the worst of the wounds you sustain today.’

‘These men will see to that,’ he grinned. ‘I even find myself eager to join in at times, but they will not hear of it.’

Asara brought out a bandage from a pocket in her travel clothes and expertly bound his hand. He flexed it; there was still perfect freedom of movement.

‘Where did you learn to do that?’

‘Don’t,’ Asara warned, her eyes hardening a little, and the moment of tenderness between them was gone.

Reki opened his mouth to speak, then closed it again and looked away. Now was not the time. He would have answers from her, whatever it took; but that would come later.

A shout of alarm made him snap his head round in time to see five ghauregs powering their way through a group of soldiers, heading for him and his men.

‘Get back!’ he cried, pushing Asara behind him. His bodyguards arranged themselves to tackle the menace. One of the creatures was taken down by rifles before it reached them; the other four crashed bellowing into their midst.

Reki’s bodyguards were the best warriors Blood Tanatsua had to offer, but even they could not easily kill a ghaureg. Reki stumbled and fell as his men were driven back into him. He scrambled to his feet, looking around for Asara but unable to see her in the press. Blades sang: one of the ghauregs lost the fingers of its hand, another one had its leg cut off at the knee and fell. Someone split its face with their sword. Suddenly Reki’s bravado seemed ridiculous: he was no fighter, and had no wish to be anywhere near combat if he could help it. But he was no coward either, and he would not run.

The battle had suddenly grown around him. Everything pressed in closer. He cast about for the enemy, but he could not see over the jostle of his bodyguards. A man screamed somewhere. There was a volley of rifle shots. A gap opened in the crush, and he saw a ghaureg on its knees, being hacked to pieces by his soldiers.

Then the army flexed and flowed away from him, and there was space again. The battle was no longer so near. His bodyguards moved to surround him. The ghauregs were dead, and shortly afterward a runner told him that the Sisters had begun to overcome the nearby Weavers and were killing the Nexuses that plagued them. The battle was turning.