The Lord of Lies: Strange Threads: Book 2 (8 page)

Hidden in
the dark of the Spire antechamber, Salarkis put together his disguise.

Having found nothing else of use, he spent the better part of the night working on the only material available to him – himself. It was a tricky and sometimes painful business to rearrange his own pattern, yet it was the best idea he had been able to come up with. Turning his attention and influence inwards – even though the adjustments were small and superficial – was like trying to make a bed while standing on it. Still, he had been good at disguises before the change and his native skills remained.

First he took up multitudes of the infinitesimal threads
within
his hair – one per strand, a thread within a thread – and stretched them out until his curls were limp and lank. He then proceeded to tighten his skin by drawing it in, constricting it over his muscles and bones to give him the same smooth, gaunt appearance of the Unwoven. Changing his colour required greater finesse. He gathered up those threads that gave him pigment, and pulled them back under the surface until he was left a sickly, pallid grey. The inside of his mouth was the worst, which had to be white to complete the effect. He achieved it in the same way as his skin, but his tongue and throat felt scratchy and dry, as if they had been sanded back. All changes he tied to one knot in the centre of his chest, to hold them in place. He felt sure that, at least physically, he could now pass for an Unwoven. Still, he wished he had a mirror, and trying to see his reflection in the dull gleam of a dagger catching scant moonlight through the doorway proved nothing but frustrating.

The final
touch was his belt, which he unspun and put together again to create a semblance of ‘pants’, which were, in fact, many thin strands hanging downwards like a kind of tattered skirt. As he fixed it about his waist, he might have found it comical were it not for his dire situation. From what he had seen of the mismatched rags the Unwoven wore, however, the strange garment would not draw attention – in fact, he could probably leave the Spire completely naked if he chose.

He fell to worrying about his daggers – hidden in the top of his skirt, they rubbed against him in dangerous ways, and the thought of carrying them in his hands seemed unnecessarily aggressive. Reluctantly, he discarded them.

Any half-decent threader would be able to detect the alterations he had made, but thankfully there were none among the Unwoven. This was fortunate, for if they scried him out, Salarkis would have a hard time fighting them off. Sheer numbers aside, Regret had created his children to be robust; their patterns were deep and hard to see, harder still to manipulate, with threads that sprang easily back into shape.

Simply walk
through
, he thought, staring down the length of the Dale – maybe two or three leagues to freedom?

Changing himself had taken longer than he would have liked, and morning light was just creeping into the Dale. He wished he still had the cover of darkness – given the Unwoven were everywhere except inside the Spire, walking out of it in plain view would instantly arouse suspicion. He could wait for the following night, he supposed, but the thought made him even more anxious. His skin prickled uncomfortably, and he was impatient to see if he could get away with his plan.

Several Unwoven nearby moved about listlessly, as if they had nothing to do and nowhere to be.
Drift on
, he willed them. As if in answer, another came by leading a pig on a rope, and the rest stopped to watch with interest. Were they hungry? They certainly looked it, all ropey muscle and sunken stomachs, their bright eyes big in receded faces. The pig and its owner wandered on, maybe heading up to the high green slopes where other livestock roamed. As heads turned to follow them, Salarkis slipped from the doorway and moved sideways away from it, then broke into a slow, aimless meander. He was sure he must have been seen in a valley with this many eyes, but there came no shouts at his sudden appearance, no accusatory pointing of fingers. As he began to angle down the slope, however, one individual fixed on him – a large male, his broad shoulders hunched low, with crystal blue eyes.

‘Where did
you come from?’ Blue-eye called in a thick voice.

Salarkis did not stop. He was not sure how Unwoven behaved among their own, but knew at the least that they showed no fear. Nor, until he could listen to some of them interact with each other, did he want to risk speaking. It was said that Unwoven thought about the world in a different way, and he feared removing his disguise with the wrong choice of words. Thus, as he glanced at Blue-eye, he simply thumbed off in some vague direction away from the door.
Do not follow
, he prayed, as he continued down the slope, trying his best to appear unconcerned while his pounding heart threatened to betray him.

Quickly he became more afraid of his immediate surrounds. Unwoven sat about toasting bits of bread and meat over fires, slumbering loudly in their huts, or lying about in the open, curled up together like horrible cats. Two of those he passed were doing a strange dance, their arms reaching upwards as they swayed about.

‘Can you smell it?’ he heard one of them whisper.

‘Yes, yes … the leaves keep spinning … his touch is spreading …’

A group
of them clustered around a stone slab over which two brutes arm wrestled, until one slammed down the other’s hand and there was hooting and laughter.

No one, thankfully, seemed very interested in Salarkis.

The slope levelled out as he moved into the ruins of the city which, in his younger days, had been a colourful, cheerful place. Now the remnants of mosaic walls, still brightly tiled under the dust, stood crumbling amidst buildings in various states of collapse. A few islands of cobblestones peppered the streets, and vegetation grew wherever it liked. It did not look like the Unwoven had actively destroyed their home, merely that they had never done anything to maintain it.

Poor people
, he thought. It was easy to forget that these were really Regret’s innocent victims, normal folk who had been changed against their will, a violation that had lasted generations. If there was a way to revert them to their old state, it had died long ago with their broken lord. The best to be hoped for them now was an end, not delivered in malice, but mercy.

Some of the buildings still seemed to be in use – Salarkis saw a chimney smoking, smelled fresh bread baking, and heard the clank of a blacksmith’s hammer. How did the Unwoven organise themselves, he wondered? There was a semblance of civilisation here, yet one thing he knew about them was that they had no names. How could any society function like that? What if the baker wanted a sword from the blacksmith – what did they say to each other? How did a mother call to her children?

There sounded
a squeal and two youngsters tore out of a half-collapsed house. They were an especially unnerving sight – hard little children without a skerrick of fat on them. The boy chased the girl, who suddenly spun around and struck him across the jaw with such force that Salarkis winced. An adult female came after them and grabbed the girl by her wrist.

‘No!’ she growled. ‘Never!’

The boy rose, apparently unhurt, grinning until the female grabbed him too.

‘The one rule,’ she said.

The children hissed at her.

‘The one rule,’ the woman repeated firmly.

‘Unwoven,’ said the girl, ‘do not fight Unwoven.’

Grunting sounded from a nearby alleyway. Salarkis was surprised to see a male pressing a female against a wall, forcefully pawing at her breasts. A moment later he pushed her downwards and she lay on her back, legs open, ready. They began to rut like pigs in the dirt, groaning without regard for the children nearby, or anyone else for that matter.

The mother finished remonstrating her children and released them. They ran away, up the alley past the writhing couple.

Salarkis wondered if the woman really was their mother.

Maybe they weren’t even siblings.

The ground
suddenly rumbled and, off up the mountainside, a jagged crack opened along an overhang of rock. It collapsed onto a grassy slope, sending up a dust cloud and loosing boulders through a herd of panicking cattle, crushing several. Salarkis gripped a wall in fright, though no one else around him seemed at all concerned. The fornicating Unwoven cried out in jubilation, their movements seemingly amplified by the earth’s vibrations. After a few more moments the rumbling died away, and the boulders came to rest with redly glistening sides.

Salarkis moved on.

The ‘one rule’ interested Salarkis. Did it apply to every Unwoven, or was it just something said to unruly children? Somehow it made sense, that a people like this, who lived hard and strong without pain or remorse, and who by all accounts held little sacred, would need a restriction to stop them killing each other. Perhaps it was part of Regret’s original design, an enforced solidarity amongst his pack.

The fact that Salarkis’s disguise seemed to be working well had the peculiar effect of slowing him down. His curiousity was getting the better of him – this was, after all, a rare chance to gain insight into the reclusive Unwoven world.

He came across a line of drying clothes hanging between buildings, with no one in particular watching over them. Trying to appear bold and uncaring, he took down a pair of trousers and a brown tunic. Nobody seemed to care, and he was glad to be able to clothe himself with a modicum of normality, though he was strangely sentimental about discarding the tattered skirt that used to be his belt.

Further on
he paused in the shadow of a freestanding wall to eavesdrop on a group chattering heatedly with each other.

‘But when? When?’

‘It does not matter. One day, or ten, or a hundred. Soon.’

‘When the cracks are wide enough to spill through!’

‘And until then,’ said a tall male whose cheeks were stained with splodges of green dye, ‘everyone goes about their happy day-to-day, eh? But I have a sword,’ he patted the sword at his side, ‘and armour on.’ He rapped on his leather vest. ‘What do you have?’

‘Swords and armour, pah!’ said a female. ‘They only get in the way. I like the
squish
.’ She gouged her thumbs into an imaginary skull.

‘I am ready, is what I mean!’

‘Raid again, then, if it will calm your soul.’

‘Bone and fire,’ exclaimed Greencheeks, smiling so wide that his eyes screwed up, ‘you are right! Who wants to raid with me?’

‘Yes, let us raid!’

‘I will come!’

‘And me!’

Greencheeks and a few of the others moved away excitedly.

‘All this
raiding,’ said an older male among those who remained, ‘may bring eyes upon the Pass. Herald our coming.’

‘Then we are heralded. Let them raid.’

‘Soon we spill into the lands untouched by his grace.’

‘Poor, ignorant fools.’

‘We will free the untarnished from their prisons of flesh.’

Salarkis was startled by a hand on his arm. It was a female, maybe middle-aged, though it was somewhat hard to tell. Her hair was wild, her pendulous breasts half-hanging out of what could loosely be described as a vest.

‘You’re a comely one,’ she said, a hungry glint in her eye. ‘Would you like to roll about?’

‘Er …’ Salarkis was so taken aback by the offer, he forgot himself for a moment. ‘No thank you.’

No thank you?
He chastised himself in terror. Surely that was not something Unwoven said to each other! Had he just given himself away?

The woman merely shrugged. ‘Please yourself. But remember, once we go from the Dale, some of us will die.’

He wasn’t quite sure what she meant – maybe some Unwoven version of seizing the moment?

‘Stop bothering me,’ he said. ‘I have to go raiding.’

Over her shoulder, he noticed Blue-eye hulking by a broken column, watching. So, he realised with a chill, he had been followed after all.

He almost turned away, but it occurred to him that he was being too meek. Maybe his flighty behaviour was what made him stand out to his pursuer. And, if it was true that Unwoven did not fight one another, perhaps he should try another approach.

‘Well,’ he
declared, striding suddenly and directly towards Blue-eye, ‘this is a fun game, isn’t it?’

Blue-eye stiffened. ‘I play no game,’ he said, in his swampishly thick voice.

‘Certainly you must! How does it work? You follow me until I notice you, and then it’s my turn? So now you head off in a new direction, and I’ll follow you until you notice me? Just remember that as long as you don’t see me, I’m winning!’

Blue-eye narrowed his gaze. ‘Do you think me a simpleton?’

‘You don’t wish to keep playing? Come, what do you say? If this is not a wonderful game then why do you follow? Have you mistaken me for a woman to come sniffing after?’

Blue-eye scowled and turned away.

Salarkis stared after him until there was some distance between them.

As he moved on he overheard more talk about cracks and going forth and spreading Regret’s touch. It sounded as if the Unwoven were readying to leave the Dale, though when and for what reason remained unclear. Deciding he had pressed his luck far enough, Salarkis quickened his step with renewed purpose. He had to get word to Yalenna.