The Skein of Lament (11 page)

Amid the immediate clutter of houses were the fortifications. Guard-towers and outposts rose above the crush. Walls had been built, their boundaries overrun by the growing town, and newer ones constructed further out. Fire-cannons looked east over the valley. On the rocky rim, which sheltered the Fold from prying eyes, a thick stockade hid between the pleats and dips of the land. In the Xarana Fault, danger was never very far away, and the people of the Fold had learned to defend themselves.

Lucia tu Erinima stood on the balcony of her guardian’s house, on one of the uppermost levels of the town, and fed crumbs to tiny piping birds from her cupped hand. A pair of ravens, perched on the guttering of the building opposite, watched her with a careful eye. From within the house, sharing a brew of hot, bitter tea, Zaelis and Cailin watched her also.

‘Gods, she’s grown so much,’ Zaelis sighed, turning away to face his companion.

Cailin smiled faintly, but the black-and-red pattern of alternating triangles on her lips made her look like a smirking predator. ‘If I were a more cynical woman, I would think that you engineered the kidnapping of your erstwhile pupil all those years ago just so you could adopt her for yourself.’

‘Ha!’ he barked. ‘You think I haven’t been over that in my mind enough times?’

‘And what did you decide?’

‘That I worry far more since I became her surrogate father than I ever did in all the years since I started the Libera Dramach.’

‘You have looked after them both admirably,’ Cailin said, then took a sip from the small green tea-bowl in her hand.

Zaelis gave her a surprised look. ‘That’s unusually kind of you, Cailin,’ he said.

‘I am occasionally capable of being so.’

Zaelis turned his attention back to the balcony where Lucia stood. Once, she had been the heir to the Saramyr Empire. Now she was just a girl a few weeks from her fourteenth harvest, standing in the sun in a simple white dress, feeding birds. Her blonde hair, once long, was cut short and exposed the nape of her neck, from which terrible burn scars ran down her back. He wished she would grow her hair again; her scars were easy enough to conceal. But when he asked her she would only give him that fey, dreamy look of hers and ignore him. She was pretty as a child, and now that the bones of her face and body were lengthening it was already easy to see that she would be beautiful as a woman, with the same petite and deceptively naïve features that her mother had. But in those pale blue eyes there was a strangeness that made her unfathomable to him, to
anyone
. He had known her longer than anyone alive, but he still didn’t know her.

‘I worry also,’ Cailin said eventually.

‘About Lucia?’

‘Among other things.’

‘Then you mean her . . .’ – Zaelis searched for a word with an expression of faint disgust – ‘
followers
.’

Cailin shook her head once, her black ponytails swinging gently with the movement. ‘I will admit they are a problem. It is far harder to keep her secret from those who would harm her when rumour spreads from the mouths of those who would keep her safe. Yet they do not concern me overly, and they may eventually prove to serve a purpose.’

Zaelis sipped his tea meditatively and stole a glance at Lucia. Several of the birds were perched on the balcony rail now, looking at her like children attentive to a master. ‘What troubles you, then?’

Cailin stirred and stood. At her full height, she was tall for a woman, and of deliberately fearsome appearance. Zaelis, from where he sat cross-legged on a mat by the low table, followed her up with his eyes. She walked a few paces across the room and stopped, looking away from him.

‘We are short of time,’ she said.

‘You know this?’ Zaelis asked.

Cailin hesitated, then made a negative noise. ‘I feel it.’

Zaelis frowned. It was not like Cailin to be so indefinite with him. She was a practical woman, little given to flights of fancy. He waited for her to continue.

‘I know how that sounds, Zaelis,’ she snapped irritably, as if he had accused her. ‘I wish I had more evidence to present you.’

He got up and stood with her, favouring one leg. His other was weak; it had been badly broken long ago and never quite healed. ‘Tell me what you feel, then.’

‘Things are building to a head,’ Cailin replied after a short pause to marshal her thoughts. ‘The Weavers have been too quiet these past years. What have they gained from their alliance with Mos? Think, Zaelis. What moves they had to make, they could have made directly after Mos took power. They had nobody to oppose them then. But what did they do instead?’

‘They bought land. They bought land, and shipping companies on the rivers.’

‘Legitimate enterprises,’ Cailin said, throwing a slender hand up as if to dash the words away. ‘And none that turn any kind of profit.’ Her frustration was evident in her tone. The Libera Dramach had been unsuccessful at gaining any further information on the Weavers’ curious purchases. The Weavers had defences that ordinary spies could not penetrate, and Cailin dared not use any of the Red Order for fear of revealing them. One captured Sister could bring the whole delicate network down.

‘This is old news, Cailin,’ Zaelis said. ‘Why is it bothering you now?’

‘I do not know,’ Cailin replied. ‘Perhaps because I cannot see their plan. There are too many unanswered questions.’

‘Yours has been the loudest voice arguing for secrecy these past years,’ he reminded her. ‘We have been content to consolidate, to build our strength and hide ourselves while Lucia grows. Perhaps we have been too careful. Perhaps we should have been harrying them every step of the way.’

‘I think you overestimate us,’ Cailin said. ‘We hide because we must. To reveal our hand too early would be the death of us all.’ She paused, mused for a time, then went on: ‘The Weavers
appear
to be consolidating also, but look closer: they knew from the start that their term in power was finite. They knew the very blight their witchstones cause would poison the earth, and they must have known Mos would be blamed for it. Mos is their champion; without him, they will not only be torn from power, but punished for trying to usurp the system. The nobles plot to be rid of him.’

‘But who has the strength to do it?’ Zaelis asked. ‘The only one who even
might
be a contender is Blood Kerestyn, in alliance with Blood Koli. They could stir up an army that would trouble the Blood Emperor. But even they could not defeat him in Axekami, with the Weavers behind him. In a few years, perhaps, but not now. They would not dare attack, no matter what outrages Mos commits. And what chance does an assassin have with Kakre guarding his life?’

‘But now there is the famine, and the prospect of poor harvest. The very
people
will rise against Mos sooner or later,’ said Cailin. She turned to Zaelis, her gaze cool. ‘Do you not see, Zaelis? There was no way that the Weavers could have thought this rise to power was a permanent position, since it is their blight that is undermining their benefactor. They were
buying time
.’

‘They have had hundreds of years to do whatever you suspect they are doing,’ Zaelis argued, his phlegmy voice as persuasive and authoritative as ever.

‘But they have only been able to move freely these past five,’ Cailin said. ‘They are letting the empire slide towards ruin, because they have no interest in maintaining it. They are up to something, Zaelis. And if they do not play their hand now, it may be too late.’

Zaelis studied his companion. Seeing her so perturbed was profoundly unsettling. She was usually a picture of cold elegance.

‘Perhaps our spy from Okhamba will have new insight,’ he said to placate her.

‘Perhaps,’ Cailin said, unconvinced. She looked over at Lucia, who had not moved. ‘And in the meantime the spirits in the Fault become more hostile, and we lose more men and women to them than we can afford. They sense the change in the earth and grow bitter. We are being penned in, Zaelis. Soon we will be surrounded by enemies, unable to move within the Fault and unable to leave it.’

This struck closer to Zaelis’s heart. Two of his best men had disappeared only last week while scouting west along the Fault. He wondered if this place would soon be too dangerous to inhabit, and what they could possibly do if it became so.

‘She can help us,’ Zaelis said, following Cailin’s eyes. ‘She can calm the spirits.’

‘Can she?’ Cailin mused darkly. ‘I wonder.’

The world was full of whispers to Lucia.

It had been that way ever since she could remember. The wind soughed in a secret language, flitting wisps of meaning piquing her attention like catching her name in someone else’s conversation. Rain pattered nonsense at her, teasing her with an incipient form that always washed away before she could grasp it. Rocks thought rock thoughts, slower even than the trees, whose gnarled contemplations sometimes took years to complete. Darting between them were the lightning-fast minds of small animals, ever alert, only relaxing their guard in the safety of their burrows and hidey-holes.

She was an Aberrant, a perversion of nature, and yet she was closer to nature than anyone alive, for she had the ability to decipher its many tongues.

She walked along a grassy, well-worn trail that dipped and curved around an overhanging cliff face to her right. To her left, the ground fell suddenly sheer away, leaving her looking out over an enormous canyon half a mile wide or more. On the far side, where the wall was sloped, tall spines of rock and stone pillars stood crookedly, dusty red in the slanting evening sun, casting spindly finger-shadows. The air was dry and hot and smelled of baked earth.

Before her went Yugi and another Libera Dramach guard; behind her, Cailin and Zaelis, and two more armed men. Venturing beyond the lip of the valley where the Fold lay was not a light undertaking these days.

They followed the trail upwards as it bent away from the edge of the chasm and into a long ditch with a thin ribbon of a stream flowing down the middle. Trees meshed tightly overhead. Bees droned in the warm shade, harvesting nectar from the rare flowers that thrived here. Lucia listened to their quiet, comforting industry, and envied their singularity of purpose and unquestioning loyalty to the hive, the simple pleasure they gleaned from serving their queen.

After a short time, they came to a glade, where the ditch ran up against a crumbling rock wall. The trees were driven back here by the pebbly soil, and Nuki’s eye peeped in to brighten it. Water splashed through a narrow gash in the orange stone, pooling in a basin where it overflowed and drained off into a muddy channel that meandered away in the direction they had come.

‘You,’ Yugi indicated his companion. ‘Stay here with me. You two, take station further down the ditch. Call if you see anything bigger than a cat.’

The men grunted and complied, their footfalls thudding away as they departed. Yugi scratched under the sweaty rag that he had wrapped around his forehead to keep his dirty brown-blond hair back from his eyes. He gave those assembled a mischievous grin and said: ‘Well, here we are again.’

Lucia smiled. She was fond of Yugi. Though his duties with the Libera Dramach meant that she did not see him as often as Kaiku or Mishani, he was always an entertaining rascal, even though she sensed sometimes that he was not as happy as his manner would suggest. She knew she would only make him uncomfortable if she pried. Whereas once she would have asked the question, now she kept her silence. Wisdom was only one way in which she had grown since they had first met.

Zaelis knelt down in front of her, his calloused hands gripping her upper arms tightly. ‘Are you ready, Lucia?’

Lucia held his gaze for a moment and then looked away, to the pool. She gently prised his fingers off her and walked over to it. Crouching at its edge, she stared into the water. It was only a few inches deep, and clear enough to see the eroded curve of the basin beneath. As she watched, a tiny minnow slipped from the cut in the rock and plopped into the pool. It made a few disorientated circuits and then allowed itself to be washed over the pouting lip of the basin, and into the stream that ran along the ditch, little realising that its path would take it plunging over the edge of the canyon in a few short minutes.

Lucia watched it go. She would not have warned it, even if she could and even if it would have listened. Its path was chosen for it, like hers.

Once, she had lived in the Imperial Keep, a prisoner in a gilded cage. Five years ago she had been rescued from that confinement and brought to the Fold, only to discover that it was merely a different prison, and in its way as constricting as the last. Instead of walls, she was suffocated by expectation.

The Libera Dramach had taken that struggling settlement eleven years ago and turned it into a thriving fortress town, using the steadily growing population as recruitment grounds for their own secret cause. It was a carefully organised, well-oiled operation. And it was all for her.

‘I saw what would happen,’ Zaelis had told her once. ‘When you were still an infant, I came to be your tutor, and even then we knew you were Aberrant. You were speaking at six months old, and not only to us. Your mother thought she could hide you, but I knew you couldn’t be hidden. That was when I began. I moved in scholars’ circles, seeking out those who might be sympathetic with Aberrants, sounding them out; and then, when I was sure, I would tell them about you. It was treason, but I told them. They saw then what you were, what you meant. If you took the throne, if an
Aberrant
ruled the empire, then it would undermine everything the Weavers had stood for. How could the Weavers consent to give service to an Aberrant Blood Empress? Yet to refuse would be to go against all the high families, who would owe you their loyalty. The stranglehold they have on us would be broken.’

And so here she was. Though she was allowed to roam and play free in the valley, there was always someone keeping an eye on her. They had vested all their hopes, all their ambitions in Lucia. Without her as a figurehead, they were merely a treasonous group of subversives. She was their reason to exist. They protected her, hid her, jealously guarding their dispossessed Heir-Empress until she could grow in power and influence, investing their time against the day when she would return to claim her throne.