The Skein of Lament (15 page)

She pulled her arm back. ‘Eszel was reciting a poem,’ she said, her voice taut. ‘And I will stay to hear it finished.’

Mos glared balefully at the poet, almost shaking with rage. Reki could almost feel Eszel’s heart sink. His sister meant well, but when incensed she was not subtle. In providing a reason to refuse Mos, she had turned his wrath back onto her defenceless friend.

‘And how would you feel if your treasured poet was suddenly to find himself without a patron?’ he grated.

‘Then my treasured husband would find himself without a wife!’ Laranya fired back. Once she had dug her heels in, she would give no ground.

‘Does he mean so much to you, then?’ Mos sneered. ‘This half-man?’

‘This
half-man
is more a man than you, since he can keep his temper, as a noble like you should be able to!’

This was too much. Mos raised his hand suddenly, a reflex of pure anger, drawing back to hit her.

She went suddenly cold, her passion taking her beyond mere fury and into a steely calm. ‘I
dare
you,’ she said, her voice like fingernails scraping on rusted metal.

The change in her stopped him. He had never raised his hand to her before, never lost control this way. Trembling, he looked into her eyes, and thought how achingly beautiful their arguments made her, and how much he loved and hated her at the same time. Then he cast one last glare of pure malice at Eszel, and stormed out of the doorway and onto the bridge, disappearing into the rainy night.

Reki let out a breath that he did not know he had been holding. Eszel looked miserable. Laranya’s chin was tilted arrogantly, her breast heaving, fiercely pleased that she had faced her husband down.

The mood was spoiled now, and by unspoken consent they dispersed to their chambers. Later, Laranya would find Mos, and they would fight, and reconcile, and make frenetic love in the embers of their anger, unaware that then, as now, Kakre would be watching from the Weave.

Kaiku, Saran and Tsata arrived in the Fold in the early morning, having ridden hard from Hanzean. They had made their way along secret routes into the Xarana Fault under the cover of darkness and slipped into the heart of the broken land without alerting any of the hostiles that lived there. Their return was greeted with great activity by those who knew of Kaiku’s mission and guessed who her companion was. By midday, an assembly of the upper echelons of the Libera Dramach and the Red Order had gathered to hear what their spy had to tell them, and Kaiku was included, both at Saran’s insistence and at Cailin’s. She felt a certain amount of relief. After giving two months of her life – and almost losing it – to bring this man back, the thought that the information he carried might be too sensitive to trust her with was too cruel.

They met on the top floor of a semicircular building that was unofficially the nerve centre of the Libera Dramach. It stood on one of the highest tiers of the Fold, its curved face looking out over the town and into the valley below. The uppermost storey was open to the view, with pillars to hold up the flat roof and a waist-high barrier of wrought iron running between them. The whole storey was a single room, used for congregations or occasional private theatrical performances or recitations, and like most of the buildings in the Fold it was functional rather than elegant. Its beige walls were hung with cheap tapestries and there was wicker matting to cover the floor, and little else except a prayer wheel in one corner and some wind chimes ringing softly in the desultory breeze, to ward off evil spirits. It was a quaint and ancient superstition that seemed somehow less comical here in the Xarana Fault.

There was no real formality about the meeting, but basic hospitality demanded that refreshments be served. The traditional low tables of black wood were scattered with small plates, and metal beakers of various wines, spirits and hot beverages were placed between them. Kaiku was sitting with Cailin and two other similarly attired members of the Red Order, neither of whom she had met before, since the membership seemed to be constantly shifting and only Cailin provided any permanence. She was excessively paranoid about letting the numbers of the Red Order be known, and kept them scattered so that they might not all be wiped out at once by any disaster. Nearby sat Zaelis with Yugi, who was virtually his right-hand man. Yugi caught her look and gave her a reassuring grin; startled, she smiled back. Tsata sat on his own, away from the tables at the edge of the room.

Kaiku watched him for a moment. She had to wonder what the Tkiurathi was doing here at all. Why had he accompanied Saran so far? What was the relationship between them? Though her anger at the callous way he had risked her life had been ameliorated by the intervening month, she had learned little about him and Saran was strangely reluctant to fill in the details, claiming that it was Tsata’s business and that he would tell her if he wanted. Kaiku could not decide if Saran was being diplomatic out of respect for his companion’s foreign beliefs, or if he was just being obtuse to vex her.

Her thoughts turned from Saran to Lucia. She wished she had been given time to visit the former Heir-Empress before the meeting, but she supposed there would be time later. Still, something chewed annoyingly at her about the matter. When Kaiku enquired after her health to Zaelis, he had responded with a breezy comment and changed the subject; but thinking back on it, he never had answered her question. If she had been Mishani, she might have thought it suspicious; but being Kaiku, she assumed that it was her own fault for not pressing him.

Then silence fell, and Saran stood with his back to the railing, framed against the far end of the valley and outlined by the sun. It was time to learn what she had risked her life for, and to determine whether it was worth it.

‘Only a few of you here know me,’ he began, his voice clear and almost entirely free of Quraal inflections now. In his tight, severe clothes he looked like a general addressing his troops, and his voice had a similar authority. ‘So I will begin with an introduction. My name is Saran Ycthys Marul. I have been a spy for the Libera Dramach for several years now, travelling far afield with one objective in mind: to discover all I could about the Weavers. My mission has taken me to the four countries of the Near World: Saramyr, Okhamba, Quraal and distant Yttryx. If you will indulge me, I will tell you now what I have found.’

He paused dramatically, and prowled left and right, sweeping the assembly with his gaze. Kaiku flinched inwardly at his grandstanding. It occurred to her suddenly that by delivering his message personally to so many people he was endangering himself in the future. The more people that knew he was a spy, the more likely he was to be discovered. She wondered what had brought on this recklessness; surely it was not that he was so conceited that he was willing to take the risk in exchange for this moment of glory?

‘Saramyr has forgotten its history,’ he said. ‘So proud were you to settle this great continent that you did not think about what you were sweeping aside. In hunting the Ugati aboriginals to extinction, you wiped the slate clean, and lost thousands upon thousands of years of this land’s memory. But other lands still remember. In Okhamba, tribes have lived untouched by outside civilisation for centuries. In Quraal, the repression of doctrine and the rewriting of history by the Theocracy was not thorough enough, and still there persists evidence from the darkest depths of the past, if a person knows where to look for it. And in Yttryx, where the constant internal wars have shifted the epicentre of power so often, documents have become so scattered that it is both impossible to find them all and impossible to destroy them all. History persists. Even here. And it seems we would do best not to forget it, for we never know when the events of the past may emerge to change the present.’

Some of the assembly shifted uneasily at the impertinence of this Quraal upbraiding them for their history, when it was the Quraal who had driven them to Saramyr in the first place; but Kaiku noted that Cailin wore a faint smile on her painted lips.

‘I will be brief, and begin with the good news,’ Saran continued, flicking back his hair and fixing Zaelis with a haughty eye. ‘Later, I am sure, I will have an opportunity to give a more detailed account to those who wish to hear it.’ He made an expansive gesture with his arm to encircle the assembly with his account. ‘In all my travels throughout the Near World, I was looking for three things: firstly, evidence of the corruption that is spreading through your own land, that we now generally believe is a side-effect of the Weavers’ witchstones; secondly, the Weavers themselves, or beings analogous to them; and finally, the witchstones, since these are the source of the Weavers’ powers.’

He began stalking back and forth again, his features profiled in the sunlight from outside. ‘I am pleased to report that on two counts, I found nothing at all. Nowhere did I find any kind of blight that could not be accounted for by insect plague or other natural explanation, and none that possessed the insidious persistence of the one that affects Saramyr. And nowhere did I find anything that might be described as a Weaver, except those few that reside in distant colonies on other continents. Certainly, there are those who possess abilities unusual to the common folk; our own priests are an example, having learned to communicate in a rudimentary fashion with the spirits of our land. The honourable Kaiku tu Makaima, here present, was witness to the abilities of the Fleshcrafters of Okhamba; and there are worse things even than Fleshcrafters in the hidden world of the deep jungle. In Quraal there are the Oblates, in Yttryx the Muhd-Taal. But however these talents are attained, it is through processes either natural or spiritual. Even the Aberrants, who were born from the corruption that the Weavers create, do not actively participate in its spreading.’ He paused, ran a finger along his cheekbone. ‘I found no Aberrants outside your own shores. There were the deformed, and lame, and crippled, but these are not Aberrants, merely the way of nature. In this land, most people do not differentiate any more; though if I may say, those in this room provide the exception to that rule, and I applaud you for it.’

Kaiku watched him as he held court, her mind wandering to the lean physique that she imagined underneath his strict black Quraal clothing. Why had she rejected him, anyway? It did not have to mean anything, to share a bed with him for a night. Why allow her mistrust of her own emotions to get in the way of enjoying herself?

She realised that she was drifting, caught herself and returned to the matter at hand.

‘From this, we can surmise that the blight is responsible for Aberrancy,’ Saran was saying. ‘This we had already guessed, but now I believe it proven beyond doubt. There is no blight outside of Saramyr, and hence no Aberrants. But there
are
witchstones.’

This brought general consternation to the assembly. Kaiku ate a spiced dumpling and kept quiet, her eyes flickering over the suddenly animated audience.

‘He plays his crowd well,’ Cailin whispered, leaning over to her.

‘He craves the attention, I think,’ Kaiku murmured. ‘It flatters his vanity.’

Cailin gave a surprised laugh and subsided with an insinuating glance at her pupil. Kaiku ignored it.

‘But if the witchstones cause the corruption in our land, how is it that there are witchstones abroad, but no blight?’ someone called.

‘Because they have not been
found
yet,’ Saran said, raising a finger. The assembly hushed. ‘They lie deep in the earth. Dormant. Waiting. Waiting to be woken up.’

‘Then what wakes them up?’ asked the same man.

‘Blood,’ Kaiku said. She had meant to say it to herself, but it came out louder than she had intended and the assembly heard it.

‘Blood. Indeed,’ said Saran, giving her a disarming half-smile. ‘Of all of us here, only Kaiku has seen a witchstone. She has witnessed the human sacrifice that feeds them. She has seen the heart.’

Kaiku felt suddenly embarrassed. Her account of her infiltration into the Weavers’ monastery in the Lakmar Mountains on Fo was a subject of some scepticism among the Libera Dramach. Many argued, quite reasonably, that what she had seen in the chamber where the witchstone was kept could have been a hallucination. She had been weak from exhaustion and starvation, and had been wearing a Weaver’s Mask for days, which was dangerous to anyone’s sanity. But for all that, Kaiku knew what she saw and stuck by it. She had seen the great branches of stone that reached from the witchstone’s main mass into the walls of the cavern, too organic to be formed by pressure or any other geological force. She had seen
into
the witchstone as it fed, seen the bright veins running through the rock, seen the pulsing core at its centre. Whatever the witchstones were, they were more than just inert matter. They were alive, like the trees were alive. They
grew
.

‘How do you know the witchstones are there if they haven’t been found?’ Yugi asked Saran.

‘At least one
has
been found, in Quraal, five hundred years ago or more,’ Saran said. ‘It is mentioned in texts I stole from the Librum of Aquirra’s own vaults, which I brought here at great peril to myself. These texts tell of an incident in a rural province wherein a small mining village began exhibiting sudden and violent behaviour. When soldiers were sent in to quell the disturbance, they were overwhelmed, with survivors reporting strange bouts of insanity and displays of unholy abilities by the villagers, such as being able to move objects without touching them and killing men from a distance without using weapons. The Theocrats sent in a much greater force to stamp out the heretics, and they triumphed with heavy losses. In the mine beneath the town, they found evidence of an altar upon which blood sacrifices had been made. The soldiers later said how they had been drawn to the altar by evil temptations and promises, but their faith was strong enough to resist, and with explosives they destroyed the altar and pounded it to dust, then sealed the mine.’ He tossed his black hair and looked around the room. ‘I am certain that what they found was a witchstone.’