Weavers of Saramyr

[wenty-Five

The Xarana Fault lay far to the south of Axekami, bracketed at its east and west end by the rivers Rahn and Zan. It was a place of dark legend, a vast swathe of shattered land haunted by the ghosts of ill memory and stalked by restless spirits, who had been shaken awake in the tumult of its formation and never quite settled again.

The histories told of how Jaan tu Vinaxis, venerated founder of the Saramyr Empire, had built the first Saramyr city of Gobinda in that place as a commemoration of the defeat of the aboriginal Ugati folk. At that time the land was flat and green, and Gobinda prospered and became a great city on the banks of the Zan. But Torus, Jaan's son, was usurped by the third Blood Emperor, Bizak tu Cho. Stories speak of the debauchery that Bizak entertained, orgies of godlessness and excess. Then came Winterfall, the day on which all men must give praise to Ocha for the beginning of a new cycle of the year. Bizak, after a three-day celebration, was too exhausted to attend. He sent his daughter in his stead.

At that, Ocha was angered. The histories tell that wise men dreamed of a great boar that night, with breath of fire and smoke and jagged tusks, who stamped the earth and split it asunder. They warned the Emperor to make amends to Ocha, reminding him that he was only Emperor of men, and Ocha was Emperor of the gods. But Bizak in his hubris would not listen, and so they fled.

There were few survivors of Ocha's mighty retribution, but those who escaped painted a terrifying picture. The ground roared and bucked and split, breaking into sections like stone hit with a hammer and pitching the people of Gobinda howling into the yawning chasms. Magma spewed from the earth, belching ash into the sky and blackening the sun, turning the world to a seething cauldron of fiery red light. Huge sections of the land plummeted suddenly hundreds of feet; rock shattered; lightning flashed; and over it all was a bellowing and screeching, as of a vast, enraged boar. Gobinda fell into the earth and was swallowed, and Bizak tu Cho, his daughter and all his bloodline went with it.

When the destruction was over, the land was buckled and ruined. The Rahn and the Zan, which had previously flowed true, were now kinked with immense waterfalls as they dropped to the newly sunken landscape. The Xarana Fault – as it came to be known, when more was understood of tectonics and the ways of the inner earth – was a maze of folds, juts, plateaux, valleys, moraines and promontories: a landscape of utter chaos. In the many hundred years since the cataclysm, it had grown new grass and trees that smoothed over its edges somewhat; but its lessons had never been forgotten. It was still a place of bad luck and ill fortune, and was seldom visited by the honest folk of the city. Spirits were abundant there; some benevolent, most of them not.

But some dared to make their home in the hard lands of the Xarana Fault. Those who sought solitude, or needed to hide; those who would risk the dangers for the rewards of precious metals and gems unearthed by the ancient upheaval; those who had found nothing for them in the cities and the fields, and wanted a new start. There were as many reasons as there were people living in the lands of the Fault, and amid the turbulent landscape dozens of small communities lived side by side, some in harmony and some in hostility. But all had the single understanding: the business of the Fault stayed in the Fault, and was not the outside world's to know.

Cailin tu Moritat sat high in the saddle of a black mare, framed against the hot mid-morning sky. Beneath her, the ground fell in massive semicircular steps, irregular plateaux that piled haphazardly on top of each other. On the backs of these plates of earth was built a small town: dense clusters of houses, supply stores, an occasional bar and a smattering of tiny shrines nestling off the dirt tracks that passed as streets. Bridges and stairways linked the disparate levels together. It was a jumble, an accretion of a hundred different styles of architecture; this place had not been planned, but built as necessity dictated, and by many different hands. The angular, three-storey houses of the Southern Prefectures rose out of a clutter of low, broad Tchom Rin dwellings; balconied and

ornamented houses that would not have looked out of place in Axekami's River District were shamed by the crafty austerity of their neighbours. Some of the dwellings had been here twenty years or more – a long time in the turbulent environment of the Fault -whereas others were still being built, wooden ribs and angle joists bristling from the wounds in their exteriors. Most of the building had been done around six years ago, when the Libera Dramach had engulfed the existing dwellings and begun to draw in people from all over Axekami, some of whom were construction engineers of no mean skill.

At the top, where the steps ran up against a mighty flank of stone, there were caves that went far into the hillside, their entrances decorated with whimsical etchings, blessings for those who entered and supplications to the gods. There, hidden within, a labyrinth of chambers lay, a secret network enshrouded in impenetrable rock.

From her vantage point on a nearby ridge, overlooking all, Cailin could see the scale of the industry that went on here. Everywhere there was movement. Workers scuttled back and forth with orders for this and that. Foremen hollered at their men. Towers were being erected, their skeletons aswarm. On one plateau, a score of men and women were being trained in the sword, jabbing and thrusting in unison to their master's barked commands. The steps were littered with wooden cranes, lifts and bamboo scaffolding. Stacks of crates and bundled supplies were being hauled to and fro by carts that ran on curving tracks. Outposts were perched on the lips of the plateau, and sentries watched within, their eyes ranging out beyond the broken slopes to the short expanse of flat earth that surrounded them and the frowning walls of grim rock beyond. The rise of the neighbouring land sheltered this place from view so efficiently that it was only possible to see it from the edge of the valley that cradled it. There was no kind of organised army here, but the Xarana Fault was a brutal place, and any settlement that did not think and act as a fortress would soon find itself overrun.

Cailin allowed herself a tiny smile, the red and black triangles painted on her lips curving slightly. This was the Fold, the home of the Libera Dramach and, for the time being, also home to a small sisterhood of the Red Order. She could not help but admire the realisation of their leader's vision. Few even knew of the existence of the Fold. For years now the Libera Dramach had been recruiting and gathering in secret, drawing from all sources equally. Bandit gangs had been offered the chance to end their hand-to-mouth existence and join; scholars had been persuaded of the rightness of their cause; common folk who had a grudge against the Weavers -and these were legion – came in search of a way of striking back at those who had hurt them. With them came physicians, apothecaries, disenchanted soldiers, wives who had been turned out of home, vagrants, debtors. All found a place here. All were brought into the Fold. At the core were the Libera Dramach themselves, those sworn to the organisation, picked from among the hundreds who came. As to the rest, some believed in the cause, and some did not; but all found themselves a part of a community, self-governed and free of the laws of nobility or the Weavers; and that was a precious thing to many.

She still found it faintly surprising that such a disparate group of individuals might have kept a secret so large for so long, especially as most of the Libera Dramach spent their time away from the Fold, in the cities, going about their daily business. These were the spies, the suppliers, the network. But, though it was a potent rumour among common folk, word of the Fold had yet to reach the nobility – or, which was more likely, they had ignored it. The Xarana Fault was a place of secrets; there were vast illegal farms of amaxa root that supplied the cities without paying their taxes, whole enclaves of people who worshipped forbidden gods, monasteries where contact with the outside world was utterly shunned. Mention of the Fold would scarcely merit the attention of a noble. At least, not one who was not already part of the organisation. For the Libera Dramach had eyes even in the courts of the Empress, and there were many who believed as they did. Aberrants were not evil. The Heir-Empress should sit the throne.

A tribute to the skill and learning of their leader, then, that they had got this far, and were ready when the long-expected crisis came. The Heir-Empress had been discovered by the world at large. Now was the time for the Libera Dramach to take action.

Cailin turned her mount and headed down the grassy ridge towards the Fold. There had been several new arrivals of late, and the moment had come to bring them all together.

'I can scarcely believe it all,' Kaiku said. She stood fearlessly at the lip of one of the uppermost plateaux of the Fold, above the main mass of the buildings, and gazed in wonder at the landscape tumbling away from her below, the maze of different-shaped rooftops an overlapping and multi-layered jigsaw. The packed-dirt streets were seething with people from all over Axekami, a collision of makeshift fashions such as Kaiku had never seen. The afternoon sun beat down on her skin, warming her with its rays; birds winged and jagged through the sky overhead. She tilted her face up, closed her eyes, and felt Nuki's eye looking down on her, a red glow behind her lids. 'It is perfect.'

Asara sat on a large, smooth rock that towered aslant out of the grassy plateau. She did not know what Kaiku was referring to as perfect: the Fold, the sunlight, or a more general expression of contentment? She dismissed it, anyway. Kaiku's spirits had been restored with a vengeance since leaving Fo and taking the River Jabaza back towards Axekami. They had disembarked some way north, warned by sailors coming upriver that Axekami was in turmoil and no boats were getting in. Taking the horses they had gained in Chaim, they rode south, crossed the Kerryn by ferry east of Axekami, and then made good time to the Xarana Fault. There, Asara had taken them by one of the few relatively safe routes through the maze of broken land, and thence to the Fold.

The journey had been a strange one. Kaiku appeared to have surmounted her loathing of herself, perhaps because there was nobody left that she cared much about who could leave her or hurt her. Her family were dead; Mishani and Tane had betrayed her by their reactions to the news that she was Aberrant. Rock bottom was a wonderful place in which to re-examine oneself, and she seemed finally to have accepted what she was and made the decision to live with it. Her initial despair at the impossibility of the oath she had sworn to Ocha had warmed and turned to determination, a rigid focus, an unswerving direction she could cling to. By the end of their journey, Kaiku had been urging Asara on, desperate to get to the Fold as quickly as possible and begin to assess what chances she had of avenging her family against the unassailable might of the Weavers.

And yet, though there was this general lightening of heart about her, she had closed up to Asara again, just when she was beginning to feel something like trust in her former handmaiden. Asara told herself that the release of passion in that cold, draughty room in Chaim was a demonstration of Kaiku's decision to discard the old rules that no longer applied to her as an Aberrant, proof to herself that she had no boundaries left; only that, and nothing more. But she had stirred something between them that refused to go away, and it hid in glances and loaded comments and darted out unexpectedly to sting the other. Kaiku was wary of Asara for another reason as well. She had never asked what had happened in that room, when Asara's kiss turned to something more than lips and tongues, and she sought to suck the breath from Kaiku's body; but she had sensed the danger on an instinctive level, and now she would not allow her guard down again.

Still, she was here, in the Fold. Asara had discharged her duty, an agreement taken on more than two years ago now. She felt something of a satisfaction in herself. She lounged on the warm rock, observing Kaiku's back as she admired the vista before her and soaked in the simple glory of a summer day.

'You have my deepest thanks, Asara,' Cailin purred next to her. Asara was quick enough to prevent herself starting and giving away her surprise at the dark lady's appearance. 'You have kept her safe. She is quite a precious asset to me.'

'I am afraid I did not do quite the job of keeping her safe that I could have done,' Asara replied, not looking up. 'But we have such things to tell you, Cailin.'

Cailin arched an eyebrow at her tone. 'Really? These I must hear.'

'Later. In private,' Asara said. She would pick the time and place. Let Cailin be reminded that she only watched over Kaiku as a favour, not because the Red Order made her. 'She has already started to get her kana under control,' Asara added. 'It is still wild, but not untameable. That is a rare thing, I understand.'

'Rare indeed,' Cailin replied, never taking her eyes off Kaiku. 'But then, we knew she would be strong. And you have put yourself in great danger for my sake. Once again, I thank you.'

'Not for your sake,' Asara corrected. 'For mine. She interests me. I have watched her lose everything, and become the thing she most despised; and I have watched her fight back and regain herself again. In my time in this world, I have seen the same loves, hates and struggles played over and again in endless monotony; but hers is a rarer story than most, and she still surprises me even now. I almost feel guilty for bringing her into your sphere of influence. You may fool her with your altruism, but not me. What are you planning, Cailin?'

'I believe you are fond of her, Asara,' said Cailin, a smile in her voice as she avoided the question. 'And I thought you too cynical for such fancies.'

'My heart and soul are not dead yet,' Asara replied, 'only dusty and jaded from lack of interest.'

Cailin laughed, and the sound made Kaiku turn and notice them for the first time. She walked over to them, away from the precipice.

'I am glad to see you are a woman of your word,' Cailin said, inclining her head in greeting. 'Did you find what it what it was you were looking for?'

'In a manner of speaking,' Kaiku said, and did not elaborate.

'The time approaches for action,' Cailin said, studying Kaiku from within the painted red crescents over her eyes. 'That is partly why I asked to meet you here.'

'What kind of action?' Kaiku demanded.

'Soon,' Cailin promised. 'But first, I have some people you might like to meet.' She waved a hand at where two newcomers were approaching along the plateau.

Mishani and Tane.

For a moment, Kaiku could not find the words to say, nor dare to think what this might mean. But then Mishani approached her, seeming strangely smaller now than before, her immense length of hair tied in a loose knot at her back, she hesitated for an instant, and then put her arms around Kaiku; and Kaiku embraced her in return. She sobbed a laugh, clutching Mishani tight to her. 'I'm so happy you're here,' she said; but the last of the sentence was incomprehensible with the tightening of her throat, and the tears that fell freely from her. Cailin flashed a triumphant look at Asara, who quirked her mouth in a smile.

The two of them held each other for a long time, there in the sun. Kaiku had no idea why she had come, or what had turned her around, but she knew Mishani well enough to realise what it meant. Eventually they released each other, and Kaiku looked to Tane, who smiled awkwardly.

'I had a little time to think,' he said, and that was all, for Kaiku embraced him too. He looked faintly abashed by the contact, but he held her also, and was a little disappointed when she withdrew much sooner than she had with Mishani.

Kaiku wiped her eyes and smiled at Cailin, who was watching her benevolently with her deep green gaze.

'People have a way of turning up when you least expect them to, Kaiku,' the tall lady told her. 'The four of you walk a braided path; your routes are intertwined, and they will cross again and again until they are done.'

'How can you know that?' Kaiku asked.

'You will learn how I know,' said Cailin. 'If you choose to take the way of the Red Order.'

'Is there a choice for me?'

'Not if you want to live to see the next harvest,' Cailin answered simply.

Kaiku demurred with a shrug. 'So, then.'

Cailin laughed once again, throwing her head back, her white teeth flashing between the red and black of her lips. 'I have never had an offer accepted with such poor grace. Do not be afraid, Kaiku; this is not a lifetime commitment you are making. A Sister of the Red Order is nothing if she is unwilling. All I ask is that you let me teach you; after that, you may choose your own way. Is that acceptable?'

Kaiku bowed slightly. 'I would be honoured.'

'Then we shall begin as soon as you are ready,' she said.

There were three Sisters in the room apart from Cailin. All of them wore the accoutrements of their order: the black dress, the red crescents painted over their eyes, the red and black triangles on their lips like teeth. Asara found their poise uncanny, but not unnerving.

In the conference chamber of the house of the Red Order, lanterns glowed against the night, placed in free-standing brackets in the corners. The red and black motif was mirrored in the surroundings: the room was dark, its walls painted black but hung with crimson pennants and assorted other arcana. Its centrepiece was a low, round table of the same colour on which a brazier breathed scented smoke into the room. The Sisters all stood, but Asara lounged in a chair. She had digested the importance of the news she brought long ago; it amused her to watch the reactions of the Sisters now.

'Do you trust her?' one of the Sisters asked, a slender creature with blonde hair.

'Implicitly,' Asara replied. 'I have known her for years. She would not lie; certainly not about this.'

'And yet there is no proof,' another pointed out.

'Not unless any remains in her father's apartment in Axekami,' Asara said. 'But I doubt that.'

Cailin bowed her head thoughtfully. 'This bears research of our own, dear Sisters. If a single scholar can assemble enough evidence to convince himself to travel all the way to Fo for proof, to risk himself and his family…' She trailed away.

'We must contact our Sisters further afield,' suggested another.

Asara raised an eyebrow. The Red Order had their ladles in more pots than anyone knew, she suspected. Though she had no clear idea of their membership, they were careful never to gather in one place in any great number. Indeed, four was the most she had ever seen together. She had gathered hints from Cailin that the Sisters were scattered all over Saramyr and beyond, engaged in hunting for new recruits like Kaiku or inveigling themselves into other organisations; but she believed there was another reason why they never congregated. They were paranoid. They knew well how fragile they were, how small their Sisterhood, and they feared extinction. While they were all connected by the Weave, there was no need to gather together, and hence no way the whole could be destroyed. Oh, she did not doubt that each of them was using their powers to further the Sisterhood, but she suspected fear was at the root. They were selfish, and sought power to stabilise themselves. The Red Order and the Weavers were not as different as Cailin would like to think.

'There is another matter,' Cailin pointed out. 'The caged Aberrants Kaiku came across. What do they mean?'

'Perhaps they are studying the effects of the witchstones on living beings. Perhaps they are searching for a cure to Aberrancy.'

'Perhaps,' Cailin replied. 'Perhaps it was merely a product of their insanity. Or maybe it is a clue to something much greater.'

'We should think on this,' agreed one of the other Sisters.

'But this changes nothing,' Cailin said, her voice rising decisively. 'Kaiku's discovery is only a first step, a breakthrough that demands our attention. But we have other, more pressing concerns now. This can wait. We must disseminate the information and ensure it becomes spread so wide that it cannot be suppressed, we must plan and research and investigate… but all that is for the future.' She made a sweeping gesture as if to clear it from their minds. 'For now, we have another task. Axekami is falling apart; the city is in the midst of revolution. The Imperial Guards cannot contain it. The armies of Blood Amacha and Blood Kerestyn squabble just outside the city. The Weave-lord Vyrrch works from within to undermine the Empress and kill her child.' She paused, and her eyes flicked to each of them in turn. 'This must not be allowed to happen. She is the only hope we have of turning the people of Saramyr away from the Weavers' teachings, making them understand that Aberrants are not the evil they imagine us to be. I do not care who takes the reins of the Empire if Blood Erinima is overthrown, but I will not lose the Heir-Empress. I have met her in her dreams, and I know something of what she can do. She is too rare and powerful a creature to die on the end of some ignorant foot soldier's blade. Perhaps Blood Erinima will emerge triumphant, but I count the chances as slim. The Empress has set herself squarely against the world. If she loses, Lucia dies.'

'Then what do you propose to do?' Asara asked.

'The plans are in place, between ourselves and the Libera Dramach, to ensure the Heir-Empress's safety the only way we can,' Cailin replied. 'We propose to kidnap her.'