The Ascendancy Veil

THIRTY-ONE

Cailin, Kaiku and the Tkiurathi emerged from the end of a sloping shaft, and into the sub-levels of Adderach.

Kaiku looked down the corridor that lay before them. It had once been a mine tunnel – that much was evident by the glimpses of rough stone that could occasionally be found – but its surface was almost entirely covered in metal. The walls were thick with black pipes that dripped a noxious liquid; the floor was of iron or some alloy of that. Gas-torches burned with smoky flames, connected by cables that ran along the ceiling.

The Tkiurathi were eager to be on with their task, distrusting their surroundings. They took point, with Cailin and Kaiku just behind and Tsata with them. Kaiku caught his nervousness and laid a hand on his forearm when nobody was looking.

'Hthre,' she murmured to him, offering the Tkiurathi pledge of mutual support.

Surprised, he grinned at her. 'Hthre,' he replied. It did not matter that she had got it wrong, that hthre was supposed to be the response and not the offer. The sentiment was what counted, and he found it heartened him immensely in this dark and horrible place.

They hurried down the corridors, following Cailin's directions. Kaiku suspected that the Pre-Eminent did not know exactly where she was going: the witchstone's influence was overwhelming and made it hard to navigate. But that was a double-edged sword, for it also gave them a very definite target. They merely had to head for the epicentre of that influence, and there would be the witchstone.

But they saw no sign of their enemy at all. There were small rooms, like cells, some of them full of noisy devices and others standing empty and apparently without purpose. They looked into them as they passed by, but did not stop. They had other priorities.

They met up with another group of Tkiurathi and a half-dozen Sisters at a junction, swelling their numbers. Keeping in contact was harder now: it was like trying to shout over a hurricane. The brooding energy beneath them was confusing the Weave, sending it into disarray. Kaiku hoped it would hamper the Weavers as much as it would the Sisters, but somehow she doubted it.

The Sisters and the Tkiurathi were descending from above, spreading out through the tunnels of the old mine, an army of ants invading an enemy nest. But still the enemy would not meet them.

Cailin's force was the first to come out of the corridors. The claustrophobic tunnels opened into a massive room, bigger than any great hall ever built in Saramyr. It was circular in shape and flat-roofed, and as the invaders poured in from the tunnel they gradually faltered and stood there, aghast, at the sight.

It was stultifyingly hot and oppressive. The air was tinged with a coppery taste and thick with steam and smoke. There were two upper levels to the room: wide, ringed platforms that ran around the edge, walkways of metal. At ground level, furnaces roared from within their casings, glowing red through the vents at their sides and spewing strange gases. Contraptions clattered and jerked, chattering through cycles of activity incomprehensible to the observers.

Placed in concentric rows around the room were elaborate metal cradles. Hanging amid the cradles' frames were veiny, transparent sacs of flesh that looked like the stomach of some huge animal. Within, there were dark shapes suspended in liquid, lit by a greenish inner glow, visible only as smears from a distance.

Kaiku walked up to one, dazed by the scale of what they had discovered, and knelt down to look inside it.

It was a child, an infant, perhaps three harvests old but out of proportion, its bones too long. Its tiny chest sucked in and out as it breathed the liquid. It was on its side, facing her, and on top of its bald head there was the glistening diamond shape of a nexus-worm female embedded in its flesh. Kaiku could see a face tracked with ridges where the tendrils ran just beneath the skin, reaching to its eyes and mouth and nose, around which thin purple capillaries showed through. Its eyes were open, but they did not follow Kaiku as she moved. They were purest black.

A young Nexus. They grew them here, in these wombs.

Kaiku stared at the thing in the tank, numb. Cailin came up next to her.

'Is this what knowledge their god gives them?' Kaiku said. 'They blaspheme against Enyu herself.'

'That is not all,' Cailin said, motioning across the room.

Kaiku got to her feet and went to where a trio of larger cradles stood. The Tkiurathi were gathered around them, talking in hushed tones. She caught a word she knew: maghkriin. It was the name they gave to the beings created by the Fleshcrafters in Okhamba, who shaped babies in the bellies of their captured enemies to make them monstrous killers.

As she neared the cradles, she understood.

It was difficult to tell what the things that hung in the sacs had originally been, nor what they might become. But they moved fitfully, here twitching a leg, there curling a claw. They were baby Aberrants, three of the same species but each one different from the other. One was growing little fins along its arms, another was developing outsize teeth, while the last was a true horror with two three-quarter heads fused together in the centre, its animal features colliding and merging. The sacs glowed from within with the same nauseating light which Kaiku recognised as that given off by witchstone.

She had seen what happened to the Edgefathers who were in contact with the witchstone for too long. She knew how the Weavers changed through even the tiny dose of dust in their Masks. The Weavers were using witchstone to mutate these creatures, who were probably themselves the offspring of mutants. Like the Fleshcrafters, they were shaping their troops. Designing Aberrants through forced mutation and selective breeding. Was this where the latchjaws had come from? The nexus-worms? The golneri?

To Kaiku, the noise of the room faded until she could hear only the sound of her own breathing. The hate in her was choking all else. She wanted to lash out, to ruin this place, to kill every one of the Weavers and eradicate their practices from a world she had once loved. She thought suddenly of Tane, the priest of Enyu who had died to save Lucia, a man who had dedicated himself to understanding nature. How this would have destroyed him. All this time, these two and a half centuries, the Weavers had been learning the dark art of subverting Enyu's plans, using these poisonous devices to imitate her processes and turn them to their advantage.

She felt a hand on her shoulder.

'We must go,' Tsata said. Behind him the Tkiurathi were beginning to move again. They crossed the room and out through the far doorway, the Sisters following behind. Kaiku paused beneath the coiled-iron frame, her shoulders tight.

'Cailin,' she said, and the Pre-Eminent, who had been just ahead of her, stopped. She saw the look in Kaiku's eyes, and nodded.

When the last of the Tkiurathi had left the room, the two of them remained in the doorway, like estranged twins, their appearance uniting them in ways that they did not feel. The only thing between them now was a common goal.

Kaiku waved a dismissive hand, and the sacs detonated from within, spewing a green flood. Those that lined the upper levels burst at the same time, slopping forth their embryonic cargo like rough abortions. A great deluge of the amniotic liquid came splashing over the edge of the walkways and washed around the boots of the Sisters.

'I wish you would change your mind, Kaiku,' Cailin said at length. 'Stay with us. We have need of your strength. And there is so much more you could learn from me.'

But Kaiku turned away and stalked down the corridor after the departing Tkiurathi, and Cailin, after appraising the destruction for a few moments more, followed her. The first attack on the intruders occurred not long afterward.

It was Cailin who sensed it. She was somehow able to filter through the baffling effect that the witchstone produced, at least to a better extent than Kaiku could. Kaiku's kana was limited to her line of sight now; the very walls seemed infused with the stuff of the witchstone, and it was extraordinarily hard to try and Weave through it. She had only been given hints of how much greater Cailin's mastery of her kana was than her own, for Cailin kept her secrets close; but she was becoming more and more assured that the Pre-Eminent and some of the most proficient Sisters operated in an entirely different league.

What Cailin sensed she rebroadcast with greater clarity for those nearby, and that was how Kaiku learned of it. Garbled empathic impressions of surprise, pain, and combat. Then silence, and the soft ache of death.

Cailin said nothing, but she continued on and the others went with her.

It happened again later, as they hunted through another empty series of rooms. This time it was a bigger group of Sisters and Tkiurathi, and there was a clearer picture. Aberrants, swamping into the corridor, bolstered by Weavers. They were systematically assaulting the Sisters, group by group, taking advantage of the fact that they had to split up to search the complex. This was what they had lured them down here for. They knew their best chance for survival lay in picking the Sisters apart.

But that was not a usual Weaver tactic, Kaiku thought. If they had the strength of numbers, they would have attacked outright. They were delaying until their reinforcements could arrive. They were on the defensive.

As Cailin had hoped, they had been drawn off by Reki's men, and had not left enough of their forces behind to protect themselves from something like this.

As it turned out, the second group of Sisters were not taken down so easily. The Tkiurathi put up a vicious fight, and it was still ongoing by the time Cailin and Kaiku were ambushed.

The Aberrants boiled out of a side-corridor, filling the junction with their bodies and ploughing towards the Tkiurathi, howling. They almost caught the front line by surprise: they had been virtually soundless in their approach, and the Weavers had cloaked themselves from the Sisters well enough that, in this difficult environment, not even Cailin had detected them. But the soft warbling of the shrillings had given them away at the last moment. The Tkiurathi met the charge with their gutting-hooks sweeping.

The two groups crashed together. The corridors were wide enough for seven or eight to fight at a time, but the Aberrants in their frenzy clambered over the top of the combatants to reach those behind. Most found themselves eviscerated as they did so, their exposed underbellies ripped open and their steaming innards spilling out. The front line of the Tkiurathi collapsed under the weight of the creatures and were either dragged free or savaged. But the Okhambans were taking down the Aberrants faster than they themselves were dying. Their twin-bladed weapons, one in each hand, hacked and plunged and parried. The warriors, men and women both, were possessed of an uncanny harmony of movement that kept their blows from interfering with their neighbour's even when they were packed tight like this.

The Weavers had made one bad mistake. The Tkiurathi were born for close combat. Their weapons were adapted to its purpose and their fighting technique tailored to those conditions. Life in the jungle had meant that they had evolved short, fast, controlled movements so that they would not tangle their blades in vines or trees, and they had reactions honed by generations of living in one of the most hostile places in the Near World. Here in the confines of the tunnels they outclassed the Aberrants, who were used to the open spaces of the mountains.

The Tkiurathi were as animals themselves when they fought, primal and ferocious, and they dodged and slashed and killed until they were drenched in the blood of their enemies.

Kaiku and the Sisters dealt with the Weavers. There were only four of them, and the Sisters in Kaiku's group outnumbered them two to one. It was no contest. The Sisters attacked in a whirling chaos of threads and the Weavers' defences could not stand it. They held out briefly and then collapsed. The Sisters ripped into the fibres of their enemy's bodies, and the force released by the sundering turned the Weavers to pillars of fire.

With the Weavers gone, they broke the necks of the three Nexuses who were controlling the Aberrants, and the predators collapsed in disarray, some of them fleeing or attacking each other. The Tkiurathi made short work of the rest.

Kaiku caught sight of Tsata nearby. He was breathing hard, flecked in blood, his eyes sharp with an intensity that she only saw when he fought. A quiet and introspective man in the main, his flipside was this feral killer. She wondered briefly what that meant for the future, how deeply that ferocity was suppressed and whether it might one day be turned on her, if she should stay with him. Was he capable of that? How could she tell? How well, in the end, did she know him?

Tsata sensed her gaze upon him and turned to meet it. She felt a shock of guilt, as if he had realised what she was thinking. Then, expressionless, he turned away, and the group began to move on, deeper into the maze of corridors.

The Weavers attacked them three more times over the next hour. Other groups of Sisters who were searching elsewhere in the complex were similarly assaulted by forces of varying size. Some were overwhelmed and slain; some managed to kill their attackers. Cailin's group, with eight Sisters among them, had the strength to outmatch the Weavers; but some were not so lucky.

Kaiku could sense Cailin's mood growing graver. The Weavers' plan, costly though it was, was working. The invaders' numbers were dwindling slowly, and still there had been no sign of a way down to the witchstone beneath them. They could be running around these colossal sub-levels for hours yet, being gradually whittled away; but long before that, the Weavers' reinforcements would arrive, and flood down through the mine. Nobody thought of giving up and going back to the surface. They were just too close. But the enemy army could not be far from Adderach now.

Reports of other places like the chamber that Kaiku had destroyed came through to them. One group found a huge complex of grim workshops, forges and lathes and whittling benches where the Masks of the Weavers were crafted; but there were no Edgefathers to be seen, for they had all been taken elsewhere, presumably to the same place that the absent golneri had gone. There was also a bigger forge nearby, something entirely different to that of a blacksmith or an artisan: a monstrous, sweltering place with huge vats of molten metal and great moulds, where they found newly-made pipes and cogs and other components of the Weavers' devices. Another found a room full of roaring machines that pumped up and down, and in its centre a pool of bubbling mud that belched foul-smelling gas. Unusually, there was a marked lack of evidence of the Weavers' insanity in these sub-levels: there were no corpse-pits, no wild scrawls or strange sculptures. Here there was only the chill efficiency of machinery, designed by the Weavers and built by the golneri. Aricarat kept a tighter rein on his subjects down here.

Whether by Shintu's will or Cailin's guidance, it was Kaiku's group who found the way down. And they found it held against them.

They were directly above the witchstone at this point: Kaiku could feel it through the great weight of rock beneath their feet. They had reached what appeared to be a wall of metal at the end of the corridor, but which turned out on closer inspection to be a door of some kind. Cailin rested her hand against it and closed her eyes; a moment later there was a loud crunch, and Cailin stepped back as the wall began to part in the centre, sliding into recesses on either side.

The chamber it revealed was dimly lit by a scattering of gas-torches, but it was too large for them to do anything more than offer faint contrast to the shadows which cloaked the far end. It was circular, like the incubation room they had passed through, and its walls were metal and lined with cables and heavy pipes that leaked steam at regular intervals with a soft sigh, as if the mines themselves were breathing. In the centre of the room was a tower of machinery, bristling with cogs and chains. In the tower was a featureless metal doorway.

They stepped into the chamber, spreading out around the entrance, and regarded the strange edifice before them.

'There it is,' said Cailin. 'That is how we get to the witchstone.'

Tsata took a step forward, but Kaiku held out her hand to block him.

'It is too easy,' she said.

Something massive shifted in the shadows at the back of the chamber, moving from behind the obscuring bulk of the tower. There were smaller figures, also, strangely indistinct even to Kaiku's kana-adapted eyes.

'Trickery!' Cailin hissed, and swept a hand out. The shadows flexed and a veil dropped from their sight.

Kaiku paled. Twenty Weavers, a dozen Nexuses, and at least fifty Aberrants were emerging from the gloom, sidelit in the faint yellow glow. And behind them came something worse still.

Kaiku had seen giant Aberrants before; she had almost been killed by one on the way across Fo many years ago, and since then there had been reports of them from time to time in the mountains. But this was something altogether more terrible than any she had heard of. It must have been twenty feet high at the shoulder, its skin black and leathery and thick with sinew. It walked on all fours, its feet flat and its bulk enormous to support its weight. Its head was all jaw and teeth, crooked fangs far too big for its mouth, and its twisted muzzle was deeply scarred and torn because of it. It drooled a frothy milk of spittle and blood which drizzled onto the metal floor. Asymmetrical features were warped out of true: a tiny eye was lower on one side of its face than the other, almost upon the ridge of its cheek. A fringe of spikes that were somewhere between fangs, tusks and horns stuck out at random angles, sprouting from the edge of its mouth, its forehead, and its lower jaw. Its back was ridged in the same spikes, as was its tail – which was flaccid and appeared broken – but they were set to no pattern. Rather, they gave the impression of rampant growth, as if its skeleton had thrust protrusions through its flesh wherever it could. At its neck, visible only as a wet patch against its skin, Kaiku could see a nexus-worm.

It was a freak, a beast spawned from generations of creatures breeding in the mines beneath Adderach, where the mutating influence of the witchstone had created horrors beyond imagining. Though much of the mine was sealed for the Weavers' own safety, and it was suicide even for them to set foot in its depths, they had managed to secure this one and tamed it as the guardian of this place. It lived in the chamber just beyond this, through a dark doorway and down a long corridor to a room full of bones and the stench of musk and dung.

The Weavers shuffled to a halt at the edge of the light. The predators stopped also, shifting restlessly. Behind them, the giant Aberrant growled, a rumbling from deep within its chest.

For a long moment, the two forces faced each other across the chamber. Then, possessed by some feeling that she could not name, a mixture of resignation and anger and deep, deep hatred, Kaiku stepped forward. Her hair hung over one painted eye, and with the other she stared coolly at the Weavers ranged before them.

'You are in our way,' she said.

It was like the spark to a powder keg. Both sides erupted in a roar, and the Aberrants and Tkiurathi charged each other.

Kaiku plunged into the Weave, and the scene slowed around her. The golden knitwork figures of the Tkiurathi and the Aberrants became transparent: she saw the clench and tug of their muscles, saw the air sucked into their lungs through gritted teeth, the minute disturbance of soundwaves as their shoes and claws hit the floor. The Weavers came fast, but she realised their tactics immediately. They had divided: half were guarding the Nexuses and the giant beast while the rest attacked. Cailin and the Sisters were with her in the Weave, their own tactics already assigned and agreed in a communication faster than thought. And then Kaiku was spiralling towards her nearest adversaries, drawing two of them in together, and as they hit they burst into a ball of threads and sucked back inward onto each other, a tight knot of conflict that would only untangle when either Kaiku or the Weavers were dead. Tsata jumped the swipe of a shrilling's sickle claw and struck down with his kntha, half-severing its foreleg. His leap landed him some way past the beast, and he left it for his kinfolk behind him while he tackled a ghaureg. In these moments of combat, he felt a stillness unlike any other, a perfection of focus that no other activity could bring him. In the sweep and slice of his gutting-hooks, in the dance of his body as he avoided the blows of his enemies by inches, he found that the chaff of existence sloughed from him like falling leaves from the trees. He was as his Okhamban ancestors had been, and their ancestors, all the way back to a time before civilisation had touched mankind. He was a hunter, a predator, streamlined to that one purpose. There was no fear of death. Death was simply impossible.

The ghaureg reached for him; he ducked under its elbow and buried his gutting-hook to the hilt in its armpit, angling in toward its heart. The creature's reflex was to swipe its arm back at him, but he had expected it and dropped beneath the swing; then he braced his foot against its ribs and in one quick motion he pulled the blade free. Blood sprayed from the wound, and the creature went down.

Rifles cracked behind him, and he saw an Aberrant he could not identify fall with its skull in ruins. The Tkiurathi, out of the cramped corridors, now had space to employ their ranged weapons without killing their own folk. Some of them took down Aberrants from a distance, but others fired at the Nexuses that hid in the shadows, and the Weavers were kept busy protecting their allies. Kaiku saw none of this: her world had diminished to the frantic scurry inside the Weave-knot, the battlefield between her and the two Weavers. They struck at her hungrily, heartened by their numerical superiority; Kaiku barely fended them off. She spun herself a tight ball of defence in the centre of the knot, sheltering from the Weavers' attacks. They were harrying her instantly, picking at stray threads, trying to unravel her. She kept curled like a hedgehog, building a construct within the confines of her defences. The Weavers, puzzled by this sudden cessation of aggression, were determined to get at her. They wound themselves together and, as one, drilled inward. Even Kaiku could not withstand an attack like that in concert, and her ball came apart, its threads scattering.

Inside was a labyrinth, an insoluble jumble of threads with no beginning and no end, and the Weavers fell right into it and were lost.

Kaiku stayed there just long enough to be sure that they would never get out, and then threw herself back into the fight. One of the Sisters had fallen, but four Weavers had also been taken out of the action. Kaiku let her hate and anger spur her to new vigour. This was a battle they could not afford to lose. Much more than their own lives depended on it. The giant Aberrant, meanwhile, was making its presence known. It roared and snapped and stamped among the combatants. The metal floor trembled with the impact. Tkiurathi swarmed around it, trying to take it down, but it was too big. Its jaws dripped with blood as evidence of the dozen lives it had already accounted for. The Sisters tried to get to it, to stop its heart or blind it, but the Weavers had made it the focus of their keenest protective measures and there were not enough Sisters to get through.

Tsata was among those who were attacking the monster. His efforts were futile. He ducked in and tried to hamstring its foreleg with his blade, but his hardest swipe made little more than a shallow cut against the creature's hide. Another Tkiurathi to his left made an attempt to get to the nexus-worm which kept the creature under control. The Aberrant swept its head to the side and gored him, then flung him shrieking into the air and caught him in its mouth with a crunch of bones.

Tsata saw the furie charging him out of the corner of his eye, and he moved just in time. The boar-like Aberrant skidded past him, and was taken in the side of the head by another Tkiurathi blade. The force of its momentum tore the weapon from its killer's hand, and it crashed into a heap, bleeding from the eyes.

Tsata looked up at the man who had slain it. It was Heth, his hair wet with sweat, his tattooed face gleaming. He gave Tsata a grave stare and then tipped his head at the roaring monstrosity that was tearing through their people.

'I'll be the lure,' he said in Okhamban. 'You kill that thing.'

Tsata tilted his chin at his friend, knowing that Heth would probably pay for it with his life. Neither of them had the slightest hesitation. It was a matter of pash. Kaiku sensed the wave of alarm across the Weave through the muting effect of the witchstone, and knew what it meant even before Cailin amplified and clarified it. It had come from one of the Sisters in another part of the complex, and its message was simple.

The enemy army had arrived, and were already pouring down through Adderach.

Kaiku felt terror clutch at her. Not at the prospect of dying: death was something she was not afraid of at this point, and part of her would welcome it. It was the thought that she might fail here, when she was so close to fulfilling her oath to Ocha, to avenging her family. She redoubled the intensity of her assaults, but it was hopeless. The Weavers had dug in; they knew what the Sisters knew. They had only to hold out for a few minutes and the reinforcements would be here.

It will not end like this, she told herself, but it was an empty thought. There was nothing she could do about it.

((Sisters)) said Cailin. ((Time has run out))

And with that came an empathic blaze of instructions. Kaiku did not question them; she had no other inspiration. The Sisters moved as one, breaking off their attacks and whirling into a frenzy, setting false resonances and weaving a screen of confusion. With the portion of her mind that attended the physical battle which raged across the chamber, Kaiku saw Cailin drawing a slender blade from inside her robe. She had a fraction of an instant to wonder what it was she hoped to do with that, when Cailin disappeared.

She had never witnessed anything like it. Even the display Cailin had shown her at Araka Jo, when she had made herself simply not there, was nothing compared to this. For as she disappeared, she dissassembled herself in the Weave, her very being coming apart into its component fibres and racing away in a diffuse burst before knotting together again elsewhere. Again, and again and again, she darted back and forth through the Weave, and finally returned to her original position and reappeared.

In the space of a heartbeat she had appeared behind several of the Weavers in rapid succession, so quick that it seemed almost simultaneous, each time stabbing with her blade. Then she was back where she had begun, the whole process enacted fast enough so that it might have been a trick of the brain. But on the far side of the room, in the gloomy shadows, eight Weavers collapsed, pierced through the nape of the neck.

Kaiku was dumbstruck. She had never imagined Cailin capable of such a thing; no wonder the Weavers were caught by surprise. Just for an instant, she had glimpsed the unplumbed depths of her own abilities, what she might be able to do if she took up Cailin's offer and returned to the fold.

But there was no time for such musings now. The Weavers were rocked by their loss, and the Sisters, scenting victory, threw themselves into the offensive. The giant Aberrant swung its head around at Heth's cry. Even from a being so small to a creature so massive, it recognised a challenge. Its mismatched eyes squinted down at the blurred figure at its feet. This little thing was becoming a torment: already the Aberrant had tried to catch Heth twice, and he kept dodging out of the way. Frustrated, it lunged for him.

Heth moved as the great jaws gaped, and when they snapped shut he was not between them. As the head came down, Tsata darted in from the side, driving his gutting-hook in towards the creature's neck, where the nexus-worm glistened. His blade hit one of the Aberrant's many facial spikes, glanced away, and Tsata was forced to jump backwards to avoid being gored as it raised its head again.

Heth was already running to a new position, and Tsata went with him, keeping himself clear of the other Aberrants that were engaged in battling his brethren. He spared an instant to glance back at Kaiku, but she was anonymous among the other Sisters, and he had no idea how their endeavours were going. He had only this purpose: to bring down the beast. And every time he failed, Heth was forced to make himself the bait once more. But the creature was too well-armoured, making what was already a hard target near to impossible.

His knuckles whitened on the hilt of his kntha. He would not fail next time.

The giant Aberrant was following Heth now, ignoring the other Tkiurathi that hacked pointlessly at its legs and tail. Heth glanced over at Tsata, to be sure he was near enough; but in the instant that Heth took his attention away, it struck.

Heth only dodged at all because of the alarm on Tsata's face, but he was a fraction too slow. Though the beast missed most of him, its jaws snapped shut on his trailing arm with a terrible cracking noise. Heth screamed; blood squirted through the monster's teeth. It shook him violently, pulling him over and tearing the rest of his arm off.

Then Tsata was there. The beast's head had sunk low to the ground, and Tsata threw himself at his target. He felt a blaze of pain in his ribs: the thing had turned slightly, and he caught one of the spikes in his side. But he took his gutting-hook and rammed it into the soft, slimy flesh of the nexus-worm, then twisted hard. The beast roared, flexing spasmodically; Tsata was lifted up and flung away. He sailed through the air for a few awful instants and landed in a heap on the hard metal floor with a loud snap.

But the beast buckled. Its legs gave way as the nexus-worm died, and it staggered sideways and collapsed with a thunderous boom, crushing Aberrants and Tkiurathi alike underneath its massive bulk. The death of the worm, so closely tied in with its brain and nervous system, triggered a stroke and a heart attack simultaneously, and after a few violent spasms it gave a bubbling sigh and was still. The Weavers fell to pieces all at once. The remainder of them had consolidated their efforts as best they could into one defensive force, but eventually it could bear the strain of the Sisters' furious assault no longer. The six Sisters that were left shredded the remaining eight Weavers, blowing them apart from within in a flaming rain of flesh and bone.

After that, it was a slaughter. The Sisters went for the Nexuses next. The black-robed beings went up like torches, silently burning. They showed no indication of pain, nor made a sound, but collapsed into blazing heaps. The Aberrants lost their minds as they lost their masters; some fled, some kept fighting, but the Tkiurathi were still thirty strong and the Aberrants half that now. The remaining beasts were destroyed by the Sisters or by the Tkiurathi, and then there was silence. As if waking from a dream, Kaiku realised that the fighting had stopped.

But a new sound was growing. The roar of an approaching horde, coming from the doorway through which they had entered. The Weavers' reinforcements were here.

'Seal that door!' Cailin cried, and the Sisters responded immediately. The mechanism that drove the metal barrier jerked into life, and the two halves began to slide from their recesses and grind shut. The sounds of the enemy got louder, louder, until Kaiku thought they must surely be upon them; and then there was a reverberant clang, and the door was closed.

Kaiku turned away, looking for Tsata, and found him kneeling, one arm cradled in the other. She hurried over to him, slowing as she neared. His trousers were black with blood which had soaked into them from the great slick all around him. Heth lay in the midst of that, his yellow skin gone white, his tattooes pallid. His arm had been ripped away, leaving only a wet mess at the shoulder through which a knob of bone showed. He was clearly dead.

'Tsata…' she murmured, then realised she did not know what to say. He did not look up. She noticed that his left forearm kinked at an angle, and he was holding it to his chest. 'Let me see to that…' she began, but then Cailin swept up to her.

'Kaiku. Come with me now,' she said. She looked down at Tsata. 'The Weavers will not be long getting through that door. We need what time you can give us.'

'You will have every moment our lives can buy,' he said quietly, and still he did not raise his head.

Cailin cast one last glance at Kaiku and then made for the doorway in the tower, where the other Sisters were heading. Kaiku waited there for a short time, trying to think of something to say, something suitable for this parting. But there were no words that could express her sorrow, nothing adequate to ease his hurt. In the end, she turned and walked away without a word. She was last through the doorway, and as soon as she was in Cailin used her kana to decipher and activate the mechanism. The door slid shut with a squeal of metal. Kaiku's gaze lingered on Tsata until he disappeared from view.

The elevator began to descend with a lurch, and they went down, down towards the witchstone.