The Ascendancy Veil

SIX

The Lord Protector Avun tu Koli trod warily through the chambers of his home. Despite Kakre's assurances that he would not be harmed, he could never be even slightly at ease in the areas that the Weave-lord had taken to inhabiting. The upper levels of the Imperial Keep had become an asylum.

The great truncated pyramid stood atop a bluff on the crest of the highest hill in Axekami. It was a masterpiece of architecture, arguably still unsurpassed since the fourth Blood Emperor Huira tu Lilira began building it more than a thousand years ago. The complex sculptures of gold and bronze that swarmed across its tiered sides had stunned visitors for a millennium with their intricacy and power, while the four slender towers that stood at its corners, linked to the main body of the Keep by ornate bridges, were as impressive now as they were all that time ago.

Throughout history, there had always been large sections of the Keep that were empty, simply because no high family had enough members to fill a building so huge, nor needed a retinue so large as to take up the spare room. Avun wondered distastefully what his ancestors might make of things now that the new occupants had arrived, and the Keep was finally filled.

The route to the Sun Chamber took him through room after gloomy room of depravity and madness. Weavers gibbered and rocked in clusters, hunched together, their Masks iridescing subtly as they shared the ecstatic bliss of their unseen world. Walls were smeared in blood and excrement, or scrawled with arcane languages which had sprung whole from the subconscious of the author. Abstract mathematics and diagrams, nonsense mingling with insights of staggering genius, were scored into priceless marble pillars or daubed across artwork that was hundreds of years old. The flyblown corpse of a servant, his lips and jaw eaten away by a roaming dog, lay in the centre of a room surrounded by strange clay sculptures, each precisely a foot high. An exquisitely clean and orderly bathing-chamber was guarded by a lunatic Weaver who spent his time obsessively tracing the grains of the wooden floor with his eye, and who screamed and flailed at anyone who entered.

Yet among these horrors other Weavers shuffled and limped, younger ones who had not yet fallen prey to the insanity of their kind. They were Kakre's lieutenants and aides, an assortment of bizarre figures who maintained their own private domains amid the chaos of the upper levels. Their own depravities only emerged after Weaving, when the trauma of withdrawal would trigger their particular manias, which were as varied and repulsive as imagination would allow.

The Weavers had always been careful to conceal the true extent of the damage that their Masks did to them, hiding away their worst casualties in their mountain monasteries; but here the inexorable and terrifying erosion of their minds was appallingly obvious. At least, Avun thought, the famine had provided plenty of victims for those Weavers who liked to kill or rape. He tried not to waste his trained servants when he could help it, preferring to use peasants or townsfolk culled from the Poor Quarter, but the necessity of navigating through this bedlam to attend to the whims of the Weavers had claimed the lives of many of them. It seemed that Kakre's decree of protection extended only to Avun, and anyone else was fair game.

The Sun Chamber had once been beautiful. The roof was a dome of faded gold and green, with great petal-shaped windows following its contours down from the flamboyant boss at its centre. It was rare enough to see glass in Saramyr windows anyway, but these were magnificent creations of many different colours whose designs had caught the light of Nuki's eye in days past and shone down onto the enormous circular mosaic on the floor. Now the light was weak and grim and flat, and what it fell on made Avun wish for darkness.

Kakre had taken the Sun Chamber for his own, and decorated it with the products of his craft. In the three galleries of wood and gold, where in ancient times councils had stood to attend to a speaker or watch a performance on the floor below, malformed and disturbing shapes hid in the gloom. Avun tried not to think about them. Here was where Kakre came to display some of the appalling art he made in his chambers many levels below. Every creation here was sheathed in skin taken from men and women and beasts while they were still alive, arranged as if in audience.

They had been moved around since last time Avun visited, and he unconsciously sought out the figures that had stuck most in his mind: the hunched figure whose left side was stitched from the skin of a man and whose right side from a woman; the winged being whose feathers were made of tanned and leathery sinew; the shrieking man from whose gaping mouth another face peered. There were animals and birds too, and other things not humanoid, frames overlaid with patchwork epidermis of many shades to form strange geometric shapes, or forms so repellent to the eye that they could not be classified. The accumulation of torture and pain and terror this room represented was more than even a man as cold as Avun could bear to consider. The faint shrieks of the tormented Weavers in nearby rooms only served to disconcert him further.

The Weave-lord Kakre was there, of course. He seemed to have lapsed into some sort of trance, standing immobile just off-centre of the mosaic that covered the floor. Avun approached quietly, watching him for any sudden movements. He had learned to be careful around the Weave-lord of late. Kakre's mental health had taken a dangerous slide in recent months, and Avun never quite knew where he stood with his master these days.

He studied the hunched figure before him. Like all his kind, the Weave-lord was clad in heavy, ragged robes sewn haphazardly together from all manner of materials – including hide and skin, in Kakre's case – and hung with ornaments: knucklebone strings and twists of hair and the like. The voluminous cowl partially covered the stretched, ghastly corpse-face that was his True Mask; the Mask concealed the even fouler visage beneath. Avun had never seen Kakre's real face, and never wished to.

'Kakre?' he prompted. The Weaver started a little and then slowly turned his dead face to the Lord Protector.

'You have come,' he wheezed, a faintly disorientated and dreamlike tone to his voice. Avun wondered whether he had accidentally interrupted Kakre's Weaving.

'You asked to see me,' Avun pointed out.

Kakre paused for a little too long, then shook himself and recovered from whatever befuddlement had been upon him. 'I did,' he said, more decisively. 'The feya-kori are ready once again. What is your advice?'

Avun regarded Kakre with his drowsy eyes. His permanent expression of disinterest belied a mind of uncommon ruth-lessless. He did not look the part of the most important non-Weaver in Axekami, with his gaunt frame and balding pate, but appearances could deceive. He had rode the chaos of the Weavers' coup to make Koli the only high family to come out on top while the others went under, and in a short time had worked his way from being a mere figurehead for the Weavers – the human face of their reign – to becoming utterly invaluable to them.

'Zila,' he said.

'Zila?' Kakre repeated. 'Why not attack? Go straight for their core, straight for Saraku?'

'They expect you to move on and try to take the Sasako Bridge, to push towards their heartland from Juraka. Do not do so. Let them know we can harry them all along their front. They will be forced to divide their armies, not knowing where the next assault will come from. Attack Zila with the feya-kori, take it, and fortify.'

'What good will that do?' Kakre asked impatiently. 'To chip away at them one town at a time?'

'War is not conducted in a headlong charge, Kakre,' Avun said. 'I would have thought you had proved that yourselves by now. Remember the early days, Kakre? That first sweep across the country after taking Axekami? Your only strategy was to fling as many troops as possible at your targets, counting your numbers as unlimited. You were beaten back time and again by forces one tenth your size. Because they used tactics. They knew how to fight wars.' He raised an eyebrow. 'As do I.'

He could feel the hatred in Kakre's glare from behind the shadowed eyes of the Mask. It was necessary to remind the Weavers of his worth now and again, lest they forget, but it was a risky business. Kakre was apt to lose his temper, and the consequences for Avun were usually painful.

'Tell me the details,' Kakre said eventually, and Avun felt the tightness in his chest slacken a little. He began to explain, recalling troop locations and the size of armies from memory, laying out the plan for his master. And if, long ago, he might have felt a twinge of guilt at betraying his fellow man this way, he felt nothing of the sort now.

The beginning of the war had not gone at all the way the Weavers had wanted it to. They had envisioned a complete collapse of the Empire, allowing them to overwhelm the disorganised opposition with their superior numbers and suicidal troops. But they had known nothing of the Sisters. With the Red Order knitting themselves across the gap that the Weavers had left and protecting the nobles from the Weavers' influence, the high families put up an unexpectedly efficient resistance. They were quick to recognise that their opponent had no knowledge of military strategies, and capitalised on it. The Weavers had the advantage in numbers; but the skilful generals of the Empire, well-studied and practised in the art of war, made them pay dearly for every mile gained. In time, it became obvious that even the apparently endless armies of the Weavers could not support such losses, and the Empire began to counterattack.

That was when Avun stepped in to lend his services. The Weavers were not generals: they were erratic, most of them were borderline maniacs, and they had no interest in history and so had not learned its lessons. Avun was shrewd and clever, and under his direction the armies of the Weavers became suddenly far more effective, and the Empire's counterattack was battered into a stalemate.

But by then the advantage had been lost. The forces of the Empire had retreated to the Southern Prefectures and held it tenaciously. The damage caused by the Weavers' ineptitude and the vast areas that they now had to keep occupied meant that the Aberrant armies were stretched thin, and the breeding programmes would take years to catch up. Time was both on their side and against them, for every witchstone unearthed made the Weavers stronger, but it accelerated the blight that was killing the crops.

The Weavers were impatient. They were afraid of their armies starving. Avun could understand that. But what he could not understand was what method lay in the Weavers' madness. A desire to conquer he could appreciate. The thirst for power through Masks and witchstones he could sympathise with. But the witchstones were causing the blight. It had been a secret for so long, but only the blind could fail to see the connection now. What use was a poisoned land to the Weavers? Even they had to eat.

Kakre would provide no answers, Avun was sure of that. But for his part, as ever, he would seek advantage for himself and his own, and as long as he was Lord Protector he had leisure to manoeuvre. Let the other nobles fight their hopeless battle against the Weavers' tide. Avun had made betrayal a science, and it had served him well. When the time came, he would betray the Weavers too.

But for now, he spoke his soft words of advice, teaching Kakre the best way to kill those he had once counted as allies, while distantly there came the hoot and gibber of the inmates of the madhouse that surrounded him. He found his wife in her chambers. It was hardly a surprise to him. She almost never left them.

Muraki tu Koli was quiet, pale and petite, an elegant ghost whose voice was rarely raised above a whisper. Her long black hair fell in an unadorned centre parting to either side of her face, and she wore an embroidered lilac gown and soft black slippers because she did not like the noise that shoes made on the hard lach floors of the Imperial Keep. Her quill was scratching as Avun entered the room, inking vertical chains of symbols on a paper scroll.

She appeared not to notice Avun. That, too, was hardly a surprise. She spent a great deal of her time in her fantasies, and when she was there it was as if the real world did not exist. She had once told him, back when they were in something approximating a normal marriage, that she could not tell what her hands were doing when she was in that fugue state, that they set down words with a will of their own, as if she were a medium and others were speaking through her. He did not pretend to understand. He had marvelled at his wife's gift back then. Now it infuriated him. She used it as a retreat, and more and more she refused to return.

'Is it going well?' he asked, referring to what she was writing. He did not need to ask the nature of it. It was a Nida-jan book. It always was.

She ignored the question while she finished off a line and then put down her quill and glanced at him briefly through her curtains of hair.

'Is it going well?' he asked again.

She nodded, but gave no more answer than that.

He sighed and took a seat nearby. Her writing room was small and stuffy and lantern-lit, with no windows to the outside, only small ornamental partitions on the top edge of the wall to provide a throughflow of air. It was exactly the opposite of the kind of open and sunny place she liked to work. She hated this room, and resented working here. Avun knew that, and she knew he did. She was martyring herself in protest at being forced to remain in Axekami when she wanted to be home in Mataxa Bay. In such indirect ways she expressed her displeasure to him.

Avun regarded her for a time. She was not looking at him, but was staring into the middle distance. 'Are you sure you would not be more comfortable in a larger room?' he asked at length.

'The local air does not agree with me,' she replied softly. 'Did your meeting with Kakre go well?'

He told her about what had been said, pleased to have something to converse about. Muraki usually took little interest in anything he did, but they could talk politics at least. Or rather, he could talk to her about it; she never gave anything back. But she listened. That was better than nothing.

He exhausted that topic and, feeling the conversation was going unusually well, he went on with a new one.

'This cannot continue, Muraki,' he said. 'Why are you so unhappy?'

'I am not unhappy,' she whispered.

'You have been unhappy for ten years!'

She was silent. Contradicting him twice in a row would be too much for her, and she was plainly lying anyway. He knew exactly why she was unhappy, and wanted to draw her into a discussion. She did not like confrontations.

'What can I do?' he said eventually, seeing that she was not rising to the bait.

'You can let me go back to Mataxa Bay,' she replied, meeting his eye at last. Then she broke his gaze and looked intently down at the paper before her, fearing she had gone too far.

But Avun was cold-blooded as a lizard and slow to anger. 'You know I cannot do that,' he said. 'You would be in danger there. You are the wife of the Lord Protector; there are many who could kill or kidnap you, use you as a bargaining chip against me.'

'Would you bargain for me, then?' she murmured. 'If I was captured?'

'Of course. You are my wife.'

'Indeed,' she said. 'But we have no love.' She glanced at him again, her face half-hidden by her hair. 'Would you sacrifice for me?'

'Of course,' he said again.

'Why?'

He gazed at her strangely. He could not see why she was finding this difficult to understand. 'Because you are my wife,' he repeated.

Muraki gave up. She had learned long ago that Avun's views on marriage and fatherhood had nothing to do with the finer points of emotion. Their own joining was one of political advantage, like many in Saramyr high society. There had been an element of attraction at the start, but that had long died, and they had been virtually strangers ever since.

Yet there was no possibility of annulment, even now, when the political advantage had become meaningless since the courts of the Empire had disbanded. She would not ask, and he would not countenance it. It would be shameful to him, a failure on his part. Just as he still refused to cut off Mishani from Blood Koli, even so long after he had driven her away. He would not admit to the dishonour of a wayward daughter, and yet he certainly would not reconcile with her.

'I am in the midst of writing,' she said after a time. 'Please let me finish.'

Avun took the dismissal with weary resignation. He got up from his seat and walked to the doorway. Once there he paused and looked back to where his wife was already freshening the ink on her quill.

'Will you ever finish?' he asked.

But she had already begun scratching her neat rows of pictograms, and she did not reply. More than six hundred miles to the southeast, high in the Tchamil Mountains, Mishani was reading her mother's words.

She sat sheltered in the lee of a rock, wrapped in a heavy woollen cloak with the wind blowing her hair across her face. She had put it into one enormous braid for the journey, tied through with blue leather strips, but some errant fronds had escaped and now tormented her. She brushed them away behind her ears; they worked free and came back.

Asara was nearby, feeding the manxthwa while the others went off and hunted. They jostled for their muzzle bags, nudging her with their heads. Mishani was surprised to hear her laugh at their impatience, and she looked up from her book as Asara playfully berated one of them. A smile curved Mishani's lips. The manxthwa's drooping, ape-like faces made them look mournful and wise, but they were in reality docile and stupid. They stared at Asara in incomprehension before beginning to butt her again.

The manxthwa had carried them from Muia, across the rocky paths of the desert and up into the mountains. They were seven feet high at the shoulder, incredibly strong and tireless, with shaggy red-orange fur and knees that crooked backwards. Since their introduction to Saramyr, they had become the most popular mount and beast of burden in Tchom Rin. Their spatulate black hooves, wide and split, dealt with smooth or uneven ground just as easily, and spread the manxthwa's weight well enough for them to walk on the dunes; they had evolved in the snowy peaks of the arctic wastes where the ground was soft and treacherous. Though slow, they were nimble enough for narrow passes, they could go for days without rest as long as they were fed often, and they could survive extremes of heat without discomfort even beneath their thick pelts.

Once Asara had fixed on all their muzzle bags, she sat down next to Mishani and began rummaging in her pack. She was wearing furs, for winter at this altitude was cold even in Saramyr. Presently, she pulled out a small, round loaf of spicebread, tore it down the middle and offered one half to Mishani. Mishani put her book aside, accepted it with thanks, and the two of them ate companionably for a time, looking out across the hard, slate-coloured folds to where Mount Ariachtha rose in the south, its tip lost in cloud.

'You seem in high spirits,' Mishani remarked.

'Aren't you enjoying this?' Asara replied with a grin, knowing full well that Mishani hated it. She had been born a noble, and unlike Kaiku she disliked giving up the luxuries of her position.

'I can think of better ways to spend my day. But you seem glad of the journey.'

Asara lay back against the rock and took a bite of spicebread. It was baked with chopped fruit inside, and made a refreshingly sweet snack. 'I have been in the desert too long, I think,' she said. 'I need a little danger now and again. When you get to be ninety harvests, Mishani, you will know how jaded the old thrills can get; but risk is a drug that never gets dull.'

Mishani gave her an odd look. It was not like Asara to be so effusive. She usually avoided mention of her Aberrant abilities, even with those, like Mishani, who already knew about them. 'The gods grant I get to ninety harvests at all,' she said. 'Still, we have been fortunate so far. Our guides have kept us out of trouble. We may yet cross the mountains without running into anything unpleasant.'

'The Tchamil Mountains are a very big place, and I think there are not so many Aberrants out there as the Weavers would have us believe,' Asara said. 'But I was thinking of the danger at our destination.'

'That cannot be the only reason you chose to come with me,' said Mishani. 'There is danger enough in the desert.'

Asara gave her a wry smile. 'It is not the only reason,' she replied, and elaborated no more. Mishani knew better than to persist. Asara was extremely good at keeping secrets.

'Do you like my present?' she asked, out of nowhere.

Mishani picked up the book again and turned it in her hand. 'It is strange…' she said.

'Strange?'

Mishani nodded. 'My mother's books… have you ever read any?'

'One or two of her early works,' Asara said. 'She is very talented.'

'Her style has changed,' Mishani went on. 'I have noticed it over the previous few books. For one thing, she now produces much smaller tales, and has them printed faster, so that it seems a new Nida-jan book arrives every few months rather than every few years as before. But it is not only that…'

'I have heard they have become much more melancholy since your disagreement with your father,' Asara said. 'There are few that doubt she is expressing her own woe at your absence.'

Mishani felt tears suddenly prick at her eyes, and automatically fought them down. Her conditioning at the Imperial Court was too deep to allow her to show how Asara's comment affected her.

'It is not the subject but the content,' Mishani explained. 'Nida-jan has taken to poetry to express his sense of loss in his search for his absent son; but the poetry is ugly, and nonsensical in parts. Poetry was never her strong suit, but this is very crass.' She turned the book over again, as if she could find answers from another angle. 'And the books seem… hurried. She used to take such time over them, making every sentence exquisite. Now they seem hasty and haphazard in comparison.'

Asara chewed her spicebread thoughtfully. 'You think it reflects her situation,' she stated. 'Her writing became sad when you left. Now it has changed again and you do not know why.' She drew out a flask of warming wine and poured some for Mishani, who took it gratefully.

'I fear that something awful is happening to her,' Mishani admitted. 'And she is so far away.'

Asara settled herself next to Mishani again. 'May I offer you some advice?'

Mishani was not used to Asara being this friendly, but she saw no reason to refuse.

'Take wisdom from one who has been around a lot longer than you have,' Asara said. 'Do not always seek cause and effect. Your mother's words may not reflect her heart in the way you think. Forgive me for saying this, but you cannot help her. She is the wife of the most dreaded man in Saramyr. There is nothing you can do.'

'It is because there is nothing I can do that I lament,' Mishani replied. 'But you are right. I may be concerning myself over nothing.'

Asara was about to say something else when they heard the sound of scraping boots and voices from upwind, heralding the return of the guards and guides that were crossing the mountains with them.

'Be of good cheer,' Asara said, as she got up. 'In a few weeks you may be reunited with your friends. Surely that is something worth looking forward to?' Then she headed away to meet the men.

Mishani watched her go. She did not trust Asara an inch; her eagerness to travel west only made Mishani wonder what kind of business she had there. From what she knew of Asara's past, she had an unpleasant suspicion that it would be something to do with Kaiku.