Weavers of Saramyr

Twenty-Four

A sara killed again in Chaim. It was an unwise risk, for she had no need to feed; but she sought diversion, and there was no other in the bleak, empty trading village to interest her. She chose a man this time, because she had less respect for them than for women, and she was less likely to suffer something like guilt for robbing their life as a source of amusement. This one was drunk, a leathery, tough brawler who had no fear of the short, dark route from the bar to his house, where no lights burned. Asara taught him otherwise.

Afterward, when she had hidden the body far away where it would not be discovered for days, she returned to her room. She was not worried about being caught. There was not a mark on him, nothing to link them. He had simply got lost on his way home in the dark, and fallen victim to exposure. Or perhaps his heart just stopped. He was a drinker, after all, and well-known for it.

She sat in her room, alone. As she preferred it. As it always was.

Her room at the lodging house was as spartan as everything else in Chaim. There was a double bed in the centre, its woollen covers dark with age and moth-ragged. There was a lantern on the wall, and bare, ill-fitting floorboards. Beyond that, there was nothing. The mountain winds cooed outside, sending chilly fingers in through the cracks in the wall to brush across her skin. The lantern was unlit, which made little difference to Asara – her night vision was near-perfect, like a cat's. It was freezing, as always, for the winds cut to the bone here even in summer. She listened to the night, and the sudden, sharp gusts that whipped around the rickety lodging house.

The bliss of feeding was short-lived, and when it left her she was maudlin. She sat cross-legged on the tatty bed and looked at the empty room. Alone, ever alone. She did not know any other way. For there were none like her, not even the other Aberrants. She was a reflection, a cypher, without identity or cause. She was nothing, not even herself.

There was no memory of her childhood. There had been a time when she had wished she could gaze upon herself at the moment of her birth, thinking that if she could see her first face, even if it was the scrunched-up red ball of a newborn, then she might have a fix on her identity, a base line from which all her other selves grew. But it was fancy. She suspected anyway that she would not like what she saw there.

Her mother died in the pregnancy. During her early years, in her lonely quest for herself, she had tracked down the place where she had been born. She learned of a woman there who had become pregnant, and within three months had wasted away to the point of death. Yet the woman's belly was so swollen that the physicians of the village cut her open, and they found a fully grown babe within. Asara had no doubt that it was her. She had sucked her mother dry from inside the womb.

What happened to the baby, nobody knew. Perhaps it was given away, perhaps lost and found. It was remarkably hard to trace her own trail, when with each new location she was a different person.

She remembered several mothers and fathers, foster parents who took her in. She was irresistible to them. With a child's eagerness to please, she unconsciously changed herself slightly, day by day, to accommodate her new parents' vision of the perfect offspring. She bewitched them by fulfilling their heart's desire. But always, sooner or later, the time came to leave. When a relative marked the drastic alterations since they had visited last year, too gradual for her parents to see but obvious to one who had been away for a while; when her cravings and appetites had claimed too many lives; when people began to question where she had come from: that was her time to move on, leaving only the memory of a curious ailment known as the Sleeping Death behind her, a disease that struck at random and left not a mark on the victim's body. As if their life had simply left them.

She grew fast. When she was six harvests old, the craving began, and instinct taught her how to sate it in the same way it taught babes to suckle or adolescents to kiss. She was clever even then, and careful never to be caught, though there were times when she had come close. In the early days, the hunger was worse, for she was growing as well as changing. By the time she was thirteen harvests of age she had the form and understanding of an eighteen-harvest girl. In those days, she seemed to absorb something of her victims, shreds of understanding and knowledge that kept her mind apace with her body; that talent she had lost with the passing of childhood, and never regained. To her, it was simply a part of growing up.

Her uncanny growth meant that she was forced to move on frequently, and learn hard lessons in life; but she was a good pupil, and an attentive one, and she survived the fate that most Aberrants suffered. She avoided the Weavers and the hatred of those around her, until she had mastered herself enough to disguise her condition.

As time went on, she grew bitter and resentful. She searched for her past and found fragments, each as unsatisfying as the last. In the end, she gave up. And yet the feeling remained, even now, eighty harvests after her birth. She had no core. She was a mirrored shell, reflecting other people's ideas of beauty, but under it all there was nothing. A void that sucked in life, and was never quite filled. It demanded that she prey on the things she imitated, desperately drawn to their light like a moth to a candle. She was an effigy, a parasite… anything but a person.

Time had given her ample opportunity to change, both in conviction and form. She had spent a few years as a man before deciding that it did not suit her. She had briefly tried to struggle against her need to feed and liberate herself from it, but in the end she could not convince herself of the worth of human beings, and she still saw most of them as a brand of cattle only slightly more unpredictable than oxen or cows. The rest were dangerous to her: the Weavers and the nobles, those who would hunt her down and slay her because she was a threat to them. No, she owed humanity no favours, and though she still hung on to a vestigial semblance of guilt and regret at sacrificing a particularly pretty life to her hungers, it was more in the manner of having been forced to break a beautiful vase.

But all changes led back to the same void, the same boredom and emptiness. And so she sat, alone, in her room in Chaim, and wondered when it might ever end.

Asara awoke at mid-morning, a moment before there came a knock at her door. She dressed hurriedly, already alert, and opened it.

The owner of the lodging house was there, a thin, grizzled, wiry man with few teeth. She dismissed him from her gaze, shifting it immediately to the one who stood next to him. Their eyes met, and the other managed a smile so weak that it told all the story it needed to tell.

Kaiku.

'This one wanted you,' the owner said. 'Was asking around.'

Kaiku stepped into the room. She looked half the weight she had been when they set off into the mountains, three weeks ago. Asara embraced her gently; she felt frail and thin, all bone.

'Bring us food,' she said to the owner. 'Meat, fish.'

'She'll be staying in this room, then?' the owner queried, a note of disapproval in his voice.

'Yes,' Asara replied bluntly. 'She will.'

By the time she had turned back, Kaiku was lying on the bed, asleep.

They did not leave the room for three days. Kaiku slept most of that time, and Asara watched over her. She seemed withdrawn, hollowed-out, and by the look in her eyes Asara knew it was something more than a physical trial she had suffered. She barely talked the first day, and only a little more on the second. Asara did not press her, not even to ask whether she had found the monastery or not. She knew Kaiku had, anyway. Her father had borne that same look about him when he returned to their house in the Forest of Yuna, shortly before the shin-shin came. Instead Asara simply waited, and guarded her while she recovered.

At Asara's behest, the owner knocked and brought them food at intervals. He was well paid for his trouble. The wealth that Asara and Kaiku carried between them, while not impressive by city standards, was a small fortune in Chaim. Kaiku ate, at first a little and then a lot as her shrunken stomach stretched to the prospect of life-giving energy. She was ravenous. At night, they slept huddled together. Asara had the owner bring extra blankets, but Kaiku shivered anyway.

By the third day, Kaiku's strength had returned somewhat. Without prompting, she suddenly began to talk.

'I imagine you are curious to know where I have been,' she said to Asara, who was sitting on the edge of the bed combing her hair.

'The thought had crossed my mind, yes,' she replied dryly.

'Forgive me my silence,' Kaiku said. 'I have had much to think about.'

Asara finished her combing and twisted to face Kaiku, who was wrapped in a blanket, hugging her knees. 'You have suffered,' she observed as a way of excusing her.

'No more than I deserve,' she replied. Then she told Asara about what she had seen and done, of her journey across the mountains and the slaying of the Weaver whose robes she stole, of the Mask and the crossing of the barrier that hid the Weavers from the world. She talked of the monastery and the strange things within, of the foul prison full of Aberrants and the creature's accusation: Look what you've done to us…

Asara's eyes widened as Kaiku recounted what she had seen in the chamber of the witchstone, and the vision the Mask had given her. She did not weep as she spoke of her father and his fate; but tears stood in her eyes, marshalling behind her lashes. Finally, she told Asara of the true nature of the witchstones. The jealously guarded source of the Weaver's power was also the despoiler of the land. Kaiku, Asara, Cailin, the Heir-Empress Lucia… all the Aberrants were merely a side-effect of the witchstones' energy that the Weavers harnessed in their Masks.

As she spoke, Asara found herself breathless with wonder. Each word seemed to increase the sensation of incredulity. The witchstones were the source of the blight? The Weavers were responsible for the very Aberrants they murdered? For the first time in longer than she cared to remember, she felt she was on the cusp of something truly worthwhile. All she had been working for these last years, with the Red Order and the Libera Dramach, in her time as Kaiku's handmaiden… all of it flexed into focus at this moment, and she felt the pounding of blood through her body and was alive.

'Do you know what you have discovered?' Asara managed. 'Do you know what you have found}' She grabbed Kaiku's arm. 'Are you sure? Are you sure it was no delirium you saw, but your father's memories?'

'As sure as I can be,' Kaiku said wearily. 'But Father's notes burned with the house, and if there were any left in his apartment in Axekami, I doubt there is any trace now.'

'But this could topple the Weavers!' Asara enthused. 'If the nobles knew, if we could prove it… the rage at being deceived would be… spirits, even if we cannot, we can plant the seed, help them ask the right questions! Why has nobody thought of it before?'

'They have,' Kaiku said. 'But most scholars are patronised by a noble, who in turn has a Weaver. They usually met with accidents before they could get far into their research, I imagine. My father was independent, and he kept his research secret, and even then he was discovered.'

Asara was barely listening. 'How did you get away, Kaiku? From the monastery?'

Kaiku shrugged minutely. 'It was easy.'

She told the rest of her story then. When she had woken from the faint induced by stress and hunger, she had forced herself to her feet and attempted to find her way back to the more central areas of the monastery, where food would be. Whether the Mask was helping her or not she could not divine, but she found a kitchen not long after, populated by short, scurrying servants whom she had not encountered until now. They were almost dwarfish in stature, wiry and swarthy, and their bunched-up faces revealed nothing about their thoughts, if indeed they thought at all. They seemed a simple, servile breed.

By pointing to a bone plate and to the stove, Kaiku procured herself a meal of root vegetables, a curious kind of rice-potato hybrid, and chunks of dark red meat swimming in an oily sauce. She retreated to solitude to eat, tipping her Mask up and spooning the food beneath, afraid in case anyone should see her face. It was surprisingly delicious, but the relief of putting food in her belly again made it seem all the more wonderful. She returned for more and the servants filled her plate unquestioningly. From then on, Kaiku navigated by that kitchen, using it as her base point so she always knew where to return to after she had done wandering.

It took her several tries to find her way out of the monastery, by which time she had become confident enough that her disguise would not be seen through. The Weavers kept themselves to themselves, and they were an eccentric breed. She came across some of them squatting in corners, rocking themselves gently and muttering gibberish; others sprang shrieking out of hiding at her and then fled. Most just passed her by. She soon realised that a Weaver who did not speak was a minor oddity among the insanity of the monastery, and she took comfort in that.

She had not known what plan she had in mind for when she found her way to the open air once again. Perhaps she had thought to walk back into the wilderness and trust to Shintu's luck to get her through. But Shintu smiled on her in other ways.

When she did emerge into the harsh, snow-crisp light, there was some kind of activity going on in the tiny settlement that clung to the mountainside opposite the monastery. She crossed the bridge that spanned the chasm and investigated. Several dozen of the dwarfish servants were hauling sacks and boxes down the immense stone stairway that led to the foot of the mountain. She watched them for a while before guessing what they were about. They were loading up carts! Suddenly excited, she made her way past them and began her descent of the stairway. It was no short trip, but she had a sense that if she missed this opportunity she may never get another.

At the bottom, she saw her efforts had not been in vain. Three large carts with great wheels wrapped in chains sat there, and manxfhwa were being tethered to them. Several Weavers were bustling around. A moment's consideration led her to discard the idea of hiding in the carts, so she did the only thing she could think to do. The driver's bench was wide enough for three, and there only appeared to be one driver for each cart. She clambered on to one of the carts and waited.

It seemed like hours before the servants had finished loading, during which time Kaiku sat still, praying that nobody would question her. She was trusting to the shield of the Weaver's insanity to let her get away with this; she had seen many far more random acts in the short time she had spent wandering the monastery. After a time, one of the dwarf servants clambered into the seat next to her. He looked at her incuriously for a moment, and then snapped the reins, and the manxthwa hauled away. Kaiku let out a breath; the Weavers were staying behind.

It took them several days by cart-trails to get back to Chaim. The servants spoke between themselves in an incomprehensible dialect, but never to Kaiku. They did not remark on how she always took her food away to eat, or how she disappeared to make toilet. At some point, they passed through the Weave-sewn barrier that surrounded the monastery again, but the servants seemed unaffected by its disorientating effects and drove right through. Kaiku was exposed to the momentary surge of bliss that accompanied that golden world of waving threads, and then it was snatched from her again with enough force to make her heart ache afresh. She settled into quiet misery, and endured. Over the entire length of the journey, she did not speak a word, and when they arrived at Chaim she could have wept with relief at the sight of the grim, squalid little town.

'When we reached here,' she concluded. 'I found a place to hide and changed back into my clothes. The Mask and robes are in my pack.' She motioned with her head towards the bulging bag in the corner of the room. 'I hoped you would have waited for me. One of you, at least.'

Asara let the unspoken question about Tane go unanswered, and that was all the answer Kaiku needed. She did not ask again.

'Kaiku, what you have done… it is a wondrous thing,' she said, as some sort of consolation.

'Wondrous?' Kaiku queried, and her eyes fell to her blanketed knees. 'No. I am condemned over again. Don't you see? I swore to the Emperor of the gods to avenge my father's death. The Weavers are responsible for that. Not just one, acting alone. All of them. How can I… how can one person face the Weavers? How can I destroy creatures that can kill with a thought, that can read a person's mind? My task is impossible, but my oath still stands.'

'Then you should come back to the mainland with me. To the Red Order. You have done enough here, Kaiku… more than enough. One person cannot destroy the Weavers; but you have done more with your strength of heart than dozens who have gone before you. And you have allies.'

Kaiku nodded, though there was no conviction in her. 'You are right. I promised Cailin I would be back. There is nothing more to be done here. We will leave tomorrow.'

Night fell, the cold, bleak night of the mountains. They ate again, then slipped into their nightclothes and into the bed with a practised rapidity. The thought of leaving this place was on both of their minds, but there was still that question lingering unsaid, and so it was no surprise to Asara when Kaiku began to weep softly. She did not need to ask what it was that troubled her; she knew well enough.

'He is gone,' she whispered, and there was a shift of blankets as she moved closer and buried her head in Asara's shoulder.

Asara made a noise of confirmation. 'I told him. About you, about me. It was right that he should know.'

'Father, Mother, Grandmother Chomi, Machim… even Mis-hani. And now Tane,' Kaiku whispered. 'They all leave me, one way or another. How much more of this am I to endure, Asara?'

'Everyone you become close to will leave you, Kaiku,' Asara said softly, feeling an uncomfortable welling of emotion herself, 'until you accept what you are. Would you rather Tane left us now… or when he saw your eyes after a burning? He has many contradictions he needs to resolve, Kaiku. Do not lose heart. He may find you again.'

The words gave new strength to Kaiku's tears. 'Do you think he will?'

'Maybe,' Asara said, her breath stirring Kaiku's fine hair as her lips lay close. 'Maybe not. He was learning, and accepting. Perhaps there was more to him than I guessed.' She placed a hand on Kaiku's head, stroking it gently. 'You are not alone. But you must choose to be Aberrant, Kaiku. Stop thinking of yourself as one of them. They hate you now. They are like Mishani: even the most trusted will turn their back on you. You have nobody but your own kind. For now at least, you have me.'

Kaiku drew away from Asara's shoulder, and wiped her eyes with the back of her wrist. She could sense Asara's gaze in the darkness, through she could see only the faintest glitter of light from her unnatural, night-seeing eyes.

No, she caught herself. Not unnatural. Beautiful. She need never fear the darkness, as I must.

'You are beyond them,' Asara said quietly. 'Forget the restrictions, all the rules you have learned. They do not apply to you; use them only when necessary to disguise yourself among them. Why should you submit to what you have been taught, when your teachers would have you executed if they could? Listen no longer. Disobey. Fight back.'

'Fight back,' Kaiku breathed, her fingertips touching Asara's cheek. She was overwhelmed, her heart seeming to swell to bursting at Asara's words, and she tasted a cocktail of fear and terror and excitement and freedom such as she had never known before. There was moment in which something seemed to shift between them, when the sharing of their body heat became suddenly magnetic, a moment in which all things seemed possible and thus became so. And in that moment, Kaiku put her lips to Asara's, who was already meeting her halfway, caught in the same tide.

They melted into one, soft skin pressing together. Their lips were dry from the wind, but they moistened swiftly in the fervour, tongues touching and sliding as they tasted each other. Kaiku's hand slid along the curve of Asara's waist and the swell of her hip, feeling the taut muscle beneath. Asara gripped the back of her neck, rolling her weight so that Kaiku was underneath her, the sound of her breath quickening in the darkness. She sat astride Kaiku's hips, and Kaiku felt Asara's hot palms on her face, running down across her shoulders, over the swell of her breasts and the apex of her nipples, across her fiat stomach.

Asara's breathing was rapid now, almost panting; Kaiku experienced a moment of doubt, that something was wrong, that she had become too excited too quickly.

'You shouldn't…' Asara sighed. 'Don't make me…'

But Kaiku, swept up in the rush, ignored her. She raised herself up to kneel on the bed and brought her lips to Asara's again, kissing her hard, all warmth and sensation and darkness. Asara's hair fell across Kaiku's uptilted face; she was straddling Kaiku's knees now, and she pulled herself closer, their bellies and breasts pressed together with only the twin layers of silken nightrobes separating skin from skin. Kaiku's nails raked down her back, as if they could slice through the barrier to what was beneath.

'You don't… you don't know what you do…' Asara murmured in protest, but Kaiku had slid one strap from her shoulder, pulling it down to her elbow, and her mouth had found Asara's nipple and was sucking it gently. She shuddered in involuntary pleasure, sweeping her hair back from her face, her hips rocking against Kaiku, her breath shallow gasps.

She seized Kaiku then, roughly, and pushed her down to the bed. Her fingers gripped clawlike on either side of the younger woman's skull, and she brought her lips to Kaiku's with a predatory lunge that she had practised a thousand times before. Something inside her was warning her to stop, to stop, but her hunger and desire had been maddened by Kaiku's passion, and the voice was weak and unheeded. Suddenly, she desperately wanted what was inside Kaiku, wanted to take back the life she had given, to suck out the part of herself that had gone into Kaiku when she stole the handmaiden Karia's breath and blew it into her dead mistress's lungs. A piece of Asara had gone with that breath, a sliver of her life had lodged in Kaiku's heart, and Asara knew in a flash that that was the true reason why she had returned to Kaiku after Kaiku had almost killed her in the Forest of Yuna.

Kaiku sensed something in Asara's urgency, but in her heat she did not know whether it was passion or anger or something altogether different, and her senses were too overloaded to rely on. Asara kissed her hard, harder, and Kaiku felt a pain inside her, as if some organ in her breast were about to rip free, her heart about to tear from its aortal mooring. Asara sucked, powerless to stop herself, wanting only to sate herself in the most complete way she knew how.

The door to the room burst inwards.

Asara tore herself away, and Kaiku flung herself across to the other side of the bed, gasping like one who had been an inch from drowning. Her body had sensed the proximity of death although her mind had not, and she felt the terror and panic crash in on her even as Mamak and three other heavyset men rushed into the room, wielding picks and shovels. They stopped at the sight that met them: the two women, one with her nightrobe hanging from her shoulder and her right breast exposed, breathing hard and caught in surprise. A leer began to spread across Mamak's face, and then Kaiku screamed, and he exploded.

The surge of kana ripped through her like a stampede. The world switched from reality to the infinity of golden threads, warp and weft, a diorama of beautiful light that burned her from within like molten metal in her veins. Her irises darkened to a deep red, and she lashed out in reaction to the fear, the passion, the surprise. She saw the bright pulse of Mamak's heart as a rushing junction of threads, the stream of his blood as it passed beneath his transparent skin, and she rent it apart with a thought. He burst in a shower of flaming gore, spattering his stunned companions and spraying the bed with shards of charred bone and brain. Asara shrieked and threw herself backwards, her instincts reminding her of what had happened the last time she had seen Kaiku like this.

But this time it was tighter, more focused. This time there was no surprise in its coming, and Kaiku managed to steer the rush, to force it away and direct it. With a sweep of her hand, she blasted the other men in the room, shredding through their fibres; and where the threads snapped, flame followed, an explosive release of energy.

Mamak's companions became blazing pillars of fire, their howls silenced in seconds as their lungs and throats charred, their eyes bubbled, cooking from inside and out. One of them lunged at Kaiku in a last, idiot attempt for revenge or supplication, but he only slumped on to the bed and ignited it.

Kaiku felt the kana blow itself out like a candle in a gale, and her vision seemed to fade back to normality, the golden threads disappearing beneath solid forms and the light from the blaze that lit the shadowy room.

The blaze.

The room was afire.

It took her a moment to assimilate her surroundings again. Asara was already up, her nightrobe pulled back into place to preserve her modesty, eyeing Kaiku warily. She seemed unable to decide which was more dangerous – the flames, or the one who had brought them. The air was filling with a choking, sickly reek of burning flesh, and black smoke gathered on the ceiling.

Kaiku swayed, feeling her head grow light. The effort of corralling the kana so as not to incinerate the entire room had brought her to the brink of fainting. Asara saw her weaken, and was on the bed with her in a moment, grabbing her arm.

'Come on,' she hissed. 'We have to go.'

Kaiku allowed herself to be pulled, her head lolling on her neck like a marionette's, her red eyes drowsing. Asara gathered up their clothes in a single scoop and threw them over the burning corpses, through the open doorway and out into the corridor. Then she slung both packs and rifles on her back and propelled Kaiku off the burning bed. The flames were licking up the walls now. Mamak's charred remains lay across the doorway, still ablaze, blocking their exit.

'We have to jump him.'

'I cannot jump,' Kaiku murmured.

Asara slapped her, hard. She recoiled, her eyes focusing.

'Jump,' she hissed.

Kaiku took a two-step run and sprang over Mamak's corpse, too fast for the flames to find purchase on her gown. The corridor outside seemed freezing in comparison to the room she had escaped from. She could hear voices and footsteps downstairs, but she was already grabbing her trousers and tugging them on over her nightrobe. Asara burst through the doorway then, following

Kaiku's lead. She pulled on her travel clothes just as the owner of the lodging house and several tenants with water pails came up the stairs and into the corridor, and a moment later they found themselves staring at the barrel of a rifle.

'I assure you, I am a very good shot,' Asara said, her eye to the sight.

'What happened?' the owner demanded.

'Our erstwhile guide decided he was tired of waiting for us to rehire him and intended to liberate us of our money,' Asara replied. She had surmised as much by their entrance, and by the unwise way Tane had flaunted their money on the trip down from the mountains.

'Get out of the way!' one of the men behind him cried. 'The place is burning, by the spirits.'

'Pick up the packs,' she said quietly over her shoulder. Kaiku obeyed wearily. The burning of the kana was already causing her to spasm in pain, jolts of agony pulsing through her body.

'What do you want?' the owner cried. 'Let me put out the fire! This is my livelihood!'

'Two horses, from your stables,' Asara said. 'We can buy them from you, or we can take them by force. Choose.'

'Heart's blood,' breathed another man suddenly. 'Look at her eyes!'

It was Kaiku he was referring to.

'Aberrant!' somebody hissed.

'Yes, Aberrant,' Asara replied. 'And she will do to you what she has done to that room if you get in our way. The horses, now, or we stay here until this whole place burns down.'

'I'll take you,' the owner snapped. 'You men, put out that fire!'

With Kaiku in tow, Asara edged down the corridor. The men rushed past her, shying back from Kaiku with mingled disgust and fear, carrying their buckets to the blaze.

'Good horses,' said Asara, 'and we'll pay you the worth of this place.'

The owner looked at her hatefully, but he knew what it might mean. A new start, in a new place, where life was not so hard and grim. 'You have the money now?'

Asara nodded.

'Then let the place burn. Come with me,' he said.

They rode that night, driving their horses, heading south through the biting wind across Fo, putting as much distance as they could between themselves and Chaim. Kaiku slept lashed to the saddle, for her kana had burned her out from within, and Asara kept by her side to guide her mount.

How strange the ways that the gods take us, Asara thought, and rode on as dawn lightened the east.