Weavers of Saramyr

Thirty-One

For one dreadful second, Mishani thought that the Empress's Imperial Guards were going to behead her where she knelt like some common servant, without any of the rituals of execution used to honour a noble adversary. Then she felt rough hands on her, pulling her upright. Asara was being treated similarly. Anais and Durun were sitting on their thrones, looking down. Anais's face was dispassionate, Durun's a smirk. She would be led to the proper place, and there her head separated from her shoulders. She was noble, even if an enemy. She would be allowed to die in a dignified fashion with her handmaiden alongside, and not on the floor of the Empress's throne room.

The Barak Mos stood to one side of the dias, watching her blandly. She met his eyes, and saw nothing there. There would be no help for her, or Asara. Her time had truly come.

Then, chaos.

The sound was a deafening roar that shook the Keep from its foundations up. The Guards who held Mishani and Asara stumbled backward to regain their balance. A moment later, a second bomb exploded, nearer to hand. This one made the room buck, and a scatter of loose stones showered down from a ceiling that had suddenly become spidercracked. The Guard by Mishani went down, and pulled her over with him. Shouts of alarm cluttered the air, suddenly multiplying as a third, more distant explosion rumbled through the room. Durun tried to get to his feet and had to grab on to the arms of his throne for support. The Barak Mos was casting around wildly in confusion, with an expression of what looked like anger on his bearded face.

'What is this?' Anais cried, mingled fear and outrage in her voice.

'What is this?'

'The Keep is attacked!' someone cried.

The main door to the throne room burst open, and in ran several dozen Imperial Guards, their swords drawn. Mishani, who had squirmed out of the grip of the man who held her, thought for a moment they had come to join the Guards already inside; but it took only that moment to see she was wrong. They were not here to guard anything. They were here to kill.

Swords swung high through the morning sun and smashed through armour, muscle and bone. Those Imperial Guards who had been unbalanced by the blasts did not react quickly enough; they were hacked down before they had even got to their weapons. The throne room erupted into turmoil, Guards running this way and that to take position in defence of the Blood Empress. The man who had held Mishani grabbed her ankle as she crawled away, unwilling to let her go; but in the scramble Mishani kicked him viciously in the face, feeling gristle crunch as his nose broke, and he slumped and went limp. Suddenly Asara was there, pulling her to her feet; her own Guard lay supine, having suffered a similar fate to Mishani's.

Blades were crashing together all around them and men were shouting. They were in the midst of a surging tide of white and blue armour, with no way to tell who were the Empress's and who were the imposters who had stormed the throne room. Mishani shied in fright as someone backed into her and turned automatically, his sword raised to strike. Whether the Guard would have struck or not when he had recognised the noble lady cringing before him was a question never answered; Asara rammed her hand into his throat, fingers rigid, and crushed his oesophagus with a single blow. He collapsed trying to clutch at air that would not come.

'Get out of here!' Barak Mos cried to his son, standing on the steps of the dais with his great, curved sword held before him. His choice of weapon reflected his style of politics: force over finesse. Behind him Anais was calling useless orders, her voice unheard over the tumult. She seemed robbed of her imperial strength now, and all the uncertainty, fear and worry she had suffered since this ordeal began showed on her face. She was betrayed somehow. Someone had got into the Keep. And if they were in the Keep, they might get to-

'Lucia? she cried, as her husband grabbed her arm.

'Come on!' he snapped, pulling her away from the throne. The imposters had broken through the main door, but there was another door at the back for the Emperor and Empress, beyond which were stately rooms where they could arrange themselves in their finery before emerging to give audience. The Imperial Guards who were loyal had formed a defensive barrier, clearing a way to that door for Durun and Anais to escape.

They were hurrying down from the dais when a Guard suddenly broke through the struggling mass, an imposter masquerading as one of the loyal defenders, and ran for the Empress. He met the sword of Barak Mos instead, who leaped to interpose. The man hesitated, taken off-guard by this unexpected opponent, and Mos hewed him down. He fell with an expression of comical surprise on his face.

'Rudrec!' Durun shouted as he led his wife to safety. One of the Guards, wearing the colours of a commander, broke away from the defensive line and ran to him. 'Go!' he hissed, so that nobody but they three would overhear. 'Find Lucia and bring her to the Sun Chamber.'

Rudrec grunted and left without bothering to salute in his haste. He was a hoary old campaigner with little time for niceties, but he was also one of their most trusted men. Anais took some small comfort in that. She clung to her husband, suddenly glad of his strength. She had ever been a formidable woman, despite her pale, elfin looks and slight stature, but she had never been threatened with physical violence in her life beyond the bedroom games she played with Durun. Now he was the one with the power, brandishing his sword in one hand as he led her with the other.

Six men joined them as they hustled out of the door and away, a retinue of bodyguards. Alarm bells were being rung in the high places of the Keep as they fled, and Anais felt a terrible sinking in her heart, a void of uncertainty that whispered her folly to her, ever to think that she could dare to put her daughter on the throne and live through it…

Kaiku coughed and choked as she stumbled through the smoke, her boots sliding on loose rubble. Nearby she could hear the rumble and growl of fire, the heat scorching her through the dark pall that filled the corridor. Someone was wailing somewhere; other people shouted orders and instructions, rendered incoherent by the ringing in her ears. She shielded her face with her arm and narrowed her streaming eyes, clambering forward through the hot murk, seeking.

She had lost sight of the others within seconds of the explosion. The bomb had been terrifyingly close, destroying a large portion of the nearby scullery and devastating the surrounding corridors. Kaiku had been knocked flat by the concussion and bruised by rubble that fell from above, and she had been rendered temporarily deaf by the noise. When she had regained her wits, she had found the already unfamiliar corridors in ruin, and disorientation had been immediate. Desperate servants hunted through the burning rooms for survivors; smoke made it impossible to see. Kaiku was picked up and then bustled out of the way when it was clear she was unhurt, pushed into a side corridor and told to make her way upstairs. By the time she knew where she was, she was lost.

The most frightening thing about the explosion was the abject panic it had provoked in the servants. Those running past her were scared out of their minds, unable to understand why their previously stable world had suddenly turned to smoke and fire in an eyeblink. Several were blank-faced and staring, zombie-like with shock, as if the explosion had wiped their brains from their heads. She had never seen people look so utterly void.

The fires were becoming too much now; the flames had spread and become fiercer and she could barely approach them without her skin burning. She was beginning to doubt whether she would find any of the others in this madness, much less find her way out; but she kept looking. It seemed the only thing she could do.

Over the squeal in her ears there came the sound of a man screaming. She considered for the briefest second that there was nothing she could do for him, that there was nothing she could do for anyone here and she should save her own skin, for her mission was more important than all of them. It did not matter. She could not ignore him.

Doggedly, she forged on into a room with walls ablaze. She kicked away a smouldering chair and ducked low to snatch a breath of lung-scorching air, then headed through the small doorway at the other end.

It had once been a kind of laundry room, she supposed; but the water in the washing troughs was boiling now, and the clothes and sheets heaped here had turned to ash. The far wall was almost

totally demolished, and she could see through the smoke to what was left of the rooms beyond: a great disorder of rubble, for the roof had fallen in and the room above had tumbled down on top. She glanced up nervously at the ceiling beams, and saw they were bowing and splitting in the heat.

The scream again, and her tearing eyes picked out a man laid in one of the washing troughs, his skin blackened and one leg a bloody stump. The burns on his body were horrible. He had been caught by the blast, and somehow crawled into the trough, seeking the protection of the water; but the water was boiling, cooking him like a lobster. He went under and surfaced again, shrieking. Kaiku could not help him, but she could not turn her back either. Her eyes welled with fresh tears of sympathy and sorrow.

And then she saw a new movement, at the other end of the room.

She caught her breath at the sight. It was a little girl, dressed in a simple robe. Long, light hair fell in curling rumbles down her back. She had a round face with a curiously lost expression on it. But this was no thing of flesh and blood; she was a spectre, a spirit, that blurred and rippled as she moved as if she were a reflection in disturbed water. She walked across to the man in the trough, heedless of the flames. Kaiku watched, transfixed, as the spectre put her hand in the water, and it stopped boiling instantly like a pan removed from the heat. The man in the trough turned to look at her and on his ravaged face there came an expression of joyous gratitude. Then the spectre laid her small hand on his head, and his eyes closed. With a sigh, he sank beneath the water.

The spectre turned to Kaiku then, her features settling into those of a wide-eyed and dreamy-looking girl.

((… help me…))

The words seemed to come from far away and were very faint, arriving seconds after the spectre had mouthed them. The roof creaked above her, and Kaiku looked up in alarm. She darted back through the doorway just before the ceiling beams gave up with a tortured bellow, and a rage of stone and flame thundered down into the room, belching hot smoke through the doorway.

Kaiku shielded her face, squinting at the room where the spectre had been buried. There was only rock there now; and the weight was making the walls of this room bulge as well.

'Get out of there!' someone cried, and she turned to see a red-faced man at the other doorway, beckoning her through. He disappeared from sight, leaving a vacant arch; and across that arch, a moment later, walked the spectre.

Kaiku clambered back through the blazing room and out into the corridor beyond. The spectre was a glimpse through the smoke. Coughing, she followed, running close to the floor to avoid the black river of murk overhead. Other people were shouting now, the general theme being that they should get out before the place collapsed. Kaiku ignored them, intent on following where the spectre led. She had a sense that it was very important she should do that, and she was learning to trust her instincts more and more of late.

'Kaiku!' came a voice, and Tane grabbed her shoulder. She clasped his wrist to acknowledge he was there, but she did not take her eyes from the girl, nor slow her pace.

'What is it?' Tane asked, bewildered, hurrying alongside her.

'Can you not see it?' she asked.

'See what?'

Kaiku shook her head, impatient. 'Just come with me.'

'What about the others?'

'They can take care of themselves,' she replied.

The spectre was mercifully leading Kaiku away from the worst of the destruction, and after a few corners the air had become clearer and she could breathe again without pain. Tane walked with her, not asking for an explanation, convinced by the determination on her face. Always the translucent figure was ahead of them, just entering a passageway or flitting across the end of a corridor. They never seemed to catch up. Soon the fire was behind them, and the ways they hurried down were more and more trafficked by running Guards and administrative scholars. None of them saw the phantom girl as she passed among them. By their manner, Kaiku guessed there were other commotions in the castle besides the explosions she had felt, but she had no time to care what. Where the spectre went, she followed.

Cailin, Zaelis and Yugi pushed through the confines of the smoky corridors, away from the fire to where the walls still stood and the fug was thin enough to breathe easily. Most of the servants had fled to whatever imagined shelter they could when the explosions began, so the intruders could travel more quickly here. Cailin found that agreeable enough. Solitude was what she needed.

'In here,' she said, and they followed her into a cramped, windowless kitchen, where a cauldron of stew simmered over a fire and the stone walls seemed to sweat. Iron pots and pans hung untidily from pegs, some of them having fallen to the floor when the blast dislodged them. Cailin looked about. 'This will do,' she said.

'Do for what?' Zaelis asked. 'We should get further away from the fire.'

'I need to be undisturbed. Nobody will come here. We are far enough away from the blaze for the moment.'

'Gods, did you see Espyn?' Yugi coughed, running a hand through his soot-blackened hair. 'What about the other two?'

Cailin had indeed seen Espyn, lying twisted in the rubble, his face bloodied and his body broken. He had caught the fringe of the blast by sheer bad luck, and had not survived it.

'Tane and Kaiku must fend for themselves,' she said coldly. She did not abandon Kaiku lightly, with all the hope she had invested there; but there were more important things to do now.

Zaelis was frantic with worry. 'Bombs? Bombs in the Keep? Heart's blood, what is going on here? This is a disaster.'

'This is Vyrrch's doing,' Cailin said.

She pulled aside some chairs to clear herself a space, and then stood facing the cauldron. They watched silently as she took a breath, relaxing her shoulders. The smell of stew filled the air, and Yugi's skin prickled from the heat, but neither appeared to bother the Sister. She closed her eyes and splayed her fingers out where her hands hung by her sides. Her head bowed, and she let out a sigh; and when she raised her head again and opened her eyes, her irises were the colour of blood, and they knew she was seeing things beyond the reach of their vision.

'I will deal with the Weave-lord. You two go to the roof gardens. Find the Heir-Empress. We are not defeated yet. This confusion may yet serve to aid us.'

Zaelis nodded once, and then he and Yugi were gone, the door slamming shut behind them.

Cailin drifted in an ocean of light, millions upon millions of tiny golden threads shifting in minuscule waves. As always, the euphoria struck her upon entering the Weave, gathering under her heart and lifting it, stealing her breath with the beauty and wonder of this unseen world that surrounded them. She allowed herself a moment to enjoy it, and then her long-practised discipline channelled the feeling away, dispersing it so it could not hook her with its false promises of eternal bliss.

Clear-headed again, she sent her consciousness out among the fibres, picking between them with infinite care, dancing from strand to strand like the fingers of a harpist. She was seeking those fibres which were being twisted out of true, those lines of light that had become marionette strings to the unwitting puppets in the Imperial Keep. Someone was manipulating events here; someone was coordinating from afar. She could sense the corruption of the Weave that surrounded several people in the Keep, and knew they were under the influence of another. They thought they were the instigators of the confusion they sowed, but the true instigator was out of their sight. And would remain so until Cailin hunted him down.

And so she darted between the threads, finding this one and that, gathering them up, each string giving her a stronger link to the fingers of the puppeteer. And finally, when she was ready, she began to follow them to their source.

Vyrrch had not moved since dawn from his customary spot, cross-legged on the floor in the centre of his bedchamber. The old lady whom he had chopped into meat had been heaved to the side of the room, from where the enterprising jackal had sneaked a few mouthfuls when it thought it was out of Vyrrch's reach. Of course, it was never really out of his reach; nor was the girl who ran loose somewhere nearby. He could have used the Weave to search for them, to simply stop their hearts or shatter their joints. But that was childishly easy, and Vyrrch was not so unsporting. He was impressed that the girl had been wise enough not to try and attack him when he was Weaving or sleeping, for no matter how comatose he looked, she would have been dead before she got within a yard of him. If she was not cheating, then neither would he. Let her go on with her hide and seek. The only key to the door was around his neck; she could not get out. It would be amusing to see how long she lasted.

Women. They were a crafty breed. Altogether too crafty, if the evidence of the past was to be believed. The Weavers' membership had been exclusively grown men for a reason: children were too undisciplined, and women too good. It had become very obvious during the earliest days of the witchstones' discovery that the female talents far outstripped those of men in the manipulation of the Weave. The Weave was the essence of nature, and men could only force nature to their will, clumsily and callously; women were part of it, and it came to them like the cycles of the moons. In those first years of madness, hidden at the settlement in the mountains where the great monastery Adderach now stood, the women had almost surmounted the men in power; but it was a mining village, and women were few in number there. The slaughter was quick. Once the men had felt the witchstones' touch, what lingering consciences they had were swiftly cast aside. From that day forth, only adult males had been accepted into the brotherhood, men who came seeking knowledge or power or sublimity.

It had been the same thinking that prompted the practice of killing Aberrant infants these last centuries, when it was suddenly noticed that girl children were being born with a rudimentary ability to control the Weave. Somehow, through the witchstones' influence on their parents and their parents' diet through the corrupted soil, the foetuses were gaining an instinct that the Weavers had had to learn. And it was as natural to them as breathing. But the Weavers were already well established by then, and the common folk were afraid of the freakish powers the infants displayed: so the practice of murdering Aberrants began. Not just the ones who could Weave, for that would make the Weavers' intentions too plain. All of them had to die, to keep the Weavers' secret.

But he had no time for such musings now. He scoured the Keep with one portion of his consciousness, searching for the anomaly in the Weave that had so alarmed him before. The bombers were out of the picture, annihilated by their own creations. Vyrrch had been forced to take direct control in those final moments, for there remained the possibility that the cat's-paws might balk at suicide. Vyrrch saw that their will remained strong until the fiery end.

The intruder had briefly dropped its guard after the bombs had exploded, but Vyrrch had been busy dealing with other things and, frustratingly, he could not pounce on it. Now he bent all his attention to the task of locating it again. With the Keep in chaos, the rest of the plan would run its course. His most pressing concern was this unknown enemy in their midst.

But Vyrrch had been a Weave-lord too long; he was too used to moving unchallenged, unaccustomed to opposition. He spun and threaded the loom of the Weave, but he did not notice the black widow creeping up the strands of his web until she was almost upon him.

Too late, he realised his mistake. This was no clumsy blundering like that of a lesser Weaver; this was an altogether different class. Even the most powerful of Weavers left tears where they went, snapped threads and tangled skeins; but she was like satin, gliding through the Weave and leaving no trace of her passing. This was a woman's way through that bright world, and Vyrrch saw they had been right to fear it.

He drew himself back suddenly, in terror, knowing that she was inside his defences. Desperately, he struck at her, but she moved like a breath of wind. She feinted and dodged, plucking threads as decoys and then sliding nearer when his attention was elsewhere. The Weave-lord began to panic, trying to recall the old disciplines he had known so well before he became complacent, the arts that would drive her out of him; but madness had robbed them from his memory, and he could not piece his thoughts together again.

'Get away from me!' he shrieked aloud into the silence. The jackal started and fled in a scrabble of claws.

He turned his thoughts inward, feeling her gossamer progress along the threads that linked him with the outside world, the suck and flow of his breath, the touch of his skin against his clothes. Frantic, he began to knot, setting up traps, corrals of fibres that led into labyrinths that would lose her for an eternity. But he could barely feel her, let alone stop her, and all he was doing was delaying the inevitable anyway. He could not afford even the slightest portion of his mind to trace her threads back to their source. He did not know who or where she was; he had nowhere to strike.

And she seemed to come from all directions at once, darting here and there to nip and tug, sending false vibrations thrumming down the glittering fibres of their battleground. He flitted to and fro in the grip of increasing panic, laying tricks and feits for her; but nothing was effective, and he realised in despair that he had no other methods to use. He saw then how one-dimensional his command of his powers were; he, the greatest among the Weavers. For so long had he enjoyed supremacy that his ability to adapt had rotted and fallen away. He could not beat her.

With that realisation, he dropped his defences. This, more than anything he had done so far, caused the intruder to hesitate in uncertainty, and it gave him the time he needed. He drew in the Weave as if he was gathering a vast ball of yarn, sucking it into his breast. Too late, his attacker saw what he meant to do, but by then she could do nothing to prevent it. He threw out the spool, putting every ounce of his strength into it, and it unravelled and spawned a million threads that flew away across the landscape of the Weave, curling and spinning randomly and everywhere. A great clarion call, a deafening broadcast to every Weaver and sensitive in Saramyr and beyond. The intruder reeled with the potency of his cry, a wordless shriek of warning to all his brothers. Beware! Beware! For women play the Weave!

But Vyrrch was clever, and amid the uncountable threads was one that was different, one that was tautly focused and directed. And in the depthless dark where they hid from the daylight, four demons of shadow raised their heads as one, eyes blazing like lamps.

The message was simple. An image of Lucia tu Erinima, Heir-Empress of Saramyr, layered with impressions of scent, location, the near-imperceptible vibration that was her presence: all the things the shin-shin needed to track her. And with it was a simple command, phrased not in language but in an empathic blaze of intent.

Kill.

Then Cailin struck, the bite of the black widow coming from nowhere, and he realised she had slipped past his every wall and reached his core. His senses were paralysed, his control of the Weave gone. He was helpless. There was a moment of utter and abject horror as he felt her coiling in his brain, taking the thread of his life in her fingers, toying with it. Then, with a twist, she snapped it.

In his chambers, the Weave-lord screamed, spasmed, and slumped forward on to the floor.

There was silence again. It lasted perhaps an hour before the jackal plucked up the courage to emerge once more from where it had fled. It was another hour or more before the girl appeared, her clothing tattered and torn, her face covered in grime. She peered around the doorway, trembling in fear and hunger. There had been no noise but a soft lapping sound for what seemed an eternity.

The Weave-lord was face down, naked beneath his rags. Thick blood from his nose, eyes and mouth had pooled inside his Mask and run out on to the filthy tiles. The jackal was licking at it still.

She stood there watching, hardly daring to hope. She feared a trick. Only when the jackal began to eat Vyrrch's fingers did she believe it was not. He was dead.

With a sob, she approached him. The jackal retreated with a growl. Around Vyrrch's throat, hidden under the rags, was a brass key. She slipped it off him, ready to run at any moment if he should move. He did not. She stared at him for a while, and finally spat upon him. Then, fearing she had gone too far, she ran away, heading for the locked outer door and freedom, while the jackal returned to resume its meal.