EIGHTEEN

‘It’s time, Kaiku,’ said Yugi.

Darkness was falling. The sky was a soft purple in the east, the harbinger of oncoming night. Iridima stood alone at halfmoon amid a thick blanket of dim stars, pallid and ghostly in the dusk. The heat of the early autumn day was fading to a warm night, and a gentle breeze dispersed the muggy closeness of the previous hours.

They had found the Weavers’ barrier, the edge of the secret that they had crossed the Fault to uncover. Nomoru had announced that they were nearing the point where she had lost her way on her previous visit, and an hour later they returned to the same spot, despite having headed steadily westward. If that was not enough, Kaiku’s senses had begun to crackle; she was certain that she knew exactly where the barrier cut across the landscape, and when they had been turned around. She had been very careful to keep her kana reined tight as they passed into it. She did not want to try and tackle the barrier without the help of her father’s Mask.

The four travellers sheltered in a dell for a few hours to wait for the cover of night. Kaiku spent them sat against a tree, holding the leering, red-and-black face before her, looking into its empty eyes. When Yugi spoke to her, she barely heard him. He had to shake her arm before she looked up at him sharply, annoyed; then she softened, and smiled in thanks. Yugi’s eyes mirrored uncertainty for a moment, and he retreated.

Her mind flitted back, skipping over days of hard journeying, alighting eventually on the gloomy, doleful marsh where Yugi had lain dying. The battle to extract the demon poison was etched in Kaiku’s memory; every probing fibre, every twist and knot were mapped onto her consciousness in shining lines. Despite herself, she felt a small grin of triumph touch her lips, and her spirits rose. But then her gaze fell on Yugi, who was shouldering his pack, and her grin faded a little.

Ever since he had awoken, Yugi had been different somehow. She had sensed something when she had been inside him, a faint wash from his mind that hinted at something dark and unspeakably ugly. She could not guess what it was, only that it lay deep and hidden, and unconsciousness had loosened it from where it was fettered. She watched him, and wondered.

Yugi tried not to notice, but he could feel her eyes on his back. His brush with the demons had sobered him, that much was certain. The proximity of death had reminded him of a previous life, before he had joined the Libera Dramach. Days of blood and blade and mayhem. He began to play with the dirty sash wrapped around his forehead; a totem of those times, times that he wanted desperately to forget but never could.

He pushed the thoughts away as the travellers got to their feet and made ready to breach the Weavers’ barrier. The immediacy of the situation focused him. Their trip across the Fault had not been an easy one, but it would get worse from here on in.

‘Is that going to work?’ Nomoru asked doubtfully, motioning to the Mask in Kaiku’s hand.

‘We will know soon enough,’ Kaiku said, and put it on.

Dreadfully, it felt like coming home. The Mask warmed to her skin, and she fancied that she felt it mould itself to the tiny changes in her face since the last time she had worn it. She felt a great contentment, a nostalgic warmth such as she felt as a little girl asleep in her father’s lap. She could hear the comforting whisper of Ruito’s voice, a phantom of his memory brushing against her, and tears sprang to her eyes.

She blinked them back. The Mask felt like her father because it had robbed him of some of his thoughts and personality when he had worn it. He had been killed for this piece of wood. The Masks were cruel masters, taking and taking in return for the power they gave, addicting their users until their victims could not live without them. Until they were Weavers. She would not let herself forget that.

Spirits, what would happen if a Sister of the Red Order became a Weaver?

‘You look ridiculous,’ said Nomoru, her voice devoid of humour. ‘What’s this going to achieve?’

Kaiku gave her a contemptuous glance. Strangely, she did not feel in the least bit ridiculous, wearing this Mask with its knowing leer. In fact, she felt that it suited her perfectly, and made her appear more impressive.

‘What it will achieve is to get us through that barrier when you could not,’ Kaiku replied airily. ‘Let us be quick. I do not want to wear this thing a moment longer than necessary.’

She thought, as they departed, that those words felt curiously hollow. She had spoken them because she thought she was supposed to, rather than because she actually meant them.

The last light had fled the sky when they came up against the barrier. Topping a gentle rise in the land between two peaks of hulking stone, Kaiku felt the Mask become hot against her cheeks.

‘It is here,’ she said. ‘Tie yourselves to me.’

Tsata produced a rope, and they did as she instructed. It was difficult to tell how much the Tkiurathi believed in the necessity of what they were doing, but he acceded to the will of the group without complaint.

Kaiku proceeded tentatively, holding her hand out before her. The Mask grew hotter still, rising in temperature until she thought it might burn her; and then her fingers brushed the barrier, and it was unveiled to her eyes.

She could not hold back a gasp. The glittering Weave-sewn tapestry swept away to either side of her, six metres high and six deep, curving up and over the steep contours of the Fault. It was a churn of golden spirals and whirls, spinning and writhing slowly, curling around each other and taking on new forms, stretching and flexing in a dance of impossible chaos. Like an eddy in the waters of reality, perception was turned around and thrown out on a new course in this place, and Kaiku marvelled anew at the complexity of the Weavers’ creation.

‘What is it?’ asked Yugi. ‘Is it the barrier?’

Kaiku realised by the tone of his voice that he was asking why she had stopped, not what the thing before them was. It was invisible to everyone but her. For a brief moment, she felt a smug and selfish glee at being the only one privy to this wonder; then, surprised at herself, she cast it aside.

‘Hold hands,’ she told them, and she gave her hand to Yugi. The others did the same.

She stepped into the barrier, and was consumed by the Weave. The first time it had happened, back on Fo, she had been tempted to let herself be swept away in the unutterable beauty of the golden world that surrounded her. This time she was ready for it, and her heart was hardened against its charms. In a few strides, she was through, pulling Yugi with her; but the sensation was a cruel wrench, and the return to reality made everything seem grey and bland by comparison.

Yugi came stumbling through backwards and tripped as he did, disoriented at finding himself turned around. He had let go of Nomoru, the next in line, and as he fell to the ground the rope around his waist tautened. She was tugging the other way. Kaiku could see her now: the barrier had faded from her sight as soon as she was past it. Nomoru was trapped in the invisible zone of disorientation, blank-faced, labouring to drag herself back in the direction they had come and seemingly unable to understand why she could not get there. Tsata was in a similar state nearby, his face a picture of childlike confusion.

‘Pull them through,’ Kaiku told Yugi, and though he was still bewildered as to where he was, he did as he was told. Between them they dragged their companions across the barrier and onto the other side.

It took the better part of ten minutes for their thoughts to become coherent again, by which time Kaiku had removed the Mask and stashed it back in her pack. She studied them with fascination as they gazed glassy-eyed at each other like babies, or looked around at their surroundings as if completely unable to process where they were. No wonder that nobody could penetrate the barrier without a Mask. What a masterpiece of Weave-manipulation it was.

Once they had collected themselves, Nomoru was still unable to remember this area which she had once professed to know. So it was Kaiku who took the lead, as Nomoru’s sense of direction seemed to be still suppressed, making her hopeless at navigation.

‘We have to get away from this place,’ Kaiku said. ‘I am not convinced that it is safe to pass the barrier, even with the Mask. We may have alerted those who set it here.’

With that, they set off into the broken landscape to their right, skirting the inside of the barrier. Kaiku relied on her senses to let her know when they were brushing too close to the invisible perimeter, and using that as a guide, they lost themselves in the dark rills and juts of the Xarana Fault, and Iridima watched them go with half a face.

When they were far from the point where they had entered the domain of the Weavers, Nomoru called a halt.

‘It’s hopeless,’ she said. ‘Doing it this way. We’ll never get there in the dark.’

The others wearily agreed. For a time, it had seemed like they were making progress; but then the night sky clouded, shutting out the glow of the stars and the single moon, and now they could barely see at all. They had been wandering amid a stretch of uneven gullies and scrub ground for some time now, scratching themselves on thorny bushes and probably going in circles. Their frustration was multiplied by the fact that they did not know exactly what they were looking for. Seeking out evidence of Weaver activity was a broad and vague objective, when they had no idea of the extent of their enemies’ capabilities, nor what form such evidence might take. Now they were walking down a trench of baked mud, with steep sides rising up over their heads: an old ditch, long dry, and infested with weeds.

‘We should rest,’ said Yugi. ‘We can go on when the sky clears, or when dawn comes.’

‘I am not tired,’ Kaiku said, who did indeed feel strangely energised. ‘I will keep watch.’

‘I will join you,’ said Tsata, unexpectedly.

They threw their packs down at the base of the ditch; Nomoru and Yugi unrolled mats, and were asleep in minutes.

Kaiku sat with her back against the trench wall, her hands linked around her knees. Tsata sat opposite her, silently. It was eerily quiet; even the raucous drone of night insects was absent. Distantly, she heard the unpleasant cawing of some bird she could not identify.

‘Should one of us go up to the top, to look out for . . .’ she trailed off, realising that she had no idea what she expected might come for them.

‘No,’ said the Tkiurathi. ‘We cannot see far, but there may be things that can see us in the deep darkness. It is better to be hidden.’

Kaiku nodded slightly. She had not wanted to go up there anyway, and it felt sheltered here.

‘I wish to talk,’ said Tsata suddenly. ‘About Weavers.’

Kaiku brushed her fringe back from her face, tucked it behind one ear. ‘Very well.’

‘I have learned about them from Saran, but I still do not know how your people accept them,’ he said.

The mention of Saran made Kaiku’s eyes narrow. That was something that the encounter with the Omecha cultists and the ruku-shai had driven entirely out of her head.

‘I am not sure I understand what you are asking,’ said Kaiku.

‘Let me say how I see it, and you may correct me afterward. Is that acceptable?’

Kaiku tilted her chin up, then realised with some embarrassment that she had used an Okhamban gesture rather than a Saramyr one.

‘Once your civilisation was dedicated to great art and learning, to building wonderful architecture and long roads and incredible dwellings,’ Tsata began. ‘I have read your histories. And though I do not share your love for stone cities, or for the way you gather in such numbers that pash becomes meaningless, I am aware that all ways are not my ways, and I can accept that. I can even accept the terrible divide between the nobles and the peasant classes, and how knowledge is hoarded by one to keep the other in ignorant labour. That I find nothing less than evil, for it is so counter to the nature of my people; yet if I began to talk about that, we would be here a lot longer, and it is the Weavers I wish to speak of.’

Kaiku was mildly taken aback, both by his bluntness – which verged on rude – and his eloquence. She had rarely heard Tsata say more than a few sentences at a time; but his evident passion for this subject seemed to have overridden his usual quiet reticence.

‘When the Weavers came, your ancestors took them in,’ he said at length, his pale green eyes steady in the darkness. ‘They were dazzled by the power they might command with a Weaver at their side. Your nobles had so long been accustomed to treating lesser men like tools, that they thought they could use the Weavers in the same way, not knowing how dangerous a tool they were. For to accept the Weavers into your world was to make a pact; a pact that your ancestors made knowing full well the terms that they were agreeing to.’ His head hung in sorrow. ‘Greed ruined them. Perhaps they had noble causes at first; perhaps they thought that with the Weavers on their side, they could expand the empire and make it greater and more invincible. But sometimes the price is too high, no matter what the reward.’

Kaiku noticed that his hands were clenched in fists, the yellow skin taut around his knuckles.

‘You invited the Weavers into your homes, and you fed them with your children.’

That shocked her. But though she drew breath to protest, she found that she could not. He was right, after all. It was a noble family’s duty to supply their Weaver with whatever they wanted during their post-Weaving mania. She knew well enough some of the awful perversions that those creatures were capable of. As the backlash from using their Masks set in, like the withdrawal symptoms of a narcotic, they had no conscience in the face of their irrational, primal lusts and needs. Nothing was too depraved where the Weavers were concerned. Rape, murder, torture . . . these were only some of the desires that the Weavers demanded be satisfied. She knew of others. Blood Kerestyn’s Weaver was reportedly a cannibal. Blood Nira had one who ate human and animal faeces. The current Weave-lord apparently had a penchant for skinning victims alive and making sculptures from them. Though not every Weaver’s mania was harmful to others – some would do things as mundane as painting or merely hallucinate for hours – a lot of them were, and while they did not need to sate themselves every time they went Weaving, most Weavers still accounted for dozens of lives each. And as they become more insane and addicted and raddled with disease, the quantity increased.

She felt suddenly ashamed, remembering the simple joy she had felt in Hanzean at returning to her homeland from Okhamba. Saramyr was a place of beauty and harmony that she felt lucky to live in, and yet it was built on the bones of so many. Before the Weavers, there had been the systematic extermination of the native Ugati, a death toll that must have reached into millions. None of this was new to Kaiku – and still, it seemed so distant and so unconnected to her that she could not really identify with it – but hearing it put in such a straightforward way reminded her what a thin veneer civilisation was, a crust on which the dainty feet of the highborn walked, while beneath their soles a sea of disorder and violence seethed.

But Tsata was not finished. ‘You are not to blame for the crimes of your ancestors,’ he said, ‘though often your society punishes sons for their fathers’ mistakes, it seems. But now the Weavers despoil the very land you live on. That is the final joke. Your people have come to rely on them to the extent that you cannot bring yourselves to get rid of them, even though they will destroy all the beauty that you once loved. You have invested so much in making your empire bigger and better that you are destroying the very foundation that it is built on. You have built a tower so tall and so high that you have begun to take bricks from the bottom to put at the top.’ He leaned closer to Kaiku. ‘You are killing the earth with your selfishness.’

‘I know that, Tsata,’ Kaiku said. She was becoming angry; this seemed a little too much like a personal attack at her. Even though she was aware that Tsata did not subscribe to the evasions and politenesses of her society, she still found his manner of speaking too confrontational. ‘What do you think we are doing here now? I am trying to fight them.’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘But are you fighting them for the right reasons? You fight for vengeance. Saran told me that much. Now the people of your land rise up, for their food is becoming short; but until then, they were content to let the blight creep, thinking that somebody else would deal with it. None of you fight for the good of the many. You only decide to struggle when it is in your personal interest.’

‘That is the way people are,’ Kaiku snapped.

‘It is not the way my people are,’ Tsata countered.

‘Perhaps, then, that is why you still remain living in the jungle, and your children eaten by wild beasts,’ she returned. ‘Perhaps civilisation is built on selfishness.’

The Tkiurathi took the implied insult without offence. ‘Perhaps,’ he said. ‘But I am not intending to compare my culture to yours, to judge the merits of one against the other.’

‘That is what you seem to be doing,’ Kaiki told him sullenly.

‘I am telling you how your land looks through my eyes,’ he said simply. ‘Does honesty make you so uncomfortable?’

‘I do not need to have you pointing out the failings of my people. Perhaps my reasons are not selfless enough to fit your taste, but the fact remains that I am doing something about the Weavers. I choose not to accept the way things are, for I know they are wrong. So do not lecture me on morality.’

Tsata watched her quietly. She calmed a little, and scuffed her heel in the dirt.

‘I have nothing to teach you about the Weavers,’ she admitted eventually. ‘Your understanding of the situation is correct.’

‘Is it a product of your culture, then?’ Tsata asked. ‘Because each of you strives for personal advancement rather than for that of the group, you will not act against a threat until it is in your interest to do so?’

‘Possibly,’ said Kaiku. ‘I do not know. But I do know that much of our acceptance of the Weavers is born of ignorance. If the high families had proof that the Weavers were the ones responsible for despoiling the land, they would rise up and destroy them. That is what I believe.’

‘But it’s not true, Kaiku,’ said Yugi. They looked over at him, and saw him sit up. He adjusted the rag around his brow and gave them an apologetic smile. ‘Difficult to sleep with you two setting the world to rights,’ he explained.

‘What do you mean, it is not true?’ Kaiku asked.

‘I probably shouldn’t tell you this, but I suppose it doesn’t matter,’ he said, getting to his feet and stretching. ‘There are a lot of dealings high up in the Libera Dramach that we don’t reveal; we made sure we checked your father’s theory about the witchstones. When we were sure he was right, we . . . well, we made it known to some of the nobles. Subtly. Hints here and there, and when those didn’t work, we actually presented them with proof and challenged them to check it themselves.’ He scratched the back of his neck. ‘Obviously, this was all through middlemen. The Libera Dramach was never really exposed.’

Kaiku waved a hand at him, indicating that he should get to the meat of the issue. ‘How did it end, then?’

He wandered over to where they sat and looked down on them. ‘They didn’t do anything. Not one. Very few of them even bothered to verify the facts we gave them.’ He laughed bitterly. ‘All this time the Weavers have been kept in check by the fear of what might happen if the high familes rose up against them. Well, we tried to make that happen, and they ignored us.’

Kaiku was aghast. ‘How can that be? When they can see what the Weavers are doing?’

Yugi put a hand on Tsata’s bare shoulder. ‘Our foreign friend here is right,’ he said. ‘It’s not in their interest. If one or even a dozen high families acted on the information, they would lose their Weavers, and the other families who did have Weavers would crush them. There are too many enmities, too many old wounds. There’ll always be someone trying to get the upper hand, thinking only about the short-term, seizing any chance they can get. Because people are selfish. The only way anything fundamental will change is if everyone decides to change at the same time.’ He shrugged. ‘And the only way that will happen is if there’s a catastrophe.’

‘It is true. You will have to wait until this land is so ruined that it can barely be lived on before it is in everyone’s interest to act,’ Tsata said. ‘And by then, it may well be too late.’

‘Is that the way of it, then?’ Kaiku demanded, feeling unfairly outnumbered. ‘That people have to die before anything changes?’

Yugi and Tsata merely looked at her, and that was answer enough.

The clouds cleared towards dawn, and they set off again to take advantage of Iridima’s glow. By now Nomoru’s sense of direction seemed to have returned, and by estimating the curvature of the barrier, she established a route inward that would take them towards the centre of the area that the Weavers had cut off from the world. It seemed reasonable to assume that whatever they were looking for lay there.

They had not travelled far before the land dropped steeply away before them, and they found themselves looking down a boulder-riven slope at the darkly glinting swathe of the River Zan. Its sibilant murmuring drifted up to them through the silence.

‘Are we still upstream of the falls?’ Yugi asked.

Nomoru made an affirmative noise. ‘This way,’ she said, turning them southward. Kaiku doubted if the scout had any more idea of where they were going than she did, but one way was as good as another when they were all lost.

The sky was beginning to lighten when Yugi stopped them suddenly. They had been on the alert for any signs of life, but nothing had appeared as yet. In fact, it was eerily empty. Even the animals seemed to have deserted this place.

‘What is it?’ Kaiku whispered.

‘Look,’ Yugi said. ‘Look at the tree.’

They looked. Standing on a rocky rise above them in silhouette was a crooked tree, its branches bare and warped, its boughs twisted in a corkscrew and curling at strange angles. It hunched there like a foreboding signpost, a warning of things to come if they should proceed.

‘It’s blighted,’ Yugi supplied redundantly.

‘They have found another witchstone,’ Kaiku said. ‘And they have woken it up.’

‘Woken it up?’ Nomoru sneered. ‘It’s a rock, Kaiku.’

‘Is that all it is?’ Kaiku returned sarcastically. ‘Then what are the Weavers hiding it for?’

Nomoru gave a snort of disgust and walked onward, heading downriver. The others went after her.

It was just past dawn when they found what they had been looking for; and it was far, far worse than they had imagined.

The ridge of land that they had been following began to curve away from the Zan below, and a great stretch of flat land opened up between the river’s eastern bank and the high ground, a grassy and fertile flood plain. Their view of the plain was obscured, for they had been forced to retreat from the lip of the slope by a suddenly hostile terrain of broken rocks, but finally Nomoru picked them a route back to the edge so that they could command a good view of the land to the west, and that was when they saw what the Weavers had been hiding all this time.

The slope had steepened into an enormous black cliff overlooking the plain, and when Nomoru reached the precipice she ducked down suddenly and motioned that the others should do the same. The burgeoning daylight was flat and devoid of force, lacking yet the strength to imbue the world with colour. The sky overhead was a drab grey, and the solitary moon was heading towards obscurity behind the jagged teeth of the Fault. They scrambled on their bellies to where Nomoru lay, and looked over.

Kaiku swore under her breath.

On the far side of the flood plain, near the river bank, hulked a massive construction, a glabrous hump like the carapace of some monstrous beetle. It was a dull, rusty bronze in colour, formed of immense strips of banded metal. Around its base, smaller constructions clustered like newborn animals clamouring for their mother’s teats. There, strange wheels of spiked metal rotated slowly, chains rattled as they slid on pulleys that emerged from narrow shafts in the earth, and stubby chimneys emitted an oily black smoke. From within came faint clattering and clanking sounds.

The observers gazed aghast at the edifice. It was like nothing they had ever seen before, something so alien to their experience that its very presence seemed out of kilter with the world. A dirty, seething horror, foul to the eye.

But that was not all. There was a more immediate and recognisable danger. The plain was awash with Aberrants.

The sheer number of the creatures that milled down there was impossible to estimate, for they were in no order or formation, and it was difficult to tell where one clot ended and another began. It was made worse by the variety of shapes and forms: a phantasmagoria of grotesqueries that seemed to have spilled whole from the imagination of a maniac. Thousands, perhaps; maybe tens of thousands. The horde carpeted the ground from the foot of the cliffs to the banks of the Zan, clustered in groups or imprisoned within enormous metal pens. Some stalked restlessly along the river, some slept on the ground, some squabbled and scratched.

Kaiku felt a pat on her shoulder, and she looked to see Nomoru proffering her a spyglass. It was a simple, portable affair – two glass lenses wrapped in a conical tube of stiffened leather – but it was effective enough. She took it with an uncertain smile of thanks. It was probably the first time Nomoru had ever volunteered any good will to any of them. Evidently the scale of what they had discovered had caused her to lay aside her petty surliness for the moment.

She put it to her eye, and the spectacle below sprang into noisome detail. Everywhere, the forms of nature had been twisted out of true. Dark, loping things like elongated jungle cats snarled as they prowled, their faces curious hybrids of canine and lizard; demonic creatures that might once have been small apes hung from the bars of their pens, lips skinning back along their gums to reveal vicious arrays of yellowed fangs; hunched, boarlike things with furious visages and great hooked tusks rooted in the dirt, compact barrels of tooth and muscle. Kaiku felt an uncomfortable thrill of recognition at the sight of a roosting-pen of enormous birds, with keratinous beaks and kinked, ragged wings with a span of six feet or more: gristle-crows, which she had last seen on the isle of Fo several years ago.

And yet there was a pattern in amid the chaos. The presence of the gristle-crows had alerted her to it, and now as she scanned the plain again she saw, in the bleak light of the dawn, that each Aberrant was not unique. There were perhaps a few dozen different types, but these types recurred over and over again. The same features cropped up, the same forms. These were not random offshoots of the witchstones’ influence. These were discrete species. Though they were horrible to look at, there were no redundant features, no evolutionary characteristic that might hamper them. No deformities.

‘Not there,’ Nomoru said impatiently. She grabbed the end of the spyglass and turned it. ‘There.’

Kaiku spared her an annoyed glance for her rudeness before she looked through it again. When she did, her blood ran cold.

There was a figure walking slowly through the horde, apparently heedless of the predators that surrounded it. At first, she thought it must be a Weaver; but if it was, it was like no Weaver she had ever seen. This one was tall, seven feet at least, and rake-thin. It walked with an erect spine instead of the hunch that Weavers seemed to adopt as their bodies became more riddled with foulness. Its robe was not patchwork like a Weaver’s, but simple black, with a heavy hood; and though it wore a mask, it was a blank white oval, perfectly smooth except for two eye-holes.

‘A new kind of Weaver?’ she breathed.

‘Don’t know,’ Nomoru replied.

Yugi took the spyglass and looked.

‘What is it I’m seeing here?’ he said, slowly panning across the horde. ‘What are they doing?’

‘Some kind of menagerie?’ Kaiku suggested. ‘A collection of Aberrant predator species?’

Nomoru laughed bitterly. ‘That’s what you think?’

Tsata’s expression was grim. ‘It is not a menagerie, Kaiku,’ he told her. ‘It is an army.’