TWENTY-NINE

The sun was setting on the Xarana Fault, igniting the western horizon in clouded bands of red and silver and purple. In the golden light of the day’s end, Yugi and Nomoru crouched on a bluff overlooking a land riven with ghylls and canyons, from which flat-topped plateaux, rocky hills and buttes thrust upward unevenly.

Below them, hidden within the creases of the Fault, men and women were dying. The sounds of gunfire and occasional detonations echoed into the calm sky. Wisps of smoke seeped like fumes from the cracks. Fleeting glimpses of movement caught their eyes from time to time: swiftly retreating figures, pursued by dark and terrible shapes. At several points over the last few hours, the battle had spilled up out of the shadow and into the open, skirmishes across hillsides or areas of scrubland. Yugi did not recognise half of the factions that he saw, but he was sure they were not Libera Dramach or folk of the Fold.

‘Getting close,’ Nomoru said, her tone suggesting that she did not care one way or the other about it.

‘We’re not slowing them by much,’ Yugi observed distractedly.

‘What did you expect?’

Yugi shrugged at that. He did not want to deal with Nomoru’s surly pessimism now. He had more pressing concerns.

Kaiku’s estimation of the Aberrant army’s speed had been accurate. Three days had passed since the night of the moonstorm, and their rate of advance had been steady and rapid. A force of thousands were swarming through the Fault at roughly twice the speed that Yugi and his band of three companions had traversed it in the other direction. In a place like the Fault, that was a recklessness verging on insanity. He wondered if their strength of numbers had been enough to overcome the dangers that they would have faced: the clan armies, the canyons bristling with traps and deadfalls, the swamps that belched poison miasma, the haunted places. For a force so big, there was no safe route. How many had they lost? And would it matter, in the end?

The Libera Dramach scouts – Nomoru included – had brought back scattered reports, but the army were simply moving too fast. They learned most of what they knew from other friendly clans, driven before the invaders, and the intelligence they had gleaned had come too recently to really do anything about it. The army had smashed through any settlements that had got in their way, overwhelming them in a tide and then ploughing onward. The clans and factions in or near the path of the Aberrants were in turmoil. Some were fleeing eastward, towards the Fold; word had been spread that it would be a last stronghold against the enemy, and it would welcome any clans who would unite with them there. A frankly dangerous gamble, to invite any of the other people of the Fault inside their fortifications, but Yugi knew that Zaelis had no other choice now.

Other communities – the vengeful remnants of those that the army had passed through, or simply those who recognised the threat – were harrying the flanks and tail of the horde. The Xarana Fault was made for hit-and-run manoeuvres, and these people had lived there the better part of their lives and knew every trick. But the Aberrants ignored the attacks nibbling at their fringes, forging onward unstoppably towards the Fold with no consideration for casualties.

Yugi’s mood was dark. How did they know? How did they find out where Lucia was? He cursed the Weavers and their ungodly methods. Heart’s blood, it could only have been a matter of time, but why now? In a few more years Lucia would have been of an age to take the throne, and they could have begun to gather real armies to support her, could have come out of hiding and challenged Mos and the Weavers.

He caught himself, remembering her shocking tirade on the night of the moonstorm. They had so long been used to Lucia being dreamy and passive, like a veil drifting on the winds, that they had not considered what she wanted at all. They had assumed that she would have objected by now if she had any objections to make. Her detachment went so deep that they had ceased to think that opinions were something that applied to her. Yugi felt a solemn guilt at how they had taken her for granted. Whatever else she was, she was also a fourteen-harvest girl, with all the associated complications, and her patience and tolerance were not endless.

He dared not think what it might mean if she developed a stubborn streak like Kaiku had. So much relied on her.

A particularly loud explosion, near at hand, brought his mind back to the present. Nomoru rubbed a hand through her thatch of hair and scowled.

‘You’re cutting it fine,’ she warned.

‘Let’s go,’ he said.

They headed away from the bluff, down a narrow slope bulwarked on either side by root-split walls of earth. There was a man there at the bottom, tensed to run, looking at them expectantly.

‘They’re coming!’ he called. ‘Be ready!’

The man sketched a salute and fled, scrambling up another slope that looped off to their right. Yugi and Nomoru carried on down without pause, their rifles clattering against their backs. They passed two more runners on the way, despatching them to their respective destinations with orders. Yugi found himself thinking how much easier, how much faster this might be if they had the women of the Red Order as relays; but Cailin had refused to commit them to the advance forces, insisting that the element of surprise was vital in their deployment. She would keep them at the Fold. Privately, Yugi wondered if she would deploy them at all.

They sprinted out into the open, running low, and the wall to their left fell away to spit them out onto a colossal shelf overlooking a barren, dead-end canyon. Sheer walls of sandy rock, banded with the striations of countless epochs, plunged down hundreds of feet to a dusty floor of churned earth. Birds rode the thermals below them in the slowly reddening light. Yugi felt a vertiginous moment at the sudden exposure to the chasm; the hot wind of the failing day blustered around him. Then they were hunkering down amid dozens of riflemen who hid behind a heap of stone further along the shelf, and he was grateful that the drop was hidden from sight.

‘Any activity down there?’ he asked.

‘Nothing,’ said a scarred young man named Kihu, whom Yugi had left in charge. ‘Can’t expect it yet though. Sun’s still out.’

‘No, you’re right,’ Yugi mused. ‘You, you, and you,’ he picked out two men and a middle-aged woman, all Libera Dramach. ‘Stay here and watch; I want to know if anything moves in this canyon before we get back. Everyone else, into position. They’re on their way.’

His orders were obeyed immediately and without question. It was what they had been waiting for. With a grim eagerness, they broke cover and headed further along the enormous rock shelf. It slanted down for some way, finally joining a greater outthrust mass that jutted out away from the cliffs they had been hugging to their right.

The vista broadened dramatically. The canyon they had been watching over was only one branch of a fork, the southernmost arm of a great junction. To the west, there was a breathtaking trench that crooked out of sight amid a clutter of buttes. East, the trench continued on, narrowing slightly. Yugi and the riflemen were running along the divider between the southern canyon and the eastern one, a steadily tapering promontory that collapsed at its tip into a series of ledges fringed with tough bushes and wretched trees.

As they ran, Yugi caught sight of one of the runners signalling across the canyon, catching the last rays of Nuki’s eye with a hand-mirror. A moment later, flashes returned in acknowledgement from concealed positions along the opposite ridge. The junction was crawling on all sides with Libera Dramach, hidden among the broken landscape.

Yugi felt a surge of fierce pride. Nothing had stopped the relentless onslaught of the Aberrants so far, but then nobody had been given a chance to prepare until now. He remembered how he had doubted the wisdom of Kaiku’s decision to stay with the army. Now he had cause to be thankful for it. It was only because of the risk Kaiku took that they had been given enough warning to organise. The Weavers had charged heedlessly through the Fault, oblivious to their casualties; but Yugi planned to give them pause for thought here.

‘Gristle-crows!’ someone called, and Yugi looked up to see the first of the huge black Aberrant birds soaring overhead. They scrambled down the sloping tip of the divider, concealing themselves among the ledges and the dry foliage that clung there. Nomoru slid down next to him in a billow of dust, her exquisite rifle clenched in her thin hands, and the two of them crouched together amidst a brake of bushes. The walls of the eastern and western canyon were not so high as the southern arm, and the floor rose up too, so that they were perhaps seventy feet above it by the time they had dug in. They waited motionless, listening to the harsh caws of the gristle-crows as they circled, scouting ahead of the main mass of Aberrants that were pouring towards them.

‘Is this going to work?’ Nomoru whispered.

‘If it doesn’t, at least there’ll be nobody left alive to tell how we failed,’ he replied.

Nomoru cackled quietly and primed her rifle. She motioned up at the birds with her eyes. ‘Want me to bring them down?’

Yugi shook his head. ‘You’ve got your targets. Until then, you don’t fire a shot.’

He settled himself, watching the mouth of the western canyon, from which the Aberrants would come. The enemy army had spread out somewhat but the Fault bottlenecked here, several routes converging into this one canyon, and it would be driving a good portion of the Aberrants this way. The alternative was to clamber up to the open high ground, but Yugi was sure they would not take that route. The reckless speed of the army meant only one thing: they wanted to surprise the Fold, so that the Libera Dramach would not have a chance to spirit Lucia away. Equally, that was why they went along the Xarana Fault rather than travelling the smooth plains on its outskirts. They would not expose themselves if they could help it, either to their intended victims or to the world at large.

Yugi wondered suddenly why they were using such a bludgeoning force instead of sending assassins, or Weavers, to quietly pick off the dispossessed Heir-Empress. Perhaps, he thought, they simply did not have time. He thought of the other army, that had departed northward in barges. The Weavers’ eyes were elsewhere, it seemed. They had matters even more important than Lucia to attend to.

The sun had almost disappeared, and the last of the red was fading from the sky, when the first sounds of the army were heard. The gristle-crows had departed now, as Yugi had expected. Kaiku had informed them about the various types of Aberrants she had encountered, and what strengths and weaknesses she had been able to learn. Gristle-crows never flew at night; she guessed that their vision in the dark was very poor.

The steadily growing noise prompted a trickle of dread in Yugi’s chest. It was a distant cacophony to begin with, but it swelled with alarming speed, a clash of gibbering and yammering, of bellows and snarls, becoming an overwhelming blanket of chaos and madness. Gunfire from the Libera Dramach and other clanfolk that were picking at their sides provided sporadic punctuation.

Yugi gripped the stock of his rifle tight, and felt the first inklings of real doubt. It was like waiting at the breakwater for a tsunami.

The horde came thundering into sight, turning into the western canyon, and he paled as he saw them spread like oil to flow between the buttes and around the rocks, a fluid mass of corruption that took his breath away. He was not prey to the prejudice against Aberrants that all Saramyr had been brought up with – indeed, it was almost possible to forget that such a thing existed in the liberal world of the Fold – but he was unable to suppress his disgust and fear at the sight of the monstrosities that now came towards him. Nature twisted out of true, a collision of species and traits, changes accelerated by the Weavers’ blight and making a mockery of Enyu’s plan.

How can these things and Kaiku be the same? he asked himself.

They were travelling at a pace akin to a jog, a speed at which they were tireless and could travel day and night with very little rest. There was no organisation in their formation, and yet somehow they managed not to trample each other as they went. Massive ghauregs towered over galloping, boarlike furies, lumbering along as the smaller Aberrants pushed past them and clamoured onward. Spidery-limbed skrendel scuttled at the fringes, monkeylike things with long fingers that kept out of the way of the larger beasts by leaping nimbly up the sides of buttes, where they hissed at each other. Shrillings slid between their clumsy allies with sinuous grace. In amongst them were others, too hard to identify at such a distance, shrieking and growling as they plunged down the canyon.

‘Gods,’ murmured Nomoru. ‘If they get to the Fold, we’re all dead.’

‘So many dogs, but who’s got the leash?’ Yugi said, peering through the bushes. ‘Where are the Nexuses? Where are the Weavers?’

The army poured out of the western canyon, into the junction where their route forked. There was no indecision: they headed east. The gristle-crows’ advance reconnaissance had already determined that the southern fork was a dead end, and they communicated that knowledge to the Nexuses by the strange link they shared through the nexus-worms. Yugi and the other riflemen who hid amid the ledges at the tip of the promontory hardly dared to breathe as the horde swept by beneath them and to their right, the rumble of thousands of feet, paws and claws shaking the earth.

‘There they are,’ whispered Nomoru, more to herself than to Yugi. She was gazing down the canyon with a calm and intense focus, and he followed her eyes to where the first of the Nexuses had come into view.

They were some way back, hidden amidst the mass, riding on beasts that looked like manxthwa except that they were hairless, and much faster. The sight of a Nexus, even so far away, brought a dreadful nausea to Yugi’s gut. They were too much like Weavers in their cloaks and their blank masks. As another came into view, he noticed that they were surrounded by a retinue of ghauregs that never strayed far from them, shielding the Nexuses with their massive bodies.

‘They’re protecting the Nexuses,’ Yugi said, raising his voice over the din of the Aberrants passing them by. ‘Can you do it?’

Nomoru gave him a disparaging look, but if she had been about to offer some snide reply, she missed her chance. At that moment, the air was shattered by a tremendous explosion, making the ground shudder violently. Yugi and Nomoru ducked instinctively as a scatter of pebbles and loose earth sloughed down on them from the ledge above.

The detonation was incredible, echoing the breadth of the Fault, destroying enormous sections of rock in a billowing cloud of dust that blasted up and down the canyon and plumed high into the sky. The Libera Dramach had placed explosives all along both sides of the eastern canyon, just beyond the junction. The initial concussion rained stones and rocks and boulders on the front line of the Aberrant army, bringing them stumbling to a sudden halt as they were battered by falling debris. But that was only the start, for a moment later came the grinding roar of collapsing rock, a monolithic rumbling that pounded the ears, and the canyon sides came down.

The Aberrants squealed and howled and stamped each other underfoot as they dissolved in confusion, but it was too late to avoid the avalanche of stone that slumped upon them. It smashed into their disordered ranks with unstoppable force, pulverising bone and rending bodies, crushing them to mangled dolls or ripping them limb from limb. Those who were not caught directly beneath the incomprehensible weight of rock were driven into it by the ranks behind, and the life squeezed from them. The dust that filled the canyon reduced visibility to almost nothing, only a yellow and stinging world filled with animal shrieks. Still the Aberrants pushed onwards, swept up in their own tide, unwittingly propelling more of their kind into the rock barrier where they bent and snapped like twigs.

Yugi raised his head and gave Nomoru a grin. ‘Now let’s show them what kind of fight they have on their hands,’ he said.

The riflemen opened fire.

There were almost a hundred of them positioned all around the junction, high above the invaders. Though the seething dust stung their eyes and made it impossible to see down to the canyon floor, the Aberrants were packed so closely that it was harder to miss than to hit. They shot indiscriminately, pulling back the sliding bolt on their weapons after each report, pausing only when their ignition powder burnt out or when they needed to reload. A murderous and inescapable crossfire turned the air into a hail of rifle balls, shredding the Aberrants that were caught within it. It punched through chitinous armour and ripped through skin and fur and flesh, fountaining blood in its wake. The canyon resounded with the agonised cries of the beasts as they flailed under the assault, seeking enemies and finding none.

Yugi, closer to the ground than the men and women on the canyon rims, was firing with the rest of them. Kihu and the other riflemen who were hidden among the ledges kept up an uneven staccato of weapon reports above and below. Occasionally, one of the agile skrendel rose out of the dusty murk, trying to climb the sides of the canyon to escape the bloodbath, but Yugi had two men down there whose job was to shoot them if they tried, and they never got close to the Libera Dramach position.

Amid all of that, Nomoru was as still as a statue, her hand around the barrel of her black-lacquered rifle, tracing the silver intaglio there. The dust was steadily clearing, blown down the canyon by the evening breeze as the land cooled. The writhing, panicked shapes of the Aberrants were becoming visible again, dim shadows in the faint glow of the recently departed sun. The sky overhead was a deep blue, so dark that it was almost black now.

‘They’re turning!’ someone cried. ‘They’re turning!’

It was true. The Aberrants, desperate to escape the killing zone and realising that their way east was blocked, had begun to flood down into the southern canyon. Yugi felt a surge of bitter triumph, wondering whether the Nexuses had lost control of their troops or if they themselves had instigated it. Either way, the result would be the same.

‘Hold this position!’ Yugi cried. They were beginning to run out of ammunition and ignition powder now, but he did not want them to let up yet. Not until Nomoru had her chance.

As if responding to his thought, she lifted her rifle to her shoulder, sighting through the bushes. The dust was settling, and the scene on the canyon floor was unveiling itself to the eyes of the ambushers. The ground was littered with shattered bodies, but it was barely possible to see them beneath the stampede of grotesqueries that trampled them.

Yet even as they saw the disorder they had sown, they noticed the Aberrants beginning to slow. The rifle fire from overhead was petering out now as guns overheated and powder punches emptied. The panic seemed to be diminishing with uncanny speed, decelerating the headlong rush into the southern canyon.

‘Nomoru,’ Yugi warned, realising now that he had an answer to his own question. ‘They’re getting control back.’

Nomoru ignored him. She had her eye to the sight, her body poised with a grace entirely at odds with her appearance or her character.

Down in the canyon, the Nexuses were gathered together, surrounded by their bodyguard of ghauregs. No expression could be seen behind their masks, but Yugi could almost feel their intent, their will, dominating the animals that they commanded.

She fired; the ball missed the shoulder of a ghaureg by an inch and hit one of the Nexuses in the face, smashing the blank white mask inward in a bloody spidercrack. The Nexus lurched, swayed and fell from its saddle.

The reaction among the Aberrants was immediate. A small section of them flew into a rage, different breeds attacking one another, and the hysteria spread swiftly. The riflemen concentrated their assault on the surrounding beasts.

Nomoru fired again. Another Nexus was pitched backward and fell from his mount.

Then someone from one of the canyon rims tipped an explosive package down into the fray, a bomb on a sizzling fuse, and when it went off pandemonium ensued. The stalled rush of the Aberrants became a charge down the only exit left to them: the southern canyon. Nomoru, unperturbed, took down a third Nexus. The ghaureg bodyguards were in disarray now. Two of them were tearing apart one of the Nexuses’ mounts. Chaos spread as the Nexuses’ guiding minds winked out like candles. The other Nexuses were retreating, forging back through the crush as best they could. As the last of the light drained from the sky, Nomoru put up her rifle and said: ‘Out of range now.’

Yugi clapped her on the shoulder in congratulation. She scowled at him. 400

‘Time to go,’ he said. ‘It’s not over yet.’

Accompanied by the rest of the riflemen in their group, they climbed back up to the top of the promontory and retraced their steps as swiftly as they could, heading along the lofty ledge that overlooked the southern canyon. Gunfire was still pocking the air behind them, sharp raps resonating emptily. As they got higher, they could see the vista across the Fault had turned a secretive blue-black in the twilight, and that the edge of Aurus was just rising in the north. It was cooling fast by the time they reached a vantage point and crouched at the lip of the ledge.

Below them, the Aberrants had swarmed in, and the vanguard had almost reached the end of the canyon and were slowing hard, realising that there was nowhere for them to go. But with no guiding force behind them they had no way to communicate to the hundreds who were coming after, and those that slowed were forced underfoot by the ones who had not yet seen the danger. The Aberrants piled up against the end of the canyon, the broken bodies of their kind forming a brake like earth before a plough. Still more crammed in behind them, seeking to escape the gunfire at the junction. Finally, when the immutability of their situation became apparent, they slowed and stopped, having packed the canyon with the dead and living.

The remaining explosives detonated at that point.

The Aberrants howled in fear as the mouth of the canyon collapsed, tons of rock hammering down, forming a wall with crushed corpses as its mortar. Sealing off their only escape, trapping hundreds of them there.

There was a pregnant pause, an expectancy that even the twisted animals felt. They prowled and paced, snapping at each other, clawing at the unyielding rock. Snarling struggles broke out. The rifles had fallen silent across the Fault.

It was difficult for those above to see in the fading light, but some of them had spyglasses, and they looked down and waited.

Whether the ghaureg was the first one to go or merely the first one they noticed, nobody could be sure. But as they watched, suddenly and without warning, the enormous beast disappeared into the earth.

The Aberrants were milling uneasily now, sensing that something was amiss here. Another one, this time a furie, was swallowed up by the ground. It had time to let out a distressed squeal and then it was gone.

‘Gods,’ murmured Kihu, who was hunkered next to Yugi. ‘This is going to be a slaughter.’

And then it was happening all over the canyon. Aberrants were disappearing, simply dropping into the earth as if the ground beneath their feet were suddenly gone. At first it was one at a time, and then several began to vanish at once, and moments later there were dozens being sucked under. The animals began to panic afresh, rearing and shrieking and roaring, attacking each other in their confusion. The skrendel, by far the most intelligent of the predator species, were trying to climb the canyon walls; but while they could get themselves off the deadly ground that way, the stone was too smooth for them to escape the trap. The canyon was emptying fast, as living and dead alike were swallowed by the churned earth of the canyon floor.

Those with spyglasses began to see the swift wakes of things speeding just below the surface, shallow humps that arrowed towards their targets. Even in the darkness, it was possible to spot the insidious swatches of blood that soaked upward from the earth, the ground too glutted to hold it all in. The Aberrants ran and scuttled on soil made damp with the fluids of their own kind, attempting a hopeless evasion as the things that hunted them swarmed about in a multitude. The skrendel were snatched from the walls by sudden profusions of thin tendrils that burst from the ground and enwrapped them, pulling them under in the blink of an eye, like a chameleon’s tongue picking off a fly.

By the time true dark had fallen, and Aurus was some way into her ascent, the canyon was quiet again. The only sign that the Aberrants had ever been there was the glistening of the moonlight on the canyon floor, where the blood of the dead creatures gradually soaked back into the earth.

Yugi let out a low whistle. There had been stories told about this place ever since he had arrived in the Fault, and several people who had not listened to those stories had provided more concrete proof of their veracity by dying here. But he had never imagined the sheer voraciousness of the liha-kiri – the burrowing demons.

A woman came racing down from further up the ledge to stand before them. ‘They’re heading back, Yugi,’ she said breathlessly. ‘They’re retreating.’

There was a cheer from those assembled, and Yugi was pounded by companionable slaps on his shoulder and back. He grinned roguishly.

‘They’ll not be in quite such a hurry to get to the Fold now,’ he said. ‘Well done, all of you.’

He would allow them a few moments of self-congratulation before he would urge them to withdraw. They deserved that much, at least. They had struck the Weaver army a terrible blow today, but the Weavers would not be so reckless a second time. Despite the hundreds they had killed, they had not done more than dent the enemy’s numbers. The Weavers, whatever else they were, were not tacticians, and they had fallen into a trap that any experienced general would have avoided; but their insanity also made them unpredictable, and that was dangerous.

He caught Nomoru’s eye, the only person not celebrating, and knew that she was thinking the same as he was. They had won a small respite, but the real battle would be at the Fold. And it might very well be a battle they could not win.