THIRTY-ONE

For the second time in his life, Barak Grigi tu Kerestyn sat on horseback in the midst of an army and looked upon the city of Axekami.

It was beautiful in the light of the early morning. Nuki’s eye was rising directly behind it in the east, the brilliance carved into rays by the spires and minarets of the capital, casting a long shadow like reaching fingers towards the throng of thousands who came to possess it. The air had a hazy, beatific quality, a fragile shimmer that made promises of the winter to come, where the days would be warm and still, and the night skies clear as crystal.

Axekami. Grigi could feel the desire kindling in his heart just by shaping the word in his mind. Those towering beige walls that had thwarted him once before; the jumble of streets and temples, libraries and bath-houses, docks and plazas. A chaotic profusion of life and industry.

His eyes travelled up the hill to where the Imperial Quarter lay, serene and ordered beneath the bluff that the Keep sat on, its far side aflame with sunlight and its western face in shadow. His gaze lingered on it, drinking in the sight of its magnificence, roaming over the temple to Ocha that crowned it and the Towers of the Winds that rose needle-thin at its corners. The Jabaza, distantly visible, wound in from the north, and the Zan headed away to the south, junks and barges waiting idly near the banks. Axekami had been sealed tight since the night before, as it always was in times of threat, and no river traffic was getting in or out.

How he wanted that city, craved it as if it were a mistress long denied him. The throne had slipped from Blood Kerestyn before, but now he was here to restore his family to the glory they deserved. He felt an elation, a certainty of the righteousness of his cause. The revolt in Zila had showed just how weak Mos’s hold was on his empire. The fact that he had left the matter to local Baraks and sent none of his own troops only made things look worse for him. How the people of Axekami would welcome Grigi this time, instead of uniting to fight against him as they had before.

And the only thing standing against him was the twenty thousand men camped between him and his prize.

‘History repeats itself,’ he grinned, flushed with the proximity of his dream. ‘Except that five years ago in summer, you were on that side.’

‘Briefly,’ Barak Avun said, the reins of his mount gripped in one bony fist. ‘Let us hope that history is kinder to us this time.’

‘After today, we will write history,’ Grigi said expansively, and pulled his horse into a canter.

The two of them rode together along the rear of the battle lines, one huge and obese, the other gaunt and ascetic. Their Weavers were not far away, keeping pace, hunched ghoulishly in their saddles. They were on hand to co-ordinate instructions between the multitude of Baraks and Barakesses whose forces stood as allies.

The high families had flocked to Kerestyn’s banner as the alternative to the ineptitude of Mos. If there had been any doubt, it had been dashed when the Empress Laranya fell from the Tower of the East Wind. Rumours of Mos’s state of mind had reached them long before, but his wife’s apparent suicide in response to the beating he delivered her was the final evidence that the Blood Emperor was insane. Grigi trusted that they would stand firm simply because there was no other option. None of the other high families, including Blood Koli, had the support or the power to make a play for the throne. Even if one or all of them betrayed him now, the families would simply fracture into an evenly-matched and self-destructive squabble, and they knew that. It was Grigi, or Mos.

The armies stood on the yellow-green grass of the plains to the west of Axekami, where so much blood had been spilt before. The sheer numbers present defeated the eye, thousands upon thousands, an accretion of humanity too vast to take in. Each man a different face, a different past, a different dream; yet here they were anonymous, defined only by the colours dyed on the leather of their armour or the hue of the sashes that some wore tied around their heads. Great swathes of warriors, sworn by blood to the families that ruled them. Each one a weapon for their nobles to wield, and in their hands a weapon of their own. Divisions of riflemen, swordsmen, riders of horses and manxthwa, men to operate fire-cannons and mortars; they stood in formations according to their allegiance or their speciality, their discipline utter, their dedication total. For these were soldiers of Saramyr: their lives were subordinate to the will of their masters and mistresses, and disobedience or cowardice was worse than death in their eyes.

The defenders were predominantly attired in red and silver, the colours of Blood Batik. Those wearing other colours were the few whose dogged loyalty to the Imperial throne had blinded them to Mos’s faults, or whose hatred of Blood Kerestyn had led them to join against him. The Imperial Guards he had kept within the city, but Mos had sent the remainder of his forces out onto the battlefield. Mos knew that if he allowed the usurpers to lay siege to the city, with the onset of famine and his unpopularity among the people he ruled, then it would only be a matter of time before the end.

Mos would not let himself be cornered. Instead, he chose to meet his enemy head on. Even weakened by splitting his forces, he possessed an army not much smaller than the combined might that Kerestyn had brought against him.

But Grigi had a trick up his sleeve. He had the Weave-lord.

Gods, the treachery was spectacular. Grigi could not even begin to imagine how Kakre had arranged the Empress’s death, but it had weakened Mos just enough. All the time Kakre had been conspiring with Grigi and Avun tu Koli, spinning secret deals, plotting to get rid of the unpopular Mos and install a new, powerful ruler in the shape of Grigi. Like a rat leaving a sinking ship, and swimming to a new one.

Of course, such untrustworthiness made them dangerous. And Weavers were not the only ones who could be sly. Once he was firmly in his rightful place, Grigi would use Kakre’s betrayal of Mos as an excuse to get rid of the Weavers once and for all. The people would demand it. Grigi had no wish to have his own ship sunk under the weight of the rats that clambered aboard.

He looked at Avun, his small eyes agleam amid the folds of his face. Avun returned the gaze unblinkingly. As if summoned, the two Weavers rode up alongside, one with the visage of a grimacing demon, one with an insectile face of gemstone, a Mask of incalculable wealth.

Avun nodded imperceptibly at Grigi. Grigi’s voice was trembling with excitement as he turned to the Weavers and spoke.

‘Begin.’

The rising roar of the armies as they closed on each other floated high into the sky, reaching to where Mos stood on a balcony of the Imperial Keep and looked down over the distant battle. His eyes were hollow and his beard thin and lank; a soft breath of air from the city below stirred his hair where it hung limply against his forehead. His flesh seemed to hang off his broad, stocky frame now, and he held a goblet of dark wine in one hand, nursing it as tenderly as if it were the child he had killed. But his gaze was clear, and despite the grief written so plainly on him, he seemed more his old self than in recent days.

How ridiculous it seemed, he thought. The plains surrounding Axekami were so flat that there was no real terrain advantage to be had, so Kerestyn had simply marched up to the city, Mos had sent his men out, and they had stood there waiting to kill each other. An idiotic civility. If there had been any passion involved, the enemy forces would have torn into each other on sight; but war was passionless, at least from where he stood. So they lined up their pieces in preparation for a charge, and only commenced when everyone was ready. It was enough to make him laugh, if he had any laughter in him.

The charge looked strangely surreal, like homing birds released from their cages. The front ranks simply dissolved into a mad dash as the signal to attack was given, and were matched by their counterparts on the other side. The distant report of fire-cannons preceded flashes of flame as sections of the charging troops were immolated. Riflemen were firing, reloading, firing, switching guns when their powder burned out. Horsemen swung out to the flanks. Manxthwa-riders powered through the foot-soldiers, their mounts turned from docile beasts of burden to angry mountains of shaggy muscle in the heat of combat, kicking out with their spatulate front hooves, their sad and misleadingly wise-looking faces turned to snarls. Up here, it was possible to see the formations moving in a slow dance, arranging themselves around the great central mass where the foot-soldiers hacked each other into bloody slabs in a dance of exquisite bladework.

‘You do not seem at all concerned, my Emperor,’ Kakre said, stepping out onto the balcony. Mos’s nose wrinkled slightly at the sick-dog smell of him.

‘Perhaps I simply don’t care,’ Mos replied. ‘Win, lose, what does it matter? The land is still blighted. Perhaps Kerestyn will kill me, perhaps I will kill him. I don’t envy him the task he takes on with my mantle.’

Kakre regarded him strangely. He disliked the tone in Mos’s voice. It was entirely too light. Since the death of Laranya, Kakre had ceased twisting the Emperor’s dreams, trusting his own despondency to make him pliable without the risk of manipulating his mind directly. For a time, it had worked: he had barely questioned Kakre when he had advised that an army should be sent to forestall the desert Baraks, had not even checked the size of Kerestyn’s army for himself. And yet now, despite his words, that despondency seemed to have fallen from him. Perhaps he was simply being fatalistic, Kakre reasoned. He had good reason to be, oh indeed.

Kakre’s mind went elsewhere, to another battle, where at the very same moment the last remaining thorn in the Weavers’ side was about to be removed. How things had shifted in their favour, that the Ais Maraxa should be foolish enough to expose themselves by inciting a revolt in Zila. Kakre had promised Mos that he would deal with the cause of that revolt and he had meant it. He had contacted Fahrekh, Blood Vinaxis’ Weaver, and all the others in the vicinity and given them one simple instruction: take one of the leaders alive, and strip their mind raw. Chance had delivered them Xejen tu Imotu, but it could as easily have been one of a half-dozen others. The Ais Maraxa had been troublesome for so long: they were too well hidden, and Kakre did not have the time to ferret them out, especially as their connection with the Heir-Empress might have been a false lead. But their zeal had been the end of them, and now it would be the end of their divine saviour. For Lucia was alive, and furthermore, Fahrekh had found out where she was.

The timing was fractionally inconvenient. Kakre would have liked to send an even greater number of Aberrants to the Fold than they had mustered, but the bulk of their force had been needed elsewhere. Even so, there were more than enough; enough to weather the occasional mistakes and setbacks, such as the massacre of the Aberrants in the canyons west of the Fold.

Kakre did not want to take the risk of simply killing the Heir-Empress and then have the Libera Dramach use her as a martyr. He wanted the Libera Dramach too, to smash that last resistance, to capture their leaders and force them to give up their co-conspirators until all sedition was stamped out. And if he was fortunate, more fortunate than he dared hope, he might even find that Weaving bitch that had killed his predecessor.

Today, in the span between sunrise and sunset, all the Weavers’ troubles would be removed.

He had all but forgotten about his suspicious mood when he felt the mental approach of another of his kind. Fast as the flicker of a synapse, he dived into the Weave to meet him, flashing along the currents of the void until the two minds joined in a tangle of threads, knotting and mingling, passing information, then pulling away into retreat. Kakre was back into himself in moments, rage bursting into life inside him. He turned his attention to the battle again, looking hard at the tiny figures that fought and died down there.

A mile north-west of the combat, a vast clot of red and silver had appeared, moving fast towards the rear of the Blood Kerestyn forces. Eight thousand Blood Batik troops, as if from nowhere. From the Imperial Keep, they could see fifteen miles to the horizon, and there had been no sign of the troops until now.

‘Mos!’ he croaked. ‘What is this?’

Mos gave him a dry look. ‘This is how I beat Grigi tu Kerestyn,’ he said.

‘How?’ Kakre cried, his fingers turned to claws on the parapet of the balcony.

‘Kakre, you seem discomfited,’ Mos observed, mockingly polite. ‘I’d advise you not to take out your aggressions on me as you did before. I may be Emperor for a very long time yet, despite your best efforts to the contrary, and it would be well not to make me angry.’ He smiled suddenly, a mirthless rictus. ‘Do we understand each other?’

Kakre had been listening in disbelief, but now he found his voice again. ‘What have you done, Mos?’ he demanded hoarsely.

‘Eight thousand cloaks, matched to the colour of the grass on the plains,’ he said. He sounded nothing like the broken man that he had seemed to be only a few short hours ago. Now his voice was flat and cold. ‘I didn’t send my men to meet the desert Baraks. And I didn’t send them after Reki either. I had them all double back. I had something of an intuition that Kerestyn might hear of this opportunity, and that he might come in greater numbers than I expected. Before dawn, I sent them out and had them hide under their cloaks and wait. You’d never see them unless you were close.’

Kakre’s eyes blazed within the black pits of his Mask. ‘And what about the desert Baraks?’ he hissed.

‘Let them come,’ Mos shrugged. ‘They’ll find Kerestyn shattered and me ruling in Axekami with nobody to challenge me. And of course, my loyal Weavers by my side.’ This last was delivered in an insultingly sardonic tone. ‘Sometimes it’s best not to let anyone know everything, Kakre. A good ruler realises that. And don’t forget I helped make Blood Batik great long before I met you.’

‘I am your Weave-lord!’ Kakre barked. ‘I need to know everything!’

‘So you can turn it against me? I think not,’ Mos said, his voice quiet and deadly. He was a man who had nothing left to lose, and even the terror of the Weavers had no hold on him now. The Imperial Keep had cast them both in shadow, but Mos’s rage made him seem darker still. ‘I’m no fool. I know what you’re doing. You treat with Koli and Kerestyn to get rid of me.’ His eyes filled with tears of sheer hatred. ‘You should never have let go, Kakre. You should never have stopped the dreams.’ He leaned closer, breathing in the stench of corrupted flesh, showing his enemy that he was not afraid.

‘I know it was you,’ he whispered.

The gaping death-mask of Kakre looked back at him emptily.

‘I can kill you in a moment,’ the Weave-lord said, the words issuing from the cavernous black mouth dripping with venom.

‘But you daren’t,’ Mos said, leaning back and away from him. ‘Because you don’t know who will be Emperor by nightfall now. And you won’t use your cursed mind-bending power on me, because you can’t be sure it will work. You slipped up once, Kakre. You didn’t cover your tracks when you left.’ He was almost shaking with disgust. ‘I remember. I remember your filthy fingers inside my head. The memories came back; you didn’t bury them deep enough.’

He turned away, back to the battle, the tears still standing in his eyes. ‘But I still need you, Kakre. Gods save me, I need the Weavers. Without you, there’s no way to get in touch with Okhamba and the Merchant Consortium fast enough to avert this famine. There’s no way to keep this land together when people begin to starve. It will be chaos, and riots, and slaughter.’ He took a shuddering breath, and the tears spilled at last, twin tracks losing themselves in the bristles of his beard. ‘To expose you, to call the noble houses to rise up and throw you out, would cause the death of millions.’

Kakre’s reaction was unreadable. He faced the Emperor for a long while, but the Emperor would only look at the battle below. Eventually, Kakre turned his attention back that way also.

‘Watch closely, Kakre,’ Mos said through gritted teeth. ‘I still have one trick left to play.’

The noise of the battle was immense, a thuggish, constant bellow underpinned by the boom of artillery and counterpointed by the scrape of steel on steel, the screams of the dead and the dying, the bone-snap reports of rifles. In the killing ground at its centre, men struggled and fought in amidst a crowd of allies and enemies, a world of disorder where every angle could bring a new attack, the survivors owing their continued life to luck as much as skill. Arrows smacked into shoulders and thighs like diving birds plunging after fish. Swords carved through flesh, causing death in ways far more brutal than fiction or history would present. The neat beheadings and swift killing strokes were few; blows glanced, slicing meat from the forearm or hacking halfway through a man’s knee, splitting someone’s face from left cheek to right ear in a spray of shattered bone or chopping into an artery to leave the wounded man bleeding white on the grass of the plains. Flame sprang up in slicks as shellshot burst, burning jelly sticking to skin and cooking it, men flailing and shrieking as their tongues blackened and their eyeballs popped and ran sizzling down their faces. The air was smoke and blood and the sick-sweet smell of charred bodies, and the battle raged on.

‘I need the Bloods Nabichi and Gor back here now!’ Grigi was demanding of his Weaver. His high, girlish voice made him sound panicky, but he was far from that. Grigi was very hard to rattle, and the seemingly inexplicable appearance of eight thousand Blood Batik troops behind them was merely a clever move to be countered. Already he had a force moving up to delay them while he could get his fire-cannons turned around and aimed. It was going to make this fight more costly, but he could still win it with shrewd leadership.

‘That fool Kakre is going to pay for this,’ he promised, reining his horse around. He did not care that other Weavers were within earshot, both Blood Kerestyn’s and the gem-stone-Masked Weaver of Blood Koli. ‘Why didn’t he warn me about the extra troops? And where’s this intervention he promised?’ He glared at Barak Avun, blaming him for Kakre’s mistakes; after all, it was through Avun that Kakre had contacted him.

Avun, who had been watching the battle with his hooded, drowsy eyes, turned and gave Grigi a bland stare.

‘There will be an intervention,’ Avun said. ‘Just not as you imagine.’ He flicked a gesture at his Weaver.

The stabbing pain in Grigi’s chest took his breath away. His multitudinous chins bunched up as he gaped, clutching at his leather breastplate. A sparkling agony was spreading along his collarbone to his left arm, numbing his hand. His eyes were wide with disbelief. They flicked to his own Weaver, desperate supplication in their gaze, but the grimacing demon looked at him pitilessly. Grigi gasped half a curse as the strength drained from his limbs.

‘History does repeat itself, Grigi,’ Avun said. ‘But it appears that you do not learn from it. You had me betray Blood Amacha last time we were here; you should have known that I cannot be trusted.’

Grigi’s face had reddened, his eyes bulging as he fought for air that would not seem to come. His heart was a bright star of agony in his chest, sending ribbons of fire through his veins. The sounds of the battle had dimmed, and Avun’s voice was thin in his ear as if from far away. He clutched at his saddle as realisation struck like a hammer: he was dying here, now, surrounded by these three impassive figures on horseback. Gods, no, he wasn’t ready! He hadn’t done what he needed to do! He was within sight of his prize, and it was being snatched from him, and he could not even make a sound to voice his defiance at his tormentor.

His Weaver. His Weaver was supposed to defend him. They were always loyal, always. The very fabric of their society depended on it. If a Weaver did not serve his master in all things, then the Weavers were too dangerous to exist. They even killed each other in the service of the family that supported them. But this one was letting him die.

How had Avun won round his Weaver? How?

‘You will find that the orders you sent did not get through to their intended recipients,’ Avun was saying languidly. ‘And they will most likely be quite surprised when my troops turn on them, and they are sandwiched between Koli and Batik men to the west and Mos’s main force to the east. It will be quite a slaughter.’ He raised an eyebrow. ‘You, of course, will not live to see it. Your heart gave out in the heat of battle. Small wonder, for one so fat.’

The pain in Grigi’s body was nothing compared to the pain in his soul, the raw and searing frustration and anger and terror all mixing and mingling to scald him. His vision was dimming now, turning to black, and no matter how he fought against it, no matter how he struggled to cry out and make a sound, he was mute. Men of Blood Kerestyn were only metres away, and yet none of them marked him, none of them saw what the Weavers were doing, reaching an invisible hand inside him to squeeze his heart. To them, he was merely in conference with his aides, and if his expression was distressed and gawping, something like a landed fish, then they were not close enough to notice.

He looked to Axekami, and it was dark now, the shadowed fingers of its spires reaching out across the carnage to enfold him. Twice he had sought it; twice been denied. Unconsciousness was a mercy. He did not feel himself slump forward and then slide from his saddle, his mountainous body crashing to the earth; did not hear the cries of alarm from Avun, false words to Grigi’s men as they gathered; did not see him and his Weaver slip away from the crowd, to turn the battle with perfidy. There was only the growing golden light, and the threads that seemed to sew through everything, wafting him like fallopian cilia towards what lay beyond oblivion.

Kakre’s hood flapped about his Masked face in a flurry of wind as he watched the battle unfold. Nuki’s eye had risen overhead now. It was hot in the direct sun, and Kakre’s sweltering robe was entirely inappropriate, but he did not retreat. Neither did Mos. Reports came to them both: to Mos through his runners; to Kakre through the Weave. The morning had passed, and the forces led by Blood Kerestyn were decimated. The armies of some of the most prominent high families in the land had been cut to pieces. Kerestyn themselves, who had dedicated almost all their troops to this venture, would not be able to rise again for decades, if ever. Weakened, they would be unable to continue fighting in the vicious internecine dealings of the nobles, and would be torn apart.

Avun tu Koli had been clever. Whatever deals he had made, he had managed to execute them without Grigi finding out. It was not only Blood Koli that turned on Kerestyn, but several other families as well, tipping the balance far enough in the Emperor’s favour to make it virtually impossible for Blood Kerestyn to turn the tide back. Ragged armies were fleeing in retreat now, Grigi’s allies deserting him as their cause became hopeless. Kakre noted that Blood Koli troops were almost entirely intact; Avun tu Koli had drawn them out of the conflict, letting the others take care of the battle, content to watch from the sidelines and preserve his men.

‘It was you,’ Kakre said at last. ‘I remember now. I had learned of a message to Avun tu Koli, sent from the Keep, but I failed to intercept it.’ He felt a pang of concern that he had forgotten about it until this point.

‘Avun tu Koli has always been an honourless dog,’ Mos replied. ‘And that makes him reliable. He’ll always choose the winning side, no matter what his previous loyalties. I just had to convince him that I would win. Look at him, holding his men back. Blood Koli will be the most powerful family behind Batik after this, and he knows it.’ He scratched at his beard, which had gone scraggy and heavily scattered with white as if withered by his grief. ‘You tried, Kakre, and it was a cursed good try. But you are stuck with me, and I’m stuck with you. No matter what you’ve done, we need each other.’

The words almost caught in his throat: no matter what you’ve done. As if he could dismiss the murder of the woman he loved so easily. As if he could ever love again, or feel anything but sorrow and hatred and shame. Locked with the Weavers in a symbiosis of mutual loathing, he saw nothing but evil in his future; but evil must be endured, for the sake of power. He had lost a son, a wife, and an unborn child now. Such things could drive better men than him to ruin. But he had nephews, and other relations that could take the reins of the Empire when he was gone; and he had a duty to his family, to Blood Batik. He would not give up the throne while he still breathed.

‘You are mistaken,’ said Kakre, his voice a dry rasp. ‘And your runners come now to tell you why.’

An urgent chime outside the door of the chamber behind them made Mos whirl. He stepped into the room, out of the sun to where the coloured lach of the walls and floor and pillars kept the air cool. He stopped halfway to the curtained doorway, and looked back at where Kakre was coming through the archway after him.

‘What is this, Kakre?’ he demanded. Suddenly, he was afraid. ‘What is this?’

The bell chimed again. Kakre’s scrawny white hand emerged from the folds of his robe and gestured towards the doorway.

‘Tell me!’ Mos roared at the Weave-lord.

The runner thought that this was an invitation to enter, and he drew the curtain aside and hurried in, blanching as Mos swung a furious glare on him and he realised his mistake. But he was terrified already, and he blurted out his message recklessly as if by delivering it he could expel its meaning from him and purge the horror that his words carried.

‘Aberrants!’ he cried. ‘There are Aberrants all over the docks. Thousands! They’re killing anything that moves!’

‘Aberrants?’ Mos howled, swinging back to Kakre.

‘Aberrants,’ Kakre said, quite calmly. ‘We sailed bargeloads of them into Axekami last night, and then you shut the gates and locked them in. You’ll find that many more are deploying on the west bank of the Zan now and heading towards the soldiers outside Axekami. They will slaughter anyone not wearing the colours of Blood Koli.’

‘Koli?’ Mos was choking on the sheer enormity of what Kakre was saying. Aberrants? In Axekami? The most dreadful enemy of civilisation at the very heart of the empire? And the Weavers had brought them here?

‘Yes, Koli,’ Kakre replied. ‘Quite the treacherous one. Ever ready to step over the corpses of his allies to victory, like a true Saramyr. He has been on my side all along.’

Mos had the terrible impression that Kakre was grinning behind his Mask.

‘Let us not delude ourselves, Mos,’ he croaked. ‘The Weavers see the way that Saramyr is turning. Soon, you would try to get rid of us. The people would demand it. Grigi tu Kerestyn was plotting to do the same. That cannot happen.’

The runner was rooted to the spot, trembling, a young man of eighteen harvests witnessing an event of an importance far beyond anything he could ever imagine being privy to.

‘At this time, Aberrants are pouring from the mountains, from our mines, from dozens of locations where we have collected them and hidden them from your sight. You were kind enough to be part of the process of demolishing the standing armies of the nobles with this charade being played out beyond Axekami’s walls. Our Aberrants will take care of the rest.’

For an instant, Mos was too stunned to take in what the Weave-lord was telling him. Then, with a strangled cry of rage, he lunged, a blade sliding free of the sheath where it had been hidden at his belt. Kakre put up a hand, and Mos’s charge turned into a stumbling collapse as his muscles spasmed and locked. He went crashing to the ground in a foetal position, his face contorted, jaw thrust to one side, his fingers jutting out at all angles, his wrists bent inwards and his neck twisted, as if he were a piece of paper screwed up and discarded. His eyes rolled madly, but he could only make a hoarse gargle emit from his mouth.

The Weave-lord stood over the Emperor, small and hunched and infinitely lethal. ‘The time of the high families is over,’ he said. ‘Your day is done. The Weavers have served you for centuries, but we will serve you no longer. The Empire ends today.’

He waved his hand, and Mos burst. Blood splattered explosively from his eyes, ears, nose and mouth, from his genitals, from his anus. His belly split and his sundered intestines coiled out in a gory slither; his vertebrae shattered from skull to coccyx.

In an instant, it was over. The ruined corpse of the Emperor lay amid a blast-pattern of his own fluids on the green lach floor of the room.

Kakre raised his head, the corpse-Mask fixing on the messenger. The shock and disbelief on the young man’s face was comical. He dropped to his knees, haemorrhaging massively.

There was silence in the room; but outside, in the streets of the city, rifle fire could be heard. Bells were tolling. An alarm was being raised.

The brightness of the sunlight on the balcony made the room seem dim in comparison. Kakre studied the bodies of the men he had killed. An Emperor and a servant, both just husks in the end.

The Aberrant predators in Axekami would rampage through the city, crush all resistance, bring the populace savagely to heel. All over northern Saramyr, huge armies of beasts were sallying forth from the Tchamil Mountains and along the rivers, an accumulation of decades of planning and five short years of unrestricted movement within the empire. Monstrous hordes, blossoming out from within like spreading cancers under the auspices of the Weavers and the Nexuses.

Messages begging for help would not get to where they were sent. Weavers would disappear, their masters murdered. So long had the nobles of Saramyr relied on the power of the Weavers to communicate that they would not know what to do. So long had they accepted the Weavers’ servitude that they could not imagine rebellion. Suddenly, they would be alone, isolated in the midst of a massive country, separated by huge expanses from anyone who could help them. By the time they adapted it would be too late. The high families would be overthrown.

The game was done, and the Weavers had won.

Kakre walked slowly from the room. When Mos’s corpse was discovered, the Imperial Guards would draw the obvious conclusion. But by that time he would be back in his chambers, and the door was thick enough to withstand the Imperial Guards long enough for the Keep to fall, if they should hunt him down.

Besides, he had a celebratory titbit waiting there, brought to him last night for just this occasion. A young woman, smooth as silk, lithe and beautiful and perfect. And such skin she had, such skin.

The Juwacha Pass lay between Maxachta and Xaxai, bridging the Tchamil Mountains where they narrowed, reaching from the fertile west to the desert of Tchom Rin in the east. Apart from the Riri Gap on the south coast, it was the only major crossing-point between the two halves of the divided land. Legend had it that Ocha himself had parted the mountains with one stamp of his foot, to open Tchom Rin and the Newlands to his chosen people and give them licence to drive the aboriginal Ugati out. More likely it was some cataclysmic shifting of the earth that had carved the sinuous route between the peaks, one hundred and fifty miles long, as if the upper and lower parts of the range were simply drawn apart and the ground between had stretched flat.

At its widest point it was two miles across, though it narrowed to half a mile at the western end, where its mouth was guarded by the sprawling city of Maxachta. What obstacles had been strewn across it on its discovery – boulder formations, glassy hulks of volcanic rock, massive jags of black stone: imperfections thrown up in the violence of its creation – had been destroyed with explosives and levelled long ago. The mountains had many passes for the agile, but for an army the Juwacha Pass was the only feasible way across without heading five hundred miles south to Riri.

Reki tu Tanatsua reached the summit of the mountain ridge at mid-morning, with the sun low and clear and sharp, shining directly in his eyes. Reki’s thin face was bearded now, the hair growing surprisingly thick for such a young man. His black hair had become shaggy, the streak of white dyed to make it invisible. His finery had gone, traded away for sturdy peasant travelling-clothes, and his gaze was flintier and wiser, less that of a child and more that of a man. He laboured up the last few yards to the top, crunching through autumn snows that dusted the ground lightly at this altitude, and there he stopped and looked back.

Asara came up behind him, clad in a fur cloak, her clothes as simple and hardwearing as his. She wore her hair down, and her face was unadorned, but even without effort she was strikingly beautiful. The exertion of the climb had not even tired her. Beyond her, over the peaks, Maxachta spread across the yellow-green plains, tiny domes and spires shining as they came out of the frowning shadow of the mountains. They had passed it the day before yesterday and given it a wide berth, shunning habitation, just as they now chose a mountainous trail to the south of the Juwacha Pass rather than risk meeting anyone on it. It was a harder road, but a safer one, for all ways had become dangerous now.

Reki offered a hand to her, and she took it with a smile. He helped her the last few steps to the tip of the ridge, and there they walked to the far side and looked down.

The mountain ridge that they had climbed lay ten miles in from the western end of the pass, at the point where it curved slightly northward. From its heights, it was possible to see a long way in either direction. Asara had judged it a prudent point to take stock of where they were and anticipate any dangers ahead; Reki had submitted without argument. He had long learned to trust her in these matters. She had kept him alive thus far, and she was astonishingly capable for a woman her age. He desired her and was in awe of her at the same time.

But there was another motive behind their ascent. Asara had a suspicion which she was unwilling to share with Reki, and she wanted to be certain of it before she continued. Her Aberrant eyes were exceptionally sharp, and the tiny wheeling dots that she had spied from afar had set her to thinking. Now she saw her suspicion confirmed.

The mountains shouldered together to the east, forming a narrow, grey valley. It was carpeted in dead men and Aberrant beasts. Carrion birds plucked and pulled flesh so fresh that it had hardly even begun to decompose, or circled silently overhead, as if spoilt for choice and unable to decide where next to feast. From where they stood, the corpses were one incoherent jumble, bodies upon bodies in their thousands.

Thousands of desert folk. Men and women in the garb of Tchom Rin.

Asara shaded her eyes and scanned the pass, picking out broken standards and faded colours. She saw the emblems of the cities of Xaxai and Muio, in among those of other high families. It took her only moments to find the one she was looking for.

Blood Tanatsua, tattered and torn, lying across several bodies like a shroud. The emblem of Reki’s family. And she knew enough of desert lore to realise that the standard was only raised above an army when the Barak himself was present.

The desert families had marched quickly at the news of Laranya’s suicide. Had Kakre’s Weavers been setting things up here too, playing the families as Kakre was doing in Axekami? Certainly, it seemed that this army had moved with uncanny speed, even assuming that news of the Empress’s death had been communicated instantly by Kakre to his foul brethren in the desert. A vanguard, perhaps? A show of might? The desert cities would not declare war on the strength of what they had heard. It would take the token that Reki carried to make them do that. But now, it seemed, his errand was redundant.

She glanced at him. His vision was not as good as hers, but he saw enough. He stared down on the scene for a long time in silence, his face still but tears welling in his eyes.

‘Is my father down there?’ Reki asked.

‘Who can say?’ Asara replied, but she knew that he was, and Reki caught it in her tone. She could only imagine what had happened: how these men had been ambushed by Aberrants, how even this massive force had been outnumbered by the tide of monstrosities pouring from the mountains. Yet how could the Aberrants be so organised, so numerous, so purposeful? Could this, too, be some dark result of the Weavers’ ambitions? It seemed impossible, yet the alternatives were even more impossible yet.

Reki wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. He did not grieve for his father, to whom he had been a source of endless disappointment; he had enough residual bitterness to pretend that he did not care. He wept instead for the death of his people. He wept at his first sight of the cost of war.

They made a fire on the summit of the ridge, careless of the consequences, and there Reki took out the sheaf of hair that had been his sister’s, and burned it. The acrid stink carried up on the thin trail of smoke into the morning sky, the ends of the hair glowing, curling and blackening. Reki knelt over it, gazing into the heart of the blaze at the last part of his sister he had as it smouldered into ash. Asara stood at his shoulder, watching, wondering how he would feel if he ever knew that his sister’s murderer was the woman by his side. Wondering what would happen if she was ever on the receiving end of his promised vengeance.

‘The responsibility passes to me,’ he said, eventually. ‘What was to be my father’s cause is now mine.’

Asara studied him. He stood up, and met her eyes. His gaze was steady, and there was a determination there that she had never seen before.

‘You are a Barak now,’ she said quietly.

His gaze did not flinch or flicker. Finally, he turned it eastward, looking over the peaks, as if he could see past them to the vast desert beyond where his home lay. Without a word, he set off that way, heading down the far slope of the ridge. Asara watched him go, noted the new set to his shoulders and the grim line of his jaw; then, with one final look to the west as if in farewell, she followed him.