The Ascendancy Veil

TEN

The walls of Zila had held back the enemies of the Empire for a thousand years and more. The feya-kori went through them like children kicking over mudcastles.

They approached under the cover of the fog, but nobody was deceived. Kaiku had warned the Sisters about the demons' methods, and the murk had gathered too quickly and smelt too foul to be natural. Yet, somehow, knowing that they were coming only made it worse: the sickening inevitability of their arrival weighed on the defenders' hearts.

The troops had already begun to prepare the town for evacuation by the time the feya-kori appeared. They lunged suddenly out of the miasma, emerging as if from nowhere within a few dozen metres of the wall. Men howled as the demons loomed up towards them; the sharp slope to the north of the town made them seem as if they were coming from below, surfacing from a sea of mist. They grabbed hold of the lip of the wall, the stump-ends of their arms smashing down onto the stone in a hissing mass of black ooze, crushing and dissolving those soldiers not quick enough to get out of the way. Then, with a long, protracted groan, they hauled, and the top third of the wall gave way in an avalanche of bodies and bricks and mortar.

Alarm bells clanged from the murk; men fought to decline their fire-cannons far enough to hit the enemy. But the feya-kori were too close. They punched and tore and smashed, their movements slow and massive, destroying a great section of the wall in minutes while rifles and arrows pocked them ineffectually.

They lumbered into the town, crashing through buildings as if they were made of sticks and paper. The Aberrant predators and Nexuses were not far behind them.

Tsata raced through the ruined streets left in the demons' wake. A dozen Tkiurathi were with him, their gutting-hooks held ready, eyes darting about for signs of the enemy. Behind them they could hear the cries of the feya-kori, disembodied moans drifting through the swiftly thinning fog; before them, distantly, was the sound of combat, where the troops of the Empire had knitted across the gash in the wall and were putting up a bloody resistance against the Aberrant horde. Tsata was concerned with neither: his purpose was the area in between, where the smoking, charred trail of the demons had left houses collapsed into rubble, with men and women and children trapped and maimed or out of their wits with fear.

The Tkiurathi dispersed at his suggestion, fracturing into groups of two and three and hurrying in different directions. They filtered off into the narrow spoke-roads and cross-alleys of the town, heading away from the main swathe of destruction – where nothing was left alive, and the cobbled thoroughfares were a melted quagmire – to the edges, where there were people to be helped.

Tsata tasted bile: the very air was bad here. The sight of the feya-kori still burned in the forefront of his mind. For the month that it took to cross the sea from his lands, he had been experiencing a steadily growing elation at the thought of returning to Saramyr. Four years he had been gathering his people, tracking them down and persuading them to his cause; four years of hunting through deep jungle, of tireless diplomacy, of bringing together men and women who had scattered over hundreds of miles of nearly impenetrable terrain. And though he might have only managed four ships to carry them, those four could go back and forth as many times as was necessary to transport all the Tkiurathi to Saramyr.

But he had been here mere hours before he witnessed how much worse things had become in his absence, and now he wished he had listened to his heart instead of his head and got here sooner.

He scrambled over a slope of rubble, where the dusty guts of a building had spilled out across the street, to where a pair of women were heaving at a beam to uncover the supine man beneath. He did not give them time to react to his appearance, to act on the flicker of fear and uncertainty at the sight of him. He grabbed the beam and lifted, and after a moment's hesitation the women added their strength to his, and two more Tkiurathi appeared and joined in. The beam moved, and the man scrambled free, delirious with agony, his foot crushed inside his boot. One of the women helped him stand one-legged.

'Find a crutch and get away from here,' Tsata told them. 'Through the south gate.' Then he rapped a few words in guttural Okhamban to his companions and they were running again.

The mist had faded to a fine haze, burnt off by the sharp light of the winter sun. The demons were abandoning their concealment; they had no need of it now. One of them had reached the town's keep, the highest and most central point, hub of Zila's wheel-like layout. Burning and broken buildings traced the creature's path from the gap in the north wall to where it was smashing into the keep's brickwork. The other one had rampaged towards the western wall.

Tsata hoped the ships had got away. There had barely been time for the Tkiurathi to gather their communal belongings and swim for shore; he had last seen the junks turning in the estuary, their prows pointing towards the open sea. A few Tkiurathi men had stayed, along with the crew. They would return and tell others what they had seen today. What the Weavers were now capable of.

For the Tkiurathi who were on Saramyr, the protection of their pash was now the priority. Okhambans did not think in the way Saramyr did: they had no concept of personal ownership, and their society had evolved around a group dynamic which meant, at its most basic level, that they considered individual needs less important than those of the many. Pash was their name for whichever 'many' they were involved with at the time, a fluid and multilayered concept of overlapping priorities which was how the Okhamban people – including the Tkiurathi – assigned importance to a situation. At this moment, at this time, their pash included the people of Zila; and so they had headed into the town without a second thought, to help with the retreat, to save lives when they could, heedless of any risk to themselves.

A cry for help drew them into a small square where one side had collapsed inward. The facades of the buildings had shaken away from their superstructures and opened the rooms to the sky. Smoke was seeping from beneath the rubble on the ground floor of what had once been a cobbler's shop, where something was ablaze. An old, bearded man was frantically working to clear away the stones there. He caught sight of Tsata and his companions, wasted a moment on uncertainty, then called to them.

'There's someone under here!'

They joined him in his work, hefting the heavy, uneven stones and flinging them away. There was a frantic knocking noise coming from beneath.

Tsata's survival instincts kept him fitfully glancing about as he laboured, honed by generation upon generation of jungle life. Without even thinking about it, he knew where the feya-kori were by their dreary, yawning voices; they were too far away to be a threat. He could tell by the cadence and timbre of the battle to the north that the forces of the Empire were still holding out. But there were Aberrant predators loose in the city, those that had slipped through the gap in the wall before it could be sealed. He had seen their handiwork, and one or two of their corpses.

They had just uncovered the corner of a trapdoor, from which the smoke was coming, when something moved in the square.

The three Tkiurathi were on their feet, gutting-hooks in hands, before the pair of ghauregs even noticed them. They ran out from the cover of the building and into the square, drawing the eyes of the beasts, leading them away from the old man. The Aberrants snorted at the sight of prey, growling deep in their chests. One of them bellowed a challenge, shaking its head, its grey shaggy pelt flailing with the movement; then slowly they advanced.

Tsata circled around the square, keeping his gaze on the predators. His companions were fanning away from him, treading soundlessly across the rubble-strewn cobbles. Coherent thought had fallen away, succeeded by the quicker and more direct reactions of a hunter. The ghauregs clacked their jaws together with a bony snap like a crocodile's, wary of their opponents. Their muzzles were streaked in blood.

There was a banging from the trapdoor, louder and more urgent than before now that it was not muffled by so much rubble, and the ghaureg's heads snapped around to fix on the old man who crouched there. He paled.

The three Tkiurathi moved together, taking advantage of the instant of distraction to cross the distance between them and the predators. Their hide shoes were so soft and their tread so light that the ghauregs did not hear them coming; they turned back only just in time to react to the attack.

Tsata saw the fist swiping towards him early enough to duck beneath it. He rammed one of his gutting-hooks into the ghaureg's ribs with as much force as he could muster. It bit deep, but the thick muscles of the beast were too tough to cut easily, and the blade wrenched free of his hand as he darted past. The ghaureg overswung, roaring in pain, and one of the other Tkiurathi took its hand off at the wrist with a brutal downward stroke; but he had been too eager at the sight of an inviting target, and he did not see the ghaureg's other hand until it grabbed his shin in an unbreakable grip. He slashed across the beast's muzzle, slicing through its lip, but the blade jarred against bone and glanced off. It flung him away, whipping him by his leg with a cracking of bones to send him flailing through the air. He crashed in a heap against the rubble, but even before he had landed Tsata had made his second strike. Occupied with one enemy, the ghaureg had no time to deal with the other, and Tsata plunged his second gutting-hook into the creature's back with all his strength.

This time he found something vital. His enemy lurched away spasmodically for a few steps, trying to paw at its back but unable to reach; then it collapsed, and blood ran over its lower teeth with its last bubbling breath.

Tsata had never lost sight of the second ghaureg in the time it took to despatch the first one. That one was still engaged with the remaining Tkiurathi. He did not spare a moment to check on his fallen comrade, but instead he carefully approached the body of the ghaureg, ready to leap away if it should move. He wrenched his weapons free and then went to the aid of his beleaguered kinsman.

That man – his name was Heth – had been fighting tactically. Instead of going up alone against a stronger enemy he had been drawing it after him to allow the others time to finish off the first ghaureg. Now he saw Tsata coming, and the advantage turned his way. He switched to the offensive, ducking in low to hack across his enemy's knees. The strike was inexact, hitting its calf instead, but it was enough to send a flood of red soaking through the grey fur. Heth pulled back faster than the counterpunch could follow, and in that moment Tsata got in behind the beast, close enough to chop a deep blow into its tricep before retreating out of its reach. Enraged, it swung back to snap at him, and once again Heth slipped inside its guard and raked a cut along its thigh.

They harried it for several minutes, each time leaving a wound, each time escaping its grasp. Finally, when its pelt was drenched crimson and blood loss had made it sluggish, Heth took advantage of an ill-executed lunge to take it through the throat, and it went down without another sound.

Tsata exchanged a breathless smile with Heth. 'We must be quick,' he said in their native tongue. 'Others may come.'

They sheathed their blades. Heth went to see to their companion, who was beginning to scream as the shock wore off. Tsata went for the trapdoor. Fumes were coming thickly from beneath it now. The knocking had stopped, and the old man was long gone. Tsata cleared away the remainder of the debris and pulled the trapdoor open, keeping it between himself and the hatchway. Flame billowed out, then retreated and settled to an insidious purr.

He took a breath, held it, and looked down into the hatchway. His eyes began tearing immediately: the smoke was too hot to bear for long. Unable to see, he instead reached in, trusting to his senses to tell him if he was getting too close to the fire. His hand touched fabric and muscle. He found a purchase, guessing it to be the upper arm of the person who had been knocking, and pulled.

The man was surprisingly light for his size, but even so Tsata had trouble with the dead weight. He dragged the limp figure across the rubble a little way and laid him down, but by then it was already apparent that he was too late.

Tsata looked down on him for a moment. His skin was white, his features so small as to be almost vestigial. There were little gill-slits at his neck, and his glazed eyes were bulbous, with pupils like crosses. An Aberrant.

He had been hiding in the city, perhaps sheltered by the cobbler. Tsata had heard that Aberrants were no longer executed on sight as they had been before the civil war began. Priorities had changed now, and with both the Red Order and Lucia fighting on their side, it seemed inappropriate to allow the killing any longer. But prejudice could not be erased as easily. Though it was unlawful to murder them, they were still reviled in the main, still forced to hide or to take shelter in their own remote communities. People like the Red Order were the lucky ones; they had the outside appearance of normality, at least. This man would have been treated as a freak.

Tsata's eyes tightened in disgust at the thought. There was so much hate in this once-beautiful land. He wondered if this man had had a family, for unlike Tsata's home, pair-bonding and the exclusive possession of offspring was the way in Saramyr. Then he glanced over at the hatchway, where flames were licking out. He decided that he would rather not know. Barak Zahn sat on horseback near the south gate of Zila, overseeing the rabble of townsfolk fleeing for their lives. He was flanked by several bodyguards, and nearby a group of Blood Vinaxis soldiers fought to herd the crowd and keep them calm. Like panicked animals, they were liable to stampede. The noise was terrible, and the air still lingered with the smell of the feya-kori's fog, mingled with the infectious odour of fear.

He looked up the hill at where one of the demons had almost finished smashing the keep to rubble. The other one was tracking about at random, pounding houses and shops and warehouses to pieces with slow and methodical blows. The sound of tumbling stone and the demon's cries rolled across the town.

His blood burned: he was furious at his own impotence. Gods, it felt so fundamentally wrong to abandon a strategic outpost like this. He had men ranged along the riverbank and along the walls, but they were only putting up as much resistance as was necessary to evacuate everyone they could, keeping the Aberrants out for as long as possible. This was a lost battle the moment the feya-kori appeared. There simply was no defence against them. And this is what it would be like in the next town they attacked, and the next, until the Southern Prefectures had fallen and the Weavers had swallowed the land.

Still, even in the face of such abject defeat, he salvaged what positive aspects he could to pass on to his allies. They were holding back the Aberrants along the river to the west and east with relative ease. Apparently the attack had relied on the feya-kori breaking down the wall and the Aberrants flooding over the water north of the town. But the feya-kori had broken through and then gone on a rampage, and the troops of the Empire were quick enough to seal the breach behind them. If there had been any kind of tactical thought applied by the demons, they would have made a bigger hole, or at least stayed there to ensure that enough Aberrants had got through to keep the passage open. Zahn doubted that the Weavers had more than a rudimentary control over their terrible creations, and that, at least, was something worth knowing.

He looked up at where the gristle-crows circled high above, out of rifle range. As always, the Nexuses were nearby, hidden and protected, directing the battle from afar. The gristle-crows were their eyes, the Aberrant predators their puppets. If they could get to the Nexuses they could throw the animals into disorder; but the Nexuses had learned to stay scattered since Zahn had routed them at the battle of the Fold, years ago. And even if they did, even if they slew every Aberrant here, they still could not win. It came back to one immutable fact: they had no weapon against the blight demons.

A rider drew up before him: a young and handsome man with a thick head of brown hair, wearing Blood Ikati colours.

'What news of our allies?' Zahn asked. He remembered this man; he had sent him into the town to keep tabs on the Tkiurathi. He had been uneasy about letting them leave their ships, but in the chaos that followed the gathering of the demon fog he had been loth to spare the men necessary to prevent them. Now they were loose in the town, and though they appeared to be a help rather than a hindrance, long experience had taught him to mistrust such apparent altruism.

But the young man's report shed no new light. The Tkiurathi were indeed doing their best to speed the retreat, rescuing the injured and aiding stragglers, hunting down those Aberrants that were loose in the streets. Some of them were dying in the process. Perhaps a ploy to win his trust, then?

The young man was coming to the conclusion of his report, but Zahn was not really listening any more. He was gazing up at where the feya-kori rose seething above the slate rooftops of the town, thinking about the strange folk from the jungle continent. It was probably what saved his life.

He saw the rifleman in the upper window of a ramshackle house an instant before the muzzle flash, and only because he happened to be looking that way. It gave him that extra minuscule fraction of a moment which was the difference between the ball hitting his heart or his shoulder. The force of it knocked him out of his saddle, sending him crashing to the ground, his feet tangled in his stirrups. His horse neighed and bucked wildly; he was dragged thrashing across the cobbles. The horse's hooves clattered as it stepped back over him. Shock swamped his senses, making everything distant and slow and remote. He was dimly aware of a man lunging for him, the young messenger, a knife in his hand; but then the messenger's hand was gone, and a moment later his head, as the swords of Zahn's bodyguards cleft through him. Another stroke, and the stirrups that tethered Zahn to the horse were severed. Suddenly, he saw the sky again; the horse danced away, kicking, and someone shot it.

There were men surrounding him, and angry cries as others rode towards the building to flush out the sniper. But the sniper would be already dead, having taken his own life. Nobody would know who had sent him, nor the messenger that had been the backup; but Zahn knew. Of course he knew.

As he lay there panting and white with his men looking into his eyes and speaking incoherently to him, he cursed the name of Oyo tu Erinima, who wanted her grand-niece back.