The Ascendancy Veil

TWELVE

The desert city of Izanzai sprawled over an uneven plateau that rose high above the dusty plains. It was a forest of dark spikes, its buildings cramming up to the lip of the sand-coloured cliffs. Needle-thin towers speared towards the pale sky; bulbous temples tapered to elegant spires as they ascended; bridges looped above the hot, shadowy streets. At its southern edge there was a vast earthen ramp that was the only road up to the top of the plateau, built through years of toil and costing many lives.

Izanzai commanded an impressive view of its surroundings. To the south and east the plains were gradually swallowed by the deep desert, and in the distance it was possible to see the beginning of the enormous dunes that humped across central Tchom Rin. To the north and west the land was starker still, dry flats and mesas streaked with swatches of muddy yellow and deep brown, then suddenly rising hard, becoming the great barrier of the Tchamil Mountains. The mountains loomed grey and bleak, their sides flensed of life by hurricanes, innumerable peaks ranked one behind the other and stretching to infinity.

At their feet, men fought and died.

Barak Reki tu Tanatsua sat on manxthwa-back on the lip of a mesa, overlooking the battle. The warm wind plucked at his hair and clothes and ruffled the pelt of his mount. His eyes were narrowed, studying the form and movement of both sides, calculating strategies. The fight was all but over, and the desert forces were the victors, but he would not count it done until every last one of the enemy were dead. To his right and left, also on manxthwa, were a Sister of the Red Order and Jikiel, his spymaster. Other bodyguards waited at a distance, keen and alert, though they were far from anything that could harm them.

The latchjaws had arrived in greater numbers than ever this time. Had they come up against the armies of the families of Izanzai alone, they would have crushed them. But the unification of the Baraks had changed things, and with old enmities laid aside, Reki had been able to direct a much larger force to defend the city. The alliance had come not a day too soon, it seemed.

But the battle had been costly. Those cursed Aberrant beasts were tough to kill, and more often than not they took a few men with them when they went. Unlike the majority of the predator species that the Weavers had deployed thus far, they needed little water or food and were all but immune to the heat. They dealt with shifting sand or hard stone with equal ease; and their deadly natural armour meant that the desert warriors' manic, close-up fighting style was effectively rendered suicidal. Too many were falling to them, snatched up in the mantrap-like jaws that gave them their name. Gods, if he didn't think it impossible, he would have believed that the Weavers had tailored this species for exactly this purpose: to overrun the desert.

It was impossible, wasn't it?

'Your men in the mountains have located some of the Nexuses,' the Sister murmured suddenly, relaying the information passed from her companions nearer the battle.

Reki made a noise of acknowledgement. He could have guessed that anyway. A section of the shambling monstrosities down on the plain had suddenly gone berserk, a sure sign that their masters had been killed. No longer under the control of the Nexuses, they reverted to being animals again, and animals were liable to react badly at finding themselves in the midst of a pitched battle of thousands.

'It seems that this day is ours,' Jikiel observed.

Reki looked askance at his spymaster. 'This day,' he said. 'But how many more can we win?'

Jikiel nodded gravely. He was old and bald, brown and wrinkled as a nut, with a thin black beard and moustaches hanging in three slender ropes down his chest. He was robed in beige, with a nakata, the hook-tipped sword worn by the warriors of Tchom Rin, belted to his hip. 'Perhaps we should take action against the source,' he suggested.

'I was thinking the same,' said Reki. 'Each time they come, there are more. We are forced to spread ourselves thin, for the borders of the mountains are vast. By bringing the Baraks together, we have won a respite; but that is all. They will overwhelm us in time.'

'What are your orders, my Barak?'

'Assemble as many men as you need. Send them into the mountains. I want to know where these things are coming from.'

'It shall be done.'

They watched the battle for a little longer. The Nexuses were falling, and with them went their troops, collapsing into disorder and being shot down by the desert folk. The manxthwa stirred and grumbled, shuffling from side to side and scraping their hooves. The Sister delivered reports from time to time.

Half of Reki's mind was on the battlefield, but half had drifted elsewhere, to his wife. It always seemed to. She had been gone over a month now, but the anxiety of separation had not faded. He still yearned for her. And he still burned at the way she had left him: without an explanation, with only cryptic hints and emotional blackmail left in her wake. He was furious at himself for letting her go without demanding more. He wondered what she was doing now, what was so important as to take her over seven hundred miles to the west. In the time she had been gone, he had tormented himself with innumerable invented histories; but in the end, how could he guess? What did he really know about Asara's past? She was a mystery to him, as much as she had ever been.

And yet, was there really anything to fear? Was there anything he could not forgive her for, anything that might stop him loving her? He could not believe that. And he could not bear the torture of possibilities when there were the prospect of certainties that he could deal with and overcome.

'Jikiel?' he murmured, turning himself so that he was out of the Sister's earshot.

'My Barak?'

'Find out about my wife.' It felt like the most exquisite betrayal, and for a moment he considered taking it back; but it was a risk he had to take. If Asara did not trust their love, then he would have to take matters into his own hands. 'Find out everything about her.'

A smile touched the corner of Jikiel's mouth. 'I thought you'd never ask.' Asara came to Cailin in the small hours of the morning, in the house of the Red Order at Araka Jo. Cailin was drinking bitter tea, looking out through the sliding panels at the dark trees, watching owls.

'Asara,' she purred. 'It was only a matter of time.'

Asara was already inside the room, having glided through the drapes without a sound. 'Why else do you suppose I would come this far, if not to see you?'

Cailin put aside the delicate bowl that she was drinking from, stood up and faced her visitor. 'Kaiku, perhaps? You never did seem to be able to keep away from her for long.'

Asara did not rise to the bait. 'I saved Kaiku's life for you,' she said calmly. 'I have paid a price for it ever since. I expect a measure of gratitude for that.'

'Ah, gratitude,' Cailin replied. 'Why would I owe you that, Asara? You did what I told you to. You will get your reward when our deal is complete.'

Asara stepped a little further into the room. It was dark; there was no light but the white glow of the two larger moons. She stood there in the shadows, a disdainful arrogance in the tilt of her chin. She wore a white dress fastened with a brooch, delicate jewellery on her wrists and in her hair. Every inch the desert Barakess.

'Things are different now,' Asara said. 'I am no longer the woman I once was.'

'You think you have changed?' Cailin said in disbelief. 'You can change all you want on the outside, Asara, but inside you are just as empty as you have always been.'

'It is my situation that has changed.' Her tone had become edged with venom now. 'As well you know.'

They regarded each other across the room. It was the same one in which Kaiku and Cailin had been Weaving several nights before, on the second storey of the Red Order's house. The vases stood empty now, the incense burner cold. The charcoal etchings on the wood-panelled walls seemed to creep in the darkness.

'I must congratulate you,' Cailin said at length. 'Your seduction of the Heir-Barak showed impressive foresight. How you must have grieved when both his sister and his father died, making way for him to become head of his family.'

'His sister was ineligible to become head of the family, since she was wed to the Emperor,' Asara replied levelly. 'Her demise benefitted you more than me. You wanted the Weavers to succeed in their coup, you wanted them to take this land. And now you have your wish.'

'And you had nothing to do with her death, I suppose?'

'Maybe so, and maybe not,' Asara replied. 'If the former, it would have been another example of how I have given more on your behalf that anyone has a right to ask, and received nothing in return.'

'Such is the nature of our agreement, Asara. You will be paid in full when the time comes.'

'Then I am altering our agreement.'

Cailin raised an eyebrow. 'You are? How amusing.'

'I am the wife of a Barak now, Cailin,' Asara said, bridling a little. 'I hold the most powerful man in the desert in the palm of my hand. You cannot sweep me aside as you might once have done.'

Cailin's red-and-black lips were set in a mocking smirk. 'I see. And you think that because you have fooled a callow boy into marriage that you can use it as leverage to bully me? I had thought better of you, Asara.'

'I have been over a decade in your thrall, Cailin,' Asara spat, sudden rage igniting within her. 'Kept tied by your promises. You realised what I needed – the gods know how; your filthy kana-games, no doubt – and you have exploited me ever since. And all this time I have chased a dream that I am not even sure you are capable of fulfilling! Now I have the power in the desert, and I can turn Tchom Rin against you and your kind. I know what you desire, and I can make it much more difficult for you if you do not give me what I want now!'

'Enough!' Cailin snapped. 'What is ten years, twenty, fifty to such as us? We will not age, Asara. We do not run out of time as others do. Where is your patience?'

'I have been patient,' came the reply. 'But there is a line between patience and foolishness. Should I be your slave for another decade, and another, until you decide to release me? And even then, could you grant me what you say you will? Would you? One woman's word is a slender thread to hang such a weight from. And you have hardly been a paragon of trustworthiness in the years I have known you.'

Cailin laughed, the sound high and bright. 'Poor Asara,' she said. 'Poor, murdering Asara.' Her laughter faded, and her voice grew dark. 'You want sympathy? I have none. The Red Order's cause is as much in your interests as ours-'

'I doubt that,' Asara interrupted.

'-and however unwillingly, you are fighting for yourself when you fight on our side. We will make a world where Aberrants can live without fear. And you will aid us in that, whether you want to or not.'

'You are avoiding the issue,' Asara said, stalking closer. 'Give me what I want.'

'Release you from our compact? Hardly. You are, despite your faults, an extremely useful ally.'

'Give me what I want!' Asara cried.

'Or what?' Cailin shouted. 'What will you do, Asara? You think you can turn the desert against us? You think you can stop us? Your best efforts would be nothing more than a mosquito bite to the Red Order. We could kill you a thousand times over before you could even get back to your beloved Barak. And even Reki is not such a fool as to forsake the powers we lend him when the Weavers are even now trying to invade Tchom Rin. Yours is a poor bluff, Asara, and you tire me now.'

'It ends here, then!' Asara returned. 'It all ends here. If you cannot prove to me that you can do what you say, then I-'

Cailin cut her throat.

It was a swift, dismissive gesture with her hand, a disgusted flick of her fingers in the moonlight. She did not touch the other woman; they were too far apart. But Asara's neck opened from side to side in a red slit, as cleanly as if Cailin had been holding a sword.

Asara staggered backward, her eyes wide, making damp noises in her chest. Blood gushed, pulsing down the front of her dress, staining it a glistening black in the moonlight. Cailin watched impassively, sidelit by the moonlight, her irises gone crimson.

Asara tried to make a sound, but none would come. She tried to draw breath, but not even a gasp would make it through her severed windpipe. Panic swamped her, a terror like nothing she had ever known before: she was dying, dying unfulfilled, and when she was gone it would be as if she had never been here. Her legs went weak, her muscles leaden. She fell to her knees, clutching her throat with one hand, the other feebly propping her upright, her splayed fingers sliding in her own fluids. Her head was becoming light. So much blood, so much blood, and nothing she could do would staunch it.

Not like this, was all she could think with the last dregs of her reason. Not like this.

Cailin made a vague waving motion with two of her fingers, and Asara's throat sewed shut, fibres and tissues knitting seamlessly from side to side as if zipped. Eager nourishment slammed from her heart to her brain, and she hauled in a huge, sobbing breath. She had never felt such a divine sensation as the relief she experienced then, nor a hatred so pure as that which she had for the one who had hurt her this way. Still gasping, her dress sodden black, she raised her head and fixed Cailin with a gaze of utter malice.

The Pre-Eminent of the Red Order looked down on her coldly. 'Satisfied?' she asked, then walked out of the room, leaving Asara kneeling in a pool of her own blood. An hour's walk northeast of Araka Jo, deep in the forested mountains, lay the glade of an ipi.

It was a place of preternatural stillness and tranquillity, a cavernous sanctum with a roof of interlaced branches and leaves through which the winter sun shone in bright, slanting shafts of light. Gently rolling hillocks and tuffets cradled pools as motionless and transparent as glass; rocks smooth and white like bleached bone hid half-buried in the earth. In the midst of the glade stood the ipi itself: a colossal tree, its bark black as char, rucked and gnarled with age. Its uppermost branches meshed with the canopy overhead, while the lower boughs reached out across the clearing like crooked arms, fingers shaggy with pine blades.

Lucia knelt at the base of the tree, her head bowed, clad in a belted robe of dark green. She was meditating, communing with the spirit of the glade. To talk to an ipi was easy for her these days. Her power had grown at a frightening rate since she had emerged from the shrine of Alskain Mar back in the Xarana Fault, and all but the most ancient spirits were open to her now. Yet with every step she took into the world of the spirits, she took one away from the world of humanity, and she was becoming more like them by the day.

Kaiku watched her from the edge of the glade. Somewhere in the trees, out of sight, were her Libera Dramach bodyguards. But in this place, in the ipi's serene presence, Lucia might have been alone in all the world. And it was true, in a sense. For there was no one like Lucia, nobody who could imagine what it was like to be as she was, poised halfway between two worlds and belonging to neither any more.

It pained Kaiku to see her so isolated. Mishani's visit had reminded her of Yugi's stinging words, how he had accused her of neglecting her friends while she subsumed herself in the teachings of the Red Order. Once, Lucia had been like a younger sister to her; now, Kaiku was not so sure.

Eventually, Lucia lifted her head and stood. She picked her way barefoot along the knolls, retrieved her shoes from where she had left them at the edge of the glade, and then joined Kaiku.

'Daygreet,' she said with a beatific smile, and then hugged Kaiku impulsively. Kaiku, faintly surprised, returned it.

'Gods, you are the same height as me now,' she said.

'Growing like a weed,' Lucia laughed. 'It's been too long since you came to see me, Kaiku.'

'I know,' Kaiku muttered. 'I know.'

Lucia put her shoes on and they began to walk back towards Araka Jo. Kaiku dismissed the bodyguards and sent them ahead: their charge would be safer with her than with twenty armed men, and they recognised her even without the makeup and attire of the Order. She and Lucia ambled along the narrow forest trails. Lucia chattered happily as they went. She was in an unusually ebullient mood, certainly not the state of dreamy detachment that Kaiku had come to expect from her.

'The blight is retreating,' she said out of nowhere, interrupting herself in the process of telling Kaiku about her day.

'It is?'

'The ipi can sense it. Since the witchstone beneath Utraxxa broke. The land here is recovering, little by little.' She watched a bird arrowing through the treetops as she spoke. 'We are not too far gone to go back. Not yet.'

'But that is wonderful news!' Kaiku cried. Lucia gave her a sidelong grin. 'No wonder you are so cheerful today.'

'It is wonderful news,' she agreed. 'And I hear you have news also.'

Kaiku nodded. 'Though I am not so sure whether it is good news or bad.' And she went on to tell Lucia about her and Cailin's encounter with the leviathan. The Weave-whale, as Cailin had come to call it.

'I am afraid of them,' she admitted. 'For too long we had ignored them as they ignored us, assuming them forever out of our reach. But we have attracted them now, I think. They have noticed what was once beneath their notice. Our meddling in the Weave is drawing creatures to which the Weavers' capabilities for destruction pale in comparison.'

'But what are they?' Lucia asked.

'Perhaps they are gods,' came the reply.

Lucia did not comment on that, but it sobered her. They walked on a short way in silence through the sun-dappled forest. A raven hopped from branch to branch overhead.

'Lucia, I truly am sorry,' Kaiku said at length. 'I have neglected you for some time now. I was so caught up in learning how to use what I have that I… forgot what I had.'

Lucia took her hand. It was a gesture from the old Lucia, the child, before she became a young woman.

'It is the war,' she said. 'Do not be sorry, Kaiku. You are a weapon, as am I. What good is a weapon if its edge is not sharpened?'

Kaiku was shocked at the fatalism in her tone. 'Lucia, no! We are not merely weapons. If I taught you nothing else, I taught you that.'

'Then you believe we have a choice? That we can turn away from all this now?' She smiled sadly, and relinquished Kaiku's hand. 'I can't. And I don't believe you can, either.'

'You have that choice, Lucia!' she insisted.

'Do I?' Lucia laughed again, and this time it was bitter and made Kaiku uneasy. 'If I wanted to duck the expectations the world has of me, I should have done it long ago. Before the Libera Dramach reorganised; before the battle at the Fold, even. Too many people have died in my name now. I cannot go back. That time has passed.' She looked down the trail, and her eyes became unfocused. She was listening to the rustle of the forest. 'I've become what they wanted of me. I've become their bridge to the spirits, for what good it will do. I am a weapon, and a weapon is useless if it is not wielded. I cannot stay useless for very much longer.'

'Lucia-' Kaiku began, but was interrupted.

'You think I don't know about the feya-kori? How we have no defence against them, no way to strike back? How long before you all call on me, then? Your last resort? Your only hope?' They had stopped walking now, and Lucia looked fierce. 'Do you know how that is, Kaiku? To spend your whole life knowing that your options are narrowing day by day, that eventually you must deliver on this promise that you never made! They look to me as their saviour, but I don't know how to save anyone!'

'You do not have to,' Kaiku told her. 'Listen to me: you do not have to.'

Lucia looked away, not remotely convinced.

'In my life I have known people who are so selfish that they would sacrifice anything and anyone to bring advantage to themselves,' Kaiku said, putting her hand on Lucia's arm. 'And I have known a man so selfless that he was willing to throw away his life too cheaply for the good of others. I believe the right path lies somewhere in between. I have told you before, Lucia: you need to be a little more selfish. Think of yourself for once.'

'Even at the expense of this land and everyone in it?' Lucia replied scornfully.

'Even then,' said Kaiku. 'For as much as you think it might, the fate of the world does not rest on your actions.'

Lucia would not meet her gaze. 'I'm afraid, Kaiku,' she whispered.

'I know.'

'You don't know,' she said, and her expression revealed a depth of something that made Kaiku scared to see it. 'I'm changing.'

'Changing? How?'

Lucia turned from her, staring out into the forest. Kaiku's attention fell upon the burn scars on the nape of her neck. The stab of guilt at the sight would never go away, it seemed.

'I realise I am distracted sometimes… most of the time,' she said. 'I realise how hard it is to talk to me. I do not blame you for not coming to see me so often.' She raised a hand to forestall Kaiku's protest. 'It's true, Kaiku. I can't pay attention to anything any more. Everywhere I go, there are the voices. The breath of the wind, the mutter of the earth; the birds, the trees, the stone. I do not know what silence is.' She turned her face sideways, looking over her shoulder at Kaiku, and a tear slid down her cheek. 'I can't shut them out,' she whispered.

A lump rose in Kaiku's throat.

'I'm becoming like them,' Lucia said, her voice small and terrifying in its hopelessness. 'I'm forgetting. Forgetting how to care. I think of Zaelis and Flen, of my mother… and I don't feel. They died because of me, and sometimes I can't even recall their faces.' Her lip began to tremble, and her face crumpled, and she rushed into Kaiku's arms suddenly and clutched her so tightly that it hurt. 'I'm so lonely,' she said, and began to cry in earnest then.

Kaiku's stomach and heart were a knot of grief that brought tears to her own eyes. She wanted to reach Lucia somehow, to do something to make things better, but she was as helpless as anyone. All Kaiku could do was to be there for her, and she had been sadly remiss at that these past years.

And as they held each other on the narrow forest trail, the leaves began to fall. First one, then two, then a dozen and more, drifting down from the evergreens to settle on their shoulders and pile around their feet. Lucia was weeping, and the trees were shedding in sympathy.