The Ascendancy Veil

NINE

Yugi tu Xamata, leader of the Libera Dramach, awoke in his cell at Araka Jo to find Lucia standing at the window, looking out onto the lake. His head was thick with amaxa root. His hookah stood cold in the corner, but the sharp scent remained in the air, evidence of another night of over-indulgence. He sat up on his sleeping-mat, the blanket falling away from his bare shoulders. It was chilly in winter at these altitudes, and there was no glass in the windows, but he had been burning up with narcotic fever last night.

He blinked, frowning, and squinted at Lucia. Whether by a trick of the morning light or his own mind, she looked ethereal, her slender form transparent, her thin white-and-gold dress a veil. Yugi had never known Lucia's mother, but he was told that she resembled Anais strongly in her petite, pretty features and the pale blonde colour of her hair. But there the similarity ended: the hair was cut short and boyish, revealing the appallingly trenched and rucked scar-flesh at the back of her neck, and her light blue eyes told a story that nobody else could share. She was eighteen harvests of age, and the child he had watched grow had gone, replaced by something beautiful and alien.

He coughed to clear his throat of the taste of last night's excesses. When Lucia did not react, he dispensed with politeness. 'What are you doing here, Lucia?'

After a long moment, Lucia turned her head to him. 'Hmm?'

'You're in my room,' Yugi said patiently. 'Why are you in my room?'

She seemed puzzled by that for a moment. She glanced around the cell as if wondering how she got there: great blocks of weathered white stone draped with simple hangings, a wicker mat covering the floor, a small table, a chest, other odds and ends scattered about. Then she gave him a smile as innocent as an infant's.

'We want to see you.'

'We?'

'Cailin and I.'

Yugi sighed and sat up further, the blankets sloughing to his waist. His upper torso was almost smooth of hair, but several long cicatrices tracked over the skin, old wounds from long ago. He did not like the way she phrased her words, the implication that Lucia and Cailin had decided to summon him together. Cailin was held in altogether too high a regard by this girl, and that was dangerous. He knew what Cailin was like.

'What's this about?'

'News from Axekami,' she said, and did not elaborate. 'We'll be by the lake.'

Yugi decided not to bother asking her any more questions. 'I'll come and find you.'

Lucia gave him another smile, and turned to leave. As she did so, the hookah overturned with a crash, spilling ash and charred root onto the mat. Yugi jumped.

'He doesn't like the way you make his room smell,' Lucia said, and then went out through the drape.

Yugi got up and dressed himself. The cold chased off the tatters of sleep. He set the hookah back upright and tidied the ash away, annoyed. The spirit had never managed anything quite so violent before. He could sense it there, a tall black smudge just on the edge of his vision, but he knew that if he looked at it directly, it would be gone. It was a peripheral thing, seen only from the corner of the eye. A weak ghost, like the hundreds of others that haunted Araka Jo, clots of congealed memory that dogged the present.

Outside his cell was a walkway of the same ubiquitous white stone that formed the bones of the complex. On one side was a long row of cells like his own, simple rectangular doorways; the other was open to the view.

It was something to wake up to, he had to admit that, even though the dregs of last night were somewhat blunting his appreciation. The ground sloped down to a wide road, again of white and aged stone, and beyond that it swept up, to where the scalloped slate roofs of the temples showed among the jagged green treetops. The swoop and swell of the mountainside hid dozens of them, all linked by dirt paths or flagged walkways that wound through the pines and kijis and kamakas. They were solid and crude in comparison to modern temples, but their form gave them a gravity that was primal and brooding, and the bas-relief friezes on their entablatures depicted scenes heavy with forgotten myth.

Araka Jo was ancient and in partial ruin, several of the temples little more than outlines of their original floorplan surrounded by mossy rubble. Despite the unfamiliar presence of inhabitants again – it had become the Libera Dramach's home these past few years – it still felt as if they were intruders there. The spirits never let them forget it.

There was a stone basin near his doorway, from which he splashed icy water on his face to wake himself. Once he was done, he removed the dirty rag from his forehead and wet his hair, smoothing it back into untidy spikes before reattaching the rag. He had slept in it, as usual.

That done, he went to find some lathamri. People were up and about even at this early hour, travelling to and fro along the roads of the complex, on visits and errands and business. Several people he greeted on his way, the cheery facade snapping into place automatically. Everyone knew him as the leader of the community. Unlike their previous hideout in the Fold, the Libera Dramach did not operate in secret in Araka Jo. Everybody here knew about Lucia, and the organisation that had been built around her. Everybody here was Libera Dramach by allegiance. Anybody who had not been able to stomach that had gone elsewhere in the Southern Prefectures.

He turned off the thoroughfare to where a side-road was lined with wooden stalls, feeling exhausted even by that short journey. The tiredness was not physical – he had always been healthy as a mule – but a weariness of spirit that weighed him down. His smile felt false now, more so than ever before: he was forced to use it too much. The people needed him to be positive, looked to him as an indicator of their fortunes. He could not afford to show weakness. He could not afford to let them know that he did not want to lead them any more.

Between the stalls were rows of stone idols, strange crouching things that had been smoothed by centuries of rain and wind. Their slitted, blank eyes stared across the side-road at each other, over the heads of the people who milled between them. Some kind of guardian spirits? Nobody knew. Araka Jo had been built in the early years after landfall, the result of a splinter religion taking advantage of the new freedom to explore their beliefs. They must have been particularly numerous and industrious to have created a complex of temples the size of a small town. Perhaps it was a mountain retreat, a place of prayer and meditation. But its purpose and its creators had been lost to history, and it had been abandoned. The folk of Saramyr were not interested in ruins.

Yugi bought a mug of lathamri from a merchant and drank it while staring at the statues. Frightening how easily the past could be forgotten. He wondered how the previous inhabitants might have felt, labouring towards what they thought was a great work, if they knew that mere centuries later nobody would know or care what they had done it for.

Perhaps they would have appreciated the irony, he thought. It was Saramyr's blithe ignorance of its past that now threatened its future.

The hot, bitter drink awakened him enough to face dealing with Cailin and Lucia, so he returned the mug to the merchant with a coin inside it and left. It was an old tradition: if the drink was not drained then the coin would be wet, so it was only polite to finish it all. Strange, Yugi thought as he walked away, that traditions linger long past the time that their origins had been lost to memory, yet the lessons of history can fade in a generation.

He headed back towards the building where his cell was, and over to the other side, where the lake lay. It was a bracingly cool and crisp day, and while there was no dew on the grass the air felt moist. He slept in what had once been the living-quarters of the worshippers who had built the place. There were about twenty of that type of building scattered around the complex, identically white and rectangular, differentiated by the carvings and sculptures on their corners. They were spartan and austere inside, being merely corridors and cells with a central atrium for cooking and washing, but Yugi did not overly mind. Some days he thought about moving down into the village that had been built around the lower slopes of the complex to house the overflow, but to do so would cause gossip, and now was not the time for rumours. Everything he did was political, whether he wanted it or not. He wished he had Mishani's faculty to enjoy that kind of life.

Beyond the building there was a long, grassy slope down to the shore of Lake Xemit. A dirt path led to a large boathouse from which fishermen issued across the water. Trees encroached in copses here and there, but not enough to obscure the magnificent view. Folk were scattered about, some talking, others on their way from one place to another. It was easy to forget the famine even existed here, in the heart of the Southern Prefectures. Life went on, regardless.

Yugi spotted Cailin and Lucia and made his way towards them. As he went, he looked out over the lake to the horizon. Lake Xemit was colossal: forty-five miles across and nearly two hundred and fifty long. It was the second largest inland body of water in Saramyr after Lake Azlea, cradled between two mountain ranges.

He had been to the other side once before, during the assault on Utraxxa. It had been one of the most famous victories of the last four years. An ancient Weaver stronghold, deep in the heart of the Southern Prefectures. Though cut off from the other Weavers after the forces of the Empire had consolidated, it still exuded its foulness into the earth, still spawned more Aberrant predators to harry the troops of the Empire from within. Protected by the mountains, it took two years before the high families, led by Barak Zahn, managed to penetrate the monastery. Though the Weavers destroyed everything of value, even the witchstone itself, it was a triumph in the eyes of the people.

It was that, more than any other incident, that gave the men and women of the Empire the strength to fight on through the long years of war. The Weavers, who for so many generations had been held as mysterious and unfathomable beings by the common folk, were only mortal. They could be beaten. The fight could be won.

They needed another victory like Utraxxa, Yugi thought. He needed one.

Lucia and Cailin were walking together slowly, talking. It irked him that Cailin was the only one whom Lucia ever seemed attentive to; with most people she had a frustrating air of distraction. Yugi could not help noticing the odd behaviour of the wildlife as he approached: the way the ravens in the trees never stopped watching her, the cat that unobtrusively tracked her from downslope, the rabbits who would hop and hide, hop and hide, yet always keeping abreast of her. Natural enemies, yet with Lucia about they were not interested in each other.

Cailin noticed him coming and they stopped to let him catch up. She was a little taller than he was, her face painted like those of all the Sisters, her black hair drawn back through a jewelled comb into twin ponytails and a thin silver circlet set with a red gem placed around her forehead. Her sheer black dress and ruff of raven feathers lent her a somewhat predatory aspect, adding to the air of cool superiority she exuded. Yugi wondered how well her arrogance would stand up in bed, whether her icy exterior would shatter in the throes of orgasm; then he caught himself, and forced the thought away.

'Daygreet, Yugi,' Cailin said. 'Did you sleep well?'

It was a weighted question. Yugi made a neutral noise to evade it. 'Lucia said there is news.'

'Kaiku has made contact.'

'She is safe, then?' Yugi asked. Despite their estrangement, he had been worried for her these past weeks; it was only now, at the point of discovery, that he realised how worried.

'She is safe,' Cailin said. 'Though she very nearly did not make it out at all.'

'Where is she now?'

'Heading down the Zan towards Maza.'

'And the others?'

'Phaeca is with her. Nomoru is gone.'

'What do you mean, gone?'

'She disappeared. They do not know where she is.'

Yugi held up a hand. 'Start from the beginning, Cailin, and tell me what Kaiku told you.'

So Cailin relayed the story of the investigation of the pall-pits, of their betrayal and how Nomoru had second-guessed it, and how they had escaped the city.

'A gang from the Poor Quarter helped them?' Yugi repeated in frank disbelief.

'Smuggled them aboard a barge.'

'And what did they want in return?'

'Apparently nothing.'

Yugi grimaced. 'Gods, they were lucky, then.'

'Perhaps so. But the people of the Poor Quarter are not stupid. The Sisters may be Aberrants, but even we are not so despised as the Weavers. Things are turning, Yugi. They know we are on their side.'

'Are you really?' Yugi said skeptically.

Cailin did not reply, and Yugi left it at that. He glanced at Lucia, who was looking away across the lake, apparently oblivious to their conversation.

'My Sisters learned a lot from the pall-pit,' Cailin said at length. 'The implications are grave indeed.'

Yugi felt a cold eel of nausea turn gently in his stomach, a remnant of last night's excesses. He did not want to hear any bad news now.

'The Weavers have modified the old sewers into a pipe network. They are channelling the miasma that their buildings produce.'

'Into the pall-pits,' Yugi guessed. He scratched his stubbled cheek. 'Why?'

'Because that is where the feya-kori are.'

'Because that is what the feya-kori are,' Lucia corrected, over her shoulder.

Yugi cocked his head at Cailin, expecting elaboration.

'They are composed of the Weavers' miasma,' Cailin said. 'Without it, they are formless. They draw it around them like a shroud, and build their shape from it. When we called them blight-demons, we did not know how right we were.'

Yugi was quick to latch on to a potential upside. 'Would that explain why they returned to Axekami after the assault on Juraka? That they need to… replenish themselves? Like a whale can dive for hours, but has to come up for air?'

'Exactly,' Cailin said, raising an eyebrow. 'An apt analogy.'

'Could that be the reason the Weavers are poisoning Axekami in such a way?'

'Perhaps,' came the careful reply. 'But let us not tie all our threads to a single revelation. There is much we do not understand yet.'

'But this gives us hope, surely?' Yugi said. 'The feya-kori have a limit, a weakness.'

'You do not yet see the grander scale,' Cailin replied. 'It is not only Axekami that the Weavers are choking. There are pall-pits in various stages of completion in Tchamaska, Maxachta and Barask. More are being built on the north side of Axekami, and in Hanzean to the west.' A chill wind off the lake rippled through the grass and hissed through the trees. 'These two feya-kori are only the first. The Weavers will bring more. We cannot stand against them.'

Yugi sighed and rubbed at his eye. 'Gods, Cailin, does it get any worse?'

'Oh yes,' she said. 'Two nights ago, the feya-kori left Axekami again.' The fortified town of Zila had seen its fair share of conflict. Since the time it was built over a thousand years ago it had weathered assaults from the native Ugati, from renegade warlords, and from the Empire itself; and still it stood, grim and dark upon a steep hill to the south of the River Zan. It was a strategic linchpin, commanding both the estuary and the thirty-five mile strip of land between the coast and the western edges of the Forest of Xu, a thoroughfare vital for travel between the affluent northwest and the fertile Southern Prefectures. Now it had become a bastion against the Weavers, denying them the passage along the Great Spice Road.

Barak Zahn looked over his shoulder at the town, a crown of stone, the roofs of its houses sloping back to the narrow pinnacle of the keep at its tip. That wall had never fallen to an enemy, not in all the history of Zila. Not even when the town was overrun, when Zahn himself had been one of the invaders; they had surmounted the wall, but they had not breached it. Then, he had left Zila smoking and battered. It was in considerably better shape now: the ruined houses had been rebuilt, the keep repaired, the streets set back in order. Troops of the Empire walked behind its parapets; fire-cannons looked out over the river. But its air of invulnerability was gone, its power diminished.

His horse stirred beneath him, and he turned his attention back to the estuary, where four huge junks swayed at anchor. The wind was brisk and the light crisp and sharp: they were heading into midwinter now, and though it was still warm the breeze off the sea could be biting.

He was a lean man, his hair grey and his stubbled cheeks uneven with pox-scars. He wore a brocaded jacket with its collar turned up, and his eyes were narrow as he stared across the water. Around him and before him were hundreds of mounted men in the colours of their respective houses. Most of them were his own Blood Ikati, clad in green and grey. To his right, wrapped in a fur cloak, the head of Blood Erinima sat in her saddle, plump and wizened. Lucia's great-aunt Oyo.

It was over a week since Kaiku and Phaeca had escaped Axekami, but Zahn knew nothing of that. He had, however, heard the news that the feya-kori were on the move again. The Red Order were few in number and stretched thin, but Cailin tried to ensure that there was at least one in every frontline settlement. The warning had spread within minutes. Not that it concerned Zahn overly: the feya-kori, like the Aberrant armies, moved too fast to keep up with, and the news that they had been deployed simply meant they were at large again, and Saramyr was a very big place. They could be up to anything. Besides, he had more immediate concerns.

The first was the woman next to him. It seemed that even in the face of the greatest threat the Empire had encountered since its inception, the wranglings of the courts went on. Though they were all ostensibly united against the Weavers, the old powerplay of concessions and arrangements and oaths continued. Oyo was annoyingly persistent, even following him up to Zila where the greater portion of his armies were garrisoned along with those of Blood Vinaxis. Her demands were simple: she wanted his daughter.

Zahn had known it would be impossible to keep Lucia's parentage a secret forever. She was so obviously affectionate towards him, and that coupled with the rumours of the Emperor Durun's infertility and Zahn's close relationship with the Empress Anais was all that anyone needed to draw the correct conclusion. Once he had become convinced that it was hopeless concealing it any longer, he let it be known that he was the father, and hoped to have done with it. But Blood Erinima – the mother's family – were not satisfied. They disputed his claim. They wanted her back, to bind her to Blood Erinima where they believed she belonged.

Zahn did not want to trouble himself with it. He believed their loyalty towards their kin was genuine – and indeed, he had never prevented them seeing Lucia – but it was also painfully transparent that they were thinking towards the outcome of the war, for if victorious then Lucia was by far the most likely candidate for the throne, and Blood Erinima wanted to ride with her to power again. However, Zahn's claim on her complicated things immensely, for as the only surviving parent she was legally his child before the family of the deceased mother. If that claim could be proved to be genuine.

But Zahn was not the biggest problem: Lucia was. She had no interest in such matters. She was happy to acknowledge her relatives, but she would not talk politics with them. Zahn was her father; it was that simple. As far as matters of Blood went, she needed neither Blood Ikati nor Blood Erinima. The Libera Dramach were at her beck and call, an army to rival any of the great houses and independent of them. She did not care about becoming Empress. She did not care about being a leader, or a figurehead, or anything at all of that nature. It was difficult to tell what she cared about. That frustrated women like Oyo immensely, and they fumed and said that the child did not realise what was good for her, and that she should be with her family. But Zahn knew his child, as well as anyone could know her, and he believed her a thing apart from the grubby machinations that Oyo wanted to drag her into. He loved her, and he let her go her own way. But he would not renounce his fatherhood, no matter how Blood Erinima cajoled and promised and threatened.

A rowboat was sliding across the estuary towards the southern shore; it was time to deal with the second and more recent concern. Zahn spurred his horse through the ranks of his men and trotted down the shallow incline at the base of the hill. Oyo watched him go with an unfriendly gaze. A small guard of twenty fell in behind at the command of one of his generals. A Sister joined them, appearing unobtrusively at his side like a shadow, her face still. They passed through the army to the stretch of clear grass where the water ended, and there they stopped.

The rowboat had reached the shore now, and the newcomers were dragging it out of the water, all four of them together. Zahn tried to establish which one of them was the leader, but it was hopeless. They were all dressed in simple hemp clothes, their hair varying in colour from blond to black; all had the same yellowish skin tattooed head to foot in curving tendrils of pale green. Tkiurathi, from the jungle continent of Okhamba, so his aides informed him. Savages, they said.

The question was, what were the savages doing in Saramyr?

The boat secured, one of them approached Zahn, walking fearlessly towards the forest of soldiers. Zahn glanced up at the junks. They were of Saramyr make. The gods knew how many other Tkiurathi were in there, but they had better hope they could swim: one signal from him and Zila's fire-cannons would blow them to flinders.

The stranger stopped a short way from Zahn. His orange-blond hair was smoothed back along his skull and hardened there with sap. Okhamban kntha – called 'gutting-hooks' in Saramyrrhic – hung from either side of his belt: double-bladed weapons with a handle set at the point where they met, each blade kinked the opposite way to the other.

'Daygreet, honoured Barak,' said the Tkiurathi, in near-flawless Saramyrrhic. 'I am Tsata.' He bowed in an ambiguous manner, in a style used between men who were unsure of their relative social standing to each other. Zahn could not decide if it was arrogance or accident. The name was faintly familiar to him, however.

'I am the Barak Zahn tu Ikati,' he said.

Tsata gave him a curious look. 'Indeed? Then we have a mutual acquaintance. Kaiku tu Makaima.'

Zahn's horse crabstepped with a snort; he pulled it firmly back into line. Now he knew where he had heard the name before. This was the man who had travelled with the spy Saran into the heart of Okhamba to bring back the evidence of the Weavers' origins; the man who had helped Kaiku destroy a witchstone in the Xarana Fault. He looked down at the Sister who stood to his right.

'Can you confirm this?'

Her irises had already turned to red. 'I am doing so.'

Zahn regarded the foreigner with frank suspicion on his face. 'Why are you here, Tsata? This is not a good time to be visiting Saramyr.'

'We come to offer you our aid,' said Tsata. 'A thousand Tkiurathi, to fight alongside you against the Weavers.'

'I see,' Zahn said. 'And what would you do if we did not want your aid?'

'We would fight anyway, whatever your wishes,' Tsata replied. 'We come to stop the Weavers. If we can do it together, so be it. If not, we shall do it alone.'

'He is who he says he is,' the Sister said. 'I have contacted Kaiku tu Makaima.' She bowed to Tsata in the appropriate female mode. 'She sends you greetings, honoured friend. The Red Order are pleased that your path has set you upon our shores again.'

Zahn felt a twinge of irritation at being undercut. His unfriendly stance was somewhat robbed of force now that Tsata had the Sisters' approval. The Red Order considered themselves above political loyalty; they knew they were invaluable, and took advantage of it. They might have been easier on the eye than the Weavers were, but they were not so different as they liked to think.

He slid down from his horse and handed the reins to a nearby soldier. 'It seems I have been ungracious,' he said, and bowed. 'Welcome back.'

'I am only sorry I could not come sooner, or bring more of my people,' Tsata said, dismissing the apology. 'Ten times this many would have come, if we had the ships.'

'I had not known the Tkiurathi were a seafaring folk,' Zahn said, embedding an implied question in an observation.

Tsata smiled to himself. Such a Saramyr thing to do, to be so indirect. 'The ships came from Blood Mumaka, as did the crew.'

'I thought they had fled Saramyr when the war began.' What Zahn thought of that was evident in his voice.

'To Okhamba, yes. They sailed their fleet away. But they still desire to help their homeland in such ways as they can. Mishani tu Koli came to me before I left and asked me to pass on news of Chien os Mumaka's death to his mother. I found them only hours before they left Hanzean, ahead of the Aberrant armies that were spreading through the northwest. In return for my news they allowed me to travel with them back to Okhamba. I have kept in contact with Blood Mumaka ever since; when the time came, they offered their aid.'

'Four ships?' Zahn said disparagingly.

'They need the others to conduct their trade with,' Tsata replied. 'The rest of the Near World goes on as ever, no matter what the state of matters here. They cannot see that if Saramyr falls, they will be next. But my people can. I have shown them.'

Zahn considered the Tkiurathi for a moment. On the one hand, any aid was welcome in these times, and he was not such a fool as to turn away a genuine ally; but on the other, it was difficult to believe that a thousand men – ten thousand, if Tsata was to be believed – would willingly sail to another continent to fight for people they had virtually no contact with.

'Our ways are not your ways, Barak Zahn,' Tsata said, his expression serious. He had guessed the other man's thoughts. 'We will not wait at home until it is our turn to be attacked. The Weavers threaten the whole of the Near World. We will stop them at their source, if we can.'

Zahn was about to reply when the Sister touched him on his arm. She was looking to the north, over the river. The line of the horizon was hazed. Zahn's eyes went to the junks: they seemed ghosted slightly, blurred at the edges. He blinked, feeling faintly myopic.

'Is it usual for fog to come so quickly in these parts?' Tsata asked, as the air thickened around them.