Weavers of Saramyr

Eleven

The morning sun dawned red as blood behind the barge as it lumbered westward into Axekami. They called it the Surananyi – the fury of Suran. Somewhere in the eastern deserts of Tchom Rin, great hurricanes were tearing across the desolate land, flinging the red dust into the sky to mar the light of Nuki's single eye.

Legend told how Panazu, god of rivers and rain, had been so besotted with Narisa, daughter of Naris, that he had asked a wise old apothecary to make him a potion that would cause her to fall in love with him. But the old apothecary was none other than Shintu the trickster in disguise, and Shintu put a feit on Panazu so that he would think the first woman he saw was his beloved Narisa. So it came to pass that he returned to his home, and the first to greet him was his sister Aspinis, goddess of trees and flowers. Panazu, thinking his sister was Narisa, chose the moment to slip his potion into Aspinis's drink, and she fell under its influence. And so they coupled, and when the morning came and their eyes were cleared they were horrified at what they had done.

But worse was to come; for they were the son and daughter of Enyu, goddess of nature and fertility, and from their coupling grew a child. They dared not tell their mother, for the child was not natural, conceived as it was of incest; and they knew well how their mother could not condone anything that was not complicit with her laws. Aspinis fled, hiding her shame. But she was beloved of the gods, and sorely missed; and so Ocha and Isisya ordered that all should search for her until she was found.

So began the Year of the Empty Temples, when the people of Saramyr suffered greatly, for the gods turned their faces away from the land and hunted through the Golden Realm for their lost kin. Crops failed, cruel winds blew, famine struck the land. Even Nuki turned away from them, and the sun was dim that year. And though the people thronged to the temples to pray for deliverance, their gods were not present.

Then, joy. Aspinis returned from the wilderness, and all the Golden Realm celebrated. In Saramyr the crops flourished, the fish were plentiful and the livestock grew fat once again. Aspinis would not speak of where she had been; but Shintu, who had guessed what had happened, threatened to tell her mother Enyu unless she revealed to him where the baby was. Aspinis – who had no inkling of Shinru's hand in the affair – told him that the baby was in a cave deep in the desert, where she would have long died.

Shintu, eager to see the results of his meddling, travelled to the cave, and there he found the baby not dead, but very much alive. She was being fed by snakes and lizards who brought her morsels, and she was a wrinkled and ugly thing with long, tangled hair and odd eyes – one green and one blue. But Shintu was struck with pity then, and he took the baby to his own home and nurtured her in secret, and named her Suran. She became a bitter girl, for in the way of the gods she remembered what had been done to her as an infant, and when she was grown she left Shintu and went back to the desert to dwell among the lizards and the snakes, to become the antithesis of everything her hated parents stood for. Suran was the outcast, the goddess of deserts and drought and pestilence; and when she raged, the whole of Saramyr saw red.

Tane's heart felt heavy in his breast as he sat on the forecastle of the barge, feeling the slow surge of the ship beneath him as it bore him onward. It was a low, clumsy craft, laden heavy with ores and minerals from the mines in the Tchamil Mountains. The rough cries of the bargemen sounded in his ears, hollering in their jagged dialect; peeping birds banked and swirled high above, mistaking the barge for a fishing vessel and hoping for breakfast; hawsers creaked and timbers groaned. All around him, life; and yet he felt lifeless.

He looked down at the planks between his knees, their colour stained red by the bloody sun, and traced the grain of the wood with his gaze. How like himself those lines were, he thought. They travelled their solitary way, sometimes brushing near to another line but rarely touching. Sometimes they were swallowed by a whorl or knot, sucked into a tangle; but always they emerged on the other side, always returning to an aimless and lonely path. He felt himself flailing inwardly, scrabbling for a greased rope of purpose that eluded his grip. Of what worth was he, one among thousands, millions; what right had he to expect the forbidden happiness of belonging? The gods meted out their gifts and blessings as they chose, and there were certainly many more worthy than him. Though he was a priest, he was still lower than these simple bargemen; for he had taken the order to atone for his past, not out of nobility or generosity. To pay off his guilt and regain his innocence. How many lives, how many sacrifices would it take before the gods were satisfied?

He felt sorrow for the priests of the temple that he had left behind, but no real grief. He and Jin had returned to Tane's erstwhile home at daybreak, and found it in terrible disarray. The priests were scattered haphazardly about like discarded dolls. They scarcely seemed real to Tane as he identified each of them: effigies only, as if the faces he had known these past few years had been replaced by waxy sculptures with glazed, glassy eyes and dry mouths gaping and lolling purple tongues.

'They were looking for something,' Jin said.

'Or someone,' Tane added.

He took Jin's silence to mean she had guessed who he referred to.

Later, he brought the priests out of the temple and laid them on the grass. There, he named them silently in prayer to Noctu, that she might record their deaths and inform her husband Omecha. He said another prayer to Enyu while Jin waited patiently, and he was just finishing when Jin's sharp intake of breath warned him that something was amiss.

When he opened his eyes, he saw the bears. They waited at the edge of the clearing, massive black and brown shapes hidden in the foliage, watching and waiting. Tane bowed to them, and then led Jin away to the boat which the priests used to travel to the nearby settlement of Ban and back.

'Is there to be no burial?' she asked.

'That is not our way,' he replied. 'The forest beasts will have them. Their flesh will return to the cycle of nature; their souls to the Fields of Omecha.'

They had bought passage on a barge from Ban. During the six-day journey, Tane had been given plenty of time for introspection. He sought inside himself for the well of loss, but found nothing. He was confused by the absence. His home, all the faces he had known, his tutors and friends and even old Master Olec were gone in a single night. Yet he could not bring himself to grieve; and in fact, he felt a guilty excitement at the prospect of moving on. Maybe he had never belonged there at all, and he had simply not admitted it to himself until now. Maybe that was why he could never find the inner peace he sought.

Enyu has another path for me, he thought. She has spared me the slaughter and set me on my way. I, the least worthy of her followers. The thought made him strangely happy.

The sun had risen high in the eastern sky by the time they reached Axekami, but it had still not cleared the veil of desert dust that hung before it, and the capital of Saramyr glowered angrily in brooding red. The approach to the city proper was through the sprawling shanties of the river nomads, whose stilt huts and rickety jetties crowded the river banks. Withered, wiry old men poled back and forth, seeming to take their lives in their hands as they cut into the path of the barge. The barge master did not slow or pay any attention. The nomads sat outside their wooden homes and shops, scraping leather or weaving, and their eyes were suspicious or indifferent as they passed over the hulking barge that plied past them down the Kerryn. Nomads only trusted their own kind, and likewise were mistrusted by all.

Jin came and sat by him as the shanties gave way to buildings, mostly warehouses and shipyards initially. She brushed her hair back over her shoulder and watched the wine-coloured water.

'I think you want to find this Kaiku tu Makaima for more reasons than simply helping me deliver my message,' she stated.

Tane looked at her sidelong. She was still gazing out over the gunwale. He studied her profile; it was flawless. She truly was beautiful; and the curious thing was she seemed to grow more beautiful by the day. If anything, she seemed too perfect in aspect. Even the great beauties had imperfections: a freckle, or a slight unevenness about the lip, or the colours of their irises mottled slightly. The imperfection heightened their beauty by contrast. But Jin had not even that.

She puzzled him. She had proved herself during their conversations these past six days to be luminously intelligent and well-travelled. Coupled with her appearance, she had the world in her lap. He found it hard to imagine anything she could not do, any position she could not attain with ease if she had the will. Why, then, an Imperial Messenger? Why choose a dangerous and dusty road, always on the move, never settling? Who was she, in truth?

She turned to him expectantly then, and he realised she wanted an answer. He gave her none. Let her speculate as she liked. Even he could not fathom why he was following Kaiku's trail; only that she was the last destination left to him after his home was gone.

'Do you think we can find her?' he said at length.

'I can find this Mishani you spoke of with ease. She is Mishani tu Koli, daughter of Barak Avun. If Kaiku is with her, our task is that much easier.'

Tane nodded. He hoped he had not made a mistake in revealing what he knew to Jin; but he could scarcely have done otherwise. They were companions, at least for a short while, and he had no idea how to find someone in a city the size of Axekami without her. Still, his suspicions about her had hardly been eased by the apparent knowledge she displayed of the shin-shin, and led him to wonder once again about that strange light he had seen in her eyes back in the forest.

'We are safe from them, at least for the moment,' she had told him. 'Whatever brought them to your temple, they cannot track us on the water. They may guess where we are heading, and possibly follow us downstream on the north bank, but once near Axekami they will not come any closer. The city is the place of men, where spirits do not belong.'

'And they'll stop tracking us then?' Tane had asked.

'Shin-shin are persistent, and they do not let their prey go easily. But if they are tracking us at all, they may give up when we reach the city. Or they may wait outside and hope to pick up our trail again when we leave.'

Tane had wanted to ask her how an Imperial Messenger had learned so much about spirits and demons, but in the end he decided that he would rather not know.

The vast capital swelled around them, domes and spires and temples crowding together, hugging in close to the Kerryn. To the north, the land sloped upwards and the buildings rose with it, until it became too steep to build on and rose almost sheer in a great bluff, upon which stood the mighty Imperial Keep, its skin burnishing red-gold in the dust-hazed sunlight. The city streets were a canvas of tinted whites, weathered greens, columns and fountains and parks. Here a clutter of warehouses in the worst state of dereliction; there a gallery, a bell tower, a library, all elegant sweeps of stone and wood and inscribed in fine metals across their entranceways. An enormous prayer gate lunged across the border of the Imperial District, a tall ellipse of stone and gold, its edges dazzling even in the muted rays of Nuki's eye.

To the south was the famous River District, where there were no roads but only canals, a place both exquisitely fashionable and extremely dangerous. It was as chaotic and beautiful as the rest of the city, only concentrated in a smaller area, with buildings of extraordinary design crowding over each other on tiny, irregular islands. The people that walked to and fro or were poled along the canals by puntmen were swathed in extravagant and impractical fashions, such as would make respectable society blush; but in the River District, nothing was too extreme.

Tane took it all in with wonder. He had been to Axekami before on odd occasions, but it still held the power to awe him. His world had been the quiet of the forests, where the only loud noise was the sharp crack of a hunting rifle or snap of a fire. Already he could hear the pummelling blanket of sound that came from the city; many thousand voices jabbering, the rattle of carts, the lowing of manxthwa as they plodded through the streets. The city seemed to seethe on the shores of the river, waiting to consume him as soon as he stepped away from the sanctuary of the barge, an inescapable din that might drive a man mad. Tane was afraid of it and desired it all at once.

The same, he thought, could be said of his future.

Kaiku knelt before the mirror in the sparsely furnished guest bedroom, and looked at herself. The face that returned the gaze seemed unfamiliar now, though the red of her irises had long faded back to their natural brown. The world had turned but once since she had learned of her condition, and yet it seemed she had forever been this way, a stranger to her own perceptions.

Outside she could hear the sounds of the servants returning from the burial. Mishani would be with them. Kaiku had not thought it appropriate to go.

She had not cried. She would not. Keep the tears to quench the flame, she had thought in a fanciful moment; but the truth was, she felt no sadness. Sorrow had belaboured her past the point of tolerance, and still it had not broken her back. It held no power over her now. Instead, she felt a hard point of bitterness in her breast, a small stone forming in the chambers of her heart like a polluted pearl inside an oyster. She was sick of sorrow, sick of pain. How could she trust anything now, even the evidence of her eyes and ears, when twenty harvests of safety and happiness had come and gone in her life only to be smashed aside in a single day of tragedy? How could she rely on anything again? Weighed against that, grief and remorse were useless. All that was left was giving up, or going on.

She chose the latter.

Mishani had closed herself up like a fan since the fire of yesterday afternoon. The blaze was mercifully checked quickly and caused little damage to the house, but the damage it had done to their relationship was immeasurable. Her once-friend was cold to her now, an impassive veneer rigidly locked in place. And though she did speak, her words were robbed of feeling, and it seemed that it took great effort to converse.

'You died, Kaiku,' she had said the previous day, in the wake of her accusation. 'It is not uncommon for Aberration to lay dormant for years, until something… wakes it up. All this time, you have carried it inside you and not known it.'

'How can you tell?' she had demanded, desperate to refute her host. 'You are not a priest; how can you tell? How can you tell what is inside me is not a demon, a malevolent spirit?'

Mishani turned away. 'We learned little of Aberrants from our tutors, you and I. They taught us manners, calligrapy, elocution; but not about Aberrants. They were not fit for polite young noblewomen like ourselves. But I have learned much since I have come to court, Kaiku, and I know how they preoccupy even the greatest of the high families.' She spoke quietly, as if fearing someone would overhear; though the lack of doors in most Saramyr houses meant that eavesdropping was severely frowned upon, and repeating what one heard was tantamount to obscenity. 'Our catches in Mataxa Bay grow more befouled by the year. Each haul brings in more three-clawed crabs, more fish with extra fins, more eyeless lobsters. Aberrations.'

Her voice was taut, suppressing disgust. The fact that Kaiku could tell at all meant that Mishani wanted her to know how she felt about it. In the background, Kaiku could hear the sounds of the servants racing to put out the fire she had started; the creaking of bucket handles, the slosh of water, shouts of alarm. They seemed impossibly distant.

'I have seen a girl in a village on my family's land,' she continued, her back to her visitor. 'She was hideous to look at, a freak of melted skin and hair, blind and lame. Where her hands touched, flowers grew. Even on skin, Kaiku. Even on metal. We found her being kept in a pen. She had killed her mother as an infant, after the poor woman allowed her daughter to feel her face. The mother's eyes were bored through by flower roots, and she choked on blossoms that grew in her mouth.' She paused, reluctant to go on; but she did so anyway. 'I have never seen a person possessed by a spirit, but I have seen and heard of many Aberrants, and I have heard of several who brought flame simply by being in a room. Most burned themselves to death; the rest were executed by the Weavers. They had two things in common, though, the fire-bringers. All were female. All of them had your eyes when the flames came. Your red eyes.' She faced Kaiku at last, and her gaze was hard and grave. 'Aberrants are dangerous, Kaiku. You are dangerous. What if I had been in that room with you?'

That had been yesterday. Since then, she had been left alone, given the bare minimum of attention by her host, given time to think on her condition. She had done a lot of thinking.

She could hear the weeping of the servants as they neared the house. Yokada, the servant girl who had been the only witness to Kaiku's condition as she escaped the fiery room, had died. It had been said she left a brazier burning in Kaiku's room, sparking the blaze. She had drunk poison last night, a suicide to atone for her crime. Kaiku doubted that the suicide was voluntary. She wondered if Yokada had even known she was drinking poison at all. Mishani had grown ruthless in her time at court. Kaiku had no illusions. Being at her lowest ebb afforded her a wonderfully clear perspective on things. Mishani had not been protecting her; she had been protecting herself. Blood Koli's standing would suffer terribly if it was found that they were harbouring an Aberrant. Worse, that the heir to the family had been fast friends with that unclean creature all through childhood and adolescence. The taint would be on Mishani's family then; they would be shunned. Their goods would fall in price, and stories about the strange fish in Mataxa Bay might start circulating.

Kaiku's presence in their home was enough to ruin Blood Koli. Mishani could not risk the loose tongue of a servant girl undoing generations of empire-building.

Mishani came into the room without ringing the chime. She found Kaiku still sitting before the mirror. Kaiku turned her gaze to Mishani's reflection.

'My servants tell me you did not eat this morning,' she said.

'I feared to find something deadly in my food,' Kaiku replied, her manner chilly and excessively formal, her mode of address altered so that she spoke as if to an adversary.

Mishani betrayed no reaction. She met Kaiku's eyes in the mirror levelly, her small, thin face in amid the mass of black hair.

'I am not so monstrous that I would order your death, Kaiku, no matter what you have become.'

'Perhaps,' Kaiku replied. 'Or perhaps you have changed much these past years. Perhaps I never really knew you.'

Mishani was perturbed by this shift in character. Kaiku was not properly and rightfully ashamed of what she was; instead, her tone condemned Mishani for her lack of friendship, her lack of faith. Kaiku had always been stubborn and wilful, but to be an Aberrant was surely indefensible?

Kaiku stood and faced Mishani. She was a few inches taller than the other, and looked down on her now.

'I will go,' she said. 'That is what you came to ask, is it not?'

'I was not intending to ask, Kaiku,' Mishani replied. 'I have told you what I know about the Mask. It is better if you go to Fo and seek answers for yourself. You understand, I am sure.'

'I understand many things,' said Kaiku. 'Some less palatable than others.'

There was a long silence between them.

'It is a measure of our friendship that I have not had you killed, Kaiku. You know how dangerous to my family you are. You know that, by revealing yourself as an Aberrant, you could hurt us badly.'

'And be executed by the Weavers,' Kaiku retorted. 'I would not throw my life away like that. It is precious. You thought so too, once.'

'Once,' Mishani agreed. 'But things have changed.'

'I have not changed, Mishani,' came the reply. 'If I was ill with bone fever, you would have sat by me and nursed me even though you might have caught it yourself. If I was hunted by assassins, you would have protected me and used all your family's powers to keep me safe, though you yourself would have been endangered. But this… this you cannot condone. I am afflicted, Mishani. I did not choose to be Aberrant; how, then, can I be blamed for it by you?' 'Because I see what you are now,' she replied. 'And you disgust me.'

Kaiku felt the blow of her words as an almost physical pain.

There was nothing else that needed to be said.

'There are clothes in that chest,' Mishani said. 'Food in the kitchens. Take what you will. In return, I ask this courtesy. Leave after sunset, that you may not be seen.'

Kaiku tilted her chin proudly. 'I ask no favours of you, nor will I grant any. I want only what is mine: my father's Mask, and the clothes and pack I came with. I will leave as soon as I have them.'

'As you wish,' Mishani replied. She paused then, as if she wanted to say something else; but the moment passed, and she left.

Kaiku walked boldly out of the front gate once the servants had brought her belongings. Barak Avun – Mishani's father – was away, so she was spared the dilemma of whether to thank him for his hospitality and bid him goodbye. She could feel the servants watching her leave. The sight of their noble lady's friend departing in trousers and boots – travelling clothes – was odd enough. Perhaps some of them also blamed Yokada's suicide on her. She cared little. They knew nothing of her affairs. They were only servants.

I have a purpose, she thought. A destination. I will go to the Isle of Fo.

There I will learn of the ones who killed my family.

The afternoon was sweltering and muggy now that the sun had climbed clear of the obscuring red dust of the Surananyi, and so bright that her eyes narrowed unconsciously. The Imperial District's streets were as clean and wide and beautiful as ever. She had money in her pack. Her first destination would be the docks. She would not think about Mishani, nor about what had been done to her, until she was far away from this place. She would not look back.

She left the compound of Blood Koli, turned a corner into a narrow side-street sheltered by overhanging trees, and almost walked into Tane, coming the other way with a woman at his side.

Surprise paralysed them both for a moment, before Kaiku found her voice. 'Tane,' she said at last. 'Daygreet. Shintu's Luck, no?' The latter was a phrase expressing amazement at an unlikely coincidence – in this case, their meeting here.

'Not luck,' he replied. 'We have been searching for you. This is Jin, an Imperial Messenger.'

Kaiku turned to the woman who walked with him, and the colour drained out of her. The sound of the city birds chirruping in the trees lining the lane seemed to fade. She became aware that, in this narrow passageway, she was all but invisible to anyone on the main thoroughfare.

'Is something wrong?' Tane asked, putting a hand on her shoulder in concern. 'Are you ill?'

Kaiku's mind whirled in denial even as her senses bludgeoned her with their evidence. A subtle difference in the bone structure, in the hairline, the lips, the skin… but none of those mattered. She saw the eyes, and she recognised her. Impossible as it was, she recognised her.

'She is not ill,' said Jin, grabbing Kaiku by the front of the shirt and pulling her roughly so they were face to face, their noses almost touching. Tane was too startled to intervene. 'You know me, don't you, Kaiku?'

Kaiku nodded, suddenly terrified. 'Asara,' she breathed.

'Asara,' said the woman in agreement, and Kaiku felt the sharp prick of a blade at her belly.