Weavers of Saramyr

Thirteen

The isle of Fo lay off the sloping north-western coast of Saramyr, a day's travel across the red-tinged waves of the Camaran Channel. The wind had freshened as the afternoon wore on, and it cooed and whistled through the ratlines of the enormous junk, rippling the sails that sprouted from its back like the spined fins of some magnificent sea creature. The Summer Tide was a merchant vessel belonging to the wealthiest trading consortium in Jinka, and it showed. Her gunwale was moulded into the likeness of stormy waves, chasing each other from bow to stern, and in amongst them frolicked seals and whales, sea-spirits and imaginary beasts of the deep. The sails were a magnificent array, with polished wooden ribs holding great fans of beige canvas between them, and painted with the red sigil of the consortium. It was a thing of beauty, carrying a cargo of beautiful things: silks, perfumes, spices; and several passengers, two of whom were watching the desolate isle draw ever closer.

Kaiku was lounging against the thick oaken rail on the foremost deck, her feathered hair whipping restlessly against her tanned cheeks. It was not especially ladylike, considering that she was the daughter of a high-born; but then, neither were her clothes, and she had ever been a tomboy. She wore trousers of heavy, baggy fabric and soft boots wound around with leather to keep them tight. In addition, she had on a light shirt of blue, wrapped right over left -men wore their shirts the opposite way – and belted around her waist with a sash of red. She felt the sun on her skin and flexed like a cat, luxuriating in the warmth. Tane, standing nearby, watched her with a hungry eye.

A week had passed since they had left Axekami and taken a barge upriver to Jinka. Upriver travel was necessarily slower on craft that had no sails, but the Jabaza's current was not strong at this time of year, and the barge had plenty of wheelmen hired. These swarthy folk rarely came up on deck; their journey was spent in the treadmills at the hot heart of the barge, turning the massive paddle-wheels that powered the craft against the flow. For three days they had watched the flattened peak of Mount Makara rise slowly from the horizon, until it bulked vast among the surrounding mountains, a pale blue-green, and they could see the wisps of smoke that issued from its volcanic maw.

That leg of the journey, from Axekami up the Jabaza, had been easy and pleasant, and the weather was good; yet Tane's recollection of it was polluted with disgust. For it had not been an entirely uneventful trip. Among the passengers on the Summer Tide had been a Weaver on his way to Jinka.

The Weaver had a separate cabin at the back of the boat, where he spent almost all his time. There was a cabin boy who saw to his needs, a fresh-faced lad of twelve years or so that brought in his food and took out his chamber-pot. His name was Runfey, and he was an ever-smiling presence aboard the barge, his high laugh often heard across the deck.

One day, as dusk approached, Kaiku was stricken with a sudden faintness. Tane was with her at the time; Asara was elsewhere, alone, as she usually preferred.

Kaiku had moaned aloud as her head went light; then she seemed to notice Tane, and fell quiet. Tane could not help feeling galled at the way she clammed up, hoarding whatever secret she kept. He did not pretend to understand her, but he sat with her until the faintness passed. Twenty minutes later, the noises began.

Kaiku had gone to lie down, and Tane was out alone, watching the moons rise as the darkness deepened. The river was a peacefully undulating abyss picked out in Iridima's light. The only sound was the sighing lap of the water against the hull of the barge, and the creak of her timbers. Tane had felt strangely peaceful then, calmer than he had been for a long time, even back in the forest when he had been trying to master his meditations.

The shrieking and raging started all of a sudden, coming from the Weaver's cabin. Tane moved closer, curious. The Weaver seemed to be in a fit of terrible anger, smashing things and throwing himself around inside. Two guards posted at his door made no attempt to disperse the small crowd of sailors that gathered at the noise, but they would let no one in. No one except Runfey.

He was brought by another guard, led by the arm to the Weaver's door. He was not struggling, but the naked fear in his eyes as they met Tane's would haunt him for a long time afterward. The guards opened the door, and all went quiet inside, a predatory kind of silence that made Tane cold. Then they put Runfey in there, and closed the door behind him.

Tane and six of the sailors stood there that night, and heard the screams of Runfey as the Weaver vented his anger on the boy. They heard him beg and plead as he was battered, heard him shriek and wail as other tortures were visited on him that Tane could only guess at, heard him cry out as he was raped repeatedly. Two hours they stood there as witnesses to the horrors that were carried out in that cabin, while their vile guest's post-Weaving rage exhausted itself. None would move, for it would be an unpardonable shame to turn their backs; and yet none dared intervene, either.

Only when silence fell did Tane leave to pray. He was still praying in the dead of night, when he heard the splash of something heavy tipped overboard. They saw no more of Runfey. Nobody spoke of it again. The next day it was business as usual, and Kaiku was still not even aware anything had happened. Tane had elected not to tell her; it would do no good to anyone.

After that, they had turned west into the Abanahn Canal. Tane felt an unfamiliar sweep of patriotic pride at the sight. He had heard of it only in tales: a vast man-made waterway that connected the Jabaza with the coast, one of the mightiest feats of engineering in Saramyr. Enormous walls of white stone rose on either side, dotted with towers and gates and locks. Immense mechanisms with cogs that were half the size of their barge lay dormant, but Tane had heard how they could be used to raise impenetrable gates to prevent enemies sailing up the canal from the sea and reaching the interior of Saramyr. They passed beneath a curved prayer gate of monolithic size, arcing from one side of the canal to the other, its inscription offering the blessing of Zanya, goddess of travellers. In both directions sailed such a profusion of gaudy boats and barges that Tane spent all his daylight hours on the deck, watching them in amazement as a child watches a procession. Moments like this reminded him how painfully limited his life had been until now, spent almost exclusively in the Forest of Yuna.

What he saw of Jinka was even more hectic than the streets of Axekami. They disembarked at the docks amid the babble of hundreds of labourers, the creak and groan of pulleys and thick ropes as they unloaded crates and bales, the raucous laughter of sailors in the taverns. The Weaver had gone about his business elsewhere, while Asara took them to a boat master she professed to know. The boat master did not appear to remember her, but after a few words in private, he beamed and said he would be delighted to arrange them transport. Asara kept her silence.

And so they had stayed the night in a clean and respectable temple inn. Temple inns were resting places owned by the priesthood of one god or another, and the only place they were unlikely to be bothered by prostitutes or drunks or cut-throats while staying in the docks. Tane had fretted to himself about the shin-shin, unable to dispel their memory and remembering Asara's comment about how the demons might track them when they left the safety of the capital. But they had entered Axekami by water and left by water, and it seemed that their trail had gone cold. Nothing disturbed them that night.

When dawn came they were taken to the Summer Wind, and set sail for Fo.

Tane leaned against the railing now, next to Kaiku. She was radiant in the westering light. Not so beautiful as Jin – Asara, he corrected himself – but possessed of some different kind of attraction, and one that was stronger. Perhaps it was something to do with the way he had met her, her total vulnerability. She had appealed to his need to heal, and he had nursed her strength back. Perhaps it was their similarities: both had lost their families, both had their secrets. Or perhaps it was something altogether different.

Lucia dreamed.

Her dreams had always been strange, informed as they were by subconscious nonsense-whispers emanating from the life that surrounded her. When she dreamed, she heard the slow, childlike thoughts of the trees in the roof garden, the rapid and unintelligible gibber of the wind, the obsessively focused ravens and the impossibly ancient ruminations of the hill upon which the Keep stood, for whom the completion of a single thought would take longer than a human lifetime. It was never silent for Lucia, and the sounds all around her translated into strange images when she slept.

She had stopped dream-walking entirely of late. The unseen presence that had suddenly begun to stalk her was too frightening, and too dangerous. She felt its monstrous attention gnawing at the edges of her consciousness even now, however. It was ravenous, hungry, frustrated by her elusiveness. She would not let it catch her.

Over the year since she had begun exploring the Keep in her dreams, she had learned to control her abilities somewhat. Whereas at first she had no say over where she would find herself when she closed her eyes, and was only a spectator to her own wanderings, she had soon divined how to guide herself, and how to choose which places to visit. More importantly, she learned how not to dream-walk, so that she could suppress it if she wanted and sleep untroubled. She rarely felt rested after a night wandering the Keep's corridors in her mind; but in those early days, her curiosity about the world outside her prison kept her going back again and again. By day, she was a rumour among the folk of the Keep; by night, she was a ghost.

But other things had changed, too. Whatever it was that she had set in motion when she had given a lock of her hair to the man in the garden, it was gathering pace, and she felt it daily.

She dreamed that she stood on the edge of a high, rocky crag, a great promontory that dropped away hundreds of feet to jagged rocks below. The landscape spread out and away beneath her, an impossible chaos of ridges and shattered stone, tree-choked valleys and plateaux. It was thick with spirits down there, invisible in their hollows, and they cooed and whispered to each other in the night.

The night. The three moons hung before her in a velvet sky, so close that they were overlapping. Aurus seemed near enough to touch, looming immense in the star-pocked darkness. She was not in the least perturbed by the impossibility of the three moons being in such close proximity without the howling maelstrom of a moonstorm lashing the land. With the easy logic of sleep, she knew that it was simply not the right time yet.

She sensed the dream lady watching her before she turned to look. The sloping table of rock she stood on jutted out from a thick wood, and in the shadows of the treeline she could see the blurred, unclear shape of the mysterious stranger. She was a smear of black and white, a child's charcoal drawing, stretched thin and tall with a cloak folded close around her like a bat's wings. Always too far away to see clearly, always evading Lucia's sight. This one had found her when the unseen monster could not; but Lucia was not afraid of the dream lady. There was no malice there, only an unsettling intensity. Often she was simply present on the sidelines of Lucia's dreams, watching silently from some distant point, a rooftop or a cavern, her gaze unwavering as she followed the Heir-Empress. Sometimes she spoke, and though Lucia did not like her voice, her words were very clear and she told Lucia things about the world outside. Lucia, desperately curious, would converse whenever she could with the dream lady; but often the newcomer would not reply, would simply watch her disconcertingly, always from far away. Lucia did not know what to make of it all, but she had the impression that the dream lady told Lucia exactly as much as she wanted the young Heir-Empress to know, and nothing more.

Still, as time went on, she learned who and what the dream lady was, and she began to think of her as a strange kind of friend.

Tonight she was not talking, it seemed. She hung in the shadows, a half-seen haze, and stared. Lucia ignored her. She had learned by now that it was pointless doing anything else. Distractedly, she sensed the unseen malevolence, hunting for her again. It was far away, and no threat to her here.

There was no sound but the sigh of the cool wind and the calling of the spirits in the cracked landscape below. Lucia wandered to the edge and looked down, her blonde hair tumbling over her shoulder. When she turned back, the dream lady was gone.

It gave her a fright. She was quite accustomed to the dream lady's visits, but her sudden disappearances were always a surprise. Before, she had only ever vanished when the dark presence that stalked her had become too strong, got too close. She had told Lucia she must stay away from the presence, must not let herself be detected. Lucia had accepted that, but when she asked what the presence was, the dream lady would not say.

Now, however, the air seemed to become light, taking on a coppery taste, and the fine hairs on Lucia's skin stood up. She felt as if she was being lifted, dragged upward towards the sky, though her feet remained firmly on the ground. The atmosphere had become charged, and the spirits hidden in the panorama beneath her had gone silent.

She felt a hand touch her on her shoulder, far bigger than any human hand, thin white fingers tipped with hooked nails. Her heart seemed to slow to a stop. She did not dare turn around. She could feel them, their presence making her consciousness crawl. Ageless, endless, mad things, the three sisters that stalked the earth when the three satellites shared space in the night sky. The Children of the Moons.

The touch was both dreadful and divine, filling her with terror and awe in equal measure. She squeezed her eyes shut, knowing that behind her there was no ground to stand on, that the spirits hung in the air over the precipice, massive and cold and fearful. She could not bear to look at them, could not face the depthless void of their eyes, where motivations boiled that were as alien to humanity as the gods were. And though some part of her knew this to be a dream, it brought her no comfort; for dreams were no refuge from beings such as these.

Words were spoken, but they came as an awful, thin, sawing noise, making Lucia shudder. She could not hope to comprehend them. She trembled, bowing her head, her lower lip shaking and her eyes screwed firmly closed.

Then they were before her instead of behind, the three of them looming, and though she could not see them she could feel their outlines through her eyelids. She felt something brush the side of her hair, and she shivered. A fingernail. It brushed her again, infusing her anew with panic and wonder, the strange current that passed into her from the contact. It took her a breathless moment to realise what the spirit was doing. It was stroking her, using only a single finger, as a person might to do a delicate animal, or a mother to a newborn baby. Gentling her. The voice came again, and once more it was horrible to the ear; but this time softer somehow, a tonal quality that transcended language and meaning.

Lucia did not know what they wanted. She did not even know if wanting was a concept that applied to them. But she said a tiny prayer to the moon sisters, and then opened her eyes, and looked upon their children.

The Imperial bedchamber was shadowy and quiet. Warm night breezes blew in through elegantly curved window arches, stirring the thin veils that hung before them. Against one wall, the enormous bed was a rolling landscape of opalescent sheets, gold and white and crimson. At each corner stood one of the Guardians of the

Four Winds, carved in precious metals and reaching up to hold aloft the canopy that roofed the whole of the grand structure.

Anais tu Erinima, Blood Empress of Saramyr, stood by a dresser of finest wood, leaning gently against the wall with a silver cup of amber wine in her hand. Her light hair was loose, falling about her deceptively innocent face and over the shoulders of the black silk nightdress she wore. The jet-coloured lack of the floor was cold against her bare soles – apart from its reflective properties, loch was a stone valued for its reluctance to take up heat, and hence keep a room cool.

She sipped her wine and waited, nursing her fury.

How she hated him. As if the Emperor Durun had not been enough of a trial before, this business with Lucia had made him a hundred times worse. He seemed to be going out of his way to anger and humiliate her. His drunkenness, always apt to get a little out of hand, was appalling now. He caroused at feasts, bawling and vomiting until even his hunting companions seemed uneasy. The hunts themselves were a mercy, because they got him out of the Keep for a few days at a time; but he used them as an excuse to stand up important guests and often reeled home in a worse state than he had left.

She seethed as she thought on it. At least she had the small revenge that his family, Blood Batik, had thrown their support behind her at the council. But this in itself was a double-edged sword. If Blood Batik had declared against her, she would at least have had the comfort of annulling her marriage to Durun; now she was forced to suffer him, for she could not do without the support of his family. Durun was too stubborn and bullheaded to toe the family line in this matter, and his frustration was evident. He and his father Barak Mos – a firebrand to equal his son – had bellowed at each other often in the past weeks, but each confrontation only sent Durun away with a renewed desire to embarrass himself. After that, the Barak had come as near as he ever came to apologising to Anais, asking her to forgive his son's transgressions and promising to make up for them in the future. Anais knew how much it had taken for him to overcome his not inconsiderable pride to do this, and she was touched; but it did not abate her anger one bit.

Durun's indiscretions with the ladies of the Keep had been an open secret for years now. Usually he preferred the younger ones; impressionable daughters of minor nobles who were visiting court, too flattered by the Emperor's attentions to think of the consequences. Other times he laid with servants who dared not say no to him. Sometimes he brought whores from the cathouses into the Keep. At first it had only been on rare occasions, and Anais had tolerated it. This was not a marriage of passion, but of politics; she was happy to do anything to make it more endurable. But gradually he had become less discreet, and the rumours began.

Anais initially felt humiliated by the whole affair, bound by the notion that she should be good enough at bedplay to keep him on her pillow; but then, as always, she had not been in a position where she could do Blood Batik the grievous insult of divorcing their favourite son. The strength her marriage provided was what had got Blood Erinima to where it was, and she could not throw it away, not even when their vows were being so flagrantly abused.

Eventually, she ceased to care. Let him do as he would. In the main, she was indifferent to him as a husband anyway. Sometimes, just sometimes, when he turned the bright flame of his passions on to something worthwhile – or more rarely, on to her – she saw a glimpse of the man he might have been, the marriage as it could be. But those moments were too brief and far between; only enough to frustrate her with possibilities. He wasted himself on idiot passions, fighting and drinking and whoring.

But now Durun had gone too far.

Tonight he had come back from a hunt, roaring drunk, and ordered a feast for himself and his companions. There in the hall they had made pigs of themselves and swilled wine. Durun, flushed with triumph at killing a boar single-handed, had been even more out of control than he usually was. When one of the servants had come to pour him another drink – a simple, slender and plain-faced girl whose lack of wit or beauty was made up for by a disproportionately large chest – he pulled her around him and on to the table, scattering greasy food and cups of wine, and had her there. Anais's handmaiden, whom she had charged with delivering a message to the Emperor when he returned from the hunt, walked in then. She found him between the legs of the servant girl, her breasts exposed between the torn halves of her shirt, gasping with each thrust while Durun's hunting companions gathered round and cheered. She had reported a slightly less graphic version of events to the Empress.

Anais was livid. Rumours were one thing; people could pretend to ignore them. But this was intolerable. The Emperor of Saramyr, rutting like an animal in a hall full of servants and the sons of nobles, flouting his infidelity for all to see. It was more than she could bear.

The heavy, unsteady footsteps that approached the bedroom door heralded the arrival of her wayward husband. He pushed the door open and lumbered through unsteadily. With his sharp, knifelike features, his bearing was proud and haughty even in such a state as he was. He saw Anais standing by the dresser, and shut the door behind him. Brushing back the long fall of fine black hair -spotted with grease and matted with wine now – he raised an eyebrow at her.

'Wife,' he said. 'You seem angry.'

She crossed the room in three strides and threw the cup of wine in his face.

'You disgusting excuse for a man!' she hissed. He sputtered, instinctively backhanding the silver cup out of her grip. It clashed and clattered across the lack floor and rolled to a stop. She slapped him, hard. He recoiled, more surprised than hurt. She hit him again, more violently this time. A small part of her was telling her that an empress should not act this way, but the wine and her pent-up fury overrode it. She was seized by the need to hurt him, encouraged by her first assaults; and she hit him again, and again, pounding against him with her fists.

He shook off his initial bewilderment as the pain seeped through his drink-fogged brain. Anais's next blow was arrested by a black-gloved hand, seizing her wrist. Instinctively, she struck with the other one, but he caught that too, holding her arms apart. She struggled desperately against him, suddenly wanting to escape. She saw the blaze in his eyes and feared she had gone too far. He was much larger and stronger than her, and he held her with effortless ease.

'Let go of me!' she hissed. 'Bastard!'

His dark eyes threatened her with pain, and she twisted to be out of his grip; then suddenly he was lifting her up by her arms, slamming her against the wall hard enough to knock the breath from her.

'Heart's blood, Anais,' he husked. 'It's been too long since you've had this kind of fight in you.'

And then he was kissing her, hard and savagely, biting her lips and her tongue. She struggled against him, making sounds of protest through her nose; he slammed her against the wall again.

'Now will you behave?' he demanded.

She sagged. 'Bastard,' she said again, but there was no strength in it. He stepped back and let her go. She regarded him for a time in the shadows, her eyes baleful and wary all at once. Spirits, she truly hated him; but she wanted him as well. It was only his heart and mind that were weak and stupid; when he towered over her like this, when she was at bay before him, she could imagine that he was the powerful, dangerous man she had wished for a husband, instead of the indolent sluggard that she got.

Well, why shouldn't she take what pleasure she could from him? She got so little else. And she only needed his body…

Surging forward, she grabbed his head, her fingers like claws at the back of his skull, drawing him into a kiss as brutal as the one he had given her. She tasted wine on his breath, mingled with other things less pleasant, but it did nothing to dampen her suddenly awakened ardour. He shoved her against the wall again, and this time she saw the animal lust on his face. He did not want her, not specifically; he wanted woman, any woman. Well, that would suit her. She wanted a man, and he would do for now.

Grabbing the front of her nightdress, he tore it half away in one great swipe. She had braced herself against it, but she was still overwhelmed by his strength, pulled into him by the force. He pushed her back again, and with a second effort he rent it from her completely. She stood before him, her pale and slender form naked in the shadows, her small, hard breasts rising and falling with her breath. Then they fell to each other.

Their congress was rough and forceful, each using the other's body without thought of tenderness. Anais tore her husband's clothes away as eagerly as he had hers, running her hands over the taut muscles of his body and the thin covering of fat overlaying them, the legacy of too much drink and rich food. No quarter was asked, and none given; he impaled her over and again as they rolled across the bed, each seeking the dominant position. Finally she pinned him down and he relented. She drove herself against him faster and faster. For all that he was drunk, and all his many failings, he still possessed a certain endowment beyond that of most men, and Anais speared herself upon it mercilessly. In the morning they would be as they always were, argumentative and spiteful; but for now, with the weight of the realm on her shoulders and more worries than she could count, she took the passion she craved so desperately, and found her release therein.

She wanted to tell him that she hated him but the words, when they came in the throes of orgasm, were quite the opposite.