Weavers of Saramyr

Six

The townhouse of Blood Koli was situated on the western flank of the Imperial Quarter of Axekami. The original building had been improved over the years, adding a wing here, a library there, until the low, wide mass sprawled across the expanse of the compound that protected it. Its roof was of black slate, curved and peaked into ridges; the walls were the colour of ivory, simple and plain, their uniformity broken up by a few choice angles or an ornamental cross-hatching of narrow wooden beams. Behind the townhouse was a cluster of similarly austere buildings: quarters for guards, stables, and storage rooms. The remainder of the compound was taken up by a garden, trimmed and neat and severe in its beauty. Curving pebble paths arced around a pond full of colourful fish, past a sculpted fountain and a shaded bench. The whole was surrounded by a high wall with a single gate, that separated the compound from the wide streets of the Imperial District. The morning sun beat down on the city, and the air was humid and muggy. Not too distantly, the golden ziggurat of the Imperial Keep loomed at the crest of a hill, highest of all the buildings in the city.

Within the townhouse, Mishani tu Koli sat cross-legged at her writing desk and laboured through the last season's fishing tallies. Blood Koli owned a large fishing fleet that operated out of Mataxa Bay, and much of their revenue and political power was generated there. It was common knowledge that crabs and lobsters stamped with the mark of Blood Koli were the most tender and delicious (and hence the most expensive) in Saramyr. It was a benefit of the unique mineral content of the bay's waters, so Mishani's father said. For two years now she had been rigorously educated in every aspect of the family's holdings and businesses. As heir to the lands of Blood Koli and the title of Barakess upon her father's death, she was expected to be able to handle the responsibility of heading them. And so she tallied, her brush flicking this way and that as she made a mark here, crossed a line there, with a single-minded focus that was alarming in its intensity.

Mishani was a lady of no great height, slender and fine-boned to the point of fragility. Her thin, pale face, while not beautiful, was striking in its serenity. No involuntary movement ever crossed her face; her poise was total. No flicker of her pencil-line eyebrows would betray her surprise unless she willed it so; no twitch of her narrow lips would show a smirk unless she wished to express it. Her small body was near-engulfed by the silken mass of black hair that fell to her ankles when she stood. It was tamed by strips of dark blue leather, separating it into two great plaits to either side of her head, and one long, free-falling cascade at her back.

A chime sounded outside the curtained doorway to her room. She finished the tally line she was working on and then rang a small silver bell in response, to indicate permission to enter. A handmaiden slipped gracefully in, bowing slightly with the fingertips of one hand to her lips and the other arm folded across her waist, the female form of greeting to a social superior. 'You have a visitor, Mistress Mishani. It is Mistress Kaiku tu Makaima.'

Mishani looked blandly at her handmaiden for a moment; then a slow smile spread across her lips, becoming a grin of joy. The handmaiden smiled in response, pleased that her mistress was pleased. 'Shall I show her in, Mistress?'

'Do so,' she replied. 'And bring fruit and iced water for us.'

The handmaiden left, and Mishani tidied up her writing equipment and arranged herself. In the two years since her eighteenth harvest, she had been kept busy and with little time for the society of friends; but Kaiku had been her companion through childhood and adolescence, and the long separation had pained her. They had written to each other often, in the florid, poetic style of High Saramyrrhic, explaining their dreams and hopes and fears. It did not seem enough. How like Kaiku, then, to turn up unannounced like this. She never was one to follow protocol; she always seemed to think herself somehow above it, that it did not apply to her.

'Mistress Kaiku tu Makaima,' the handmaiden declared from without, and Kaiku entered then. Mishani flung her arms around her friend and they embraced. Finally, she stepped back, holding Kaiku's hands, their arms a bridge between them.

'You've lost weight,' she said. 'And you seem pale. Have you been ill?'

Kaiku laughed. They had known each other too long to be anything less than brutally honest. 'Something like that,' she said. 'But you look more the noble lady than ever. City life must agree with you.'

'I miss the bay,' Mishani admitted, kneeling on one of the elegant mats that were laid out on the floor. 'I will admit, it is galling that I have to spend my days counting fish and pricing boats, and being reminded of it every day. But I am developing something of a taste for tallying.'

'Really?' Kaiku asked in disbelief, settling herself opposite her friend. 'Ah, Mishani. Dull, repetitive work always was your strong suit.'

'I shall take that as a compliment, since it was you who was always too flighty and fanciful to attend to her lessons as a child.'

Kaiku smiled. Just the sight of her friend made the terrors that she had endured seem more distant, fainter somehow. She was a living reminder of the days before the tragedy had struck. She had changed a little: shed the last of her girlhood, her small features become womanly. And she spoke with a more formal mode than Kaiku remembered, presumably picked up at court. But for all that, she was still that same Mishani, and it was like a balm to Kaiku's sore heart.

The handmaiden gave a peremptory chime and entered; she needed no answering bell when she had already been invited by her mistress. She laid a low wooden table to one side of Kaiku and Mishani, placed a bowl of sliced fruit there, and poured iced water into two glasses. Finally, she adjusted the screens to maximise the tiny breaths of the wind that stirred the hot morning, and unobtrusively slipped away. Kaiku watched her go, reminded of another handmaiden from a time before death had ever brushed her.

'Now, Kaiku, to what do I owe this visit?' Mishani said: 'It is not a short way from the Forest of Yuna to Axekami. Are you staying long? I will have a room prepared. And you will need some proper clothes; what are you wearing}'

Kaiku's smile seemed fragile, and the sadness within showed

through. Mishani's eyes turned to sorrow and sympathy in response. 'What has happened?' she asked.

'My family are dead,' Kaiku replied simply.

Mishani automatically suppressed her surprise, showing no reaction at all. Then, remembering who it was that she was talking to, she relaxed her guard and allowed the horror to show, her hand covering her mouth in shock. 'No,' she breathed. 'How?'

'I will tell you,' Kaiku said. 'But there is more. I may not be as you remember me, Mishani. Something is within me, something… foreign. I do not know what it is, but it is dangerous. I ask for your help, Mishani. I need your help.'

'Of course,' Mishani replied, taking her friend's hands again. 'Anything.'

'Do not be hasty,' Kaiku said. 'Listen to my story first. You are in danger just by being near me.'

Mishani sat back, gazing at her friend. Such gravity was not Kaiku's way. She had always been the wilful one, stubborn, the one who would take whatever path suited her. Now her tone was as one convicted. 'Tell me, then,' she said. 'And spare nothing.'

So Kaiku told her everything, a tale that began with her own death and ended in her arrival at Axekami, having bought passage on a skiff downriver from Ban with money she found in her pack. She talked of Asara, how her trusted handmaiden had revealed herself to be something other than what she seemed; and she told of how Asara died. She spoke of her rescue by the priests of Enyu, and the mask Asara had taken from her house, that her father had brought back from his last trip away. And she told of her oath to Ocha: that she would avenge the murder of her family.

When she was finished, Mishani was quite still. Kaiku watched her, as if she could divine what was going on beneath her immobile exterior. This new poise was unfamiliar to Kaiku; it was something Mishani had acquired accompanying her father in the courts of the Empress these past two years. There, every movement and every nuance could give away a secret or cost a life.

'You have the mask?' she asked at length.

Kaiku produced it from her pack and handed it to her friend. Mishani looked it over, turning it beneath her gaze. The mischievous red and black face leered back at her. Beautiful and ugly at the same time, it still looked no more remarkable than many other masks she had seen, worn by actors in the theatre. It seemed entirely normal.

'You have not tried to wear it?'

'No,' Kaiku said. 'What if it were a True Mask? I would go insane, or die, or worse.'

'Very wise,' Mishani mused.

'Tell me you believe my story, Mishani. I have to know you do not doubt me.'

Mishani nodded, her great cascade of black hair trembling with the movement. 'I believe you,' she said. 'Of course I believe you. And I will do all I can to help you, dear friend.' Kaiku was smiling in relief, tears gathering in her eyes. Mishani handed the mask back. 'As to that, I have a friend who has studied the ways of the Edgefathers. He may be able to tell us about it.'

'When can we see him?' Kaiku asked, excited.

Mishani gave her an unreadable look. 'It will not be quite as simple as that.'

The chambers of Lucia tu Erinima were buried deep in the heart of the Imperial Keep, heavily guarded and all but impregnable. The rooms were many, but there were always Guards there, or tutors pacing back and forth, or nannies or cooks hustling about. Lucia's world was constantly busy, and yet she was alone. She was trapped tighter than ever now, and the faces that surrounded her looked on her with worry, thinking how the poor child's life must be miserable, for she was hated by the world.

But Lucia was not sad. She had met many new people over the last few weeks, a veritable whirl compared to her life before the thief had taken a lock of her hair. Her mother visited often, and brought with her important people, Baraks and ur-Baraks and officials and merchants. Lucia was always on her best behaviour. Sometimes they looked on her with barely concealed disgust, sometimes with apprehension, and sometimes with kindness. Some of those who came prepared to despise her departed in bewilderment, wondering how such an intelligent and pretty child could harbour the evil the Weavers warned of. Some left their prejudices behind when they walked out of the door; others clutched them jealously to their breast.

'Your mother is being very brave,' said Zaelis, her favourite of all the tutors. 'She is showing her allies and her enemies what a good and clever girl you are. Sometimes a person's fear of the unknown is far, far worse than the reality.'

Lucia accepted this, in her dreamy-eyed, preoccupied kind of way. She knew there was more, deeper down; but those answers would come in time.

It was while she was with Zaelis one balmy afternoon that the Blood Empress Anais brought the Emperor.

She was sitting on a mat by the long, triangular windows in her study room, with the sunlight cut into great dazzling teeth and cast on to the sandy tiles of the floor before her. Zaelis was teaching her the catechisms of the birth of the stars, recounting the questions and answers in his throaty, molten bass tones. She knew the story well enough: how Abinaxis, the One Star, burst and scattered the universe, and from that chaos came the first generation of the gods. Sitting neatly and with her usual appearance of inattentiveness, Lucia was listening and remembering, while in the back of her head she heard the whispers of the spirits of the west wind, hissing nonsense to each other as they flowed across the city.

Zaelis paused as a gust ruffled through the room, and Lucia looked quickly upwards, as if someone had spoken by her shoulder.

'What are they saying, Lucia?' he asked.

Lucia looked back at Zaelis. He alone treated her abilities as if they were something precious, and not something to be hidden. All the tutors, nannies and staff were sworn to secrecy on pain of death with regards to her talents; they looked away if they caught her playing with ravens, and shushed her if she spoke of what the old tree in the garden was saying that day. But Zaelis encouraged her, believed her. In fact, his fervour worried her a little at times.

'I don't know,' she said. 'I can't understand them.'

'One day maybe you will,' said Zaelis.

'Probably,' Lucia replied offhandedly.

She sensed Durun's arrival a moment before she heard him. He frightened her with his intensity of passion. He was a knot of fire, always burning in anger or pride or hate or lust. In the absence of anything that heated his blood, he lapsed into boredom. He had no finer emotions, no intellectual interests or stirrings of mild introspection. His flame roared blindingly or not at all.

The Emperor strode into the room and halted before them, his black cloak settling reluctantly around his broad shoulders. Anais was with him. Zaelis stood and made proper obeisance; Lucia did so as well.

'So this is she,' Durun said, ignoring Zaelis completely.

'It is the same she as you saw previously, on every occasion you bothered yourself to visit her,' Anais replied. It was clear by their manner that they had just argued. Anais's face was flushed.

'Then I had no idea that I was harbouring a viper,' Durun answered coldly. He looked Lucia over. She returned his gaze with a placid calm. 'If it weren't for the distance in those eyes,' he mused, 'I would think her a normal child.'

'She is a normal child,' Anais snapped. 'You are as bad as Vyrrch. He breathes down my neck, eager for the chance to-' She stopped herself, glanced at Lucia. 'Must you do this in front of her?'

'You've told her, I suppose? About how the city is rising against her?'

Zaelis opened his mouth and shut it again. He knew better than to interfere on behalf of the child. If the Emperor would not listen to his wife, he certainly would not listen to a scholar.

'You'll bring this land to ruin with your ambition, Anais,' Durun accused. 'Your arrogance in making this abomination the heir to the throne will tear Saramyr apart. Every life lost will be on your head!'

'So be it,' she hissed. 'Wars have been fought for less important causes. Look at her, Durun! She is a beautiful child… your child! She is all you could hope for in a daughter, in an heir! Don't be blinded by a hatred wrapped up in tradition and lore. You listen too much to the Weavers, and think too little for yourself.'

'So did you,' he replied. 'Before you spawned that.' He flung out a finger at Lucia, who had been watching the exchange impassively. 'Now you use arguments that you would have scorned in days gone by. She's an Aberrant, and she's no child of mine!'

With that, he turned with a melodramatic sweep of his cloak and stalked away. Anais's face was tight with rage, but one look at her daughter and it softened. She knelt down next to Lucia, so that their faces were level, and hugged her.

'Don't listen, my child,' she murmured. 'Your father doesn't understand. He's angry, but he'll learn. They all will.'

Lucia didn't reply; but then, she seldom did.