The Skein of Lament (40 page)

‘No, you have subjugated it,’ he replied. ‘More, you have annexed it from the Ugati, who by your own laws had the rights to be here. You did not like your own country, so you took another.’

‘And on the way, we stopped at Okhamba, and the Tkiurathi came of that,’ she reminded him. ‘You cannot make me feel guilty for what my ancestors have done. You said yourself: I cannot help the circumstances of my birth.’

‘I do not ask you to feel guilty,’ he said. ‘I am only showing you the price of your “developed” culture. Your people should not feel responsible for it; but it terrifies me that you ignore it and condone it. You forget the lessons of the past because they are unpalatable, like your noble families ignore the damage the Weavers are doing to your land.’

Kaiku was quiet, listening to the night noises, thinking. There was no heat in the argument. She had gone past the point of feeling defensive about Saramyr, especially since her culture had long ago ostracised her for being Aberrant. It was merely interesting to hear such a coldly analytical and unfavourable point of view on ways of life she had always taken for granted. His perspective intrigued her, and they had talked often over the last few days about their differences. Some aspects of the Tkiurathi way she found impossible to believe would work in practice, and others she found incomprehensible; but there were many valid and enviable facets to their mode of living as well, and she learned a lot from those conversations.

Now she turned matters to more immediate concerns. She brushed her fringe away from her face and adopted a more decisive tone.

‘Matters are beyond doubt,’ she said. ‘The Weavers have a way to control the Aberrants. We do not know exactly how, but it is connected to the creatures that we have found on the back of the Aberrant’s necks.’ She rolled her shoulders tiredly. ‘We can assume that every Aberrant down there has one.’

‘And we know now that it is not the Weavers who control them,’ Tsata added. ‘But the
other
masked ones.’

‘So we have that much, at least, to aid us,’ she said, scratching at some mud on her boot. ‘What is next?’

‘We must fill in the gaps in our knowledge,’ Tsata replied. ‘We must kill one of the black-robed men.’

The next day dawned red, and stayed red until late morning. History would record that the Surananyi blew for three days in Tchom Rin after the Empress Laranya’s death, striking unexpectedly and without warning. The hurricanes flensed the deserts in the east, sandstorms raged, and the dust rose like a cloud beyond the mountains to stain Nuki’s eye the colour of blood. Later, when the news of Laranya’s tragic suicide had spread across the empire, it would be said that the tempest was the fury of the goddess Suran at the death of one of her most beloved daughters, and that Mos was forever cursed in her eyes.

But Lucia knew nothing of this beyond a vague unease that settled in her marrow that morning, and did not abate until the Surananyi had ceased. She sat by a rocky brook on the northern side of the valley where the Fold lay, and looked to the east, and imagined she could hear a distant howling as of some unearthly voice in rage and torment.

Flen sat with her. He was tall for his age, gangly with sudden growth, possessed of a head of dark brown hair that flopped loosely over his eyes and a quick, ready smile. He had not smiled all that much this morning.

Lucia had changed.

She had not told him about the trip to Alskain Mar until after they had returned, and then only in the barest terms. Of course none of the adults thought he was important enough to know, but it was Lucia’s decision to keep it a secret that hurt him. It was not entirely a surprise: nothing Lucia did was too unusual, for she had always seemed to operate on some level quite apart from everybody else, and it made her strange and fascinating. But it troubled him deeply that she was
different
now, and he was frightened that she was becoming more detached.

It was not something he could describe; only a feeling, in the instinctive way that adolescents navigated their way through the passage to adulthood. Like the sly, forbidden self-assuredness of a newly shed virginity that the inexperienced unconsciously deferred to; like the constantly switching hierarchy of friendships and leaders and scapegoats that was ingrained in pubescents without them knowing who gave them the rules or even that they were following rules at all.

There was a new distance in her pale blue eyes now. Something had been shed, and a new skin grown underneath; something lost, something gained. She had talked to a creature that was one step down from a god. She had
died
, however briefly, and it had shifted her perspective somewhere that Flen could not follow. She seemed to have aged, not outwardly but in the measure of her responses and her tone. And all Flen could think was that he was losing his best friend, and how unfair it was.

They sat together for a long time on the edge of that rocky brook, leaning against a boulder. Tall grasses rose all around them, tickling the backs of their knees. The brook trickled through a chicane of broken stone from the valley rim, and dragonflies droned about, moving in jerky little spurts to hover before their faces, studying them uncomprehendingly. The sky was pink, and the cascading tiers of houses to their right had a sinister and brooding quality in that light, no longer homely but a jumble of jagged edges and smoothly rounded blades.

Below them, on the flat valley floor, a herd of banathi was grazing, watched over by a dozen men and women on horseback. Flen watched them shamble idly about, cropping the grass with their wide, rubbery mouths. They were huge creatures but very docile, beasts seemingly destined to exist only to feed predators. Though the bulls possessed enormous curving horns, they only ever used them in the mating season when competing for females. In ancient times, they had roamed freely across the plains; now they were almost entirely bred for meat and milk.

It was while Flen was musing on the lot of the banathi that Lucia finally spoke, as he knew she would.

‘Forgive me,’ she said quietly.

Flen shrugged. ‘I always do,’ he said.

She took his arm and leaned her head on his shoulder. ‘I know what you think. That things are different now.’

‘Are they?’

‘Not between us,’ she replied.

Flen adjusted himself so that they were both more comfortable. He had bony shoulders.

‘You understand, though,’ she said. ‘There are things I can’t explain. Things there are no words for.’

‘You live in a place different to me,’ he said. ‘It’s like . . . you live beyond a door, and I can only see through the cracks around the edges. You see what’s inside the room, but I can only catch a glimpse. It’s always been that way.’ He put a hand on her thin forearm, her delicate wrist. ‘You’re alone, and everyone else is shut out.’

She smiled a little. How like Flen, to turn around her apology to make it seem as if it were she who deserved sympathy.

She drew herself upright again. ‘I shouldn’t tell you this . . .’ she said, her voice dropping in volume.

‘But you will,’ he grinned.

‘This is very important, Flen,’ she told him. ‘You can’t let anybody else hear of it.’

‘When have I ever?’ he asked rhetorically.

Lucia regarded him for a moment. She had a way of seeing into people that was frankly uncanny; but she did not need to doubt him. She knew that Flen counted her the most important person alive, and not because of any expectations of healing the land or ruling the empire. It was simply because she was his best friend.

There was one thing that she had never quite been able to puzzle out about him, though: why did he
want
to be with her? Not that she thought herself unpopular: on the contrary, she had a wide circle of friends, who seemingly came to her without any effort on her part, attracted by some magnetism of personality that she did not really understand since she was by no means the most lively or social of people. But Flen had been virtually inseparable from her since the day they had met. He had always sought her out before any others, had always possessed a seemingly endless patience for her quirks and oddities. She had given virtually nothing back for a long time. She enjoyed his company, and allowed him to be with her, but she was in a world of her own and she had learned by then that it was useless inviting anyone to join her there.

Yet he had persisted. He was a popular boy himself, and she often wondered why he did not spend his time with someone whom he did not need to make such an effort for; but she was always his priority, and gradually,
gradually
, she became used to him. Of all the people she had ever known, he was the one closest to understanding her, and she loved him for it. She loved his guileless, unselfish heart and his honesty. Though they made a strange pair, they were friends, in the purity of that state that only exists before the complication of adulthood corrupts it.

‘I’ll tell you what I learned in Alskain Mar,’ she said.

‘Spirits, I thought you’d never get round to it,’ Flen said mischievously. She did not laugh or smile, but she knew it was his way to joke when he was nervous or uncertain, and he was suddenly both. Lucia’s expression was grave. She was remembering the horror on Zaelis’s face as she passed on to him the things the spirit had showed her, the coldness in Cailin’s eyes.

‘Maybe
learn
is the wrong word,’ she corrected herself. ‘I didn’t learn as if someone was teaching me. It was . . . as if I was remembering and prophesying at the same time; as if it was a memory and a prediction of a future that had already come to pass. At first it was hard to understand . . . it still is hard for me to think on it. The things I know now aren’t clear.’ She looked down at the ground and began to fiddle with a blade of grass. ‘It was like hanging onto the fin of a whale, and having it plunge you down further than you can imagine to the wonders at the bottom of the sea. Except that your eyes can’t focus underwater, so it’s all a blur. You can’t open your mouth to speak. And sooner or later you remember that the whale doesn’t need to breathe as much as you do.’

‘What did it show you?’

‘It showed me the witchstones,’ she said, and her gaze seemed suddenly haunted.

When she did not elaborate for a time, Flen prompted her: ‘And what did you see?’

She shook her head slightly, as if in denial of what she was about to say. ‘Flen, I am part of something much bigger than anyone thought,’ she whispered. She clutched his hands and looked up to meet his stare. ‘We all are. This isn’t just about an empire; this isn’t a matter of who sits on the throne, no matter how many thousand lives are at stake. The Golden Realm itself watches us with the keenest intent, and the gods themselves are playing their hand.’

‘You’re saying that the gods are controlling things?’ Flen asked, unable to keep a hint of scepticism from his voice.

‘No, no,’ Lucia said. ‘The gods don’t
control
. They’re more subtle than that. They use avatars and omens, to bend the will of their faithful to do their work. There’s no predestination, no destiny. We all have our choices to make. It’s us who have to fight our battles.’

‘Then what . . .’

‘Kaiku always said that the witchstones were alive, but she was only half right,’ Lucia explained, uncharacteristically hurried. The words were trembling out of her and she could not stop them. ‘They’re not just alive, they’re
aware
! Not like the spirits of the rocks in the earth; not like the simple thoughts of the trees. They’re intelligent, and malevolent, and they are becoming more so with every passing day.’

Flen barely knew whether to credit this at all, but he did not have the chance to decide.

‘The Weavers are not our true enemies, Flen!’ Lucia cried, her face an unnatural red in the dust-veiled morning sun. ‘They believe themselves the puppet masters, but they are only the puppets. Slaves to the witchstones.’

‘This is—’ Flen began, but Lucia interrupted him again.

‘You have to hear me out!’ she snapped, and Flen was shocked into silence. For the first time he began to appreciate the depth of Lucia’s terror at what she had found out in Alskain Mar. ‘The witchstones
use
the Weavers. They make them think that they are operating to their own agenda, but no Weaver really knows who sets that agenda; they believe it part of a collective consciousness. That consciousness is the will of the witchstones. The Weavers are only the foot-soldiers. They are
addicts
, trapped by their longing for the witchstone dust in their Masks, not even knowing that in gaining their powers they are subverting themselves to a higher master.’

She looked around, as if fearing someone was listening; and indeed it seemed that way, for the dragonflies had quieted and departed, and the wind had fallen. ‘That first witchstone, the one beneath Adderach . . . it ensnared the miners who found it. It was weak then, starved for thousands of years, but they were weaker. They took the dust, driven by some compulsion they did not understand. They learned to give it blood in the same way. It grew, and as it grew its power grew, and it sent the Weavers out into the world to be its eyes and ears and hands. It sent them to find more witchstones.’

‘But what
are
the witchstones?’ Flen asked.

‘The answers were in front of us, but nobody wanted to believe it,’ Lucia whispered. ‘
I
would not have believed it, except that what the spirit of Alskain Mar showed me was more than truth or lies or fact or fiction. Even that spirit was not old enough to have witnessed what happened all that time ago, but it told me what it knew.’

She closed her eyes, squeezed them tightly shut, and when she spoke she was using a more formal mode of speech, used when referring directly to the gods.

‘The gods fought, in an epoch when civilisation had barely left its cradle. In that time, the entity we call Aricarat, youngest of Assantua and Jurani, made war in the Golden Realm, for reasons lost to history. He almost overthrew Ocha himself, but in a last stand his own parents led an army that slew him, in a battle that tore the skies. At his death, his own aspect in the tapestry of the world – the fourth moon that bore his name – was destroyed, and pieces of the moon rained down onto the world in the cataclysm that Saran told us about.’ She squeezed his hands harder. ‘But he was not dead,’ she whispered. ‘Not while a part of him remained in the tapestry . . . in
our
world. The moon came down in pieces, and some of those pieces survived. In each of them, a tiny fragment of Aricarat’s spirit remained. Dormant.’