The Weavers of Saramyr (40 page)

The surge
of kana
ripped through her like a stampede. The world switched from reality to the infinity of golden threads, warp and weft, a diorama of beautiful light that burned her from within like molten metal in her veins. Her irises darkened to a deep red, and she lashed out in reaction to the fear, the passion, the surprise. She saw the bright pulse of Mamak’s heart as a rushing junction of threads, the stream of his blood as it passed beneath his transparent skin, and she rent it apart with a thought. He burst in a shower of flaming gore, spattering his stunned companions and spraying the bed with shards of charred bone and brain. Asara shrieked and threw herself backwards, her instincts reminding her of what had happened the last time she had seen Kaiku like this.

But this time it was tighter, more focused. This time there was no surprise in its coming, and Kaiku managed to steer the rush, to force it away and direct it. With a sweep of her hand, she blasted the other men in the room, shredding through their fibres; and where the threads snapped, flame followed, an explosive release of energy.

THE WEAVERS OF SARAAV/R

Mamak’s companions became blazing pillars of fire, their howls silenced in seconds as their lungs and throats charred, their eyes bubbled, cooking from inside and out. One of them lunged at Kaiku in a last, idiot attempt for revenge or supplication, but he only slumped on to the bed and ignited it.

Kaiku felt the
kana
blow itself out like a candle in a gale, and her vision seemed to fade back to normality, the golden threads disappearing beneath solid forms and the light from the blaze that lit the shadowy room.

The room was afire.

It took her a moment to assimilate her surroundings again. Asara was already up, her nightrobe pulled back into place to preserve her modesty, eyeing Kaiku warily. She seemed unable to decide which was more dangerous - the flames, or the one who had brought them. The air was filling with a choking, sickly reek of burning flesh, and black smoke gathered on the ceiling.

Kaiku swayed, feeling her head grow light. The effort of corralling the
kana
so as not to incinerate the entire room had brought her to the brink of fainting. Asara saw her weaken, and was on the bed with her in a moment, grabbing her arm.

‘Come on,’ she hissed. ‘We have to go.’

Kaiku allowed herself to be pulled, her head lolling on her neck like a marionette’s, her red eyes drowsing. Asara gathered up their clothes in a single scoop and threw them over the burning corpses, through the open doorway and out into the corridor. Then she slung both packs and rifles on her back and propelled Kaiku off the burning bed. The flames were licking up the walls now. Mamak’s charred remains lay across the doorway, still ablaze, blocking their exit.

‘We have to jump him.’

‘I cannot jump,’ Kaiku murmured.

Asara slapped her, hard. She recoiled, her eyes focusing.

‘Jump,’ she hissed.

Kaiku took a two-step run and sprang over Mamak’s corpse, too fast for the flames to find purchase on her gown. The corridor outside seemed freezing in comparison to the room she had escaped from. She could hear voices and footsteps downstairs, but she was already grabbing her trousers and tugging them on over her nightrobe. Asara burst through the doorway then, following

Kaiku’s lead. She pulled on her travel clothes just as the owner of the lodging house and several tenants with water pails came up the stairs and into the corridor, and a moment later they found themselves staring at the barrel of a rifle.

‘I assure you, I am a very good shot,’ Asara said, her eye to the sight.

‘What happened?’ the owner demanded.

‘Our erstwhile guide decided he was tired of waiting for us to rehire him and intended to liberate us of our money,’ Asara replied. She had surmised as much by their entrance, and by the unwise way Tane had flaunted their money on the trip down from the mountains.

‘Get out of the way!’ one of the men behind him cried. ‘The place is burning, by the spirits.’

‘Pick up the packs,’ she said quietly over her shoulder. Kaiku obeyed wearily. The burning of the
kana
was already causing her to spasm in pain, jolts of agony pulsing through her body.

‘What do you want?’ the owner cried. ‘Let me put out the fire! This is my livelihood!’

‘Two horses, from your stables,’ Asara said. ‘We can buy them from you, or we can take them by force. Choose.’

‘Heart’s blood,’ breathed another man suddenly. ‘Look at her eyes!’

It was Kaiku he was referring to.

‘Aberrant!’ somebody hissed.

‘Yes, Aberrant,’ Asara replied. ‘And she will do to you what she has done to that room if you get in our way. The horses,
now
, or we stay here until this whole place burns down.’

‘I’ll take you,’ the owner snapped. ‘You men, put out that fire!’

With Kaiku in tow, Asara edged down the corridor. The men rushed past her, shying back from Kaiku with mingled disgust and fear, carrying their buckets to the blaze.

‘Good horses,’ said Asara, ‘and we’ll pay you the worth of this place.’

The owner looked at her hatefully, but he knew what it might mean. A new start, in a new place, where life was not so hard and grim. ‘You have the money now?’

Asara nodded.

‘Then let the place burn. Come with me,’ he said.

They rode that night, driving their horses, heading south through

the biting wind across Fo, putting as much distance as they could between themselves and Chaim. Kaiku slept lashed to the saddle, for her
kana
had burned her out from within, and Asara kept by her side to guide her mount.

How strange the ways that the gods take us
, Asara thought, and rode on as dawn lightened the east.

[ wenty-Five

The Xarana Fault lay far to the south of Axekami, bracketed at its east and west end by the rivers Rahn and Zan. It was a place of dark legend, a vast swathe of shattered land haunted by the ghosts of ill memory and stalked by restless spirits, who had been shaken awake in the tumult of its formation and never quite settled again.

The histories told of how Jaan tu Vinaxis, venerated founder of the Saramyr Empire, had built the first Saramyr city of Gobinda in that place as a commemoration of the defeat of the aboriginal Ugati folk. At that time the land was flat and green, and Gobinda prospered and became a great city on the banks of the Zan. But Torus, Jaan’s son, was usurped by the third Blood Emperor, Bizak tu Cho. Stories speak of the debauchery that Bizak entertained, orgies of godlessness and excess. Then came Winterfall, the day on which all men must give praise to Ocha for the beginning of a new cycle of the year. Bizak, after a three-day celebration, was too exhausted to attend. He sent his daughter in his stead.

At that, Ocha was angered. The histories tell that wise men dreamed of a great boar that night, with breath of fire and smoke and jagged tusks, who stamped the earth and split it asunder. They warned the Emperor to make amends to Ocha, reminding him that he was only Emperor of men, and Ocha was Emperor of the gods. But Bizak in his hubris would not listen, and so they fled.

There were few survivors of Ocha’s mighty retribution, but those who escaped painted a terrifying picture. The ground roared and bucked and split, breaking into sections like stone hit with a hammer and pitching the people of Gobinda howling into the yawning chasms. Magma spewed from the earth, belching ash into

the sky and blackening the sun, turning the world to a seething cauldron of fiery red light. Huge sections of the land plummeted suddenly hundreds of feet; rock shattered; lightning flashed; and over it all was a bellowing and screeching, as of a vast, enraged boar. Gobinda fell into the earth and was swallowed, and Bizak tu Cho, his daughter and all his bloodline went with it.

When the destruction was over, the land was buckled and ruined. The Rahn and the Zan, which had previously flowed true, were now kinked with immense waterfalls as they dropped to the newly sunken landscape. The Xarana Fault - as it came to be known, when more was understood of tectonics and the ways of the inner earth - was a maze of folds, juts, plateaux, valleys, moraines and promontories: a landscape of utter chaos. In the many hundred years since the cataclysm, it had grown new grass and trees that smoothed over its edges somewhat; but its lessons had never been forgotten. It was still a place of bad luck and ill fortune, and was seldom visited by the honest folk of the city. Spirits were abundant there; some benevolent, most of them not.

But some dared to make their home in the hard lands of the Xarana Fault. Those who sought solitude, or needed to hide; those who would risk the dangers for the rewards of precious metals and gems unearthed by the ancient upheaval; those who had found nothing for them in the cities and the fields, and wanted a new start. There were as many reasons as there were people living in the lands of the Fault, and amid the turbulent landscape dozens of small communities lived side by side, some in harmony and some in hostility. But all had the single understanding: the business of the Fault stayed in the Fault, and was not the outside world’s to know.

Cailin tu Moritat sat high in the saddle of a black mare, framed against the hot mid-morning sky. Beneath her, the ground fell in massive semicircular steps, irregular plateaux that piled haphazardly on top of each other. On the backs of these plates of earth was built a small town: dense clusters of houses, supply stores, an occasional bar and a smattering of tiny shrines nestling off the dirt tracks that passed as streets. Bridges and stairways linked the disparate levels together. It was a jumble, an accretion of a hundred different styles of architecture; this place had not been planned, but built as necessity dictated, and by many different hands. The angular, three-storey houses of the Southern Prefectures rose out of a clutter of low, broad Tchom Rin dwellings; balconied and

ornamented houses that would not have looked out of place in Axekami’s River District were shamed by the crafty austerity of their neighbours. Some of the dwellings had been here twenty years or more - a long time in the turbulent environment of the Fault -whereas others were still being built, wooden ribs and angle joists bristling from the wounds in their exteriors. Most of the building had been done around six years ago, when the Libera Dramach had engulfed the existing dwellings and begun to draw in people from all over Axekami, some of whom were construction engineers of no mean skill.

At the top, where the steps ran up against a mighty flank of stone, there were caves that went far into the hillside, their entrances decorated with whimsical etchings, blessings for those who entered and supplications to the gods. There, hidden within, a labyrinth of chambers lay, a secret network enshrouded in impenetrable rock.

From her vantage point on a nearby ridge, overlooking all, Cailin could see the scale of the industry that went on here. Everywhere there was movement. Workers scuttled back and forth with orders for this and that. Foremen hollered at their men. Towers were being erected, their skeletons aswarm. On one plateau, a score of men and women were being trained in the sword, jabbing and thrusting in unison to their master’s barked commands. The steps were littered with wooden cranes, lifts and bamboo scaffolding. Stacks of crates and bundled supplies were being hauled to and fro by carts that ran on curving tracks. Outposts were perched on the lips of the plateau, and sentries watched within, their eyes ranging out beyond the broken slopes to the short expanse of flat earth that surrounded them and the frowning walls of grim rock beyond. The rise of the neighbouring land sheltered this place from view so efficiently that it was only possible to see it from the edge of the valley that cradled it. There was no kind of organised army here, but the Xarana Fault was a brutal place, and any settlement that did not think and act as a fortress would soon find itself overrun.

Cailin allowed herself a tiny smile, the red and black triangles painted on her lips curving slightly. This was the Fold, the home of the Libera Dramach and, for the time being, also home to a small sisterhood of the Red Order. She could not help but admire the realisation of their leader’s vision. Few even knew of the existence of the Fold. For years now the Libera Dramach had been recruiting and gathering in secret, drawing from all sources equally. Bandit

gangs had been offered the chance to end their hand-to-mouth existence and join; scholars had been persuaded of the rightness of their cause; common folk who had a grudge against the Weavers -and these were legion - came in search of a way of striking back at those who had hurt them. With them came physicians, apothecaries, disenchanted soldiers, wives who had been turned out of home, vagrants, debtors. All found a place here. All were brought into the Fold. At the core were the Libera Dramach themselves, those sworn to the organisation, picked from among the hundreds who came. As to the rest, some believed in the cause, and some did not; but all found themselves a part of a community, self-governed and free of the laws of nobility or the Weavers; and that was a precious thing to many.

She still found it faintly surprising that such a disparate group of individuals might have kept a secret so large for so long, especially as most of the Libera Dramach spent their time away from the Fold, in the cities, going about their daily business. These were the spies, the suppliers, the network. But, though it was a potent rumour among common folk, word of the Fold had yet to reach the nobility - or, which was more likely, they had ignored it. The Xarana Fault was a place of secrets; there were vast illegal farms of amaxa root that supplied the cities without paying their taxes, whole enclaves of people who worshipped forbidden gods, monasteries where contact with the outside world was utterly shunned. Mention of the Fold would scarcely merit the attention of a noble. At least, not one who was not already part of the organisation. For the Libera Dramach had eyes even in the courts of the Empress, and there were many who believed as they did. Aberrants were not evil. The Heir-Empress should sit the throne.