On the other side of the row of rocks, a narrow trench cut through the stony earth, scattered with thorny, blight-twisted bushes and straggling weeds. The shrilling’s paws crunched on loose gravel and shale as it walked. Its steady, casual gait disturbed Kaiku. As with the other creatures they had encountered, she could not get used to the eerie sensation that it was patrolling. Not looking for food or marking its territory or any other understandable animal instinct, but acting as a sentry. It went slow and alert, and if they followed it for long enough Kaiku was certain that it would come back to this spot, treading the same path over and over until it returned to the flood plain and another Aberrant would appear in its stead.
They were not acting like animals. It should have been carnage down on the plain, with that many violent predators in close proximity, but an uneasy peace existed as of enemies forced to be allies by necessity. Skirmishes and squabbles broke out, but never more than an angry snap or scratch before both parties retreated. And then there were the perfectly regular patterns of the gristle-crows’ flight during the day, and the curiously organised patrols at night. No, there was something unnatural here.
Tonight, Kaiku meant to find out for sure what that was.
She kept her eyes on the stealthy Okhamban ahead of her. When he was like this, he seemed half-animal himself, a being of primal energy capable of shocking viciousness; it was a bizarre alter-ego to the quiet and contemplative man who had accompanied them across the sea, with his strange and alien mind-set.
A little way ahead of him, a hazy splash of pallid green moonlight spilled through a gap in the rocks. He looked back at her, making an up-and-over motion with one tattooed arm. She took his meaning. Adjusting her rifle on its strap across her back, she slipped up to the dark face of the barrier to their right. She listened: the gentle trill of the Aberrant drifted back to her, the scrape of its paws. With a deliberate tread, it passed the spot where she crouched.
In one quick motion, she pulled herself onto the top of the row and jammed her feet into the uneven folds to brace herself. She swung her rifle around and sighted down into the trench. Her ascent was not as quiet as she would have liked, but it made little difference. Shrillings navigated like bats, blatting a series of frequencies which were picked up and sorted by sense glands in their throat, building up a picture according to which frequencies returned to them and how long they took. It made them exceptional night hunters in their element, but it had the side-effect of limiting their field of perception to what was in front of them. Kaiku had her rifle trained on it squarely, but it kept steadily walking away from her down the trench, towards the gap in the rocks where Tsata waited.
She did not fire. Squatting in the light of Neryn and uncomfortably exposed, she held her nerve and her trigger finger. She was there as a back-up only, in case the worst should happen. The report of a rifle would alert everyone and everything within miles to their presence.
The shrillings were lithe and deadly beasts, an uncomfortable blending of mammal and reptile, preserving the most advantageous aspects of both. Their size, bone structure and movements were like a big cat, but their skin was covered with tough, overlapping scales of natural armour. Elongated skulls curved to a long, smooth crest. Their upper jaws were lipless, and rigid and beaklike, but from beneath them dark red gums sheathed killing teeth. They walked on all fours, though they could stand on two legs for a short time while balancing on their tails, and their forepaws each held a single outsized claw which could unzip flesh and separate muscle effortlessly. They were efficient carnivores who had climbed to the top of their rapidly shifting food chain in the blighted areas of the Tchamil Mountains, using their night-seeing capabilities to pinpoint animals that hid at the sound of their warbling. Fast, streamlined and deadly.
But so was Tsata.
He waited until the creature had just passed the gap in the rocks before he sprang. Movement so close to its body was picked up by some peripheral sense, and it curved its spine to meet him, its jaws gaping wide. But he had predicted it, and swung to one side, so that its teeth snapped shut on nothing but air. He rammed one end of his gutting-hook into its outstretched neck, behind its crest. It spasmed once, but in that time Tsata had swung onto its back, using the embedded gutting-hook as a lever, and buried his second blade into the other side of its throat. Its legs collapsed beneath it and it started to thrash before Tsata wrenched both blades upward, tearing them through the muscle of its neck and severing its vertebrae in a gout of blood and spinal fluid. The shrilling flopped. It was all over in an instant.
Kaiku scrambled down from her perch and slid into the trench. Tsata’s gutting-hooks were laid aside, and he had turned the Aberrant’s head so as to move its crest out of the way. Its black eye reflected his face as he felt amid the pulses of gore that ran down its neck.
‘Have you found it?’ Kaiku asked as she hurried up to him. His bare arms and hands were dripping with noxious blood, black in the green moonlight.
‘Here,’ he said. Kaiku met his glance. ‘Can you do this?’
‘I have to risk it,’ she said. ‘For the pash.’
He grinned. ‘One day I will teach you how to use that word properly.’
The fleeting moment of camaraderie was too brief to enjoy. She put her hands where his were, and felt the repellent skin of the black, wormlike creature attached to the arch of the shrilling’s neck, just above the point where Tsata’s blades had cut. This was the fourth Aberrant they had killed between them, and every time they had found one of these nauseating things in the same place, deep in the flesh, dead.
This one was not dead yet, but it had only seconds left, its body failing as its host’s systems ceased. Seconds were enough.
Kaiku touched it, and opened the Weave. Tsata watched her as her eyes fluttered closed. The dark gush of the Aberrant’s blood over the wrists and hands became a trickle as the heart stopped pumping.
The link was easy to follow, once she was inside it. The slug-thing’s fading consciousness was like an anchor in the body of the Aberrant beast. Small tendrils of influence were retreating as it died, the hooks it had buried into its deadly host; but the strongest link arced away across the Fault, connected to some far destination like an umbilical cord. She followed it, and it led her to a nexus where dozens of other similar links converged like ribbons around a maypole, wafting in the flow of the Weave.
She read the fibres, and the answers came to her.
The nexus was one of the tall, black-robed strangers. They were not Weavers; they could not shape and twist the Weave. Rather, they were the hands that held a multitude of leashes, and the leashes tethered the Aberrants through the vile entities embedded close to their spines. They were the handlers.
That was how the Aberrants were under control, she realised. Carefully, she probed further. She was not sure to what extent the link operated: did the handlers actively know what the Aberrants know? Did they see through the beasts’ eyes? No, surely not, for if the handlers were linked mind-to-mind with the beasts then they would know of Tsata and Kaiku’s incursions, and the Weavers would have reacted with much more alarm. She gave up trying to guess; it was useless to speculate at this point.
Her eyes flicked open, and the irises were deepest crimson. She stepped back.
‘As we thought,’ she murmured. Her gaze went to Tsata’s. ‘We should go. They will be coming.’
The two of them slipped up the trench, disappearing into the shadows. Tsata led with practiced ease; Kaiku followed, alert for danger. Distantly, a yammering and howling had begun, but by the time the other Aberrants arrived at the scene of the death, the perpetrators had long fled.
Kaiku’s glance strayed to the Mask that lay on the ground beside her. Tsata, hunkered down next to her in the glade, intercepted the look.
‘It is wearing you down,’ he said softly. ‘Is it not?’
Kaiku nodded slightly. She picked up her pack and threw it on top of the Mask, obscuring its mocking expression.
/> The night was warm, but a cooler breeze hinted at the promise of distant winter. Chikkikii cracked and snapped like branches in a fire from the darkness, a staccato percussion as they clicked their rigid wing-cases, underpinning the melodic cheeping of other nocturnal insects and the occasional hoot of some arboreal animal. Neryn’s smooth face glowed through the gently swaying network of leaves overhead, dappling the small clearing in restful light, playing across the arches of tough roots that poked out of the ground and the colonies of weeds and foliage that had made their home here. A spray of moonflowers nodded lazily, their petals open in drowsy grey stars, questing up toward the life-giving illumination.
The glade lay beyond the Weavers’ barrier of misdirection, a mile east of the point where it began. They never rested inside the danger area, especially not now that the enemy was on the alert. Ever since the first Aberrant sentry had surprised them and they had been forced to kill it, the patrols had been more intense, and gristle-crows scoured the sky during daylight hours. They had only barely escaped that time, for they had wasted precious minutes examining the strange, slimy thing attached to the sentry’s neck, and only Tsata’s instincts had warned them in time to evade the dozen other Aberrants that came running. It had been just another part of the puzzle: how did the creatures know when one of their own had died?
Since then Kaiku had been forced to shield them more than once from the malevolent attention of a Weaver, hiding them as an unseen presence swept across the domain in search of the mysterious intruders. The Weavers suspected that something was amiss, and the occasional death of one of their creatures must have caused consternation by evidence of the increased security; but they could not find the cause of the disturbance.
They were limited in their thinking. They imagined a rogue tribesman from elsewhere in the Fault had somehow got inside and was now trapped and causing them minor inconvenience. They had not considered the fact that someone was passing freely through their barrier, and so they never looked outside it. Nor, of course, did the Aberrants stray beyond those boundaries. Kaiku and Tsata took advantage of that, to sleep and plan in relative safety.
‘I wish to apologise,’ Tsata said, out of nowhere.
‘Yes?’ Kaiku said mildly.
‘I was ungenerous in my judgement of you,’ he said. He shifted position to a more comfortable cross-legged arrangement: it was one of the few mannerisms that Saramyr and Okhamba shared.
‘I had forgotten about it,’ Kaiku lied, but Tsata knew her people’s ways well enough not to be fooled.
‘Among the Tkiurathi it is necessary to say what we think,’ he explained. ‘Since we do not own things, since our community is based on sharing, it is not good to keep things inside us. If we resent someone for taking too much food at every meal, we will tell them so; we do not let it fester. Our equilibrium is maintained by approval or disapproval of the pash, and from that we determine the common good.’
Kaiku regarded him evenly with dark red eyes.
‘I said that you took on this cause for selfish reasons, and it is still true,’ he went on. ‘But you are unselfish in your pursuit of that cause. You make many sacrifices, and you ask of nobody what you would not do yourself. I admire that. It runs counter to my experience of Saramyr folk.’
Kaiku could not decide whether to feel praised or insulted by that, for he had complimented her at the same time as deriding her countrymen. She chose to take it in a forgiving spirit.
‘You are brutal in your honesty, and frank with your opinions,’ she said with a weary smile. ‘It takes a little time to get accustomed to it. But I did not hold myself offended by what you said.’
His reaction to that was impenetrable. She watched him for a short while. She had become quite used to him now, from the sap-stiffened orange-blond hair that swept back over his skull to the unusual pallor of his skin and the curves of the pale green tattoos over his face and down his bare arms to his fingertips. He no longer seemed foreign, only strange, in the way Lucia was strange. And he was certainly not hampered by the language barrier. He had improved since he had arrived on the shores of her homeland, and his Saramyrrhic was virtually flawless now. In fact, he was uncommonly articulate when he wanted to be.
‘What do you think of us, Tsata?’ she asked. ‘Of Aberrants like me?’
Tsata considered that for a time. ‘Nothing,’ he replied.
‘Nothing?’
‘We cannot help the circumstances of our birth,’ he said. ‘A strong man may be born a strong child, may always outmatch his friends in wrestling or lifting. But if he only uses his strength, if he relies on it alone to make him acceptable, he will fail in other ways. We should only be seen by how we utilise or overcome what we have.’
Kaiku sighed. ‘Your philosophies are so simple, and so clear,’ she said. ‘Yet ideals sometimes cannot weather reality. I wish that life were so uncomplicated.’
‘You have complicated it yourself,’ Tsata said. ‘With money and property and laws. You strive for things you do not need, and it makes you jealous and resentful and greedy.’
‘But with those things come medicines, art, philosophy,’ Kaiku answered him. ‘Do the wrongs in our society that we have to suffer outweigh the benefits of being able to cure plagues that would decimate less developed cultures like yours?’ She knew he would not take this as a slight; in fact, she had picked up some of his indelicacy of speech, for only days ago she would have phrased her meaning much more cunningly.
‘Your own scholar Jujanchi posited the theory that the survivors of such a plague would be the ones best able to carry on the race,’ he argued. ‘That your goddess Enyu weeds out the weaker elements.’
‘But you would allow yourself to be culled by the whims of nature,’ Kaiku put back. ‘You live within the forest, and let it rule you like it rules the animals. We have dominated this land.’
‘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.