‘We did it,’ he echoed, raising himself up on his elbows to kiss her.
When he had laid his head back on the pillow, she resumed stroking his hair, her fingertips tracing the white streak amid the black, then down his cheek to where the deep scar ran from the side of his left eye to the tip of his cheekbone.
‘I like this scar.’
‘I know,’ Reki said with a grin. ‘You never leave it alone.’
‘It is interesting to me,’ she offered as an explanation. ‘I do not scar.’
‘Everybody scars,’ he returned.
She let it drop, and for a long while she just looked at him, enjoying the heat of their bodies pressed together. He was no longer the boy she had seduced back in the Imperial Keep years ago. The loss of his father and sister, the sudden impact of responsibility upon him, had broken the chrysalis of adolescence and revealed the man inside. No longer able to hide from the world in books, nor under the repressive disapproval of Barak Goren or overshadowed by the vivacious Empress Laranya, he had been forced to cope and had surprised himself and everyone else with how well he had done so. The boy whom most had perceived as a weakling, while still not physically strong, had a fortitude of will beyond that which anybody had expected; and all his time spent in books had made him crafty and learned. His confidence in himself had multiplied rapidly, helped not least by the breathtaking woman who – to his bewilderment – had stayed with him through all his trials and supported him tirelessly. He was wondrously, madly in love with her. It was impossible not to be.
Of course, he still had no idea that she had murdered his sister Laranya and, by doing so, precipitated the death of his father Goren. Nobody knew that but Asara, and she, wisely, was not telling.
Blood Tanatsua had always been one of the strongest of the Tchom Rin high families, even after the slaughter in the Juwacha Pass that had claimed Barak Goren’s life. The small advance force that had lost their lives there had not crippled the family, for the bulk of their armies had still been in Jospa, unable to respond fast enough to the news of Laranya’s death. But under Reki’s astute guidance, they had risen over the space of four years to the prime power in the desert.
It was not, however, all his doing. Circumstance had worked in his favour. The desert had remained a hard territory for the Weavers to conquer because the Aberrant predators that formed their army were not adapted to the sands and were at a great disadvantage there. But in recent months, a new type of Aberrant had appeared, one which might have been born for the desert, and it had begun decimating those territories near the mountains. Jospa, the seat of Blood Tanatsua, was in the deep desert and had yet to be threatened by this, but the other families had suddenly realised just how much danger they were in, and it was this that had spurred the sudden desire to unify. Blood Tanatsua had not been weakened by these attacks as their rivals had.
Then there was Asara. More than once a stout rival or an insurmountable obstacle to Reki’s ascent had disappeared quietly and mysteriously. In the desert the use of assassination as a political tool was a little more overtly acceptable than in the west – hence their more thorough security – and Asara was the perfect assassin. Reki knew nothing of this: she took care to spend time away from him often, so that it would not occur to him that these instances of good fortune always coincided with her absences. Nor did he notice the occasional vanishing of a servant or a dancing-girl from their lands. He lived in ignorance of the nature of his wife; but then, he was far from the first man to ever do so.
‘Reki . . .’ Asara murmured.
‘I recognise that tone,’ he said.
She sighed and slid off him, lying on her back and looking up at the ceiling. He rolled onto his side, his hand on her smooth stomach, and kissed her softly on the neck.
‘You are going away again,’ he said.
She made a noise low in her throat to indicate he was correct. ‘Reki, this will not just be for a week, or even several weeks,’ she said. She felt him tense slightly through his fingers on her skin.
‘How long?’ he said, his voice tight.
‘I do not know,’ she replied. She rolled onto her side to face him; his hand slid over to her hip. ‘Reki, I am not leaving you. Not in that way. I will be back.’
She could see his distress, though he fought to hide it from her. She even felt bad about it, and guilt was not something that Asara was used to feeling. Like it or not, this man had got under her skin in a way nobody but Kaiku ever had before. She could not have said if she loved him or not – she was too empty and hollow to find that emotion within herself – but she did not despise him, and that to her was as good as love considering that she secretly despised almost everyone.
‘I have to go with Mishani to the Southern Prefectures. To Araka Jo,’ she said.
‘Why?’ he asked, and in that one word was all the pain of the wound she had just dealt him.
‘There is something I must do there.’
It was as blunt an answer as he had learned to expect from her. Her past was off-limits to him, and he had been forced to accept that before they married. Though she seemed little older than him, she had a wealth of knowledge and experience far beyond her years, and she forbade him to pry into how she had obtained it. It was a necessary stain on their relationship. Even Asara might be caught out with a lie if she had to invent a watertight past for her new self and maintain it over years of intimacy. The truth was, she was past her ninetieth harvest; but her body did not age, renewing itself constantly as long as it was fed with the lives of others. To admit that was to admit that she was Aberrant, and that would ruin everything she had worked to achieve even if it did not result in her immediate execution.
Reki was bitterly silent. After a few moments, she felt she had to give him something more.
‘I made a deal, a long time ago. It is something that we both want, Reki. But you must trust me when I tell you that you cannot know what it is, nor how much it means to me.’ She ran a sculpted nail along his arm. ‘You know I have secrets. I warned you that one day my past might affect our present.’ Her fingers twined in between his and held his grip. ‘Please,’ she whispered. ‘I know your frustration. But let me go without anger. You are my love.’
Tears were in her eyes now, and answering tears welled in his. He could not bear to see her cry, and Asara knew it. The tears were a calculated deceit; they melted him. He kissed her, and the sobs turned to panting, and they joined again with something like desperation, as if he could salve the grief in his breast by dousing it in her throes.
By the time they were spent, he had already resigned himself to sorrow. She could always make him do as she wished. She had his heart, even if sometimes he suspected that he did not have hers.
FIVE
Nuki’s eye was rising in the east as the barge lumbered downstream, following the river Kerryn towards Axekami. Paddle-wheels churned the water, driven by the groaning and clanking mechanism deep in the swollen belly of the craft. Vents on either side seethed a heavy black smoke that tattered and dispersed in oily trails. Once, there had been wheelmen to drive the paddles, swart and muscular folk who would labour below decks during those times when the barge headed against the flow or when the current was not strong enough to carry it. But their day was passing; many of the vessels that plied the three rivers out of Axekami had replaced the wheelmen with contraptions of oil and brass, pistons and gears.
Kaiku stood on the foredeck, the morning wind stirring her hair, watching the land slide by with a sickened heart. She was no longer dressed in the attire of the Red Order; her clothes were simpler now, unflattering and tough, made for travelling in. Her face was clean of the Sisters’ paint. The cares of the past decade had not seamed her skin, though they told in the bleakness of her gaze sometimes. And it was bleak now.
The world had lost its colour. The plains that stretched away to the horizon on either side were not the sun-washed yellow-green she remembered. Even in the pale light of the dawn, she could see
that they had been drained of something, some indefinable element of life and growth. Now they were doleful, and the occasional trees that grew in copses seemed isolated in a dull emptiness. Even the hue of the river water was unsettlingly altered to her eyes: once a blue so deep it was almost purple, it now seemed greyer, its vigour robbed. In days gone by birds would have circled the barge and settled in its rigging in the vain hope that it was a fishing vessel; but here there was not a bird to be seen.
This is how it begins, she thought. The slow death of our homeland. And we do not have the strength to prevent it.
She looked to the west, along the river, and there she saw a dim smear on the horizon and realised what it must be. She had heard the tales from their spies and from the refugees who had made it to the Prefectures from the Weaver-held territories. But nothing could prepare her for the sight of what Axekami had become.
The once-glorious city was a louring fortress, shadowed under a gloomy veil of fumes. The great walls bristled with fire-cannons, and other devices of war which Kaiku had never seen before. A huge metal watchtower squatted outside the south-east gate, dominating the road and the river alike. Scaffolding and half-constructed buildings patched the exterior of the capital. Kaiku remembered how she had been thrilled as a child to see this place, the wonder of their civilisation, the cradle of thought and art and politics. She was appalled to find it turned so, a forbidding stronghold steeped in a dark miasma that drifted slowly up to sully the sky.
The shanties of the river nomads on the approach to the city proper were deserted, their stilt huts empty. The nomads were gone. No longer would they crowd the banks and squint suspiciously at the barges passing by, no longer would they sew or string beads or pole out into the river for fish. The roofs of their huts were collapsing, crushed by the slow grip of entropy, and the supports on their rotting jetties tilted as they sunk into the mud. The clatter and growl of the barge’s mechanisms disappeared into the silence as it slid by.
‘What’s been done to this place?’ murmured Phaeca, who had joined her on the foredeck while she had been lost in reverie.
Kaiku glanced at her companion, but did not reply. She always found it strange to see Phaeca bereft of the accoutrements of the Order. Perhaps it was because she was more used to seeing her with the make-up than without it, but Kaiku thought it suited her better when she was painted. It shifted the emphasis of her face favourably; when it was not there, she looked too thin, and forfeited some of her mystery and character. Still, what she lost she more than regained through her natural style. She had grown up in the River District of Axekami, and had a flamboyancy about her that Kaiku faintly envied. Her hair was always a masterpiece, her deep red locks twisted through elaborate arrangements of hair ornaments, here hanging in a tress, there coiled or bunched or teased into a curl. Her clothes were outrageous in comparison to Kaiku’s, and though she had toned herself down today so as not to attract too much attention in the city, she still trod the thin line between elegance and gaudiness that characterised the fashions of the River District.
‘Where is Nomoru?’ Kaiku asked distractedly.
Phaeca made a noise that indicated she did not really care. Nomoru had, predictably, failed to endear herself to the Sister on their long journey from the Southern Prefectures. Even Phaeca, who was the soul of tolerance, had grown to dislike the scout’s unremitting rudeness.
‘Be aware,’ Kaiku said after a time. ‘The Weavers may be searching. Do not let your guard rest until we are out of the city again.’ She looked again at the grim cloud seeping upward from the city and felt nausea roll in her stomach. ‘And do not use your kana if you can possibly help it, except to hide yourself from their attention. It will draw them down onto us.’
‘You’re nervous, Kaiku,’ Phaeca smiled. ‘There’s no need to remind me what to do; I know well enough.’
Kaiku gave her an apologetic look. Phaeca’s ability to see through people was second only to Lucia’s; she had an extraordinary talent for empathy. ‘Of course I am nervous. What kind of fool would I be if I was not?’
‘The kind of fool who volunteered for the mission in the first place,’ Phaeca said dryly. Kaiku could not muster the humour to laugh. Her spirits had been too depressed by the ghastly shape of the unfamiliar city that loomed up before them.
The enormous stone prayer arch that had straddled the gate where the Kerryn flowed into the city was chiselled blank, the blessings gone. The grumbling, fuming barge took them steadily towards it. Kaiku feared to think what would be beyond that smooth maw, what she would find when they were swallowed.
If it had been a matter of preference, she would not have set foot on the barge at all. But the roads were carefully guarded by Weavers, and it was easier to slip into the city undetected at a crowded dock, so they had left their horses in a small town on the south bank of the Kerryn and taken this route. She despised every moment she spent aboard this craft with its mechanical core. It was a Weaver contraption, and Weavers created with no thought for consequence. She watched the greasy smoke venting from the barge with flat and desolate eyes.
Yet even they are not the real enemy, Kaiku reminded herself, only puppets of a greater master.
‘Kaiku,’ Phaeca murmured suddenly, a warning in her tone. ‘Weavers.’
She had already sensed them, their consciousnesses purposeful as sharks, slipping beneath the surface of the world. They were hunting for Sisters, seeking any disturbance in the Weave that might indicate the presence of their most dangerous foes. The chances were slim that Kaiku and Phaeca would be noticed, but it was never wise to rely on chance. The Weavers’ abilities had been unpredictable of late. Each witch-stone they awakened increased their powers, and they had surprised the Red Order more than once. The feya-kori were only the latest example of that.
Phaeca and Kaiku sewed themselves into the Weave, blending with the background, becoming as inert to the Weavers’ perception as the boards of the deck beneath their feet. Such a technique was second nature to them, and required only a small amount of concentration and a minuscule exertion, not enough even to trigger the darkening of the irises that came as a side-effect of kana usage. They stood together as the Weavers passed over them, unseeing, and faded away to search elsewhere.
The barge slid beneath the desecrated arch and into the city proper, and Kaiku felt her chest squeeze tight in anguish at the sight.
Axekami had withered. Where once the sun had beat down on thronging thoroughfares, on gardens and mosaic-addled plazas, on shining temple domes and imposing galleries and bathhouses, now it filtered onto a place that Kaiku would not have thought was the same city had it not been for the familiar layout of the streets. A funereal gloom hung over the scene, a product of something deeper than the smoke that shrouded Nuki’s eye. It exuded from the buildings themselves, from their shuttered windows and discoloured walls: a sense of exhaustion, of resignation, of defeat. It bore down on the Sisters like a weight.
The temples had gone. Kaiku searched for them, seeking out points of recognition from long ago, and found that where once the gaudiest and grandest buildings had stood there were strange carapaces of metal, humped monstrosities that sprouted pipes and vast cogs and vents seeping fumes. As her gaze travelled up the hill to their right towards the Imperial Keep at the top, she saw that the stone and gold prayer gate which had once marked the entrance to the Imperial Quarter had been pulled down. Even the small shrines in the doorways of the riverside houses were gone, the wind-chimes taken away. Without the religious clutter that adorned their façades, they seemed hollow and abandoned.
To their left, the archipelago of the River District was a shell of its former brightness and vivacity. Kaiku heard Phaeca suck her breath over her teeth at the sight of what her home had become. The great temple of Panazu had been destroyed and left to ruin. The cathouses and narcotic dens were empty, and those few people who walked its narrow paths or poled boats between the splintered islands were drab and went with their eyes low
ered. The bizarre and whimsical architecture of the houses had not changed, but now it seemed foolish rather than impressive, a folly like an old man’s last, sad snatch at youth.
Kaiku heard the catch in Phaeca’s throat as she spoke. ‘I think I’ll go and change,’ she murmured. ‘Even this dress is too much for a city so dour.’
Kaiku nodded. It was a wise enough decision, but she suspected it was really an excuse to retreat and compose herself. Phaeca’s sensitivity to emotions was a double-edged sword, and she was undoubtedly feeling the oppressiveness of this place far more than Kaiku was. She departed hastily.
‘Find Nomoru,’ Kaiku said absently after her, and Phaeca made a noise in acknowledgement before she was gone.
By the time they reached the docks, the fug in the air was thick enough so that it was palpably unhealthy to breathe, and Kaiku felt dirty just standing in it. The streets were crowded around the warehouses. Barges and smaller craft unloaded at piers amid the hollering of foremen; carts and drays pulled by manxthwa creaked by, heaped with netted crates and barrels; merchants argued and haggled; scrawny cats wound in and out of the chaos in the hope of spying a rat or two. But for all the industry, there was no laughter, no raucousness: cries were limited to instructions and orders, and the men worked doggedly with their attention on what they were doing. Heads down, concentrating only on getting through their tasks, as if existence was an obstacle they had to surmount daily. They were simply enduring.
Nomoru joined them as they disembarked. There were formalities: a passenger register to be signed with false names, faked papers of identification to be shown, a search for weapons. An officer of the Blackguard asked them their business, and reminded them of several rules and regulations that they were to abide by: no private gatherings of more than five people, no icons or symbols of a religious nature to be displayed, a sunset curfew. Phaeca and Kaiku listened politely, half their attention on shielding themselves from the Weavers who lurked nearby and monitored the docks. Nomoru looked bored.