There was no light in the tunnel, and Lucia was forced to feel her way along it. Her fingers trailed over the moist soil of the tunnel wall, b.u.mping occasionally against protruding roots. It was silent. The babble of the spirits and the animals was quiet. Nothing existed except the Xhiang Xhi.

She wished she could stay here, in the peaceful dark, where there were no voices to plague her. To rest, to sleep in this precious hush just for a single night, would be a prize beyond anything she could ask for.

To be this clear-headed forever, not to be burdened with the knowledge that outside this oasis of calm lay chaos, and that even if she survived this she would have to return to it. A place where her thoughts were fogged and a thousand whispers clamoured for her attention, and to even interact with humankind was a struggle to focus.

But it was only a wish. There was no sanctuary for her. She went on through the tunnel, until a short way onwards she saw a ragged oval of grey, with roots hanging across it like a curtain. She pushed through them and stepped into the domain of the great spirit.

It was a gloomy dell that she found on the other side, a hollow surrounded by thick forest which leaned overhead to make a roof of tangled branches. The ground was marshy; ridges of turf rose out of the water, dividing it into brackish pools full of weeds, and thin mists hung in the cold, still air or slunk close to the earth. An occasional tree grew in the dell, ancient and knotted, its leaves brown and dead.

She could sense the spirit here, a vast and brooding melancholy, its attention fixed upon her. The force of its presence was oppressive, the magnitude of its power beyond comprehension. She had spoken with many of the land's oldest spirits since that day when she had descended into Alskain Mar, deciphering the ways of their kind; but this was a thing apart, older than the rocks, older than the rivers, older than the forest it dwelt in.

She waited. Though she was afraid, she was armoured by fatalism. Her life had led to here, and she was as ready as she could possibly be. If it all came to nothing, then that was the way it would go. She could do no more.

Nothing stirred.

After a time, she took off her shoes and walked forward, picking her way from the edge of the dell along a bank of earth towards a tuffet that poked out of the marsh. Chill water welled up between her toes as the soft gra.s.s sank beneath her feet. When she reached the tuffet, she knelt there, and laid her hands upon the ground. She bowed her head and let her breathing slow, readying herself to enter the trance-like state necessary for communication with the spirits.

((There is no need, Lucia. I am not as the others are)) She tensed. The voice had been like the sigh of a dying man, a breath of air through a dusty temple. In all her life, a spirit had never spoken to her before. Contact had always been achieved without language, a primal, empathic exchange. It was a meeting on the most basic of levels, because it was the only way beings utterly alien to each other could reach some sort of understanding.

((I understand you)) said the Xhiang Xhi. Her thoughts were as transparent to it as if she had said them out loud. ((They are as children to me, and lack wisdom. They do not know how to think as you do)) She felt dizzied. Children? Heart's blood, this being saw the other spirits as children? What kind of fool had she been, thinking that she was ready for the Xhiang Xhi? She dared not consider what might happen if she had tried to meld with it as she had with the others.

Slowly, she opened her eyes and looked upon the spirit. It hung in the air before her, a slender wraith of mist, an elongated wisp of humanoid form like a shadow cast at sunset. It had hands, with spindly, attenuated fingers, and something that might have been a head, but it shifted and blended with the stir of the murk, so that Lucia could see only impressions of it. Perspective was skewed: it appeared near and far all at once, tiny and ma.s.sive, and its aspect shifted with its movements and frustrated her efforts to decide. It was ever the way with the spirits: they could not manifest themselves in ways that human senses were entirely comfortable with.

((Stand)) it said to her. ((Do not abase yourself before me. I have no need of worship or respect)) She did so.

((You need not fear to speak, Lucia)) And indeed she did not fear it, not in the way she had some of the other spirits, the ones who were angry and capricious and who had met her with malice or resentment. What she did fear was its terrible sorrow, the heartbreaking sense of tragedy that seeped from it. She was afraid that it might let her know the source of that sorrow and pa.s.s its grief on to her, and that was something she would not be able to bear.

'How old are you?' she said eventually. She wanted to test its responses before she asked what she had come to ask, even though she was sure it already knew her purpose. But there was a way for things to be done, and she would bow to that.

((I existed before the first of you stood upright, before the land was formed, before the moons were born.

I existed when this world was but dust, and before that. There is no measurement I can give you that would have meaning. I am not like the other spirits you know: they were formed of this land, but I was not. I came from elsewhere, and I will go elsewhere once again when this world is swallowed in fire and its moons turned to ash)) Its voice, like the stirring of dry leaves in her skull, arrived amid fleeting images, spectral glimpses of star-studded void with gargantuan spheres of breathtaking colour turning slowly, and bright, bright flame swelling to consume them. Then, as quickly as they flitted across her consciousness, they were gone, leaving her wide-eyed, her breathing quick, her pulse fluttering. The Xhiang Xhi swirled restlessly in the mist.

'Are you a G.o.d?' Lucia asked at last.

((I am not a G.o.d)) it replied. ((What now you call G.o.ds you may come to call by other names. Some you will lose to myth; others may be more real than you imagine. It is not my place to reveal them. There can be no understanding for you of the things you speak of, though that may come with the pa.s.sing of ages.

For now, you have only interpretation, and that will change as you change, sometimes taking you closer to truth, sometimes further away. Your race is young, Lucia; and like infants you cannot fully comprehend what you see)) Lucia accepted this with a slight nod of her head. Her mind had gone blank. Now that she was here, in the presence of the great spirit, she found that words were eluding her. For long seconds she stood mute, a slight figure in torn and muddied travelling clothes, her blonde hair in disarray.

((There are things you need to know, Lucia)) the spirit said at last. ((You seek to make war to save your homeland, but you do not yet realise the threat. I will show you)) 'Show me,' Lucia murmured, and the dell and everything around her disappeared.

She was standing on a vast plain of black rock, rucked with ridges of shattered stone and scattered with smouldering rubble. The air rippled with heat, scorching her lungs, shrinking her flesh. Wind screamed past her, throwing dust and pebbles and pushing boulders end over end, making her clothes flap furiously against her body. It stank of sulphur and poison. At her feet, a ma.s.sive chasm roiled with magma, underlighting the contours of her face in infernal red. Other chasms scratched their way across the plain, and the earth shook sporadically like the shivers of some sleeping leviathan.

Lucia was shocked by the panorama and the chaos of the gale. She knew, somehow, that she was not really here, and she believed it had no power to harm her; but her instincts said otherwise, and she stumbled away from the chasm, gazing wildly around for a rescuer.

The lava ran from a distant range of volcanoes, so broad and high that their tips were lost above the thick blanket of brown vapours that roofed the world. Muted red glows blazed up there, amid thunderous concussions as the volcanoes erupted endlessly. Other mountains, seemingly dead and cold but just as gigantic, loomed around her, and where she could see across the plain to the horizon it seemed much too near. Lightning flickered in the clouds and struck the earth, faster than she had ever seen, a dozen times a second and more.

'What is . . . what is this place?' she said against the howl of the wind.

((This is the home of your enemy, thousands of years ago, before it was destroyed. This is the moon which you call Aricarat)) The Xhiang Xhi's voice came from inside her head like a rattle of twigs.

((It is not a place for your kind. The air here would choke you. The temperature would melt the flesh from your bones. The wind would pick you up and dash you to pieces. The very atmosphere would crush you like an egg)) 'Why have you brought me here?' Lucia gasped, her eyes beginning to tear in horror.

((To show you)) the spirit said again.

'Show me what?'

((Your enemy)) Lucia looked around helplessly. 'I see nothing.'

((You are hampered by the limits of your senses. Use the ability that makes you unique. Listen)) And so she did. With some effort, she began calming herself, sinking slowly down into a trance of stillness. Practice had made it possible, even amid the maelstrom that whipped around her, to turn herself inward and create a core of quietude to retreat to. She sank to her knees, only now noticing that her feet were still bare. She laid her hand on the hot rock, and listened to the heartbeat of the moon.

As careful as she was, the sheer violence of Aricarat was still overwhelming: the burning veins of lava tubing, the swirling core, the constantly changing surface that crumbled and was remade by earthquakes and volcanoes. The raging fury of creation stripped raw and made terrible. She retreated, drawing herself away in fear of being destroyed by the power of the sensation. She could not allow herself to be subsumed in that.

Delicately, she sank back into the trance and began again, and this time she was more tentative. Among the roar and screech of this awful place, she began to make out thoughts. Thoughts as slow and ma.s.sive as continents, drifting beneath her, processes too colossal and complex for her to even begin to fathom.

The ruminations of a G.o.d.

'I hear him . . .' she said hoa.r.s.ely, tears spilling from her eyes. 'I hear him . . .'

((Now, look)) the Xhiang Xhi urged, and she cast her eyes upward to where a white glow was growing rapidly behind the clouds, speeding from horizon to horizon, growing from dim to unbearably bright in the span of a second.

'The spear of Jurani,' Lucia whispered to herself. Then something burst through the clouds, a sun flung from the sky, and there was a sound like the end of the world. Lucia screamed as the fireball of its impact hit her.

When she came to her senses, she was lying on the tuffet in the Xhiang Xhi's dell, her face and hair dirty where she had fallen. After a moment to orient herself, she stood shakily, facing the spirit once again. It still hung in the mist before her, veiled from clear sight, a long-fingered wisp like some childish sketch of a nightmare. Drifting, shifting, its dreary emanations oppressing her.

She took a few breaths to compose herself, then raised her head.

'That was the moment when the G.o.ds destroyed Aricarat,' she said. 'When the army led by his parents, a.s.santua and Jurani, made war on him; and his own father, the G.o.d of fire, destroyed him with his spear.'

((That is your interpretation. Muddled with myth, but holding a core of truth, as many legends do)) She frowned. 'But I was told of it by the spirit of Alskain Mar.'

((The spirit of Alskain Mar is not old enough to remember nor wise enough to understand. Spirits know much, but their experience is narrow)) This was new. It had never occurred to Lucia that spirits could be wrong. She knew them to be wilful liars at times, but she had always had faith in their superior lore. To hear that even they were deemed benighted by this ent.i.ty shook her deeply.

'And what is your interpretation?' she asked, almost fearing an answer.

((You would not understand mine. Your knowledge is built on the knowledge of your ancestors, slowly accreting towards truth. That is the way of your species. At all times you believe you know all there is to know, and that which you do not know you explain in other ways. Yet later generations will laugh at your ignorance, and do the same, and be laughed at in their turn. Understanding must be reached gradually, Lucia. What answers I would have for you, you would not believe even if you could comprehend them)) 'Then what can you tell me?' Lucia asked, spreading her hands in supplication. 'What is it I must know?'

((You have learned much already, but not enough)) the spirit replied. ((You know that the fragments of Aricarat that fell onto your planet carried with it fragments of the ent.i.ty that resided there. You know that this being had enough remnant influence to create the Weavers, and that they carry out its work with no knowledge of what controls them. But you do not understand the Weavers' intentions. You think they want to conquer. But conquest is not their aim, merely a stage in Aricarat's plan. They will not spread beyond Saramyr. They will not have to)) Lucia waited in dread. So many certainties were falling into ruin around her. The Xhiang Xhi loomed in the mist, becoming darker.

((They are changing your world, Lucia. They are making it more like their master's home. They are preparing it for his arrival)) Lucia saw again, suddenly, the blasted plain and brown clouds, tasted the sulphur in the air, and a weakness swept her. The buildings that the Weavers had erected, the machines, the pall-pits: these were the tools by which they would make the world dark and poisonous. From Saramyr they would spread a miasma over the whole of the Near World, and across the great oceans that none had ever crossed except the mysterious explorers of Yttryx; then even the strange and distant lands beyond would be swallowed, and Nuki's eye would never again gaze down on the world, for it would be forever concealed from his sight.

((There is no word in your language for what they are doing)) the Xhiang Xhi was saying. ((Other cultures in other places far, far, from here have a name for the process, but it would be meaningless to you. You need know only this: if you do not stop the Weavers, one way or another, your world will end)) Lucia's pale eyes were cold as she looked into the mist. 'Whether by Aricarat's plan, or by that of the other G.o.ds.'

((You are perceptive for one of your kind. The spirit of Alskain Mar was right in that, at least. Once, Aricarat was powerful, a great presence in the Weave. If he returns he will again make war on what you call G.o.ds. They fear him. The spear of Jurani may strike this planet too)) Lucia's jaw clenched. It took some time for her to realise that she was furious.

'Then the G.o.ds are spiteful,' she said, 'that they should make us pay for their inept.i.tude. They should have made certain of their enemy the first time.'

((Even G.o.ds make mistakes)) the Xhiang Xhi replied. ((Your people have a story, of the Grey Moth and the Skein of Lament, that attests to your belief in that)) 'And where are the G.o.ds now?' Lucia cried.

((To that I have no answer)) it said. ((Their ways are beyond me, just as mine are beyond you. All things are transient, all things dwarfed by matters of greater scale. Perhaps your war is beneath contempt in the eyes of such beings. Perhaps the acts you commit in the name of your G.o.ds go unnoticed. Or perhaps they watch your every move, and they wait for reasons of their own. I do not know. The G.o.ds do not interfere unless they must)) Lucia bit down on her frustration. Anger was an emotion that was almost foreign to her, but she felt it now. So many had died to bring her to this point, the culmination of her purpose, and now she learned that all their strife was to correct an error of judgement made by the G.o.ds themselves, and that the G.o.ds might not even be present to see them.

No. She would not believe that. When she was a child, the moon sisters themselves had sent their children to save her from the shin-shin. More than once she knew Kaiku had been spurred by the Emperor of the G.o.ds into actions she would not otherwise have committed.

And yet . . . what if the moon sisters were merely spirits that had no connection with the G.o.ddesses of the moon at all? It was entirely possible that they had saved Lucia for reasons of their own. Spirits were capricious in general, and the Children of the Moons were insane by human standards. What if Kaiku's dreams were only that: dreams, evoked by faith?

The G.o.ds 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.

Her own words, spoken to her friend Flen back when he was still alive. And there was the crux: avatars, omens, subtlety. Never allowing certainty, never allowing their believers to know for sure, never providing anything that could not be accounted for in other ways, as coincidence or delusion. Heart's blood, did they purposefully shroud themselves? Did they enjoy the torment of anxiety and bewilderment that their inconclusiveness caused in their followers? Was it better to be like the Tkiurathi, to worship no G.o.ds at all but the memories of their distinguished ancestors?

Or were the G.o.ds like distant parents, allowing their children to make their own mistakes and solve their own problems? Teaching them that they could not rely on anyone but themselves, intervening with only a guiding nudge here and there? Even when there was everything at stake?

But then, thought Lucia with a vertiginous plunge as her perspective shifted, perhaps theirs was not the only world that the G.o.ds ministered. Perhaps they were only a tiny, insignificant mote among the stars, one of uncountable cultures, each one squalling for attention in the emptiness.

The cruelty of that drove her to her knees.

((You can never know, Lucia)) said the Xhiang Xhi. ((One way or another, certainty would destroy you)) She stared at the wet gra.s.s of the tuffet.

'Tell me,' she said eventually. 'What hope is there?'

((There is hope)) the spirit replied. ((For Aricarat's plans have gone against him in some ways. He did not expect the Sisters. He did not expect you)) 'But we are Aberrants. We came from the blight he created. A disease of the land, that kills crops and twists children in the womb.'

((The blight is not a disease of the land. It is a catalyst of change. Aricarat does not want to kill all life on the planet; he needs you still, and will for a long time yet, until he is entirely restored. People and plants and animals will die, but some will adapt and survive and recover. He is changing the flora of Saramyr, and he is changing your people)) 'Changing us?'

((Changing you so that you can live in the new world he will make. So that you can breathe the air that is poison to you now. The Sisters can already do it to a limited degree. Over time, the change will accelerate. More of you will be born Aberrant. As the air turns more hostile, only those Aberrants who can breathe it well will survive, and their children will inherit that ability. Eventually, only the Saramyr will remain: the blight will be what saves you. All other countries will die, and the witchstones there will be excavated at leisure. By your people)) Lucia closed her eyes, and saw the images as the spirit spoke. A tear ran from the edge of one eye.

'Then how does that offer hope?' she asked.

((You offer hope. The Sisters offer hope. He did not know what he was unlocking when he meddled with your kind. His interference has provoked changes that would not have otherwise occurred for millions of years, if ever)) 'Then what are we?'

((You are the next stage. You have torn the veil of ascendancy: the divide between the base world of the physical and the world beyond the senses. In the eyes of the G.o.ds, it is the line that marks the end of your infancy. You achieve this in one way, the Sisters in another. It matters nothing. Beyond that point, you are no longer as you were. You are the first of the true transcendents of humanity)) 'Cailin was right,' Lucia whispered. 'All this time, she was right.'

((Indeed)) the spirit replied. ((I would have ensured safe pa.s.sage for you and the Sisters, though I extended no such courtesy to those who had not breached the veil. One of you fell, however, and I could not prevent that)) She raised her head. 'What about the Weavers?'

The Xhiang Xhi seemed to recede in her vision, melting into the mist. ((They are not as you are. Their abilities come from their Masks. From Aricarat)) 'But if Aricarat created the Aberrants, then why were the Weavers killing them?' Lucia protested. She did not want to believe any of this, and was fighting to find holes in the spirit's logic.

But the Xhiang Xhi was relentless. ((It was necessary, to safeguard their rise to power, to prevent beings such as you and the Sisters from existing. They failed at that, in the end. They will stop killing Aberrants in time, and begin breeding them selectively instead)) 'How do you know this?' she cried.

((Because it is the only course of action that makes sense)) the spirit replied, and she was defeated. She could not argue with such an ent.i.ty, something older than recorded history, which dwarfed her understanding so completely that she was fighting to a.s.similate even the limited s.n.a.t.c.hes of information it fed to her. She dared not think of how much it was not telling, how much lay outside her experience. Maybe, if she knew, she would be as sorrowful as it was. Perhaps ignorance was better.

How small they all were, in the final a.n.a.lysis.

She got to her feet, dishevelled and haggard, and stared into the mist at the vague and swaying shape of the Xhiang Xhi.

'I beg you,' she said. 'Help us. Help us stop all this coming to pa.s.s.'

She felt the Xhiang Xhi regarding her, there in its chill and gloomy dell.

((I will help you)) it said. Then, after a pause of moments that felt like hours: ((But there is a price)) It was dusk when Lucia emerged from the tunnel.

n.o.body noticed her at first. They had sunk into grief, and sat wearily on the forest floor beneath the unwavering gaze of the shadow-beast that hunkered atop the hillock. Most of them had fallen into an exhausted slumber, for here, in the presence of the great spirit, the nightmares were held at bay.

Kaiku awoke to the touch of Tsata's hand on her shoulder. She looked up at him. Sometime over the past hours, she had cried herself to sleep with her head on his thigh where he sat. She raised herself, brushing her hair back behind one ear, and followed his eyes to where Lucia stood.

Then she was scrambling to her feet and rushing over. She gathered Lucia in a tight embrace; but the words of relief that were forming were never spoken. Lucia remained rigid, her arms by her sides. Kaiku backed away, searching her face quizzically.

'Lucia?'

The three soldiers were getting to their feet now, coming closer, warily, as if afraid of her. Asara had stood also, but she watched from a distance.

'It is done,' Lucia said, her gaze shifting minutely to meet Kaiku's. Her voice was flat and expressionless.

'We have been granted pa.s.sage out of this forest. The beast will guard us.'

'Lucia?' Kaiku said again, the word a question. She tried to smile, but it faded into uncertainty. 'Lucia, what happened?'

'The spirits will aid us when the time comes,' Lucia said bitterly. 'That is what you wanted, is it not?'

Before Kaiku could protest, Lucia addressed the group, overriding her.

'We must return to Araka Jo. I do not wish to stay in this place an instant longer.'

Her tone precluded any further questions, and she did not give anyone the opportunity anyway. She walked away from Kaiku, leaving her bewildered and hurt, and headed into the trees. With nothing else they could do, the remnants of her retinue followed, one by one, as night fell across the Forest of Xu.

TWENTY.

The great city of Axekami loured in its own miasma.

The exhalations of the Weavers' constructions had a strange weight to them, a persistency unlike that of smoke. The main bulk of it rose above the city in a roiling cap, slanted by the breeze across the plains so that it leaned eastward; but it also sank to mist the earth, and to spread outward along the ground. At its edges it was a diffuse haze, but still it appeared to permeate the air from horizon to horizon, a suspicion of something amiss that was too subtle for the eye to define. There were always clouds around Axekami now, which was unusual for winter when the skies were traditionally clear. Occasionally they unleashed a brown rain which smelt powerfully of rotten eggs.

The Imperial Quarter was a spectre of its former glory now. Its gardens went untended, its fountains murky and unclean. Its trees had shed their leaves and they decayed on the flagstones and cobbles. The townhouses that had once been occupied by the n.o.bles and high families of the Empire had been gutted, their fineries long since stripped, occupied now by swarms of the dest.i.tute. The wide thoroughfares were all but empty of traffic, and shuffling vagrants meandered in the overgrown parks or the sc.u.mmed water gardens.

Yet though the heart of the place was gone, small sections of its past remained. Shops and wholesalers stayed open, eking a living from what they could get into the city to sell, barely able to afford the guards that prevented them from being robbed. A thin trade from the rest of Axekami kept them alive. The alternative was to abandon their property and move, but few had the money or the opportunity now.

They weathered the troubles as best they could, and hoped for better days.

One such shop was owned by a herbalist, who once had enjoyed a reputation as the best in the land. His father and grandfather before him had been appointed as suppliers to the physicians of the Imperial family, as had he in his turn. After the Weavers had taken Axekami, and the Imperial family was no more, he had refused to give up his ancestral premises. Even when the physician to the Lord Protector and Blood Koli offered him a place in the Imperial Keep, he had refused. Apart from his determination to keep his shop, he had little love for the Weavers, and he trusted them not at all.

So he remained here in the Imperial Quarter, and the physician came to him to buy what he needed, arriving in a black carriage gilded in gold, escorted by guards with rifles. The guards took station outside the shop while he went within.

The physician, whose name was Ukida, was thin and frail, with lank white hair combed across a balding pate and rheumy blue eyes. Despite the infirmity of his appearance, he moved like a man half his age and his hands and voice were steady and sure. His robe hung awkwardly on his spare frame as he walked up to the counter of the shop, pa.s.sing rows of jars and cloth bags half-full of powdered roots.