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 pa.s.sed 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 facades, they seemed hollow and abandoned.

To their left, the archipelago of the River District was a sh.e.l.l 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 lowered. 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 s.n.a.t.c.h 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 pa.s.senger 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.

They found their contact in the Poor Quarter as arranged. Nomoru led them, having grown up among the endless gang warfare that consumed the shambolic, poverty-stricken alleyways of this section of Axekami. Even here, the change in the city was evident. As squalid as it was, its occupants had always been angry, their tempers quickly roused, railing against their conditions rather than meekly submitting to them; but now the alleyways were quiet and doors were kept closed. Those people that they saw were thin and starving. The famine was biting even in the capital, and as always, the underprivileged were the first to suffer.

The sight made Kaiku think of Tsata, with his alien views on her society, and she wondered what he would make of all this. The memory of him brought a twinge of sadness. He had almost entirely slipped her mind over the years, buried as she was in studying the ways of the Red Order under Cailin; but his influence had lasted, and she often found herself trying to think of things from his viewpoint to lend herself a measure of objectivity. It was because n.o.body questioned the way things were that the Empire was in this situation in the first place: the ingrained belief that society could not do without the Weavers had allowed them to wrest the Empire from the hands of those who created it. Tsata had helped her see that, but then he had left her, returning to his homeland to warn his people about what was happening in Saramyr. As they walked through the dereliction of the Poor Quarter, she wondered vaguely if he would ever come back.

Their contact lived on the second storey of a tumbledown building, and they had to climb a set of rickety steps propped up with makeshift kamako cane scaffolding to get to the door. Kaiku's uneasiness had grown during their journey. Distantly she could hear the rumble and clank of one of the Weavers'

beetle-like buildings in the eerily subdued quiet. The atmosphere here was an effort to breathe and tasted foul. If it were not for the fact that she knew her body was subtly and instinctively neutralising the poisons she was inhaling, she would have worried what damage it might be doing to her. G.o.ds, what must it be like to live in this miasma?

Nomoru struck the chime and the door was opened by a sallow, ill-looking man. His eyes widened in recognition as he saw the scout. After an awkward instant, they exchanged pa.s.swords and he let them inside. He took them into a threadbare room where tatty mats lay on the floor. Sliding doors were left half-open to expose cupboards of junk crockery and chipped ornaments, and thin veils were draped over the window-arches, obscuring the view and making the room dim. An imposing, shaven-headed figure had moved one of the veils aside a little and was peering out at the street below. As they entered, he let the veil fall and turned to face them. He was ugly, with thick lips and a squashed nose and a brow that fell in a natural scowl.

'Nomoru?' he said. 'G.o.ds, I never thought I'd see you again. You haven't changed a bit.'

Nomoru shrugged without replying.

He looked at the Sisters. 'And you must be Kaiku and Phaeca then. Which is which?'

They introduced themselves properly, despite his informality, bowing in the correct manner for their relative social stations.

'Good,' he said. 'I imagine you've guessed me by now. Juto en Garika. And that's Lon in the doorway.

There's more of us, but we don't gather here. For now, you deal with me and Lon, and that's all.'

Kaiku studied him closely. His accent and manner all bespoke a life in the Poor Quarter. Like many here, he had no family name, but he took in its place the name of his gang, and the Low Saramyrrhic en prefix meaning literally 'a part of'. His sheer physical presence was intimidating. Ordinarily, Kaiku would not have felt threatened by that not now she was a Sister of the Red Order but the shock of seeing how Axekami had fallen and the fact that she could not use her powers within its walls had combined to make her feel on edge.

He sat down cross-legged on a mat without inviting anyone else to, but Nomoru sat down anyway and the Sisters followed her lead. Lon slipped un.o.btrusively away. The room was haphazardly set out with no thought to aesthetics, which mildly offended Kaiku's highborn sensibilities, but she told herself not to be priggish. If this was as much as she had to deal with during her time in Axekami, she would count herself blessed by Shintu.

'Let's get to it, then,' Juto said. He cast a glance at the Sisters. 'First thing, though: we all know who you are and your particular . . . abilities.' Kaiku was pleased to note that the familiar note of disgust when referring to her Aberrant powers was absent in his tone. 'It'd be best if none of us mentioned them aloud. Plots and schemes come and go, but anyone catches a whiff of you and they'll trip over themselves to sell you to the Blackguard.' He caught Phaeca's glance towards the doorway. 'Lon knows.

You can trust him. n.o.body else, though.'

'Do you two know each other?' Phaeca asked, referring to Juto and Nomoru. Kaiku had been wondering the same thing ever since Juto had first spoken.

Juto grinned, exposing big, browned teeth. 'We don't forget our own.'

'You were part of the same gang?' Phaeca prompted her. Nomoru just gave her a sullen glare in reply.

'Some time ago now,' Juto said. 'We'd given her up.' His gaze flickered to Nomoru. 'I went looking for you. Tracked you to the Inker that did you last. He said you-'

'Juto!' she snapped suddenly, cutting him off. 'Not their business.'

His eyes blazed for a moment, and then an expression of dangerous calm settled on his face. 'You haven't been Nomoru en Garika for a long while,' he said with an unmistakable threat in his voice. 'You be careful how you speak to me.'

She just stared at him, a challenge in the set of her shoulders, a scrawny creature with hair in spiky tangles levelling with somebody twice her bulk. There was no fear in either of them.

'How are things in the city?' Kaiku asked, in an attempt to break the stalemate. It worked better than she intended, for Juto bellowed with laughter and shook his head.

'Were you wearing blinkers on the way here?' he asked in disbelief. 'The people are crushed. The Lord Protector has the city under his boot heel and he'll keep on grinding until all that's left is powder and bone. Axekami is the lucky recipient of most of the remaining food in the north-west and still hundreds starve to death every day. The only good thing I can say is that at least we don't have the n.o.bles siphoning all the supplies as we would have done under the magnificent government of the Empire.' His sarcasm was obvious and scathing. 'The workers get the food. And the Blackguard and the Weavers'

d.a.m.ned Aberrant army, of course; that goes without saying. But the Poor Quarter suffers as ever, because some of us would rather die than go to labour in those G.o.ds-cursed constructions they've built in place of our temples.'

'And what do they do in there?' Phaeca asked. The Sisters had never been able to establish the purpose of the Weavers' buildings in the cities.

Juto curled his lip. 'No idea. Each worker only knows his own task, and what all those tasks amount to, n.o.body seems to be able to work out. They don't seem to produce anything. That's the cursed mystery of the things.'

He got to his feet and went to the window-arch again, looking out past the veil. When he spoke again, it was more measured. 'Then there's this murk. Old men cough themselves to death, mothers miscarry, the sick don't get better and cuts gets infected. What kind of people take over a city and then poison their own well? What idiocy is that?'

The question did not seem directed at any of them, so they stayed silent. He turned around and leaned against the wall with his arms crossed. 'They've outlawed the G.o.ds,' he went on. 'All of them. They're crippling any chance of rebellion by not allowing us to gather and coordinate. That's the reason everybody thinks they took down the temples. But heart's blood, it doesn't make sense! Letting the people have their faith would keep them calm, discourage revolt.' He scratched his ear and snorted.

'Some say they just want us to know that we haven't any hope. I don't believe that. I just think they hate the G.o.ds. Either that, or they're afraid of them.'

'And has it worked?' Kaiku asked. 'Do you think Axekami could be persuaded to rise against their oppressors?'

Juto sat down again, shaking his head as he did so. 'You could march an army up to the gates and they wouldn't dare to open them. It's not only a matter of spirit, though there's little enough of that left.

We're weak and sickly. The Blackguard are fed and strong and there's more of them each month because people join up all the time. They see their families dying and their principles fade like mist in the morning sun. Then you've got informers and spies, all working to fill their bellies. The Weavers seem to know everything, whether by the cursed powers they possess or by the folk who've sold themselves. As fast as rumours start spreading about a new leader there are rumours that they've died or disappeared.

And on top of all that, there's the Aberrants. The Weavers just have to say the word and the streets are full of them.'

'What about Lucia?' Nomoru interjected. 'Could rouse them then. If Lucia came.'

'Lucia?' Juto mocked. 'I won't deny the people would welcome anyone in place of the Weavers, Aberrant or not, but a legendary figure's no good if they're not here. I won't believe she's real till I see her with my own eyes, and even then she'd have to be in golden armour with the G.o.ds themselves singing her praises from the skies before I'd count myself safe enough to turn on the Weavers.' His tone was becoming bitter now. 'You think you can even get to Axekami with an army? I don't. The Weavers would crush you before you got north of the Fault.'

Kaiku took the disappointment stoically. She had expected such a response anyway. It did not take someone of Phaeca's skills to divine that Yugi's faint hope of picking up the scent of revolt would be thwarted; Kaiku had guessed that as soon as they entered the city. She did not think he had seriously entertained the possibility anyway.

'Enough of our troubles,' said Juto, hunkering forward and giving them a smile that was more like a snarl. 'What about yours? How goes the battle in the south?'

'That is a puzzle,' Kaiku said, brushing her hair behind her ear. 'It is much as we left it almost a fortnight ago. The Weavers have occupied Juraka, but there has been no move to cross the river as yet, and the feya-kori seem to have disappeared.'

'Ah, there's the meat of it,' said Juto. 'The feya-kori.'

'They came from Axekami,' Phaeca said. 'Do you know where?'

'I have my suspicions,' Juto said. 'But I've been waiting for you to arrive so we can take a look.'

'When can we go?'

'Tonight,' he said. 'After curfew.'

Kaiku considered this for a moment, then a small frown crossed her brow. 'What exactly do the Blackguard do to enforce this curfew?'

Juto grinned nastily. 'They let the Aberrants out.'

SIX.

The Lord Protector Avun tu Koli trod warily through the chambers of his home. Despite Kakre's a.s.surances that he would not be harmed, he could never be even slightly at ease in the areas that the Weave-lord had taken to inhabiting. The upper levels of the Imperial Keep had become an asylum.

The great truncated pyramid stood atop a bluff on the crest of the highest hill in Axekami. It was a masterpiece of architecture, arguably still unsurpa.s.sed since the fourth Blood Emperor Huira tu Lilira began building it more than a thousand years ago. The complex sculptures of gold and bronze that swarmed across its tiered sides had stunned visitors for a millennium with their intricacy and power, while the four slender towers that stood at its corners, linked to the main body of the Keep by ornate bridges, were as impressive now as they were all that time ago.

Throughout history, there had always been large sections of the Keep that were empty, simply because no high family had enough members to fill a building so huge, nor needed a retinue so large as to take up the spare room. Avun wondered distastefully what his ancestors might make of things now that the new occupants had arrived, and the Keep was finally filled.

The route to the Sun Chamber took him through room after gloomy room of depravity and madness.

Weavers gibbered and rocked in cl.u.s.ters, hunched together, their Masks iridescing subtly as they shared the ecstatic bliss of their unseen world. Walls were smeared in blood and excrement, or scrawled with arcane languages which had sprung whole from the subconscious of the author. Abstract mathematics and diagrams, nonsense mingling with insights of staggering genius, were scored into priceless marble pillars or daubed across artwork that was hundreds of years old. The flyblown corpse of a servant, his lips and jaw eaten away by a roaming dog, lay in the centre of a room surrounded by strange clay sculptures, each precisely a foot high. An exquisitely clean and orderly bathing-chamber was guarded by a lunatic Weaver who spent his time obsessively tracing the grains of the wooden floor with his eye, and who screamed and flailed at anyone who entered.

Yet among these horrors other Weavers shuffled and limped, younger ones who had not yet fallen prey to the insanity of their kind. They were Kakre's lieutenants and aides, an a.s.sortment of bizarre figures who maintained their own private domains amid the chaos of the upper levels. Their own depravities only emerged after Weaving, when the trauma of withdrawal would trigger their particular manias, which were as varied and repulsive as imagination would allow.

The Weavers had always been careful to conceal the true extent of the damage that their Masks did to them, hiding away their worst casualties in their mountain monasteries; but here the inexorable and terrifying erosion of their minds was appallingly obvious. At least, Avun thought, the famine had provided plenty of victims for those Weavers who liked to kill or rape. He tried not to waste his trained servants when he could help it, preferring to use peasants or townsfolk culled from the Poor Quarter, but the necessity of navigating through this bedlam to attend to the whims of the Weavers had claimed the lives of many of them. It seemed that Kakre's decree of protection extended only to Avun, and anyone else was fair game.

The Sun Chamber had once been beautiful. The roof was a dome of faded gold and green, with great petal-shaped windows following its contours down from the flamboyant boss at its centre. It was rare enough to see gla.s.s in Saramyr windows anyway, but these were magnificent creations of many different colours whose designs had caught the light of Nuki's eye in days past and shone down onto the enormous circular mosaic on the floor. Now the light was weak and grim and flat, and what it fell on made Avun wish for darkness.

Kakre had taken the Sun Chamber for his own, and decorated it with the products of his craft. In the three galleries of wood and gold, where in ancient times councils had stood to attend to a speaker or watch a performance on the floor below, malformed and disturbing shapes hid in the gloom. Avun tried not to think about them. Here was where Kakre came to display some of the appalling art he made in his chambers many levels below. Every creation here was sheathed in skin taken from men and women and beasts while they were still alive, arranged as if in audience.

They had been moved around since last time Avun visited, and he unconsciously sought out the figures that had stuck most in his mind: the hunched figure whose left side was st.i.tched from the skin of a man and whose right side from a woman; the winged being whose feathers were made of tanned and leathery sinew; the shrieking man from whose gaping mouth another face peered. There were animals and birds too, and other things not humanoid, frames overlaid with patchwork epidermis of many shades to form strange geometric shapes, or forms so repellent to the eye that they could not be cla.s.sified. The acc.u.mulation of torture and pain and terror this room represented was more than even a man as cold as Avun could bear to consider. The faint shrieks of the tormented Weavers in nearby rooms only served to disconcert him further.

The Weave-lord Kakre was there, of course. He seemed to have lapsed into some sort of trance, standing immobile just off-centre of the mosaic that covered the floor. Avun approached quietly, watching him for any sudden movements. He had learned to be careful around the Weave-lord of late.

Kakre's mental health had taken a dangerous slide in recent months, and Avun never quite knew where he stood with his master these days.

He studied the hunched figure before him. Like all his kind, the Weave-lord was clad in heavy, ragged robes sewn haphazardly together from all manner of materials including hide and skin, in Kakre's case and hung with ornaments: knucklebone strings and twists of hair and the like. The voluminous cowl partially covered the stretched, ghastly corpse-face that was his True Mask; the Mask concealed the even fouler visage beneath. Avun had never seen Kakre's real face, and never wished to.

'Kakre?' he prompted. The Weaver started a little and then slowly turned his dead face to the Lord Protector.

'You have come,' he wheezed, a faintly disorientated and dreamlike tone to his voice. Avun wondered whether he had accidentally interrupted Kakre's Weaving.

'You asked to see me,' Avun pointed out.

Kakre paused for a little too long, then shook himself and recovered from whatever befuddlement had been upon him. 'I did,' he said, more decisively. 'The feya-kori are ready once again. What is your advice?'

Avun regarded Kakre with his drowsy eyes. His permanent expression of disinterest belied a mind of uncommon ruth-lessless. He did not look the part of the most important non-Weaver in Axekami, with his gaunt frame and balding pate, but appearances could deceive. He had rode the chaos of the Weavers' coup to make Koli the only high family to come out on top while the others went under, and in a short time had worked his way from being a mere figurehead for the Weavers the human face of their reign to becoming utterly invaluable to them.

'Zila,' he said.

'Zila?' Kakre repeated. 'Why not attack? Go straight for their core, straight for Saraku?'

'They expect you to move on and try to take the Sasako Bridge, to push towards their heartland from Juraka. Do not do so. Let them know we can harry them all along their front. They will be forced to divide their armies, not knowing where the next a.s.sault will come from. Attack Zila with the feya-kori, take it, and fortify.'

'What good will that do?' Kakre asked impatiently. 'To chip away at them one town at a time?'

'War is not conducted in a headlong charge, Kakre,' Avun said. 'I would have thought you had proved that yourselves by now. Remember the early days, Kakre? That first sweep across the country after taking Axekami? Your only strategy was to fling as many troops as possible at your targets, counting your numbers as unlimited. You were beaten back time and again by forces one tenth your size. Because they used tactics. They knew how to fight wars.' He raised an eyebrow. 'As do I.'

He could feel the hatred in Kakre's glare from behind the shadowed eyes of the Mask. It was necessary to remind the Weavers of his worth now and again, lest they forget, but it was a risky business. Kakre was apt to lose his temper, and the consequences for Avun were usually painful.

'Tell me the details,' Kakre said eventually, and Avun felt the tightness in his chest slacken a little. He began to explain, recalling troop locations and the size of armies from memory, laying out the plan for his master. And if, long ago, he might have felt a twinge of guilt at betraying his fellow man this way, he felt nothing of the sort now.

The beginning of the war had not gone at all the way the Weavers had wanted it to. They had envisioned a complete collapse of the Empire, allowing them to overwhelm the disorganised opposition with their superior numbers and suicidal troops. But they had known nothing of the Sisters. With the Red Order knitting themselves across the gap that the Weavers had left and protecting the n.o.bles from the Weavers' influence, the high families put up an unexpectedly efficient resistance. They were quick to recognise that their opponent had no knowledge of military strategies, and capitalised on it. The Weavers had the advantage in numbers; but the skilful generals of the Empire, well-studied and practised in the art of war, made them pay dearly for every mile gained. In time, it became obvious that even the apparently endless armies of the Weavers could not support such losses, and the Empire began to counterattack.

That was when Avun stepped in to lend his services. The Weavers were not generals: they were erratic, most of them were borderline maniacs, and they had no interest in history and so had not learned its lessons. Avun was shrewd and clever, and under his direction the armies of the Weavers became suddenly far more effective, and the Empire's counterattack was battered into a stalemate.

But by then the advantage had been lost. The forces of the Empire had retreated to the Southern Prefectures and held it tenaciously. The damage caused by the Weavers' inept.i.tude and the vast areas that they now had to keep occupied meant that the Aberrant armies were stretched thin, and the breeding programmes would take years to catch up. Time was both on their side and against them, for every witchstone unearthed made the Weavers stronger, but it accelerated the blight that was killing the crops.

The Weavers were impatient. They were afraid of their armies starving. Avun could understand that. But what he could not understand was what method lay in the Weavers' madness. A desire to conquer he could appreciate. The thirst for power through Masks and witchstones he could sympathise with. But the witchstones were causing the blight. It had been a secret for so long, but only the blind could fail to see the connection now. What use was a poisoned land to the Weavers? Even they had to eat.

Kakre would provide no answers, Avun was sure of that. But for his part, as ever, he would seek advantage for himself and his own, and as long as he was Lord Protector he had leisure to manoeuvre.

Let the other n.o.bles fight their hopeless battle against the Weavers' tide. Avun had made betrayal a science, and it had served him well. When the time came, he would betray the Weavers too.

But for now, he spoke his soft words of advice, teaching Kakre the best way to kill those he had once counted as allies, while distantly there came the hoot and gibber of the inmates of the madhouse that surrounded him.