He was watching the gristle-crows circling overhead in the flat light of the dawn, his eyes tight with distrust. The air was dead and still.

He rode with his hand near the hilt of his nakata. His hair was tied back in a short queue to keep it out of his face in battle; it made his scar more obvious. The beige leather of his armour creaked as he moved, and his expression was grim with concentration.

Reki had been keeping in contact with the Tkiurathi force since landfall, and in that time the tension in his men had grown unbearable. The Aberrants had all but disappeared, except for the gristle-crows that shadowed them from high above, out of rifle range. In less than an hour, if the Sisters' estimations were correct, they would be coming up against the Weavers' barrier. The Tkiurathi had already successfully penetrated it during the night, and were lying in wait in the mountains just inside the perimeter. But there was no sign of any opposition. Even the skirmishes that had whittled at his army in those first weeks had ceased.

It was too easy. And this pa.s.s was too dangerous: a shallow-sided valley of shale and granite, bulwarked on either side by peaks. After so many days of struggling to find navigable trails through the hostile heights, he should have been glad that they at last had a few smooth miles to walk. His men had been taxed to their limits by the journey, and they needed a rest, but the pressures of time would not allow it.

The longer the day wore on, the more chance that the Tkiurathi would be discovered by roaming gristle-crows within the perimeter of Adderach, and their deceit would be revealed.

So they had to come through this eerily silent pa.s.s.

All the scouts he had were scouring the surrounding land, but they reported nothing. He asked the Sisters that travelled with him, but they had no answer. Perhaps the Weavers were consolidating around Adderach. Perhaps even inside it. That would make things extremely problematic. It would be much harder to winkle the Weavers out of their lair if they had settled in to a defensive position, and it would give them time to destroy their own witchstone if it came to a last resort. That, as far as Reki understood, would be disastrous.

Asara rode alongside him, in the midst of the army of desert warriors that moved uneasily down the narrow route through the mountains. Her manxthwa murmured and snorted and shook its head as it plodded, apparently oblivious to the prevailing mood of foreboding.

She was trying to reconcile the man at her side with the boy she had first seduced, long ago, in her capacity as a spy for the Libera Dramach. It was no good. He was no great warrior his skills lay in tactics, and he never fought in the frontline like some Baraks did but he certainly looked like one now.

Once he had been shy and uncertain of himself; now he was lordly and a.s.sured, and people responded to that and followed him.

Asara had watched that change, due in no small part to her. Having a lover and later a wife of such staggering beauty did wonders for his self-esteem. She had been unfailingly supportive and loyal, guiding him towards strength, and he had done whatever she suggested. When he was with her, he believed he could achieve anything, and believing made it so. Four years had pa.s.sed swiftly for her. At her age, time was accelerating faster and faster. She had the body and face of a twenty-harvest G.o.ddess, but the soul of a woman of ninety.

However, things were not as they were. A cloud had gathered over their relationship and was darkening rapidly. He was asking about her past, and he would not let it lie. His love for her was poisoning him. His imagination fashioned dozens of different scenarios that he tested her with to see her reaction: desperate suggestions as to how she might have lived her childhood, as if she might give away some signal when he struck on the right one. It had become an obsession, a worm of doubt that had grown into something monstrous and gnawed him inside, feeding on the magnitude of his pa.s.sion for her. Had she not won him so utterly, he might have managed to be content with ignorance; but she had long experience of men and their ways, and she knew that this would consume him until he was either satisfied or driven to some mad act. She had known men slay their partners in frustration when in the throes of such torment, or cast themselves from cliffs.

Even a lie would not be enough, now. Soon it would be time to leave.

Her whole life had been a sequence of transitory episodes, always forced to move on as her nature became apparent. Eventually people noticed that she did not become old, or that she healed from wounds uncommonly fast, or that people had a strange tendency to die in any place where she settled.

The Sleeping Death had struck several times in the last few weeks, causing consternation among the men and fears of a plague. It was unwise, but Asara was hungry. Hungrier, in fact, than she had ever been. And she knew exactly why; had suddenly, unequivocably understood when she woke in the night less than a week past.

She was pregnant with Reki's child.

Even the Libera Dramach, where her Aberrancy was acceptable and known to some, she must leave behind now. Cailin would learn in the end that Kaiku had been persuaded into completing her part of the bargain struck with Asara long ago. Asara was beholden to Cailin no more. She had what she wanted. But Kaiku's misgivings at allowing her to become pregnant would be shared by Cailin. It was simply not politic to let Asara breed, to run the risk of allowing her to become the first of a race of beings that could change their outward shape at will.

Asara believed that Cailin would kill her if she ever knew. And kill her children too. So she would never return to Araka Jo, nor ever have any part of the Libera Dramach or the Sisters again.

Then why not go now? said the new voice in her mind, the voice that thought of her child first and only and always. You have what you want from him. If you make yourself part of this battle, you could die; and what you carry is too precious to lose. You have a duty to survive now.

But as much as she believed that, she could not leave. There was one thing left to do.

A cry from somewhere in the army brought her attention sharply back to her surroundings, and, seeing that everyone was looking up, she followed their gaze, and saw the Aberrants.

They were swarming down one side of the pa.s.s, a heaving ma.s.s of claws and fur and hide and teeth; and there, on the other side, more of them, coming from behind as well.

'How did we not see them?' Reki cried, unsheathing his sword. He turned to the Sister that rode nearby.

'How did you not know?'

Her expression was grim; she did not seem surprised or horrified, but resigned. 'They have learned to disguise themselves well,' she said.

Reki shot her a look of disgust and dismissed her with a snort. The sound of rifles was crackling along the flanks of the army as they arranged themselves defensively. The G.o.ds only knew what chance they would have against this. The Aberrants kept coming, thundering down the sides of the pa.s.s.

'Stay with me, Asara,' he said; then he muttered a quick prayer to Suran, and the first of the Aberrants reached them.

THIRTY.

The pale light of Nuki's eye grew over Adderach, illuminating madness.

The oldest monastery of the Weavers was a testament to the insanity that saturated their kind. Though the other monasteries were similarly chaotic in their architecture, nothing came close to the nightmarish creation that they had raised on the spot where they had first found a witchstone, where Aricarat had ensnared them and turned them, unknowing, to his will.

It towered at the foot of Mount Aon, built primarily of stone the colour of sand, a bewildering agglutination of forms fused together in a pile that possessed a fractured logic all its own. Domes like bubbles poked out at odd angles from brickwork that varied wildly in size and shape. Walls slumped or curved, perhaps once intended to encircle something but never completed. Surreal statues, dream-images both fascinating and terrifying, were frozen in place, scattered randomly about the surroundings or growing out of the monastery itself. Walkways jabbed from the main body of the structure, half-completed. Spires tipped crazily, corks.c.r.e.w.i.n.g along their length.

The monastery sprawled in all directions. Half of the place was derelict, as were the majority of the outbuildings, which were themselves incredible demonstrations of caprice. Most of them looked ridiculous, but some showed hints of genius in their construction that the best sane minds in the Empire had never come close to matching.

Where the Weavers' ideas came from, even they did not know. But just as the Masks took pieces of their owners and pa.s.sed them on, so did they possess pieces of their progenitor. The knowledge they contained most of it far beyond the grasp of the Weavers' minds would reveal itself in dreams and visions and moments of insight that the Weavers could not possibly have attained by themselves.

Through the addle of benighted understanding, revelations were glimpsed like lanterns in the fog, some so incomprehensible that they sent their witnesses further into madness, and others lying just on the cusp of reason, that the Weavers might act on. Strange mathematics, unheard-of techniques of manufacture, combinations of reagents that would produce astounding results, patterns of logic: ideas, ideas, ideas.

The Weavers were inefficient conduits for their unseen master, but eventually the results leaked through. For every thousand misfires there was one moment of shocking clarity, and the Weavers built on these. Beneath the anarchy of Adderach there was cold, hard purpose.

The Tkiurathi attacked in the early morning, not long after they received the news that Reki's forces had been ambushed. They had crept inward from the perimeter as the dawn broke, their progress cloaked by the power of the Sisters. When the first of the gristle-crows began to appear, the Red Order deflected them so that they turned away and looked elsewhere. Once a Weaver surveyed their area, his attention crackling over them, but he was easily blinded by his skilful opponents. The Weavers were evidently not on any alert: after all, they had been steadily tracking the progress of Reki and his men for days now, and knew exactly where they were. They were confident of having their enemy safely within their grasp.

As Cailin had hoped, they did not expect an a.s.sault from the north.

When the moment came, the Tkiurathi broke cover at a run, howling battle-cries. Kaiku ran in the rearguard with some of the other Sisters. There were perhaps two hundred Aberrants, scattered across the rocky surrounds of Adderach as guards. As soon as they noticed the enemy, they raced to intercept.

Two hundred Aberrants could have done a lot of damage, even to such consummate warriors as the Tkiurathi, but they did not coordinate themselves, instead rushing at the army in clots and drabs. The Tkiurathi took them to pieces.

Kaiku felt a surge of fierce joy at the sight of Adderach, revealed there before her as the incline bottomed out and they rounded an outthrust root of the colossal Mount Aon, which rose into the insipid sky to her right. The proximity of their target and the battle ahead served to stir her from the maudlin reverie she had sunk into ever since she had removed the Mask the night before. G.o.ds, even now she could remember the awful joy of it, and half her mind was telling her to take it from inside her dress and put it on, that she would seem so much more fearsome and formidable wearing it over her face. But she was already wearing one mask, that of the Red Order. She told herself that it was enough to serve her, and held onto that one to stave away the temptations of the other.

She caught sight of Tsata at the fringe of the horde, but then he was gone again. She had only a glimpse of him, his face fiercely intense as he swept toward a rampaging group of furies, and then the Weavers attacked.

The force of it was staggering. The Sisters had not expected such rage. Their enemies came through the Weave like demons, with a vigour beyond anything Kaiku had ever faced from them. They were angry at being duped, that much was evident; but more, they were angry that women were here, that they had penetrated the sanctuary of man this way and appeared, uninvited, so close to the heart of them. And under that anger they were desperately afraid, because they knew now that they had made a mistake and that their adversaries were close enough to reach their most precious treasure.

That first clash was a brutal one, and the Sisters almost buckled under the power of it, for they could not devote all their resources to the combat while they were still attending to the physical world in some degree. They were hampered by the necessity of running towards the monastery, and were fighting on the fly. But the Weavers' rage worked against them and made them clumsy, and after the shock of the initial impact the Sisters rallied and fought back, spinning traps and tricks into their path.

Kaiku was guarded by several Tkiurathi, as were the other Sisters, and she took her cues from their movements as to where to place her feet while she looked into the Weave. She was darting and shuttling, meshing with the efforts of her companions, as if she were one of a dozen needles working in perfect unison to knit fabric. She felt a blaze of satisfaction as the Weavers ran into their traps, or pulled up short to avoid them. Those that were too slow became ensnared and were pulled to pieces by the Sisters, or lost themselves in closed labyrinths, leaving their bodies in a drooling, vegetative state while their minds ceaselessly wandered.

Cailin had schooled the Sisters ruthlessly in the tactics they would employ, and Kaiku sensed several of the Order tracing away under cover of the battle to find Nexuses. With the Weavers distracted, the Sisters were free to hunt the masters of the Aberrants through the links that were strung between the nexus-worms embedded in both Nexus and predator. It was a discipline that they had learned from Kaiku. She had been able to do it intuitively the first time she tried, back in the Xarana Fault, but it had proved oddly difficult for most of the other Sisters. Now they had the art of it, and the Weavers were too busy to prevent them. They followed the links back to where the Nexuses were and burst their internal organs. The controlling minds behind the Aberrants faded, and those beasts that the Tkiurathi had not killed ran into the safety of the mountains.

At some point during the conflict, Kaiku noted a diffuse spray of threads heading away from them across the golden vista that she operated in. A call for help, directed south. Just as Cailin had planned.

The Sister to Kaiku's right stumbled, fell with a strangled cry. The Tkiurathi behind her caught her, bearing her up, but Kaiku knew it was useless. The Weavers had got to her. Her essence was destroyed now, and her body was an empty husk, which would soon wind down and stop without the spark of life to empower it.

There were many Weavers here, more than there were Sisters; but the Sisters were better, even with the new tricks that their opponents seemed to learn with every conflict. It would be a hard fight, but it was one they could win. At least until the other Weavers that had been occupied with Reki's forces joined in.

Time was against them. They had to find and penetrate the witchstone before then, or they would be overwhelmed.

Obsessed with the fight, Kaiku barely noticed the deafening tumult of the Tkiarathi, the thudding of feet and the giddy rush of the charge. The Aberrants had all but ceased to be a threat now, and it was only the Weavers that concerned her. But as she neared the monastery, its baroque and twisted spires reaching high above, she began to notice something else. The witchstone. She could feel it, all the way out here, throbbing through the earth. Its power dwarfed the other witchstones she had come across before, a venomous and malevolent strength like nothing she had ever encountered. If they could sense it all the way out here, what must it be like to stand before it? For the first time, doubts began to creep in.

I will ease your mind, promised the Mask that was hidden in her dress, close to her breast.

For an instant she faltered, stumbled a little, and in that moment a Weaver slid at her along the Weave like the thrust of a rapier. It was only by Cailin's intercession that the strike was turned aside: she wrapped the point of the attack in threads like swaddling a hot poker in towels, and thrust it away.

((Kaiku, concentrate!)) came the swift admonishment. Kaiku felt a surge of resentment at being scolded so, and used it to clear her mind of the Mask's whisperings. Hatred was her ally here, no matter whom it was directed at.

Then they were at one of Adderach's many walls, a spot between two wings that snaked away like angular tentacles on either side on them. It was curved and bowed inwards, constructed of uneven layers of brick and what looked like whole boulders suspended in a matrix of mortar. The Tkiurathi were bunching around it expectantly.

((With me)) came the order, and Kaiku and several other Sisters broke off portions of their consciousness from the front line of the battle in the Weave and sent them spinning in Cailin's wake.

They sewed themselves along the length of the wall, and it detonated in a blast of sandy powder. It slumped inward on itself, leaving a wide hole, strewn with rubble.

The Tkiurathi headed for the breach and poured inside. Kaiku followed, pulling out of the Weave as she clambered over the shifting chunks of stone amid the flood of tattooed folk. Several Weavers had already fallen, and there were enough Sisters to do without her now.

The morning light brought unbearable brightness to the shadowy interior of the monastery, and it echoed with the sound of the Tkiurathi's feet and voices. Much of the room was covered in debris, but she could see that it was cavernous, and that its walls were built at drastically uneven angles, higher at one end than the other. A great semicircular opening fringed with what looked like human hair led out of the room. There were other doorways, but they were too small for anything bigger than a dog. The twisted perspective made her head hurt.

Then Tsata was at her side, scrambling up from behind and taking her arm. She welcomed the sight of him; together they ran through the debris and onward, where the Tkiurathi were spreading through the building. Small clashes began as they came across those Aberrants that were still trapped inside.

Adderach was just as demented within as without. Rooms narrowed to nothing; doors had been built but no doorways; corridors were like mazes. Every room brought some new strangeness. They came across a chandelier of crystal hanging incongruously over what looked like a butcher's table, with fresh and b.l.o.o.d.y meat strewn everywhere. There was a sculpture twice the height of a man that was shockingly hideous and yet masterfully crafted, standing in a room that had been built with no doors. It was only revealed when one of the Sisters blasted a hole in the wall. One room was round and sloped down towards a circular pit, and from the blackness came hungry howls. There was little they came across that had any obvious purpose, and certainly there seemed to be nothing like dining rooms or other places of gathering. There was only the evidence of a speedy evacuation: food and rubbish everywhere, fires left burning while stew bubbled over, torches still blazing where they had been dropped. Kaiku had expected to find golneri everywhere, the diminutive servants of the Weavers, but while the presence of cooking equipment and their footprints in the dust suggested that they were around, there were none to be seen.

There were, however, dead Nexuses. Their elongated bodies, freakishly tall and thin and clad in black robes, were twisted in the throes of death. They lay in various contortions, blood weeping through the eyeholes of their blank white masks. Kaiku's stomach turned as she remembered what she had seen when they had looked beneath those masks. Tsata, who had shared her experience, gripped her shoulder rea.s.suringly; she laid her hand on the back of his in acknowledgement.

These, then, were the Nexuses who had been coordinating the small defence force outside. And yet still it all seemed too easy, and there were too few of them.

She rushed from room to room with Tsata and several other Tkiurathi, often backtracking as they were foiled by the Weavers' architecture, sometimes blasting through the wall when it was possible to do so without bringing the upper levels down on them. She could sense other Sisters there, scouring the corridors above her, hunting their way up to the spires.

Presently, she came face-to-face with Cailin, who stalked into the room from another doorway.

Semicircular discs of metal had been embedded in the walls and floor and ceiling of this chamber, their edges etched with markings that Kaiku could not identify. Cailin picked her way across to Kaiku, accompanied by the Tkiurathi that were guarding her.

'This is wrong, Cailin,' Kaiku said.

'Indeed,' she replied. 'Where are they all? Where is the resistance? They are not in the levels above; that much I am certain.'

Kaiku tapped her foot on stone. 'They are below. They have retreated and they are waiting for us to come to them.'

Cailin met her eyes, and it was clear that she had thought the same. The conflict in the Weave buzzed around them, tickling their senses. Kaiku was keeping sporadic checks on it, but the Sisters had matters in hand.

'Can you sense it?' Kaiku asked. 'The witchstone. Already it hampers my Weaving; I cannot see the layout of this cursed place, nor see a way down.'

'There are many ways down,' said Cailin. 'It does not foil me as it does you, but I think that will change as we get nearer.' And Kaiku saw the ways as Cailin broadcast a blaze of knowledge to all her brethren.

The answering mesh of information came smoothly back: the Sisters all knew their place, whether it be continuing to fight off the the Weavers, checking the remainder of the upper levels, keeping in contact with the Sisters who fought with Reki or heading downward to whatever lay beneath Adderach.

Abruptly the battle in the Weave collapsed. The Weavers, as one, faded from the field, drawing back into themselves. The Sisters, bewildered, made to follow, but Cailin forbade them.

((Do not be drawn in. We will descend and face them there)) Adderach was eerily silent. There was no fighting, whether physical or in the Weave. The place was still, but for the pulsing of the witchstone beneath their feet.

'Come,' said Cailin, and she swept away. Kaiku followed, Tsata and the other Tkiurathi with her. They were somewhere near the centre of the edifice, Kaiku knew that much. Other Sisters were heading for other routes down. The Tkiurathi were draining into them too, leaving Adderach and its surrounds empty. They did not have a large enough force to retain a guard on the surface, in case an enemy army should arrive. If they did not succeed below, then their only chance at survival was to get out and away before the Weavers answered the distress call sent a short while ago.

Otherwise, they would be trapped down there.

Asara fired, primed, fired again. It took two more shots to get through the latchjaw's thick skull, but eventually she hit the brain. It slumped to the ground, its great porcupine-like quills shivering as it settled.

Grimed with sweat and dust, she took quick stock of her surroundings and located Reki. He was in the midst of a crowd of men, his nakata drawn but unbloodied; he was well protected. They struggled with another pair of latchjaws, squat monstrosities with fanged snouts, covered in deadly spines. They had stubby feet that protruded before them, their three digits stumpy and clawed; they had no back feet at all, only a short tail which they dragged behind them. Though they were c.u.mbersome, they were fast enough in a lunge and their spiky armour meant that they were incredibly dangerous at close quarters.

She looked around. The floor of the pa.s.s was thick with fighting, but the desert warriors' core still held strong, due in no small part to the fact that most of the Aberrants had already left. At first the overwhelming tide of predators had taken a great toll on them, but Reki's generals had wisely kept up the defensive until their reprieve came. At some unseen signal, which Asara guessed had come from the Weavers at Adderach, the larger proportion of their attackers had broken away and headed northward up the pa.s.s. But they had left enough to keep the desert warriors busy for quite some while, and the battle continued on. Their situation was not quite so desperate now, but it was far from comfortable.

Reki was casting about for a sight of his wife, and relief showed on his face when their eyes met. She had become separated in the melee; now she slung her rifle across her back, drew a dagger and began to make her way to him, shying away from the swell of conflict as it loomed close to her.

The latchjaws had succ.u.mbed at last to their wounds, after taking down three of Reki's men, and his Blood Tanatsua bodyguards were regrouping around their Barak. They parted to allow Asara through.

Reki regarded her for a moment, then unexpectedly he embraced her, driving the breath from her. He recoiled with a grunt, looking down at his hand.

Asara took it, concern on her face. There was a deep scratch along his palm, where the tip of the dagger she held had caught him. Blood welled up from within. 'Careful, my Barak,' she muttered. 'You will hurt yourself.' She turned the hand over, then looked up at him with a smile. 'I pray that is the worst of the wounds you sustain today.'

'These men will see to that,' he grinned. 'I even find myself eager to join in at times, but they will not hear of it.'

Asara brought out a bandage from a pocket in her travel clothes and expertly bound his hand. He flexed it; there was still perfect freedom of movement.

'Where did you learn to do that?'

'Don't,' Asara warned, her eyes hardening a little, and the moment of tenderness between them was gone.

Reki opened his mouth to speak, then closed it again and looked away. Now was not the time. He would have answers from her, whatever it took; but that would come later.

A shout of alarm made him snap his head round in time to see five ghauregs powering their way through a group of soldiers, heading for him and his men.

'Get back!' he cried, pushing Asara behind him. His bodyguards arranged themselves to tackle the menace. One of the creatures was taken down by rifles before it reached them; the other four crashed bellowing into their midst.

Reki's bodyguards were the best warriors Blood Tanatsua had to offer, but even they could not easily kill a ghaureg. Reki stumbled and fell as his men were driven back into him. He scrambled to his feet, looking around for Asara but unable to see her in the press. Blades sang: one of the ghauregs lost the fingers of its hand, another one had its leg cut off at the knee and fell. Someone split its face with their sword. Suddenly Reki's bravado seemed ridiculous: he was no fighter, and had no wish to be anywhere near combat if he could help it. But he was no coward either, and he would not run.

The battle had suddenly grown around him. Everything pressed in closer. He cast about for the enemy, but he could not see over the jostle of his bodyguards. A man screamed somewhere. There was a volley of rifle shots. A gap opened in the crush, and he saw a ghaureg on its knees, being hacked to pieces by his soldiers.

Then the army flexed and flowed away from him, and there was s.p.a.ce again. The battle was no longer so near. His bodyguards moved to surround him. The ghauregs were dead, and shortly afterward a runner told him that the Sisters had begun to overcome the nearby Weavers and were killing the Nexuses that plagued them. The battle was turning.

Reki listened with half an ear: he was searching, becoming increasingly frantic.

'Where is your Barakess?' he demanded of the people around him. 'Where is Asara?'

But they could not answer him, and he himself had not seen her since the ghauregs had attacked.

In the end, he did not find her. Not even after the battle was over, and the remainder of the army almost half its size now forged on to Adderach in the hope of saving their allies there. Grief-stricken, he stayed with a small retinue and walked the corpse-strewn pa.s.s, praying to Suran that she might still somehow be alive.