In the s.p.a.ce of a heartbeat she had appeared behind several of the Weavers in rapid succession, so quick that it seemed almost simultaneous, each time stabbing with her blade. Then she was back where she had begun, the whole process enacted fast enough so that it might have been a trick of the brain.

But on the far side of the room, in the gloomy shadows, eight Weavers collapsed, pierced through the nape of the neck.

Kaiku was dumbstruck. She had never imagined Cailin capable of such a thing; no wonder the Weavers were caught by surprise. Just for an instant, she had glimpsed the unplumbed depths of her own abilities, what she might be able to do if she took up Cailin's offer and returned to the fold.

But there was no time for such musings now. The Weavers were rocked by their loss, and the Sisters, scenting victory, threw themselves into the offensive.

The giant Aberrant swung its head around at Heth's cry. Even from a being so small to a creature so ma.s.sive, it recognised a challenge. Its mismatched eyes squinted down at the blurred figure at its feet. This little thing was becoming a torment: already the Aberrant had tried to catch Heth twice, and he kept dodging out of the way. Frustrated, it lunged for him.

Heth moved as the great jaws gaped, and when they snapped shut he was not between them. As the head came down, Tsata darted in from the side, driving his gutting-hook in towards the creature's neck, where the nexus-worm glistened. His blade hit one of the Aberrant's many facial spikes, glanced away, and Tsata was forced to jump backwards to avoid being gored as it raised its head again.

Heth was already running to a new position, and Tsata went with him, keeping himself clear of the other Aberrants that were engaged in battling his brethren. He spared an instant to glance back at Kaiku, but she was anonymous among the other Sisters, and he had no idea how their endeavours were going. He had only this purpose: to bring down the beast. And every time he failed, Heth was forced to make himself the bait once more. But the creature was too well-armoured, making what was already a hard target near to impossible.

His knuckles whitened on the hilt of his kntha. He would not fail next time.

The giant Aberrant was following Heth now, ignoring the other Tkiurathi that hacked pointlessly at its legs and tail. Heth glanced over at Tsata, to be sure he was near enough; but in the instant that Heth took his attention away, it struck.

Heth only dodged at all because of the alarm on Tsata's face, but he was a fraction too slow. Though the beast missed most of him, its jaws snapped shut on his trailing arm with a terrible cracking noise. Heth screamed; blood squirted through the monster's teeth. It shook him violently, pulling him over and tearing the rest of his arm off.

Then Tsata was there. The beast's head had sunk low to the ground, and Tsata threw himself at his target. He felt a blaze of pain in his ribs: the thing had turned slightly, and he caught one of the spikes in his side. But he took his gutting-hook and rammed it into the soft, slimy flesh of the nexus-worm, then twisted hard. The beast roared, flexing spasmodically; Tsata was lifted up and flung away. He sailed through the air for a few awful instants and landed in a heap on the hard metal floor with a loud snap.

But the beast buckled. Its legs gave way as the nexus-worm died, and it staggered sideways and collapsed with a thunderous boom, crushing Aberrants and Tkiurathi alike underneath its ma.s.sive bulk.

The death of the worm, so closely tied in with its brain and nervous system, triggered a stroke and a heart attack simultaneously, and after a few violent spasms it gave a bubbling sigh and was still.

The Weavers fell to pieces all at once. The remainder of them had consolidated their efforts as best they could into one defensive force, but eventually it could bear the strain of the Sisters'

furious a.s.sault no longer. The six Sisters that were left shredded the remaining eight Weavers, blowing them apart from within in a flaming rain of flesh and bone.

After that, it was a slaughter. The Sisters went for the Nexuses next. The black-robed beings went up like torches, silently burning. They showed no indication of pain, nor made a sound, but collapsed into blazing heaps. The Aberrants lost their minds as they lost their masters; some fled, some kept fighting, but the Tkiurathi were still thirty strong and the Aberrants half that now. The remaining beasts were destroyed by the Sisters or by the Tkiurathi, and then there was silence. As if waking from a dream, Kaiku realised that the fighting had stopped.

But a new sound was growing. The roar of an approaching horde, coming from the doorway through which they had entered. The Weavers' reinforcements were here.

'Seal that door!' Cailin cried, and the Sisters responded immediately. The mechanism that drove the metal barrier jerked into life, and the two halves began to slide from their recesses and grind shut. The sounds of the enemy got louder, louder, until Kaiku thought they must surely be upon them; and then there was a reverberant clang, and the door was closed.

Kaiku turned away, looking for Tsata, and found him kneeling, one arm cradled in the other. She hurried over to him, slowing as she neared. His trousers were black with blood which had soaked into them from the great slick all around him. Heth lay in the midst of that, his yellow skin gone white, his tattooes pallid. His arm had been ripped away, leaving only a wet mess at the shoulder through which a k.n.o.b of bone showed. He was clearly dead.

'Tsata . . .' she murmured, then realised she did not know what to say. He did not look up. She noticed that his left forearm kinked at an angle, and he was holding it to his chest. 'Let me see to that . . .' she began, but then Cailin swept up to her.

'Kaiku. Come with me now,' she said. She looked down at Tsata. 'The Weavers will not be long getting through that door. We need what time you can give us.'

'You will have every moment our lives can buy,' he said quietly, and still he did not raise his head.

Cailin cast one last glance at Kaiku and then made for the doorway in the tower, where the other Sisters were heading. Kaiku waited there for a short time, trying to think of something to say, something suitable for this parting. But there were no words that could express her sorrow, nothing adequate to ease his hurt. In the end, she turned and walked away without a word. She was last through the doorway, and as soon as she was in Cailin used her kana to decipher and activate the mechanism. The door slid shut with a squeal of metal. Kaiku's gaze lingered on Tsata until he disappeared from view.

The elevator began to descend with a lurch, and they went down, down towards the witchstone.

THIRTY-TWO.

None of the Sisters spoke as the machinery whirred and squeaked. They could sense that they were sinking by the feeling in their stomachs, but they were encased in the circular metal room of the elevator, and there was nothing to look at but each other. With every pa.s.sing second, the power exuded by the witchstone was growing, becoming fiercer and more intense. Cailin had not brought the Tkiurathi with them because she believed they would not be able to survive such proximity to the thing; Kaiku wondered now if any of them would. This witchstone was older by far than the one she had destroyed in the mine long ago, older even than the stone that had been shattered at Utraxxa. It was the heart of a G.o.d, and merely to look on it might be enough to kill them.

After what seemed like an age, the elevator shuddered and stopped. There was a pregnant silence. Then the doors opened.

The force of the witchstone's presence made the Sisters cry out and recoil, their arms instinctively raised before their eyes as if by blocking the brightness they could mute its strength. The thick metal of the elevator had been shielding them until now; robbed of that barrier, they were blasted by it like a hurricane.

Kaiku fell backwards to the cold, hard floor, breaking her fall with her arm. The Weave was a maelstrom, its churning so violent that it physically pushed her over. She clung to control, trying to ride the chaos before she was swept away by it entirely. The very touch of the witchstone was foul, tainting the golden threads black, a sucking mora.s.s of malevolent darkness. The rage of Aricarat was palpable, a hatred pure enough to drive them insane.

But somehow Kaiku held on, long enough to sew a skin around herself, a protective coc.o.o.n that screened out the worst of the barrage. She found her level and allowed herself to flow with the maelstrom like a boat on stormy waters. Then she set about rescuing those of the Sisters that had not managed to do so yet. Finally, they were stable enough to stand again; but Kaiku's kana was already being taxed, and she knew she could not hold out like this for long.

They staggered out of the elevator and into the chamber of the witchstone.

It was gargantuan, towering almost a hundred feet high and half that in width, filling the cavern. There was no discernible overall shape to it; it was simply a ma.s.s, a crooked lump of rock that sprouted roots and protuberances all over its surface, and from those extrusions other extrusions came. It was growth gone mad, multiplying over and over in ridiculous plethora until there was barely any s.p.a.ce at all between its branches. Like the other witchstones, it thrust into the wall of the surrounding cavern, melding with it; but unlike the others, its branches were so dense that it was almost impossible to tell where the witchstone ended and the cavern began. It had a.s.similated itself into its surroundings almost totally.

The nauseating luminescence of the witchstone blanched the faces of the Sisters as they came cringing into its presence, casting stark shadows across the broken floor. Several great roots reared over them, dwarfing them by comparison.

But Cailin straightened herself, her expression made hideous by the unnatural light, and her voice rang out across the chamber.

'Sisters! Cleanse our land of this abomination!'

Kaiku steeled herself and unleashed her kana at it. The vast, pulsing black tangle filled her world and engulfed her. The touch of it was like acid, but through the burning she fought to untangle the threads of the witchstone, to find purchase to get inside it. Its radiance was so terrible that even the Weavers had not been able to come near to plant explosives, like they must have done at Utraxxa. The Sisters had only to bore inward and they would be inside the web of the witchstones, able to spread to every stone in Saramyr. But each moment they wasted was a moment closer to that when the Weavers would break through the lingering defences that the Sisters had left on the door to the chamber above. Then the Tkiurathi would be killed Tsata would be killed and the Sisters would be next. The Weavers would send an elevator full of Aberrants down, and it would be the end.

She gritted her teeth, scratched and picked at the witch-stone ferociously, but it did no good.

Frustration grew in her. She could find nowhere amid the awful ma.s.s that would permit her entry to the thing: its exterior defences were too dense. No Sister had ever Weaved into a witchstone before, and now they found that they had underestimated the difficulty greatly.

Cailin sent an instruction to them all, and they battled their way through the whirling disorder and sewed themselves together. In one slender needle of intent, they thrust at the witchstone, driving into it; but incredibly, it held. They managed to make fractional headway before the point of the needle was blunted and expelled. They struck again, to no avail.

The Sisters began to try anything and everything they could. They attempted to make themselves diffuse, to seep into it like gas through the pores of a membrane; they tried attacking it from many angles at once; they worked at unpeeling it like an onion. Nothing worked. It remained invincible, and their best efforts did not even scratch it.

Kaiku was exhausted. The sheer mental strain of being in its presence was becoming too much, and Weaving on top of that was draining her utterly. What was more, her kana was being diverted to repair the damage that was being done to her physical body. She could feel the witchstone's insidious rays changing her, making minuscule alterations, causing tiny cancers and encouraging unusual and unnatural processes into life. Her kana was automatically fixing this corruption as it occurred. If not for that, it would not have been long before she became like the elder Edgefathers were: repulsive freaks, warped beyond recognition.

She dropped out of the Weave, and realised that she was on her knees on the rough floor of the cavern.

Her legs had been unable to support her any longer. She was gasping for breath, her body aching.

Spirits, no. Not when we are so close. We cannot fail here. Ocha, emperor of the G.o.ds, help us now if you can. Help me fulfil my oath. Show me how to end this evil.

And the answer came to her. A possibility so awful that she at first dismissed it out of hand, but then, despairingly, she realised that it was the only chance they had left. She could sense the Sisters fruitlessly battering at the witchstone, and knew that even Cailin's skill could not help them now.

She thought of all that would be lost if the Sisters fell here. Of all the beauty she remembered from her childhood: the rinji birds on the Kerryn, the sun through the leaves of the Forest of Yuna, the dazzling waters of Mataxa Bay. All that would pa.s.s into a memory, and eventually even memories would fade.

The skies would die. And after the Near World was gone, after their planet had been enshrouded as the Xhiang Xhi had predicted, then Aricarat would spread outward, into whatever was beyond.

It was too much, too much responsibility to comprehend. So she thought only of Tsata. She would save his life, if she could. Even if it meant trading her own. For pash.

She drew the leering red and black Mask from her dress and slipped it over her head.

'Kaiku!' Cailin shrieked, seeing what she was doing. 'Kaiku, no! '

With the Mask on her face, she Weaved.

The world shattered, and there was nothing but delirium and pain. Sense unravelled, connections of logic becoming estranged. There was no Kaiku, no self at all; she was a part of everything, subsumed, a curl of wind in a cyclone of derangement.

But she felt a gentle and insistent tugging, drawing her. For no reason she could fathom, it was a comfort, and she went to it. The disa.s.sembled parts of her consciousness gradually came together, reaching tendrils of sanity to each other, cohering into a structure around the warm, blessed clot of emotion that attracted them.

Father.

It was him. Or rather, it was the part of him that the Mask had robbed all that time ago, an imprint of his thoughts and mind that Kaiku had subconsciously recognised and gravitated towards. She wished somehow that she could gather it up, treasure it; but it was only a faint recollection, a sensation of trust and safety that she had lost long ago.

That the Weavers had taken from her.

She struggled to gain control of the madness around her. Anger rose within, anger at how this sanctuary had been stolen by her enemies, how her father had been so broken that he had poisoned his own family rather than let them fall into the hands of the Weavers. They had done that to him. Them!

With one colossal effort of will, she dragged herself into focus, until she was Kaiku again.

She was in the Mask, in the fibres that formed the wood and lacquer of the thing. And she was in the witchstone dust, tiny particles of the enormous ent.i.ty that they had come to destroy. They were part of her surroundings, bending the Weave unnaturally, befouling and violating her. She saw the dementia they engendered, the way they fractured the Weave in such a way that even she found it hard to understand. No wonder that it drove the Weavers mad in the end. No wonder the Sisters had never dared to attempt this. It was only because the Mask was exceptionally young and therefore weak, and because she had worn it before and was used to it, that she had not entirely shed her mind upon entering; that, and the fact that her father had been here before her.

She let herself sink into the dark threads of the witch-stone dust. These were mindless things, possessing none of the fearsome hatred of Aricarat, and yet they did live. In those little particles were a mult.i.tude of infinitesimally small organisms, so incredibly minute that Kaiku could only sense them and not identify them at all. But they possessed a portion of their parent, ingrained memory and power held in suspension. Each one possessed a tiny glimmer of energy, the force that twisted plant and flesh into new configurations. They were like tiny synapses: individually they were nothing at all, but in a group they made connections, and the connections made them greater than the sum of their parts.

And as Kaiku touched them, a flash of understanding bloomed in her mind. How one of these organisms could link with another, how the links increased in number exponentially as the number of organisms increased until they were sufficiently complex to become aware, like the processes of the human brain.

How the organisms, multiplying endlessly, became legion, their intelligence and their ability growing as the gestalt ent.i.ty grew until it was beyond human comprehension. And how the more them that gathered, the greater the energy they exuded, and the more they warped anyone or anything that came near.

Once these things had dominated a moon, until the spear of Jurani destroyed it. The G.o.d had been smashed, and the pieces had rained down on Saramyr. But the organisms in the rock had survived: senseless, stupid, like newborns once again, but alive. And some pieces, like this one beneath Adderach, had been large enough to exert their influence over the weak minds of humans when they were at last uncovered. They discovered blood, which had been absent on the moon; they converted its organic energy to strength, building pathways, altering the rock that sheltered them to better distribute the life-giving matrix, full of the nutrients they needed for growth. They took the designs from the beings that had discovered them. They built hearts and veins and used them.

I know you now, she thought darkly. And with that, she attacked the witchstone.

She burst from the Mask, tearing through the Weave towards the seething snarl of her enemy. She was aware of the shock of the Sisters as she raced past them, and then she hit the skin of the witchstone's defences.

But this time it was different. She had found the tiny threads that connected the Mask to its parent, just as the greater links joined witchstone to witchstone across the land. And she rode those threads, piggybacking them inward, and permeated the rock at last.

The witchstone's alarm was a blare that stunned her. It knew she was here, knew she was inside it. She sensed the billions upon billions of organisms that surrounded her, the crushing foulness of their presence. There, at the core, she found a junction, a nexus of tendrils, each snaking away to another, distant witchstone, a.s.similating them as part of the matrix, making them nodes in the unfathomable mind that the people of Saramyr called Aricarat.

But then the world around Kaiku began to wrench apart. The threads of the Weave twisted and snapped. And Kaiku realised in terror what was happening, and what had happened to the witchstone at Utraxxa. It had not been destroyed by the Weavers at all. It had realised that it was compromised, and had destroyed itself.

No! No! It was not enough that this witchstone should crumble into ruin. It was not enough that they won here today. It had to end now.

And as the witchstone began to tear itself apart around her, Kaiku sewed herself into it and she held it together.

It almost pulled her mind to pieces. The agony was appalling. She was being ripped asunder from every direction at once, and only her will kept her from being shredded into raving lunacy. But she would not let go. She would not let the witchstone come apart. And though the pain was more than she could bear, and the power that burst from her scorched her insides, the witchstone did not shatter. Though it shook and pulsed and deep cracks appeared along its length, though chunks of it rained down upon the Sisters so that they were forced to deflect them, it did not split.

Kaiku, both Sister and Weaver, bound it together. And with the last fraction of her energy, she punched a hole out through its defences from within, a conduit for the Sisters outside. They flooded in eagerly, pa.s.sing through her and into the nexus at the core of the witchstone; and from there they spread outward, flashing along the links between the other witchstones across Saramyr. Possessing them.

Infecting them.

Destroying them.

The first blast of a witchstone's death rolled across the Weave, buffeting Kaiku like a tsunami. But still she held, still she refused to let the witchstone go. She would not release it until she was sure that every one of them was gone. The suffering was unearthly, more than she could take, and had she a voice she would have screamed; but she held on, beyond endurance, possessed of a power greater than she had ever known. The Mask was turned against its master, and she had dominated it and taken its strength for her own. The world around her was frantically trying to twist itself apart even now, wrenching her so that she felt she would burst.

But still she held. Holding on was all she had left now. She knew nothing else.

Another shockwave rolled over her, and another. Aricarat was convulsing, his death throes ripping across the Weave, anguished and terrible and desperate. A vicious, bitter satisfaction sparked in her breast.

Die, she thought savagely. Die for what you did to me.

The Weave knotted before her, shrinking to a point of infinite density. A moment before it sprang back Kaiku realised what was about to happen and braced herself for the arrival of the Weave-whale.

It smashed into existence, its sheer mind-bending immensity crushing her. She hung in the Weave, the centre of a web of millions of straining tendrils all trying to break away from her, stretched as if on a rack; and now she was pierced also by the dread regard of one of the monstrous beings who haunted the Weave. She had gone beyond pain: her mind trembled on the edge of snapping, unable to exist in such conditions. The indescribable torment of continuance was all that had ever been, all there ever would be, a timeless h.e.l.l with nothing beyond it, and all there was left of her was that slender thread of will that told her to endure, and which would not break.

The witchstones were dying. One by one they shattered, pulverised from within by the Sisters.

More singularities sucked and bloomed. More Weave-whales arrived. Kaiku did not even realise. She had gone beyond sense, beyond sight. She was only a force of purpose now, driven far beyond the limits of her body and mind.

The Sisters were returning. She felt them flow through her, and a tiny sliver of comprehension penetrated. The witch-stones were all gone, all but the one that she held together that was still desperately trying to pull itself to pieces. It would not bear an invader, though all hope of saving the rest of the network had long pa.s.sed. It would rather have non-existence.

It is done, Kaiku thought, and she let go.

Tsata and the remaining Tkiurathi waited in the chamber above, hardly daring to breathe. They feared some kind of trick. The great metal barriers were gradually sliding aside, their mechanism activated at last by the Weavers without; but the scene they revealed was far from the ravening horde that the Tkiurathi had expected.

There were perhaps thirty Weavers there, and all of them were dead. Behind them, several dozen Aberrants fought among themselves, some of them fleeing away up the corridor, others attacking members of different predator species. A dozen Nexuses stood still, their shoulders slack, and even behind their blank white masks it was evident that something had been extinguished inside them. Tsata watched in disbelief as one of them was knocked down and savaged by a shrilling. The Nexus did not react as the beast tore him apart.

'Fire!' one of the Tkiurathi cried, and a hail of bullets ripped into the Aberrants and Nexuses alike. Those Aberrants that were not killed ran howling; the Nexuses keeled over silently and lay still.

Tsata, his broken arm held to his chest, his teeth gritted against the pain, merely stared. Then a cheer rose from the Tkiurathi, a full-throated bellow of victory. They had realised what had happened before Tsata had. The witchstones were destroyed.

All across the land, the effects were the same. The Weavers died, simply falling over like puppets whose strings had been cut. The Nexuses, bereft of instruction, went still and did not move again. Their minds were void, utterly empty, and most stood where they were until they starved to death, unless they were first eaten by the predators that they had controlled or killed by vengeful townsfolk. It took the people of Saramyr a long time to understand what had happened at that instant when a G.o.d had been slain, but when they did they rejoiced, whole cities erupting in scenes such as none in living memory could recall; for their world was theirs again.

But for Tsata, there was only one thing that concerned him. The great mechanism that had taken the Sisters away was grinding and clanking again, bringing them back. Bringing Kaiku back to him. He walked over to the doorway to the metal edifice in the centre of the chamber. His brethren gathered around him, their gazes expectant. Finally, the elevator settled with a racket of machinery, and the door slid open.

Five Sisters were there, but they were crouching around a sixth, who lay in the arms of Cailin. Cast aside on the floor of the elevator was a Mask that had split in half. Kaiku's Mask.

Cailin looked up at him, and in her red eyes he saw all that he had to know. Numbness clouded him, killing even the pain of his arm. He took a few steps forward and sank to his knees before the fallen Sister. He had not recognised her at first, but he recognised her now.

Her hair had turned from tawny brown to bright white, and her irises were rich crimson, but it was unmistakably her. Her, and yet not her. She still breathed, but her features were vacant. The life that had animated them had gone. She was not there.

'She gave too much, in the end,' Cailin said quietly, and there was real grief in her voice. 'n.o.body could master a Weaver's Mask like that and hope to come out unscathed.'

'Where is she?' Tsata whispered, his eyes filling with hot tears. 'Where has she gone?'

'She is lost to the Weave, Tsata. She has lost her mind to the Weave.'