Chris Wooding - The ascendancy veil

'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 god 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. 'Nobody 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.'

The year that followed was a turbulent one.

The restoration of the Empire was not to be achieved in a day; nor would the famine that gripped most of the land disappear overnight. Saramyr was like a wounded animal which had licked its injuries clean of infection: it was healing itself, but it was still weak, and the process was slow and painful.

Against all expectations, there was little civil conflict in the wake of the Weavers' demise. It had been predicted that riots would occur as the redistribution of limited foodstuffs left some areas hungrier than others, that lack of medical supplies and malnutrition would encourage plague, and this would spark further unrest. It was expected that opportunist leaders, demagogues and bandits would rise up to fill the power vacuum before the Empire could regain what it once had lost. But Saramyr was exhausted. It was tired of war and suffering, and there was little enthusiasm for it any more. Even through their strife, the people were prepared to be patient. They had been given a taste of what an alternative to the Empire might be like, and in the light of that they would endure anything to get back the days that already seemed like a fond dream.

Though the high families' armies had been decimated and they barely had enough strength to defend their borders against the roaming Aberrants that were now a feature of the Saramyr wilds, they returned to their lands and were rapturously welcomed. With them went the Sisters. There were few of them left, dangerously few, for despite Cailin's best efforts they had been brought perilously close to extinction in the war with the Weavers. But those few knitted the continent together. And if there were murmurings of dissent at the idea of replacing the Weavers with women like these, they were drowned out by the acclaim. The Sisters, after all, had saved their country where even the high families and the legendary Lucia had failed. Cailin made very certain that everyone knew that.

The accession of Emperor Zahn tu Ikati was due in no small part to the support of the Sisters. Cailin could have thrown her weight behind a more tractable candidate, but she knew that Zahn was the strongest, and she wanted to be sure of being on the winning side. His old treaties with the minor families had held firm even through the war, and the generals knew him as a warrior and a tactician. Though his detractors pointed out that the death of his daughter would leave him a broken man – as it had in the past when he had believed her dead – Zahn's reaction surprised everyone. Though he grieved, he accepted that there was no question this time that Lucia had died and no possibility of her coming back. He became grim and cold, but he did not retreat into himself. Though there was no spark of compassion in him any more, and he was stern sometimes to the point of cruelty, he was in perfect possession of his faculties. The nobles believed a firm leader was what they needed to restore their country. There was the usual squabbling, but Zahn took the throne at the last.

As to Cailin, she lived in the Imperial Keep and nursed her plans. The reconstruction of Axekami went on around her: the destruction of the pall-pits, the rebuilding of the great temples, the dismantling of the Blackguard. But she had little interest in that. She was thinking, as always, of her Sisterhood.

The retreat of the blight across the land meant fewer Aberrants, and soon there would be no more born with the power to manipulate kana. The time would come when she would allow the Sisters to breed, under closely controlled conditions and with carefully chosen stock. Without the Weavers, they had no competition in the field of the Weave any more, and she could count them relatively safe. But one day, that might change, and she must be ready for it. The Sisterhood would grow and diversify, and their powers would grow also. They would sink into the fabric of society and become inextricable, even more so than the Weavers had. Who knew what might be possible in a century, in ten centuries? Would they be as gods? Or would they wane and fade into history? Perhaps she would not live to see it; perhaps her kana would dry up and she would age and die. Perhaps she would be here until the apocalypse predicted by the Xhiang Xhi would come to pass, engulfing the planet in fire. Or perhaps, even, she would be elsewhere by then.

She thought of the Weave-whales, and what they had left when they departed, and she knew they would not be safe for ever.

And so, more and more, her mind strayed to the empty Weaver monasteries, that had been sealed by the Sisters and surrounded by defences. More and more she wondered about what was inside them, what secrets they might hold that she could use to protect herself and her kind.

More and more, she wondered about the machines. Two hundred Tkiurathi were left alive of the thousand that sailed to Saramyr in the winter of the war. Seventy of them went back to Okhamba, to spread the word of what had happened. The rest stayed.

For their part in the destruction of Adderach, the Emperor Zahn gave them a gift of land. At Mishani's request, they were mandated a small stretch of the western coast, northeast of Hanzean and just south of Blood Koli's ancestral territories around Mataxa Bay. The minor noble who had owned it had been one of the many casualties of the war, his property annexed by the Weavers. The Tkiurathi built a small settlement there, of repka and precarious dwellings raised on stilts and poles, with aerial walkways and rope bridges built between the trees. And there they went on with their way of life, puzzling the local Saramyr with their strange and foreign customs and philosophies.