Chris Wooding: The ascendancy veil

There was an instant of incomprehension on his face as he looked upon the two black-clad Sisters, who had come in from the rain and yet were not even damp. Then the grin appeared, a somewhat sickly rictus in the jaundiced light. 'Kaiku,' he said. 'Come to volunteer?'

'You sound surprised,' she observed.

He got to his feet, running a hand through the brown-blond quills of his hair. 'I would have thought Cailin would not let you go.'

'We have more than enough Sisters to defend a single bridge against the Weavers. And as to the feya-kori… well, you know as well as I. One Sister or a dozen will make little difference there.'

'I meant that I didn't think she would let you go,' he said. 'You are something of a valued possession of hers nowadays.'

Kaiku did not like the implication of that phrase, but she deflected it with a smile. 'I do not often do what I am told anyway, Yugi. You know me.'

Yugi did not take up the humour. 'I used to,' he murmured. Then his eyes went to Phaeca and he made a distracted noise of acknowledgement. 'You too?'

'It'd be nice to see home again,' Phaeca said.

He paced slowly around the periphery of the tent, deep in thought. 'Agreed. Three of you, then. That will be enough.'

'Three?' Kaiku asked. 'Who is the third?'

'Nomoru,' he replied. 'She asked to go.'

Kaiku kept her expression carefully neutral, allowing neither her dislike of the wiry scout nor her surprise that Nomoru had volunteered to cross her face.

'She's from the Poor Quarter,' Yugi said. 'She knows people. I want to test the water there, make contact with our spies. Those poor bastards in the capital have been living under the Weavers for four years now. They were happy enough to rise against Lucia taking the throne; maybe a little taste of the alternative has taught them the error of their ways. Let's see if the conditions have kindled any of that old fire.'

'A revolt?' Phaeca prompted.

He gave an affirmative grunt. 'Test the water,' he said again.

There was a silence for a moment, but for the dull percussion of the rain on the canvas.

'Is that all?' he asked.

Kaiku gave Phaeca a look, and Phaeca took the hint. She excused herself and slipped out of the tent.

'Ah,' Yugi said wryly, scratching under the rag around his forehead. 'This seems serious. Am I in trouble?'

'I was about to ask you the very same thing,' Kaiku replied. 'Are you?'

'Only as much as all of us,' he replied, looking around the tent at everything but her. He picked up a scroll case and began absently fiddling with it.

She hesitated, then tried a different approach. 'We have not seen each other as often as I would like these past years, Yugi,' she said.

'I imagine that's true of most of those you once knew,' he returned, glancing at her briefly. 'You've been otherwise engaged.'

That was a little too close to the bone for Kaiku. She knew her old friendships had suffered neglect, partly because of the war, mostly because she had devoted herself to Cailin's tutelage, which allowed time for little else. Lucia had become distant and alien, worse now than when she was a child. Mishani was ever absent, always engaged in some form of diplomacy or another. She had heard nothing of Tsata since he had departed for his homeland just after the war began. And Asara… well, best for her not to think about Asara. As much as Kaiku hated her, she was haunted in the small hours of the night by an insidious longing to see her erstwhile handmaiden again. But Asara was far to the east now, and likely would remain there, and that was best for both of them.

'The war has changed many things,' she said quietly.

'And none more so than you,' Yugi replied with a faintly snappish edge to his tone, looking her over.

She was hurt by that. 'Why attack me so? We were friends once, and even if you do not believe that any more, we are certainly not enemies. What has turned you into this?'

He laughed bitterly, a sudden bark that made her start. 'Gods, Kaiku! It's not as it once was between us. I look at you now and I see Cailin. You're not the woman I knew. You're different, colder. You're a Sister now.' He waved a hand at her in exasperation. 'How do you expect me to confide in you when you're wearing that damned stuff?'

Kaiku could barely believe what she was hearing. She wanted to remind him that she had become a Sister to fight for his cause, that without the Sisters the war would have been over in a year and the Weavers victorious. But she held her tongue. She knew that if she opened her mouth, she would begin an argument, and she would likely destroy whatever slender bridges still existed between them. Instead, she swallowed her anger with a discipline which the trials of the Red Order had instilled in her.

'I suppose I cannot,' she said calmly. 'Please let me know the arrangements for our departure to Axekami.'

With that she left, stepping out into the rain where Phaeca waited for her, and the two of them walked through the crowded grounds of the songbird-house, back towards the river. For the first time in some while, Kaiku noticed how the soldiers unobtrusively moved aside to let them pass.

The triad of moons hung in a sky thick with stars. Two of them had matched orbits low in the west, descending towards the crooked teeth of the Tchamil Mountains, the flawless green pearl of Neryn peeping out from behind the huge blotched disc of her sister Aurus. Iridima glowered at them from the east, her white skin marbled with blue. Beneath, from horizon to horizon, lay the desert of Tchom Rin, an eternity of languid waves desiccated on the point of breaking. A cool wind brushed across the smooth, shadowy humps, dusting their crests. It was the only sound that could be heard in all the vastness.

Saramyr was riven north to south by the spine of the Tchamil Mountains, dividing the more populous and developed lands to the west from the wilder places in the east. The south-eastern quadrant of Saramyr was dominated by the continent's only desert, stretching over six hundred miles from the foot of the mountains to peter out a little short of the eastern coast. It was here that the settlers had come over seven hundred years ago, to begin the colonisation of the eastern territories.

Stories of those pioneer days were rife in Tchom Rin legend: tales of those who chose to stay while others went on to the more fertile Newlands to the north, those who made a pact with the bastard goddess Suran to live in her realm and worship her in return for being taught the ways of this cruel new world. Suran was kind to her followers, and she showed them how to thrive. In the wasteland of the desert, they built sprawling cities and gargantuan temples, and they chased out the Ugati and their old and impotent gods. The settlers took the desert as their own, and the desert changed them, until they had become like a people unto themselves, and the ways of the west seemed distant.

One of the greatest of the cities that the early settlers founded was Muia. It lay serene and peaceful in the green-tinged moonlight, in the lee of an escarpment that stretched for miles along its western edge. Tchom Rin architecture, so popular history told, had been invented by a man named Iyatimo, who had based his constructions on the bladed leaves of the hardy chia shrub, one of the few plants capable of surviving in the desert. Whatever the truth of it, the style proliferated, and the buildings of the Tchom Rin became renowned for their smooth edges and sharp tips. Bulbous bases flowed into needle-like spires; windows were teardrop-shaped, tapering upward; the walls that surrounded the city were made impressive and forbidding with rows of knife-like ornamentation. Though the lower levels of the complex, twining streets rose in orderly stepped rows of broad dwellings, the upper reaches were a dense forest of spikes, a multitude of stilettos thrust at the sky. Everything was drawn into the air as if the gravity of the moons overhead had sucked the cities of Tchom Rin out of shape and made them into something new and strangely beautiful to the eye.