Chris Wooding - The ascendancy veil

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 pass 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 pass.

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 assured, 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 passed swiftly for her. At her age, time was accelerating faster and faster. She had the body and face of a twenty-harvest goddess, 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 passion 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 pass, a heaving mass 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 gods only knew what chance they would have against this. The Aberrants kept coming, thundering down the sides of the pass.

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

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, corkscrewing along their length.