Chris Wooding - The ascendancy veil

The Weavers had made one bad mistake. The Tkiurathi were born for close combat. Their weapons were adapted to its purpose and their fighting technique tailored to those conditions. Life in the jungle had meant that they had evolved short, fast, controlled movements so that they would not tangle their blades in vines or trees, and they had reactions honed by generations of living in one of the most hostile places in the Near World. Here in the confines of the tunnels they outclassed the Aberrants, who were used to the open spaces of the mountains.

The Tkiurathi were as animals themselves when they fought, primal and ferocious, and they dodged and slashed and killed until they were drenched in the blood of their enemies.

Kaiku and the Sisters dealt with the Weavers. There were only four of them, and the Sisters in Kaiku's group outnumbered them two to one. It was no contest. The Sisters attacked in a whirling chaos of threads and the Weavers' defences could not stand it. They held out briefly and then collapsed. The Sisters ripped into the fibres of their enemy's bodies, and the force released by the sundering turned the Weavers to pillars of fire.

With the Weavers gone, they broke the necks of the three Nexuses who were controlling the Aberrants, and the predators collapsed in disarray, some of them fleeing or attacking each other. The Tkiurathi made short work of the rest.

Kaiku caught sight of Tsata nearby. He was breathing hard, flecked in blood, his eyes sharp with an intensity that she only saw when he fought. A quiet and introspective man in the main, his flipside was this feral killer. She wondered briefly what that meant for the future, how deeply that ferocity was suppressed and whether it might one day be turned on her, if she should stay with him. Was he capable of that? How could she tell? How well, in the end, did she know him?

Tsata sensed her gaze upon him and turned to meet it. She felt a shock of guilt, as if he had realised what she was thinking. Then, expressionless, he turned away, and the group began to move on, deeper into the maze of corridors.

The Weavers attacked them three more times over the next hour. Other groups of Sisters who were searching elsewhere in the complex were similarly assaulted by forces of varying size. Some were overwhelmed and slain; some managed to kill their attackers. Cailin's group, with eight Sisters among them, had the strength to outmatch the Weavers; but some were not so lucky.

Kaiku could sense Cailin's mood growing graver. The Weavers' plan, costly though it was, was working. The invaders' numbers were dwindling slowly, and still there had been no sign of a way down to the witchstone beneath them. They could be running around these colossal sub-levels for hours yet, being gradually whittled away; but long before that, the Weavers' reinforcements would arrive, and flood down through the mine. Nobody thought of giving up and going back to the surface. They were just too close. But the enemy army could not be far from Adderach now.

Reports of other places like the chamber that Kaiku had destroyed came through to them. One group found a huge complex of grim workshops, forges and lathes and whittling benches where the Masks of the Weavers were crafted; but there were no Edgefathers to be seen, for they had all been taken elsewhere, presumably to the same place that the absent golneri had gone. There was also a bigger forge nearby, something entirely different to that of a blacksmith or an artisan: a monstrous, sweltering place with huge vats of molten metal and great moulds, where they found newly-made pipes and cogs and other components of the Weavers' devices. Another found a room full of roaring machines that pumped up and down, and in its centre a pool of bubbling mud that belched foul-smelling gas. Unusually, there was a marked lack of evidence of the Weavers' insanity in these sub-levels: there were no corpse-pits, no wild scrawls or strange sculptures. Here there was only the chill efficiency of machinery, designed by the Weavers and built by the golneri. Aricarat kept a tighter rein on his subjects down here.

Whether by Shintu's will or Cailin's guidance, it was Kaiku's group who found the way down. And they found it held against them.

They were directly above the witchstone at this point: Kaiku could feel it through the great weight of rock beneath their feet. They had reached what appeared to be a wall of metal at the end of the corridor, but which turned out on closer inspection to be a door of some kind. Cailin rested her hand against it and closed her eyes; a moment later there was a loud crunch, and Cailin stepped back as the wall began to part in the centre, sliding into recesses on either side.

The chamber it revealed was dimly lit by a scattering of gas-torches, but it was too large for them to do anything more than offer faint contrast to the shadows which cloaked the far end. It was circular, like the incubation room they had passed through, and its walls were metal and lined with cables and heavy pipes that leaked steam at regular intervals with a soft sigh, as if the mines themselves were breathing. In the centre of the room was a tower of machinery, bristling with cogs and chains. In the tower was a featureless metal doorway.

They stepped into the chamber, spreading out around the entrance, and regarded the strange edifice before them.

'There it is,' said Cailin. 'That is how we get to the witchstone.'

Tsata took a step forward, but Kaiku held out her hand to block him.

'It is too easy,' she said.

Something massive shifted in the shadows at the back of the chamber, moving from behind the obscuring bulk of the tower. There were smaller figures, also, strangely indistinct even to Kaiku's kana-adapted eyes.

'Trickery!' Cailin hissed, and swept a hand out. The shadows flexed and a veil dropped from their sight.

Kaiku paled. Twenty Weavers, a dozen Nexuses, and at least fifty Aberrants were emerging from the gloom, sidelit in the faint yellow glow. And behind them came something worse still.

Kaiku had seen giant Aberrants before; she had almost been killed by one on the way across Fo many years ago, and since then there had been reports of them from time to time in the mountains. But this was something altogether more terrible than any she had heard of. It must have been twenty feet high at the shoulder, its skin black and leathery and thick with sinew. It walked on all fours, its feet flat and its bulk enormous to support its weight. Its head was all jaw and teeth, crooked fangs far too big for its mouth, and its twisted muzzle was deeply scarred and torn because of it. It drooled a frothy milk of spittle and blood which drizzled onto the metal floor. Asymmetrical features were warped out of true: a tiny eye was lower on one side of its face than the other, almost upon the ridge of its cheek. A fringe of spikes that were somewhere between fangs, tusks and horns stuck out at random angles, sprouting from the edge of its mouth, its forehead, and its lower jaw. Its back was ridged in the same spikes, as was its tail – which was flaccid and appeared broken – but they were set to no pattern. Rather, they gave the impression of rampant growth, as if its skeleton had thrust protrusions through its flesh wherever it could. At its neck, visible only as a wet patch against its skin, Kaiku could see a nexus-worm.

It was a freak, a beast spawned from generations of creatures breeding in the mines beneath Adderach, where the mutating influence of the witchstone had created horrors beyond imagining. Though much of the mine was sealed for the Weavers' own safety, and it was suicide even for them to set foot in its depths, they had managed to secure this one and tamed it as the guardian of this place. It lived in the chamber just beyond this, through a dark doorway and down a long corridor to a room full of bones and the stench of musk and dung.