Chris Wooding - The ascendancy veil

The Weavers shuffled to a halt at the edge of the light. The predators stopped also, shifting restlessly. Behind them, the giant Aberrant growled, a rumbling from deep within its chest.

For a long moment, the two forces faced each other across the chamber. Then, possessed by some feeling that she could not name, a mixture of resignation and anger and deep, deep hatred, Kaiku stepped forward. Her hair hung over one painted eye, and with the other she stared coolly at the Weavers ranged before them.

'You are in our way,' she said.

It was like the spark to a powder keg. Both sides erupted in a roar, and the Aberrants and Tkiurathi charged each other.

Kaiku plunged into the Weave, and the scene slowed around her. The golden knitwork figures of the Tkiurathi and the Aberrants became transparent: she saw the clench and tug of their muscles, saw the air sucked into their lungs through gritted teeth, the minute disturbance of soundwaves as their shoes and claws hit the floor. The Weavers came fast, but she realised their tactics immediately. They had divided: half were guarding the Nexuses and the giant beast while the rest attacked. Cailin and the Sisters were with her in the Weave, their own tactics already assigned and agreed in a communication faster than thought. And then Kaiku was spiralling towards her nearest adversaries, drawing two of them in together, and as they hit they burst into a ball of threads and sucked back inward onto each other, a tight knot of conflict that would only untangle when either Kaiku or the Weavers were dead. Tsata jumped the swipe of a shrilling's sickle claw and struck down with his kntha, half-severing its foreleg. His leap landed him some way past the beast, and he left it for his kinfolk behind him while he tackled a ghaureg. In these moments of combat, he felt a stillness unlike any other, a perfection of focus that no other activity could bring him. In the sweep and slice of his gutting-hooks, in the dance of his body as he avoided the blows of his enemies by inches, he found that the chaff of existence sloughed from him like falling leaves from the trees. He was as his Okhamban ancestors had been, and their ancestors, all the way back to a time before civilisation had touched mankind. He was a hunter, a predator, streamlined to that one purpose. There was no fear of death. Death was simply impossible.

The ghaureg reached for him; he ducked under its elbow and buried his gutting-hook to the hilt in its armpit, angling in toward its heart. The creature's reflex was to swipe its arm back at him, but he had expected it and dropped beneath the swing; then he braced his foot against its ribs and in one quick motion he pulled the blade free. Blood sprayed from the wound, and the creature went down.

Rifles cracked behind him, and he saw an Aberrant he could not identify fall with its skull in ruins. The Tkiurathi, out of the cramped corridors, now had space to employ their ranged weapons without killing their own folk. Some of them took down Aberrants from a distance, but others fired at the Nexuses that hid in the shadows, and the Weavers were kept busy protecting their allies. Kaiku saw none of this: her world had diminished to the frantic scurry inside the Weave-knot, the battlefield between her and the two Weavers. They struck at her hungrily, heartened by their numerical superiority; Kaiku barely fended them off. She spun herself a tight ball of defence in the centre of the knot, sheltering from the Weavers' attacks. They were harrying her instantly, picking at stray threads, trying to unravel her. She kept curled like a hedgehog, building a construct within the confines of her defences. The Weavers, puzzled by this sudden cessation of aggression, were determined to get at her. They wound themselves together and, as one, drilled inward. Even Kaiku could not withstand an attack like that in concert, and her ball came apart, its threads scattering.

Inside was a labyrinth, an insoluble jumble of threads with no beginning and no end, and the Weavers fell right into it and were lost.

Kaiku stayed there just long enough to be sure that they would never get out, and then threw herself back into the fight. One of the Sisters had fallen, but four Weavers had also been taken out of the action. Kaiku let her hate and anger spur her to new vigour. This was a battle they could not afford to lose. Much more than their own lives depended on it. The giant Aberrant, meanwhile, was making its presence known. It roared and snapped and stamped among the combatants. The metal floor trembled with the impact. Tkiurathi swarmed around it, trying to take it down, but it was too big. Its jaws dripped with blood as evidence of the dozen lives it had already accounted for. The Sisters tried to get to it, to stop its heart or blind it, but the Weavers had made it the focus of their keenest protective measures and there were not enough Sisters to get through.

Tsata was among those who were attacking the monster. His efforts were futile. He ducked in and tried to hamstring its foreleg with his blade, but his hardest swipe made little more than a shallow cut against the creature's hide. Another Tkiurathi to his left made an attempt to get to the nexus-worm which kept the creature under control. The Aberrant swept its head to the side and gored him, then flung him shrieking into the air and caught him in its mouth with a crunch of bones.

Tsata saw the furie charging him out of the corner of his eye, and he moved just in time. The boar-like Aberrant skidded past him, and was taken in the side of the head by another Tkiurathi blade. The force of its momentum tore the weapon from its killer's hand, and it crashed into a heap, bleeding from the eyes.

Tsata looked up at the man who had slain it. It was Heth, his hair wet with sweat, his tattooed face gleaming. He gave Tsata a grave stare and then tipped his head at the roaring monstrosity that was tearing through their people.

'I'll be the lure,' he said in Okhamban. 'You kill that thing.'

Tsata tilted his chin at his friend, knowing that Heth would probably pay for it with his life. Neither of them had the slightest hesitation. It was a matter of pash. Kaiku sensed the wave of alarm across the Weave through the muting effect of the witchstone, and knew what it meant even before Cailin amplified and clarified it. It had come from one of the Sisters in another part of the complex, and its message was simple.

The enemy army had arrived, and were already pouring down through Adderach.

Kaiku felt terror clutch at her. Not at the prospect of dying: death was something she was not afraid of at this point, and part of her would welcome it. It was the thought that she might fail here, when she was so close to fulfilling her oath to Ocha, to avenging her family. She redoubled the intensity of her assaults, but it was hopeless. The Weavers had dug in; they knew what the Sisters knew. They had only to hold out for a few minutes and the reinforcements would be here.

It will not end like this, she told herself, but it was an empty thought. There was nothing she could do about it.

((Sisters)) said Cailin. ((Time has run out))

And with that came an empathic blaze of instructions. Kaiku did not question them; she had no other inspiration. The Sisters moved as one, breaking off their attacks and whirling into a frenzy, setting false resonances and weaving a screen of confusion. With the portion of her mind that attended the physical battle which raged across the chamber, Kaiku saw Cailin drawing a slender blade from inside her robe. She had a fraction of an instant to wonder what it was she hoped to do with that, when Cailin disappeared.

She had never witnessed anything like it. Even the display Cailin had shown her at Araka Jo, when she had made herself simply not there, was nothing compared to this. For as she disappeared, she dissassembled herself in the Weave, her very being coming apart into its component fibres and racing away in a diffuse burst before knotting together again elsewhere. Again, and again and again, she darted back and forth through the Weave, and finally returned to her original position and reappeared.