Chris Wooding - The ascendancy veil

In the space of a heartbeat she had appeared behind several of the Weavers in rapid succession, so quick that it seemed almost simultaneous, each time stabbing with her blade. Then she was back where she had begun, the whole process enacted fast enough so that it might have been a trick of the brain. But on the far side of the room, in the gloomy shadows, eight Weavers collapsed, pierced through the nape of the neck.

Kaiku was dumbstruck. She had never imagined Cailin capable of such a thing; no wonder the Weavers were caught by surprise. Just for an instant, she had glimpsed the unplumbed depths of her own abilities, what she might be able to do if she took up Cailin's offer and returned to the fold.

But there was no time for such musings now. The Weavers were rocked by their loss, and the Sisters, scenting victory, threw themselves into the offensive. The giant Aberrant swung its head around at Heth's cry. Even from a being so small to a creature so massive, it recognised a challenge. Its mismatched eyes squinted down at the blurred figure at its feet. This little thing was becoming a torment: already the Aberrant had tried to catch Heth twice, and he kept dodging out of the way. Frustrated, it lunged for him.

Heth moved as the great jaws gaped, and when they snapped shut he was not between them. As the head came down, Tsata darted in from the side, driving his gutting-hook in towards the creature's neck, where the nexus-worm glistened. His blade hit one of the Aberrant's many facial spikes, glanced away, and Tsata was forced to jump backwards to avoid being gored as it raised its head again.

Heth was already running to a new position, and Tsata went with him, keeping himself clear of the other Aberrants that were engaged in battling his brethren. He spared an instant to glance back at Kaiku, but she was anonymous among the other Sisters, and he had no idea how their endeavours were going. He had only this purpose: to bring down the beast. And every time he failed, Heth was forced to make himself the bait once more. But the creature was too well-armoured, making what was already a hard target near to impossible.

His knuckles whitened on the hilt of his kntha. He would not fail next time.

The giant Aberrant was following Heth now, ignoring the other Tkiurathi that hacked pointlessly at its legs and tail. Heth glanced over at Tsata, to be sure he was near enough; but in the instant that Heth took his attention away, it struck.

Heth only dodged at all because of the alarm on Tsata's face, but he was a fraction too slow. Though the beast missed most of him, its jaws snapped shut on his trailing arm with a terrible cracking noise. Heth screamed; blood squirted through the monster's teeth. It shook him violently, pulling him over and tearing the rest of his arm off.

Then Tsata was there. The beast's head had sunk low to the ground, and Tsata threw himself at his target. He felt a blaze of pain in his ribs: the thing had turned slightly, and he caught one of the spikes in his side. But he took his gutting-hook and rammed it into the soft, slimy flesh of the nexus-worm, then twisted hard. The beast roared, flexing spasmodically; Tsata was lifted up and flung away. He sailed through the air for a few awful instants and landed in a heap on the hard metal floor with a loud snap.

But the beast buckled. Its legs gave way as the nexus-worm died, and it staggered sideways and collapsed with a thunderous boom, crushing Aberrants and Tkiurathi alike underneath its massive bulk. The death of the worm, so closely tied in with its brain and nervous system, triggered a stroke and a heart attack simultaneously, and after a few violent spasms it gave a bubbling sigh and was still. The Weavers fell to pieces all at once. The remainder of them had consolidated their efforts as best they could into one defensive force, but eventually it could bear the strain of the Sisters' furious assault no longer. The six Sisters that were left shredded the remaining eight Weavers, blowing them apart from within in a flaming rain of flesh and bone.

After that, it was a slaughter. The Sisters went for the Nexuses next. The black-robed beings went up like torches, silently burning. They showed no indication of pain, nor made a sound, but collapsed into blazing heaps. The Aberrants lost their minds as they lost their masters; some fled, some kept fighting, but the Tkiurathi were still thirty strong and the Aberrants half that now. The remaining beasts were destroyed by the Sisters or by the Tkiurathi, and then there was silence. As if waking from a dream, Kaiku realised that the fighting had stopped.

But a new sound was growing. The roar of an approaching horde, coming from the doorway through which they had entered. The Weavers' reinforcements were here.

'Seal that door!' Cailin cried, and the Sisters responded immediately. The mechanism that drove the metal barrier jerked into life, and the two halves began to slide from their recesses and grind shut. The sounds of the enemy got louder, louder, until Kaiku thought they must surely be upon them; and then there was a reverberant clang, and the door was closed.

Kaiku turned away, looking for Tsata, and found him kneeling, one arm cradled in the other. She hurried over to him, slowing as she neared. His trousers were black with blood which had soaked into them from the great slick all around him. Heth lay in the midst of that, his yellow skin gone white, his tattooes pallid. His arm had been ripped away, leaving only a wet mess at the shoulder through which a knob of bone showed. He was clearly dead.

'Tsata…' she murmured, then realised she did not know what to say. He did not look up. She noticed that his left forearm kinked at an angle, and he was holding it to his chest. 'Let me see to that…' she began, but then Cailin swept up to her.

'Kaiku. Come with me now,' she said. She looked down at Tsata. 'The Weavers will not be long getting through that door. We need what time you can give us.'

'You will have every moment our lives can buy,' he said quietly, and still he did not raise his head.

Cailin cast one last glance at Kaiku and then made for the doorway in the tower, where the other Sisters were heading. Kaiku waited there for a short time, trying to think of something to say, something suitable for this parting. But there were no words that could express her sorrow, nothing adequate to ease his hurt. In the end, she turned and walked away without a word. She was last through the doorway, and as soon as she was in Cailin used her kana to decipher and activate the mechanism. The door slid shut with a squeal of metal. Kaiku's gaze lingered on Tsata until he disappeared from view.

The elevator began to descend with a lurch, and they went down, down towards the witchstone.

None of the Sisters spoke as the machinery whirred and squeaked. They could sense that they were sinking by the feeling in their stomachs, but they were encased in the circular metal room of the elevator, and there was nothing to look at but each other. With every passing second, the power exuded by the witchstone was growing, becoming fiercer and more intense. Cailin had not brought the Tkiurathi with them because she believed they would not be able to survive such proximity to the thing; Kaiku wondered now if any of them would. This witchstone was older by far than the one she had destroyed in the mine long ago, older even than the stone that had been shattered at Utraxxa. It was the heart of a god, and merely to look on it might be enough to kill them.

After what seemed like an age, the elevator shuddered and stopped. There was a pregnant silence. Then the doors opened.

The force of the witchstone's presence made the Sisters cry out and recoil, their arms instinctively raised before their eyes as if by blocking the brightness they could mute its strength. The thick metal of the elevator had been shielding them until now; robbed of that barrier, they were blasted by it like a hurricane.