Chris Wooding - The ascendancy veil

Kaiku fell backwards to the cold, hard floor, breaking her fall with her arm. The Weave was a maelstrom, its churning so violent that it physically pushed her over. She clung to control, trying to ride the chaos before she was swept away by it entirely. The very touch of the witchstone was foul, tainting the golden threads black, a sucking morass of malevolent darkness. The rage of Aricarat was palpable, a hatred pure enough to drive them insane.

But somehow Kaiku held on, long enough to sew a skin around herself, a protective cocoon that screened out the worst of the barrage. She found her level and allowed herself to flow with the maelstrom like a boat on stormy waters. Then she set about rescuing those of the Sisters that had not managed to do so yet. Finally, they were stable enough to stand again; but Kaiku's kana was already being taxed, and she knew she could not hold out like this for long.

They staggered out of the elevator and into the chamber of the witchstone.

It was gargantuan, towering almost a hundred feet high and half that in width, filling the cavern. There was no discernible overall shape to it; it was simply a mass, a crooked lump of rock that sprouted roots and protuberances all over its surface, and from those extrusions other extrusions came. It was growth gone mad, multiplying over and over in ridiculous plethora until there was barely any space at all between its branches. Like the other witchstones, it thrust into the wall of the surrounding cavern, melding with it; but unlike the others, its branches were so dense that it was almost impossible to tell where the witchstone ended and the cavern began. It had assimilated itself into its surroundings almost totally.

The nauseating luminescence of the witchstone blanched the faces of the Sisters as they came cringing into its presence, casting stark shadows across the broken floor. Several great roots reared over them, dwarfing them by comparison.

But Cailin straightened herself, her expression made hideous by the unnatural light, and her voice rang out across the chamber.

'Sisters! Cleanse our land of this abomination!'

Kaiku steeled herself and unleashed her kana at it. The vast, pulsing black tangle filled her world and engulfed her. The touch of it was like acid, but through the burning she fought to untangle the threads of the witchstone, to find purchase to get inside it. Its radiance was so terrible that even the Weavers had not been able to come near to plant explosives, like they must have done at Utraxxa. The Sisters had only to bore inward and they would be inside the web of the witchstones, able to spread to every stone in Saramyr. But each moment they wasted was a moment closer to that when the Weavers would break through the lingering defences that the Sisters had left on the door to the chamber above. Then the Tkiurathi would be killed – Tsata would be killed – and the Sisters would be next. The Weavers would send an elevator full of Aberrants down, and it would be the end.

She gritted her teeth, scratched and picked at the witch-stone ferociously, but it did no good. Frustration grew in her. She could find nowhere amid the awful mass that would permit her entry to the thing: its exterior defences were too dense. No Sister had ever Weaved into a witchstone before, and now they found that they had underestimated the difficulty greatly.

Cailin sent an instruction to them all, and they battled their way through the whirling disorder and sewed themselves together. In one slender needle of intent, they thrust at the witchstone, driving into it; but incredibly, it held. They managed to make fractional headway before the point of the needle was blunted and expelled. They struck again, to no avail.

The Sisters began to try anything and everything they could. They attempted to make themselves diffuse, to seep into it like gas through the pores of a membrane; they tried attacking it from many angles at once; they worked at unpeeling it like an onion. Nothing worked. It remained invincible, and their best efforts did not even scratch it.

Kaiku was exhausted. The sheer mental strain of being in its presence was becoming too much, and Weaving on top of that was draining her utterly. What was more, her kana was being diverted to repair the damage that was being done to her physical body. She could feel the witchstone's insidious rays changing her, making minuscule alterations, causing tiny cancers and encouraging unusual and unnatural processes into life. Her kana was automatically fixing this corruption as it occurred. If not for that, it would not have been long before she became like the elder Edgefathers were: repulsive freaks, warped beyond recognition.

She dropped out of the Weave, and realised that she was on her knees on the rough floor of the cavern. Her legs had been unable to support her any longer. She was gasping for breath, her body aching.

Spirits, no. Not when we are so close. We cannot fail here. Ocha, emperor of the gods, help us now if you can. Help me fulfil my oath. Show me how to end this evil.

And the answer came to her. A possibility so awful that she at first dismissed it out of hand, but then, despairingly, she realised that it was the only chance they had left. She could sense the Sisters fruitlessly battering at the witchstone, and knew that even Cailin's skill could not help them now.

She thought of all that would be lost if the Sisters fell here. Of all the beauty she remembered from her childhood: the rinji birds on the Kerryn, the sun through the leaves of the Forest of Yuna, the dazzling waters of Mataxa Bay. All that would pass into a memory, and eventually even memories would fade. The skies would die. And after the Near World was gone, after their planet had been enshrouded as the Xhiang Xhi had predicted, then Aricarat would spread outward, into whatever was beyond.

It was too much, too much responsibility to comprehend. So she thought only of Tsata. She would save his life, if she could. Even if it meant trading her own. For pash.

She drew the leering red and black Mask from her dress and slipped it over her head.

'Kaiku!' Cailin shrieked, seeing what she was doing. 'Kaiku, no!'

With the Mask on her face, she Weaved. The world shattered, and there was nothing but delirium and pain. Sense unravelled, connections of logic becoming estranged. There was no Kaiku, no self at all; she was a part of everything, subsumed, a curl of wind in a cyclone of derangement.

But she felt a gentle and insistent tugging, drawing her. For no reason she could fathom, it was a comfort, and she went to it. The disassembled parts of her consciousness gradually came together, reaching tendrils of sanity to each other, cohering into a structure around the warm, blessed clot of emotion that attracted them.

Father.

It was him. Or rather, it was the part of him that the Mask had robbed all that time ago, an imprint of his thoughts and mind that Kaiku had subconsciously recognised and gravitated towards. She wished somehow that she could gather it up, treasure it; but it was only a faint recollection, a sensation of trust and safety that she had lost long ago.

That the Weavers had taken from her.

She struggled to gain control of the madness around her. Anger rose within, anger at how this sanctuary had been stolen by her enemies, how her father had been so broken that he had poisoned his own family rather than let them fall into the hands of the Weavers. They had done that to him. Them!

With one colossal effort of will, she dragged herself into focus, until she was Kaiku again.

She was in the Mask, in the fibres that formed the wood and lacquer of the thing. And she was in the witchstone dust, tiny particles of the enormous entity that they had come to destroy. They were part of her surroundings, bending the Weave unnaturally, befouling and violating her. She saw the dementia they engendered, the way they fractured the Weave in such a way that even she found it hard to understand. No wonder that it drove the Weavers mad in the end. No wonder the Sisters had never dared to attempt this. It was only because the Mask was exceptionally young and therefore weak, and because she had worn it before and was used to it, that she had not entirely shed her mind upon entering; that, and the fact that her father had been here before her.