Chris Wooding - The ascendancy veil

She let herself sink into the dark threads of the witch-stone dust. These were mindless things, possessing none of the fearsome hatred of Aricarat, and yet they did live. In those little particles were a multitude of infinitesimally small organisms, so incredibly minute that Kaiku could only sense them and not identify them at all. But they possessed a portion of their parent, ingrained memory and power held in suspension. Each one possessed a tiny glimmer of energy, the force that twisted plant and flesh into new configurations. They were like tiny synapses: individually they were nothing at all, but in a group they made connections, and the connections made them greater than the sum of their parts.

And as Kaiku touched them, a flash of understanding bloomed in her mind. How one of these organisms could link with another, how the links increased in number exponentially as the number of organisms increased until they were sufficiently complex to become aware, like the processes of the human brain. How the organisms, multiplying endlessly, became legion, their intelligence and their ability growing as the gestalt entity grew until it was beyond human comprehension. And how the more them that gathered, the greater the energy they exuded, and the more they warped anyone or anything that came near.

Once these things had dominated a moon, until the spear of Jurani destroyed it. The god had been smashed, and the pieces had rained down on Saramyr. But the organisms in the rock had survived: senseless, stupid, like newborns once again, but alive. And some pieces, like this one beneath Adderach, had been large enough to exert their influence over the weak minds of humans when they were at last uncovered. They discovered blood, which had been absent on the moon; they converted its organic energy to strength, building pathways, altering the rock that sheltered them to better distribute the life-giving matrix, full of the nutrients they needed for growth. They took the designs from the beings that had discovered them. They built hearts and veins and used them.

I know you now, she thought darkly. And with that, she attacked the witchstone.

She burst from the Mask, tearing through the Weave towards the seething snarl of her enemy. She was aware of the shock of the Sisters as she raced past them, and then she hit the skin of the witchstone's defences.

But this time it was different. She had found the tiny threads that connected the Mask to its parent, just as the greater links joined witchstone to witchstone across the land. And she rode those threads, piggybacking them inward, and permeated the rock at last.

The witchstone's alarm was a blare that stunned her. It knew she was here, knew she was inside it. She sensed the billions upon billions of organisms that surrounded her, the crushing foulness of their presence. There, at the core, she found a junction, a nexus of tendrils, each snaking away to another, distant witchstone, assimilating them as part of the matrix, making them nodes in the unfathomable mind that the people of Saramyr called Aricarat.

But then the world around Kaiku began to wrench apart. The threads of the Weave twisted and snapped. And Kaiku realised in terror what was happening, and what had happened to the witchstone at Utraxxa. It had not been destroyed by the Weavers at all. It had realised that it was compromised, and had destroyed itself.

No! No! It was not enough that this witchstone should crumble into ruin. It was not enough that they won here today. It had to end now.

And as the witchstone began to tear itself apart around her, Kaiku sewed herself into it and she held it together.

It almost pulled her mind to pieces. The agony was appalling. She was being ripped asunder from every direction at once, and only her will kept her from being shredded into raving lunacy. But she would not let go. She would not let the witchstone come apart. And though the pain was more than she could bear, and the power that burst from her scorched her insides, the witchstone did not shatter. Though it shook and pulsed and deep cracks appeared along its length, though chunks of it rained down upon the Sisters so that they were forced to deflect them, it did not split.

Kaiku, both Sister and Weaver, bound it together. And with the last fraction of her energy, she punched a hole out through its defences from within, a conduit for the Sisters outside. They flooded in eagerly, passing through her and into the nexus at the core of the witchstone; and from there they spread outward, flashing along the links between the other witchstones across Saramyr. Possessing them. Infecting them.

Destroying them.

The first blast of a witchstone's death rolled across the Weave, buffeting Kaiku like a tsunami. But still she held, still she refused to let the witchstone go. She would not release it until she was sure that every one of them was gone. The suffering was unearthly, more than she could take, and had she a voice she would have screamed; but she held on, beyond endurance, possessed of a power greater than she had ever known. The Mask was turned against its master, and she had dominated it and taken its strength for her own. The world around her was frantically trying to twist itself apart even now, wrenching her so that she felt she would burst.

But still she held. Holding on was all she had left now. She knew nothing else.

Another shockwave rolled over her, and another. Aricarat was convulsing, his death throes ripping across the Weave, anguished and terrible and desperate. A vicious, bitter satisfaction sparked in her breast.

Die, she thought savagely. Die for what you did to me.

The Weave knotted before her, shrinking to a point of infinite density. A moment before it sprang back Kaiku realised what was about to happen and braced herself for the arrival of the Weave-whale.

It smashed into existence, its sheer mind-bending immensity crushing her. She hung in the Weave, the centre of a web of millions of straining tendrils all trying to break away from her, stretched as if on a rack; and now she was pierced also by the dread regard of one of the monstrous beings who haunted the Weave. She had gone beyond pain: her mind trembled on the edge of snapping, unable to exist in such conditions. The indescribable torment of continuance was all that had ever been, all there ever would be, a timeless hell with nothing beyond it, and all there was left of her was that slender thread of will that told her to endure, and which would not break.

The witchstones were dying. One by one they shattered, pulverised from within by the Sisters.

More singularities sucked and bloomed. More Weave-whales arrived. Kaiku did not even realise. She had gone beyond sense, beyond sight. She was only a force of purpose now, driven far beyond the limits of her body and mind.

The Sisters were returning. She felt them flow through her, and a tiny sliver of comprehension penetrated. The witch-stones were all gone, all but the one that she held together that was still desperately trying to pull itself to pieces. It would not bear an invader, though all hope of saving the rest of the network had long passed. It would rather have non-existence.

It is done, Kaiku thought, and she let go. Tsata and the remaining Tkiurathi waited in the chamber above, hardly daring to breathe. They feared some kind of trick. The great metal barriers were gradually sliding aside, their mechanism activated at last by the Weavers without; but the scene they revealed was far from the ravening horde that the Tkiurathi had expected.

There were perhaps thirty Weavers there, and all of them were dead. Behind them, several dozen Aberrants fought among themselves, some of them fleeing away up the corridor, others attacking members of different predator species. A dozen Nexuses stood still, their shoulders slack, and even behind their blank white masks it was evident that something had been extinguished inside them. Tsata watched in disbelief as one of them was knocked down and savaged by a shrilling. The Nexus did not react as the beast tore him apart.