She was an Aberrant, a perversion of nature, and yet she was closer to nature than anyone alive, for she had the ability to decipher its many tongues.
She walked along a grassy, well-worn trail that dipped and curved around an overhanging cliff face to her right. To her left, the ground fell suddenly sheer away, leaving her looking out over an enormous canyon half a mile wide or more. On the far side, where the wall was sloped, tall spines of rock and stone pillars stood crookedly, dusty red in the slanting evening sun, casting spindly finger-shadows. The air was dry and hot and smelled of baked earth.
Before her went Yugi and another Libera Dramach guard; behind her, Cailin and Zaelis, and two more armed men. Venturing beyond the lip of the valley where the Fold lay was not a light undertaking these days.
They followed the trail upwards as it bent away from the edge of the chasm and into a long ditch with a thin ribbon of a stream flowing down the middle. Trees meshed tightly overhead. Bees droned in the warm shade, harvesting nectar from the rare flowers that thrived here. Lucia listened to their quiet, comforting industry, and envied their singularity of purpose and unquestioning loyalty to the hive, the simple pleasure they gleaned from serving their queen.
After a short time, they came to a glade, where the ditch ran up against a crumbling rock wall. The trees were driven back here by the pebbly soil, and Nuki’s eye peeped in to brighten it. Water splashed through a narrow gash in the orange stone, pooling in a basin where it overflowed and drained off into a muddy channel that meandered away in the direction they had come.
‘You,’ Yugi indicated his companion. ‘Stay here with me. You two, take station further down the ditch. Call if you see anything bigger than a cat.’
The men grunted and complied, their footfalls thudding away as they departed. Yugi scratched under the sweaty rag that he had wrapped around his forehead to keep his dirty brown-blond hair back from his eyes. He gave those assembled a mischievous grin and said: ‘Well, here we are again.’
Lucia smiled. She was fond of Yugi. Though his duties with the Libera Dramach meant that she did not see him as often as Kaiku or Mishani, he was always an entertaining rascal, even though she sensed sometimes that he was not as happy as his manner would suggest. She knew she would only make him uncomfortable if she pried. Whereas once she would have asked the question, now she kept her silence. Wisdom was only one way in which she had grown since they had first met.
Zaelis knelt down in front of her, his calloused hands gripping her upper arms tightly. ‘Are you ready, Lucia?’
Lucia held his gaze for a moment and then looked away, to the pool. She gently prised his fingers off her and walked over to it. Crouching at its edge, she stared into the water. It was only a few inches deep, and clear enough to see the eroded curve of the basin beneath. As she watched, a tiny minnow slipped from the cut in the rock and plopped into the pool. It made a few disorientated circuits and then allowed itself to be washed over the pouting lip of the basin, and into the stream that ran along the ditch, little realising that its path would take it plunging over the edge of the canyon in a few short minutes.
Lucia watched it go. She would not have warned it, even if she could and even if it would have listened. Its path was chosen for it, like hers.
Once, she had lived in the Imperial Keep, a prisoner in a gilded cage. Five years ago she had been rescued from that confinement and brought to the Fold, only to discover that it was merely a different prison, and in its way as constricting as the last. Instead of walls, she was suffocated by expectation.
The Libera Dramach had taken that struggling settlement eleven years ago and turned it into a thriving fortress town, using the steadily growing population as recruitment grounds for their own secret cause. It was a carefully organised, well-oiled operation. And it was all for her.
‘I saw what would happen,’ Zaelis had told her once. ‘When you were still an infant, I came to be your tutor, and even then we knew you were Aberrant. You were speaking at six months old, and not only to us. Your mother thought she could hide you, but I knew you couldn’t be hidden. That was when I began. I moved in scholars’ circles, seeking out those who might be sympathetic with Aberrants, sounding them out; and then, when I was sure, I would tell them about you. It was treason, but I told them. They saw then what you were, what you meant. If you took the throne, if an Aberrant ruled the empire, then it would undermine everything the Weavers had stood for. How could the Weavers consent to give service to an Aberrant Blood Empress? Yet to refuse would be to go against all the high families, who would owe you their loyalty. The stranglehold they have on us would be broken.’
And so here she was. Though she was allowed to roam and play free in the valley, there was always someone keeping an eye on her. They had vested all their hopes, all their ambitions in Lucia. Without her as a figurehead, they were merely a treasonous group of subversives. She was their reason to exist. They protected her, hid her, jealously guarding their dispossessed Heir-Empress until she could grow in power and influence, investing their time against the day when she would return to claim her throne.
Nobody had asked her if she even wanted to claim the throne. Not in all these years.
‘Is everything well, Lucia?’ Cailin asked. Lucia looked up at her fleetingly, then returned her gaze to the pool.
‘She’s probably wishing we had chosen to build the Fold nearer a stream she could talk to,’ Yugi quipped. ‘I’ve heard the brooks in our valley curse like soldiers.’
This brought a faint smile to Lucia’s lips, and she gave him a grateful glance. He was half right. It was dangerous to go outside the valley, but this was the closest body of water that flowed directly from the Rahn, and its language was less muddied by the ancient ramblings of subterranean rocks and deeper, darker things. She cupped her hands in the water and lifted it carefully, not spilling a drop.
Listen.
Her head bowed, her eyes closed, and the physical world fell quiet to her ears. The rustle of the leaves in the sluggish wind dimmed and the sound of calling birds diminished to a distant staccato. Her heartbeat slowed; her muscles loosened and relaxed. Each exhalation made her sink deeper into unreality. She focused only on the feel of the water in her palm, the trembling of the liquid from the slight movement of her hands, the way it slid into the minuscule gullies in her skin and filled the whorls of her fingertips. She let the water feel her in return, the warmth of her blood, the throb of her pulse.
Everything natural had a spirit. Rivers, trees, hills, valleys, the sea and the four winds. Most were simple, merely an existence of life: an instinctive thing, as incapable of reason as a foetus and yet just as precious. But some were old, and aware, and their thoughts were massive and unfathomable. This water came from the belly of the Tchamil Mountains, flowing along the Kerryn for hundreds of miles until it had split off into the Rahn and travelled southward to the Fault. The great rivers were ancient, but beneath their incomprehensible consciousness they thronged with many more simple spirits. Lucia would not dare try to communicate with the Rahn itself; that was a magnitude of mystery beyond her. But here, at this place, she could sift out something that was within her capabilities. And gradually, while she kept practising like this, she was gaining the control that might one day let her make contact with the true spirit of the river.
She let the water trickle through her fingers, allowing it to carry the feel of her into the pool, tentatively announcing herself. Then, gently, she let her hands rest on the surface, her touch turning it to a chaos of ripples.
Something coming.
Something—
It rushed shrieking at her, a black wave of horror that forced its way into her throat, her lungs, choking. Death and pain and atrocity, washed downriver in the water. And with it something cold, cold and corrupt, a blasphemy against nature, a monstrous clawing thing that rent at her. A terror on the river, terror on the river, and the spirits were screaming!
Her mind blanked out, overwhelmed by the
unimaginable ferocity of the onslaught, and she tipped backwards onto the pebbly floor of the glade without a sound.
EIGHT
The Servant of the Sea drifted in an endless black, the lanterns along its gunwale and atop its mast casting lonely globes of light in the abyss. A single gibbous moon stood sentry in the sky overhead: Iridima, her bright white surface spidercracked with blue like a shattered marble. Thick, racing bands of cloud obscured her face periodically, extinguishing stars in their wake.
An unseasonably chilly wind fluttered across the junk, setting the lanterns swaying and making Kaiku hug her blouse tighter to her skin as she picked out constellations on the foredeck. There was the Fang, low in the east – a sure sign that autumn was almost upon them. Just visible through the cold haze of Iridima’s glow was the Scytheman, directly above her: another omen of the coming end to the harvest. And there, to the north, the twin baleful reds of The One Who Waits, side by side like a pair of eyes, watching the world hungrily.
It was late, and the passengers were asleep. Those men that kept the junk sailing through the night were quiet presences in the background, their voices low. But Kaiku had not been able to rest tonight. The prospect of arriving at Hanzean tomorrow was too exciting. To set foot on Saramyr soil again . . .
She felt tears start to her eyes. Gods, she never thought she would miss her homeland this much, after it had treated her so badly. But even with her family dead and she an outcast, destined to be shunned for her Aberrant blood, she loved the perfect beauty of the hills and plains, the forests and rivers and mountains. The thought of coming home after two months brought her more joy than she would have ever imagined it could.
Her gaze was drawn to the face of Iridima, most beautiful of the moon-sisters and the most brilliant, and she felt a chill of both awe and fear. She said a silent prayer to the goddess, as she always did when she had a moment like this to herself, and remembered the day when she been touched by the Children of the Moons, brushed by a terrible majesty of purpose that humbled her utterly.
‘I thought it would be you,’ said a voice next to her, and she felt the chill turn to an altogether more pleasant warmth that seeped through her body. Turning her head slightly, she favoured her new companion with an appraising glance.
‘Did you?’ she answered him, making it less of a question and more an expression of casual disinterest.
‘Nobody else wanders the decks at night,’ Saran replied. ‘Except the sailors, but they have a heavier tread than you.’
He was standing close to her, a little closer than was proper, but she made no move to lean away. After a month of seeing each other every day, she had given up trying to conceal her attraction, and so had he. It had become a delicious game between them; both aware of the other’s feelings to some extent, neither willing to give in and be the one to make the next move. Waiting each other out. She suspected that part of it was the allure of the message he carried, the implied air of mystery which it lent him. She was desperately curious about the nature of his mission, yet he always evaded her probing, and the frustration only added to how tantalising he was.
‘You are thinking of home?’ he guessed.
Kaiku made a soft noise in her throat, an affirmation.
‘What is there for you?’ he persisted.
‘Just home,’ she said. ‘That is enough for the moment.’
He was silent for a time. Kaiku suddenly realised that she had been callous, and misinterpreted the pause. She laid a hand on his arm.
‘My apologies. I had forgotten. Your accent has improved so much, sometimes you seem almost Saramyr.’
Saran gave her a heartbreaking smile. As usual, he was immaculately dressed and not a hair out of place. He might have been vain – something Kaiku had learned over the past weeks – but he certainly had something to be vain about.
‘You should not apologise. Quraal is not my home, not any more. I have been away a long time, but I do not miss it. My people are blinkered and reluctant to leave their own shores, afraid that mingling with other cultures is offensive to our gods, afraid that the Theocrats might accuse them of heresy. I do not think that. Those Quraal that do deal with foreigners stay aloof, but I find beauty in all people. Some more than most.’
He was not looking at her as he delivered the final sentence, nor was it weighted any more that its predecessors, but Kaiku felt a blush anyway.
‘I thought that way once,’ she said quietly. ‘I suppose I still do, but it is not so easy nowadays. Mishani tells me I need a harder heart, and she is right. To think too much of someone only makes a person vulnerable. Sooner or later, one will disappoint or betray the other.’
‘That is Mishani’s opinion, not yours,’ Saran said. ‘And besides, what of Mishani herself? You two seem close as kin.’
‘Even she has wounded me in the past, and that hurt went deeper than any had before it,’ Kaiku murmured.
Saran was silent for a time. They stood together, listening to the sussurant breathing of the sea, looking out over the darkness. Kaiku had more she wanted to say, but she felt she had already said too much, revealed too great a portion of herself to him. She kept her inner self guarded; it was her way, and experience had taught her that there was little point in trying to change it. Somehow, whenever she let her defences down, she always chose the wrong person; yet if she kept them up, she drove people away from her.
She had fallen into two relationships since she had lived in the Fold, both fulfilling at the time but ultimately proving empty. One man she was with for three years before realising that she stayed with him to alleviate the guilt she felt over the death of Tane, who had followed her into the Imperial Keep out of love and had died there. The other lasted six months before he revealed a terrible temper, made worse by the fact that he could not physically overpower her since she was an apprentice of the Red Order. She did not see the rage building until it burst out. He hit her once. She used her kana to crush the bones in his hand. Unfortunately, despite his other failings, he had been a skilled bomb engineer and a great asset to the Libera Dramach, but Kaiku’s actions had put paid to that. She felt more sorry about causing trouble for Zaelis’s organisation than about maiming him.
But there was one other, who had got under her skin a long while ago and would not be dislodged, persistent as the whispers from her father’s Mask that sometimes woke her in the night with their insidious temptations.
‘I miss Asara,’ she said absently, her eyes unfocused.
‘Asara tu Amarecha?’ Saran said.
Kaiku’s head snapped around to meet his gaze. ‘You know her?’
‘I have met her,’ he said. ‘Not that she was going by that name, but then, she never did keep to one identity for too long.’
‘Where? Where did you meet her?’
Saran raised a sculpted eyebrow at the urgency in Kaiku’s voice. ‘Actually, it was in the very port that we are docking at tomorrow. Several years ago, now. She did not know me, but I knew her. She was wearing a different face, but I had intelligence of her arrival.’ He smiled to himself, enjoying Kaiku’s attention. ‘I made contact with her. We are both, after all, on the same side.’
‘Asara is on nobody’s side,’ Kaiku said.
‘She chooses her allegiances to suit herself,’ Saran said, then turned away from her and into the wind, flicking his hair away from his face with a flourish. ‘But you of all people should know that she is helping the Red Order and the Libera Dramach.’
‘She was,’ said Kaiku. ‘I have not seen her since Lucia was—’ She stopped herself, then remembered that Saran already knew. Brushing her fringe back in an unconscious imitation of him, she continued more carefully. ‘Since Lucia came to the Fold.’
‘She spoke highly of you,’ Saran told her, pacing slowly about the foredeck. He stood too rigid, too straight, and Kaiku felt that his movements and speech were pretentiously theatrical. He annoyed her when he became like this. Suddenly, now that he knew he had information she wanted
, he was showing off, making the most of his advantage. She should have deflated him and feigned disinterest, but it was too late. Quraal were legendarily arrogant, and Saran was no exception. Like many people who were naturally beautiful, he did not feel he had to cultivate the finer points of his personality since women would fall at his feet anyway. What irked Kaiku more than anything was that she knew that, and yet she still kept coming back to him.
Saran wanted her to ask what Asara had said about her, but she would not give him the satisfaction this time.
He leaned on his elbows against the bow railing, the moon at his shoulder, and studied her with his dark eyes. ‘What were you two to each other?’ he asked eventually.
Kaiku almost felt that she did not want to tell him; but tonight she felt reflective, and it did her good to talk.
‘I do not know,’ she said. ‘I never knew who she was, or what she was. I knew she could . . . shift her form somehow. I knew she had watched over me for a long time, waiting for my kana to show itself. She could be cruel, or kind. I think maybe she was lonely, but too obsessed with being independent to admit it to herself.’
‘Were you friends?’
Kaiku frowned. ‘We were . . . more than friends, and less than friends. I do not know what she thought of me, but . . . there is a piece of her still in me. Here.’ She tapped her breastbone. ‘She stole the breath of another and put it into me, and some of her went with it. And some of me went into her.’ She became aware that Saran was watching her coolly, shook her head and snorted a laugh. ‘I do not expect you to understand.’
‘I think I understand enough,’ Saran said.
‘Do you? I doubt it.’