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  'Let's get to it, then,' Juto said. He cast a glance at the Sisters. 'First thing, though: we all know who you are and your particular… abilities.' Kaiku was pleased to note that the familiar note of disgust when referring to her Aberrant powers was absent in his tone. 'It'd be best if none of us mentioned them aloud. Plots and schemes come and go, but anyone catches a whiff of you and they'll trip over themselves to sell you to the Blackguard.' He caught Phaeca's glance towards the doorway. 'Lon knows. You can trust him. Nobody else, though.'

  'Do you two know each other?' Phaeca asked, referring to Juto and Nomoru. Kaiku had been wondering the same thing ever since Juto had first spoken.

  Juto grinned, exposing big, browned teeth. 'We don't forget our own.'

  'You were part of the same gang?' Phaeca prompted her. Nomoru just gave her a sullen glare in reply.

  'Some time ago now,' Juto said. 'We'd given her up.' His gaze flickered to Nomoru. 'I went looking for you. Tracked you to the Inker that did you last. He said you-'

  'Juto!' she snapped suddenly, cutting him off. 'Not their business.'

  His eyes blazed for a moment, and then an expression of dangerous calm settled on his face. 'You haven't been Nomoru en Garika for a long while,' he said with an unmistakable threat in his voice. 'You be careful how you speak to me.'

  She just stared at him, a challenge in the set of her shoulders, a scrawny creature with hair in spiky tangles levelling with somebody twice her bulk. There was no fear in either of them.

  'How are things in the city?' Kaiku asked, in an attempt to break the stalemate. It worked better than she intended, for Juto bellowed with laughter and shook his head.

  'Were you wearing blinkers on the way here?' he asked in disbelief. 'The people are crushed. The Lord Protector has the city under his boot heel and he'll keep on grinding until all that's left is powder and bone. Axekami is the lucky recipient of most of the remaining food in the north-west and still hundreds starve to death every day. The only good thing I can say is that at least we don't have the nobles siphoning all the supplies as we would have done under the magnificent government of the Empire.' His sarcasm was obvious and scathing. 'The workers get the food. And the Blackguard and the Weavers' damned Aberrant army, of course; that goes without saying. But the Poor Quarter suffers as ever, because some of us would rather die than go to labour in those gods-cursed constructions they've built in place of our temples.'

  'And what do they do in there?' Phaeca asked. The Sisters had never been able to establish the purpose of the Weavers' buildings in the cities.

  Juto curled his lip. 'No idea. Each worker only knows his own task, and what all those tasks amount to, nobody seems to be able to work out. They don't seem to produce anything. That's the cursed mystery of the things.'

  He got to his feet and went to the window-arch again, looking out past the veil. When he spoke again, it was more measured. 'Then there's this murk. Old men cough themselves to death, mothers miscarry, the sick don't get better and cuts gets infected. What kind of people take over a city and then poison their own well? What idiocy is that?'

  The question did not seem directed at any of them, so they stayed silent. He turned around and leaned against the wall with his arms crossed. 'They've outlawed the gods,' he went on. 'All of them. They're crippling any chance of rebellion by not allowing us to gather and coordinate. That's the reason everybody thinks they took down the temples. But heart's blood, it doesn't make sense! Letting the people have their faith would keep them calm, discourage revolt.' He scratched his ear and snorted. 'Some say they just want us to know that we haven't any hope. I don't believe that. I just think they hate the gods. Either that, or they're afraid of them.'

  'And has it worked?' Kaiku asked. 'Do you think Axekami could be persuaded to rise against their oppressors?'

  Juto sat down again, shaking his head as he did so. 'You could march an army up to the gates and they wouldn't dare to open them. It's not only a matter of spirit, though there's little enough of that left. We're weak and sickly. The Blackguard are fed and strong and there's more of them each month because people join up all the time. They see their families dying and their principles fade like mist in the morning sun. Then you've got informers and spies, all working to fill their bellies. The Weavers seem to know everything, whether by the cursed powers they possess or by the folk who've sold themselves. As fast as rumours start spreading about a new leader there are rumours that they've died or disappeared. And on top of all that, there's the Aberrants. The Weavers just have to say the word and the streets are full of them.'

  'What about Lucia?' Nomoru interjected. 'Could rouse them then. If Lucia came.'

  'Lucia?' Juto mocked. 'I won't deny the people would welcome anyone in place of the Weavers, Aberrant or not, but a legendary figure's no good if they're not here. I won't believe she's real till I see her with my own eyes, and even then she'd have to be in golden armour with the gods themselves singing her praises from the skies before I'd count myself safe enough to turn on the Weavers.' His tone was becoming bitter now. 'You think you can even get to Axekami with an army? I don't. The Weavers would crush you before you got north of the Fault.'

  Kaiku took the disappointment stoically. She had expected such a response anyway. It did not take someone of Phaeca's skills to divine that Yugi's faint hope of picking up the scent of revolt would be thwarted; Kaiku had guessed that as soon as they entered the city. She did not think he had seriously entertained the possibility anyway.

  'Enough of our troubles,' said Juto, hunkering forward and giving them a smile that was more like a snarl. 'What about yours? How goes the battle in the south?'

  'That is a puzzle,' Kaiku said, brushing her hair behind her ear. 'It is much as we left it almost a fortnight ago. The Weavers have occupied Juraka, but there has been no move to cross the river as yet, and the feya-kori seem to have disappeared.'

  'Ah, there's the meat of it,' said Juto. 'The feya-kori.'

  'They came from Axekami,' Phaeca said. 'Do you know where?'

  'I have my suspicions,' Juto said. 'But I've been waiting for you to arrive so we can take a look.'

  'When can we go?'

  'Tonight,' he said. 'After curfew.'

  Kaiku considered this for a moment, then a small frown crossed her brow. 'What exactly do the Blackguard do to enforce this curfew?'

  Juto grinned nastily. 'They let the Aberrants out.'

  SIX

  The Lord Protector Avun tu Koli trod warily through the chambers of his home. Despite Kakre's assurances that he would not be harmed, he could never be even slightly at ease in the areas that the Weave-lord had taken to inhabiting. The upper levels of the Imperial Keep had become an asylum.

  The great truncated pyramid stood atop a bluff on the crest of the highest hill in Axekami. It was a masterpiece of architecture, arguably still unsurpassed since the fourth Blood Emperor Huira tu Lilira began building it more than a thousand years ago. The complex sculptures of gold and bronze that swarmed across its tiered sides had stunned visitors for a millennium with their intricacy and power, while the four slender towers that stood at its corners, linked to the main body of the Keep by ornate bridges, were as impressive now as they were all that time ago.

  Throughout history, there had always been large sections of the Keep that were empty, simply because no high family had enough members to fill a building so huge, nor needed a retinue so large as to take up the spare room. Avun wondered distastefully what his ancestors might make of things now that the new occupants had arrived, and the Keep was finally filled.

  The route to the Sun Chamber took him through room after gloomy room of depravity and madness. Weavers gibbered and rocked in clusters, hunched together, their Masks iridescing subtly as they shared the ecstatic bliss of their unseen world. Walls were smeared in blood and excrement, or scrawled with arcane languages which had sprung whole from the subconscious of the author. Abstract mathematics and diagrams, nonsense mingling with insights of stagger
ing genius, were scored into priceless marble pillars or daubed across artwork that was hundreds of years old. The flyblown corpse of a servant, his lips and jaw eaten away by a roaming dog, lay in the centre of a room surrounded by strange clay sculptures, each precisely a foot high. An exquisitely clean and orderly bathing-chamber was guarded by a lunatic Weaver who spent his time obsessively tracing the grains of the wooden floor with his eye, and who screamed and flailed at anyone who entered.

  Yet among these horrors other Weavers shuffled and limped, younger ones who had not yet fallen prey to the insanity of their kind. They were Kakre's lieutenants and aides, an assortment of bizarre figures who maintained their own private domains amid the chaos of the upper levels. Their own depravities only emerged after Weaving, when the trauma of withdrawal would trigger their particular manias, which were as varied and repulsive as imagination would allow.

  The Weavers had always been careful to conceal the true extent of the damage that their Masks did to them, hiding away their worst casualties in their mountain monasteries; but here the inexorable and terrifying erosion of their minds was appallingly obvious. At least, Avun thought, the famine had provided plenty of victims for those Weavers who liked to kill or rape. He tried not to waste his trained servants when he could help it, preferring to use peasants or townsfolk culled from the Poor Quarter, but the necessity of navigating through this bedlam to attend to the whims of the Weavers had claimed the lives of many of them. It seemed that Kakre's decree of protection extended only to Avun, and anyone else was fair game.

  The Sun Chamber had once been beautiful. The roof was a dome of faded gold and green, with great petal-shaped windows following its contours down from the flamboyant boss at its centre. It was rare enough to see glass in Saramyr windows anyway, but these were magnificent creations of many different colours whose designs had caught the light of Nuki's eye in days past and shone down onto the enormous circular mosaic on the floor. Now the light was weak and grim and flat, and what it fell on made Avun wish for darkness.

  Kakre had taken the Sun Chamber for his own, and decorated it with the products of his craft. In the three galleries of wood and gold, where in ancient times councils had stood to attend to a speaker or watch a performance on the floor below, malformed and disturbing shapes hid in the gloom. Avun tried not to think about them. Here was where Kakre came to display some of the appalling art he made in his chambers many levels below. Every creation here was sheathed in skin taken from men and women and beasts while they were still alive, arranged as if in audience.

  They had been moved around since last time Avun visited, and he unconsciously sought out the figures that had stuck most in his mind: the hunched figure whose left side was stitched from the skin of a man and whose right side from a woman; the winged being whose feathers were made of tanned and leathery sinew; the shrieking man from whose gaping mouth another face peered. There were animals and birds too, and other things not humanoid, frames overlaid with patchwork epidermis of many shades to form strange geometric shapes, or forms so repellent to the eye that they could not be classified. The accumulation of torture and pain and terror this room represented was more than even a man as cold as Avun could bear to consider. The faint shrieks of the tormented Weavers in nearby rooms only served to disconcert him further.

  The Weave-lord Kakre was there, of course. He seemed to have lapsed into some sort of trance, standing immobile just off-centre of the mosaic that covered the floor. Avun approached quietly, watching him for any sudden movements. He had learned to be careful around the Weave-lord of late. Kakre's mental health had taken a dangerous slide in recent months, and Avun never quite knew where he stood with his master these days.

  He studied the hunched figure before him. Like all his kind, the Weave-lord was clad in heavy, ragged robes sewn haphazardly together from all manner of materials – including hide and skin, in Kakre's case – and hung with ornaments: knucklebone strings and twists of hair and the like. The voluminous cowl partially covered the stretched, ghastly corpse-face that was his True Mask; the Mask concealed the even fouler visage beneath. Avun had never seen Kakre's real face, and never wished to.

  'Kakre?' he prompted. The Weaver started a little and then slowly turned his dead face to the Lord Protector.

  'You have come,' he wheezed, a faintly disorientated and dreamlike tone to his voice. Avun wondered whether he had accidentally interrupted Kakre's Weaving.

  'You asked to see me,' Avun pointed out.

  Kakre paused for a little too long, then shook himself and recovered from whatever befuddlement had been upon him. 'I did,' he said, more decisively. 'The feya-kori are ready once again. What is your advice?'

  Avun regarded Kakre with his drowsy eyes. His permanent expression of disinterest belied a mind of uncommon ruth-lessless. He did not look the part of the most important non-Weaver in Axekami, with his gaunt frame and balding pate, but appearances could deceive. He had rode the chaos of the Weavers' coup to make Koli the only high family to come out on top while the others went under, and in a short time had worked his way from being a mere figurehead for the Weavers – the human face of their reign – to becoming utterly invaluable to them.

  'Zila,' he said.

  'Zila?' Kakre repeated. 'Why not attack? Go straight for their core, straight for Saraku?'

  'They expect you to move on and try to take the Sasako Bridge, to push towards their heartland from Juraka. Do not do so. Let them know we can harry them all along their front. They will be forced to divide their armies, not knowing where the next assault will come from. Attack Zila with the feya-kori, take it, and fortify.'

  'What good will that do?' Kakre asked impatiently. 'To chip away at them one town at a time?'

  'War is not conducted in a headlong charge, Kakre,' Avun said. 'I would have thought you had proved that yourselves by now. Remember the early days, Kakre? That first sweep across the country after taking Axekami? Your only strategy was to fling as many troops as possible at your targets, counting your numbers as unlimited. You were beaten back time and again by forces one tenth your size. Because they used tactics. They knew how to fight wars.' He raised an eyebrow. 'As do I.'

  He could feel the hatred in Kakre's glare from behind the shadowed eyes of the Mask. It was necessary to remind the Weavers of his worth now and again, lest they forget, but it was a risky business. Kakre was apt to lose his temper, and the consequences for Avun were usually painful.

  'Tell me the details,' Kakre said eventually, and Avun felt the tightness in his chest slacken a little. He began to explain, recalling troop locations and the size of armies from memory, laying out the plan for his master. And if, long ago, he might have felt a twinge of guilt at betraying his fellow man this way, he felt nothing of the sort now.

  The beginning of the war had not gone at all the way the Weavers had wanted it to. They had envisioned a complete collapse of the Empire, allowing them to overwhelm the disorganised opposition with their superior numbers and suicidal troops. But they had known nothing of the Sisters. With the Red Order knitting themselves across the gap that the Weavers had left and protecting the nobles from the Weavers' influence, the high families put up an unexpectedly efficient resistance. They were quick to recognise that their opponent had no knowledge of military strategies, and capitalised on it. The Weavers had the advantage in numbers; but the skilful generals of the Empire, well-studied and practised in the art of war, made them pay dearly for every mile gained. In time, it became obvious that even the apparently endless armies of the Weavers could not support such losses, and the Empire began to counterattack.

  That was when Avun stepped in to lend his services. The Weavers were not generals: they were erratic, most of them were borderline maniacs, and they had no interest in history and so had not learned its lessons. Avun was shrewd and clever, and under his direction the armies of the Weavers became suddenly far more effective, and the Empire's counterattack was battered into a stalemate.

  But by the
n the advantage had been lost. The forces of the Empire had retreated to the Southern Prefectures and held it tenaciously. The damage caused by the Weavers' ineptitude and the vast areas that they now had to keep occupied meant that the Aberrant armies were stretched thin, and the breeding programmes would take years to catch up. Time was both on their side and against them, for every witchstone unearthed made the Weavers stronger, but it accelerated the blight that was killing the crops.

  The Weavers were impatient. They were afraid of their armies starving. Avun could understand that. But what he could not understand was what method lay in the Weavers' madness. A desire to conquer he could appreciate. The thirst for power through Masks and witchstones he could sympathise with. But the witchstones were causing the blight. It had been a secret for so long, but only the blind could fail to see the connection now. What use was a poisoned land to the Weavers? Even they had to eat.

  Kakre would provide no answers, Avun was sure of that. But for his part, as ever, he would seek advantage for himself and his own, and as long as he was Lord Protector he had leisure to manoeuvre. Let the other nobles fight their hopeless battle against the Weavers' tide. Avun had made betrayal a science, and it had served him well. When the time came, he would betray the Weavers too.

  But for now, he spoke his soft words of advice, teaching Kakre the best way to kill those he had once counted as allies, while distantly there came the hoot and gibber of the inmates of the madhouse that surrounded him. He found his wife in her chambers. It was hardly a surprise to him. She almost never left them.

  Muraki tu Koli was quiet, pale and petite, an elegant ghost whose voice was rarely raised above a whisper. Her long black hair fell in an unadorned centre parting to either side of her face, and she wore an embroidered lilac gown and soft black slippers because she did not like the noise that shoes made on the hard lach floors of the Imperial Keep. Her quill was scratching as Avun entered the room, inking vertical chains of symbols on a paper scroll.