The Weavers of Saramyr (36 page)

There was no choice.

A quick search of the outpost - carefully avoiding the attentions of Moon-face - revealed nothing but deserted buildings, and yielded no morsel to eat. So it was that Kaiku found herself crossing the narrow stone bridge to the monastery, leaning on her staff like an old man, and hoping only that whatever was within would not question her disguise.

The monastery facade was stern and simple. Great pillars held up a roof that sloped back to merge with the rock of the mountainside, and beneath it there crouched four mighty statues, four creatures all haunch and scale and fang. As Kaiku approached, she saw that the pillars were decorated with thousands of tiny, intricate glyphs and pictograms, and that the statues were not weathered like their inferior counterparts on the stairway she had climbed yesterday. These were so carefully carven that it was almost possible to believe they breathed. The portal to the monastery had heavy stone gates, but they were open and inside it was dark.

Kaiku hesitated. The statues made her skin crawl. She had a notion that their eyes were on her, a sensation too strong to be put down to nerves. She looked back across the bridge and saw Moon-face watching her from the other side of the gorge. The fear of discovery assailed her anew; but she could not turn back. Steeling herself, she walked onward and into the stone throat of the monastery.

The corridor she came into bore torch brackets but no torches. By the morning light that shone in through the square portal, she could see hints of statues to either side, deformed beasts that pawed at her or gathered themselves to leap. Beyond that, all was black. She went forward, her shadow preceding her, gradually merging with the darkness until she was swallowed by it.

Her eyes adjusted slowly as she went, tapping her staff before her. This place seemed as deserted as the outpost, and yet Moon-face had come from
somewhere
. Though she was weak and fragile, her hunger drove her onward, even after the light from the entrance had disappeared with the turn of a corner.

And then she saw new light, and became aware of someone coming towards her from below. She stopped still at the top of a staircase she had been about to tumble down. The flickering torch came nearer, until she could see that it was held by another creature of motley and rags, this one with a face like a grinning skull, made of blackened bone. The newcomer came up the stairs and halted a

few steps below Kaiku. She was stooped so that her robes buried her, the better to conceal her femininity; but she felt her heart begin to accelerate as the Weaver regarded her. Was he waiting for her to speak? She could not: to open her mouth would be to give herself away. After a short pause that seemed to stretch agonisingly, he grunted and handed Kaiku his torch, then walked past her, without fear of the darkness. Kaiku let out a pent-up breath.

The steps took her down to a new corridor, and as she progressed along this one she found that the torch brackets were occupied more often than not, and smoky flames cast warm reddish light about the pathways of the monastery. The walls, ceiling and floor were built of massive bricks of a sandy-coloured stone, and decorations were strewn haphazardly about: here a little votive alcove, there a hanging, chiming talisman. Sometimes there were tiny carven idols standing on shelves, and sometimes Kaiku had to duck beneath hanging streamers. She could discern no pattern to the imagery; it was as if someone had hoarded the detritus of a dozen religions together. There were icons from far-off lands, heathen dolls from the jungle continent of Okhamba, ancient Ugati carvings, depictions of the Saramyr pantheon including some of those gods who had been all but forgotten. She even saw a graven fountain, now dry, that had the three aspects of Misamcha set into its pedestal in the classical Vinaxan style, from the very beginning of the Saramyr Empire.

The corridor split off into two, and that into four, and soon Kaiku was hopelessly lost within the subterranean maze of the monastery. She wandered through chamber after chamber, finding them arranged utterly without order or direction, as if planned by some madman. She passed other masked Weavers several times, but all of them ignored her, and she began to relax a little, content that her disguise hid her gender well enough.

Presently, after walking for some time down deserted ways, she came across an area which she took for some kind of prison. There was no light burning and nobody present, but the sound of shuffling and scraping from the dark recesses of the cells told her that at least some of them were occupied.

Curiosity overcame hunger, and she crept inwards. What kind of prisoners did the Weavers keep? The chamber was little more than a short, wide corridor between two rows of barred cell doors. The silence as she stepped inside became total; even the shuffling

stopped. Her torch showed her only the bars, and did nothing to illuminate what was behind them.

She stood indecisive for a time. Then, slowly, she stepped over to one of the cells, holding her torch up. There was something pressed back there in the shadows, something…

It sprang at her without warning, crashing into the bars and lunging with one clawed arm. She yelled and pulled herself away, the claws missing her by centimetres. The torch fell from her hand to the floor, rolling back a little way, out of the creature’s reach.

An Aberrant. She had seen its kin many times in the mountains, but never one like this. This one was a true grotesquerie, a malformed abomination of muscle and tooth. It had four arms, but all were different sizes, ranging from withered to massively swollen. A single eye blinked balefully from a face that was black and wizened, and its lower portions were a terrible tangle of half-grown limbs and tentacles, wrapped around each other, some crooked and broken. Its back was a shiver of spines and fins. It looked like the collision of several different types of creature, all fighting to represent themselves by a limb or a feature and resulting only in a horrible clutter of nauseating aspect.

‘…
kkilll yoooou
…’ the thing gurgled in Saramyrrhic, and Kaiku’s heart froze.

Suddenly, all around her, the cells were alive, things rattling the bars of their cages or reaching out of the darkness for her. Roars and bleatings became mangled words from deformed mouths, pleadings, curses, even some awful noise that sounded like weeping. Kaiku recoiled in terror, snatching up the torch, but she dared not take her eyes off the thing that had spoken first. It retreated slowly out of the light, letting the darkness take it once more, and as it did so it spoke again.

‘…
lookkk wwwhattyoou’ve ddooone ttto ussss
. . .’ She fled the prison, horror making her blood cold as she ran, and she did not stop until she was beyond the reach of the clamour. There she leaned against a wall, panting, listening to her heart slow. The shock of having that thing attack her had been bad enough, but to hear it speak… it was almost more than she could bear, in her weakened state. They were
full-grown
Aberrants in the midst of a Weaver monastery. Intelligent, aware, and imprisoned. What could it mean?

Seeking to distract herself from the memories, she stumbled

onward, thoroughly lost. The possibility had occurred to her several times that she might be unable to escape this maze before she starved, but for the moment her hunger was forgotten. Instead, she pressed onward, knowing no direction but away from that prison.

After a time, she became aware of a dull hum coming from somewhere ahead of her. By now she had passed into unlit corridors that were little more than crude tunnels, and there were no torch brackets here. She had seen nobody for some while, and had resigned herself to the fact that she had strayed far from the beaten path. She had been about to turn back to where there was a greater likelihood of finding food, but the hum intrigued her enough to keep her going.

A light further up the tunnel drew her to it, and she found a wide rent in the side of the corridor which let out on to a broad ledge in a vast chamber. The hum was coming from the chamber, and the light from within shone on her, a strangely uneasy glow of an indefinable hue.

The ledge blocked her view of the chamber below, so she wriggled through the rent and crawled to the lip, and there she looked over and saw what was beneath.

The chamber was more ornate than anything she had seen so far in this place. It was possessed of a powerful, stony grandeur, its sandy walls curved into pillars or gliding into mighty stone lintels above the gold-etched gates at floor level. Kaiku was very high up, her ledge only a little below the flat ceiling. On either side of her, a cluster of enormous gargoyle-like creatures leered over the proceedings below, smaller cousins to the vast statue that dominated the far end of the chamber. That one was fully fifty feet high, its shoulders scraping the ceiling as it squatted in the unnatural light. The creatures were foul beyond imagining, eyeless things with gaping maws whose proportions seemed to defy sense. They were monstrously malformed, just humanoid enough to be recognisable as such but twisted so far out of true that Kaiku could not help but doubt the sanity of the mind behind them. They were lit from below, their hideous features made more menacing by shadow.

But it was what was happening in the centre of the chamber that drew Kaiku’s attention. There was the source of the light: a massive rock, perhaps forty feet in length and half that in height. It was not like any rock Kaiku had ever seen.

The shape of the thing was utterly irregular, and doubly so for a mineral. It seemed to have
sprouted
, like a plant or a coral reef, so that great roots and lumpen antlers of stone reached out from its core and buried themselves in the floor, walls and ceiling of the chamber. It seethed with an unnatural glow. Kaiku narrowed her eyes behind her Mask and felt a sickness creep into her belly. It made her feel ill just to look upon it.

/
know of these
, she thought to herself, the memory of the Mask coming to her.
This is a witchstone
.

She was gazing on the source of the Weavers’ power, and their most jealously guarded treasure.

There were twelve Weavers surrounding the rock, attired as Kaiku was in patchwork robes and odd Masks. There was a thirteenth person as well, but this one was naked: a thin, emaciated man struggling weakly in the clutches of two of the robed figues. Kaiku watched as they dragged him up a set of steps and pulled him on to the jagged back of the witchstone. She guessed what was going to happen even before one of them drew his sickle and cut the unfortunate man’s throat.

The man slumped forward on his face. One of the robed figures retreated while the other turned him over and cut him from chin to manhood, opening him up to expose his insides. These he roughly began to hack at, pulling them out one by one without finesse, laying them aside on the rock when they were free. Heart, kidneys, liver, intestines… in moments, he was surrounded by the man’s

organs.

Kaiku had been watching this with no particular horror. The fate of that man did not concern her, nor the method in which he was despatched. But there was something wrong with what she was seeing, and it took her a little time to understand what it was.

There was no blood. Oh, certainly, the man
bled
, and the Weaver’s garments were sprayed with gore; but the rock, where almost all the blood had eventually fallen, was spotless. Where the heart had been taken out and laid aside, it lay as clean and dry as an apple. Where the intestines should have rested in a pool of red, they were rubbery and blue and immaculate. The blood was coming out, all right, but where was it going? It was as if the rock absorbed it somehow.

Or
drank
it.

Kaiku frowned at the thought, but she could see now that the

witchstone was beginning to darken, the foul glow fading and being drawn inwards, until the cavern was almost pitch black. The only source of light was within the rock, and the rock was full of veins, a network of glowing lines hanging in the pure darkness, as if its skin had become transparent and its own innards were exposed. And at its core, a pulsing chamber like a human heart, pushing the bright white blood around it.

By the spirits
, Kaiku thought.
The witchstone. It is alive
.

The memories hit her then, a sudden rush of understanding that flooded into her brain, triggered by the realisation. Connections that she had never considered before became suddenly obvious, each one sparking another and another until the circuit was complete and she saw the whole of the grand design, as her father had seen it. Kaiku knew, in a flash, what Ruito tu Makaima had found out, why he had run, and why they had killed him for that knowledge.

The witchstones were alive. And just as the dust of the witch-stones in the Weaver’s Masks corrupted and warped their bodies, so the witchstones were corrupting and warping the earth in which they lay.

It opened up to her then as a vision. Ruito in his study, in a hired apartment in Axekami, poring over a map and a heap of charts and scrolls. A project he had been working on in secret for years, a passion, a suspicion. In her vision, Kaiku stood with him at the moment of realisation - though she had not been present in real life - when all the facts and figures and distances fell into place. There was a correlation between the reports of Aberrant births and their proximity to Weavers. He saw that the epicentre of Aberrancy always lay at the site of a Weaver monastery, and the monasteries were always built around the witchstones. How could nobody have seen this before? How many people had been killed or dissuaded, to keep their silence? But Ruito saw, and determined to investigate, to gain the proof he needed to confront the nobles with. So he had come here, and seen this, and then he had run.

But they had known. Somehow, they had known, by some carelessness that even Ruito was not aware of. An invisible trigger, a misplaced word… who could say? By the time he returned to the mainland, it was hopeless. Only in secrecy could a man such as he hope to overcome the Weavers. Once they were forewarned, he would never be able to so much as get a message to the nobles.