The Ascendancy Veil

'Things are different now,' Asara said. 'I am no longer the woman I once was.'

'You think you have changed?' Cailin said in disbelief. 'You can change all you want on the outside, Asara, but inside you are just as empty as you have always been.'

'It is my situation that has changed.' Her tone had become edged with venom now. 'As well you know.'

They regarded each other across the room. It was the same one in which Kaiku and Cailin had been Weaving several nights before, on the second storey of the Red Order's house. The vases stood empty now, the incense burner cold. The charcoal etchings on the wood-panelled walls seemed to creep in the darkness.

'I must congratulate you,' Cailin said at length. 'Your seduction of the Heir-Barak showed impressive foresight. How you must have grieved when both his sister and his father died, making way for him to become head of his family.'

'His sister was ineligible to become head of the family, since she was wed to the Emperor,' Asara replied levelly. 'Her demise benefitted you more than me. You wanted the Weavers to succeed in their coup, you wanted them to take this land. And now you have your wish.'

'And you had nothing to do with her death, I suppose?'

'Maybe so, and maybe not,' Asara replied. 'If the former, it would have been another example of how I have given more on your behalf that anyone has a right to ask, and received nothing in return.'

'Such is the nature of our agreement, Asara. You will be paid in full when the time comes.'

'Then I am altering our agreement.'

Cailin raised an eyebrow. 'You are? How amusing.'

'I am the wife of a Barak now, Cailin,' Asara said, bridling a little. 'I hold the most powerful man in the desert in the palm of my hand. You cannot sweep me aside as you might once have done.'

Cailin's red-and-black lips were set in a mocking smirk. 'I see. And you think that because you have fooled a callow boy into marriage that you can use it as leverage to bully me? I had thought better of you, Asara.'

'I have been over a decade in your thrall, Cailin,' Asara spat, sudden rage igniting within her. 'Kept tied by your promises. You realised what I needed – the gods know how; your filthy kana-games, no doubt – and you have exploited me ever since. And all this time I have chased a dream that I am not even sure you are capable of fulfilling! Now I have the power in the desert, and I can turn Tchom Rin against you and your kind. I know what you desire, and I can make it much more difficult for you if you do not give me what I want now!'

'Enough!' Cailin snapped. 'What is ten years, twenty, fifty to such as us? We will not age, Asara. We do not run out of time as others do. Where is your patience?'

'I have been patient,' came the reply. 'But there is a line between patience and foolishness. Should I be your slave for another decade, and another, until you decide to release me? And even then, could you grant me what you say you will? Would you? One woman's word is a slender thread to hang such a weight from. And you have hardly been a paragon of trustworthiness in the years I have known you.'

Cailin laughed, the sound high and bright. 'Poor Asara,' she said. 'Poor, murdering Asara.' Her laughter faded, and her voice grew dark. 'You want sympathy? I have none. The Red Order's cause is as much in your interests as ours-'

'I doubt that,' Asara interrupted.

'-and however unwillingly, you are fighting for yourself when you fight on our side. We will make a world where Aberrants can live without fear. And you will aid us in that, whether you want to or not.'

'You are avoiding the issue,' Asara said, stalking closer. 'Give me what I want.'

'Release you from our compact? Hardly. You are, despite your faults, an extremely useful ally.'

'Give me what I want!' Asara cried.

'Or what?' Cailin shouted. 'What will you do, Asara? You think you can turn the desert against us? You think you can stop us? Your best efforts would be nothing more than a mosquito bite to the Red Order. We could kill you a thousand times over before you could even get back to your beloved Barak. And even Reki is not such a fool as to forsake the powers we lend him when the Weavers are even now trying to invade Tchom Rin. Yours is a poor bluff, Asara, and you tire me now.'

'It ends here, then!' Asara returned. 'It all ends here. If you cannot prove to me that you can do what you say, then I-'

Cailin cut her throat.

It was a swift, dismissive gesture with her hand, a disgusted flick of her fingers in the moonlight. She did not touch the other woman; they were too far apart. But Asara's neck opened from side to side in a red slit, as cleanly as if Cailin had been holding a sword.

Asara staggered backward, her eyes wide, making damp noises in her chest. Blood gushed, pulsing down the front of her dress, staining it a glistening black in the moonlight. Cailin watched impassively, sidelit by the moonlight, her irises gone crimson.

Asara tried to make a sound, but none would come. She tried to draw breath, but not even a gasp would make it through her severed windpipe. Panic swamped her, a terror like nothing she had ever known before: she was dying, dying unfulfilled, and when she was gone it would be as if she had never been here. Her legs went weak, her muscles leaden. She fell to her knees, clutching her throat with one hand, the other feebly propping her upright, her splayed fingers sliding in her own fluids. Her head was becoming light. So much blood, so much blood, and nothing she could do would staunch it.

Not like this, was all she could think with the last dregs of her reason. Not like this.

Cailin made a vague waving motion with two of her fingers, and Asara's throat sewed shut, fibres and tissues knitting seamlessly from side to side as if zipped. Eager nourishment slammed from her heart to her brain, and she hauled in a huge, sobbing breath. She had never felt such a divine sensation as the relief she experienced then, nor a hatred so pure as that which she had for the one who had hurt her this way. Still gasping, her dress sodden black, she raised her head and fixed Cailin with a gaze of utter malice.

The Pre-Eminent of the Red Order looked down on her coldly. 'Satisfied?' she asked, then walked out of the room, leaving Asara kneeling in a pool of her own blood. An hour's walk northeast of Araka Jo, deep in the forested mountains, lay the glade of an ipi.

It was a place of preternatural stillness and tranquillity, a cavernous sanctum with a roof of interlaced branches and leaves through which the winter sun shone in bright, slanting shafts of light. Gently rolling hillocks and tuffets cradled pools as motionless and transparent as glass; rocks smooth and white like bleached bone hid half-buried in the earth. In the midst of the glade stood the ipi itself: a colossal tree, its bark black as char, rucked and gnarled with age. Its uppermost branches meshed with the canopy overhead, while the lower boughs reached out across the clearing like crooked arms, fingers shaggy with pine blades.

Lucia knelt at the base of the tree, her head bowed, clad in a belted robe of dark green. She was meditating, communing with the spirit of the glade. To talk to an ipi was easy for her these days. Her power had grown at a frightening rate since she had emerged from the shrine of Alskain Mar back in the Xarana Fault, and all but the most ancient spirits were open to her now. Yet with every step she took into the world of the spirits, she took one away from the world of humanity, and she was becoming more like them by the day.

Kaiku watched her from the edge of the glade. Somewhere in the trees, out of sight, were her Libera Dramach bodyguards. But in this place, in the ipi's serene presence, Lucia might have been alone in all the world. And it was true, in a sense. For there was no one like Lucia, nobody who could imagine what it was like to be as she was, poised halfway between two worlds and belonging to neither any more.