Nomoru shrugged her narrow shoulders. 'Never the prettiest kitten in the box anyway. Besides, it makes Kaiku nervous. Can tell she thinks I want to kill her. Funny.'
Yugi grinned widely, then faltered, not sure whether it was appropriate. His hand came up, seemingly belonging to someone else, moving into his vision to touch her scarred cheek. At the moment of contact his fingertips exploded into sensation, bypassing his numb arm and going straight to his brain, islands of exquisite sensitivity free-floating before him. He felt the rayed tracks of the cicatrices that marred her skin, his face a comical picture of childlike wonder.
'It's a beautiful pattern,' he murmured.
Nomoru grunted a laugh. 'You're under,' she said again. 'You'd think mud was beautiful.'
Yugi did not appear to be listening. He took his hand away, suddenly unable to get comfortable on his mat. The curvature of his spine was annoying him. He got up into a cross-legged position with some difficulty, only to find that his knees were now causing him bother and he had merely shifted the ache from his upper back to his coccyx. He reached for the hookah, but Nomoru caught his arm and guided it back to his lap.
'Don't,' she said. 'Not going to watch you end up like my mother.'
'Come under with me,' he said, his pupils huge and bright though his face was slack.
She shook her head. 'You know what happened last time.'
'Weavers won't get you here. You can trust me.'
She looked away from him. 'I don't trust anyone.'
He was hurt by that. For a moment, there was nothing to say.
'Where did you go? In Axekami,' he asked at length. Sparkling shapes were whirring about the floor like translucent wriggling eels. 'I was worried.'
'No you weren't,' she said. She leaned back on her hands. 'Easier to get away on my own. Had to see an Inker.' She drew up her sleeve, where a freshly completed tattoo of a hookah with a dagger in it stood out against the paler pictures surrounding it. 'Paid the debt I owed Lon. Or Juto. Doesn't matter which.'
He was getting more lucid now. Amaxa root was shortlived in potency, and required a constant topping-up from the hookah to remain effective. The spirit that lived in the corner of his room was nothing more than a grey smear now, if ever he had seen it at all.
Suddenly he reached out and slipped his arm round Nomoru's waist, drawing her to him. He lay back as she moved with the pressure, uncrossing his legs so that she could slip onto his chest, her thin, hard body resting down the length of him. Her face was close enough to his so that he could feel her breath on his face, the sensation narcotically amplified to a rolling cloud of fire on his stubbled cheek. He studied the newly cut contours in her skin, his eyes flicking across them in fascination. Then he put his lips to hers. Her tongue was small and she tasted sour and kissed too hard, but it was familiar to him and he liked it. The amaxa root sent sparkling bursts from his mouth throughout his body.
She pulled away from him. 'Take that off,' she said, touching the trailing end of the rag tied round his forehead. 'Feels strange.'
'I can't,' he said, with a tired sigh. They had been through this before.
She was cooling again. 'She's dead. It's done. Take it off.'
'I can't.'
She looked down at him a moment, then shrugged. 'Worth a try,' she said, and fell to him once more. The roof gardens of the Imperial Keep had withered and died. Where once they had been verdant and lush, planted with trees and flowers gathered from all over the Near World, now they were a brown, skeletal wasteland. The flowerbeds were a mush of detritus and spindly crinkles that were the remnants of bushes. The trees sloughed bark and oozed sap, and the leaves were all gone. It was a doleful and tragic place, and few came here now. The murk closed it in, a smoky grey canopy, and a bitter wind chased sticks and twigs across the flagstones.
Avun met the Weaver in a small paved area screened by a dense tangle of branches on all sides. At its south end, a double set of steps flanked by small statues of mythical beings led to paths set higher and lower in the gardens. There was a carved wooden bench, dull from lack of care, but Avun did not sit. He stood with a heavy cloak wrapped around him, for the lack of sunlight and the wind made it as cold as he could ever remember being in his life. The branches rattled a macabre and erratic rhythm as they tapped against each other.
The Weaver came slowly up the steps from below. He was young, not so raddled as others of his breed, and he moved with a slow and controlled gait. His Mask was all angles of gold, silver and bronze, his cowl hanging loosely over it. The patchwork robe was stitched and patterned crazily; there seemed to be some kind of order there, but Avun could not grasp it. He gave up looking. Perhaps it would be best not to work it out.
'Lord Protector,' he said, the voice made tinny by the metal Mask.
'Fahrekh,' Avun replied.
'I assume you have heard about Kakre's injudicious choice of victim today?'
Avun blinked languidly. 'He was a useful general.'
'He may still be alive,' Fahrekh said. 'Though I doubt he will be good for much any more.'
'He had been with Kakre too long before I found out,' said Avun. 'There is no point antagonising the Weave-lord now. My general would not lead the Blackguard so well without half his skin.'
'And without half his sanity, I suspect.'
Avun did not care to think about it. 'This has become intolerable,' he muttered.
'Indeed.'
There was a silence between them. Each was waiting for the other to say what they both thought. In the end, it was Fahrekh.
'Something must be done.'
'And what do you have in mind?' Avun said carefully, though he knew full well what it was. They had fenced around this before. Avun had no idea about Fahrekh's feelings, but he was gods-damned if he was going to incriminate himself by being the first to speak it out aloud.
'We will kill him, of course,' Fahrekh said.
Avun regarded the Weaver with hooded eyes. Could he trust this one? He still had a suspicion that Fahrekh was only faking complicity, that this was some test of loyalty by the Weavers. If he went along with it, would they treat him as a betrayer?
'You would kill one of your own?' he asked.
'It is necessary. We must cut off the spoiled right hand to save the arm.' Fahrekh's voice was an even and measured monotone. 'Kakre is a liability. For the good of the Weavers, he must be removed.'
'Will he stand down?'
Fahrekh chuckled. 'No Weave-lord has ever stood down before. Besides, he is too irrational now. He will not see things as we do. The Weavers need a new and clear-sighted leader, or our ambitions will go unfulfilled.'
Avun thought about this. He had learned a lot about the Weavers in his time as Lord Protector, through observation and conversation and by listening to Kakre's periodic fugues. Discovering the power structure of his allies was an important goal for him: their strength lay in secrecy, and Avun was determined to uncover them.
How was it that the Weavers were so united in purpose? And how could that be squared with the way they would kill each other in times past at the behest of their masters? At first he had believed that there was a coterie of Weavers in Adderach dispensing orders, but that was not good enough. In two hundred and fifty years he would have expected at least a few coups, power struggles, something like that. Yet there was no evidence of such. There were certainly disagreements about the way things should be done from time to time, but never about the ends, only the means.
Avun had not been able to understand it to his satisfaction, but he had established some things. The Weavers did not appear to know themselves where their direction came from: it was simply an instinctive drive towards the same goal. Whatever provided this goal was vague and indistinct, not an absolute dictator or an entity that was in complete control of the Weavers; it was simply a knowledge that all of them accepted and did not question.