'But if another of my men goes missing, we're leaving,' he warned.
'You must do what you will,' she said. 'But I am staying. And in the end, it is Lucia's decision whether you will leave or not: you would not last an hour in this place without her.'
Doja was angry, she could sense that, though he suppressed it well. He was a square-jawed man with a cleft chin covered in wiry black stubble, a sharp nose and small eyes. Kaiku respected him immensely as a leader, but she had undermined him and he resented that. Threatening one of his soldiers had not done her any favours in his estimation, and now her intransigence was a direct challenge to his authority. The relationship between the Libera Dramach and the Red Order had become more and more strained of late. Whereas before the Red Order had been an extremely useful secret weapon for their cause, now that they were out in the open they were too powerful to be trusted, and there was a general suspicion that they only fought on the side of the Empire because it coincided with their own agenda.
'I give you one night,' he said. 'After that, we will ask Lucia.'
A clamour arose before Kaiku could reply, coming from the direction where she had left Peithre. She broke off their conversation without another word and hurried back to that spot, and there she found the soldiers with their rifles ready, spread in a loose circle, aiming outward between the trees. Someone, made jumpy by his surroundings, sighted on her as she approached; she ducked instinctively, but thankfully he did not fire. She swept past him with a corrosive glare and he cringed away from her.
'What is it?' she asked Tsata. He and Heth knelt by Peithre, their own guns ready.
'Out in the trees,' he said, motioning with his head.
She looked, and as she did so, she glimpsed something. It was a flash of white, darting between the vine-strewn maze of trunks.
'Do not fire on them!' she said, raising her voice to include the whole group. 'Remember where we are! Shoot only if they attack.'
The soldiers muttered sarcastically between themselves. She glanced down at Peithre, still asleep on the forest floor with a blanket as a pillow, and then out into the trees again. Another movement caught her eye, but it was too quick, gone before she could find it.
((Are you with Lucia?)) she asked Phaeca, and received an immediate affirmative. ((Bring her here))
'There's one!' someone cried.
'Do not fire!' Kaiku shouted again, fearful of the excitement in the man's tone, as if he had just spotted game and was about to take it down. Kaiku saw where everyone else was looking, down a corridor of boles and bushes to where one of the things had frozen, caught in their eyes, watching them watching it.
It was beautiful and terrifying all at once. Its short fur was perfectly white, but for where shadows delineated the hollows of its ribs. It had elements in it of deer and fox – a brush for a tail; stubby, sharp antlers; a certain furtiveness of movement – and yet its musculature and bone structure were disturbingly human, as though it were a lithe and elongated man standing on all fours. Its face had something of the fox's narrow cunning, and something of the deer's alarmed docility, but its features were more mobile than either, and when it skinned back its lips it showed an array of close-fitting, daggerlike teeth that betrayed a carnivorous diet.
'Aberrant,' someone hissed.
'It is no Aberrant,' Kaiku murmured in reply. Even if she could not sense it by their Weave-signature, she would have known anyway. There was something about these creatures, some linearity of structure that bespoke an entirely natural evolution. They were somewhere between spirit and animal, a hybrid of the two.
Then it was gone, launching itself back into the trees. Phaeca appeared a few moments later, leading Lucia and a group of soldiers who acted as her bodyguards. Asara arrived, her own rifle ready.
'Lucia,' Kaiku said. She did not respond: her eyes were far away. 'Lucia!'
She focused suddenly, but almost immediately began to drift again. 'What are these things?' Kaiku demanded. 'Can you talk to them? Do they mean to harm us?' She shook Lucia's shoulder and said her name again. 'Listen to me!'
'Emyrynn,' Lucia murmured, staring over Kaiku's shoulder into the trees. 'They're called emyrynn in our tongue. They want us to follow them.'
'Follow them? Is this some kind of trap?'
Lucia made a vague negative noise in her throat. 'We have to follow them…' she said, and then she had slipped beyond rousing again, lost in some dreamwalk where Kaiku could not reach her. Kaiku bit her lip to kill the frustration at seeing her this way. This forest was too much for Lucia, overwhelming her, making her more distant than ever before. It was agony to watch, for Kaiku had no way of knowing if she could ever come back from this, or whether every moment within the borders of the forest was making her worse.
Doja was quicker to decide than she was, and his faith in Lucia was evidently greater. 'We can't move this woman yet. Three men, go with them. Come back and fetch us when you find whatever it is they want us to see. And heart's blood, be careful.'
'I will go,' Kaiku said, because she would do anything not to be around Lucia a moment longer.
'And I,' said Tsata.
Asara volunteered also. Doja was happy to accept: it meant he did not to have to risk any of his soldiers. Kaiku felt a flicker of uncertainty at the thought of having Asara along, but she had Tsata at least, and in him her trust was total.
'Where are they? Where are you seeing them?' she asked the group in general, and several men pointed, all in roughly the same direction. They set off into the trees; Tsata warned Asara about the reed that had poisoned Peithre, and she nodded in acknowledgement, not taking her eyes off Kaiku.
Rifles held close, they forged through the undergrowth, while ahead of them the emyrynn led onward, annoyingly elusive and yet never quite out of sight. None of them spoke; their concentration was bent on seeking out danger, waiting for the jaws of a trap to spring shut, hoping to predict it in time to evade.
But their journey was not a long one. They had not been travelling for more than ten minutes before they found what it was the emyrynn wanted to show them, and there they stood dumbfounded, and wondered what kind of beings they had stumbled upon in the depths of the Forest of Xu. In the upper levels of the Imperial Keep, where the Weavers' lunacy had made it dangerous to tread, the dust lay thick and spiders webbed the windows.
Kakre's preferred room for Weaving was not the Sun Chamber that he had populated with his kites and mannequins of skin. He found the noise of the other Weavers distracting. Instead, he took himself to a section where he could be alone, a morose and silent place too out of the way for the Weavers or the frightened servants to trouble themselves with. The floor was rucked with wide, overlapping trails, paths carved in the powdery dust by the threadbare hem of his robe as he wandered. Weak daylight filtered through the miasma that cloaked the city, and the air was heavy and oily.
Avun had been here for three hours now, talking with spectres. Seven Governors of the major towns and cities within the Weavers' territory hung in a circle around the centre of the empty room, blurred apparitions, with Avun the only solid one among them. They were discussing the interminable minutiae of their respective situations, the state of the land, the course of the famine. Kakre was the link that held them all together, a junction through which all eight participants could see each other as murky avatars. Avun had insisted that it be so, for drawing eight people together in a country the size of Saramyr was impractical at best, especially as some lived in the distant Newlands to the east.