'I did not know you were going,' Lucia replied. 'Were you intending to leave without telling me?'
Kaiku studied her. Lucia's light blonde hair was growing out a little, after years of her keeping it boyishly short. Kaiku wondered what this meant, or if it meant anything at all, or if anything meant anything any more.
'I did not think you would be interested,' Kaiku said truthfully, and was surprised at how cruel it sounded.
The look on Lucia's face showed plainly how deep she felt the barb. 'That is unfair, Kaiku.'
'Is it? You have not seemed to want to know me since your visit to the Xhiang Xhi. What had I done to deserve such treatment?'
'You should know more than anyone that I have… matters to deal with,' Lucia replied. 'I would expect a little more latitude.'
Kaiku was bewildered by her tone: she sounded nothing like the Lucia she knew. She was much more strident.
'Forgive me, then,' said Kaiku, tossing her a casual apology that had no weight to it. 'But how am I meant to know when you will not talk to me? Before we entered the forest, you were at least you, even when you were not lucid. But since then you have changed. I am not sure who you are or what you want now.' Her voice softened as she realised she was being harsh; the emotional rigors of these last days and her nervousness at the prospect of leaving had made her callous. 'What happened to you in there?'
It was the concern in the question that caused Lucia to crumble. Abruptly she seemed to shed her thorny exterior and become once again the Lucia of old. She told Kaiku of what the spirit had said to her, of the true purpose of the Weavers and the veil of ascendancy. But she made no mention of the price that the spirits' aid would entail.
Kaiku listened. It all seemed curiously unimportant to her, and revelations that should have shocked her barely penetrated. The scale was too large: it did not interfere or impact upon her sworn purpose. But Lucia's evasions were obvious, and when she was done, Kaiku said: 'There is something else you are not telling me.'
'That is between myself and the Xhiang Xhi,' Lucia replied.
That brought them to an impasse for a time.
'I am sorry for being rude,' Kaiku said eventually, with sincerity this time. 'You are under a great deal of strain, and you cannot or will not share the burden. It was ungracious of me to leave without saying farewell.'
'Let us forget all this,' said Lucia. 'I want you to know that I did not mean to treat you badly these last few days, and that all I said to you in the emyrynn village still holds true. You have always cared for me, and I for you. I do not wish our last goodbye to be tainted with rancour.'
'What makes you think it is our last?' Kaiku asked. The question was phrased with enforced lightness, to counter the thrill of dread at Lucia's words.
Lucia did not answer: instead she approached Kaiku and embraced her gently. It was worse than any reply she could have given.
'Lucia, what is it?' Kaiku whispered, suddenly terrified. 'What do you know that you are not telling me?'
Lucia released her, and her pale blue eyes were full of sorrow and pity.
'Goodbye,' she whispered, and then she walked away.
Kaiku wanted to call after her, to demand an answer to her question, but she could not think of a single thing to say that might change Lucia's mind. Some part of her did not want to rupture the purity of the moment with anger and shrill entreatments. She felt crushed by the pressure of something invisible and inevitable that she did not understand, and by the time she had recovered herself the door had slid shut and Lucia was gone.
Kaiku stood in the emptiness of the house for a time. It felt like a tomb now, and she could not bear to be here. She snatched up her pack and shouldered it, and she left her house to head to the valley where the Tkiurathi were meeting.
As she walked away up the dirt street, she was suddenly conscious that it might be the final time she ever saw the place. She did not look back.
TWENTY-FOUR
The journey from Araka Jo – around the north edge of Lake Xemit and west, skirting the south of the Forest of Xu – was made with all haste, but even with Mishani's information they had no certain date when Lalyara would be attacked. It was clear by their actions that the Weavers intended to destroy the fleet trapped in the harbour. The Tkiurathi hoped to get there in time to fight their way through the barricade of Weaver ships and away. Then warning reached them several days from their destination that the Weaver force had been sighted, and was moving quickly towards Lalyara. The rest of the journey was taken at a punishing pace; but the Tkiurathi were extraordinarily fit, hardened by the dangers of their homeland, and they covered ground fast when they needed to. They reached Lalyara a mere hour before the fog began to descend, and preparations commenced immediately to launch the vessels waiting in dock.
But quick as they were, they were not quick enough. Explosions. The creak of timber and the turbulent slap of water against the stone of the dock. Men and women calling to each other, hurrying past Kaiku; the sense of huge movement as one of the enormous ships pulled away from its pier to her right, the deep splash as the discarded gangplank plunged into the sea. An uneven pattern of gunfire speckling the distance. Salt in the air, cold spray on her face, the scent of burning and blood and everywhere the terrible, choking fog.
The feya-kori had arrived.
The docks were in chaos. Sailors clambered along the shadowy rigging of their vessels, obeying hollered instructions. The junks were looming silhouettes in the haze. Tkiurathi clattered up gangplanks, cramming onto the decks of the ships while dockhands hacked hawsers free and the coastal wind caught rising sails to belly them outwards. Kaiku steadied herself against the buffeting flow of men and women and looked to the north with red eyes, penetrating the murk.
There they were, on the crest of a distant slope, rising over the northern wall of the city with all the inexorability of a tidal wave. Two of them, the same two that had demolished Juraka and Zila, their forms black, seething tangles of Weave-threads. Their drear moans drifted across the rooftops as they pounded the wall to rubble. And though she could not see, she knew that the Aberrants were swarming in.
Something rushed overhead and she flinched; it hit a warehouse a few streets away and obliterated one of its walls. Out to sea she could hear the sounds of fire-cannon. The coastal batteries were shelling blind, foiled by the feya-kori's miasma. Weaver ships had drawn in closer now, no longer content to be a blockade and with little fear of the guns; their Weavers were their eyes, and they rained destruction on the city, using a new kind of artillery that was heavier and more explosive than the kind the Empire had used in years past.
But less than half the junks had set out yet, and there were still many to go.
Kaiku sensed the incoming shellshot from a fire-cannon, instinctively calculated its trajectory and realised that it would hit square on the docks. She was about to deal with it when one of the other Sisters got there first: its momentum dissipated in mid-air and it dropped into the waves.
Another one, and another: two of them coming in at once. She took one out in the same way as her companion had, careful not to break the shell and scatter the jelly within, which would ignite on contact with air. The second one was similarly repulsed.
Two more; and two more on top of that. The Weaver ships had got their range now.
Three of the missiles dropped harmlessly; the fourth did not. In haste, one of the Sisters braked it as it looped over a ship that was almost ready to set sail. It dipped and smashed into the mast, blowing it to splinters. Sailors and Tkiurathi on the deck fell clutching their faces and bodies as they were pierced by shards of burning hardwood; the mast collapsed in a slow topple, trailing smoke from its blazing sails. The men beneath did not have space or time to get out of its way. The ship descended into confusion: some evacuated, some fought to help the wounded, and meanwhile more artillery was coming in, whispering through the fog with deadly speed.