'Not yet.'
The downs were ripped with a terrible shriek, making Mishani shudder, and a jagged fork of purple lightning split the night. The sky exploded in a thunderous roar. Wind howled, jostling them, and the rain drove down hard enough to hurt. Lucia lifted her face up, tilting it to receive the full force of the downpour. Above them, the moons formed an uneven triangle, scratched with churning clouds.
Her eyes flickered open.
'Now.'
TWENTY-EIGHT
The men surrounding Lucia fell back from her with oaths of terror as she called, at last, the full force of the spirits to their aid. Even Mishani stumbled away, shocked at the thing she saw in Lucia's place. Nothing physical had changed, but her aspect had warped. No longer were her features pretty and naive in appearance, but sly and evil and chilling. The air became flat, difficult to breathe, tasting of iron. Mishani looked around her and saw that it was not only Lucia who had changed: the soldiers' faces were narrow and hateful, the Sister's painted countenance was shrewish and full of spite. Subtle whispers, promising half-imagined horrors, hissed in Mishani's ears. Flitting figures massed thickly in the moon-shadows. The presence of the spirits twisted perception, and never had it been so strong as now.
Lucia was standing still, her arms loose, her face upturned to the barrage of the rain as if it were a balm, blinking rapidly against its fury. She was soaked to the skin. Mishani, small and light as she was, had to fight to keep steady in the wind. She shielded her eyes with her hand and looked on fearfully. Steam was wisping from Lucia's clothes now, thin trails of vapour that congealed and thickened until Mishani realised what she was seeing.
Something was rising out of her.
The Xhiang Xhi unfolded from Lucia's body like the wings of some mythical demon, spreading and looming, its impossibly long fingers giving it the appearance of some vaporous and skeletal bat. A thin chalk figure, a shadow cast in mist, it was attached to her lower back like a ghostly incubus, covering her with the parasol of its hands. Its face was a blur, its size defying the eye as it seemed to change with every new angle. The soldiers cringed, and some of them ran, unable to take the overbearing weight of its presence.
Mishani would have run, too, if not for Lucia. But she had sworn to herself that she would not desert the child she had once thought of as a sister, and so she stayed, caught between honour and dread.
The feya-kori unleashed a long, discordant drone across the downs, loud enough to rattle swords in their scabbards. They had sensed their adversary and were issuing a challenge.
The Xhiang Xhi raised its hands, splaying its spindly fingers wide; Lucia opened her mouth, and the answering screech that came from her blasted outward like the concussion of a bomb, making Mishani clamp her hands to her ears, staggering back under the force of it.
The armies stilled. The artillery fell silent. The night was darkening as a blanket of cloud boiled out from the triad of moons, its underside flashing with lightning. There was a rumbling in the earth, at first so low that it could not be heard, but growing ominously louder. The wind had roused to a gale strong enough to push men over, and the armies of the Empire and Aberrants alike were thrown into disorder. Mishani fell to her knees in the mud, bracing herself as best she could on the hilltop. Lucia's bodyguards slipped and slid and held onto each other for support. Only the Sister stood firm against it, the pressure of the wind diverting around her and leaving her untouched.
The Aberrants went scrambling aside as the feya-kori walked through them on all fours. Some of them, blown by the wind or trapped by the press, were crushed like beetles, or burned by the noisome filth that dripped from the demons. The feya-kori drove on through the tempest, not slowed by it in the least.
The rumbling had become huge now, and the earth trembled in small judders. The soldiers cried prayers to the gods and almost broke ranks to run, but their generals barked at them and their legendary discipline held them in place.
The sky shrieked and boomed. A crooked tine of lightning struck the flank of one of the feya-kori, blowing a hole there, spraying acidic muck in great gobbets over the Aberrants below. The demon groaned and crabstepped sideways; then it continued onward, toward the river. The ooze from its body was seeping inward to close the wound in its side.
Mishani looked on, huddled low against the storm and slimed in mud, as more lightning came flashing from the clouds in strikes as fast as the flicker of a snake's tongue. Each one was accompanied by a resonant explosion that battered the ears and made her cringe. The world was turning to madness: everywhere was noise, the crashing and keening of the sky, the ceaseless bellow of the earth, the shaking of the ground, the shoving of the wind and relentless lash of the rain. And all this made worse by the disorientating influence of the spirits and the moonstorm combined, leaving her scared and paranoid. If she had had anywhere to run to then, even her honour would not have kept her by Lucia's side; but there was nowhere to go.
The feya-kori were being hit again and again, rocked by the lightning. And now their advance faltered, for the blows hurt them, and though they forged on towards the river they stumbled and flinched under the barrage. Mishani, staring through the sodden mesh of her hair, could see faces of spirits in the lightning, leering sketches in jagged light burned onto the darkness, slow to fade. And not only that: the wind's howls had changed tone now, becoming more and more like voices, distorted mutters, cooing and shrieks of nonsense, barely definable but intimating some kind of language.
Gods, let it stop, let it stop!
But though the lightning could slow the feya-kori, their wounds closed again. And though the wind could batter and shove them, they were too massive and too solid to be toppled. They came onward, towards the river. Far back in the ranks of the Aberrant army, hidden from sight, the Weave-lord Kakre worked, surrounded by his retinue of ghauregs. His mind was largely gone, the connections in his brain fused and muddled by the impossible task of overseeing six feya-kori. Yet while he was with the demons, as part of this gestalt of Weavers, his faculties still held together. He had been subsumed into the whole, borrowing from it heavily. When this all was over and he was released from the net they had woven, he would be left a gibbering lunatic.
His judgement had gone awry long ago. Reluctant to relinquish power, he had given himself the most important position among those Weavers that pooled their abilities to call and guide the initial pair of blight demons. He had done so again with this larger gestalt, and it had been far beyond him, far beyond the powers of any one Weaver; but they would not know that until afterward, when they disentangled themselves. For now, he was entirely occupied with the feya-kori, attempting to steer them to his will.
The strikes that hurt the demons hurt Kakre also, as they did the other Weavers of the gestalt, who were hidden around the battlefield. Kakre cared nothing for the pain, however, nor for the Aberrants his demons were trampling. Without Avun, the Weavers did not see the need to preserve their troops so carefully; after all, their numbers were overwhelming, and even the great army ranged against them could not have held them off if it were not for the spirits brought into play.
But the feya-kori knew what to do about that. Though Lucia could not be touched by the Weavers, the demons could sense the Xhiang Xhi like a beacon.
Yes, Kakre saw the girl's plan, oh indeed. The Xhiang Xhi was the Forest of Xu: it had become so much a part of that place that it could not possibly leave its home without a host to carry it. And as it was a beacon to the demons, it was also a beacon to the spirits; Lucia had had to bring it here so that the spirits would flock to it.