The moonstorm was over. A shimmer passed across the Children and they disappeared. The three moons drifted their steady way apart in a gradually clearing sky.
Mishani was curled up, trembling, still in shock. The sense that the danger had passed was a relief too precious to believe. She was alive, she was alive, beyond all hope it had seemed. She would have lay there for much longer, if not for one thing: the reason she was even here in the first place.
Lucia.
She crawled on her hands and knees to where Lucia lay. A frail thing, eighteen harvests, her clothing plastered to her body. And red, red blood, soaking her stomach, where she had been shot.
Mishani sobbed her name, gathering her up so that Lucia's head lay in her lap, and shook her. Lucia's eyes flickered open, and they were blue and distant. She tried to smile, and coughed instead. Blood ran over her lips and down her chin.
'I'm sorry, Mother,' she whispered. Mishani knew then that it was not her face Lucia was seeing, but Anais'. Already her gaze was becoming dim.
'Ssh,' she said. 'Ssh, do not speak.' She looked up at the Sister, who was standing over them and looking down. Her make-up had not even been smudged by the rain. 'Can you not help her?' she demanded, her voice shrill.
The Sister shook her head sadly. 'The power that kept her from the Weavers' attentions keeps her from ours as well. We cannot touch her. I cannot heal her.'
'Then what good are you?' Mishani shrieked. The Sister did not answer, and Mishani turned back to Lucia. 'What good are you?' she murmured again, helplessly.
'I didn't know,' Lucia was saying, her eyes roving. 'I didn't know they'd take so many. They took so many, Mother. They said they'd only take a few. A few lives to satisfy them. Because they hate us. Because that was their price.'
'Oh, child,' Mishani wept. 'Why? Why did you do it? Why did you agree?'
Lucia coughed again. Her chin and breast were soaked in crimson now. The night had gone still. There seemed nothing in the world but the three of them on the hilltop.
'I couldn't let them down…' she whispered.
Mishani began to weep anew at that. Gods, this poor girl, this appointed saviour who had spent every moment of ten years under the crushing expectation of the world. Could she have walked out of that forest a failure, after all the lives already given in her name? No. She had taken the Xhiang Xhi's bargain: a sacrifice in return for the spirits' help. Mishani could only imagine how that had torn her apart.
And now she was here in Mishani's arms, a rifle ball in her. Her skin was grey, her hair in wet draggles. Her slowing heartbeat pulsed in the crook of her collarbone. She was seeing beyond, into somewhere Mishani could not follow.
'Help me, Mother,' she said, her voice trembling. 'I don't want to die. I don't want to die.'
But Mishani could not form a reply. Her throat was locked with grief, her body racked by it, and all she could do was cry as Lucia gave a long sigh, and her last breath was driven from her lungs. It was some time before Mishani heard the footsteps of Barak Zahn, and she looked up. He slumped to his knees, his face a mask of disbelief. He did not try to take Lucia from her. To do so would be to admit that it was real, that this had really happened, that he had lost his child for the second and final time.
She wondered how historians might one day justify this loss. Would they count it worthy that the Weavers' army had been stopped, even at such a terrible cost? No, there was not even that to offer succour. To destroy the enemy was one thing, but the armies of the Empire were destroyed too. There was barely enough in reserve to defend their lands now. The same could be said of the Weavers, but the Weavers bred armies faster and stronger than humans did. The two forces had wiped each other out, levelled the score temporarily, but the reality was that the Weavers had won in the long term. Without this army, they needed less food. They could survive another two years, perhaps three, on what they had. And in that time they could launch a new offensive, one that nobody could stand up to. The Empire had bought itself a stay of execution, no more.
Everything now relied on one thing. Cailin's plan had to work. They had to destroy the witchstones. It was their last and only hope.
Those soldiers that had survived stood around the tableau on the hilltop: their fallen saviour, her head in Mishani's lap; the broken Barak on his knees; the impassive Sister. They felt the uncertainty that Mishani felt, and they dared not think of the future now.
Among them stood a thin woman with tangled hair and a sullen cast to her face. She watched the scene for a time, then turned away. Grief and death were not new to Nomoru: she had seen enough as a child to last her a lifetime. Her only concern was that nobody knew who it was that fired the shot which killed their beloved Lucia. And beneath that, there was the slightest twinge of embarrassment at her shoddy marksmanship. After all, she had been aiming for Lucia's head. When dawn came, the battlefield was empty. Starfall drifted down in the aftermath of the moonstorm like tiny flakes of glass, glinting as it caught the sun. The armies of the Empire would search for their comrades and loved ones when Nuki's eye had risen high, but until then they had retreated, unable to bear staying in the abattoir that the banks of the River Ko had become. No carrion birds or flies troubled the corpses: the residue of the spirits was too strong here.
On the north side of the river, amid the uncountable thousands of those that had died, there stood a mound of earth the size and shape of a small, hunched man. Its visage, what there could be seen of it, was a gaping face, emaciated like that of a corpse.
The effigy lasted until mid-morning, when the sun warmed and dried it. It began to crack slowly; and then the Weave-lord Kakre crumbled, bit by bit, until he was nothing more than powdery dirt on the wind.
TWENTY-NINE
Kaiku stood on the foredeck of the junk and looked bleakly towards the grey peaks. She clutched her robe to her chest with one hand, cinching it tight against the chill sea breeze. She could have warmed herself up with a thought, but she wanted to suffer. It suited her mood.
The sky was overcast, and though it was spring there was no hint of it today. A dozen ships swayed at anchor before and behind her. They shed small rowing-boats periodically that ferried back and forth from the drab shingle beach to the south, a slender finger of the Newlands that extended along the line of the coast and stopped just east of the looming, slanted bulk of Mount Aon.
For days they had been skirting the northern edge of Saramyr and there had been nothing but sheer black rock, great mountain walls that plunged vertically into the sea and offered no purchase for a landing. Kaiku had gone to starboard every morning and watched the thin plume of dark smoke from the volcanic Mount Makara drift steadily away to her right. And now here they were at their destination, a bay of stony beaches and hard planes of slate which ran inland for a few short miles before the mountains rose up again. This was where they were to make landfall, where the seven hundred Tkiurathi would disembark and make their way southwest to Adderach.
Their voyage had been favoured by Assantua, it seemed. The moon-tides had gone their way and the winds had been good. And though they had been forced to take a somewhat indirect route – passing Fo on its western side to avoid the heavily trafficked Camaran Channel – and more than once they had been forced to detour while the Sisters cloaked them from the attention of distant ships, still they had arrived on the exact day they had intended to. Or so Cailin assured them, anyway. Kaiku had stopped counting long ago.
The journey had been a miserable affair even before Kaiku had learned of the Empire's pyrrhic victory and Lucia's death. After that, she remembered little, and the discomfort and boredom of their confinement seemed insignificant in comparison to her grief.