Kaiku's gaze roamed across the town, across the broken shrines and sundered houses, the streets where men and women fought running skirmishes with shrillings and furies and worse. Gristle-crows soared high on the thermals overhead, providing a literal birds-eye view for their Nexus masters. But these were enemies she knew, creatures she had dealt with many times in the four years since this war had begun. She turned her attention to the authors of the town's downfall.
There were two of them, one down by the shore and another rearing over the treeline on the hilltop. Feya-kori: 'blight demons' in the Saramyrrhic mode used for speaking of supernatural beings. They were forty feet high: drooling, lumbering, foetid things in a mocking approximation of human shape, distorted figures with long, thick arms and legs, that walked on all fours and seethed a dire miasma as they moved. They were formed of some kind of noisome, roiling sludge that dripped and spattered, and where it touched it spread fire and rot, causing leaves to crinkle and wood to decay. They had no faces, merely a bulge between their shoulders, in which burned incandescent orbs that trailed luminous gobbets. They moaned plaintively to each other as they went about their destruction, their mournful cries accompanying the slow, idiot savagery of their actions.
As Kaiku watched, one of them waded out into the lake. The waters hissed and boiled, and a black patina began to spread from where its limbs plunged. She felt her stomach sink as she saw its intention. It forged its way towards one of the Empire's junks, and with a doleful groan it raised one stump of a hand and brought it crashing down onto the vessel, breaking it in half and setting men and sails aflame. Kaiku closed her eyes reflexively and turned away, but even then she could feel the force of the demons' presence through the Weave, a blasphemous dark pummelling at her consciousness.
The other feya-kori was surging out of the forest, leaving a vile scar of browning foliage and collapsing trees in its wake. It smashed an arm into the nearest rooftops, wanton in its malice. Five of Kaiku's Sisters had already died attempting to tackle the feya-kori. All over Juraka the order to retreat was spreading, and the forces of the Empire were pulling back to the south-west.
Then she sensed the spidery movement of a Weaver down in the streets below, heard the distant screams of soldiers, and the rage and sorrow in her heart found a target.
If I cannot stop this, she promised herself, I will at least take one of them in payment.
She stalked away from the administrative complex, out through the prayer gate with its eloquent paean to Naris, god of scholars, and into the narrow, sloping streets beyond.
Blood ran in chain-link trickles between the cobbles, inching slowly downhill from the bodies of men and women and the foetally curled corpses of Aberrant predators. Kaiku experienced a moment of bitter humour at how Aberrants, which were created by the Weavers in the first place, were simultaneously their greatest resource and their greatest opponents. She and all the other Sisters were a product of the same process that had spawned monstrosities like the ghauregs. She was certain that the gods, watching from the Golden Realm, never tired of laughing at the way events had turned out.
She passed swiftly between the newly scarred buildings, little fearing the creatures that ran amok in the alleys. Wooden balconies and shop-fronts gaped emptily as if in shock at how they had been deserted. Carts and rickshaws were left where they had been abandoned in the rush to evacuate the townsfolk. A crackle of rifle fire sounded up the hill as dozens of soldiers wasted their ammunition in a futile attempt to hurt the demon that was battering its way towards the lake from the treeline.
The screams she had heard were louder now. She sensed the stirring of the Weave like coiling tentacles, the Weaver's ugly manipulation of the invisible fabric beneath the skin of the waking world. She hated them, hated their clumsiness in comparison to the Sisters' elegant sewing, hated their brutal way of forcing nature to their will. She fed her rage as she approached, concealing her presence from the Weaver with a few deft evasions.
The street opened out into a junction of three major thoroughfares. The heart of the junction was a cobbled area in which stood a bronze statue of a catfish, depicted as if swimming upward towards the sky, its torso curved and fins and whiskers trailing. It was the animal aspect of Panazu, god of rivers, storms and rain and – by extension – lakes. An appropriate choice for a town on the shore of the greatest lake on the continent. Two-storied buildings leaned in close, their shutters hanging open, cracked plant pots outside and wooden walls riven by holes from rifle balls.
This had been one of the critical defensive points of Juraka, and had been fortified accordingly with barricades and a pair of fire-cannon. But such measures were useless against Weavers. Without a Sister of the Red Order to counter him, the Weaver had muddled the soldiers' minds and thrown them into rout. Aberrants had overrun the unmanned positions and were tearing into their panicking prey. The Weaver was nowhere to be seen.
Kaiku did not waste time considering how this predicament had come about. There should have been a Sister here to protect the soldiers, but the Red Order was in dis-array across the town. Instead she stood brazenly at one end of the junction and opened up the Weave. The air stirred around her, rippling her dress and ruffling her tawny hair where it lay across one side of her face. She surrendered herself to the ecstasy of Weaving.
The pure joy of disembodiment, of witnessing the raw stuff of creation in an endless profusion of glittering threads, was enough to drive the untrained to madness. But Kaiku had been there many times, and she had mantras and methods of self-control that anchored her against that first tidal wash of narcotic harmony. She saw the tears and rents left by the Weaver's passing, felt his influence extending into the golden stitchwork dolls that were the soldiers, twisting their perceptions, making them confused and helpless.
He was unaware of her yet, and she used that. She slipped closer, winding along fibres, darting from strand to strand so that the emanations of her approach would be subtle and widely spread, faint enough to be missed in amongst the throb of the demons' presence. She could locate him with ease: he was in the upper storey of an old cathouse overlooking the junction. This Weaver was young and careless, for despite his power he did not notice her until she was close enough to strike him.
She did not strike him, however. Even angry as she was, she knew the risks that facing a Weaver entailed. Instead, she slid into the fibres of the beams that held up the roof of the cathouse, securing herself along their length to obtain the necessary mental leverage. The best way to kill a Weaver, she had found, was to do it indirectly.
In one violent twist, she ripped the beams apart.
The explosive detonation caused by shredding the fibres of the Weave created enough concussion to blow the shutters of the cathouse off their hinges. Flame billowed from the topmost windows; boards splintered and went spinning end over end through the air. The roof caved in, crushing the Weaver beneath it. The reverberations of the death flashed out across the Weave in a frantic pulse and slowly faded away.
One less of you, then, Kaiku thought, as the Weave faded from her vision.
The soldiers were coming to their senses, disorientated at finding themselves in the midst of an attack. Some were too slow to react, and were cut to pieces by the Aberrants that swarmed among them; but others were faster, and they brought their swords to bear. There were enough remaining to put up a resistance yet, and they did so with sudden and fierce anger.
Kaiku walked among them, slaying Aberrants as she went. With a wave of her hand she burst organs and shattered bone, tossed the creatures away or burned them to tallow and char. The soldiers, shouting hoarse rallying cries to one another, fought with renewed heart. Kaiku joined the cry, venting a deep and nameless hatred for what had been done to her, to her land, to these people; and for a time she steeped herself in blood.