'Kaiku!'
It was Phaeca's cry that brought her back from the brink. She staggered, and the blades cut through the sole of her boot and pricked into her heel. With a moan, she bent down, holding her arm out, and only then did she catch sight of the thing thumping towards Phaeca from the right. It was a feyn, an awful collision between a bear and a lizard, with the worst features of each. Phaeca's expression was desperate, frantic: she saw Kaiku leaning down and she jumped. Kaiku braced just in time, her adrenaline pumping, and she caught Phaeca and hauled her up and over the wall. Phaeca's legs dragged across the blades as she went, carving through her trousers and darkening them in red, but she somehow got them under her again in time for Kaiku to drop her over the other side of the wall.
Kaiku had one last glimpse of the enraged monstrosity before she pulled her foot free and jumped down next to Phaeca, who was picking herself up, tears blurring her eyes. She was whimpering; Kaiku, whose wounds were much worse, was silent. They staggered across the waste ground towards the city, and the fog swallowed them, leaving the fruitless questing of the Weavers behind them like the buzzing of angry wasps. Kaiku did not remember the journey back to the Poor Quarter, and the sanctuary of the rooftops. She did not know what Phaeca said to the men that they found there. She remembered rough faces and an ugly dialect, questions which frightened her; and then dirty bandages, mummifying her arms and enwrapping her feet. They were little more than strips of cloth. At some point her ability to suppress her kana had slipped: she could feel her body healing itself restlessly.
She never exactly lost consciousness, but she slipped out of the world for a time, and when she came back to it she was in a bare room, and a grey dawn was brightening outside. Her head was on Phaeca's breast, and she was being held like a baby. Her arms burned. She became aware that Phaeca was Weaving, concealing the activity within Kaiku's body as the power inside her repaired the damage done to its host. She felt hollow, as if there was a vacuum in her veins where the lost blood should be. But she was alive.
'Kaiku?' Phaeca's voice came simultaneously from her mouth and reverberantly though her breastbone.
'I am here,' she said.
There was a silence for a time. 'You faded away for a while.'
'It takes more than that to kill a Sister,' she replied, with a faint chuckle that hurt too much to continue. Then, because the bravado felt good, she added: 'I told you to trust me.'
'You did,' Phaeca agreed.
Kaiku swallowed against a dry throat. 'Where are we?'
'The building belongs to a gang. I don't know their name.'
'Are we prisoners?'
'No.'
'Not even… did they see our eyes?'
'Of course,' Phaeca said. 'They know we're Aberrants. I could scarcely conceal it from them.'
Kaiku sat up slowly and felt lightheaded. Phaeca put out a hand to help her, but Kaiku waved her off. She steadied herself, took a few breaths, and raked her tawny hair back.
'What will they do? What did you tell them?'
'I told them the truth,' said Phaeca simply. 'What they will do is up to them. We're in no state to do anything about it.'
Kaiku frowned. 'You are very calm.'
'Should I be scared of men? After what we saw in the pallpits?' Phaeca's face was wry. 'I think they already knew of us. I believe they believed me. Aberrants are the least of their worries here in the Poor Quarter. And now we are not the scapegoat for all the world's ills, people like these have found somewhere new to put their hate.'
Kaiku looked around the room. It smelt of mildew. The wooden walls were greened with mould, and the beams were dank. A few dirty pillows were thrown in one corner, and a heavy drape hung across the doorway. No lantern burned here; they must have been sitting in the dark.
Kaiku noticed then the bandages around her friend's legs, beneath the bloodied tatters of her trousers. 'Spirits, Phaeca, you're hurt too.' She remembered what had happened as she said it.
'Not as badly as you were,' she replied, and there was something in her eyes, some depth of gratitude that words were inadequate to express. She looked away. 'I'll deal with it later. Until then, you rest.'
Kaiku sagged, and Phaeca put her arm round her friend again, letting her rest her head. 'I am tired,' Kaiku murmured.
They heard footsteps, and the drape was pulled back. Kaiku did not even rouse herself from Phaeca; her muscles were too heavy. Two men came in: one was very tall and thickly bearded; the other had shaggy brown hair and a rugged, pitted face, and when he spoke Kaiku saw that his teeth were made of brass.
'We've been talking,' he said, without introduction or preamble.
Phaeca looked at him squarely. 'And what have you decided?'
The brass-toothed man squatted down in front of them. 'We've decided that you look like you need a hand.'
NINE
Yugi tu Xamata, leader of the Libera Dramach, awoke in his cell at Araka Jo to find Lucia standing at the window, looking out onto the lake. His head was thick with amaxa root. His hookah stood cold in the corner, but the sharp scent remained in the air, evidence of another night of over-indulgence. He sat up on his sleeping-mat, the blanket falling away from his bare shoulders. It was chilly in winter at these altitudes, and there was no glass in the windows, but he had been burning up with narcotic fever last night.
He blinked, frowning, and squinted at Lucia. Whether by a trick of the morning light or his own mind, she looked ethereal, her slender form transparent, her thin white-and-gold dress a veil. Yugi had never known Lucia's mother, but he was told that she resembled Anais strongly in her petite, pretty features and the pale blonde colour of her hair. But there the similarity ended: the hair was cut short and boyish, revealing the appallingly trenched and rucked scar-flesh at the back of her neck, and her light blue eyes told a story that nobody else could share. She was eighteen harvests of age, and the child he had watched grow had gone, replaced by something beautiful and alien.
He coughed to clear his throat of the taste of last night's excesses. When Lucia did not react, he dispensed with politeness. 'What are you doing here, Lucia?'
After a long moment, Lucia turned her head to him. 'Hmm?'
'You're in my room,' Yugi said patiently. 'Why are you in my room?'
She seemed puzzled by that for a moment. She glanced around the cell as if wondering how she got there: great blocks of weathered white stone draped with simple hangings, a wicker mat covering the floor, a small table, a chest, other odds and ends scattered about. Then she gave him a smile as innocent as an infant's.
'We want to see you.'
'We?'
'Cailin and I.'
Yugi sighed and sat up further, the blankets sloughing to his waist. His upper torso was almost smooth of hair, but several long cicatrices tracked over the skin, old wounds from long ago. He did not like the way she phrased her words, the implication that Lucia and Cailin had decided to summon him together. Cailin was held in altogether too high a regard by this girl, and that was dangerous. He knew what Cailin was like.
'What's this about?'
'News from Axekami,' she said, and did not elaborate. 'We'll be by the lake.'
Yugi decided not to bother asking her any more questions. 'I'll come and find you.'
Lucia gave him another smile, and turned to leave. As she did so, the hookah overturned with a crash, spilling ash and charred root onto the mat. Yugi jumped.
'He doesn't like the way you make his room smell,' Lucia said, and then went out through the drape.
Yugi got up and dressed himself. The cold chased off the tatters of sleep. He set the hookah back upright and tidied the ash away, annoyed. The spirit had never managed anything quite so violent before. He could sense it there, a tall black smudge just on the edge of his vision, but he knew that if he looked at it directly, it would be gone. It was a peripheral thing, seen only from the corner of the eye. A weak ghost, like the hundreds of others that haunted Araka Jo, clots of congealed memory that dogged the present.