They approached under the cover of the fog, but nobody was deceived. Kaiku had warned the Sisters about the demons' methods, and the murk had gathered too quickly and smelt too foul to be natural. Yet, somehow, knowing that they were coming only made it worse: the sickening inevitability of their arrival weighed on the defenders' hearts.
The troops had already begun to prepare the town for evacuation by the time the feya-kori appeared. They lunged suddenly out of the miasma, emerging as if from nowhere within a few dozen metres of the wall. Men howled as the demons loomed up towards them; the sharp slope to the north of the town made them seem as if they were coming from below, surfacing from a sea of mist. They grabbed hold of the lip of the wall, the stump-ends of their arms smashing down onto the stone in a hissing mass of black ooze, crushing and dissolving those soldiers not quick enough to get out of the way. Then, with a long, protracted groan, they hauled, and the top third of the wall gave way in an avalanche of bodies and bricks and mortar.
Alarm bells clanged from the murk; men fought to decline their fire-cannons far enough to hit the enemy. But the feya-kori were too close. They punched and tore and smashed, their movements slow and massive, destroying a great section of the wall in minutes while rifles and arrows pocked them ineffectually.
They lumbered into the town, crashing through buildings as if they were made of sticks and paper. The Aberrant predators and Nexuses were not far behind them.
Tsata raced through the ruined streets left in the demons' wake. A dozen Tkiurathi were with him, their gutting-hooks held ready, eyes darting about for signs of the enemy. Behind them they could hear the cries of the feya-kori, disembodied moans drifting through the swiftly thinning fog; before them, distantly, was the sound of combat, where the troops of the Empire had knitted across the gash in the wall and were putting up a bloody resistance against the Aberrant horde. Tsata was concerned with neither: his purpose was the area in between, where the smoking, charred trail of the demons had left houses collapsed into rubble, with men and women and children trapped and maimed or out of their wits with fear.
The Tkiurathi dispersed at his suggestion, fracturing into groups of two and three and hurrying in different directions. They filtered off into the narrow spoke-roads and cross-alleys of the town, heading away from the main swathe of destruction – where nothing was left alive, and the cobbled thoroughfares were a melted quagmire – to the edges, where there were people to be helped.
Tsata tasted bile: the very air was bad here. The sight of the feya-kori still burned in the forefront of his mind. For the month that it took to cross the sea from his lands, he had been experiencing a steadily growing elation at the thought of returning to Saramyr. Four years he had been gathering his people, tracking them down and persuading them to his cause; four years of hunting through deep jungle, of tireless diplomacy, of bringing together men and women who had scattered over hundreds of miles of nearly impenetrable terrain. And though he might have only managed four ships to carry them, those four could go back and forth as many times as was necessary to transport all the Tkiurathi to Saramyr.
But he had been here mere hours before he witnessed how much worse things had become in his absence, and now he wished he had listened to his heart instead of his head and got here sooner.
He scrambled over a slope of rubble, where the dusty guts of a building had spilled out across the street, to where a pair of women were heaving at a beam to uncover the supine man beneath. He did not give them time to react to his appearance, to act on the flicker of fear and uncertainty at the sight of him. He grabbed the beam and lifted, and after a moment's hesitation the women added their strength to his, and two more Tkiurathi appeared and joined in. The beam moved, and the man scrambled free, delirious with agony, his foot crushed inside his boot. One of the women helped him stand one-legged.
'Find a crutch and get away from here,' Tsata told them. 'Through the south gate.' Then he rapped a few words in guttural Okhamban to his companions and they were running again.
The mist had faded to a fine haze, burnt off by the sharp light of the winter sun. The demons were abandoning their concealment; they had no need of it now. One of them had reached the town's keep, the highest and most central point, hub of Zila's wheel-like layout. Burning and broken buildings traced the creature's path from the gap in the north wall to where it was smashing into the keep's brickwork. The other one had rampaged towards the western wall.
Tsata hoped the ships had got away. There had barely been time for the Tkiurathi to gather their communal belongings and swim for shore; he had last seen the junks turning in the estuary, their prows pointing towards the open sea. A few Tkiurathi men had stayed, along with the crew. They would return and tell others what they had seen today. What the Weavers were now capable of.
For the Tkiurathi who were on Saramyr, the protection of their pash was now the priority. Okhambans did not think in the way Saramyr did: they had no concept of personal ownership, and their society had evolved around a group dynamic which meant, at its most basic level, that they considered individual needs less important than those of the many. Pash was their name for whichever 'many' they were involved with at the time, a fluid and multilayered concept of overlapping priorities which was how the Okhamban people – including the Tkiurathi – assigned importance to a situation. At this moment, at this time, their pash included the people of Zila; and so they had headed into the town without a second thought, to help with the retreat, to save lives when they could, heedless of any risk to themselves.
A cry for help drew them into a small square where one side had collapsed inward. The facades of the buildings had shaken away from their superstructures and opened the rooms to the sky. Smoke was seeping from beneath the rubble on the ground floor of what had once been a cobbler's shop, where something was ablaze. An old, bearded man was frantically working to clear away the stones there. He caught sight of Tsata and his companions, wasted a moment on uncertainty, then called to them.
'There's someone under here!'
They joined him in his work, hefting the heavy, uneven stones and flinging them away. There was a frantic knocking noise coming from beneath.
Tsata's survival instincts kept him fitfully glancing about as he laboured, honed by generation upon generation of jungle life. Without even thinking about it, he knew where the feya-kori were by their dreary, yawning voices; they were too far away to be a threat. He could tell by the cadence and timbre of the battle to the north that the forces of the Empire were still holding out. But there were Aberrant predators loose in the city, those that had slipped through the gap in the wall before it could be sealed. He had seen their handiwork, and one or two of their corpses.
They had just uncovered the corner of a trapdoor, from which the smoke was coming, when something moved in the square.
The three Tkiurathi were on their feet, gutting-hooks in hands, before the pair of ghauregs even noticed them. They ran out from the cover of the building and into the square, drawing the eyes of the beasts, leading them away from the old man. The Aberrants snorted at the sight of prey, growling deep in their chests. One of them bellowed a challenge, shaking its head, its grey shaggy pelt flailing with the movement; then slowly they advanced.
Tsata circled around the square, keeping his gaze on the predators. His companions were fanning away from him, treading soundlessly across the rubble-strewn cobbles. Coherent thought had fallen away, succeeded by the quicker and more direct reactions of a hunter. The ghauregs clacked their jaws together with a bony snap like a crocodile's, wary of their opponents. Their muzzles were streaked in blood.