'Kaiku. Come with me now,' she said. She looked down at Tsata. 'The Weavers will not be long getting through that door. We need what time you can give us.'
'You will have every moment our lives can buy,' he said quietly, and still he did not raise his head.
Cailin cast one last glance at Kaiku and then made for the doorway in the tower, where the other Sisters were heading. Kaiku waited there for a short time, trying to think of something to say, something suitable for this parting. But there were no words that could express her sorrow, nothing adequate to ease his hurt. In the end, she turned and walked away without a word. She was last through the doorway, and as soon as she was in Cailin used her kana to decipher and activate the mechanism. The door slid shut with a squeal of metal. Kaiku's gaze lingered on Tsata until he disappeared from view.
The elevator began to descend with a lurch, and they went down, down towards the witchstone.
THIRTY-TWO
None of the Sisters spoke as the machinery whirred and squeaked. They could sense that they were sinking by the feeling in their stomachs, but they were encased in the circular metal room of the elevator, and there was nothing to look at but each other. With every passing second, the power exuded by the witchstone was growing, becoming fiercer and more intense. Cailin had not brought the Tkiurathi with them because she believed they would not be able to survive such proximity to the thing; Kaiku wondered now if any of them would. This witchstone was older by far than the one she had destroyed in the mine long ago, older even than the stone that had been shattered at Utraxxa. It was the heart of a god, and merely to look on it might be enough to kill them.
After what seemed like an age, the elevator shuddered and stopped. There was a pregnant silence. Then the doors opened.
The force of the witchstone's presence made the Sisters cry out and recoil, their arms instinctively raised before their eyes as if by blocking the brightness they could mute its strength. The thick metal of the elevator had been shielding them until now; robbed of that barrier, they were blasted by it like a hurricane.
Kaiku fell backwards to the cold, hard floor, breaking her fall with her arm. The Weave was a maelstrom, its churning so violent that it physically pushed her over. She clung to control, trying to ride the chaos before she was swept away by it entirely. The very touch of the witchstone was foul, tainting the golden threads black, a sucking morass of malevolent darkness. The rage of Aricarat was palpable, a hatred pure enough to drive them insane.
But somehow Kaiku held on, long enough to sew a skin around herself, a protective cocoon that screened out the worst of the barrage. She found her level and allowed herself to flow with the maelstrom like a boat on stormy waters. Then she set about rescuing those of the Sisters that had not managed to do so yet. Finally, they were stable enough to stand again; but Kaiku's kana was already being taxed, and she knew she could not hold out like this for long.
They staggered out of the elevator and into the chamber of the witchstone.
It was gargantuan, towering almost a hundred feet high and half that in width, filling the cavern. There was no discernible overall shape to it; it was simply a mass, a crooked lump of rock that sprouted roots and protuberances all over its surface, and from those extrusions other extrusions came. It was growth gone mad, multiplying over and over in ridiculous plethora until there was barely any space at all between its branches. Like the other witchstones, it thrust into the wall of the surrounding cavern, melding with it; but unlike the others, its branches were so dense that it was almost impossible to tell where the witchstone ended and the cavern began. It had assimilated itself into its surroundings almost totally.
The nauseating luminescence of the witchstone blanched the faces of the Sisters as they came cringing into its presence, casting stark shadows across the broken floor. Several great roots reared over them, dwarfing them by comparison.
But Cailin straightened herself, her expression made hideous by the unnatural light, and her voice rang out across the chamber.
'Sisters! Cleanse our land of this abomination!'
Kaiku steeled herself and unleashed her kana at it. The vast, pulsing black tangle filled her world and engulfed her. The touch of it was like acid, but through the burning she fought to untangle the threads of the witchstone, to find purchase to get inside it. Its radiance was so terrible that even the Weavers had not been able to come near to plant explosives, like they must have done at Utraxxa. The Sisters had only to bore inward and they would be inside the web of the witchstones, able to spread to every stone in Saramyr. But each moment they wasted was a moment closer to that when the Weavers would break through the lingering defences that the Sisters had left on the door to the chamber above. Then the Tkiurathi would be killed – Tsata would be killed – and the Sisters would be next. The Weavers would send an elevator full of Aberrants down, and it would be the end.
She gritted her teeth, scratched and picked at the witch-stone ferociously, but it did no good. Frustration grew in her. She could find nowhere amid the awful mass that would permit her entry to the thing: its exterior defences were too dense. No Sister had ever Weaved into a witchstone before, and now they found that they had underestimated the difficulty greatly.
Cailin sent an instruction to them all, and they battled their way through the whirling disorder and sewed themselves together. In one slender needle of intent, they thrust at the witchstone, driving into it; but incredibly, it held. They managed to make fractional headway before the point of the needle was blunted and expelled. They struck again, to no avail.
The Sisters began to try anything and everything they could. They attempted to make themselves diffuse, to seep into it like gas through the pores of a membrane; they tried attacking it from many angles at once; they worked at unpeeling it like an onion. Nothing worked. It remained invincible, and their best efforts did not even scratch it.
Kaiku was exhausted. The sheer mental strain of being in its presence was becoming too much, and Weaving on top of that was draining her utterly. What was more, her kana was being diverted to repair the damage that was being done to her physical body. She could feel the witchstone's insidious rays changing her, making minuscule alterations, causing tiny cancers and encouraging unusual and unnatural processes into life. Her kana was automatically fixing this corruption as it occurred. If not for that, it would not have been long before she became like the elder Edgefathers were: repulsive freaks, warped beyond recognition.
She dropped out of the Weave, and realised that she was on her knees on the rough floor of the cavern. Her legs had been unable to support her any longer. She was gasping for breath, her body aching.
Spirits, no. Not when we are so close. We cannot fail here. Ocha, emperor of the gods, help us now if you can. Help me fulfil my oath. Show me how to end this evil.
And the answer came to her. A possibility so awful that she at first dismissed it out of hand, but then, despairingly, she realised that it was the only chance they had left. She could sense the Sisters fruitlessly battering at the witchstone, and knew that even Cailin's skill could not help them now.
She thought of all that would be lost if the Sisters fell here. Of all the beauty she remembered from her childhood: the rinji birds on the Kerryn, the sun through the leaves of the Forest of Yuna, the dazzling waters of Mataxa Bay. All that would pass into a memory, and eventually even memories would fade. The skies would die. And after the Near World was gone, after their planet had been enshrouded as the Xhiang Xhi had predicted, then Aricarat would spread outward, into whatever was beyond.
It was too much, too much responsibility to comprehend. So she thought only of Tsata. She would save his life, if she could. Even if it meant trading her own. For pash.