But it was what was happening in the centre of the chamber that drew Kaiku's attention. There was the source of the light: a massive rock, perhaps forty feet in length and half that in height. It was not like any rock Kaiku had ever seen.
The shape of the thing was utterly irregular, and doubly so for a mineral. It seemed to have sprouted, like a plant or a coral reef, so that great roots and lumpen antlers of stone reached out from its core and buried themselves in the floor, walls and ceiling of the chamber. It seethed with an unnatural glow. Kaiku narrowed her eyes behind her Mask and felt a sickness creep into her belly. It made her feel ill just to look upon it.
I know of these, she thought to herself, the memory of the Mask coming to her. This is a witchstone.
She was gazing on the source of the Weavers' power, and their most jealously guarded treasure.
There were twelve Weavers surrounding the rock, attired as Kaiku was in patchwork robes and odd Masks. There was a thirteenth person as well, but this one was naked: a thin, emaciated man struggling weakly in the clutches of two of the robed figues. Kaiku watched as they dragged him up a set of steps and pulled him on to the jagged back of the witchstone. She guessed what was going to happen even before one of them drew his sickle and cut the unfortunate man's throat.
The man slumped forward on his face. One of the robed figures retreated while the other turned him over and cut him from chin to manhood, opening him up to expose his insides. These he roughly began to hack at, pulling them out one by one without finesse, laying them aside on the rock when they were free. Heart, kidneys, liver, intestines… in moments, he was surrounded by the man's organs.
Kaiku had been watching this with no particular horror. The fate of that man did not concern her, nor the method in which he was despatched. But there was something wrong with what she was seeing, and it took her a little time to understand what it was.
There was no blood. Oh, certainly, the man bled, and the Weaver's garments were sprayed with gore; but the rock, where almost all the blood had eventually fallen, was spotless. Where the heart had been taken out and laid aside, it lay as clean and dry as an apple. Where the intestines should have rested in a pool of red, they were rubbery and blue and immaculate. The blood was coming out, all right, but where was it going? It was as if the rock absorbed it somehow.
Or drank it.
Kaiku frowned at the thought, but she could see now that the witchstone was beginning to darken, the foul glow fading and being drawn inwards, until the cavern was almost pitch black. The only source of light was within the rock, and the rock was full of veins, a network of glowing lines hanging in the pure darkness, as if its skin had become transparent and its own innards were exposed. And at its core, a pulsing chamber like a human heart, pushing the bright white blood around it.
By the spirits, Kaiku thought. The witchstone. It is alive.
The memories hit her then, a sudden rush of understanding that flooded into her brain, triggered by the realisation. Connections that she had never considered before became suddenly obvious, each one sparking another and another until the circuit was complete and she saw the whole of the grand design, as her father had seen it. Kaiku knew, in a flash, what Ruito tu Makaima had found out, why he had run, and why they had killed him for that knowledge.
The witchstones were alive. And just as the dust of the witch-stones in the Weaver's Masks corrupted and warped their bodies, so the witchstones were corrupting and warping the earth in which they lay.
It opened up to her then as a vision. Ruito in his study, in a hired apartment in Axekami, poring over a map and a heap of charts and scrolls. A project he had been working on in secret for years, a passion, a suspicion. In her vision, Kaiku stood with him at the moment of realisation – though she had not been present in real life – when all the facts and figures and distances fell into place. There was a correlation between the reports of Aberrant births and their proximity to Weavers. He saw that the epicentre of Aberrancy always lay at the site of a Weaver monastery, and the monasteries were always built around the witchstones. How could nobody have seen this before? How many people had been killed or dissuaded, to keep their silence? But Ruito saw, and determined to investigate, to gain the proof he needed to confront the nobles with. So he had come here, and seen this, and then he had run.
But they had known. Somehow, they had known, by some carelessness that even Ruito was not aware of. An invisible trigger, a misplaced word… who could say? By the time he returned to the mainland, it was hopeless. Only in secrecy could a man such as he hope to overcome the Weavers. Once they were forewarned, he would never be able to so much as get a message to the nobles.
They would not even let him leave his house, watching his every move like vultures. Perhaps if he had gone straight to Axekami, tried to spread the knowledge to others, they would have killed only him. But he had come home, shattered by what he had seen, to think and recuperate; and they had been following him all the way. It was only then they had let themselves be seen, let him know they were on him like a shadow. They allowed him to come all the way home, back to his family, and then they showed themselves.
And Ruito knew that his life was at an end; he had discovered too much.
Kaiku felt she would choke on sorrow as she felt him make his choice. There was no escape, and no way to unknow what he knew. He would be killed, and so would his family. But they could at least leave the player's table with honour, instead of at the foul hands of whatever creatures the Weavers would employ. He would not let his family be subject to tortures or interrogation, to have their minds laid bare and flayed by the monsters he had stirred up.
It was no assassin who poisoned the evening meal that day, no agent of the Weavers who killed Kaiku that first time. It was her father.
When they were assured of his impotency, once they had scoured his apartment in Axekami and removed all his work, the Weavers sent the shin-shin. But the shin-shin were too late to do anything but clean up the evidence, and it was only through the strength of Asara that anyone was left to tell of it at all.
Kaiku's eyes flooded with tears. She felt all the despair, all the loss, the terrible realisation that her father had borne. No wonder he had seemed haunted when last he returned to their home; he had been broken by the scale of the conspiracy he had uncovered, shattered by the knowledge that neither he nor his family would be allowed to live. Destroyed by the choice he had to make, to poison his loved ones or leave them to a far worse fate.
The Weavers had killed Aberrants for two hundred years, preached hatred towards them, used their positions of power to ingrain it into the consciousness of the people of Saramyr. But they were not doing it out of the desire to keep the human race pure, nor for any religious reason. They were cleaning up their own mess, covering their tracks, destroying the evidence.
The source of the Weavers' power was also the source of the blight that was wasting the land.
This final realisation was too much for her. Starving, exhausted and frightened, she slid back through the crack in the wall and away from the ledge. She did not know how long she stumbled until she fainted, but she welcomed oblivion with open arms.
Twenty-Three
Anais tu Erinima, Blood Empress of Saramyr, stood at the top of the Imperial Keep and looked over the city below. A pall of smoke was drifting up from the north bank of the Kerryn, joined by several thinner cousins nearby, polluting the evening sky. The air was as dry and hot as the inside of a clay oven. Behind her and to her left, Nuki's eye was a westering ball of sullen orange, setting the horizon afire behind the grand bulk of the temple to Ocha that lay in the centre of the Keep's roof. Beneath the walkway that supported her lay the Keep's sculpture garden, a frozen forest of artistic shapes and constructions, open to the sky. The strange forms that inhabited the garden cast long, warped shadows across their neighbours. Narrow white paths wound through carefully tended lawns, gliding between the pedestals that the sculptures rested on.