the sun-warm beige stones that tiled the floor of this, one of the many tranquil resting places and walkways curving through the greenery. Before her the terraces dropped away in steps until they came to the high perimeter wall of the roof gardens; hidden beyond that was the city of Axekami, the sweltering sprawl of streets surrounded by an even higher wall to separate it from the vast grassy expanses of the plains.
Nuki's eye was descending through the thin streamers of cloud that haunted the distant horizon, and Lucia's eyes flickered periodically from the spectacle before her to the pattern-board and back again. Taking a wide-spaced, soft-bristled circular brush, she dipped it into one of the china bowls of heavy water that rested on the stone next to her and eased it across the pattern-board, leaving a faint mist of pink suspended there in the picture.
The pattern-board was an old art form, practised since before the time of many of the newer bloodlines. It involved the use of a coloured blend of water and paint and sap, thickened to a certain consistency, called 'heavy' water. This was applied to a pattern-board, a three-dimensional wooden cage that held within it a flattened oblong of transparent gel. The gel was part-baked into shape, after which it would always return to its oblong shape no matter what was done to it. This allowed artists to part the gel and paint inside the oblong, in the third dimension. The use of heavy water gave the pictures a curiously feathery, ethereal quality. When the painting was finished, the gel was baked further, becoming a substance like glass, and then displayed in ornate cradles that allowed the picture within to be viewed from all sides.
'Daygreet, Lucia,' came a voice from next to her, deep and smooth. She sat back on her heels, shading her eyes with one hand as she looked up.
'Daygreet, Zaelis,' she said, smiling.
Her tutor crouched down next to her, his lean frame draped in thin silk of black and gold. 'You've nearly finished, then,' he observed, making a languid motion towards the pattern-board.
'Another day and I'll be done, I think,' she said, returning her gaze to the floating swirls of colour before her.
'It's very good,' Zaelis commented.
'It's all right,' she said.
There was silence for a moment.
'Are you angry?' she asked.
'You've been here in the sun all day,' he said. 'And I've spent most of it trying to find you. You know how protective your mother is, Lucia. You should know better than to disappear like that, and you should really know better than to sit out in the full glare of Nuki's eye on a day like this.'
Lucia exhaled slowly in what was not quite a sigh. His tone and mode of address showed that he was not angry, but she was chastened all the same. 'I just had to get away,' she said. 'For a little while.'
'Even from me?' Zaelis sounded hurt.
Lucia nodded. She looked back at the sunset, then to the pattern-board, then pushed her fingers a little way into the top of it and pulled open a thin gash in the gel. She made a few quick strokes with a narrow brush, lining the pink of the clouds with red, then withdrew her fingers and let the rift seal itself.
Zaelis watched her, his face impassive. Of course she needed escape. To a girl as sensitive as Lucia was, the tension in the corridors of the Keep bled through even to here. And though he had kept his own concerns to himself regarding her safety, he was sure that even his best efforts at secrecy were useless against her. She knew full well that all the discord, all the deaths, were down to her in one way or another. Zaelis did his best to dissuade her from feeling guilty, but he was not even sure if she felt guilty. She had talked before of how she had set all this in motion, and wondered how it might have gone if she had tried to stop it instead of embracing the change. But whether there was regret there, Zaelis could not tell. Lucia's moods were like the deepest oceans, unfathomable to him.
Her head snapped up suddenly, with an urgency that made Zaelis jump. He followed her gaze, not dreamy and unfocused as it usually was but sharp and intense. She was looking to the north, where the white rim of Aurus was just cresting the horizon, foreshadowing the coming night. Her brow creased into a frown, and it trembled there for a moment. The fierceness of her glare shocked him; he had never seen such a look upon her face. Then she tore herself away, staring back into the heart of her painting, seeming to smoulder sullenly.
'What is it?' Zaelis asked. When she did not reply, he repeated: 'Lucia, what is it?' This second question was phrased in a more authoritative mode. He did not usually push her this way, but what he had witnessed a moment ago concerned him enough to try.
'I heard something,' she said reluctantly, still not meeting his eyes.
'Heard something?' Zaelis prompted. He looked back to the northern horizon. 'From whom?'
'No, not like that,' Lucia said, rubbing the back of her neck in agitation. 'Just an echo, a whisper. A reminder. It's gone now.'
Zaelis was staring at the edge of Aurus as it glided infinitesimally higher in the distance. 'A reminder of what}'
'A dream!' she snapped. 'I had a dream. I met the Children of the Moons. They were trying to tell me something, but I didn't understand. Not at first. Then…' She sagged a little. 'Then I think I did. They tried to show me… I don't know if it was a warning, or a threat… I don't…'
Zaelis was horrified. 'What did they tell you, Lucia?'
She turned to face him.
'Something's going to happen,' she whispered. 'Something bad. To me.'
'You don't know that, Lucia,' Zaelis protested automatically. 'Don't say that.'
She hugged herself to him in a rush, clutching herself close, taking him by surprise. He hugged her back, hard.
'It was just a dream,' he said soothingly. 'You don't need to be scared of a dream.'
But over her shoulder, he was looking to the northern horizon and the cold arc of Aurus's edge, and his eyes were afraid.
Weave-lord Vyrrch rested, his scabrous white flank heaving, the ribs showing through like a washboard. He was naked, his grotesque, withered body pathetic and repulsive to the eye. His scrawny, misshapen arms were gloved in blood; it spattered the melted skin of his face, his thin chest, pot-belly and atrophied genitalia. He looked like something recently born, curled amid the soiled sheets of his broken bed, panting and gasping.
For the object of his recent attention, however, there was no breath to be had. She was an old lady, chosen for the sake of variety in a fit of whimsy after he had sent Barak Mos's requested message to his Weaver. It had vaguely crossed his mind that he was murdering altogether too many people of late; most Weavers only reached that state of frenzy rarely. But then, wherever his servants procured his victims from, they were obviously not being missed. A servant's life was their master's or mistress's to take in Saramyr, and this one lady could not have been anything more than a cook or a cleaner, a servant of the Keep and hence of the Empress. He was sure Anais would not mind, even if she knew. She was aware of the deal when she took on Vyrrch as her Weave-lord; in doing so, she put the low folk of the Keep at his disposal, to satisfy his whims. A small price to pay for a Weave-lord's powers.
The old lady lay in a pool of viscous red, her simple clothes plastered to her body with her own vital fluids. He had been in the mood for the knife today, intending to take his time; but when she had arrived, he had flown into an unaccountable rage and stabbed her, hacking and plunging again and again. She died almost instantly, killed by the shock. It had only increased his fury, and he attacked the corpse over and over until it was almost unrecognisable as human.
Yes, perhaps he had been killing a little too much recently. But he was the spider at the centre of the web, and he needed feeding often.
The Guard Commander who had arrested Unger tu Torrhyc had been a tough one to crack, but Vyrrch had given himself time. As skilled as he was, he dared not simply seize the mind of a man and take control of him. That would require all his concentration, and confine him to his rooms; and there was every possibility that the Guard Commander might realise he had been meddled with once Vyrrch released him. Hasty operations like that were dangerous; he thought back to his recent attempt to sway Barak Zahn, when he was foiled by Zahn's Weaver, and wondered why he had not better considered the risk then.