Free The Braided Path: The Weavers of Saramyr, The Skein of Lament and the Ascendancy Veil by Chris Wooding Page A

darkness. He had never understood what they were: a product of his own imagining, or something else
altogether? Nor had he ever found out, for they eluded him effortlessly, remaining always out of his reach. Eventually he had given up trying, and for their part they ignored him as being beneath
their notice.
    Swiftly he glided between the immense threads, a gnat against their heaving flanks. By reading their vibrations he found the thread he sought and, steeling himself, he plunged into it, tearing
through its skin into the roaring tumult inside, where chaos swallowed him.
    Now he was a spark, a tiny thing that raced along the synapses of the thread with dizzying speed, selecting junctions here and jumping track there, flitting along faster than the mind could
comprehend. From this thread to that he flickered, racing down one lane after another, a million changes executed in less than a second, until finally he reached the terminator of a single thread,
and burst free.
    His vision cleared as his senses reassembled themselves, and he was in a small, dimly lit chamber. It was unremarkable in any way, except for the crumbling yellow-red stone of its walls, and the
pictograms daubed haphazardly across it, spelling out nonsense phrases and primal mutterings, dark perversions and promises. The ravings of a madman. A pair of lanterns flickered fitfully in their
brackets, making the shadow-edges of the bricks shift and dance. A peeling wooden door was closed before him. Though he was far from any mark by which to recognise his surroundings, the walls
exuded a familiar resonance to his heightened perception. This was Adderach, the monastery of the Weavers.
    The room was empty, but he sensed the approach of three of his brethren. While he waited, he thought over the news he had to report.
    He could not imagine how she had stayed hidden for so long. That the Heir-Empress could be an Aberrant . . . how could he have not seen it before? It was only when he began to hear reports from
frightened servants of a spectral girl walking the corridors of the Keep at night that he began to suspect something was amiss. And so he had begun to investigate, searching the Keep for evidence
of resonances, tremors in the Weave that would indicate that someone was manipulating it, in the way a spider feels the thrashings of the fly through her web.
    He found nothing. And yet something was there. Whatever was causing these manifestations was either too subtle to be detectable even by him, or was of a different order altogether.
    Eventually his searching bore fruit, and he found the trail of the wandering spectre as she prowled the corridors of the Keep, a tiny tremor in the air at her passing that was so fine it was
almost imperceptible. Yet though he sensed himself drawing close time after time, he never caught up with her; he was always evaded. Frustration gnawed at him, and his efforts became more frantic;
yet this only seemed to make her escapes all the easier. Until one day one of his spies overheard Anais consulting a physician about her daughter’s odd dreams, and the connection was
made.
    Like many, he had never laid eyes on the Heir-Empress, but he had spied on her from time to time. The Heir-Empress was far too important for him to abide by her mother’s wish for her to be
kept sheltered and secret. He knew at once that she was not so sickly as Anais made out, but he also knew there were many good reasons why a child as important as this one should be kept safe from
harm. He had simply attributed it to Anais’s paranoia about her only daughter – the only child she could ever have – and forgotten about it. It had not seemed urgent at the time,
and as the seasons came and went he forgot about it, the thoughts slipping through the gauze of his increasingly addled mind and fading away.
    It was his assurance of his own abilities that had led him to discount the little Heir-Empress from his initial investigations concerning the