Free The Ascendancy Veil by Chris Wooding Page A

word and the streets are full of them.’
    ‘What about Lucia?’ Nomoru interjected. ‘Could rouse them then. If Lucia came.’
    ‘Lucia?’ Juto mocked. ‘I won’t deny the people would welcome anyone in place of the Weavers, Aberrant or not, but a legendary figure’s no good if they’re not here. I won’t believe she’s real till I see her with my own eyes, and even then she’d have to be in golden armour with the gods themselves singing her praises from the skies before I’d count myself safe enough to turn on the Weavers.’ His tone was becoming bitter now. ‘You think you can even get to Axekami with an army? I don’t. The Weavers would crush you before you got north of the Fault.’
    Kaiku took the disappointment stoically. She had expected such a response anyway. It did not take someone of Phaeca’s skills to divine that Yugi’s faint hope of picking up the scent of revolt would be thwarted; Kaiku had guessed that as soon as they entered the city. She did not think he had seriously entertained the possibility anyway.
    ‘Enough of our troubles,’ said Juto, hunkering forward and giving them a smile that was more like a snarl. ‘What about yours? How goes the battle in the south?’
    ‘That is a puzzle,’ Kaiku said, brushing her hair behind her ear. ‘It is much as we left it almost a fortnight ago. The Weavers have occupied Juraka, but there has been no move to cross the river as yet, and the feya-kori seem to have disappeared.’
    ‘Ah, there’s the meat of it,’ said Juto. ‘The feya-kori.’
    ‘They came from Axekami,’ Phaeca said. ‘Do you know where?’
    ‘I have my suspicions,’ Juto said. ‘But I’ve been waiting for you to arrive so we can take a look.’
    ‘When can we go?’
    ‘Tonight,’ he said. ‘After curfew.’
    Kaiku considered this for a moment, then a small frown crossed her brow. ‘What exactly do the Blackguard do to enforce this curfew?’
    Juto grinned nastily. ‘They let the Aberrants out.’
     
    SIX
    The Lord Protector Avun tu Koli trod warily through the chambers of his home. Despite Kakre’s assurances that he would not be harmed, he could never be even slightly at ease in the areas that the Weave-lord had taken to inhabiting. The upper levels of the Imperial Keep had become an asylum.
    The great truncated pyramid stood atop a bluff on the crest of the highest hill in Axekami. It was a masterpiece of architecture, arguably still unsurpassed since the fourth Blood Emperor Huira tu Lilira began building it more than a thousand years ago. The complex sculptures of gold and bronze that swarmed across its tiered sides had stunned visitors for a millennium with their intricacy and power, while the four slender towers that stood at its corners, linked to the main body of the Keep by ornate bridges, were as impressive now as they were all that time ago.
    Throughout history, there had always been large sections of the Keep that were empty, simply because no high family had enough members to fill a building so huge, nor needed a retinue so large as to take up the spare room. Avun wondered distastefully what his ancestors might make of things now that the new occupants had arrived, and the Keep was finally filled.
    The route to the Sun Chamber took him through room after gloomy room of depravity and madness. Weavers gibbered and rocked in clusters, hunched together, their Masks iridescing subtly as they shared the ecstatic bliss of their unseen world. Walls were smeared in blood and excrement, or scrawled with arcane languages which had sprung whole from the subconscious of the author. Abstract mathematics and diagrams, nonsense mingling with insights of staggering genius, were scored into priceless marble pillars or daubed across artwork that was hundreds of years old. The flyblown corpse of a servant, his lips and jaw eaten away by a roaming dog, lay in the centre of a room surrounded by strange clay sculptures, each precisely a foot high. An exquisitely clean