Free The Weavers of Saramyr by Chris Wooding Page B

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 seem 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 spectre; surely, he would have sensed something if she had been unusual in any way. He had not looked closer at first, because he should have detected it when he first spied on her.
    The night he heard about the Heir-Empress’s dreams, he had used his Mask to search for her, to divine what she truly was. It was something he should have done a long time ago. Yet when he tried, she was impossible to find. He knew who and where she was, but she was still invisible to him. His consciousness seemed to slip over her; she was unassailable. The rage at his failure was immense, and cost the lives of three children. All this time, there had been an
    Aberrant under his very nose; but it had taken him eight years to see it.
    He knew now that he was dealing with something unlike anything he had encountered before. He considered what she was and what it might mean, and he feared her.
    And yet still he needed proof, and it must be a proof that could not be connected to him in any way. So he had sent a message to Sonmaga tu Amacha’s Weaver, who had advised the Barak, who had employed a series of middlemen to obtain a lock of the Heir-Empress’s hair. Anyone who followed the trail would find it led to Sonmaga tu Amacha’s door; the only one who knew of Vyrrch’s involvement was Sonmaga’s Weaver, Bracch.
    The conclusive proof of Aberration