‘Asara! More of them!’ Kaiku cried, and there they were, two of the creatures, hiding in the shadowy archways of the entrance hall. Asara clutched her mistress’s wrist and they froze. Kaiku’s hand was on the door, but she dared not tear it open and run, for the creatures would cut her down before she had gone ten metres. The raw, choking fear that had attended her ever since her eyes had opened tonight began to claw its way up her throat. She was blank with panic, disorientated, caught in a waking nightmare.
Slowly the shin-shin came into the hall, ducking their torsos beneath the archways as they angled their long, tapered limbs with insectile grace. They were the more terrible because Kaiku’s gaze refused to fix on them properly, allowing only hints of their form; only the glitter of their eyes was solid and visible. She was conscious of Asara reaching for something: a lantern, dormant and unlit on a window-ledge. The demons crept closer, keeping to the deepest darknesses.
‘Be ready,’ Asara whispered; and a moment later, she threw the lantern into the centre of the room. The shin-shin whirled at the sound, and in that instant Asara brought up her rifle and fired it into the slick of lantern oil on the floor.
The room was suddenly bright, a roaring sheet of flame, and the demons shrieked in their unearthly tongue and scattered clumsily away from the brilliance. But Kaiku was already through the door
and out into the storm, racing barefoot across the grass towards the trees that surrounded the house. Asara came close behind, leaving the fire to lick at the wooden walls and paper screens. They rushed through the rain, cringing at the great screeches coming from the sky. Not daring to look back, not knowing if Asara was following or not, Kaiku plunged into the forest.
The three moons were out tonight, clustered close above the slowly writhing clouds. Vast Aurus, the largest and eldest of the sisters; Iridima, smaller but brighter, her skin gullied with blue cracks; and the tiny green moon Neryn, the shyest of them all, who rarely showed her face. Legends told that when the three sisters were together, they fought and tore the sky, and that the screeching was Neryn’s cries as her siblings teased her for her green skin. Kaiku’s father taught a different tale, that the moonstorms were simply a result of the combined gravity of the moons playing havoc with the atmosphere. Whatever the reason, it was accepted wisdom that when the three moons were close moonstorms would follow. And on those nights, the Children of the Moons walked the earth.
Kaiku panted and whimpered as she ran through the trees. Thin branches whipped at her from all sides, covering her arms and face with wet lashes. Her sleeping-robe was soaked through, her chin-length hair plastered to her cheeks, her feet muddied and slimed. She fled blindly, as if she could outrun reality. Her mind still refused to grip the enormity of what had occurred in the previous few minutes. She felt like a child, helpless, alone and terrified.
Finally, the inevitable happened. Her bare foot found a rock that was more slippery than it looked, and she fell headlong, landing heavily against a root that was steadily emerging from washed-away layers of mud. Fresh tears came at the pain, and she lay in the dirt, filthy and sodden, and sobbed.
But there was no rest for her. She felt herself gripped from behind, and there was Asara, dragging her upright. She shrieked incoherently, but Asara was merciless.
‘I know a safe place,’ she said. ‘Come with me. They are not far behind.’
Then they were running again, plunging headlong through the trees, stumbling and slipping as they went. The air seemed to pluck at them, trying to lift them up, charged with a strange energy by the storm. It played tricks on their senses, making everything seem a little more or less than real. Grandmother Chomi used to warn her
granddaughter that if she jumped too high in a moonstorm she might never come back down, but drift into the sky. Kaiku pushed the thought away, remembering instead the scream she had heard earlier. Her grandmother was gone. All of them were gone. She knew without knowing, by the void in her heart.
They came out of the trees at the edge of a rocky stream, swollen and angry with the rains. Asara looked quickly left and right, her long hair soaked to deepest black and sluggish with moisture. She made her decision in moments, heading downstream, tugging Kaiku after her. The latter was almost at the limit of exhaustion, and it told in her staggering steps and lolling head.
The stream emptied into a wide clearing, a shallow bowl of water from which humped several grassy islands and banks, scattered with the bald faces of half-buried rocks and taut clusters of bushes. The largest island by far was the pedestal for a vast, ancient tree, overwhelmingly dominating the scene by its sheer size. Its trunk was twice as thick as a man was tall, knotted and twisted with age, and its branches spread in a great fan, leaves of gold and brown and green weeping a delicate curtain of droplets across the water below. Even in the rain, the clearing seemed sacred, a place of untouched beauty. The air here was different, possessed of a crystalline fragility and stillness, as of a held breath. Even Kaiku felt the change, the sensation of a presence in this place, some cold and slow and gentle awareness that marked their arrival with a languid interest.
The sound of a breaking twig alerted Asara, and she spun to see one of the shin-shin high up in the trees to their right, moving with impossible dexterity between the boughs while its lantern eyes stayed fixed on them. She pulled Kaiku into the water, which came up to their knees and soaked through their robes. Urgently, they splashed across to the largest island, and there they clambered out. Kaiku collapsed on the grass. Asara left her there and raced to the tree. She put her palms and forehead against it and murmured softly, her lips rapid as she spoke.
‘Great ipi, venerated spirit of the forest, we beg you to grant us your protection. Do not let these demons of shadow defile your glade with their corruption.’
A shiver seemed to run through the tree, shaking loose a cascade of droplets from the leaves.
Asara stepped back from the trunk and returned to Kaiku’s side. She squatted down, wiping the lank strands of hair from her face,
and scanned the edge of the glade. She could sense them out there, prowling. Three of them, and maybe more, stalking around the perimeter, hiding in the trees, their shining eyes never leaving their prey.
Asara watched, her hand near her rifle. She was no priest, but she knew the spirits of the forest well enough. The ipi would protect them, if only because it would not let the demons near it. Ipis were the guardians of the forest, and nowhere was their influence stronger than in their own glades. The creatures circled, their stiltlike legs carrying them to and fro. She could sense their frustration. Their prey was within sight, yet the shin-shin dared not enter the domain of an ipi.
After a time, Asara was satisfied that they were safe. She hooked her hands under Kaiku’s shoulders and dragged her into the protection of the tree’s vast roots, where the rain was less. Kaiku never woke. Asara regarded her for a moment, soaked as she was and freezing, and felt a kind of sympathy for her. She crouched down next to her mistress and stroked her cheek gently with the back of her knuckles.
‘Life can be cruel, Kaiku,’ she said. ‘I fear you are only just beginning to learn that.’
With the moonstorm raging high overhead, she sat in the shelter of the great tree and waited for the dawn to come.
Two
Kaiku awoke to a loud snap from the fire, and her eyes nickered open. Asara was there, stirring a small, blackened . pot that hung from an iron tripod over the flames. A pair of coilfish were spitted on a branch and crisping next to it. The sun was high in the sky and the air was muggy and hot. A fresh, earthy smell was all about as damp loam dried from last night’s downpour.
‘Daygreet, Kaiku,’ Asara said, without looking at her. ‘I went back to the house this morning and salvaged what I could.’ She tossed a bundle of clothes over. ‘There was not a great deal left, but the rain put out the blaze before it could devour everything. We have food, clothes and a good amount of money.’
Kaiku raised herself, looking around. They were no longer in the waterlogged clearing. Now they sat in a dip in the land where the soil was sandy and clogged with pebbles, and little grew except a few shrubs. Trees guarded the lip of the depression, casting sharply contrasting shadows against the dazzling light, and the daytime sounds of the forest peeped and chittered all about. Had Asara carried her?
The first thing she noticed was that her bracelet was missing.
‘Asara! Grandmother’s bracelet! It must have fallen… it…’
‘I took it. I left it as an offering to the ipi, in thanks for protecting
us.‘
‘She gave me that bracelet on my eighth harvest!’ Kaiku cried. ‘I
have never taken it off.‘
‘The point of an offering is that you sacrifice something precious to you,’ Asara said levelly. ‘The ipi saved our lives. I had nothing I could give, but you did.’
Kaiku stared at her in disbelief, but Asara appeared not to notice.
She made a vague gesture to indicate their surroundings. ‘I thought it best not to start a fire in the ipi’s glade, so I moved you here.’
Kaiku hung her head. She was too drained to protest any further. Asara watched her in silence for a time.
‘I must know,’ Kaiku said quietly. ‘My family…’
Asara put down the spoon she had been using to stir the pot and knelt before Kaiku, taking her hands. ‘They are dead.’
Kaiku’s throat tightened, but she nodded to indicate she understood. ‘What happened?’
‘Would you not rather eat first, and compose yourself?’
Kaiku raised her head and looked at Asara. ‘I must know,’ she repeated.
Asara released her hands. ‘Most of you were poisoned,’ she said. ‘You died as you slept. I suspect it was one of the kitchen servants, but I cannot be sure. Whoever it was, they were inefficient. Your grandmother did not eat at the evening meal last night, so she was still alive when the shin-shin came. I believe that somebody sent the demons to kill the servants and remove the evidence. With no witnesses, the crime would go unsolved.’ She settled further on her haunches.
‘Who?’ Kaiku asked. ‘And why?’
‘To those questions I have no answers,’ she said. ‘Yet.’
Asara got up and returned to the pot, occasionally turning the fish. It was some time before Kaiku spoke again.
‘Did I die, Asara? From the poison?’
‘Yes,’ replied the handmaiden. ‘I brought you back.’
‘How?’
‘I stole the breath from another, and put it into you.’
Kaiku thought of Karia, her other handmaiden, who she had seen lying dead on the floor of her room.
‘How is that possible?’ she whispered, afraid of the answer.
‘There are many things you do not understand, Kaiku,’ Asara replied. ‘I am one of them.’
Kaiku was beginning to realise that. Asara had always been the perfect handmaiden: quiet, obedient and reliable, skilled at combing out hair and laying out clothes. Kaiku had liked her better than the more wilful Karia, and often talked with her, shared secrets or played games. But there had always been the boundary there, a division that prevented them from becoming truly close. The unspoken understanding that the two of them were of a different
caste. Kaiku was high-born and Asara was not, and so one had a duty to serve and obey the other. It was the way in Saramyr, the way it had always been.
And yet now Kaiku saw that the last two years had been a deception. This was not the person she thought she knew. This Asara had a steely calm, a core of cold metal. This Asara had saved her life by stealing another’s, had burned down her house, had taken her most valuable token of her grandmother’s love and given it away with impunity. This Asara had rescued her from demons.
Who was she, truly?
‘The stream is nearby, Kaiku,’ Asara said, pointing with her spoon. ‘You should wash and change. You will catch a chill in that.’ It had not escaped notice that since last night she had ceased to call Kaiku ‘mistress’, as was proper.
Kaiku obeyed. She felt she should be ashamed of the state of herself, half undressed with her thin white sleeping-robe mussed and filthy. Yet it seemed insignificant in the wake of what had gone before. Weary despite her sleep, she went to the stream, and there she threw away the soiled robe and washed herself clean, naked in the hot sunlight. The feel of the water and warmth on her bare skin brought her no pleasure. Her body felt like only a vessel for her grief.
She dressed in the clothes Asara had brought her, finding that they were sturdy attire for travelling in. Leather boots, shapeless beige trousers, an open-throated shirt of the same colour that would belong better on a man. She had no complaints. She had always been a tomboy, and she fitted as easily into the trappings of a peasant as those of a noble lady. Her elder brother had been her closest companion, and she had competed with him at everything. They had fought to outride, outshoot and outwrestle each other constantly. Kaiku was no stranger to the gun or the forest.
When she returned to the campfire, the air was alive with sparkling flakes, drifting gently from the sky like snow. They glittered as the sun caught them, sharp flashes of light all about. It was called starfall: a phenomenon seen only in the aftermath of a moonstorm. Tiny, flat crystals of fused ice were created in the maelstrom of the three sisters’ conflict, thin enough to float on their way down. Beauty after chaos. Much prose had been written of starfall, and it was a recurring theme in some of the finest love poetry. Today, it held no power to move her.
THE WEAVERS OF SARAMyR
Asara handed her a bowl of coilfish, vegetables and saltrice. ‘You should eat,’ she said. Kaiku did so, using her fingers in the way she had as a child, barely tasting it. Asara arranged herself behind, and gently untangled Kaiku’s hair with a wooden comb. It was an act of surprising kindness, in the face of everything; a gesture of familiarity from a girl who now seemed a stranger.