gap in the rocks before he sprang. Movement so close to its body was picked up by some peripheral sense, and it curved its spine to meet him, its jaws gaping wide. But he had predicted it, and swung to one side, so that its teeth snapped shut on nothing but air. He rammed one end of his gutting-hook into its outstretched neck, behind its crest. It spasmed once, but in that time Tsata had swung onto its back, using the embedded gutting-hook as a lever, and buried his second blade into the other side of its throat. Its legs collapsed beneath it and it started to thrash before Tsata wrenched both blades upward, tearing them through the muscle of its neck and severing its vertebrae in a gout of blood and spinal fluid. The shrilling flopped. It was all over in an instant.
Kaiku scrambled down from her perch and slid into the trench. Tsata’s gutting-hooks were laid aside, and he had turned the Aberrant’s head so as to move its crest out of the way. Its black eye reflected his face as he felt amid the pulses of gore that ran down its neck.
‘Have you found it?’ Kaiku asked as she hurried up to him. His bare arms and hands were dripping with noxious blood, black in the green moonlight.
‘Here,’ he said. Kaiku met his glance. ‘Can you do this?’
‘I have to risk it,’ she said. ‘For the pash.’
He grinned. ‘One day I will teach you how to use that word properly.’
The fleeting moment of camaraderie was too brief to enjoy. She put her hands where his were, and felt the repellent skin of the black, wormlike creature attached to the arch of the shrilling’s neck, just above the point where Tsata’s blades had cut. This was the fourth Aberrant they had killed between them, and every time they had found one of these nauseating things in the same place, deep in the flesh, dead.
This one was not dead yet, but it had only seconds left, its body failing as its host’s systems ceased. Seconds were enough.
Kaiku touched it, and opened the Weave. Tsata watched her as her eyes fluttered closed. The dark gush of the Aberrant’s blood over the wrists and hands became a trickle as the heart stopped pumping.
The link was easy to follow, once she was inside it. The slug-thing’s fading consciousness was like an anchor in the body of the Aberrant beast. Small tendrils of influence were retreating as it died, the hooks it had buried into its deadly host; but the strongest link arced away across the Fault, connected to some far destination like an umbilical cord. She followed it, and it led her to a nexus where dozens of other similar links converged like ribbons around a maypole, wafting in the flow of the Weave.
She read the fibres, and the answers came to her.
The nexus was one of the tall, black-robed strangers. They were not Weavers; they could not shape and twist the Weave. Rather, they were the hands that held a multitude of leashes, and the leashes tethered the Aberrants through the vile entities embedded close to their spines. They were the handlers.
That was how the Aberrants were under control, she realised. Carefully, she probed further. She was not sure to what extent the link operated: did the handlers actively know what the Aberrants know? Did they see through the beasts’ eyes? No, surely not, for if the handlers were linked mind-to-mind with the beasts then they would know of Tsata and Kaiku’s incursions, and the Weavers would have reacted with much more alarm. She gave up trying to guess; it was useless to speculate at this point.
Her eyes flicked open, and the irises were deepest crimson. She stepped back.
‘As we thought,’ she murmured. Her gaze went to Tsata’s. ‘We should go. They will be coming.’
The two of them slipped up the trench, disappearing into the shadows. Tsata led with practiced ease; Kaiku followed, alert for danger. Distantly, a yammering and howling had begun, but by the time the other Aberrants arrived at the scene of the death, the perpetrators had long fled.
Kaiku’s glance strayed to the Mask that lay on the ground beside her. Tsata, hunkered down next to her in the glade, intercepted the look.
‘It is wearing you down,’ he said softly. ‘Is it not?’
Kaiku nodded slightly. She picked up her pack and threw it on top of the Mask, obscuring its mocking expression.
The night was warm, but a cooler