go or merely the first one they noticed, nobody could be sure. But as they watched, suddenly and without warning, the enormous beast disappeared into the earth.
The Aberrants were milling uneasily now, sensing that something was amiss here. Another one, this time a furie, was swallowed up by the ground. It had time to let out a distressed squeal and then it was gone.
‘Gods,’ murmured Kihu, who was hunkered next to Yugi. ‘This is going to be a slaughter.’
And then it was happening all over the canyon. Aberrants were disappearing, simply dropping into the earth as if the ground beneath their feet were suddenly gone. At first it was one at a time, and then several began to vanish at once, and moments later there were dozens being sucked under. The animals began to panic afresh, rearing and shrieking and roaring, attacking each other in their confusion. The skrendel, by far the most intelligent of the predator species, were trying to climb the canyon walls; but while they could get themselves off the deadly ground that way, the stone was too smooth for them to escape the trap. The canyon was emptying fast, as living and dead alike were swallowed by the churned earth of the canyon floor.
Those with spyglasses began to see the swift wakes of things speeding just below the surface, shallow humps that arrowed towards their targets. Even in the darkness, it was possible to spot the insidious swatches of blood that soaked upward from the earth, the ground too glutted to hold it all in. The Aberrants ran and scuttled on soil made damp with the fluids of their own kind, attempting a hopeless evasion as the things that hunted them swarmed about in a multitude. The skrendel were snatched from the walls by sudden profusions of thin tendrils that burst from the ground and enwrapped them, pulling them under in the blink of an eye, like a chameleon’s tongue picking off a fly.
By the time true dark had fallen, and Aurus was some way into her ascent, the canyon was quiet again. The only sign that the Aberrants had ever been there was the glistening of the moonlight on the canyon floor, where the blood of the dead creatures gradually soaked back into the earth.
Yugi let out a low whistle. There had been stories told about this place ever since he had arrived in the Fault, and several people who had not listened to those stories had provided more concrete proof of their veracity by dying here. But he had never imagined the sheer voraciousness of the liha-kiri – the burrowing demons.
A woman came racing down from further up the ledge to stand before them. ‘They’re heading back, Yugi,’ she said breathlessly. ‘They’re retreating.’
There was a cheer from those assembled, and Yugi was pounded by companionable slaps on his shoulder and back. He grinned roguishly.
‘They’ll not be in quite such a hurry to get to the Fold now,’ he said. ‘Well done, all of you.’
He would allow them a few moments of self-congratulation before he would urge them to withdraw. They deserved that much, at least. They had struck the Weaver army a terrible blow today, but the Weavers would not be so reckless a second time. Despite the hundreds they had killed, they had not done more than dent the enemy’s numbers. The Weavers, whatever else they were, were not tacticians, and they had fallen into a trap that any experienced general would have avoided; but their insanity also made them unpredictable, and that was dangerous.
He caught Nomoru’s eye, the only person not celebrating, and knew that she was thinking the same as he was. They had won a small respite, but the real battle would be at the Fold. And it might very well be a battle they could not win.
THIRTY
Nuki’s eye had risen and set since the massacre of the Aberrants, and Iridima held court in the cloudy sky far to the west of the Fold. Kaiku and Tsata stood on the western bank of the Zan in the moon-shade of a thicket of tumisi trees that had somehow resisted the blight emanating from the nearby witchstone. The warm night was silent, but for a cool autumn breeze that stirred the leaves restlessly.
Across the river sat the bizarre building that dominated the flood plain, the strange grublike hump of banded metal that they had wondered about for weeks now. It seethed a foulsmelling, oily miasma, and it groaned and squeaked with the