waiting until it was too late. Why had she held back so long? Why had a woman so shrewd, so commanding, allowed matters to get so out of hand?
Kaiku caught herself. Where was all this coming from?
But the answer had presented itself almost as soon as she posed the question. She suspected Cailin. She had suspected her from the beginning, from their very first meeting, when she had mistrusted her Sister’s apparently altruistic invitation to join the Red Order. So much time had passed, and she had almost forgotten, almost become used to Cailin’s ways; but nothing had changed, not really.
It was her encounter with Asara that had reminded her, the deep and fundamental deception that she had been subjected to. Cailin knew who Saran really was, and yet she had kept the secret, even though she must have suspected Kaiku’s feelings for him. It had been Asara that had watched her for two years in the guise of her handmaiden, waiting for Kaiku to manifest her kana. Asara who had brought her to Cailin. Now Asara who had given five years of her life to glean clues buried by thousands of years of history all over the Near World.
Yet no matter what Tsata thought, Asara was not working for the greater good; she was selfishness personified. Whatever she was up to, it was for her good and hers alone. She and Cailin, locked in a conspiracy of two, hidden behind veils of misdirection and always, always working towards something. Something that Kaiku had not been let in on.
Machinations, wheels turning within wheels. She was not like Mishani. She sickened of deceit.
They were forced to cross the shaft again as they descended, for the tunnel branches that they chose looped around and spat them back out into the open. They endured a passage across an immeasurable void on a thin metal bridge anchored by spidery struts to the surrounding rock. On the way, they came so close to one of the curiously beautiful waterfalls that Kaiku might have reached out and touched it if she were not unreasonably afraid that her interference in the flow might trigger some sort of alarm.
When they regained the safety of the tunnels, and the massive weight of the stone closed in around them once more, they began to come across the long-expected signs of life. This tunnel had been adapted from its original form, which was probably too uneven or obstructive to be viable as a corridor, and it was braced with a metal framework. The torches that burned here were of the usual kind, not the strange contraptions belching inflammable gas that were present in the enormous dark of the shaft.
It was the golneri. The smell of cooking meat and the sound of muttering voices alerted the intruders. They instinctively drew back into shadow, listening to the jabber of the golneri’s incomprehensible dialect. Kaiku wondered where they had come from, how they had come to be so enslaved by the Weavers. A pygmy tribe, hidden in the depths of the Tchamil Mountains, subjugated all those years ago when the first Weavers’ baptism of slaughter was over and they disappeared into the uncharted peaks of Saramyr? Certainly, it was not beyond possibility. Between her home in the Forest of Yuna and the Newlands to the east, the mountain range was three hundred miles wide. From Riri on the southern edge to the northern coast which abutted them, they stretched for over eight hundred miles, dividing Saramyr into west and east with only two major passes along that whole length. There were unexplored areas of the Tchamil Mountains so vast that an entire civilisation could have thrived there and nobody in Saramyr would be the wiser. Even after more than a thousand years of settlement, the land was simply bigger than they could swell to fill it; and in those empty places the spirits still held sway, and resented the encroachment of humankind.
She would probably never know. Whatever the golneri were or had been, now they were merely appendages to the Weavers, to feed them and care of them when their masters’ insanity took hold. Kaiku tried to pity them, but she had precious little pity left, and she saved it for her own kind.
They crept onward until the tunnel became a small cavern, hot and smoky and redolent with the scent of crisping flesh. The tunnels were by no means smooth and straight, their sides a mass of folds and natural alcoves, and the