still as its frequency-sensitive glands were overloaded. The first shrilling had barely hit the floor before Tsata was on the second one, driving both his gutting-hooks into the back of the creature’s neck, slicing through the nexus-worm affixed there. The Aberrant shivered and went boneless, collapsing in a heap, borne down by Tsata’s weight.
Kaiku had seen the Tkiurathi fight enough times during the last few weeks, but his deadly grace never ceased to amaze her. He faced the Nexus now over the corpses of its shrillings, his bare left arm pumping blood over his golden, tattooed skin to run down the lower edge of his forearm and drip from his wrist.
There was a moment of hesitation. The Nexus was an unknown quantity. They had no idea of its capabilities.
Tsata’s good arm snapped out and sent his gutting-hook spinning through the air. The Nexus was either not fast enough to get out of the way or simply chose not to; either way, the blade buried in its body with a sickening impact, and its knees buckled. It fell silently to the floor.
The Tkiurathi did not waste any time. The cries of the other shrillings were getting nearer. He pulled the gutting-hook out of the Nexus as Kaiku ran up to him.
‘You’re bleeding,’ she said.
Tsata gave her one of his unexpected smiles. ‘I had noticed,’ he replied. Then he reached down and tore off the mask of the Nexus, and Kaiku caught her breath at what was uncovered.
Its face was dead white, cracked with thin purple capillaries, its expression as blank as the mask Tsata had thrown aside. The mouth was a thin slash, hanging open and toothless. Its eyes were large and pure black, reflecting Kaiku as she peered into them with an expression of horror.
But for all that, it was the face of a child.
Beneath the veined skin, a multitude of thin tendrils sewed over the forehead and across the sunken cheeks, terminating at the lips and ears and eyes and throat, dozens of tiny bumped lines radiating along the contours of the skull.
Tsata raised the Nexus’s head and pulled back its hood. Buried in the flesh of the scalp, sunken into the skin, was one of the nexus-worm females, a glistening black diamond shape. Its tail ran down the nape of the neck and disappeared between the shoulder blades, diving into the spine.
‘Now we know,’ Tsata said.
Kaiku sheathed her sword and squatted by the fallen thing, appalled to the point of disbelief. The Nexuses were human symbiotes, their will joined with the nexus-worm females who shared their body. The females in turn controlled the males, who controlled the Aberrants. The Weavers must have been capturing predators for years in the mountains, perhaps subduing them with their Masks before implanting them with worms, building the superstructure of their army. No civilised humans would fight for the Weavers, so they had built a force of killing beasts, monsters spawned by the blight that the Weavers themselves had created. And they controlled them with the Nexuses.
But children? They affixed the female worms to children? Was that the only way to achieve the necessary integration, to implant them early? Did that explain the freakish way they had developed?
Kaiku gritted her teeth in rage, feeling tears come to her eyes.
It had no tongue. The stump was still there.
They did this to children.
Tsata grabbed her arm. ‘There is no time to grieve for them, Kaiku,’ he said, bringing her to her feet and handing her the sack of explosives.
Then they were running again. The shrillings’ cries were coming from before and behind now. The tunnel ended in a three-way junction, cluttered with discarded metal components of some kind of half-built contraption. Tsata did not hesitate, choosing a tunnel and heading into it, apparently oblivious to the wound that was streaking blood down his arm. There was not so much noise from that direction, and the tunnel was uneven and rough. It bore the signs of a passage rarely used, and that meant it was less likely that anything would be coming down it. Torches became infrequent, so Tsata snatched one and carried it with him. Kaiku hung back, conscious of letting the flame near the dangerous burden she was carrying.
The sensation of Weaving crackled over her in a wave, a dark and malevolent interest sweeping the mine. Someone was looking for them. Kaiku carefully made them invisible to the seeker, blending their signatures into the Weave. It was one of the first things Cailin had