at them like piranhas, nibbling from every direction at once, feinting and tugging, unravelling a knot here, picking loose a thread there, seeking a way through into the Weavers’ core where they could begin to do real, physical damage. Cailin darted and jabbed, dancing from fibre to fibre and leaving phantom echoes of her presence to confuse and delay the enemy. She cut threads, excised knots, opened pathways for her brethren to exploit.
The Weavers desperately repaired the rents that the Sisters opened, batting them away, but it was hopeless. The Sisters worked as if they were one: an effortless communication existed between them that allowed them to co-ordinate themselves perfectly. They were aware of each and every ally in the battle, where they were and what they were doing. Several of them would mount attacks on unassailable positions so that others could quietly work at boring through less protected spots while the Weavers were distracted. Others harried the enemy by confusing them with ephemeral vibrations while their brethren knotted nets to catch the Weavers out.
Cailin evaded the grasping tendrils of the Weavers’ counterattacks with disdainful ease, slipping away from them like an eel. She struck at them fearlessly: she had killed one of their number before, and these were no comparison to him. Yet she spared a concern for her Sisters, whose experience was less than hers. She would defend them from the Weavers’ attacks, spinning barriers of confusion or clots of entanglement to slow them if the enemy assault should chance to come too near.
The collapse, when it came, was total. Cailin had been carefully weakening sections of the Weave, so carefully that the enemy was not even aware of her, and at her command the Sisters hit those sections all at once. The Weave gave way before them, opening gaping maws in the Weavers’ defences. The Sisters swarmed through the Weavers’ sundered barricades, sewing into the fabric of their bodies, ripping apart the bonds that held them together. The Weavers shrieked as they burst into flame, a half-dozen new pyres lighting simultaneously across the battlefield to join the blaze that was consuming sections of the valley floor.
But the Sisters’ advantage of surprise had been used up now. At least two of the dead Weavers had had the foresight to send calls of distress across the Weave, flinging threads that were too scattered to intercept. A silent plea for help to their brothers who fought elsewhere in the Fold, and a warning.
The swell of outrage was almost palpable, a fury among the remaining Weavers that there should exist anything to challenge their authority in the Weave. Fury, and fear. For they remembered the final cry of the Weave-lord Vyrrch before he died, five years ago and more:
Beware! Beware! For women play the Weave!
Threads snaked out across the invisible realm, seeking, seeking. And while men and women and Aberrants both human and animal fought and struggled and died all along the valley, battle was joined in a place beyond their senses. The Red Order had revealed itself at last.
On the western side of the Fold, the stockade wall groaned under the weight of the corpses piled against it.
It was hard to breathe for the stench of burnt and burning meat. Nomoru’s eyes teared as she aimed her rifle; she blinked several times and finally gave up. The air was a fog of black smoke and flakes of carbonised skin. The Aberrants’ attempts to create ramps of their own dead had been stalled for a time when the folk of the Fold had begun pouring oil over them and setting them alight, but the pause had not lasted for long. The creatures resumed their climbing, squealing and howling as they were immolated. Some of the corpseheaps were high enough for the invaders to get over the wall now; they burst through in flames and fell off the walkway to smoulder on the ground below, or came flailing onto the swords of the Libera Dramach. But their sheer relentlessness was keeping the defenders occupied, and the oil was not getting to the fires where it was needed. Blazes were already dying, and some Aberrants were beginning to surmount the wall without setting themselves alight in the process.
Further down the line, several dozen creatures had managed to overwhelm some of the men and escape into the streets of the Fold before more swords arrived to seal the gap, and other breaches were happening more and more frequently. The Aberrant army seemed to have