but they were pragmatic people, and not superstitious, and soon they realised what had happened here and understood that it was the perfect place for a town. Here, two warring factions had wiped each other out fighting over one another’s territory, and the remainder had scattered. The land was unclaimed, and so the scholars claimed it.
They did not know the extent of their fortune. Most new arrivals in the Fault did not last a week before some other force, already well entrenched, consumed them. But the great battle had emptied the land for a mile in every direction, and they managed to create a small community unhindered and unnoticed, hiding in their picturesque vale while they built crude fortifications and homes.
This was to have been their first Aestival Week in the Fault, and despite the hardships they felt like explorers on a new frontier, and they were glad.
Then, on the second night of Aestival Week, people started to disappear.
Lulled by their apparent safety, the revellers in Ashiki had allowed their security to become lax amid the celebrations. Four people were nowhere to be found by the morning. Their absence was hardly noted at first; when it was, it was thought that they had fallen asleep somewhere, drunk. By nightfall, their families and friends were concerned, but the rest of the town were not worried enough about a few missing people to curtail their festivities. In all probability they had simply gone off to find themselves a place to couple or to get a muchneeded break from the community at large. It was not unknown.
That night, six people disappeared. Some of them from their beds.
This time the town took notice. They sent out search parties to comb the surrounding area. When they returned, they were two men short.
Now, as night came on the fourth day of Aestival Week, nobody slept. The silent demons and spirits that were stealing them away had made them mortally afraid, and they clustered in their houses or hid behind their stockade walls and dreaded what the dawn might bring. They did not know that their demon had done its work, and departed now. It had all the victims it needed.
The entity that Kaiku knew as Asara brooded in a cave, still wearing the shape of Saran Ycthys Marul. Kaiku would not have recognised him, however. He was massive and swollen, his skin a webwork of angry red veins that hung loosely off him in folds as if all the elasticity had gone out of it. His strict Quraal clothes lay discarded at his side, next to a different set of clothes that he had stolen for the purpose of his new guise. The once-muscular body was grotesque and sagging now, spilling over his folded knees. His eyes were filmed with white and speckled with shards of dark iris which floated freely around in myopic orbs. The components of his body were breaking themselves down, reordering themselves in a genetic dance of incredible precision, changing bit by bit to ensure that all functions kept working while the miracle of metamorphosis occurred. He was altering his very structure, being reborn within his own skin.
The cave was dank and pitch-black, well hidden. By firelight, it would have been a small, pretty grotto, dominated by a shallow pool surrounded by stalagmites, its walls glinting with green and yellow mineral flecks. But he had lit no fire, for he needed no heat. He had chosen the cave for its inaccessibility, and had made sure it was well away from any settlement in the Fault. It reeked of a choking animal musk. The occupant had been killed and removed by Saran a few days ago, but the stink would serve to keep other animals away. He had barricaded the entrance with stones, to be sure.
In the days it would take him to change, he was vulnerable. His muscles had already wasted to the point where he could barely move. He was effectively blind and deaf. Alone in the dark, there was only the gradually slowing tide of his thoughts to keep him company, decelerating towards the hibernation state in which he would spend the bulk of his transformation.
What thoughts still swirled around in the bottom of his mind were bitter dregs.
Asara had taken on the body of Saran Ycthys Marul with entirely innocent intentions. It had been a necessary guise to facilitate her mission in Quraal. Under the rigidly patriarchal Theocracy, women were not allowed to move between provinces without special dispensation,