FICTION: The Path of the Weaver

“The future,” Farseer Yolindo had told Siora, “is light refracted through a waystone: multifaceted, ephemeral, shimmering. Those who have never walked the Path of the Seer imagine that knowledge of the future is like knowledge of events on some remote exodite world, that to say ‘on some distant day such a thing will happen’ is no different than saying that today, far off on Myrandias, a child hatched a dragon from an egg. It is not so.”

One of the twins had rolled her eyes at this. Months together in the limited confines of the Iybraesil’s Bounty bred familiarity between the Farseer and the artisans, a familiarity that led the more practically minded Aeldari to dismiss these impromptu metaphysical lectures, especially when they began during a meal.

“I sense you don’t agree?” Yolindo had asked Alyl, who did not look up from her plate of fleshy leaves, fruits of their successful trade visit to the exodites.

“Tell us Yolindo,” Alyl had said, “why do you spend your breath in this way? Why water us with words that will not grow us? None here but you is a Seer- what good does this do?”

Siora had squirmed at the discourtesy. She had known there was no malice in Alyl’s words; the gardener was just giving voice to what many of them had been thinking since their delegation left Iybraesil, but it had rankled all the same. “Perhaps,” she had said, “the Farseer knows something we do not. Perhaps one of us is destined to be a Seer, and he is helping us to perfect the tapestry of a future self before it has begun.”

Yolindo took a long look at Siora, his grey face unreadable. “You haven’t been listening,” he said, then turned back to Alyl. “I am telling you this- I have been telling you these things- because I am about to ask you to do something difficult, and if we are to succeed, you need to understand what it means to have an eye on distant events. In less than a day, we will drop out of the webway to board a much larger hostile vessel. Some of us may not survive.”

In the silence that followed, Siora could feel the tumultuous emotions of the other artisans tumbling like scraps of bright cloth in a boiling wash basin. There were only ten of them, and none was a warrior. True, some like Siora, had once walked the path of Khaine, but those identities had been left behind long ago. They were artists and crafters now, shapers of stone, and wool and words, not killers. It was much to ask.

“There is a boy on that vessel,” Yolindo had continued, “a human boy, who has to live.”

***
                                                                        ~
Siora and the other guardians crowded into the wraithbone docking tunnel checking and rechecking the clips in their shuriken catapults. Ahead of them, the ovular mouth of the tunnel gripped the side of the enemy vessel, sealed over a set of external cargo doors clamped shut as though against an unwanted kiss. Behind her, Siora heard the farseer order Maleo to fire the brightlance, one of two platform-mounted support weapons that they had maneuvered into the tunnel ahead of their party. The harsh beauty of the blue-white beam reduced the doors to liquid metal; as it rolled away from the blast point to harden in bulbous clumps, Siora concentrated on slowing her breathing. 
 

When the flash of cold light subsided, she could see into the dim angular hold of the primitive vessel. A dozen or so humans in dark grey uniforms had erected a hasty barricade of cargo containers that bristled with the barrels of their rifles.

Farseer Yolindo’s voice came not through her helmet’s speakers, but as sense-knowledge, like the feeling of a person entering a room behind her, a presence formed of language. There are possible futures in which their officer can be reasoned with, so I will try. It will only take a moment to determine whether those paths remain open. 


As Yolindo grunted a few syllables of the mon-keigh’s guttural language, his mind provided a translation to Siora and her fellow guardians; “we do not wish to fight,” it said, “only to talk.” One of the humans raised his head and shoulders above the barricade and pointed his sidearm directly at Yolindo, a feeble act of defiance.
       

Siora had never seen a mon-keigh in the flesh before, and her reaction was a mixture of pity and disgust. The human was misshapen and clumsy, but similar enough in form to an aeldari to make Siora feel almost as though she were looking at the victim of some hideous genetic defect. Were one of her own people so twisted and broken by the threads of fate, it would be a mercy to snip him free of his physical body so that his soul might slip unencumbered into the freedom of the infinity circuit.
 

The human barked a response, translated wordlessly by the farseer. “If you don’t want to fight, then I suggest you return to your ship because if you take one more step, my boys will burn you down faster than you can say your own name, alien.”


The guardians felt Yolindo’s order to be still. “You are Lieutenant Dagrodine of the one hundred and twelfth Vostrin Militia,” he said, “assigned to provide security for this trade vessel. In the last few minutes, you have been trying unsuccessfully to contact your commanding officer over your vox network. Your junior officer has assured you that this is most probably due to a technical issue; it is not.”

   

Siora saw a look of uncertainty flutter across the mon-keigh’s crude face. “How could you know that? Are you jamming us?”
           

“No, we are not, but members of your own crew are. A mutiny has started below decks, and nothing can now be done to save your vessel. We are here to rescue one of your civilians: a child. Help us find the boy called Algernon Grease, and when you die you can do so knowing that your life has been traded for a noble purpose.”


The human’s side armed lowered slightly, his mouth a sneer of incredulity. “Let me get this straight. You expect me to believe that you are here to save little Algie Oil from mutineers? And you want me to- “The path has shut, Siora heard the Seer say.
        

A psychic projection of Yolindo more than twice size of the physical farseer appeared on top of the barricade and severed the officer’s pistol hand with an upwards slash of an enormous witchblade. The spectre reversed the weapon in a blur, cleaving through the officer’s torso and taking the top off the head of the man next to him. 
   
Before the horrified mon-keigh could squeeze the triggers of their primitive weapons, Yolindo’s psychic avatar had slain three more, while the eyes of others burst like overripe fruit and ran down their cheeks in rivulets of gore.
           
It was then that the screaming began. As the survivors broke, running for the door at the far end of the cargo bay, their bodies came apart in ribbons of bone and flesh when a single volley of shuriken fire whispered through them from behind. The micro thin razor disks made a soft whooshing noise as they passed through their targets, reminding Siora of sound threads made brushing against one another in her loom.
  
          
She was surprised to find that she was not without compassion for the mon-keigh. When she had worn the mask of the Dire Avenger, she had felt no compassion- no remorse, even when she had felled her Drukhari cousins in a bloody trade dispute on the exodite world of Ishariel. After the battle, she had moved about the killing field, placing the barrel of her weapon against the chests of wounded foes too proud to plead. She had felt nothing but satisfaction when she shredded their hearts, even knowing that their souls would be consumed by She Who Thirsts. Khaine was cruel, and those who walked his path were beyond compassion or doubt.
   
              
But now she was Siora the Weaver, and in each dismembered human form she saw a thread cut, a brief life rendered even briefer by the necessity to shape the tapestry of time. If the Asyurani of Craftworld Iybraesil, her people, were to survive, the interlocking threads of her civilization must be made strong, whatever the cost. Although she could pity these pathetic dead, it would never occur to her to spare a thousand of them, if their lives could be traded for even a one more day in the life of a daughter of Iybraesil who would not be born for ten generations. 

           
“Maleo the Stoneshaper and I will hold this point with the scatter laser platform,” the farseer said. “Kelnora’s team will search the crew quarters, while Siora, Jazan, and the twins sweep the maintenance passage between this deck and the one below. There are futures in which the child can be found in each of these places. When you have him, return here as quickly as you can.”

           
Without the presence of the farseer, the plan would have been madness. In an open fight, ten guardians could have no hope against the crew of this vessel so much larger than Iybraesil’s Bounty, but with the preternatural insight of Yolindo, there was a reasonable chance that they could extract the child quickly and without losses. Of course, it was also this same power of insight that had brought them to danger in the first place. Yolindo had seen a vision, a vision of an existential danger to Iybraesil itself, and now it fell on this handful of citizen soldiers to tease Yolindo’s design into the tapestry of fate.
   
          
Siora and her team passed into the dimly lit hall beyond the cargo hold and removed a circular panel in the floor, revealing a ladder that led to a maintenance passage running between decks. The farseer had mentally probed the immediate area and projected the sense-knowledge of the layout into their minds. They found that they could navigate the ship intuitively with this information, already knowing for example that the passageway at the bottom of the ladder was just tall enough for them to stand and not quite wide enough for two to walk abreast. The walls and ceiling were covered in pipes and visibility was limited by a haze of steam. Ahead and behind, other hallways branched off to the left and right at sharp angles. 
       
           
Siora gestured for Jazan to take the forward-most position. He had armed himself with a fusion gun that would prove deadly to any foe in these close quarters, and an elegant Aeldari sword, its folded steel rippling in the flickering fluorescents like starlight on water. The blade Jazan had selected was objectively less effective than a chainsword, but since taking up the path of the poet, many of Jazan’s decisions had become aesthetic rather than practical.
      
          
As he brushed passed Siora’s shoulder, he said, 

“Should I one day walk the seer’s path,
remind me, friends, of the bygone wrath
Of Jazan the poet, whose journey here

was touched with the uncertain fear

that comes of shadows cast by light
from that imperfect lantern: a Farseer’s sight.”

  
“Save it for the critics,” said Alyl. 
 
           
“Speak prose,” said her twin. “You’re no solitaire.” 
      
           
Ever since the twins had abandoned the path of the warrior for the path of the gardener, they had little tolerance for Jazan’s pretense.
           
           
Jazan sighed. “I liked you two better when you were Banshees,” he said. “At least then you had some fire in you. Your souls are shriveled, my stunted dears, with your dirty knees and gardening shears.”
 
           
The words were cutting, but all of them could sense through their innate psychic connections that there was no ill intention behind them; he was just talking to cover the disquiet that touched all of them in this strange place.
      
           
“Be silent,” Siora ordered, “all of you.” Although her military rank was no different than theirs, Iybraesili tradition held that authority fell upon the eldest female in circumstances where no other hierarchy took precedence. “I feel something.” 

           
They all did. Perhaps two decks below them, the guts of the freighter were quivering with arrhythmic palpitations that were most likely explosions. Siora had to remind herself that the ships of the mon-keigh were not living things, like aeldari vessels with their psychokinetic wraithbone nervous systems, and to therefore quell her empathetic response. These imperial ships could no more feel than could a stone.

           
“Do you hear that?” asked Siora. They listened together to tiny tremors in the coolant pipes carrying the sounds of screams and small arms fire from the decks below. “They have begun killing one another,” said Alyl. “Just as the Farseer said.”

           
“Perhaps it will make our task easier,” said her twin. “If they are busy fighting, they may not notice us.” 
          
“Perhaps,” Siora agreed. “But either way, we need to move.”

The team pushed on through the steamy gloom, occasionally pausing to let Jazan and Siora search a short side passage, while the twins covered the main hall in both directions with their shuriken pistols and chainswords at the ready. The sounds of fighting no longer needed the scaffolding of coolant pipes to find its way to the ears of the craftworlders. The screams and gunfire were now fully audible from the deck below, as brief and occasional flurries indicated that another group of crewmen was being overcome. The mutineers were clearly making their way towards the top deck where the bridge was likely to be located.
 
          
As Jazan and Siora were rejoining the twins again, an access panel moved in the floor of the main hallway just beyond pistol range. Jazan dropped to one knee with his fusion gun to give Siora a clean line of fire as she brought the wraithbone stock of her shuriken catapult to her shoulder and took aim. A little head of dark curls appeared first, followed by the rest of the boy as he squirmed up into the maintenance passage. He looked up to see the blue-green aeldari with their weapons pointed at him and froze.

           
Siora was wondering how to communicate their good intentions to the child, when a large hand, or more accurately a claw, emerged from the floor and another figure hoisted itself into the steam of the maintenance tunnel. This human was not like the others. Its skin was pale almost to the point of translucence, and it had a third arm that erupted from its abdomen and ended in tri-partite talons. The mutant grinned down at the boy with a mixture of amusement and predatory lust, unaware of the silent aeldari.
          
           
“‘ere you are moy li’’tle grease rat!” it said in a language that to Siora was series of incomprehensible wet grunts. “Old Gage has a special present for you.” 
   
           
As the creature unhinged its jaw unnaturally wide, Jazan fired once with the fusion gun and the mutant’s torso erupted in a liquid slurry that immediately evaporated into steam, filling the passage with a red haze. The legs and pelvis, still upright, wavered for a moment and then tipped backwards through the open access grate.

           
The boy continued to stare wide-eyed at the craftworlders, apparently unmoved by his brush with violent death. Then he said something that even Siora could recognize as a question by the upward inflection.
           “He wants to know if we’re the ‘Star-Children,’” said Jazan.
 “You speak their language?” she asked in surprise. 
    
“I was once Jazan the scholar.”
   
          
“Then tell him yes, we are these ‘Star-Children’ and we are here for him.” She assumed that the star children must be some mon-keigh myth, a nursery tale perhaps. She would tell the child anything to keep him calm and compliant.


Jazan’s translation did not have the desired result. As soon as the boy heard it, he threw himself back down through the access point and began to run.

“Crone’s curse!” Siora swore, as they leapt after him, dropping through the opening with easy grace. But despite the superior agility of the aeldari, he had a good lead and was already vanishing around a corner ahead of them.
       
         
As they chased the boy, they passed corpses of crewmen, some of which had been dismembered with spectacular gore, intestines spilling from deep abdominal cuts, and severed limbs scattered about like a child’s discarded toys. In places, someone had used the blood of the dead to paint a crude pictogram on the walls that looked to Siora like some fetal dragon curled in on itself in a half moon, its jagged teeth a promise of hungry violence. 
        
           
The boy could not evade them for long.  At the end of the next passageway, they cornered him at the edge of cargo shaft that fell away into the dark bowels of the ship. For half a moment, it actually looked like the boy might throw himself over the edge.

          
“In the Crone’s name child, do not jump! We are here to help you,” Jazan said in low gothic. The child turned to face them, but did not step away from the edge. His eyes were dry, and resolute for one so young. 

           
“I don’t want your help,” said the boy.
     
           
“You have no choice,” said Jazan. “There is no other way off this ship, except with us- and you could not survive here long. Please, step away from there.”
       
           
“The men down in maintenance told me about you,” said the boy. “They said that one day the Star Children would come to take away all of our pain, all of our loneliness. They said the children of the stars would make all of us a part of them, a part of one another, and that nobody would ever be alone again.”
        
           
“But surely that sounds like a good thing,” said Jazan.

           
“I like being alone sometimes,” said the boy. 

           
Jazan translated all of this for Siora, who said, “tell him that it is good he likes being alone. It will help him be brave when he needs to be, but we are only going to take him back to his home; the planet he calls Chiros.”
         
           
The boy seemed to relax a little when he heard this. “Where would I live though? Mummy died.”
          
           
“You will live at a school,” said Jazan, “for soldiers.” He reached up and removed his helmet, so the boy could see his features, not so different from those of a human. “Someday you will learn to be a great soldier yourself.”

           
“You are not the Star Children,” said the boy. He looked past Jazan at something behind the aeldari. “I think they are.”

           
Siora turned to see a pair of hunched creatures half again as large as the mutant that they killed in the access tunnel. Each of the monstrosities had four arms ending in predator’s talons and their skin was a mottled blue, covered in bits of bone-colored carapace. One of the creatures hissed a wet challenge that, to the aeldari, had the mental resonance of a psychic screech.
      
           
Jazan whipped his fusion gun around and fired, but the shot went wide as the creatures leapt forward faster than Siora would have thought possible. The twins rushed to meet the monsters with their chainswords humming, but their heroism was short lived. Alyl was beheaded by the first swipe of talons and then impaled on a five-fingered claw that went through her armored abdomen as though it were made of soft cheese. Her twin faired a little better, striking a blow that bit into the neck of the second creature but did not cut deeply enough to fell it. The nightmare of teeth and claws tore the twin like a wet rag as Siora opened fire with her shuriken catapult. The first volley of micro disks pinged musically off the creature’s carapace, but the second found the soft under-meat of the thing’s torso and eviscerated it in a spray of acid blood that sizzled where it fell on the deck.

The other creature had shaken off Alyl’s corpse and was charging Jazan, springing off the wall to avoid his defensive fire. A five-fingered claw back-handed the fusion gun out of the guardian’s grip, while another grabbed his sword arm at the wrist, immobilizing it. Instead of mauling his face and throat with its jaws, the creature grabbed Jazan with its other two arms and began forcing its long tentacle-like tongue down his throat. As the poet’s eyes were rolling back into his head, Siora snatched Alyl’s chainsword from where it had tumbled from her dead fingers and jammed its thrumming tip through the monster’s cheek down and out the side of its neck. The spray of acidic blood roused Jazan from his unconscious reverie with a howl as his cheek smoldered in agony. The burn was deep and horrible and Siora could see one of Jazan’s molars through the wound. He fell to his knees and retched purple mucus onto the floor. 
  

“Why didn’t it kill me?” He gasped between breaths. Siora wondered the same, but there was no time to contemplate it now.

She felt a small hand take hers, and looked down to see the human child gazing up at her. This time, she did not need Jazan to translate what he said. He was coming with them. 
       They paused only long enough for Jazan to recover his weapons while Siora knelt and mumbled a brief prayer to a dead goddess as she plucked the soul stones from the bodies of the twins. Then they began making their way as quickly as they could back towards the ladder that lead through the maintenance hall to the deck above, where Yolindo and Maleo were holding the cargo bay. 

           
“We have the child and are on our way back to you,” said Siora over the comm. “The twins are slain but safe.” A few heartbeats later, she felt Yolindo’s mind brush against her own as he searched out her location on the ship. In that moment of contact, she could sense his battle fury as he let loose another a psychic barrage while also mentally guiding the fire of the Scatter Laser. The war glory was on him, but he was exhausted both in mind and body.

           
“No,” he said over the comm. “We cannot hold long enough for you to return to us. You must reach the escape pods on the opposite side of the ship; they are not far from your current position. We will retreat to Iybraesil’s Bounty and disengage the docking clamps. Once we are underway, we can recover the lifeboat. Remember, Siora, the boy must live, whatever the cost.”
           
Siora wondered uncomfortably what futures the seer had just glimpsed that lead him to add that uncomfortable phrase.
“Plans have changed,” she told Jazan.
 
          
Just then, a rasping voice came over the ship-wide speakers. “This is Magus Albius Crumb; Rejoice my brothers and sisters! the ship is ours. Blessed be the Emperor’s Writhing Shadow! Blessed be those who do its will! But before we can begin our holy pilgrimage, we must resolve the matter of a few uninvited guests on deck seventeen. To those boarders I say, lay down your weapons and allow us to embrace you with the sacred kiss that will open your minds and hearts to the one and only and eternal truth of the universe. It matters not that you are xenos, for we are beyond the petty ignorance of the false emperor and his sad bigotry. Lay down your arms, accept our gift, and soon we will call you brother.”
           
           
“What does it mean?” Siora asked Jazan.
          
           
“It means we need to hurry,” said the poet. “We are almost out of time.”
     
           
The trio ran as fast as the boy could manage through the corpse ridden hallways to the aft cargo bay, where the farseer’s sense-knowledge told them the closest escape pods were located. Large piles of red shipping containers were stacked against the walls, and in the center of the room a servo crane with a single claw hung over a recently opened container emanating the same pungent stink as the creatures Siora had just killed. Otherwise, it was much like the room through which their boarding party had first accessed the vessel, but in one wall was a series of a half dozen alcoves with hatchways into life-pods set in launch tubes, emergency releases on the outside.
 
          
When they approached the lifeboats, Siora’s heart sank. Only a single pod remained, and it was small, only large enough for one occupant. They could hear dozens of boots pounding towards them in the hallway behind. When she locked eyes with Jazan over the boy’s small head, his smile was one of kindness and regret.
 “Death is not too steep a price, when blood is spent to pay for life.” He placed the tip of his slim sword almost tenderly against her throat. “Poets make better martyrs than do weavers my dear. Let me save you.” 
      
           
But she never gave him the chance. From her hip, she fired her shuriken catapult into Jazan’s face, slicing his skull and brain into slabs that unraveled as his body collapsed. Siora bent and removed the soulstone from his left breast. “He will be safe now,” she told the stunned boy in a language he did not speak. But he did not resist as she maneuvered him into the alcove containing the final pod and pulled the lever that opened the doors. “Keep these for me,” she said, handing the child all three of the precious waystones. He closed his small hands around them instinctively, although without understanding.

           
When their ship returned to Iybraesil, Jazan and the twins would join their ancestors in the infinity circuit. Behind her, Siora could hear the sounds of her own less fortunate future in the whining shrieks of the mutants and monsters boiling into the cargo bay. For her, there would be no ghostly afterlife among the spirits of her ancestors, only the eternal torments of consumption by She Who Thirsts, the demon who had killed the very gods themselves. But that was not what mattered. 
     As she listened to the escape pod’s engine ignite behind the safety shield, she knew she was beginning a tapestry that would take shape just as the farseer had said: the boy delivered to an Imperial world where he would attend a school for warriors; the child growing to a man who would become a great general; a general who would lose an important battle where another might have succeeded. That failure would keep Iybraesil safe for a few more days. The cost was not only the lives of millions of these humans, these tragic diminutive creatures whose very teeth she could smell rotting in their mouths, but her own soul as well. The guardian did not hesitate. The boy would live. Iybraesil would endure.