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.At least, Avun thought, the famine had provided plenty of victims for those Weavers who liked to kill or rape.He tried not to waste his trained servants when he could help it, preferring to use peasants or townsfolk culled from the Poor Quarter, but the necessity of navigating through this bedlam to attend to the whims of the Weavers had claimed the lives of many of them.It seemed that Kakre’s decree of protection extended only to Avun, and anyone else was fair game.The Sun Chamber had once been beautiful.The roof was a dome of faded gold and green, with great petal-shaped windows following its contours down from the flamboyant boss at its centre.It was rare enough to see glass in Saramyr windows anyway, but these were magnificent creations of many different colours whose designs had caught the light of Nuki’s eye in days past and shone down onto the enormous circular mosaic on the floor.Now the light was weak and grim and flat, and what it fell on made Avun wish for darkness.Kakre had taken the Sun Chamber for his own, and decorated it with the products of his craft.In the three galleries of wood and gold, where in ancient times councils had stood to attend to a speaker or watch a performance on the floor below, malformed and disturbing shapes hid in the gloom.Avun tried not to think about them.Here was where Kakre came to display some of the appalling art he made in his chambers many levels below.Every creation here was sheathed in skin taken from men and women and beasts while they were still alive, arranged as if in audience.They had been moved around since last time Avun visited, and he unconsciously sought out the figures that had stuck most in his mind: the hunched figure whose left side was stitched from the skin of a man and whose right side from a woman; the winged being whose feathers were made of tanned and leathery sinew; the shrieking man from whose gaping mouth another face peered.There were animals and birds too, and other things not humanoid, frames overlaid with patchwork epidermis of many shades to form strange geometric shapes, or forms so repellent to the eye that they could not be classified.The accumulation of torture and pain and terror this room represented was more than even a man as cold as Avun could bear to consider.The faint shrieks of the tormented Weavers in nearby rooms only served to disconcert him further.The Weave-lord Kakre was there, of course.He seemed to have lapsed into some sort of trance, standing immobile just off-centre of the mosaic that covered the floor.Avun approached quietly, watching him for any sudden movements.He had learned to be careful around the Weave-lord of late.Kakre’s mental health had taken a dangerous slide in recent months, and Avun never quite knew where he stood with his master these days.He studied the hunched figure before him.Like all his kind, the Weave-lord was clad in heavy, ragged robes sewn haphazardly together from all manner of materials – including hide and skin, in Kakre’s case – and hung with ornaments: knucklebone strings and twists of hair and the like.The voluminous cowl partially covered the stretched, ghastly corpse-face that was his True Mask; the Mask concealed the even fouler visage beneath.Avun had never seen Kakre’s real face, and never wished to.‘Kakre?’ he prompted.The Weaver started a little and then slowly turned his dead face to the Lord Protector.‘You have come,’ he wheezed, a faintly disorientated and dreamlike tone to his voice.Avun wondered whether he had accidentally interrupted Kakre’s Weaving.‘You asked to see me,’ Avun pointed out.Kakre paused for a little too long, then shook himself and recovered from whatever befuddlement had been upon him.‘I did,’ he said, more decisively.‘The feya-kori are ready once again.What is your advice?’Avun regarded Kakre with his drowsy eyes.His permanent expression of disinterest belied a mind of uncommon ruth-lessless.He did not look the part of the most important non-Weaver in Axekami, with his gaunt frame and balding pate, but appearances could deceive
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Tematy
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Christine Wood [Life Plan 01] A Life Plan Without You (epub)
Cheryl McIntyre [Infinitely Infinitely (epub)
Clair Delaney [Coral 01] Coral (epub)
Christine Cody [Bloodlands 01 Bloodlands (epub)
Christina Ross [Unleash Me, A Unleash Me, Vol 3 (epub)
Christine Flynn [The Hunt for Once Upon a Christmas Eve (epub
Christian Fletcher [The Left Left on the Brink (epub)
Christopher G Nuttall [Royal The Royal Sorceress (epub)
Zelazny, Roger The Second Chronicles of Amber 05 Prince of Chaos