Schisms Read online

  Anna fired again.

  When the dark cloud vanished, the shooter’s upper half was strewn down the corridor and dripping from the ceiling.

  She spun away, sensing the tremors in her hands and the hard knot in her throat, and started down the stairwell. Three years of violence hadn’t made killing any more pleasurable, nor even easier, but decidedly more common. In fact, time had only made her more aware of how warriors were shaped: The nausea and terror remained, but everything was so perfunctory, done as habitually as breathing or chewing. Not that she had the luxury of being revolted by that fact. As she descended she unscrewed the weapon’s empty shaving pouches and replaced them with fresh bulbs.

  Footsteps echoed up from the staircase’s depths. Yatrin appeared a moment later, his face a mass of tension and pockmarks in the light of an alcove’s candle. He had a black beard—dense, verging on wild—that nearly hid the tight line of his mouth. It wasn’t that Anna forgot his youth at times; to the contrary, she often remembered it. Especially when he was afraid.

  “Did I hear it?” he whispered in river-tongue.

  Anna nodded. “We’ll go in pairs.”

  “They could’ve had you, you know.”

  “But they didn’t.” Anna stepped past him, lingering in his shadow. “Dragging him out is too much of a risk.”

  “You didn’t even tell me.”

  “We have our tasks,” she hissed. “Listen to what I’m telling you now.”

  Yatrin seemed to be peering within himself, searching for some mote of calmness in the eye of the storm, as Anna had taught him so long ago. His brow relaxed. “Kill, then?”

  She held Tensic’s face in her mind, envisioning the creases set by a long and cruel life, the distance in his eyes that was surely born from stillborn babes and dead lovers. “Kill.”

  Anna picked her way through the hall and its huddled travelers, flashing hard stares at Khara and Baqir as they carved wood by the doorway. She rarely had to say more to them. As the pair stood and slipped out into the darkness, two bulky shawls among many, Anna searched the room: blankets, ceramic cups, pipes, rolled burlap covers, dark and clear bodies—

  Ramyi.

  The girl was a thin, motionless shape in the corner of the room, a purple silk cushion tucked under her head and black hair pooling at her back. Her shawl rose and fell with the rhythm of a dreamer’s breaths.

  Anna stalked toward her as Yatrin did his work behind the partition—the soft opening of skin, the gurgling of open veins, the muted final words buried behind a killer’s hand. She stood over the girl and prodded her with a mud-spattered boot. “Get up,” she hissed in flatspeak.

  Ramyi stirred and rolled over with a scowl. “What is it?”

  “Come outside.” Anna glanced sidelong at Yatrin, who’d emerged from behind the curtain, wiping a short blade with the inner fold of his shawl. “I said, get up.”

  “I’m not some hound,” Ramyi whispered. She lay still, staring up at Anna with clenched hands, but finally shifted to stand.

  “You need to listen,” Anna said, leading the girl to the door and holding it open as a gust of cool wind rolled down from the hills. She waited till Yatrin and Ramyi had both passed, then closed it gently. Sound carried easily in the valley. “I address you as you behave, you know. Some things have to be earned.”

  Ramyi’s jaw tightened, ready to spill all the bitter words she’d learned in the streets of Nur Kalimed, but the anger drained from her eyes at once. She was staring past Anna, more curious than concerned.

  That was a warning in itself.

  Anna whirled around, catching a fleeting glimpse of the shadows darting between market lanes. She spotted Khara and Baqir near the road, their shawls lit by firelight and dancing in the breeze, walking with the gait of soldiers who mistook silence for safety.

  “Call,” Anna said to Ramyi. “Call!”

  “What?” Ramyi whispered.

  “Am’dras!” Yatrin shouted. Heads swiveled toward them from all corners of the artisan flats, drinking up the eastern tongue with a mix of fear and awe, but secrecy was now a wasted effort.

  The two soldiers dropped to their stomachs.

  The blast was transient, little more than a flash amid fire pits and a blossom of dark smoke. The air itself burst, fanning dust up and out in a tight wave, scattering caravan attendants, sending screams into the night. Shrapnel whistled overhead and smoldered in pockets of sand.

  Ramyi stared at the wisps of smoke, huffing, fumbling for words. “So close.”

  Anna’s hearing trickled back as Yatrin rushed past her. She seized Ramyi by the arm, pulled her into a low run toward Khara and Baqir. “That was their first strike.”

  More pops sounded, muffled but prominent, no longer frightening her as they had years before. She watched the bakers and clothiers and spicemen scrambling from the market, awash in dust and soot, and beyond them, killers flooding out of walled compounds and the cover of awnings. Six, perhaps seven, all bearing ruji and blades.

  Anna froze, fixing Ramyi in place at the edge of the haze. She’d expected more.

  A moment later, she found it.

  Black shapes squirmed on the crest of the surrounding hills. Rusted plates reflected moonlight in jagged stains, gave shape to dozens of churning cogs and cylinders and an enormous firing tube. Even the southern nebulae were soon blotted out, smothered by the fumes bleeding from smokestacks and iron grates. Twitching, awkward legs, strung together with iron cables to resemble a puppeteer’s monstrous spider, rose out of nothingness and crashed down on the nearby hillside, drilling through a granite outcropping, fountaining dirt over a terraced opium sprawl.

  The machine’s cannon wobbled on its suspension cables, coming to rest as a ruj’s payload bit into the low wall near Ramyi. More blasts tore through the sand around Khara’s head.

  Ramyi gazed wide-eyed at the machine. “It’s going to fire.”

  “Keep moving.” Anna pulled her along, even as she stared at the cannon herself. “Yatrin, Khara, Baqir. Do you understand?” The order was practical, not personal. “Do you?”

  “Yes!”

  “Calm down,” Anna said. “You need to still your hands.”

  Yatrin cut to the right, dashing past a dying peddler and into the cover of a tailor’s shop. It was a low, sturdy box, their best hope of surviving the machine’s volley. He called to Khara and Baqir, but the blasts were constant now, drowning out his words.

  Another curtain of smoke and sand brushed past the flats, and when it cleared Anna saw the two fighters kneeling by a ruined brick wall, their ruji assembled and loaded. She pulled Ramyi toward the tailor’s shop, whistling as she ran. Before she trained with Nahoran fighters, she hadn’t known the force of proper whistling. It was loud enough to pierce utter chaos.

  Khara lifted her head to the sound. She slapped Baqir on the arm, pointing.

  Anna sprinted into the shop’s cover, which was cool and dark and deafening with the sound of boots scraping over packed earth. She spotted Yatrin by the slit of the far window, peering out with his yuzel in hand, calmly selecting his target in that haunting eastern way. Another blast thudded against Yatrin’s cover, flooding the room with a flash of white light and sparks.

  Ramyi was hunkering down behind a crooked wooden table, digging through her pack for supplies she’d memorized a thousand times in training. She fumbled and spilled a set of vials into the shadows around her knees.

  Anna knelt beside Ramyi as the other two fighters dashed through the door, ruji smoking and ripped shawls exposing ceramic panels. “Be still, or we’ll die.” Glancing at the window slit’s firing position, she saw Baqir changing places with Yatrin.

  “I can’t help it,” Ramyi said.

  “Focus on me.” Anna waited for Yatrin to scramble behind the table before taking the girl’s hand. It had gone cold with panic. “Remember th
e moment before your birth.” It was an old Kojadi meditation, a paradoxical challenge to conjure vapidness, but it worked. She watched Ramyi’s irises settle back into the notch of her lids.

  Yatrin angled toward Ramyi, unwound his neck scarf and lifted his chin, exposing a smooth canvas. It had been marked countless times, but Ramyi’s cuts were accurate: She hadn’t marred a single fighter’s throat, and her runes faded as delicately as tracks in the southern woods.

  When she was calm.

  “There are too many,” Khara called out from the firing position near Baqir’s. Her voice was as measured as ever, but the urgency of her shots—rapid, snapping between targets as she leaned in and out of iron-flecked cover—betrayed her concerns.

  “Focus on the essence,” Anna said. Ramyi’s blade lingered over Yatrin’s throat with a wavering edge. Two volleys clipped the edge of Baqir’s cover, showering them with plumes of pulverized clay and mud, filling the shadows with the odor of scorched dust. “Nothing but the essence, Ramyi. Become it.” While counseling the girl, Anna slid her own pack off her shoulders and withdrew the two ruj halves from their webbing. One trigger mechanism, locked in place for sixteen clicks of a cog’s teeth, and one barrel, heat-tempered with webweave. “Don’t be afraid.” She slotted the barrel in its housing, threaded the components together, and slid the sixteen-pouch cartridge into the central chamber. An explosive burst near the door as Anna disengaged the bolt lock and shouldered the weapon, training her eyes on the blast zone and its gray wisps. “We’ll make it out of here.”

  Ramyi’s first cut was uncertain, yet manageable. Anna could feel it in the hayat’s bleed-off, the way Yatrin’s crescent configuration swarmed toward the open wound with hungry curiosity. In her periphery she watched the girl’s hands sweep with increasing confidence, arcing over the windpipe and past the major arteries, sweeping up to join the lines at their apex. Beyond the doorway, shadows flitted past her ruj’s barrel and Anna fired once, twice, three times, raking a still-smoldering brick oven and patches of blackened sand with her shots but failing to connect.

  Yatrin’s neck gleamed with hayat’s pale luminescence.

  “It’s done.” Ramyi’s smiling lips were an icy blue shimmer in its light.

  “You’re not finished,” Anna said, firing once more as a fighter dashed from wall to wall. “Add the bridge.” Every second of pride gritted her teeth further. For all of Anna’s meditation and prolific rune revelations, she hadn’t been able to mimic—or merely parse—some of the designs Ramyi had gained while simply toying with awareness. It was a skillful waste. “Add it now!”

  That startled the girl to action. Her blade slid back into the fresh protection rune, channeling hayat down parallel tracks to form a branching addition. As she carved the third line, a pair of fighters burst out of a nearby compound’s entryway and unleashed a coordinated volley, their shots chipping away the doorframe and drilling into Yatrin’s back. Plates across his ceramic vest exploded in white puffs.

  Yatrin’s cry was low, buried. His flesh sizzled as it ejected the iron shavings, re-formed, and grew glossy with a sheen of sweat.

  Rage flickered through Anna. It was a shadow of her former self, of the days before she’d tamed her mind, but forceful nonetheless. She let off three shots and eviscerated one shooter’s knees, forearm, and skull, picking apart his body before putting a fourth payload squarely into his partner’s jaw. The dust ceded to a sprawl of stringy limbs and blood. Khara’s desperation was resonating in her, fed by the fact that Ramyi’s best markings endured for an hour. Terror and haste would only bleed their efficiency.

  “There!” Ramyi jerked her blade away, revealing the bridging rune: long, intricate rows, bisecting sweeps, clusters of dotted gouges, and an alien labyrinth encircling the entire design. It was beyond comprehension, stranger than anything Anna had ever glimpsed, and beyond memorization. Every bridge was unique and folded space itself, requiring meditation so thorough that there could be no divide between Ramyi and the tethering site. Not if they wanted to emerge intact.

  Anna whistled again, this time competing with a tortured, rumbling scream from the market. Giants, she realized, wondering just how far they’d go to destroy her. She heard timber cracking and clay panels shattering and duzen-swollen feet stomping closer as Baqir slid behind the table.

  Khara joined them when the air grew hot and charged, heralding the first volley from the hilltop’s machine. Both of the Nahorans’ faces were streaked with blood, dotted with wasp bites of shrapnel and scalding grit. She and Baqir knelt with their hands on Yatrin’s shoulders, shutting their eyes to the shop’s smoke-laden dust and shouts in river-tongue.

  When Yatrin’s runes began to pulse, oscillating between cobalt and ivory, Anna gripped Khara and Ramyi’s shoulders. She glared at Ramyi, who then held them to join the circle in tandem with the cannon’s tinny howl.

  Everything crystallized for an instant. Anna had no body, no singular mind, no presence beyond mere awareness of the shop as it imploded and vaporized in a hail of liquefied iron pellets.

  She was there and not there. She was everywhere.

  An unbroken ring consumed her awareness.

  In the darkness of the overhang, which materialized as though she’d been plucked from a nightmare and thrust back into wakefulness, frigid wind kissed her face. Her fingers vibrated as they vented the energy that had, in some sense, killed her.

  Baqir was lying on his side and coughing up bile. Khara knelt by his side, gently caressing his back and its chipped ceramic covering. Yatrin’s rune had taken most of the load, it seemed, judging by the stillness with which he gazed at Anna, and the delicate folding of his hands across his lap. Ramyi’s breaths echoed through the chamber, raspy and broken. Bits of the shop’s debris—mostly wool scraps and measuring string—were swept away on the breeze.

  Rising from her knee, Anna slid off her pack and retrieved the scroll case. There was no guarantee it was worth anything, much less reliable in her hunt, but it was her only chance for progress amid ruins. A seed of sorts.

  “Just breathe.” Khara was still touching Baqir, but she’d shifted her attention to the mirage-like flickering of the rear wall’s basalt. “Anna, it’s open again.”

  Far in the distance, beyond an expanse of rock and silver dunes, the valley twinkled with blossoms of white light. Distorted aftershocks arrived with groans and playful flurries of sand.

  She turned away and stared at the Nest’s warped opening. There was no salvation for those trapped in a war they hadn’t engineered nor fed—only sacrifice.

  Anna gripped the scroll case till her knuckles ached. You have to sprout, little seed.

  Chapter 2

  The Nest was never somber, never sleeping. There was no nightfall to settle it and no sunrise to rouse it and besides, there was far too much to be done. For every hour that passed in the true world, the Nest had another rotation of fighters deploying or returning, another lesson for foundlings, another intercepted communiqué being dissected in the tacticians’ chambers. Everybody labored and hauled themselves to their bunks on their own schedule, but nobody truly rested.

  At least Anna didn’t.

  She’d received High Mother Jalesa’s request for a meeting just after slipping into her bath and dabbing a cloth at her scrapes. Less than an hour after their return, judging by the thick glob of sand still bleeding downward in her hourglass, and certainly before the breakers had any hope of parsing their recovered pattern. Even so, she hurried to dress and join the others in the lower chambers.

  On her way she passed a group of fresh arrivals: foundlings that had been pulled from the cinders near Tas Alim’s monastery. They marveled at the corridors and caverns just as Anna had once done, taking in the ethereal warp and weft of it all, gaping at how the hayat’s blue-white strands pulsed like arteries within obsidian tiles and walls and vaulted ceilings. Their guide was Mother Basarak, whose smile
never seemed to falter.

  “It was all his work,” Basarak said in flatspeak, running a hand over marbled wall panels. Her eyes were as bright as the children’s. “Shem loves you so much that he built this place, all for you.”

  They giggled and murmured to one another, giving Anna pause in the adjacent doorway. Seeing children be children was everything she’d hoped for, but after all the misery they’d endured, she couldn’t fathom it. Some burdens never truly faded. She ascribed some of it to Basarak’s charisma, of course—the Mother was patient and loving, perhaps on account of her youth. Youth. Anna’s thoughts snagged on that word, on the irony that Basarak had as many years as her, if not more. But Basarak was young. She’d notched more years on her belt, but had lived through far less.

  Anna heard the world-worn age in the children’s laughter, and it gnawed at her stomach.

  After descending a stairwell with breathing steps and traversing a garden with a reflective pool on its ceiling, the latter swirling with Halshaf adjutants and scribes in meditative circles, she slid aside the meeting chamber’s screen and entered.

  Most of the vital faces were already seated at a circular table with a needle-thin coil as its base, hands wrapped around glass bulbs filled with steaming mint tea. The hayat walls in this room were darker, as though some molten material in the linking corridors had cooled and coalesced into droplets behind sealed doors. Lamps glowed atop the bookshelves encircling the chamber.

  “You don’t need to wait for me,” Anna said as she settled onto her cushion. Nobody replied. They all just watched her with tight lips and hunched shoulders. She could sense unspoken sentiments as intrinsically as the sigils beneath their skin. “You have our attention, High Mother.”