Scions Read online

  His right eye twitched. “No?”

  “Death belongs to the humble,” she whispered. “Surely a god has no need for it.”

  “You’ve grown sick, haven’t you? Fine. Let me squeal a bit before you open my veins.”

  “I’ll do whatever I please.”

  “I know what you want.”

  “You know nothing about me,” she said. “Not anymore. But I’m certain of what you want, because you’re a hound. A sad, starving hound. You talk about knowing my eyes, but I know yours. All you crave is control.”

  “No control in letting you gut me.”

  “You want to die on your terms,” she said, taking a step forward, drowning in his stench of marsh-rot and liquor and bile. “You let me believe I was in command, but you knew what scared me, didn’t you? Those days are gone.” Another step. “What could you possibly take away from me now? My life? Those I love? Everything burned away, but I remain. And now you’ll understand fear.”

  The tracker’s chest swelled with a spastic rhythm. “You watched Volna’s men march to the gallows. Don’t act like you’re not after blood, girl.”

  “Once I knew a girl who would’ve given anything to see you bleed,” she replied. “But she died long ago. You made sure of that.”

  Bones creaked along the tracker’s wrists. “What do you want, then?”

  “Far less than you.”

  “You can stomp us out. Right here, right now.”

  “I already have. But your death occurred in council rooms and referendums, not at the end of a blade.” She tapped the tracker’s chest with a crooked finger. “I want to know what has you running scared.”

  “Seems clear that I’ve had my time with running.”

  “You’ll never outrun living,” she said. “It’s nipping at your heels, isn’t it? It must be crushing you. Imagine how shattered your mind will be in a hundred years, a thousand…when you’ve seen every being rise and fall like stalks in a field, and the weight of eternity finally breaks you.” Laughter flared up in her, at once absurd and callous. Yet she held nothing back. “Oh, how I’ll weep for you.”

  “Shattered minds,” the tracker growled. “Look what the north did to you. You star-chasing, sand-blinded—”

  “What broke you?”

  The tracker tilted his head lower, glaring down at her with eyes that spoke of murder, of solitude among broken peaks and howling caverns.

  Of hate.

  “You’ve taken far too much of my time already,” Anna continued. “See him off to his den, Konrad.”

  Anna surveyed the white-clad brother, her gust of pride taking on a sharply sour note. Nothing pleasant was born of ignorance.

  “He knows where the others fled,” Konrad said. His eyes flicked up at her with haunting prescience, with the weight of passions he’d learned to bury, yet had not forgotten. The Breaking was a return to emptiness, but those with dark cravings often found a way to regain their appetite.

  “And what?” Anna’s gaze darted between the two men. “They have no refuge in this world or the next.”

  “A curious sentiment from the hunter herself,” the tracker mused. “How many of your precious scribes have put blades to the inquisitors’ necks? Seems you’re keen on dragging the beasts from their holes.”

  “For stability, not vengeance.” Some shard of her heart raged against that. There was no denying that Anna had done everything in her power to withdraw them from the currents of the world and its wars, urging transcendence over domination in every forum to which she’d been summoned. But nobody could ignore the parallel truth: The orders were pillars of the new regimes in Rzolka and abroad, a mystical flurry of arms and blades resembling the hundred-limbed guardians in Kojadi murals, ready to sever the head of whatever serpents rose against a fragile peace. And they—she—had proven that in ample measure. “When I said that we have nothing to discuss, I meant it.”

  “Don’t remember what a few bitter men can do?”

  Anna’s jaw ached. “I recall the cost of compliance far too well.”

  “They have networks, Anna,” Konrad said grimly. “These are the architects. The ones that kept us awake at night. If they could do that to Golyna, right under our—”

  “They won’t,” Anna snapped.

  “How can you be so sure?”

  “The eyes of the world witnessed their crimes,” she said. “It acts as one gaze, Konrad, and it sees everything. Soon every hollow will have its shadows burned away.”

  The tracker snorted. “Must’ve been a blind spot everywhere I went.”

  “You know how a fire rages, Anna,” Konrad whispered. “If one ember remains…”

  “And if only you knew how the flames were spreading,” the tracker said.

  “Fear had its time,” Anna said, narrowing her eyes at Konrad. “We left it all behind and nothing will drag us back. Especially not something so pathetic.” She regarded the tracker with bare pity, looking him up and down as one might examine a lame horse. “Go back to your shadows, and never return to this place. There’s mercy in my heart, but I speak for none of my followers, nor the things they’ll do once they seize you. Nothing will trouble my mind if they seal you in a place of unending pain. Silence would be my protest.” She gathered up the pleats of her robe and moved toward the chamber door, bowing her head as she went.

  “Then I suppose the girl will find you,” the tracker growled.

  Anna’s foot hovered above the carpet. “What?”

  “The girl,” he said. “The Starsent.”

  Her bemusement was raw and swift, burning away any trace of disbelief as it hardened to rage. “Don’t call her that.”

  “Struck a nerve, have I?”

  She turned to face the tracker. “You’re lying.”

  “Up in arms over shadows then, aren’t you?” His laugh was sickly, hoarse. “But as you want it, panna. No more barks from this old hound. Even if you’ll spend your nights counting slats on the ceiling, thinking all the while, ‘what if?’”

  Anna looked to Konrad, but the man’s unease rivaled her own. Plenty of nights had already come and passed with the girl weighing heavily upon her mind, threatening to strangle her in dreams of blighted cities and fallow fields. “Where is she?”

  “You know my price,” the tracker said.

  “Yet I trust none of your words.”

  The tracker gave a wheezing sigh. “All good things in time, eh?” He twisted his neck to the side, filling the chamber with dull cracking. “You get your pup and I get the cuts I’m owed. Swear on that.”

  Anna studied the man’s jaundiced eyes under a creeping shroud of nausea. It was a safer deal than any she’d ever forged, but it still carried an omen of lessons ignored and promises obliterated. She suspected that its suffering might somehow eclipse whatever the girl would bring to bear when she rose from the shadows. The cruelty of a wicked man, after all, had no end, no final flourish. And—

  The Starsent.

  Even that title was enough to tighten Anna’s throat.

  “Send a missive to the captain in the Kowak chapter,” Anna said to Konrad, still gazing into the dark clouds of the tracker’s eyes. “Tell him I’ll need their best.”

  Chapter 2

  In the womb of the Halshaf monastery, reborn under every mica-strewn nebula and passage of the shattered moon, Anna had grown to perceive herself as the world rather than its wanderer. In fact, she’d found kinship in the world. She’d fixed it in her mind as some macrocosm of what she was, some seed that had germinated before time itself. No matter how often its shoots and saplings were cut down by the swings of a woodman’s ax, it had held fast to its roots within the soil, waiting for the mercy of spring to venture forth once more. But even that had been a concept that she’d wishfully forced upon the world.

  It was a child’s fantasy, a projection of f
orlorn hopes.

  Soaring high above the patchwork fields and forests of central Rzolka, Anna saw—seemingly for the first time—the truth of her enduring seed. It had been torn from the earth, scorched and cracked, scattered to the winds like the ashes of cities she’d once known. Between masses of wispy ashen clouds, the lowlands stretched out in blackened meadows, in freckled expanses of cut and cleared logging sites, in great tracts of empty huts and halls that jutted from the mires as rotting bones. Most of the sacred groves had been abandoned to overgrowth, or worse, trampled and desecrated by the heretics that had flooded the region in Volna’s absence.

  Roads that had once been knotted with caravans now appeared as desolate, withering veins, slashed here and there by rusting kator tracks. Furnaces bled their black fumes on the horizon.

  Perhaps it had always been this way, Anna considered. Perhaps the higher she ascended, the further back she drew from her insect ignorance, the more the truth of the world revealed itself. But mutation was a constant truth, for better or worse. There were no marking stones for the grave of the Rzolka she’d known—only the soot-stained, oily shrine of what it had become.

  “What’s that glint in your eyes, girl?” the tracker asked. Seated directly across from Anna on a quilted bench, his hands iron-bound and tucked snugly into his lap, it was nearly impossible to avoid his chilling stare. “Not what it was, is it?”

  “Your comrades did their work tirelessly,” she replied, sparing a momentary glance at his reflection in the window before gazing outward once more.

  “My kind? Wasn’t a grain of cartel salt in Rzolka before the war.”

  “Of course,” she said. “Mass killings were the lesser evil, I’m sure.”

  “You laugh, but time’ll tell. Mark my word on that. Not even the Moskos managed to sell our flesh at a whore’s rate, Anna. Doesn’t take a diviner to see the way of it, figure out why the gods want nothing to do with us. Ever learn the word forsaken, girl?”

  Anna met the tracker’s rigid gaze. “I’m no girl.”

  “The Southern Death’s more fitting, eh?”

  She looked away.

  “Titles, titles,” the tracker cackled. “Such a sickness in the world for titles. The runts in Malchym would slit their mothers’ throats for a fitting one.”

  “You share the disease of pride,” Anna said.

  The tracker clicked through his teeth and jingled his iron links, needling Anna’s mind with barbs of panic, of latent violence. Narrowed eyes seemed to drink in her fear. “Keep looking for river flowers, girl. This entire world is sickness.”

  At midday, the nerash wheeled over the outskirts of Kowak with a sickening lurch. It sliced through stormy billows, offering vignettes of a black, turbulent sea and a sprawling city that gathered like froth at its shores. Twenty of the order’s scribes had deployed there over the past year, but their runes—those that sprouted trees, cleansed wells, reamed in brush fires—hadn’t changed the face of the land much at all.

  Anna held onto rattling straps near her head as they dove into the downpour. Her stomach knotted like it had in the capsules of the kales, but the sensation soon receded in a backdrop of bewilderment, of screeching wing flaps and crackling eardrums and oscillating iron panels. She wrinkled her nose at the sudden burst of sparksalt fumes; they seemed to bleed from dying turbines, wafting into the cabin and stinging her throat in seconds.

  Beneath her the forests swelled, rising up in a stark, threatening mass through screens of mist and smoke. A vast mesa—formed from compacted soil and timber, it seemed—drifted into view in the adjacent clearing. It grew nearer and nearer, fringed by towering pine masts that sharpened to gust-raked canopies, then to quilts of silvery needles, then to ravens perched on gnarled branches and—

  The nerash’s skids struck the mesa with a teeth-jolting thump.

  Anna’s head jerked forward, bobbing with every hop and crunch over the ragged landing platform. She shut her eyes as the nerashif cranked back on his lever, digging the skid’s talons into the damp earth and its evergreen skeleton.

  They twisted and skittered over the soil, filling the cabin with horrible crunching each time the talons caught a buried log and tore across its bark. Finally there was a clap, a groan from deep within the beast, a hiss as the nerash’s cylinders stretched and dampened their halt. The craft rocked back on its haunches, calming the blackness behind Anna’s lids, and grew still.

  Its turbines slowed with a pup’s whine.

  “Not dead yet,” the tracker said, equally surprised and amused. “Could hardly tell it was an easterner at the helm.”

  Anna opened her eyes and worked to undo her harness.

  “Never been to Kowak, have you?”

  She shook her head. “Let’s go.”

  “Swore I’d only visit this pit again when we’d drowned it in ashes,” he said. “Then again, you’d know more about that than I would.”

  “Be silent and hear me well,” Anna snapped, snuffing out the tracker’s rising giggle. “If you truly desire an escape from your marking, then you’ll come to heel. From this moment onward, you’ll resist your animal instincts. Not a foul word, not an errant gesture. I have no qualms with casting you back into this world. You are nothing.”

  She undid the final buckle in their newfound quiet.

  * * * *

  Between chest-stirring cracks of thunder, silence found its deepest notch. That murderous silence, so thick that it leeched the breaths from one’s lungs, hung palpably over the inner districts of Kowak. As palpably as the odors of kerosene and rotting bodies, which now lay in heaps at the bottoms of flooded mass graves. It had been impossible to ignore them; they flanked the last stretch of the kator’s tracks like pale, bloated flowerbeds.

  “There was a riot last night,” a ruddy-cheeked militia boy had explained while leading Anna through the moot hall’s smoky corridors. “We told them to go home. But that sow’s been milked now, hasn’t it?”

  Anna could not bring herself to look at the tracker’s cloaked face. To behold his glee, to know whatever vindicated thoughts he might exclaim with wild eyes.

  Waiting in the Chamber of Antlers, she found herself surveying the clusters of empty brown bottles strewn across the table. Their stench, biting and tinged with the same rot that had clung to the drifters who staggered through Bylka, assailed her with every swell of the hearth’s dry heat. Amber liquid had pooled into thick, glossy splotches upon the sacred wood of the eastern groves. Decrees and writs and missives were plastered together in stained piles. And high up on timber walls, illumined by grimy lamps that had gathered mounds of shriveled gray gnats, were the dust-covered and club-cracked skulls of the city’s earliest pinemen and seers.

  This was the seat of Rzolka’s eastern power. This was where infallible men had decided the lives and deaths of those with soil beneath their nails.

  Anna studied the bitterness creeping through her chest.

  The doors creaked open to reveal a mass of grim-faced, heavyset men shambling toward them. They offered little more than nods or grumbles of clan-speak to the flesh-branded young women stationed in the threshold. Jenis was among them, muttering to his captains in a sour, guarded tone, but it was difficult to distinguish the remaining southerners. They all wore the strange pastiche of traditional vestments and northern luxuries that had flooded the region in the past year or so: quilted doublets, the bristly skins of bears and wolves, dozens of layered amulets and trinkets that gleamed with emeralds, amber, Hazani rose gold. Some even had their faces stitched and studded with the turquoise droplets from Nahora’s coast, which had been one of Kowak’s most demanded tributes for bringing aid to their shores.

  Upon noticing the tracker, however, their jangling and murmuring fell away. Konrad’s old habit of omission was hard to break, it seemed.

  “Well,” the tracker said, lifting his muddied feet onto the table,
“I’m glad you lot haven’t been too busy to tuck into your suppers.” His laugh was barely stifled. Then his eyes fell upon Jenis and there was an absence of mirth, of base composure. He gazed at the commander with the hatred of a wronged man.

  “What is this?” a gray-bearded man spat. “Brought the korpa here to string him up, have we?”

  A bald, scowling captain stepped forward. “Honor would be all mine.”

  “Not yet,” Anna said. “Sit. There are matters to discuss.”

  “Konrad said we had a new trail,” Jenis said, shouldering his way to the head of the gathering. His scars were dark and mottled in the lamplight, flashing bright pink as a serving girl moved past them with a dribbling candle and a bushel of bread.

  The tracker smoothed out his shirt. “In the flesh.”

  “Best tell me you’re toying with us,” Jenis growled at Anna. “This city’s already stomped on enough slugs. One more’s nothing to us.”

  “I’ll explain,” Anna said.

  “Explain what?” Jenis asked. “Break his marking. We’ll cut him slow and proper.”

  Anna rose from her chair and swept her gaze across the Rzolkan ranks, making no attempt to uncoil the knot in her brow. “Sit down.”

  The men shared glances and curled lips, shifting anxiously until they found the courage to wander to their armchairs. Several of them, including Jenis, instinctively lifted corked bottles from beneath the table and passed them around the crescent. There was a long stretch of squeaking, fizzling, chugging, all underscored by the hum of sleeping violence with which Anna had grown intimately familiar.

  She could almost feel their liquor burning through ulcerous guts, dulling their minds further with every sip and gulp…. “I don’t care what’s gone on between you,” she said, her stare cutting a wide arc around the table. “This day will be immune from your squabbling.” Nobody heeded her words as promptly as the tracker, who was quick to straighten his spine and disarm his glare.