Schisms Page 3

  “We’ve exchanged some words,” High Mother Jalesa said. Everyone appeared guilty, but she was the most skilled at hiding it. “If I’d known how long your excursion took, I wouldn’t have—”

  “I’m here, so speak freely.”

  Mesar, one of the Alakeph veterans from Malijad, cleared his throat. “Have you seen the combat reports from last cycle?”

  Sixteen dead, fifty-two wounded. “Fewer and fewer with every engagement,” Anna said.

  “True enough,” Mesar replied, “but it’s not purely a game of numbers.”

  Anna frowned. “Do you think their deaths brighten my dreams?”

  “That’s not what I meant, morza.”

  “Volna can afford to bleed,” Jenis rasped. He was an aging man, scarred from forehead to chest, and his six years in Kowak’s first ranks added some gravity to his insights. “Means nothing if we hit a column and slit every last throat. Next dawn, twice as many come marching for us. Like locusts.”

  Anna drew a slow breath, trying to fight the first bristles of anger in her jaw. “What do you think our aim is? Mere slaughter?” Some of the Alakeph captains and Nahoran defectors exchanged glances, but none dared to speak. Her voice was broken but biting, and her gaze tucked the fighters’ tails between their legs. “High Mother Jalesa, how many foundlings have we sheltered in the last cycle alone? How many settlements did we evacuate?”

  “Bandages merely hide an infection,” Mesar said. “Your vision is admirable, morza, but you tasked us with handling matters of violence. We must be practical.”

  “If casualties are your concern,” Anna said in cutting tones, “perhaps you should restructure your tactics.”

  Jenis grunted, shifting his legs on the cushion with an audible crack. “Nothing’s free.”

  “Ask the foundlings if the trade was fair,” she whispered. “Better yet, ask the brothers who died for them.”

  “It’s simply not sustainable,” Mesar said.

  Five or six captains mumbled in agreement, pretending to stir their tea or smooth the folds of their robes to avoid meeting Anna’s eyes.

  “Chasing ghosts doesn’t help,” Jenis said.

  Anna bit the lining of her cheeks. “If we sever the head, the body withers.”

  A wheezing laugh, short but easily discerned from the murmurs, brought silence. Gideon Mosharan, the old Nahoran breaker, crinkled his white brow and meshed his crooked fingers on the tabletop. “A beast with a thousand heads. Who’s to say which directs its hands?”

  True or not, it lent doubt where plenty already existed. Anna had seen their faces turning grimmer, if not more jaded, with every strike she carried out in the tracker’s footsteps. Nobody doubted the stillness of her mind, or the way she sublimated her fears as force, but they recognized the vengeance in her, an ever-burning coal at the center of her being. It enslaved her.

  “There are other avenues to consider,” the High Mother said.

  Anna scoffed. “Such as?”

  “Golyna’s proposal was never retracted.”

  “And Krev Aznaril turned down our offer yesterday,” Mesar cut in. “And Krev Sul’afen and Krev Hefasha shipped their best columns to Malchym just before that. Three families in one cycle, turned or swept from the bargaining mat. And not for lack of salt or bars, but from fear. There’s enormous danger in placing hands upon the backs of the damned.”

  “I trained Suf’afen’s frontline sukry,” Jenis cackled. “No sweat shed. I know how to break ’em.”

  “That’s not the point,” Mesar said. “We need a standing army’s spine to brace ourselves.”

  “Kowak isn’t off the table, either,” the High Mother added.

  Mesar’s eyes hardened as he lifted his cup with both hands. “They’re butchers.”

  “We won’t be mercenaries for any state,” Anna snapped.

  “I would never ask that of you,” Jalesa replied evenly. “Our message is this: If we proceed as we have been, extinction is certain.”

  “So what do you suggest?” Anna’s ribs were shrinking. She throbbed with an anger she couldn’t dissipate outside of meditation. Condemnation for things she couldn’t control—that was the trigger, she’d come to understand. Her mind was still alight with the valley’s firefly blasts.

  “We’re squandering a precious resource,” Mesar said.

  Jalesa nodded. “It’s a matter of necessity.”

  “I’m not a child,” Anna said. “Speak plainly, would you?”

  “You’ve seen how the Scarred Ones fight,” Mesar said. It was a bitter term among the fighting units, but at least it bore none of Anna’s involvement, no obvious watermark from a creator. For many of the Alakeph’s newer blades, facing them had become a brutal rite of passage. “Eventually we’ll need to match them, Anna.”

  She’d felt their sentiments looming like a thunderhead, waiting to burst when her restraint was at its weakest. Dragging the feeling mind to the surface was the surest way to discredit the truths she held in her heart. “If you think they’re unbeatable, why waste time under a doomed banner?” She dug her fingernails into the back of her hand until she broke the skin. “They’re not champions. They’re mistakes.”

  “And they can’t be undone.” The High Mother’s stare was haggard, pleading. “You can sway the present. You possess a weapon that none of us can fathom.”

  Anna gazed into the amber depths of her tea. “But you want to control it all the same.”

  “We want to live,” Adanna, one of the younger Halshaf hall-mothers, added with a twitching stare.

  Mesar pushed his tea aside. “If we won’t apply markings, then we’ll need to put our weight behind Nahora. Not as mercenaries, but as allies.”

  “I’ve seen Nahora’s heart,” Anna said. “We will not stand by them.”

  “How can you be so stubborn?” Adanna asked.

  Anna thrust a finger across the table. “If you live in fear, you’ll die in it too.” In the ensuing silence she realized how her voice had run amok, stunted though it was. She softened her brow and knitted her fingers on the tabletop, drowning in the Nest’s ever-present hum to center herself. Recently her rage had been a stitch woven into every action, every thought, every memory; it was something everybody sensed, including herself. But that which could be observed could be beaten. “Death has never been able to smother death—that’s the reality we need to accept. When we marched against them, we shared a vision: No one else would be marked. Whether you’ve sat here since the beginning or are still breaking in your boots, you know our path.”

  “All paths lead somewhere,” the High Mother warned.

  “Somewhere sounds like the Grove, right about now,” Jenis said. “Two hundred bodies and not a scratch of sand under our control.” He reached under the table, produced a bulbous flask of arak, and poured the clear liquid into his tea. “Ideals are the playthings of the dead.”

  “Your ideal is slaughter,” Anna said. Words rusted in the back of her throat, vying for attention with memories of burning-eyed men and blood mist darkening the air and blades being forced out of unbroken flesh. “Even if you turn against them, my principles endure. We’ll keep trickling our operatives into their ranks, but nothing more. I’m not a hound you can bring to heel.” She stood, bristling at the military leaders’ emergent groans and folded arms and overplayed masks of frustration. “If anybody has words of value, I’ll be in my quarters. This chamber is plagued by echoes.”

  * * * *

  Even in solitude, stillness was an absent luxury. Her meditation was broken, constantly warped by visions of skin flapping in the breeze and a hawkeyed woman. Every time she lost her focus she opened her eyes to a towering mirror, but even that ritual was becoming tainted, reminding her of the scared, wrathful girl she’d once been. She practiced in loose robes to perceive herself: long, tangled, sun-bleached hair, scar-matted forear
ms, a rigid jaw sheltering a lifetime of secrets. When her mental fragments became too grotesque, she wandered into a small, dimly-lit study and delved into Kojadi tomes, somehow fueling her own loathing with the discrepancy between written wisdom and her inner state. Her garden of mindfulness, sprouted from Bora’s seed, had been growing blighted and fallow.

  You were granted gifts, she thought while running her fingers along leather spines. How many breaths were stolen to bring you here?

  Some breaths were still bleeding away, fed by the hayat she’d infused in their bones. Breaths like Shem’s, flowing into the fabric of this place, somehow both its lifeblood and output. In the earliest days she’d meditated by his body for hours at a time, but it demanded detachment. Nothing about the boy’s condition could be reckoned with in a lesser state of mind; she’d attempted it enough times to know its trauma.

  Her finger hovered over a tome about reconciling with death, but—

  “Anna.” Yatrin’s voice cut through meditative trances and jumbled, vapid thoughts alike, rooting her to the present and its ocher candlelight.

  She turned to find his silhouette framed in the doorway. “How are you feeling?” Her flatspeak was more colloquial than ever, on account of its use as a shared tongue between them, but she’d never grown truly comfortable using it. She got the sense that Yatrin hadn’t, either.

  “I’ll rest soon,” Yatrin replied, stepping into her chambers with a rushed bow. Without his plated vest he was narrower, as lithe as the leopards stalking Nahora’s steppes, but no less intimidating. His conditioning and awareness separated him from the brutes Anna had once served. “The others already are. The herbmen are nearly done with Baqir.”

  Anna moved to her desk, rifling through ribbon-bound missives she’d yet to scan. “And Ramyi?”

  “With the sisters. She’s shaken, but by tomorrow she ought to be settled.”

  Anna was silent as she uncoiled the first ribbon. Two growing fields and a quarry settlement cleansed. Recommend evacuation of third territory. She set the scroll down, rubbing her temples. “Did they send you to talk some sense into me?”

  “Sense?” Yatrin raised a brow. “The breakers came looking for you. Something about the coordinates you picked up.”

  “That’s all they said?”

  “All they’ll nestle in my ears,” Yatrin said. He examined the library’s crowded shelves with a distant gaze, as though mired in thoughts he didn’t care to entertain. “And there was one other thing, though I’m not sure if you’ll appreciate it.”

  The inevitable didn’t sting as much as she thought. “It was a plant?”

  Yatrin shook his head. “It’s authentic. Nahoran, that is.”

  Relief and unease swelled through her at once. “So they must’ve broken it.” Their intelligence operatives retained their knowledge of the state’s encryption patterns with frightening accuracy, if Anna’s experience with their defectors was any indication.

  “Not quite.” Yatrin clasped his hands behind his back and stared at the scarlet rug. “Foreign units rely on their own systems. No two are identical, really. Most of this cell’s fighters were lost after Malijad, not to mention the Scorch Campaign. You might recall the missives.”

  Foreign agents. Yatrin’s forthcoming revelation was already festering in her mind by the time he spoke. It wasn’t difficult to recall the red-ink obituary of 407 Nahoran fighters they’d intercepted last spring. Most of the casualties had been from their Borzaq special units and a subsection of their Foreign Guard battalion: Viczera Company, led by—

  “Konrad’s unit uses the system,” Yatrin said grimly.

  It was jarring to think that the Rzolkan was still alive, considering how Anna’s parting glimpses of him had been stained by massacre and a crumbling city. At times he haunted her dreams or appeared as a phantom shell squirming over Yatrin, which the Nahoran surely acknowledged and despised as deeply as she did. But the past cycles had brought scattered reports of Konrad’s life in Golyna, occasionally mentioning his hillside villa or honor ceremonies at the onset of winter. He was a demigod now, beyond criticism and justice.

  “Burn it,” Anna said, turning away and settling her eyes on a row of Moraharem suttas. “I’m sure it was a plant.”

  “The state—” Yatrin caught himself, grimacing. “Nahora has no reason to lure us.”

  “He had no reason to leave a message written in something we can’t even read,” Anna spat.

  “Volna would be even blinder to it than us,” Yatrin said. “I would caution you against destroying it too soon, Anna.”

  She considered the Nahoran’s plea, wondering if and how such information would ever be useful to them. There was no comfort in the idea of Konrad materializing within the Nest, nor in chasing what was likely another brick in an endless wall of misinformation.

  But the desperate crinkle in Yatrin’s eyes plucked her hidden strings.

  “Tell the breakers to start an archive entry,” she said. “Anything we recover should be matched against that, in case we start to fill in a set. We can try to break their constructs with enough samples.” Countless hours in the company of breakers and planners had made the business of war easier to track and operate, but everything had its price. Blossoming logic had a habit of bleeding empathy, of withering the living cost of every decision.

  “Understood,” Yatrin said. He inclined his head and took in a long breath, his shoulders rounding with tension. “Are we still ruling out making contact?”

  Anna’s jaw ached under the pressure. “So you did speak to them.”

  “Not directly,” he explained, sheepish with the curl of his fingers and the craning of his neck. “The barracks are just chattering, but truth slumbers within prattle. I’ve no doubts about their loyalty, but even adorers can grow disillusioned in time.” He looked away. “Some of the units said Mesar’s vying for leadership. In tactics, anyway.”

  “He’s certainly trying,” Anna whispered.

  “Don’t dwell on it,” Yatrin said. “None of this could exist without you.”

  “Of course not. So I know how it feels, watching them try to sharpen its claws.”

  “Everybody wants what’s best.”

  That miserable fact burned in the notch of her sternum. “Nobody knows what’s best,” Anna countered, tucking the pleats of her robe closer and tightening the sash. “I’ll meet with the breakers before we deploy Ramyi’s unit. In the meantime, tell Baqir to rest. He has a deployment coming up.”

  The Nahoran nodded, giving way to shadows that appeared as black smudges beneath his brow. His stance was always dignified, vigilant, unshakeable.

  At times she began to form an image of how she imagined he truly was, without hallucinations of a bright-eyed man and jade necklaces playing through her mind. She was crafting it as he stood before her, an avatar of deference, waiting for her dismissal despite claiming the breaths of a hundred men. His pride never drowned him. Perhaps he was immune to lures of glory and self-worship, and perhaps even wickedness.

  Perhaps.

  Anna found herself studying his lips, wondering how coarse they were after so many days of smoke and sand. How it might feel to touch them. “Sleep with a hawk’s lids, Yatrin.”

  He bowed and departed. Alone again, she could not still her mind. War was an exercise in constant thinking, pitting memories against predictions and assigning fates to those within a banner’s shade. There was no time for affection and no place for attachment.

  That night she awoke to darkness, her skin clammy and lungs convulsing, holding the maelstrom center of a violet flower in her mind’s eye.

  Chapter 3

  Silence spoke in different ways, and in the breakers’ den, it meant that nothing had been cracked. Drafting boards were littered with unfurled scrolls, all of them crowded with painted pins and strings, tracking patterns that seemed to shift every cycle. Missi
ves bearing the names of Volna captains and field wardens and marked fighters formed mosaics on the den’s high walls, which were scoured and rearranged by Azibahli breakers employing all six limbs. Veteran breakers like Anim, who’d studied under Gideon in the crucible of the Weave Wars, sat in the clutches of grotesque magnification apparatuses, staring through countless rings of focusing glass and poring over letters’ tails in the hopes of understanding their writers’ intentions. Every shelf was crowded with khat stalks and vials of distilled efadri sap, and not merely for decoration: When the breakers’ eyes snapped up from inspecting scrolls, they were bloodshot, dilated to fat tar droplets.

  And yet, between ruffling papers and mumbled northern greetings, the den was silent.

  Gideon Mosharan was hobbling along the railing of the second level, smiling absently at the Azibahli breakers that skittered across the ceiling’s darkness and clicked at one another in bottomless cylindrical pits. He carried his years well, as any respectable Nahoran did, but his levity reflected true acceptance of death, of the gradual creep toward nothingness.

  Everyone reconciled with the end in different ways, Anna supposed.

  “Staying swift on your feet?” Gideon asked, pausing mid-step and shuffling to face Anna.

  His faint, careless smile unnerved her. “Certainly staying busy,” she said. “I need to see everything you have about the coordinates.”

  “Everything.” Gideon wandered to the railing and draped his hands over the edge, watching breakers and runners move in quiet swirls below. “Such a curious word for so little.”

  Anna moved closer and took in a scent like fermenting apricots. “You took your jabs at the High Mother’s table.”

  “Oh, come now,” Gideon sighed. “Kuzalem’s fur, ruffled by a helpless old man?”

  Anna bristled at the title. Once it had been Kuzashur, the Southern Star, a reminder of her worth in a horrifying world. Now it had been corrupted to both a rallying cry and a curse, a hushed fear on the lips of thousands who’d never glimpsed her face.

  Kuzalem, the Southern Death.