Schisms Page 4

  “What did your sulking bear tell you?” Gideon continued.

  “Is it true, what he said about the Foreign Guard?”

  “Not so keen to speak about it, is she?” he asked, smirking. “Viczera Company’s stain is all over it.”

  “We should be able to parse it.” Anna glowered at the old breaker. “Your men covered the passes during the spring. They tracked everything.”

  “Well.” Gideon chuckled and shrugged. “Everything Nahora was willing to show.”

  “Your job is to unearth everything it wasn’t.”

  “Gaze with fresh eyes.” Gideon swept a vein-wreathed hand over the den. “We do our work tirelessly, Kuzalem, as do the butchers of Volna. Each dawn brings a new harbinger of their savagery. What stands to be gained from the death of a single malefactor? One whose very name has been lost to the southern winds?”

  “One aim shouldn’t usurp another,” Anna snapped. “It doesn’t need to.”

  Gideon’s lips spread into a slow, indulgent smile. “Precisely. We seek to pick apart the tapestries of our enemies, not dissect the strings.”

  “Codes are all about strings.”

  “Ah, but you’ve not seen the tapestry.” Gideon shrugged once more. “Some of the runners from the Ganhara region said your unit was set upon by the Toymaker.” He paused, letting the stain of the name from past strikes sink in. “They’re amassing more men, it seems.”

  “One of their top lieutenants,” Anna said. “In a downpour, all waiting hands are fed equally.”

  “Aphorisms do little to calm a storm, no?”

  “We each have our methods.”

  “Very true, very true.” He grinned. “I just wonder where you’ll find the last stone on your path.”

  Anna considered the breaker’s words, the gnawing possibility that she was the unreasonable echo in their chambers. But there was no mechanism of the thinking mind to divorce suffering from a need for vengeance. “What would it take to break their code?”

  “Venom may only be remedied with the serpent itself,” he replied. “If your heart still bears the words you spoke to our Council, then there’s little to be done.”

  Whether or not he told the truth was irrelevant. She’d stopped seeking constant honesty from the breaker long ago—that sort of thing was antithetical to a trade built upon lies and deceit. And all hearts, in some form or another, were susceptible to twisting reality to meet their own ends. Her council’s end was Nahora.

  The looming serpent.

  “Perhaps it’s beyond my charge,” the breaker continued, “but with so much sand in one’s grasp, one could stand to shed a few granules.”

  “Clear away your riddles.”

  “The girl, Ramyi,” he said. “Her tuition has suffered as this affair drags on it, has it not?”

  “The sisters are good to her.”

  “Yet you’ve acted as her immutable presence. A guardian of sorts. In Nahora, no child goes without a consistent shepherd.”

  “I’ve done my best with her,” Anna said. “Her lessons aren’t a priority.”

  “Can she even name the sixteen regions encompassing her birthplace?” the breaker asked. “I understand your burden, Kuzalem, but expand your aperture.” He smiled. “Let me act as her watcher. I’ve guided countless children from cribs to columns.”

  She tightened her jaw and glanced away. She’d done her best for the girl, but her best wasn’t good enough.

  “Uz’kafilim!” a voice croaked from the lower pits. Chitin shimmered and flashed in pools of lantern light, giving form to a rush of spastic movement. A dozen Azibahli legs clambered up the walls and raced over grooved channels in the floor. The command radiated outward in waves, passed through clicking mandibles and hoarse northern tongues and fluted pipes amid the rafters, circling until an Azibahl breaker with mangled forelimbs bolted along the railing and towered over Gideon.

  “Venerable Gideon Mosharan,” the Azibahl droned, equally as impassive as his brethren. “The safe house north of Sadh Nur Amah is in peril.”

  Anna’s attention danced between the old breaker and the Azibahl, who rested on its haunches like a hound waiting for a thrown stick. Strikes on soft targets like monasteries weren’t shocking anymore. In fact, they were so commonplace that the only response was to designate an evacuation period. But there was urgency in the den’s scrambling. “Mesar’s leading a recovery force tomorrow at nightfall.”

  Gideon regarded her with a raised brow, but spoke to the breaker. “By which hesh?”

  “The latest missive demands haste,” the Azibahl explained. “Ruin will be brought by midday.”

  “That’s in three hours,” Anna whispered. “We don’t have a tunnel.”

  “It’s never too late to form an arrangement,” Gideon said.

  The term arrangement brought its own thorns. Sadh Nur Amah was well within striking range of Nahora’s garrisons, but granting their troops dominion over a Halshaf cell was unthinkable. Most of the cell would surely choose death before subjugation.

  She always had.

  “Send runners to Mesar and Jenis,” Anna said to the Azibahl. “Tell them to take twenty men each and assemble in the warrens.” She stared at the creature’s nebula of beady eyes, waiting, but it seemed that the old breaker’s approval superseded her own. “Go!”

  The Azibahl sank onto its forelimbs and raced up a nearby column, vanishing into blackness near the ceiling’s array of linking passages. Its departure did little to soothe the panic of the den below.

  “Which scribe will cut their teeth out there?” Gideon asked, more placid than ever.

  “We won’t need one,” Anna hissed.

  “Good practice for your little cub, maybe.”

  “Send two of your breakers for the ridges,” Anna replied. “Make sure they’re skilled with mirrors.” She strode away, quickening her pace to the clap of breakers’ boots.

  Gideon’s laugh stilled her before she reached the iron staircase. “All this effort to wade through the current,” he called. “Why do you forsake the bridge, Kuzalem?”

  Better a bridge than their lives.

  * * * *

  Nobody in the warrens dared to breathe as Anna whispered in Shem’s ear. Her words were sweet and soft, coaxing hayat from the depths of the child’s translucent flesh, delivered in the shelter of cupped hands and candlelight. “Remember how the sand felt under your toes, Shem. Do you remember it?”

  His lids fluttered, and the fractal edges of his tunnel rune pulsed as though they were ashes being raked in a dying fire. His fingertips remained still on the stone slab. Beneath the skin his heart rippled in drawn-out, creeping beats, pumping no more than three times in the span of a minute. Slower was better. Slower meant more accurate, in matters of memory.

  “There was a gully to the north,” she whispered, examining the distorted mirror of another tunnel as it formed on the far wall. There were currently fifteen others, all vivid and flawless in their clarity, offering glimpses of jagged wadis and burned-out Kojadi fortresses and storm-battered passes in the floodlands. A living gallery of Shem’s memories. “This was where you cut down a Gosuri regiment, wasn’t it? You did it for me.”

  Grains of ocher sand sharpened in the nascent portal.

  She glanced at the silent ranks of scribes surrounding the dais and its slab; they had been reduced to bowed heads and bead-wrapped palms in the darkness, lit only by lanterns floating upon the warren’s pools. Their collective meditation seemed to embolden Shem’s abilities, or, at the very least, sustain them with some vital fuel. Focus upon me well. When I die, this will be your charge. Or so she hoped. There was no telling whether Shem would ever respond to the suggestions of another, or if he could understand her mortality. Ignorance was the poison of obsession, after all.

  At her back, murmuring among themselves and shifting with ceram
ic clacks, were the fighters assigned to Ramyi’s deployment. Drowning out their noise was simple, unlike doubt. Doubt that the girl was ready, that the fighters knew her pettiness well enough to command her, that they would return at all.

  Perhaps ignorance was the poison of desperation, rather.

  “It’s beautiful,” Anna said, returning her focus to the tunnel. It was widening, no longer rippling but settling into a varnished pane, inseparable from a spyglass’s lens in its sharpness. “Remember it with every breath, Shem.”

  The tunnel’s edges glistened with crystalline fractals, then fell still.

  Anna kissed the boy’s forehead, stood, and faced Ramyi’s detachment. “Shara,” she ordered, sweeping her arm toward the tunnel.

  The fighters jogged ahead of the girl in tight ranks, faces streaked with scorchsap and shoulders saddled with bulbous rucksacks. One by one they slipped through the boundary and staggered forward, jarred by the shearing and stretching of flesh, then assumed firing positions around the entry point. Withering sunlight painted the fighters’ beige cloaks, making them as inconspicuous as the distant gorges and their mounds of stone.

  Ramyi’s steps slowed as she approached the entrance, forcing her team to glance back and ensure she hadn’t been mutilated by the crossing. But the tunnel’s gift of vision was skewed, and revealed only desert where there had once been worship and shadows. The girl wandered closer, trembling, then looked back to meet Anna’s stare. Before the tunnel’s glimmering mouth she was a silhouette, thin and weak, bearing all of her faults in darting eyes and shaking hands.

  Anna’s nod disregarded all of that.

  The girl was ready, even if she didn’t know it. But readiness meant little in war.

  Ramyi shifted her burlap bag’s strap higher up on her shoulder, stared into the tunnel’s burned sprawl, and stepped through. Despite her faltering steps across sand she remained upright, though wavering. She cast a final glance back at Anna, but now there was only dusk and broken flats. Her lips tightened and she issued a wordless command to the fighters before they started their long trek eastward, intent on the compound tucked within canyon walls.

  Anna’s breaths faded, squirming in her throat.

  She would’ve wished the girl luck, but luck meant nothing in war.

  “Mesar,” Anna said to the white-clad masses gathered at the back of the warrens. The Alakeph commander shouldered his way into the candlelight, bowing his head. “Bring another ten men and a spare engagement kit.”

  * * * *

  There was ritual agency in donning weavesilk garments and a ceramic vest. Each time Anna pulled on the coarse layers and cinched the straps and fastened the buckles, she felt that she was omnipotent, that she could march against Volna and all its columns unscathed. When she crossed the tunnel and entered an expanse stricken by hot, parched wind, she was capable of saving anyone, stopping anyone, killing anyone.

  But an hour into their march on Sadh Nur Amah’s outlying cliffs, she saw the truth of things.

  She scaled the loose gravel and clay that spilled from the canyon’s throat, awash in sweat and shade, focused on the sound of gusts whistling into crags and boots hushing up the sand all around her. Her fighters were mum, vaguely crestfallen, with their ruji slung over their packs and shoulders slumped. There was no need for urgency, no expectation of recovering anything beyond the shriveled bodies Volna had left at its previous slaughtering pens. They were simply too late. The realization came as threads of smoke on a bone-white sky, as utter stillness where she expected groaning cogs.

  “There could be survivors,” Yatrin said to his column, still picking his way up the slope with calm, labored steps.

  Mesar stopped at Anna’s side and drank from his canteen. “Mercy isn’t their language.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Anna said. She spun to face the fighters in their loose columns, scowling at the flippant faces and wasteful, meandering tracks up the slope. If they had any bitter thoughts about her refusal to contact Nahora, they hid them well. Better than she hid them from herself. “Save your water for the ones we find.”

  But deep down, perhaps worst of all, she suspected there was no one to find. She led the columns down trampled fissure paths and through canals embossed with overgrown kator rails, bringing them deeper into the maze of the canyon and its mandala-blossom awnings. There was no shock when they came upon the first body: a Gosuri woman shrouded in a patina of dust, her blood running down a hallowed staircase, sprawled out beside a torn blindfold and ritual beads. Next were the children tied to the splintered northern gates, their throats slit and eyes glinting like marbles under Har-gunesh’s kiss. The district’s refugee encampment still smelled of sparksalts and copper. Its soil was pitted and churned up and strewn with discarded signs of life—shredded tent fabric, crushed tin dolls, abandoned ovens spewing black smoke. Wrists and cheeks poked through the earth in patches of bronze and pale yellow and black. Tangles of iron bolts and wire-wrapped timber, fitted with wing-like canvas frames, dangled from the crags above like skinned fowl.

  Anna’s nausea only rose when she realized their safe house was the epicenter of it all. Halfway down the corpse-strewn market road, surrounded by blackened sand and smoldering gouges in the cliff dwellings above, was the underground storehouse they’d rented from a sympathizer. Around its iron shutters were bodies, all curiously similar in death save for their armor, which ranged from Mesar’s handpicked fighters to bare-chested Huuri and disemboweled Volna raiders. Blood was a splotchy garnet wash across the path and its shawl-shrouded grain stalls.

  “Search for Ramyi’s unit,” Anna said. She braced herself to find the girl’s corpse anywhere within the compound. Then she gazed skyward, listening to her fighters’ boots pad off into the ruins.

  Several of Mesar’s men descended the ladder pits into the storehouse, prodding around and whispering in flatspeak until their captain whistled. “Vaults keep things in,” one of them later said, brushing the soot from his tunic, “but the sisters needed to get out. They must’ve flooded it with kerosene.”

  “There aren’t many remnants to bring up,” his comrade added weakly.

  But Anna’s attention remained with the rest of the compound, still glancing skyward to avoid any dark-haired Hazani girls who might’ve been sleeping in the dust. Screams from high up in the canyon, nestled within smoking wooden terraces and winding limestone passages, were her only relief.

  Mesar’s men emerged from the cliffs’ wicker doors bearing ash-smeared babes and limbless, babbling Hazani. A pair of Huuri children with whip-scarred backs stumbled out of a potter’s lean-to, squinting against a blinding sun, offering their last scraps of flatbread with broken hands.

  “We nourish the Ascended Ones,” the larger child rasped, flashing a bloody smile. “Accept our penance.” His legs buckled and he fell before Yatrin, before Anna, before a dozen fighters holding their breath high in their chest. “Absolve us of our punishment…”

  Yatrin moved to lift the boy, aided by two of Mesar’s Alakeph, but Anna turned away. She bit back her tears with a grimace, training her gaze on Har-gunesh and his piercing rings above the canyon wall. This isn’t war, she told herself as another pair of children were carted past her, this is slaughter. It was unthinkable that anybody, even Volna, could sanction such madness. Even more unthinkable were the repercussions of her pride.

  Nahora could’ve intervened. Nahora would’ve intervened. Her resignation blossomed with Mesar’s voice and High Mother Jalesa’s condemning stare.

  “Anna,” Yatrin shouted. “They’re alive.”

  Her fighters were waiting near a rusted water tank beside the gates, strung out in a weary row. Ramyi sat in the tank’s shade, cradling Baqir. No, not Baqir, not anymore. She was cradling a body. Blood had dried in crevices of his vest’s plates, on his leggings, on Ramyi’s hands and lap. It all stemmed from his jugular, slit by an excited cut any no
vice was apt to make. Even with a still face, his lips were curled like the edges of burned paper, smiling vaguely. Yet his dead stare was fixed on stained sand and pulverized bricks. Ramyi’s face was bruised, scratched, bleeding in bold red stripes. Her eyes flicked up at Anna and darted downward, and then she shifted the body onto the sand, shying away. The closer Anna drew, the more her fighters shrank back.

  Anna towered over the girl. Any flutter of hope she’d experienced upon seeing the girl had fallen away, ceding to reality. Now there was only rage. “What did you do?”

  “Anna,” Yatrin warned.

  But she was still glaring at Ramyi, at the crown of black hair she bore as she gazed into the soil. The girl knew her order: Mark three others before Baqir. Three others who would be pulled from the catacombs in pieces and buried beside her chosen boy. “Did you leave them to die?”

  Ramyi tucked her arms around her knees. “There were too many of them.”

  “Did you hide while they were burning?” Anna whispered. “Did you hear them?”

  “We were already too late!” Ramyi looked up with swollen eyes. “Half of us were gone before we even got to the ladders. They had these flying machines, I swear it—they came down on us. They rained fire on everything. On everybody.”

  “But not you.”

  “We should make our way back,” Mesar said from somewhere in the crowd.

  But Anna wouldn’t—couldn’t—look away from the girl. “You could’ve saved more, you know.” She looked at what had once been Baqir, with its mask of dark sap and its soft grin. “You killed him.”

  “They brought Scarred Ones,” Ramyi cried. “I didn’t know what to do. Everyone was screaming.” Tears ran down her cheeks, mingling with the dust and blood and sand. She wiped at her face with torn sleeves.

  “You knew they were here,” Anna said, jabbing a finger in her face. “If you’d marked them before you entered the compound—”

  “You made them!” Ramyi hissed. “We were cleaning up your mess!”

  Anna was distantly aware that she’d struck the girl. It didn’t seem real until she moved away, numbly edging past her fighters and taking care to avoid stepping on half-buried faces. She saw the smears of blood across her palm. Yatrin’s broad hand fell upon her shoulder, but she shrugged it off. Her silence had become the gathering’s muteness; she stood with the rigid posture they’d come to expect, waiting until they resumed the business of wrapping bodies in sheets and scavenging supplies from their dead brethren, then approached Mesar.