Schisms Page 7

“Blades can have curious shapes,” Konrad said, smirking at Anna.

  “We’re not here for you,” Anna said. “We’ve come to see the Council in Golyna. I urge you to offer us safe passage.” Her awareness became snagged on her periphery, where Ramyi was balling up her fists and forcing hard, short breaths. The girl was too young to understand diplomacy, but too old to ignore threats.

  Konrad studied Ramyi with faint amusement. “And who is this?”

  Nausea crept over Anna, worsening as she abandoned herself to memories of the violet flower, the bright eyes among parched flats, the man who loved something other than her. The same man who’d leveled his gaze on a scared, angry girl. “Leave her be,” Anna warned. “We’re not seeking war.”

  “It must feel like a proper rest after the business near Sadh Nur Amah,” Konrad said.

  “That wasn’t our doing.”

  “My, my, the story grows richer.” Leering, he turned to face his fighters. “Not that it matters much, panna. That overgrown pit was a flag in the wind. One day our colors, Volna’s the next . . . it gets tiresome.”

  “Perhaps one of your garrisons received our glints along the way,” Mesar said.

  “They did.” Konrad lowered his hands to his hips and rocked back and forth, considering something that never reached his lips. Crowds of women and children in ruby fabric ran behind him, oblivious to the scent of imminent violence. “The Council gave me full discretion in dealing with this incursion.”

  Mesar cleared his throat, glancing back at his own men for some mesh of assurance. “Well, I ought to begin by—”

  “If I want your words, I’ll ask for them.”

  The Alakeph captain’s eyes widened as though he’d been struck. As though he were a child who’d forgotten the rules of his favorite game.

  “Going by principle,” Konrad said, his gaze sweeping back to Anna, “Perhaps I’ll look each and every one of you over. My unit can read the truth of a twitching hand.”

  “We won’t beg for our lives,” Anna said.

  “Beg?”

  “Do what you wish.” Sweat coalesced in cool pockets along Anna’s palms. Her breaths were short, stifling, squeezed through a tightening airway. She’d mastered the art of bluffing with wicked men, but those days were long gone. “You’ll be giving us a merciful gift, cutting us down before Volna ever has the chance to drag us out of our fighting holes. We can offer more than our blades, and your masters surely know that. But we won’t be toyed with, and we won’t bare our bellies. Choose wisely, Konrad.”

  Mesar’s long, aching exhale was lost to the sound of children’s laughter.

  And in the crystallizing silence, stranded between Konrad’s blank stare and the expectation of countless ruji tearing into the tender flesh around her, Anna held her pointed gaze. It was a taunt, an invitation to the bloodshed Konrad surely craved. All it would take was his raised fist, or perhaps a coin flipped up in the air, glinting as bursts of metal shavings reduced Anna to the nameless flesh Bora had once been.

  Fear is just an impulse, she reminded herself.

  She hoped.

  “Oh, Anna,” Konrad sighed at last. “How I’ve missed you. Come, pull your unit together—tea and cakes ought to be ready on the kator.”

  Hoarse chuckles broke out among the northern irregulars and southern conscripts within earshot. Brushing past Yatrin, Mesar hurried to Konrad’s side in a bid to converse during their walk to the kator. But he resembled an overzealous schoolboy, as sycophantic and hamstrung by ideals as any of the students Anna had known in the kales.

  Anna simply wrapped her arm around Ramyi’s shoulder and pulled the girl closer, warding off the glances and grins that Konrad flashed her.

  If Mesar had forgotten the rules of the game, Anna would craft her own.

  Chapter 5

  Anna had never known how opulent a kator’s capsule could be. It was a pastiche of gold leaf and swaying velvet drapes and aged, varnished wood, thick with the scent of rosewater. Lanterns sustained by rattling vials of sparksalt solution and magnetic beads bathed the capsule in an otherworldly crimson glow. It stood in opposition to the cramped, rusting furnaces Anna remembered, which she hadn’t experienced since leaving Malijad. But wealth alone seldom brought comfort.

  They’d been gliding along the impeccable Nahoran rails for well over two hours, and during the kator’s occasional stop, Anna glimpsed cities that grew more lavish and clean, gleaming in the sunlight like diamonds pressed from portico and vibrant greenery. Cities so stunningly adapted to the rugged mountain passes and damp, grassy lowlands that they made Zakamun seem like a Hazani outpost.

  Across the divide of a low table and four-armed silver hookah, Konrad adjusted the cushions lining his rattan sofa. He exhaled a thick coil of smoke and shifted himself into a wider stance, settling his boots on the silk covering and splaying out his arms. Without a neck sleeve, his rune was a pale, blinding distraction.

  More fittingly, it was an accusation. Anna stared at its precise cuts, searching for the faded fingerprints of a girl she could hardly recall. Memory was a damning stain of guilt, a constant reminder of crimes once committed using her face, her hands, her mind. At times, especially when in the depths of meditation, she was overcome by the sense that she’d inherited her flesh from a monster. The same flash of panic came over her as she recognized her marks.

  “If only you knew how long I’d been waiting,” Konrad said in flatspeak, jarring her. “Most of the others were certain they’d find your bones dangling from the rafters in some Gosuri den. But I—well, you know me. I had faith.”

  She didn’t know him. Not really. “Faith can be dangerous.”

  “Once a wise girl, always a wise girl.” Konrad took another inhale and peered at Ramyi, who’d barely touched her tea or flat pistachio cakes. He seemed to take some delight in the girl’s shyness, in prodding her with his eyes and coy words, much like a hound with its crippled prey. It wasn’t malice, but his nature. His truth of the world. “Is she your servant? A droba, maybe?”

  “No,” Anna said. “Treat her with dignity.”

  That provoked some latent curiosity in him. “Do you speak any Orsas?”

  Ramyi shook her head.

  “Do you speak?” he asked, venting the smoke out through his nostrils with a smirk. “She learned well from you, panna.”

  “I remember you,” Ramyi whispered.

  “Is that so?” Konrad asked.

  “You were a captain,” Ramyi said, unblinking and tense at the edge of her chair. “Sometimes you waved at us when you patrolled with your men.”

  Konrad shot a curious look at Anna. “She’s from Malijad?” A tincture of worry, thinly veiled as surprise, laced his words.

  “One day you even brought pears for us,” Ramyi continued. “I liked you. We all did.”

  Anna flashed the girl a warning gaze, but it went unnoticed.

  Ramyi leaned closer. “We remember your name, and your face hasn’t changed much at all.”

  “Southern vitality.” He gave a shaky laugh.

  “None of us forgot about you,” Ramyi said. “Especially not me.”

  “Huh.” Konrad stroked his bare chin. “Anna, come off it. Was she an Orzi’s babe?” He met Ramyi’s gaze directly, but it unnerved him in a way Anna had never witnessed. He fussed with his shirt and picked at the silk around his legs, fidgeting as though Ramyi’s stare had hatched spiders between his fingers. “Is your father a saltman? Forgive me if I can’t nail a name to your flesh. It was a while back, after all.”

  “We always thought it was strange that a paper-skin would come to Hazan for fortune,” the girl said, picking up her tea for the first time. “Maybe you just don’t have a home anywhere.”

  Sighing, Konrad propped his chin up with his hand. “This girl thinks she knows the way of the world,” he said to Anna. “Doesn’t it grate you
just a bit? You were humble when you had her years. Who is she?”

  “What do you want in Nahora?” Ramyi pressed. “Do they feel like your people, or are you just a greedy whorespawn?” Even as Konrad began to speak, uttering a retort that was buried beneath the kator’s chattering, Ramyi’s eyes remained piercing. “Maybe they’re the same thing.”

  “Oh, she’s precious,” Konrad groaned.

  “And you’re pathetic.”

  Leaning more heavily on his arm, Konrad yawned. “We have some catching up to do, Anna. Don’t you think?”

  Ramyi’s frustration was plain, but no more telling than water on the surface of the sea. Her sentiments ran deep, and even Anna hadn’t probed their depths. But it wasn’t worth exploring them on a whim. Anna nodded somberly at the girl.

  “Eat with the others,” Anna said quietly. “I’ll fetch you soon.”

  “Anna,” she hissed.

  Anna tilted her chin toward the door. “It’s all right.”

  Those words settled the girl somewhat, at least outwardly, and she tucked both her hands and her gaze into her lap, then rose and moved to the egress. Though it took some effort, she worked the swinging mahogany door open and slipped out. The silence was charged now, bursting with every rustle and muted thump of the cogs.

  “Sharp wit on that one,” Konrad said.

  “Did you earn your rank, or is Ga’mir awarded to all of the traitors?” Anna asked.

  His lips stirred, but didn’t part. “Are you still bitter about Malijad, Anna?”

  “I’m not here to work with you.”

  “Oh?” he prodded. “It’s curious that you chose to come to us now. Something must really be stoking the fire under your boots.”

  Anna thought of the scroll case in her pack, wondering if the Ga’mir’s smugness had anything to do with leaked missives. But there was a time and place to play her hand, to bargain for what she wanted once they’d glimpsed what they needed.

  “Whatever you might think of me,” Konrad continued, “I’ve proven myself as a tactician.”

  “The fact that your troops are sharing this kator with innocents is a testament to your discretion.”

  “You’re saying the Council ought to seize civilian infrastructure.”

  “No,” Anna hissed. “But you’re not taking this fight seriously. None of your masters are.”

  “Have you considered that it’s not so serious?”

  “Our breakers have been following your diplomacy. You haven’t even reached out to Kowak. They’re the last foothold you’ll find in Rzolka.”

  Konrad cocked his head to the side. “Volna hasn’t declared war on Nahora. As of right now, it’s neighborly bickering. It’s nothing new.”

  “This many cartels and krev lines have never been joined under one banner,” Anna explained. It was a parroted report from one of the Azibahli analysts in Gideon’s company, but it concisely demonstrated Volna’s core threat. The fact that Volna had been able to alter the title of a bloodline to a southern analogue, krev, was proof of their permeation. “And what have you done about the Toymaker?”

  Konrad’s smile faltered. “Where’ve you heard that name?”

  “We’re not sheltered fools.”

  “Through my eyes, it’s a peculiar sight,” Konrad said. “You marched across western Nahora, banging your pots and pans the whole way. Don’t you think it’s time to stop playing soldiers?”

  It was difficult to keep the hot, pulsing anger out of her face. She couldn’t read him, not at all. He seemed to wander the world with no roots, no sense of guilt, no curse of lineage nor knowledge of eternity’s true span. Nothing moved his heart. “Rzolka is burning,” she said finally.

  “And midnight is dark,” Konrad said. “After three years, it’s a struggle to keep holding your breath and waiting. At least our Council sheared the wool. The state’s flourishing without all of those extra blades, you know. Think of how many resources are being put to use in the fields and shipyards. Malchym and Kowak always shouted that into the soil.”

  Anna drained the burning air in her lungs, then straightened. “At the very least, you could give up on provoking my people.”

  “They’re a people now. Conspicuously similar to an army, though.”

  “I’ve learned where practicality is needed,” Anna whispered.

  Konrad snorted, taking up another hookah pipe and puffing. “Who’s that little fawn you’re dragging around?”

  “She’s a scribe,” Anna said. She drew a breath and held it at the apex of her inhale, letting the silence settle and drift down like the dust motes suspended in lantern light. Clarity was a rare gift, but an illuminating one: She noted the vicious curl in Konrad’s lip, the way his back straightened and spasms worked through his brows.

  “A scribe.” His tone wasn’t angry, but perplexed. “One of the cartel’s apprentices?”

  “She was, is, a foundling.” Anna watched Konrad’s face darken and his lips draw tighter. “Whatever she is now was done by Nahora, and it’s not something you can justify. But you should understand her mind, why she acts the way she does.”

  “It’s not strange for a young girl,” Konrad said, winking, “but it’s strange for you, panna. I half-expected you to tear my throat out on sight.” His grin shifted. “What happened in Malijad was never about you. You, Anna, I mean. It could’ve been that girl, or it could’ve been some Gosuri worm. But it was you, and that’s unfortunate.”

  “It’s unfortunate that you know a young girl’s mind so well.”

  “This is how it was meant to be, Anna,” Konrad said, clouding the air with a roiling exhale and coughing. His stare ran up and down her body, lingering on the folds of her tunic. “Nevertheless, you’re not a young girl anymore, are you? Whatever communion you have with the stars must be working, because you’ve sprouted into a particularly stunning young woman.”

  Woman. Panna. The terms felt vapid as he inspected her, unearthing the same disgust she’d felt in Malijad or Bylka before it. She’d sought those titles for so long, but their true forms—their burdens, as it was—were revealed entirely too late.

  “How long till we reach Golyna?” Anna asked.

  Konrad glanced at the hourglass set into a brass apparatus. “After a bout of beauty rest, you’ll be staring at its main station. Quite a sight as you’re passing from the mountain tunnels to the Crescent.”

  Anna set her teacup and saucer down, rose, and moved to the door.

  “Before you go,” Konrad said, “where’s our old friend? Bora, wasn’t it?”

  Anna rested a hand on the doorknob. “My people will be retaining their weapons and conducting their own patrols.”

  “Naturally, fine. Now, what about the scrapper? Granted her death wish, or is she hunkering down in your invisible palace, or whatever it really is? Has she got any babes?” He sat upright. “Oh, and that nagging little Huuri boy too. How’s he faring?”

  “Have you heard what they call me, Konrad?”

  “Kuzalem.” He cackled, filling the air with the wet popping of a smoke-stricken throat. “It’s a fierce title, but death? The Anna I know was afraid of wasps.”

  She imagined that the southerner’s Anna, who she hadn’t seen in years, was shriveling under mounds of Hazani sand and pulverized stone. Without turning back, she opened the door.

  “Don’t you find it a tad funny, Anna?” Konrad asked.

  Anna stepped into the tapestry-laden hallway and shut the door slowly. “Call me Kuzalem.”

  * * * *

  In the honeycomb arrangement of bunks that filled a bulbous, towering sleeping pod, Anna found most of the fighters drinking out of their ration bundles’ tin cups. They sat in clusters around the strange, ever-burning lanterns, murmuring and shushing one another as Anna searched the various passageways for Ramyi and the others. None of her unit had been in t
he lavish, sweet-smelling dining pod, nor in the communal bathing pod, which featured braziers with burning turquoise stones and petal-dusted water that swayed to the cylinder’s leaning. In their place she’d found crowds of calm, curious Nahorans that gestured and whispered, none of whom had the look or armaments of fighters. But Anna’s own fighters were apt to wander; Ramyi’s absence was the concerning one.

  She ascended the zigzagging stairwells to the uppermost level of the pod, which resonated like a leaf in the wind and seemed possessed by an eerie whistling. Still holding Konrad’s sickening grin in her mind, she found the bunkroom’s soft amber lighting and laughter maddening. Everybody except her could relax, be reckless, live. Perhaps they truly didn’t care for her presence. It wasn’t that being ignored upset her, really, but it disturbed her. It was a reminder of a time before she’d been known by her runes, when she barely had a name or any legacy at all. And as swiftly as that torrent of infamy had washed over her in Malijad, it now seemed to break and fall away, promising the same insignificance she’d spent so long trying to retain. It felt foolish, if not self-absorbed, to fear it so much. The things we want are seldom what we truly want. A wise, recurring Kojadi motif, easily drowned under the terror of survival.

  Ramyi sat on a mound of cushions with an assortment of Mesar’s men and Jilal fighters, whose lips and eyes were ringed with ritual scars. Her head was thrown back in a giggling fit, her cheeks flush and eyes clenched. One of the Jilal fighters was babbling, amusing Ramyi and the others, making her swing her tin cup and spill its contents across the rug.

  Further back, almost consumed by shadow, Khara hunched over her cup.

  “. . . and the widow didn’t know them!” the fighter finished, howling the final words.

  Moving to a metal column, Anna paused and observed. Two bottles of arak and an empty flask of grain liquor sat on a nearby table. Yatrin was sitting upright in a wooden chair, grimacing at Ramyi’s antics. Before she could edge closer, the easterner spotted her and stood, skirting gracefully around the gathering to approach her.

  “They’re drunk,” Anna said.