The Unbroken

by C. L. Clark

  “Aye, aye, Captain.” Touraine threw her mother a salute.

  Touraine’s stomach sank as she came up on the temple. Outside it, a group set to battering the doors down with a low-backed couch. Only a few wore Balladairan blacks. The others looked like civilians, with bellies of comfort and long hair slicked with sweat. Their faces twisted with the effort; they laughed like drinking friends.

  The Grand Temple’s glass windows had been shattered with projectiles—bullets, rocks, Touraine didn’t know. Smoke billowed from them in thick clouds, a black haze above the flames. The night was perfumed with frankincense and sandalwood, as if all the incense in the world had been lit at once, for one great prayer. Enough to appease an entire world of gods. Inside, people were screaming.

  “Heave!” A broad woman at the back of the couch called to her friends. Her thick shoulders strained the coat of her uniform across her back and arms. With one arm guiding the couch, she waved the other arm like a flag. That’s when Touraine realized they weren’t just laughing. They were singing. The Balladairan imperial anthem.

  After over twenty years of training and fighting and studying with them, she hadn’t managed to prove that she, that Qazāli, were worth more than this. What would it take for Balladaire to see them as more than cheap labor and cannon fodder?

  Maybe watching death come for them, wearing her face.

  Touraine barreled into the macabre conductor knife-first. She collided with so much force that the woman lifted off the ground and toppled into her neighbor. They all fell in a heap, and the end of the couch slammed near Touraine’s face.

  The woman beneath her stared up with glassy eyes. The man beneath the woman squirmed under the combined weight. Touraine jumped up and snapped his neck with her boot.

  The four Balladairans left gaped in confusion, still dumbly holding their sections of the couch. Two civilians, two blackcoats. Only one civilian had sense enough to flee from the look in Touraine’s eyes. She yanked her knife from between the conductor’s ribs and flicked it toward the others. They flinched as blood speckled their pale faces, and she leapt before they could coordinate themselves.

  Shāl, if you really give a shit about anyone here, let them be safe… Touraine was out of practice on the prayer bit. I promise I’ll do better if I make it out of this alive.

  Her first slash caught one blackcoat on the inner forearm, and his hand flopped uselessly without its tendons. Then the blade was through the man’s stomach and up, up into his heart. Then she ducked the blow she knew would come and shot her heel back and up. A satisfying crunch of contact.

  One blackcoat left.

  The soldier had his rifle back in hand. He lifted it to fire as one of the Qazāli rebels ran up behind him on silent feet. Faster, faster—

  The energy in Touraine’s legs bunched and coiled, and she sprang backward through the air, like Jaghotai had taught her, one hand grazing the ground. When the world had righted itself, the last soldier was dead, a gash on each side of his throat.

  “Thanks, brother,” Touraine said in Shālan.

  “Mulāzim.” The rebel dragged Touraine by the arm, looking over his shoulder. His scarf covered most of his features, but she recognized his green eyes, wide in horror. His cheeks were wet as firelight from the temple danced across his face. His name was Faran, one of the younger rebels, like Malika, who was either below the theoretical “prime age” or not yet born when the Droitists took the Sands for “reeducation.”

  Touraine coughed as the incense-heavy smoke filled the air. Sky above and earth below. Surely Cantic hadn’t ordered this. Luca wouldn’t sanction it.

  “We have to get them out,” Touraine said. She dragged frantically at the heavy couch. “Grab it—help me!”

  Smoke crept from the cracks of the main doors. When she ran to the small side door, she had to jerk her hand away from the heat. Whatever the torches had caught burned quick and hot. She let her palm hover in the space, unable to move for several heartbeats.

  “They’re smart, Mulāzim. They’ll take the tunnels.” Faran’s choked-up voice brought her back to herself. He nodded back to the center of the city. He sniffed. “We should help the Jackal.”

  Right. Jaghotai had told her to gather her fighters and organize them. She could already see pockets of flame and smoke blossoming in other areas of the city like morbid night flowers. The boy’s tears made Touraine feel like the lieutenant again. She grabbed his shoulder, forced him to look at her and not the smoking temple. “No. If there are tunnels, get to them. Help people get out. If you see any more of the Jackal’s fighters, take them with you. Evacuate any civilians. They need you. I’ll help the Jackal.”

  It wasn’t hard to make the words. She had a lot of practice sweetening the stench of death to come. And the rebel bought the words as easily as any of her soldiers ever did—meaning he barely bought them at all. But it was enough to put his battle fear to work for him instead of against him.

  Touraine didn’t have high hopes for Jaghotai’s rebel fighters against the blackcoats. They were underarmed, with little training and no strategy. Whatever the Jackal said, this was a losing game. She wasn’t going to send the boy into the thick of the fighting to die.

  And this is the side you chose.

  She heard shouts and rounded the corner of the temple. A pair of blackcoats knelt beside the building. A moment later, they jumped up and ran, straight for her. They were surprised to see her, but they had a wild look in their eyes and didn’t stop to engage her.

  We are fucked.

  For a split second, she paused, and the world paused with her. Her instincts screamed for her to follow them, but it took so long to issue the command to her body. She turned. Her legs reached. Then the world moved at normal speed again, with a sound like a thousand cannons fired at once.

  A rush of hot air at her back pushed her through the air. Flat on the ground, she watched the high bowls and spires of the temple shudder and sway, like a mirage. Slowly, as if fainting, it collapsed, spraying a shower of dust and chunks of stone.

  For a moment, everyone nearby was transfixed, Touraine and the Balladairans all. Then the cloud of dust expanded like a stampede, and the Balladairans fled.

  Touraine buried her head and let the cloud pass over her. She tasted blood in her mouth. Blood ran down her face, too, and she felt like she’d been trampled by a horse. She considered lying there and not getting up until it was all over.

  Instead, she rolled over to her hands and knees and spat a gob of blood and phlegm and marble grit. The dust hung in the air like fog and was just as hard to see through.

  She was here because she was a soldier. A fighter. She didn’t know anything else, and she was good at it. Cantic had made sure of that. And Touraine enjoyed it. She could still feel the glee of punching Tibeau for the first time. It would be the death of her, but she’d always expected that. She’d been raised for this, and she had nothing but this, even though she had tried so fucking hard to find something else.

  She was needed here. She got back up.

  She went to fight with the Jackal for the Qazāli.

  Shāl, have mercy on us.

  Shāl, have mercy on us, Luca thought, squeezing the handle of her knife in her left hand while blood welled from the new cut on her forearm.

  She glanced furtively over her shoulder. She had barricaded herself in her office in the town house, all the way upstairs, just so that she could have privacy. The last thing she wanted was for Gil to walk in and catch her.

  The slice Luca had made was just under the cut Aranen had made earlier that day. The blood was a deep wine burgundy in the lamplight, stark against her pale skin. Her dinner of stewed lamb and chickpeas was mostly gone—she’d requested it especially for this. It was a local dish, flavored with dried fruit and warm spices, and the scent lingered.

  She squeezed her fist to make the blood come faster and closed her eyes, like Aranen had done. Shāl, have mercy on us.

  Luca peeked one eye at
the small wound. Nothing. Nothing but the sting of the cut and the tickle of blood sliding down her arm toward the crook of her elbow.

  She tried again, thinking the words in Shālan, murmuring them under her breath. She tried different combinations of phrases she’d heard Shālans utter automatically or when they thought Balladairans couldn’t hear. She even resorted to simply asking Shāl to hear and heal her.

  Still, nothing happened.

  Luca had seen the magic work. She had seen Aranen do it with her own eyes. That was proof enough that Shāl existed, and so Luca no longer doubted. And yet it wasn’t enough. Apparently, you couldn’t simply ask a god to intercede. You couldn’t simply want badly for a god to be real, or believe in phenomena created by a god.

  The vision of herself on the Balladairan throne, banishing the Withering and healing the people, the greatest queen of an age, died with a frustrated whimper. She snatched up the cloth towel on her desk and wrapped it around her still-bleeding arm, grateful for the way the burn of the cut matched that frustration.

  Shāl, she thought petulantly, at least give me a sign that you’re real.

  A resounding boom vibrated through Luca’s chest and left her ears ringing.

  “Shāl?” she said in a strangled whisper. She cast about sheepishly for some angry deity but saw nothing.

  But someone was pounding frantically at the door and shouting.

  Luca wound the cloth tighter around her forearm and hid the bloody knife in the drawer.

  “What?” she called. “What’s happening?”

  Gil burst through the door. Was Luca imagining it, or were his eyes rimmed red with tears? The last time she’d seen him like this, she’d been trampled by a horse. Maybe she had struck a nerve with her questions earlier. She hadn’t meant to hurt him.

  “What?” she asked again.

  “The temple, Luca.” Gil’s voice was thick with horror. “Blackcoats destroyed the Grand Temple.”

  PART 4

  MARTYRS

  CHAPTER 35

  AN UNEARTHING

  The early evening sun shone through a sky streaked with smoke. The Grand Temple was a mountain of cracked marble slabs, pebbles, and dust. Touraine’s boots crunched on pulverized glass. She pulled her scarf up to keep from inhaling enough dust to make mud in her lungs. The wreckage smelled like prayers. She wasn’t a Shālan, not yet, but she ached for this. She replayed its collapse in her mind, the earth shaking beneath her feet. She imagined the explosion echoing in the corridors. Even buildings along the outside of the courtyard hadn’t been safe. Cracks splintered like rivers across their walls; one wall had crumbled.

  The Qazāli resistance was just as broken. It seemed like half the city was unaccounted for. On the other side of a chunk of the temple’s walls, Malika’s face fell as she understood the extent of the Qazāli losses. Until this year, Touraine had never thought it possible to see a heart break. She had been naive. Finally, Malika met Touraine’s eyes and held them. Desperately, like a piece of flotsam in the sea.

  “Ya! There’s someone here!” a person shouted in Shālan.

  Touraine jumped at the voice, picking along the heap of rubble. Delicately, to keep from collapsing the rock and killing someone they hadn’t found underneath. Quickly, so that this someone wouldn’t suffocate. There had been survivors. There had also been corpses.

  “Shāl, be gentle,” someone prayed as two men shifted rock.

  Touraine’s fingers were scraped and bleeding, coated white. She and the others—including Sands who had abandoned their uniforms—formed a line to shuttle rocks away from the buried person. Her breath came in anxious, hopeful bursts.

  “I have a leg!” the man at the front of the line called.

  “Quicker!” she shouted.

  They worked harder. Touraine realized she was passing her rocks to Jaghotai. She nodded. Like everyone else, she wore her scarf up for the dust, and like everyone else, her eyes were red rimmed. Dust mingled with the gray hairs in her dreadlocks.

  A voice tunneled from the rocks. “Shāl is merciful,” it said, over and over.

  Touraine gave a relieved laugh as two men pulled up the last massive rock enough for a man to sit up.

  “His legs are broken!”

  “Carry him!”

  “Healers!”

  The last was a reflex, and it met a solemn hush. There were no more healers. They were all in Cantic’s—in Luca’s cells.

  Another pair of Qazāli pried the man out of his crevice. Onlookers cheered.

  Touraine clapped with them, but her mind had already moved on. She went to Jaghotai. “We need to figure out our next position. Attack or retreat, is there somewhere we can set up a defense—”

  Jaghotai frowned incredulously. “What is wrong with you?”

  Touraine should have known that Jaghotai of all people wouldn’t want to work with her. If Djasha had been here instead of Jaghotai, they would have had a plan already. Instead of answering, Touraine circuited the excavated parts of the collapse to the far edge, where a Qazāli woman worked with a Sand. Noé. He always managed to get body duty. He tapped his forehead in solemn salute. He’d been one of the Sands who’d joined the rebels in the chaos the night the Grand Temple fell.

  They’d found another body in a black coat, its skull half-flattened. While everyone else looked pointedly up and away, Jaghotai looked over the Balladairan coldly.

  Touraine pointed with her head. “Put him with the other dead.”

  Noé and the woman pulled him out of the wreckage and carried his mangled body to a growing row. Touraine’s stomach turned. She wretched, barely able to swallow the vomit, burning, back down her throat. Sky above, she’d gotten soft.

  Jaghotai pulled her away, white-dusted fingers gripping Touraine’s biceps hard. “Go home.”

  Touraine pulled away. “It’s a bit late for that—”

  Jaghotai shook her head wearily and held her palms up. “Not what I meant.” She started to walk away from the wreckage, away from the people digging up answers in the shape of flesh.

  In a low voice, she continued as they walked. “Half the council is dead. Our temple is in ruins. My city’s still smoking. You’re not gonna fix this right now—doesn’t matter how many orders you give.”

  Touraine scoffed. “I’m not stupid. We have to prepare.”

  “Prepare? Ha! If they come for us now or they come for us next week, what will they get?”

  Touraine looked over, eyebrows tight in confusion.

  “Everything. All of it. Anything they want,” Jaghotai said. She stepped closer. Tentatively, she put a hand on Touraine’s shoulder. “You’ve been out here since they brought it down. Take some time. Clean yourself up. It won’t make any difference.”

  Touraine looked down at herself. Her trousers were splattered with blood, pale with stone dust. She put a hand to her sweaty forehead and wiped at the grit.

  “Go wash in one of the channels. The crocodiles don’t usually wash up so far inland.”

  The darkness Touraine had been avoiding lurked at the side of her vision, crept at the edges of her limbs, and threatened to weigh her down. She tried to fight it.

  “What right do you have—” To care? To give her orders?

  “Every right.” Jaghotai headed back to the temple, leaving Touraine no dignified choice but to walk away.

  Touraine followed her anylight.

  “Touraine…” Jaghotai warned.

  Touraine kept marching back to the mess she’d made, to something she could do. Jaghotai flung her arm out to catch Touraine in the chest and shoved. Touraine pushed her back and stalked on, back to the rubble.

  “Are we really doing this?” barked Touraine over her shoulder. “We’ve got work to do.”

  “Touraine—” The other woman tried to grab her in a bear hug, but Touraine spun, breaking the grip with an elbow. She hooked a punch into Jaghotai’s jaw.

  Jaghotai went sprawling. It took a second before either of them registered what ha
ppened. As she rubbed her jaw, Jaghotai’s eyes went dark. She bared her teeth, and Touraine saw blood streaking them. Her hand was still clenched in its fist. It hurt to ease her fingers apart.

  “I’m… sorry.” Touraine clenched and unclenched her fists again, working the fingers loose. She shook her head, trying to clear away that… that darkness that was invading. With Jaghotai still on the ground, she turned on her heel and strode toward the river.

  Touraine scooped water onto her face from a tepid little pond made by the irrigation and damming architecture that the Qazāli had learned from Balladaire. The water, trapped during the Hadd’s flood season and the rains, normally watered goats. The goats were gone now.

  The water dripped onto her aching shoulders and soaked into her scalp. She waded farther in. Maybe if she lay down in it, she could wash away the smell of the smoke. Maybe if she kept her ears stopped up with water, she wouldn’t hear the screaming and that infernal imperial anthem anymore.

  They had sometimes sung it when they marched, the Sands. Noé leading the verses while they all chimed in, variously out of tune. It was too sore for some of them, though. Instead, they preferred songs like “Jolly Soldier,” which were morbid but at least reflected the lives they lived instead of an ideal Balladaire that they would never be a part of.

  She hummed as the water tickled her scalp and she splashed a handful on her face.

  Welcome, soldier. Welcome, jolly soldier. How can I help you today? Can I take your boots, sir, your army-issued boots, sir? How can I help you today?

  The water dripped down her bare neck and drew goose bumps across her skin. The sun was on its way down, and the night was cooling quickly.

  The river was lower than usual, people said, and this pool was barely knee high, murky with mud and plants, and too still to be completely fresh. It still smelled better than she did.

  She stared at the Cursed City on the other side of the river. With the River Hadd between them, patrolled by the Many-Legged, the border between Qazāl and Briga stretched anywhere from a mile to several. At first, she’d thought it bizarre, the Qazāli leaving a whole city uninhabited because of superstition. Now Touraine knew what magic could do, and she didn’t care to test it. Like Djasha had said months ago—superstitions came from somewhere.