“Who sent you?” Anna hissed.
The man’s eyes were bulging, fighting to focus as the blade began to recede from his flesh and heal over.
A thunder of boots and horns and barked orders descended upon their corner of the plaza, drowning out the man’s rasping. His lips peeled back into a red-gummed, crooked smile, and his eyes took on a joyful man’s creases. “How dark your skin’s grown, traitor,” he cackled in river-tongue.
Anna felt her control evaporate; she lunged forward and forced her knee into his sternum as Bora had once done to her, driving down with her opposite leg until she heard a crack beneath her. “Who?”
But the Chayam were upon them now, ordering bystanders about and forcefully parting the crowd. They grasped Anna’s arms, flashing ruji barrels in her periphery and growling orders she couldn’t comprehend. They dragged her off the man, then further back; further, further, until the crowd consumed her vision and her rage became a whisper.
* * * *
Golyna’s northeastern precinct was an immense, featureless cube overlooking the harbor districts and their urban hillside sprawls, accessible only by a shielded kator line or a series of drooping capsule tubes. Anna traveled there with Konrad and Shem at the onset of dusk, staring out at a fog-shrouded city blooming with lanterns and eerie braziers on weavesilk spires. After two hours of questioning about the day’s incident, as the Chayam had termed it, it was the last place she sought to visit.
But truth had to be exposed.
She hadn’t even told Ramyi about the southerner, far too aware of the damage that the rash and powerless were apt to cause. “Don’t say a word,” Anna had whispered harshly to Yatrin that afternoon. “Don’t tell any of them, because word carries. She doesn’t need more reasons to hate this place.” It was better for the girl to sleep in a seaside inn with the rest of the unit, telling Yatrin about how much she’d adored the seagulls and the almond treats she’d eaten on the promenade, than to feed whatever judgments she already held in her heart.
And it appeared that the regional Chayam commander thought the same: They’d instituted a full lockdown in the plaza and its surrounding streets, twisting the incident until the district’s citizens believed it to be a drunken brawl.
The afternoon’s only saving grace had been the Nahoran herbmen—more literally suturers, as it seemed to translate into the river-tongue—finding a temporary fix to Shem’s exhaustion. The aftermath of the event had traumatized him somewhat, and the suturers who tended to his unconsciousness had administered an altered batch of duzen draught, replacing the wrathroot with khat or some other stimulant. When the chaos had subsided and Anna found Shem, the difference was palpable. He was nearly as winsome as he’d been in those early days, long before hayat clawed at him. But the effect was temporary, they’d warned, and Anna saw it fading now, just hours after its ingestion.
“You don’t have to come, you know,” Konrad said as their capsule oscillated upon the web track between pylons. “Gal Asur isn’t a pleasant picture.”
Anna stared into her lap, suppressing nausea with anger. It was the audacity of it all, the constant lack of security that countless fighters couldn’t remedy, even in the paradise of Golyna. It was just so easy for things to fall apart. “Take me to him.”
Gal Asur’s corridors were as grim as its outer shell, moving in gloomy, labyrinthine paths between holding cells and processing centers. Beneath the grated walkways, captives shuffled body to body down high-walled, rusted paths like sows in a slaughterhouse, their limbs and heads bound by the same sense-killing bulbs they’d clamped onto Shem. Fumes of kerosene and blackened iron hung in the air.
“This is what you do to your own citizens?” Anna asked.
“Does it disturb you?” a violet-draped jailer asked. Her weavesilk mask, which shielded her nose and mouth, thrummed with every breath and stirred the haze around her. “To be a citizen is to hold salvation. Little is deserved by those who forsake it.”
“It’s not only for citizens,” Konrad added cheerily. “Grove knows how many Volna scouts they’ve got down there. Gosuri marchblades, separatists, southern runners too. They’re heavy on egalitarianism.”
The jailer glowered at Konrad.
“Nobody of my kind,” Shem said, frowning at the captives.
“The Huuri have their own justice rites,” Konrad said. “I don’t suggest you go looking.”
After passing a series of aperture-shaped vault doors, which were controlled by Azibahli teams and their wall-fixed pulleys, they came to the southerner’s cell. A single lamp shone overhead, throwing uncanny red light on the web-shrouded dome around them and illuminating a man’s stretched shoulders and bald, gleaming scalp. He was naked and stretched out like some grotesque mockery of a bearskin, his appendages tethered to the walls.
“The bitch,” the man shrieked.
“What’s his name?” Anna asked the jailer. “Have you gotten that much?”
“No name,” she replied. “But he had Nahoran coins in his possession.”
“Whoever paid him will wish this was their fate,” Konrad remarked.
“What is your name?” the jailer asked in flatspeak, picking a suitably middle-tier dialect for the man.
“I’ll tell you nothing,” he spat.
“Very well.” The jailer snapped her fingers. A hole tore open in the dome’s webbing, and an Azibahl runner scurried out with two trays balanced on its forelimbs, offering the jailer its selection of razors and needles and chisels. “I’ll repeat the question: What is your name?”
“How dare you stand with them,” the man growled, glaring at Anna. “What went wrong with you, girl? The butchers are finally being repaid. Everything they ever stole from us.”
“You don’t see your own horrors,” Anna said.
“Wait till you’ve seen your kin stolen in the night. Wait till they do everything they’ve done to the rest of this world to you.”
“Your name,” the jailer repeated, low yet firm.
“This city’s in its swan song,” the man said. “We’re already here—our scribes, our blades, our whores in your rosi chalam cesspools. The Claw guides us and the stars bless us. Your violence has come home to you, you mewling bitch!” He stared at Anna. “You’ll die a slave to these butchers, but I’ll die a hero.”
Shem instinctively raised his right hand, which thumped and pulsed as though exploding within. Hundreds of hair-thin cuts instantly ripped open across the man’s body, lacerating his eyes and lips, and he screamed into the webbed gloom. “Speak with care,” Shem thundered, “or not speak.”
Healed in moments by the rune, the man caught his breath and gritted his teeth. “When this mark fades, you’ll cut me up. But I’ll go to the Grove knowing you sukry watch everything burn. You’ll know what it means to be helpless.”
The jailer whispered to the Azibahl in Orsas, prompting the creature to set its trays down, creep toward the captive, and latch its forelimbs onto the sides of the man’s face. Its hairs sunk in like barbed hooks, and as it began to pull outward, wrenching the man’s scalp apart, the chamber was filled with the most sickening scream Anna had ever heard.
“Stop,” Anna commanded.
Jarred by her voice, the Azibahl retracted its hairs and skittered back onto the dome’s floor.
“Tell us where your scribe learned a rune to obscure your form, and I’ll let you die,” Anna said.
The man scoffed. “Let me die?”
“If you don’t reveal everything about that scribe,” she said calmly, “I’ll mark you myself. You’ll spend an eternity here, at their mercy and their whim.”
Beads of sweat glimmered in the lantern’s light. “You haven’t got any fangs, girl.”
“Are you with the Katil Anfel?”
A hard, throaty cackle. “Katil Anfel? We burned those flatland pups out. I’ll let you save your breat
h . . . my silence is my bond.”
Anna picked a scalpel up from the tool tray. “This is your final chance.”
“Open your eyes to what you’re doing, you foolish, monstr—”
Shem’s arm rose once more. The air around the man’s wrists shimmered and then crushed inward, pulverizing his limbs, forcing bone shards through the skin. The man bit through his lip as he groaned. But as always the flesh re-formed, stitching itself back to perfection.
“Nazashte Dabnyry,” the man huffed in river-tongue, eyes clenched shut. It was an old mantra from the people of the mountains, who’d always passed through Anna’s village with ripe berries and campfire tales. “Nesmerechna, toshen postna. . . .”
With that final chant, the rune was snuffed out, vanishing without a trace.
“Wait,” he whimpered.
“You’ll live long enough to see what becomes of your movement,” Anna said, stalking toward the man with the scalpel by her side. “There will be ample time to unravel your secrets.”
Somewhere beneath the man’s howling she heard metal clinking, bony legs scampering about, and Konrad whistling to himself. Once she and Shem left, it would surely become a sleepless evening for the Nahoran questioners.
* * * *
In the calm hours before dawn, she sat cross-legged in the windowsill of that seaside inn, staring out at black water and billowing purple clouds above. Far out along the rocky coast was a mesmerizing, mandala-shaped Huuri temple that managed to shine, even in the darkness. It was a monument to the man-skins, to the ascended forms that they wished to embody in their successive lives. Yet Anna couldn’t see the logic in that, having just scrubbed her hands of blood and fearful sweat in the bath chamber. But the wind was subtle in her hair and the night was still and Ramyi was asleep in the next room, guarded by Shem and some of Jenis’s fighters, so Anna stared.
“Come here,” Yatrin whispered.
Anna turned to find him sitting up in bed with his hands wrapped around his shins. “Go back to sleep. I’ll be there soon.”
“You’re the one who needs sleep the most.”
“I’m just thinking.”
“Oh, Anna,” he sighed.
She spun around with hard eyes. “They knew he was coming today! They weren’t coming for him, they were coming for me. Or for Ramyi, or for who knows? It was to prove a point, Yatrin. They want to do it because they can.”
“We won’t let that happen.”
“We almost did,” she said, lowering her voice. “All of those fighters, and they can’t stop it.” She slid off the windowsill and settled into the empty nest of blankets she’d left by Yatrin’s side. He was warm and held her closely, even safely, but she didn’t feel safe. All judgments were illusory. “They thrive on chaos, you know. Mesar was right. They can kill our champions, but we can only stomp out their maggots.”
“Breathe, Anna,” he whispered in her ear.
And at once her heart slowed and calmness fell over her in a tingling wave. She was faintly aware of his hands moving over her, of hers moving over him, of wanting him while he was still there. His lips touched her neck—anyone could be bought, they all had a price—and his feet brushed her feet, and—they had people everywhere, ready to strike—she heard his heart pounding through his chest, getting some hot rush as he—
Her arm snatched the short blade from the floor and held it, unsheathed, to Yatrin’s neck. She watched his breaths fog along the iron edge.
“Anna,” he whispered, staring at the blade, but composed, “what are you doing?”
She blinked once, twice. Dropped the blade to the floor with a rattling thud. “I’m sorry.”
An hour later she drifted toward sleep in Yatrin’s embrace, still dressed in her shirt and trying to focus on the approaching sunrise. It was startling to think that somewhere in the world, the wicked were plotting the death of an entire people. Worse yet, they had capable scribes in their ranks.
Scribes that had unraveled the secrets of hayat just as well as Anna.
Perhaps better.
Chapter 8
“Are they going to attack us here?” Ramyi asked.
Anna gazed down at the map, at its ragged string of brown-ink mountains and its city marker, labeled in three languages as Hedilam. She’d never heard of the hill-spanning settlement, though the Nahoran breakers had made a convincing argument for its grip on the southern passes. Its bordering Hazani territory belonged to Krev Torashah, which had turned the region’s sprawling plains into a gathering site for hired blades, profiteering cartels, and some of Volna’s Gosuri regiments, all for a hefty contract sum. Or so she’d been scared into believing. “No,” she said finally. “We’re just going to help them.”
“Help what?”
“To make it safer,” Anna explained. She didn’t like the terse edge in her own voice, though being trapped in a planning room all evening hadn’t done anything to alleviate it. It had been two weeks of waiting, of tense, yet uneventful, happenings, of touring cloistered scribe academies and reviewing defense drafts. Yet now they were alone, mentor and student, and the edge remained.
“Is Shem coming with us?” Ramyi asked.
Anna nodded. Securing a constant stream of the suturers’ corps’ miracle draught had been one of Konrad’s finer, if not more unexpected, maneuvers within the Council’s debate chambers. Still, it did little to ease her mind about gleaning nothing from their captive. “You should start packing your things, Ramyi. We’ll set off soon.”
“We’re coming back, aren’t we?”
“Of course.”
Ramyi leaned over the planning table. During the meeting she’d found a distraction in trying to read the Orsas script along the map’s edges. Time among the shabad children had warmed her to Golyna, it seemed. “It all looks so vast, Anna. Like we can’t do anything.” She glanced up. “Doesn’t that scare you somewhere deep in your belly? Just a little bit?”
Anna worked to keep her face placid. “Labor is the cure for a restless mind.”
Hours after reaching the city on a high-priority kator, having been packed in with pods full of construction material, weapons, and surveying equipment, Anna led Shem and her detachment around the overgrown fields between Hedilam proper and a row of pine-darkened mountains in the distance. The skies were ash dissolving in water, rolling out over the horizon in gray plumes. Shem wandered through the high grass with full attention and a grin, unaware of how his spatial memorization would be put to use in the days to come.
“Focus on any landmarks,” Anna advised, pointing to snake dens that twisted down into the soil. “Hold a single spot in your mind, just like before. Tuck it away in yourself.”
Most of the Nahoran soldiers watched in a silent mass, the wind flapping their cloaks in wild dervish twirls. It was hypnotic for them, it seemed. Many had served with scribes in their own regiments, but none—much to Nahora’s chagrin, Anna sensed—had seen hayat harnessed in such a novel manner.
Far away, at the edge of a gloomy stand of pines, Mesar and a senior Nahoran officer led a contingent of Huuri engineers and Azibahli runners along the tree line. They were marking the field with iron rods every half-league or so, flashing materiel requests to the mirrormen in Hedilam with encoded glints.
Things felt different without Yatrin, without even Konrad. She’d seen their deployment as a black splotch on a map of Nahora’s northern coastline. There had been whispers of sea landings, a need for hull-breaching iron tangles in the shallow stretches, but Anna had learned long ago that tacticians often conjured fears where none existed.
She glanced at Ramyi, who knelt fifty paces away with her chin tucked to her chest. The girl’s meditation was coming along well, cultivating the sutal—the razor focus—she’d need to strengthen her runes. Marking the diggers and planters and builders was essential practice. After all, a rune that burned for eight hours was r
emarkable, but it wouldn’t win them the war.
Anna moved closer to the gathering. Creaking wagon wheels signaled the approach of the Chayam brigades, soon joined by the crackling rush of Azibahli sled teams. “Let’s begin. Daylight is a virtue.”
With slight hesitation, the scribes seated themselves in a ragged line and beckoned the rows of Chayam fighters forth. They carved one Nahoran throat after another, falling into smooth rhythms with the skin-splitting hush of their blades, occasionally pausing to rinse the blood from their hands using canteens.
Every so often, Ramyi anxiously met Anna’s eyes.
Yet Anna did not know what the girl hoped to see.
Within the hour the field was scarred with nascent trenches and weavesilk-lined fighting pits. Anna walked among sandbags, scaffolding segments, and the deconstructed frames of enormous ruji cannons lying scattered among the staked-off zones. Every quarter-league, the Azibahli and Huuri engineers had coordinated to construct pyramid-shaped watchtowers, formed from some cryptic mixture of weavesilk and setstone. She felt a strange stillness in the midst of such bustling, such exertion. Even Shem was infrequently put to use by the local engineers, using his water rune to fill ration drums and his crush rune to drive stakes into the soil or compact the earth.
Anna’s presence felt abruptly useless, no more effective or welcome than the Nahoran youths who’d gathered near the dirt path to watch the spectacle. Every so often she returned to the scribes to critique their cuts, but they’d been trained well, and they regarded her with polite smiles that failed to hide their true sentiment: You’re obsolete.
Four hours into the day’s undertaking, Mesar crossed the razor-threaded field and approached Anna. He was sweating and breathing hard in spite of the southern air. “The governor’s prepared a welcome for us, so we ought to wash up,” he explained, nodding contentedly at the scribes and rune-imbued laborers. “There are also some strategic questions to be addressed, but if you don’t wish to be burdened with—”
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