Anna turned to face Hedilam’s prickly skyline. “It would be my pleasure.”
* * * *
Hedilam reminded Anna of the shifting illusions she’d once been shown by tricksters in Malijad’s markets, changing its form as she tilted her head from one side to the other. It felt trapped between the hard, pragmatic ways of Rzolka and the poise of Nahora, opting to use flawless timber beams in place of Golyna’s fitted white stones, to settle ritual ponds into the fern-crowded valleys between its rises, to cover the city in a veneer of weavesilk so extensive that it resembled a woodland spider’s overgrown dwelling. It was living proof that Nahora was a shared philosophy, not a place. Not even a people.
Anna studied its citizens as they went about their business below the passing kator, trimming bulbous flowers in their windowsills and walking hand in hand and waving up at her as though she were one of them. Many of them, according to Anna’s Nahoran attendant, were shabad carpenters and herbmen and tutors that had come down from the flats or coast, unable to ply their trade in the more demanding markets. They had homespun garments, fair skin, and a generally breezier manner than Golyna’s citizens, but their smiles lingered with Anna. If the cold, brooding people of her region had been born just a few dozen leagues north, their lives would’ve been entirely different. Outwardly they were identical to Hedilam’s people, but inwardly they were as distant as man-skins and Huuri.
The governor of Hedilam was a tall, flat-faced woman with auburn hair and freckles, though Anna initially mistook her for one of the central lodge’s serving attendants. She met Anna and Mesar in the lodge’s southern chamber, which rested atop a hooked ridge and stared out at the mountains through a series of diamond-latticed windows. Walking briskly alongside her attendants to the low table and its arrangement of cushions, she offered a nod and a grin to both foreigners before settling onto her knees and spreading a collection of charts across the table. Her attendants worked around her wild sorting, filling the foreigners’ cups with blackberry tea and a spoonful of honey.
“I apologize for such a delayed meeting,” she explained, scrunching her brow as she slid a pair of stamped documents toward Mesar. “I trust our forces have been cooperative?”
“We appreciate their assistance,” Anna said. She was distracted by the bustling fields, which had surely once been an aspect of the vantage point’s beauty. It was surreal to see something so pristine swarming with engineers and partially erected fortifications. Tomorrow they would reshape the forest, and the northern slope of the mountains after that. . . .
“With their assistance,” Mesar said, pausing as he glanced sidelong and noted Anna’s wandering gaze, “the project is well ahead of schedule. We should be finished within the span of a week.”
“That’s what I was hoping to speak about,” the governor said. “Should I continue in the artisan’s dialect, or turn to river-tongue?”
Several of her attendants, gathered near the broad windows, bristled at that.
“Flatspeak is fine,” Anna said.
“Very well,” she said, dropping clumps of brown sugar into her tea. “Our breakers have had a series of meetings with Golyna’s intelligence division. Our approach to guarding the region is largely the same, but this area has a few special considerations to bear in mind. I don’t know how deeply you discussed them before you traveled south.”
Mesar settled his hands into his lap, nodding considerately. “This is the first we’re hearing of it.”
“Are you referring to the mountains?” Anna asked.
“That was one point,” the governor said, “although Golyna promised us three Borzaq regiments in the next cycle. We’re quite confident in their abilities.”
“You’re not training your own?”
“We have one unit, but they’ve been tasked with overwatch on seven other communities. It’s simply not enough.”
“We can spare a portion of our forces,” Mesar said, though he glanced at Anna uncertainly. “I think we can shift the slopes to our primary focus, if it’s such a concern. We’ll deny them a firing position from the peaks.”
“It’s appreciated,” the governor said, “but a firing position isn’t our fear. Even if their bolts managed to cross the expanse, we’d be able to locate and disable their machines with haste.” Her lips scrunched and she eyed her attendants uncomfortably. “Perhaps you’ve encountered some news of a cartel leader in eastern Hazan.”
“The Toymaker,” Anna said quietly.
The governor nodded. “That was the crux of our discussions. The breakers in Golyna snared some of his correspondence, including two missives to Malchym. They had a lot to do with wind patterns, cloud cover, that sort of thing.”
“By air?” Mesar narrowed his eyes. “You think they’d attempt that?”
“Sadh Nur Amah,” Anna said to the Alakeph commander, her stomach souring at the memory of that day. She recalled Ramyi’s breathless tale, the blackened soil, the wrecked tangle of metal and wood that had been left hanging from the canyon’s outcroppings. “They didn’t just attempt it there; they did it. We assumed it was isolated,” she explained to the governor. “Some prototype they’d decided to test on a soft target.”
“Perhaps it was,” the governor said. “But these missives suggest something on a larger scale.”
“Have your agents found anything concrete?” Anna asked.
The governor shook her head, sighing. “I can’t disclose much to you. Golyna’s directive, you understand. But as of now, we have no idea what they’re planning. We don’t even know how the machines would function.”
Anna lowered her head. “Ramyi knows. She was there when they attacked.”
“Her testimony would help greatly.”
“Not to deviate too greatly,” Mesar said, clearing his throat, “but I assume these are the modified defenses you’re speaking about. Something to ward off anything that approaches over the peaks.”
“Precisely,” the governor replied. “Some of our engineers have put forth plans for quilts in the sky. They’d be able to trap their machines, or, at the very least, disable them before they reached the city. But it’s a hard undertaking.”
Anna studied the mountain range once more. “A costly one too, if they focus their efforts on the ground.” They all sat in silence for a while, occasionally picking up terrain charts and poring over their options. She couldn’t forget the terror she’d seen in Ramyi’s eyes after the strike on the safe house, where blackened bodies had been hauled up and lain bare under the sun. “Build the webbing. Our forces will run a ranging mission over the peaks tomorrow.”
Mesar cast her a warning glance; he was a shrewd tactician, stiffly averse to prodding the enemy when it wasn’t necessary. Especially when an errant footstep could trigger invasion.
But Anna had little concern for rules that their enemy never hesitated to break.
War was bitter, brutal, and lawless.
War was coming.
* * * *
“Hayat is a river,” she said to the sharp-eyed women and girls, including Ramyi, during the day’s lecture portion. She was pacing around the circle’s inner ring, straining her broken voice to rise above the hammering and crackling outside. An hour of humming mantras had left the scribes in a sort of trance, attentive, yet tranquil. “It’s an infinite source that surrounds us. Our runes are nothing more than cupped hands, however the water might flow or scatter or freeze.” Shem’s face clawed its way into her awareness. “But it’s possible to drown in this river. A body is a vessel, but an imperfect one. All things have their price. Remember this in the coming months.”
But forgetting war at all had been difficult, if not impossible. It was etched onto the scribes’ faces. Some were hopeful, others more even-gazing, but they could no longer ignore it. Not after six postings, each one creeping progressively southward, rife with the same tired faces, the same bushel
s of bread and sweets, the same curfews.
But no news of Yatrin’s regiment.
The last of her scribes filed out to their morning assignments, leaving a pall of sunlit dust in the doorway. In that sudden silence her mind resumed its standard functions. Her thoughts during the session had been fragmented, delving into memories of charred villages and Gosuri training camps, where vicious tribesmen had trained by striking corpses and small animals. Still, her students had made progress: Some of the more practiced women could apply branching runes that chilled the air or sharpened the fighter’s vision. Yet for better or worse, months of practice in Nahora and abroad had taught Anna that any symbols gained in meditation were restricted to their creator’s use. The symbol itself was a link to some deeper well of consciousness, some intensely personal manifestation of hayat.
Something dazzling and white entered her awareness.
“Forgive me for this intrusion,” Mesar said, inclining his head graciously. He approached Anna with joined hands and a coy smile.
“Do you require me?” she asked.
“Not with haste,” he said. “Yesterday evening I spoke with the regional Borzaq commander.”
Anna flattened out the pleats of her robe. “Regarding?”
“The latest reports. Flying machines are scouring western Rzolka and the neutral cities too.”
She nodded.
“With your blessing, I would assume command of a portion of your ranks,” he continued. “There are simply too many works to be done. And if we have any intention of guarding Rahabal from these hordes—”
“Rahabal’s death will come from the sky,” Anna said. She was stunned by the flatness of her voice, the certainty that frequent strategic meetings had drilled into her. But she’d known that truth from the moment she arrived. It was an endless sprawl of black water and reeds and morning mists, so clogged with rusting kator tracks and abandoned depots that only Volna’s blindest tacticians would overlook it. Spring had ultimately sealed the city’s fate, shearing off its veneer of frost and starving the enemy of any chance for a ground assault.
Yet Nahora had made it the southern staging ground.
“Your view is duly noted, Kuzalem,” Mesar said. “Even so, we’ll be placing sap braziers around its outskirts. A weavesilk net is also in order. Without your scribes, I fear we’ll fall short of our aims.”
“Perhaps your time would be better spent constructing shelters.”
“They’re accounted for.”
“Near the garrisons,” Anna replied. “But there are people living here, you know. People who won’t get to the eastern dugouts.” Instead the engineering regiments had spent their time with stake-lined pits and hollowed-out sparksalt caches, playing out fantasies of an impossible infantry scenario. “With all due respect, Mesar, our markings are what will determine the course of this war. You’re asking to break the daily practice of my scribes.”
His smirk was subtle, nearly hidden. “I ask you to see the full scope of our efforts.”
“Do I not train with the Borzaq myself?” Boiling the bark of scraggly lagoon trees, wading through algae-choked water, scaling walls with ropes and hooks—none of it brought a deeper sense of readiness.
“Our advisors from Kowak are willing to lend us a contingent,” Mesar said. “It would be pleasant if you could offer similar generosity.”
She recalled the heavyset, bearded men crowded around campfires at the edge of the city, often drinking and rarely speaking. “They’re fighters, not scribes.”
Mesar gave a long exhale. “My Alakeph walk the divide between fighters and mystics,” he explained. “I’ve learned to make sacrifices to that end. I urge you to see our collective interests, Kuzalem. I would hate to pursue a solitary course.”
“What is that supposed to mean?” she whispered.
“Revel in the day,” Mesar replied, offering a slight bow before turning away and heading toward the door. “May you walk with low suns.”
Anna watched his white cloak shrink and disappear, but her mind did not settle.
In the afternoon, energized by stalks of khat and the thick, bitter Nahoran coffee they served in cafés along the reedbed’s walkways, Anna brought Shem and Ramyi to the dry hills just north of the city. Along the way she showed them the trout and tadpoles stirring under fog-shrouded piers, recalling their names in the river-tongue for the first time in years.
It was a pleasant distraction from the training to come.
Yet against all odds, gnats and sunstroke among them, spirits remained high. The troops wouldn’t teach their native tongue, of course, but they translated the latest chatter from their home barracks. “We don’t kill the servants of Volna,” one explained, “we liberate them from existence.” That one got a wave of belly laughs. Another admitted that their unit had been drafting messages to their embedded operatives, encouraging them to spread rumors of Rzolkan women being taken as rosi chalam consorts.
The region’s Borzaq unit proved to be the most severe instructors for their detachment. They wore sleek, quilted suits formed from alloy plating and weavesilk, and featureless, skintight masks, which seemed capable of withstanding a yuzel’s blast at point-blank range.
Most alien was their pack’s reservoir of shalna, a last-ditch compound that even the most hardened veterans were reticent to handle. The Borzaq units had spent the day touting it as the end to all ends, the sacred blade of the state’s martyrs. A borzaqem tossed his pack onto an open patch of mud and hiked back to the group, unspooling a length of thin black wiring as he approached. All eyes lingered on the rucksack as though it were a sleeping beast.
“What is that?” Anna asked the nearest fighter.
A moment later, the borzaqem answered her by twisting a wire-wrapped knob. Superheated weavesilk and setstone concentrate exploded out in a radiant blossom, encasing the muddy sprawl in a massive, crackling block of porous stone.
In the absence of victory, Anna recalled grimly, embrace death.
In the late afternoon, the Borzaq led three hours of firing drills on a stretch of compact soil, forcing the troops—and Anna—to contend with moving targets, constant whistling in their eardrums, and ragged lanes of razor wire underfoot, all with emptied canteens and backhanded strikes for those who dared to rest their legs.
“Even a year wouldn’t be long enough,” the borzaqem remarked, sullenly watching the fighters limp back to the bunkhouses. “They’re not ready.”
Anna resisted the urge to drink in front of him. “To fight?”
“To die.”
That night Anna slept in an old, crooked bunkhouse at the edge of the city’s fen, cradling Ramyi close to her and clutching at wool blankets. It was frigid for the first time in recent memory, even with several dozen bodies packed into the loft, and wind threaded through the rafters in swelling moans. Rain drummed across the tar roof, the tanned hide canopies stretched over barges and sloops along the docks, and the city’s dark waters, which had already risen to drown the walkways. She listened to the flood slushing and stirring far below her; it was kept at a distance by nothing more than stilts and crude drainage piping.
“I want to carry a ruj,” Ramyi said in the blackness.
It startled her. “You shouldn’t think about that.”
“I think about it all the time. Sometimes I hate feeling so useless, like I’m just too small to do anything.”
“You do plenty.”
She was silent for a long while. “Do you believe there are evil people in the world?”
“Yes,” Anna said. “I do.”
“Me too. And I just think about my sisters. I think about you and all the other good people, and then I remember what people do when they’re not good. They want to hurt people.”
“We won’t let them do that.”
“I don’t want to wait and find out,” she said softly. “If you�
�re not around, and it’s just me and an evil person, there’s little I can do.” She swallowed hard. “I want to kill them, Anna. I want to kill them all.”
Anna’s chill had nothing to do with the storm. “Keep hope in your heart and everything else will follow.”
She pulled her blankets tighter around her shoulders, curling inward as though settling back to sleep. Her breaths grew fainter, longer. “That’s what the dead always think.”
* * * *
Golyna’s runners arrived on the first kator the following morning, their baggage carts stuffed with hundreds of missives, sealed command scrolls, and transcribed mirror-glints. But the capital’s most important message was delivered by a thin, blond-haired intelligence officer amid the din of breakfast in a hilltop garrison.
Anna was nearly finished with her kasha, having just slapped Ramyi’s wrist with a spoon for dawdling, when the runner drew up at her side. Anna noted the dark rings beneath the officer’s eyes, the agitated churning of her jaw, the telltale tics in her neck: It had been a sleepless, khat-fueled string of days for the runner.
“Kuzalem,” the officer said, granting a perfunctory nod, “your presence is requested in Golyna. We depart in two hours.”
“Two hours?” Ramyi blurted out, snapping her head up from sludge-like coffee.
Anna held her composure. “For what reason?”
“They’ve approved the strike.”
“What strike?” Ramyi asked.
Anna pushed her bowl away, suddenly filled with memories of a man’s tattooed inner lip, frayed burlap, eastern encryption. As she stalked away from the table, she gave Shem and Ramyi a parting order: “Be packed within an hour.”
Chapter 9
Schematics were the most efficient way to visualize death. Every set of parallel ink lines, expanded to corridors in the mind’s eye, was a chance for two or three fighters to be cut down like saplings in a row. Disconnected dashes, realized as doors by those who would need to kick them in, were funnels for waiting enemies. Windows were an ambusher’s vantage points, jujube rows were billowing veils, low walls were nests for ruji volleys and tossed explosives. Even the barren, blank-paper sprawl surrounding the complex was a daunting risk, stripped of any cover or camouflage for the assault’s first waves.
Schisms Page 13