Schisms

by James Wolanyk

  Waves. Anna snagged the thought just before it faded, reflecting on how cold and inhuman it was when compared to the glass-eyed, once-warm corpses lying under the Alakeph’s shrouds. Waves of bodies. Even the Nahorans, who she’d never thought to fear death, carried some morose burden for the days and weeks following a comrade’s end. She knew their rites through Yatrin and Khara, who had, in spite of leading their own ceremonies for Baqir, had the young man’s body drained, wrapped, and set aside by the Nest’s Azibahli warren, preserving his flesh until he could be venerated as a sacred champion in Golyna’s catacombs.

  But Anna had little concern for what became of flesh. Her focus—indeed, her dread—revolved around the end of a sentient being. And as she studied the blueprints of the tracker’s estate, noting every pincer point and avenue of enemy fire, she was overwhelmed by the void of life.

  Whether or not the scribes’ marks held, it would be a night possessed by violence.

  “Once we’ve emerged from Kuzalem’s Webs, we’ll proceed to our destination and receive hayat’s sacraments behind this ridge,” one of Konrad’s Borzaq operatives said, tapping a bruised-nail finger onto a faint curve east of the compound. His face was a patchwork of wrapped black fabric and burned flesh, but scrunched golden eyes revealed his Hazani roots. “The support unit should deploy on the ridge to the north.”

  Several Nahoran intelligence officers and quartermasters noted that in their leather-bound operation logs, their faces long and pitted under the planning room’s hook-hung lantern. Silence was a dense thing in the garrison’s underground level, pooling among setstone and soil. Two-dozen Nahoran operatives, most of whom would be comfortably distant from the strike, had been packed around the table and its broad, austere layout of the target estate, all nodding and asking questions as though its line work actually posed a threat to them.

  Konrad, the only rested and clean-shaven face among the group on account of his rune, hadn’t recorded anything. He passed Anna a coy, indulgent smile, almost as though nudging her and whispering, I’ve kept my word, now pay up.

  Three levels above, Shem and the scribes were busy preparing with the detachment of Viczera Company’s Borzaq and an urban Pashan unit. Yatrin had been stationed in a command room with Mesar, viewing the operation in even more abstract terms. Ramyi and Shem hadn’t been briefed about the mission’s true nature; it would only cripple them with reckless emotions, particularly in Shem’s case. Ramyi had been so preoccupied by the word strike that bringing her was a forgone conclusion. During the journey northward, the two of them had been curious, prodding creatures, constantly pressing Anna about the coming days and what had stolen the mirth from her eyes.

  “Sleep is a luxury,” Anna had explained to them. “This is a moment of essentials.”

  “Once both units have been assembled,” the operative now continued, tracing a line to the compound’s eastern facade, “Viczera Company will scale the rise and breach the outer courtyard.”

  Anna squinted at the map’s diagonal slashes, which represented a real-life escarpment at least twenty paces high. “How do you plan to do that?”

  “Allow us to handle the ascent,” he replied. “Regarding the perimeter, plans are fluid. If we scale the rise undetected, we’ll opt for a quiet entry. If we engage with the enemy, we’ll need to deploy reshaping tactics. Next, we’ll need to align our focus on the manor house in the southeastern corner. Our Pashan fighters will remove the enemy from the perimeter. If we should fall under attack, the Pashan’s support wing will reinforce us from the ridge. With the state’s succor, the target will be extracted in a hare’s twitch.” He paused, taking stock of the table’s worried glances and pursed lips. “Are there any challenges to be heard?”

  The plan itself was simple, but in that shapeless realm of maps and figures, everything was. Anna suspected that the fighter was an adept tactician, perhaps even a remarkable one. But all plans were assigned their worth in the light of reflection.

  The operative pulled his mask over his nose. “Kuzalem, is the Exalted Shadow prepared to deliver us to our fate?”

  Anna gazed down at the table and visualized their strike as ripples, blossoming from the first kill and pulsing out in expanding spirals, rising, swelling, consuming everything in their path until they swept over Nahora.

  She nodded.

  “So it is,” the operative said. “Our home is a living spirit born of breath and bone.”

  * * * *

  Eight years ago, under the charge of a Halshaf caravan bound for Qersul, Shem had stood atop a stretch of bald rock in the Behyam Mountains. He’d lingered under that cloudless sky, transfixed by distant pastel hills and broken expanses of pine and white-water streams. It was the western slope, where shearing wind tugged the trees into crooked knots and the days swung between downpours and dry, blistering heat. Split-sole boots and patient, apple-bearing Halshaf sisters filled his tales of that day, which had ended with bedding down in a cave housing a Saloram shrine.

  “Remember what you said about the wax,” Anna whispered, drawing Shem deeper into his recollection. The site was a five-hour march away from the strike area, necessitating a cautious trek through rocky crags and foothills. Ideal or not, it was the closest site to the estate that Shem could recall. It would have to do. “Just be there.”

  Even in sleep, a smile cut across his lips. He had to be drowning in the details he’d recited so many times: the red candles that bled down the walls from their rock notches, the mandalas and carved visage of some forgotten martyr, the empty brass bowl that the sisters hurried to fill, eager to aid the next wayward travelers that sought shelter from the peaks’ gusts.

  Anna watched the tunnel stitching itself into existence, shimmering with gossamer and burnished light, fed by the Huuri boy’s devotion. Her scribes were straining to meditate in tandem around the chamber, but even between their aid and the draught, there were simply too many bodies in the warrens.

  Countless columns—Pashan fighters, Mesar’s Alakeph, Jenis’s irregulars, and Viczera Company, whose tar-painted faces resembled the Black Beasts feared by every eastern Hazani child—waited in rigid silence behind Shem’s slab. Their eyes were huge and bold in the tunnel’s newborn light.

  Gideon Mosharan hobbled around the outside of the formation, coordinating the order of deployment with his runners, dragging his stick around, jabbing those with slumped spines, tossing out orders in a slush of Orsas and laborers’ flatspeak. He’d been shockingly busy over the past weeks, assuming command over the flow of missives and emergency deployments that Jenis had handled before journeying to Golyna. His age did little to slow him down; in fact, it seemed to sharpen his reaction to stress, to feed his resolve with some deeper well than restfulness or vigor. Perhaps it was simply contact with the state, which had enlivened all of the Nest’s easterners beyond Anna’s expectations. Perhaps it was nostalgia for his days in the Pashan. Whatever the case, it had infused his breakers with intense purpose.

  Adanna and several other hall-mothers had spent their recent time under Gideon’s direction, suspending half their services and sleeping half as much, according to Jenis. They were still preparing for the radical changes the Nest would undergo in the coming weeks, tracking foundling rosters, medical supplies, territory control, and other logistical matters that had been buried under the immediacy of violence. Now they strode up and down the columns with their tins full of burning incense, blessing the fighters with Kojadi chants. “Enter death as a fish enters water.”

  The tunnel’s surface grew tawny and placid, hardening into existence like the first skin of ice over a winter pond. Blackness and dull, fraying clumps of the cosmos were the only things visible on its opposite side, but its presence stilled the warren. Something monstrous lurked across the divide, waiting. Something that had risen up in a sister’s tortured dreams for years. Something that had escaped justice for so long that a young boy’s blood was dry u
pon its hands.

  Anna circled Shem’s slab, still entranced by the tunnel and its beads of silvery stars. We’re coming for you.

  Orsas broke out as the fighters of Viczera Company inspected one another, slipping on helmets and tightening the leather straps of their bandoleers and rucksacks. They turned their ruji end-over-end, inspecting every pin and bulb and coil. There was a chillingly melodic tone to their checking procedure, and soon Anna realized that they were not conversing in words, but rather humming and singing old eastern songs. It had the air of a funerary rite, perhaps fittingly so. For them, the distinction between marching to war and marching to death was illusory.

  Joining their voices to produce sweet, resonant harmony, the Borzaq fighters moved to the mouth of the tunnel.

  “Is there prudence in bringing the child?” Gideon whispered at Anna’s back.

  Anna met Ramyi’s eyes from across the warren. She read the girl’s tapestry of mind, woven from trembling fingers and sweat-streaked brows. And however well Anna carried herself, channeling her nausea into a focus on Shem’s glowing runes, she recognized that fear intimately. “I’ve trained her well enough.”

  Gideon hummed. “My blessings, Kuzalem.”

  * * * *

  The walls of the compound lay flat and black against a horizon of predawn clouds. Crouching low behind a spiny shelf of granite, Anna could barely make out the shapes of the Pashan support fighters on the nearby ridge. Both combat groups had been communicating with some method of candle-box reading supplemented by spyglasses, though Anna hadn’t been able to crack the protocol, even after observing their exchanges over three hours of dusk.

  So many bodies, packs, and jutting bits of metal had been crowded behind the ridge that it seemed miraculous to avoid detection. The units were kneeling in their formations, having been arranged by Konrad’s secondary officer from Viczera Company, listening to the wind’s screeching and the clap-clap of a distant hammer. Khutai, bearing the rune that Ramyi had tethered to a salt mine two leagues away, sat behind the main force.

  The estate was bustling, which proved to be an enormous benefit; wind caught the compound’s black fumes and wafted them toward the higher passes, while the low drone of running water masked whatever errant coughs broke out among the easterners.

  The spyglass-gazing observer to Anna’s right craned his neck higher, prompting Anna to do the same. She noted the Nahorans near the escarpment’s upper rim.

  Konrad and his Borzaq unit were creeping up the shrub-dotted, root-choked slope with flaking soil underfoot, occasionally tying themselves to bowed tree trunks to rest and wait for the din to resume above. Throughout their climb they’d driven loop-headed stakes into the earth, threading their ropes through the notches to aid the successive waves. Now nearing the granite fangs that marked the ridge’s lip, the Borzaq filed under a shadowed overhang and fussed with their equipment, producing a series of strange rods and bulbs. Then they coalesced into a pyramid of woven flesh, locking ankles and knees and wrists, elevating one of their bulkier comrades and hefting him over the ridge. In moments, the operative had secured a climbing rope and swiveled his ruj along the eastern wall, remaining vigilant while his remaining comrades also ascended and hurried to the wall’s cover.

  “You should reenter the Nest in this moment,” one of the Borzaq’s liaisons from the Pashan division whispered, crawling up from the lesser ranks. “Harm may come to you.”

  Anna shifted to stare at the eastern man. “These are my fighters too. I’m staying with them.”

  “Konrad would want you to examine the risk, Kuzalem.”

  “This is the only place I want to be.”

  The Nahoran grunted. “Noted.”

  As the Borzaq shouldered along the eastern wall, flowing silently, yet swiftly, along the setstone-and-clay like a black serpent, a candle flickered to life in the upper floor of the northeastern guardhouse. One operative slowed his steps, but did not alert the others.

  A narrow silhouette moved to the window, wrenched the latch open, and pulled the curtains aside. Soft light spilled out over the eastern ridge, the sand-shaded helmets—

  A flicker burst from the borzaqem at the head of their line, hardly stirring his ruj barrel. Grit burst out in plumes from the window frame. Chipped tiles and pulverized skull fragments sailed off through the haze. Glossy red stippling covered the windowsill. The body sank in a dark heap, twisting back into the candlelight to carve out thin, henna-traced arms.

  An unwed girl.

  “That’s not a fighter,” Anna said to the observer. Her body was burning, itching, fighting to remember to breathe.

  Again, the liaison shuffled closer. “Allow them to do their work, Kuzalem.”

  But there was no time to dwell. A hideous scream—the sort made by those who have never before found a loved one’s corpse—echoed from within the guardhouse. The following seconds were a blaze of alarm. Whistles, rattling bells, and hollered ruinspeak broke out in waves, trailed by flames leaping from enormous rooftop braziers and doors squealing open, cracking back, slamming shut.

  Then Anna understood their predicament.

  Far behind the compound, shrouded by thin fog and blanketing a gentle slope to the very bottom of a basin, dozens of braziers sparked to life. Their flames coiled up among the haze; two, three at a time, materializing like fireflies on the verge of dusk. Low, thunderous horns rolled up from the basin.

  Nervous whispers broke out in Orsas. The observer and liaison began muttering back and forth, initially restrained, but gradually becoming fiercer.

  “We can’t leave now,” Anna said, rolling to face both Nahorans. “We’re too close.”

  Ramyi squirmed up from the row of scribes. “What’s going on?”

  “Not now,” Anna said softly. She lifted her head to watch the Borzaq unit assembling some device below the guardhouse, working with wordless efficiency. More shouts were rising from within the walls.

  “Kuzalem, you must understand,” the observer began.

  “If you force them to withdraw,” Anna cut in, “I’ll order Shem to seal the tunnel. We’ll die together.” She watched their eyes widening, their lips twitching. “You have your orders and I have my arrangements. Don’t interfere.”

  Wrinkling his nose with a buried protest, the Borzaq liaison slid back down the ridge and began slapping the shoulders of his unit leaders. “Onward, onward,” he urged in flatspeak, clapping a palm on the dirt to rouse the dawdling columns. All down the line, the dark shapes of eastern and northern fighters clawed out of blackness, scrambled up against the murky horizon, and slipped down into the valley’s cover. Their observer rattled his candle box to the adjacent ridge, sending the Pashan support troops into a frenzy around their deployed machines.

  The scribes pressed themselves lower to the ground, almost as though meditating with the earth itself. But Ramyi’s eyes remained up and open, locked on Anna with panicked bemusement.

  “I need to be with them,” Anna whispered to the girl. “Stay here and keep them calm. Do you understand?”

  “Take me with you,” Ramyi begged.

  “I can’t,” she replied. She spun around, watching the faraway smudges of Volna troops flood the compound’s western paths. “Wait for me.” Without turning, she shifted her pack upon her shoulders, tucked her ruj under her arm, and backed over the ridge’s edge. Her last glimpse of the rock shelf was a Hazani girl’s firm, glassy stare.

  * * * *

  The first blasts thumped down the slope just before Anna had reached Viczera Company’s ridge position. It had been discovered early in the Volna campaign that explosives were the most reliable and efficient manner of controlling a battle. When marked soldiers engaged one another, the defeated captives were nearly always nude and unarmed, having been disintegrated several times during the course of an engagement. Half of the Pashan carried tungsten knives, allowing th
em to escape whatever nets they became snared in; or, in cases of imminent capture, to slit their throats. Explosives commanded the mind and wreathed it in terror.

  But explosives had no allegiance in combat.

  Granules and pebbles vibrated in great sheets, liquefying and coursing downward with each impact of the Pashan division’s tube-borne shells, shaking through Anna’s hands as she clenched the guiding rope and squeezed away her sweat. Long ago, with only a forest girl’s calluses, she would’ve bled to death on its fibers. But not everything could be trained away. Even between impacts, her body was shaking madly, racing with some possession deeper than fear. It was a stalking hound’s ecstasy. All around her were hard grunts, the scrapes of boots on sand, the ancient moans of rope pulled taut. Countless bodies were squirming up the steep slope, fighting for each new handhold on bare roots or cracked stones.

  Anna took a gloved hand, only recognizing it as Konrad when he gave a nervous laugh. From behind the wall she saw black plumes rising in the air, lit in ghastly, convulsing shapes by the braziers.

  “Mind yourself,” Konrad shouted. “You shouldn’t be here.” Thirty or forty paces away his fighters were tightening a metal device clamped to the wall. All of his unit’s explosive packs, as well as tools that wouldn’t survive the blast, were stacked near Konrad. He held her at bay with his wrist, waiting.

  “I’m not turning back,” Anna told him.

  The Borzaq scattered along the wall, ducking low and wrapping their torsos around their ruji. An instant later there was a jarring blast, concussive and black and smoldering, washing the world out to ringing and dull thumps. The metal device was now a smoking gap in the masonry, still dribbling at its edges with molten setstone. But Konrad’s fighters wasted no time in wheeling about and dashing into the compound’s outer ring.