Schisms

by James Wolanyk

  Most of them had additional marks from Ramyi: A wave of copper shards sprayed across the courtyard, the glass on the southeastern watchtower darkened to jet-black, a cloud of frost burst into the night. The girl’s branching runes, for all their worth, were far more tiring than Anna’s, sapping the user’s vitality like an uncorked drain. They still made for an impressive initial assault.

  Several Hazani shouts, clamoring to kill the dogs or summon the house guard, fell away abruptly.

  “Stay back,” Konrad warned, twisting away and rushing through the breach himself.

  Anna watched some of the Pashan troops jog southward along the wall to the lower guardhouse. Huddling in a drainage ditch, they tossed sparksalt cylinders into the upper windows. Glass and tattered fabric and dust burst out in dark tufts.

  Across the low valley, the support team was feverishly launching their shells, occasionally sending smoke or sparks up from behind the embankment. Soon they’d need to pause their volley, swapping out the tubes or letting the night cool their white-hot iron. Shock and awe couldn’t last forever.

  A group of Pashan troops shuffled to the breach, already huffing from their ascent and distended rucksacks. Once they began to file into the compound, their young and haggard faces illumined by a florescent bang on the western rooftops, Anna followed.

  Another impact, this one bursting on the edge of the northwestern watchtower’s roof, threw a wink of light across the courtyard before her. Writhing knots of smoke and black fumes hung overhead like drifting claws, pulsing with new pits and billows at every flash. The packed soil was streaked with bodies, most sprawled out and bearing little more than buckets or bushels, and Viczera Company were mere silhouettes filing through the doorways of the gatehouses. A rolling clap broke out across the expanse as the Borzaq operatives kicked down the front door of the central structure. Four dark shapes surged into the candlelit foyer, ruji snapping up and raking the walls with dusty scars, silencing young screams. One of the fighters had to be using Ramyi’s hush rune, sapping noise from the air as their explosive cylinders blew out windows in a silent blast of glass and wood.

  Anna shook herself back to the moment, cognizant that her feet had slowed and bodies were welling up at her back. She crouched and dashed for the manor house, but her attention was frantic, snapping from window to window, body to body, every pop and shock that broke out among the compound’s western fortifications. She could smell burning timber and hay in the air, and as she neared the splintered doorway, she saw red and orange threads licking at the underside of the smog.

  But the sight within was far grislier.

  She froze in the doorway’s pane of soft orange light, staring at the oak chips and twisted, rent iron of the hinges resting amid boot-scarred earth. An old woman, swathed in the loose cedar wrap of eastern Hazani droby, lay perfectly still beyond the threshold. Her eyes were parted in a questioning sense, somehow pitiful, as though she couldn’t comprehend why her stomach was torn open, her blood leaking out in an enormous pool, her innards scattered down the corridor like a doll’s stuffing.

  Again, those useless words tumbled through Anna’s mind: That’s not a fighter.

  She raised her head and listened to the chaos within the manor house—sobbing, shrieking, boots crunching over glass, gurgling, the hard hiss of ruji, earthenware bursting and clattering to the floor. Even from outside she heard the Pashan’s shouts, her force’s scattered flatspeak and river-tongue. Her mind was alight with theaters, setstone heights rupturing, streets—

  The tracker is here. Gathering herself, she stepped over the body and aimed her ruj down the hallway.

  Everything in the house was so calm, so orderly, so utterly unlike the man she was hunting. As she moved through the kitchen and swept her ruj over a still-simmering pot on the coals, she was struck by a sense of wrongness. It was a home for somebody, after all. But only the wicked would share a roof with her target. That thought sustained her as she moved into the next corridor and pushed open every door with the ruj’s barrel, letting bands of light illuminate rattan sofas and hookahs and celestial shrines, replete with bowls of meteorite shards and blank-eyed effigies.

  The celestials. She paused, recalling how the tracker had always mocked the northerners and their devotion to the stars. Beliefs changed, she supposed.

  Just before she moved on from the shrine chamber, a whimper rose in the shadows. Nudging the door open fully, Anna discovered a small girl—no more than three or four—clutching feebly at a gaunt man’s arms and wiping wet red eyes with his tunic. Their sigils were mellow, listing about in spite of the chaos. With a pained gasp the man pulled his daughter closer, patting her hair, whispering in ruinspeak, studying Anna’s ruj.

  Anna’s breaths seized in her throat. “Go,” she said in Hazani, stepping aside and holding the door open. “Get out while you can.”

  After an instant of disbelief, the man lifted his daughter and cradled her in his arms. He stopped in the doorway long enough to nod at Anna, crinkling his eyes with some desperate mockery of gratitude. Then he was a flitting shadow down the corridor, bursting out through the far door and disappearing into night.

  The manor house began to rumble, shedding flakes of plaster and clay from the corridor’s ceiling as Anna worked her way to the western edge of the compound. The Pashan firing team’s launchers were cycling once more at full speed, shaking door handles and shattering the surviving windowpanes.

  Reaching the end of the corridor, Anna shoved the door open and emerged onto a covered patio.

  The entirety of the basin lay below her, sloping down to a dry riverbed that was nearly lost to the screen of smoke and airborne sparksalt residue. Her last glimpse of the man and his daughter were along a shrubby rise, hovering among the brambles before vanishing suddenly. Watchtowers, shanty huts, and fortified complexes clung to the descent and the flanking hills, now crawling with dark shapes like some ant hive roused to action. It was more a town than an estate, more ripe fruit than a hardened objective. But as another volley of tube-borne rounds came down across the northwestern towers, exploding like white bolts and showering the walled paths with smoldering brick and clay, the compound’s heart became visible: A long, sloping track of setstone snaked down into the basin’s deepest defile, shielded by spurs of basalt and granite.

  River-tongue and Orsas rang out from within the manor house, trailed by slapping footfalls and huffing.

  Anna ducked back into the corridor, waving them away from the doors. “It’s clear! What am I looking at?” She glanced back, watched the shapes coalescing as they approached from the southern paths. “Get over here!”

  Pashan and southern fighters shouldered into the corridor, crowding it with bodies and curses and ruji barrels. Three Borzaq fighters slipped out of the crush and jogged to the patio.

  The tallest among them, Konrad, cursed and tore off his mask. Sweat caked his hair to his forehead and he wore a wild scowl. “It wasn’t supposed to be operational.”

  Anna’s chest ached. “Operational?” she spat. “What does that mean? Where is he?”

  An otherworldly thrumming seemed to shred her words in midair. A black blur raced down the setstone and soared over the basin as rippling canvas wings and bulbous air sacs and a sleek wooden body, cutting over the hills with an underside lit by braziers, then banked toward the manor house.

  “It’s time to go,” Konrad said. He called out in Orsas, whistling through his fingers and slipping back through the door. Amid a rush of footsteps and shouting, he whispered to Anna, “Don’t stand and watch. Let’s move.”

  She followed, but lingered in the corridor, staring out at the basin’s twisting, rising shapes and sensing the world humming through her boots. The tracker had to be there somewhere, a phantom amid the smoke and embers, and if she carved her way through—

  An enormous shock tore down into the manor house, ripping a crooked fissure thro
ugh the ceiling, rattling Anna’s teeth, swallowing sound itself, furling out over the patio and lower compound as a cloud of roiling dust. Pashan fighters limped off the patio and hobbled numbly past Anna, their faces a shroud of plaster and sweat streaks. Some of Ramyi’s marked fighters, imbued with the branching rune swell, sealed off the doorway with mounds of soil.

  Anna too wandered in a daze, hearing only shouts and the pulsating whines of circling machines. Her lungs were choked with dust, her eyes watering and clouded with grit, her hands struggling to grip the ruj.

  A second blast landed just shy of the patio. Her body convulsed as though shoved from some great height and striking earth; it forced the air from her chest, slammed her into a serving table near the kitchen door. Sand and plaster dust pelted Anna’s back, exploding down the corridor in brown plumes. Gasping, choking, she wiped her eyes clear and staggered into the kitchen.

  Smoke stirred in the air above. Flames were whipping in angry red swirls along the walls and alcoves and shelves, fed by cracked ceramic jars leaking oil and kerosene. Another pair of marked fighters burst into the kitchen, churning the air, resettling the smoke long enough to see that the ceiling had fallen away at one corner and spilled a bedroom’s contents into the blaze. Shattered hardwood and fraying rug tassels drew the fire up to the second floor.

  “Is everyone out?” she called out to the Pashan fighters.

  With lips pursed eerily against the smoke, the breathless fighters nodded and hurried on.

  Anna could already hear foreign Hazani cutting through the panic, emanating from the patio and cobbled slope that wound down to the basin. Suddenly she realized what had delayed their counterattack for so long: They’d been marking something. Soon the enemy’s own blasts wouldn’t hold any sway, becoming as inconvenient as gnats to a woodsman. Anna dashed out into the foyer, stealing a last glimpse of smoke furrowing down from the second floor and candles glowing like luminous eyes amid the haze.

  “Anna!”

  Her name pierced the smog and its muffling shroud. The young girl’s voice, shrill and northern and wracked with panic, came from upstairs.

  Ramyi.

  Anna glanced at the kitchen’s doorway, saw smoke whirling up through the ceiling’s gash, heard guttural Hazani leaping back and forth within the gloom. Perhaps her hearing was cracked, fueling her mistruths and fears. To stay was to perish.

  Khara ran into the foyer with a yuzel in her hand and black markings painted across her cheeks, narrowly avoiding the old woman’s body as she approached the stairwell. “Ramyi!” She flinched upon noticing Anna. “Kuzalem, we’re withdrawing. The girl ran off.”

  Another girl’s scream broke the air. Dread burrowed into Anna’s gut. It was real, it was happening. She could stand to find other bodies, but Ramyi’s—

  “I’ll get her,” Anna said, shouldering past the easterner.

  Khara aimed her weapon toward the kitchen and its bleeding smoke. “It’s not secure.” Without lowering her yuzel, she slid off a Borzaq rucksack, weighed down with countless agirs of explosives and entrenching devices, and slid it over chipped tiles. Anna fumbled to lift and secure it as Khara continued. “The unit is waiting on your command! Make haste to them.”

  But by the time she’d spoken Anna was already bounding up the stairs, her vision thickening to black sheets with every step, the air growing hotter and tighter in her throat. Flames were thrashing about beneath the smoke, whirling and raking up the walls, giving form to overturned tables and bloody bodies. “Ramyi,” she called, though the crackling timber and whooshing blaze drowned her out. “Ramyi, where are you?” She dropped to her hands and knees and crawled forward, straining to draw still-cool air that smelled of rusted copper and shisha. Pushing her ruj along with one hand, she swatted weakly at the smoke with the other.

  “Anna?” The voice was dim but audible, no more than ten paces away.

  “I’m here,” Anna said, unclasping her cloak, rolling it into a wad, and breathing through its cotton. “Come to me, Ramyi.”

  Nothing moved amid the inferno.

  With another hard breath, Anna pushed forward into the blackness. Her eyes were prickling, itching, begging to escape. But just ahead was a small boot, squirming over a red rug. She grasped a thin ankle, watched Ramyi roll out of the smog to face her.

  The girl’s face was stained with soot and gray ash. Dark spots of blood, carved by shrapnel and superheated grit, covered her left cheek. “Anna, I’m sorry.”

  “Breathe through this,” she said, tucking the cloak into Ramyi’s hands. “Where’s Khutai? We need that tether.”

  “I don’t know!”

  “Come.” Anna swiveled around and wormed toward the dark square of the stairwell, ignoring an overhead beam as its varnish burst into flame and scarred bright orange cracks along its grain. Reaching the steps, she turned to find Ramyi swiping at her eyes, hacking up dark saliva into the cloak, sobbing quietly. “You can’t break right now,” Anna said firmly. “Do you understand me? You can do that later.”

  Three ruji went off in quick succession, showering the stairwell’s landing in a hail of iron shavings and setstone dust. Khara had no time to scream; she struck the wall of the stairwell in a mist of blood, her left half eviscerated and ceramic plating blasted away. Even as her body re-formed, sprouting fresh tendons along her jaw and pearl-white eyeballs within a nascent skull, the approaching fighters surrounded her and fired six rounds into her spine and face. Her head burst once, twice, showering the landing with brain matter that crumbled and regrew at once. But the body was only still for an instant, twitching as it acted out its death spasms. Then it was reborn. Khara sprang up as her skull spread like spores over gray lobes, shoving her yuzel into a wiry man’s face and evaporating his head in a pink wash.

  They’re not marked. The realization spurred Anna to snatch her ruj from the hardwood and aim it at the melee, where six, now seven fighters, had swarmed into the foyer and encircled Khara. She fired indiscriminately, ripping apart Khara twice during her volley, squeezing the bulb’s trigger until the cylinders emptied.

  Blood, bone, stringy flesh, dust, shattered tiles—the stairwell’s landing was a gory mound, smearing and shifting with every fighter that fell upon Khara.

  Something caught on Anna’s rucksack. She spun around to find Ramyi fishing out explosive cylinders, fresh ruj barrels, and pouches of iron shavings, dumping them in a loose pile near Anna’s hand.

  Twisting the ruj’s center lock and turning it over, Anna ejected the glowing, warped barrel like a rod of starlight. It sparked down the steps as smoke wafted past her, as heat screamed at her back, as she surrendered control of her hands to marshland training and slotted a new barrel in place. Hastily snatching up the iron pouches, Anna clamped them into the cylinder’s notches and wound back the firing hammer. “We’re going to move, Ramyi,” she said, aiming the ruj at a brawny man sawing through Khara’s shoulder. “Follow me and don’t hesitate.”

  Glancing back, she noticed the girl’s trembling. Her eyes were brimming with tears; red, inflamed. But it was no time for rebuke, no time for ideals.

  There was simply no time.

  Anna worked her way down the steps, snapping her focus to silhouettes as they dashed through the kitchen doors and cutting them down before they emerged from the haze. Bodies were piling up in the threshold, buying enough time for Ramyi to pick her way through the gore and trampled torsos, to retch once she staggered into the courtyard.

  Khara was still facing the kitchen, her forearms and legs and face bathed in bright red. Her plated vest had been sheared away to little more than strips of weavesilk and fractured ceramic, blackened in places and fused at others. But her eyes were deadly, her rune pulsing defiantly, her hair falling in shiny black bunches over her chest and shoulders. “Go first, Anna. I’ll stand.”

  Anna nodded, wasting no time in hurrying through the front door and tr
ailing Ramyi in darkness. Their footsteps resonated to the edges of the courtyard, hard and distinct in spite of the blasts tearing through the compound. But as she spun around, waiting for Khara’s shape to press against the blackness, she saw the marks she’d been expecting since the first lull in combat.

  A gargantuan black shape rose against the sky, nearly eclipsing the manor house’s inferno. The giant crashed through the structure’s crumbling southern half, swatting away iron struts and baked mud like a spider’s webs. Anna’s enormous and long-forgotten rune, enshrined with onyx amulets that dazzled in the light of another blast, shone its burning brand through the smoke. It was naked, hairless, balancing on grotesquely swollen legs and webbed feet. Thundering forward, it gave a reckless swing that demolished the manor house’s second floor. Its screeches were hideous and tormented, so agonized that Anna could hardly sense the divide between Dogwood captain and beast.

  “Khara!” Anna’s voice was forced beyond its limit, burning her throat, but it didn’t matter. She fired twice at the beast’s chest, but the iron shavings were nothing more than a nuisance, falling to the earth and sizzling in clusters.

  The Nahoran sprinted out of the doorway just before the giant pummeled downward with the flat of his fist. Another belly-born scream rang out, heralding a second strike that drove Khara’s body into the dirt. She lay broken, wheezing with a shattered spine, until the rune enabled her to roll free of the furrowed earth. “Go!”

  Shadows were picking their way over the rubble of the manor house, whooping and whistling as they approached. An eardrum-drilling whine warned of the flying machines’ return.

  Anna aimed her ruj at a target across the courtyard, squeezed, and—

  Empty.

  Khara was staying low to the earth, slashing madly with her short blade and lacerating the giant’s legs, but it was a failing effort. The giant’s thrashing became sharper, faster, crushing her body and tearing her into wet, shadowy strands. With a final reconstruction of her legs, Khara scrambled away and waved to Anna. She was naked in the firelight, standing tall before a jumble of seared ceramic remnants, a vivid incarnation of forest goddesses Anna had dreamed of long ago. “Throw me the pack.”