Schisms

by James Wolanyk

  Anna’s stomach knotted. “What?”

  “The pack!”

  The woman’s urgency was impossible to oppose. Anna slid the pack from her shoulders and threw it underhand, sending it skittering to Khara’s feet amid a wash of dust.

  When the easterner retrieved the pack and began tinkering with its underside, the plan became clear.

  Anna’s heartbeats were kicking, violent things, numbing her chest and throat. “Khara, we can still leave.”

  “Go with the girl,” Khara said, still working as the giant lumbered toward her. “Tell her that I forgive her.”

  “This isn’t necessary.”

  “Death is an illusion,” she said, nearly shouting the phrase. It had to be a Nahoran maxim, drilled into the fighters from their earliest days. “It is a natural consequence of separation. It is the reclamation of bliss.

  The giant was nearly upon her, looming with its bloated arms and warped southern features.

  “One life,” Khara yelled, “is all I can repay to this world.”

  She twisted the final knob.

  A flash, then a great ripping.

  The rucksack and Khara and the giant were gone. The entire courtyard was bisected by a creeping maze of setstone and argent weavesilk, which now stretched skyward in alien columns and mottled teeth. Moisture evaporated from the tangle with a final few glimmers, hardening and losing its luster like some distant nebula winking out of existence.

  Anna stumbled backward, dropped her ruj in the dirt. She could hear someone—no, Khutai; Khutai and his tether rune, so dependable, yet so late—calling her name near the breach.

  She could already imagine the elation of Mesar and his fellow commanders when they drafted the combat report, likely wine-drunk and riding a wave of ecstasy unknown to those with soil packed beneath their fingernails. One casualty was a small price to pay for the punishment they’d inflicted.

  It was hardly a price at all.

  Chapter 10

  It would’ve taken a Borzaq battalion to drag Anna back to Golyna that night. She couldn’t go, wouldn’t go. The war could’ve begun right there, cracking the world from shore to shore, and she would’ve listened to it burn through hayat’s membrane. The true world held little for her. Instead, she cloistered herself in her study, staring into a brass mirror until she recognized her own face, her own hair, her own body, recently washed but carrying the tacky sensation of blood nonetheless. It was preferable to seeing Khara on the black canvas of her eyelids, made pristine by the memory she’d honed so diligently.

  Her mind was a blade, slicing her open from every angle.

  She didn’t need to die. That was all she’d murmured after they crossed back into the Nest. All around her the fighters had been elated, surging with hot blood, beaming despite the grit dappled across their faces; they’d only noticed Khara’s absence when the easterner’s unit performed a head count. Sixteen out, fifteen in. The most affected was Ramyi, who’d stood against the wall and cried softly into her sleeves, her back heaving with shaky gasps. But Anna was too broken for scorn. Her chest was a dull aching, a mechanical thing, swallowing up whatever feeling she tried to muster.

  “It was noble of her,” Konrad had said as Shem reawakened the tunnel to Golyna. “I’ll make sure she has a stone in the catacombs. Beside Baqir’s body, maybe.”

  But his words were hollow, stinging sounds. A mockery of empathy. There was no remorse in his heart, neither for Khara nor the compound they’d destroyed. If she’d been able to conjure wrath, she would’ve beat her fists against his chest, screamed at him, did anything that required elusive passion. It was simpler to stand and listen, to watch him march away with his unit as though something had truly been accomplished.

  Where is he, Konrad?

  Anna rose from her cushion, paced around the study like a caged animal, and finally ate the apples and rye bread left near the door by Halshaf sisters. It was her first meal in over a day, but she chewed and digested like a marked fighter, keeping up old appearances without cause or need. She’d had Shem seal off every tunnel before dawn, sending runners to Yatrin, the Council, and several commanders about her absence, which she’d tactfully deemed recuperation. Her air of occultism was her saving grace, her freakish excuse to be cordoned off from reality. She couldn’t even face Shem, who’d slipped back into a draught-starved slumber in the warrens.

  “Anna,” the girl whispered. She stood in the doorway with her arms wrapped around herself, her hair uncombed and tangled about her face. “Could I stay here?”

  Anna blinked at Ramyi. It was as though she’d forgotten how to speak, how to process anything at all beyond her own breathing.

  “The sisters and hall-mothers are leading a ceremony for her,” Ramyi continued. “I just couldn’t be there.”

  “Sit.” Anna’s voice had rusted over.

  Ramyi did as instructed, shutting her eyes once she’d settled onto the cushion and draped her arms gently over her legs. They were both silent for a long while, waiting to stumble upon the proper words. But words were a pale imitation of feelings. At last Ramyi’s head slumped forward and she glanced at Anna, bleary-eyed. “Is this what it’s like to be you?”

  Something lanced through her, sudden and crushing, too forceful to be contained by words. It reminded her of sorrow from long ago, when nobody had listened and everybody had spoken. “What do you mean?”

  “She did it for me,” Ramyi whispered. “But I’m nothing remarkable, Anna. I see into people, but I don’t want to. If I were anybody else, they would’ve left me.”

  Warm, thumping blood shifted in Anna’s neck. “That isn’t true.”

  “She shouldn’t have gone back for me.”

  “Don’t say that.”

  “I mean it,” she said. “I just wanted to hurt them so much. Somebody, anybody.”

  “Ramyi.”

  “And you should’ve left me too, because—”

  “Be silent!”

  Ramyi grimaced, scratched away her tears with the back of her hand. Her sniffling built to jerking, angry breaths. Anger was a refuge beyond hurt.

  “Mind your speech,” Anna said, restrained even as her hands shook. “You did something foolish, but the world passed on. It’s still passing on.”

  “That’s what you say.”

  “It’s what I know.”

  The girl frowned at her reflection. “But you miss her. She’s gone, and it’s because of me.”

  “You’re right.” Innocent blood was a scribe’s penance. It was a sour truth, understood over a lifetime of pain and grief. But the process couldn’t be shared, couldn’t be soothed. “And she would die for any of us again. She chose to surrender her life for you.”

  Tears glimmered in the candlelight. “And what now, Anna?”

  “Now you live,” Anna said. “You’ll hurt, and you’ll strive, and someday you’ll surrender your life for somebody else. But for now, you live.”

  “I only know how to hurt.”

  A chill settled over Anna. Not from shock, but from truth: Hurt was, and had always been, the crux of the girl’s existence. “Spend time with the sisters, Ramyi. They’ve missed you.”

  She rose on wobbling legs and headed for the door. “I’m sorry for what I’ve done, Anna.” Her voice, once wounded, was a resolute mask. A chillingly familiar one, no less. “I’ll be with the breakers.”

  “They have little time to spare.”

  “Gideon invited me,” she replied, opening the door. “He said he’d teach me to kill.”

  “I don’t—”

  “You won’t need to worry about me anymore,” Ramyi whispered. “They’ll remember my name, Anna. They’ll all be afraid.”

  Beneath a swell of memories—a northerner’s shaved head, a ring of bodies, red sand—Anna heard the door’s latch click shut.

  She gazed
into her lap, certain that Ramyi would fulfill her promise. But the girl had nothing to apologize for. Her failures belonged to words unspoken, to affection withheld, to a childhood tarnished and stolen at every opportunity.

  They belonged to Anna.

  * * * *

  Within three days’ time the southern trade networks and Hazani cities were alight with a surge of missives and logistical reports, according to the Nest’s breakers. It was as though their strike had thrown pebbles at an enormous beehive, leaving them waiting with bated breath to be stung. Nothing they intercepted was inherently linked to Volna’s campaign, the Azibahli runner had explained, but its stains were everywhere: more lucrative contracts for the cartels drilling in Hazan’s western sparksalt quarries, relocation orders for three hired blade companies operating in the plains, mass dispatches to governors and krev leaders calling for a levy on personal holdings and cargo shipments. Some replies were encouraging, including outright refusal from a string of coastal cities and several communities in central Rzolka, but others indicated where Nahora had lost any hope of cooperation.

  The territorial maps hanging in the breaker’s den were rapidly swelling with Volna’s black ink, overtaking the shaded patches where operatives had once made contact and offerings with regional leaders. Not that Anna held any bitterness toward the defectors. Perhaps they’d simply seen the leaves turning, the vast rainfall approaching, and taken shelter under the tallest oaks.

  If nothing else, the runner’s news roused Anna from her isolation.

  There was no time to be broken, for better or worse. Volna’s shuffling columns prompted a similar reaction from the commanders in Golyna and Kowak, forcing Anna to settle Shem back into stasis and reopen seven tunnels. The Huuri was eager to comply, naturally, but Anna hated the notion that his freedom was the war’s first casualty. She’d settled him to sleep like a dying hound, singing southern lullabies, grinning, holding his hand until his heartbeats slowed to a gentle ebbing.

  Within moments, runners from Golyna and several frontline cities had streamed into the Nest, intent on meeting chambers to exchange information and requisition aid supplies from the Halshaf.

  One runner, the same Nahoran liaison that’d found Anna in Rabahal, commanded Anna’s entire attention. She arrived at Anna’s study with a ribbon-bound stack of letters, just as austere as before.

  “The ga’miri?” Anna asked, glancing at the letters with disinterest.

  “Several,” the runner replied. She fished one letter out of the stack, marked by a red stripe, and extended it to her. “Yatrin Telayn delivered this with urgency.”

  Anna stared at the letter, then took it gently from the runner’s hand. She opened it in a daze of curiosity and exhaustion.

  It was written in awkward, block-like imitations of Kojadi script. A quarter of its lines had been marred by the ink of Golyna’s breakers. Yatrin’s voice was present throughout, however, hardly brushing the word death as he wrote about Khara’s burial ceremonies. It will be in the grove on the cycle’s twelfth day. We will plant a cedar for every loss, regardless of creed. Foundlings are well. Mesar is frustrated. Volna is sending emissaries. At the page’s very bottom, written with harder, darker quill strokes than those above, was a single line:

  Your absence is felt.

  There were only two tunnels linking Golyna to the Nest, one in the northern foothills’ garrison and the other to the southwest, deep within a bunker complex that had subterranean kator lines running to the inner city. The latter was a recent engineering project, its walls mottled and lanterns sparse along the corridors. Mesar had agreed to the Council’s restriction on hayat tunnels within Golyna proper, and even the underground rails were safeguarded in the event that an invasion was launched from the tunnel site, whether out of betrayal or some Volna siege: The long setstone passages, Anna gleaned from her liaison in the kator, were dotted with embedded shalna charges that could solidify the entire track on an officer’s command.

  Anna wasn’t convinced that Volna was the threat they had in mind. She wasn’t convinced of much at all, in fact. She spent the hour-long ride largely in sitting meditation, sensing the red glow of the capsule’s lantern swaying behind her eyelids. It pained her to admit that Gideon had lived up to his duties as Ramyi’s tutor, forging boldness and a sense of duty that Anna had never been able to instill in the girl. In her mind’s eye she recalled the girl striking sand-filled sacks, pulling herself up on iron rungs, plucking an exact sequence of marbles from a full basket as part of some Nahoran memory game, constantly met with praise and adoration from the old breaker.

  Perhaps she was better off there, far from Anna and her lessons. But Anna’s thoughts burned away as the capsule’s doors parted and revealed a garish, lamplit terminal.

  A handful of Viczera Company’s logistical officers were waiting for her, nervously scanning the passage’s depths for some unseen threat. Their party was sparse and slate-faced, reminiscent of guard units within prisons or besieged settlements or the kales in Malijad. None of the Nahoran leadership seemed keen to meet with Anna, particularly outside of council rooms, but they were more wary of leaving her unattended.

  Konrad came into view at the rear of their gathering. “Welcome back.”

  Anna’s jaw tensed. Sukra. His ease, his constant and damnable ease, lanced like a needle through the open sores in her memory. She could feel their tendrils, fanning out from her head and into her heart and very center, throbbing with rage for everything she’d allowed to happen that night, for every answer left unsought in the rubble, for every monstrous lie Konrad had ever bundled up and nestled into her hands as a gift. Even Bora, buried for longer than Anna could recall, surfaced as a ringing of echoes and calcifying reminders: Sweet words, child. Sweet words will destroy the thinking mind.

  “The Nest has grown crowded,” Anna said darkly. “There may not be room for another woman and child.”

  The lump in Konrad’s throat bobbed. “Just what I’ve been meaning to discuss, Anna.”

  “My fighters demand more of my attention.”

  Konrad’s boyish smile began to flicker, ceding to the edge in Anna’s voice. “The ceremony’s not due to begin for several hours.” He cast telling glances at his fellow officers. “We can mince words in a more private setting.”

  * * * *

  At times Anna had lived as though she belonged in parlors and gilded halls, striding past nobility with the scents of summer muck and lye still clinging to her. At others, she was struck by how little she belonged, how badly she longed for solitude, how young and inexperienced the world thought her to be. The hillside lodge belonging to the Order of Asiyalar, set into the steep, overgrown banks near the southern rivers, was far from the most opulent place Anna had ever visited, but it still managed to remind her of her place.

  None of Konrad’s accompanying officers had been permitted entry at the stained mahogany doors. It had taken ample coaxing for the lodge’s guard detachment to even allow Anna through. “If you don’t know of her,” Konrad had assured the aging guard commander, “your superiors do.” Its doors carried a sense of the occult—they were adorned with ten-pointed figures, archaic Orsas script in a waterfall’s vertical slashes, gold-lined carvings of bodies dissolving into motes of ether as their outlines approached blade-shaped handles.

  Indeed, the lodge itself was another world.

  It was an open, airy complex, swaying with brass chimes and enormous flowing curtains. A pair of hooded lodge acolytes, scarred with Asiyalar’s decagram symbol on their cheeks, guided Konrad and Anna to a candlelit den facing the Crescent and its distant mountains. Poets sat within the windowsills overlooking the central river and its labyrinthine gardens. Behind sliding canvas doors, diplomats gorged themselves on red grapes and blackberry liquor, chuckling their way through trade agreements with cartel leaders. Children in the pebbled courtyard were being scolded, initiated, beaten, soothed, ord
ered about.

  Anna knelt on the cushions as the acolytes shuffled around the den, clearing away serving dishes and fussing with the latches of hanging lanterns. She hadn’t spoken much since she arrived, so holding her tongue was an easy thing. Konrad was the one affected by the quietness, she read; he was squirming on his cushion, busying himself with the advent of nightfall and its coming storms.

  “Until a few days ago, it was calmer,” Konrad said in flatspeak, his eyes focused to the shadows beyond Anna. “At the year’s birth, they deployed a vanguard column. All graduates.” He shrugged. “Now the new litter’s in. They’re chomping at the bit for summer lessons, believe it or not. Their heads’ll be swallowed by their helmets.” Another pause, this once capped off as he cleared his throat. “Have you heard the news about their emissaries?”

  Anna nodded.

  “They’ve been here for two days already.” Konrad rubbed his temples. “Their teeth are gnashing over that incursion. Not that I’ve been allowed into the talks, mind you.”

  She watched the black clouds billow. Dry, crackling thunder broke the air as the acolytes slid the doors shut.

  “I miss her, you know,” he added in the river-tongue.

  “You never knew her,” Anna replied. Nor did he have any way to replace her and all the good she’d done; all the good she might’ve done. And nothing could convey the pain of losing a sister shared for two years, embraced in trenches and blackened fields, who’d always offered her last ration scraps instinctively.

  “I was aware of her,” Konrad admitted. “Her unit supported mine before she defected. Twice, actually.” He smiled faintly, uncorking a bottle of brandy and pouring a measure for himself and Anna. “One dawn we were at Efasera, pushed back into the foothills by a Gosuri band. Sixty or seventy of them, in fact. They must’ve chased us for an hour, whooping and screeching, lobbing canisters the whole way. It tore up our ranks. Eventually we just stopped calling out or checking numbers. But one woman was always dashing back, even for the Hazani and southerners in Viczera. That was Khara.”