Schisms

by James Wolanyk

  “They scream out from the devastation they’ve seen,” Tarusa whispered from across the campfire, her forehead piercings and hair bands pulsing with orange light. Several of her Jilal comrades, crowded along a granite outcropping, murmured in agreement. Smoke snagged on a passing gust, whirling up against the overhang’s lip before streaming down the slope toward the dark pines and trench-scarred expanse and Hedilam’s gauzy dome of webbing. “They warn against sleep, Kuzalem. We will pry our eyes open with stones.”

  Anna was certain that Tarusa would do just that, if it were necessary. She’d seen the dark scrawling on the Jilal fighters’ lids, carved using obsidian needles to thin the flesh and keep themselves wary, even during rests.

  Ramyi shifted on her folded rug, poking at the fire’s white coals with a birch branch. “Which tongue do they speak?”

  “It is felt, not heard,” Tarusa replied. “Their tongue has been entrusted to the sacred people.”

  “The Jilal?”

  “That’s right.”

  Frowning, Ramyi tossed her stick aside. “Gideon told me that most of the Jilal joined the enemy. I hope they don’t turn the wind against us.”

  Tarusa snapped another piece of kindling over her thigh.

  “Who’s taking the third watch?” Anna asked, tracking the silhouettes of the local fighters as they hiked down from the upper promontory and its flapping canopy cover. She herself hadn’t slept for nearly a day, but there was more than Jilal superstition keeping her awake.

  A pair of Jilal fighters grunted, rose, and began their trek up the bare rock. When they reached the promontory, they flashed a kerosene beacon to the observers further along the peaks, letting their signal make ripples across all thirty posts.

  “Is Yatrin to the north?” Ramyi asked.

  Anna gazed into the fire’s white core. “The east,” she said. “But only for now. Konrad’s to the north.” In fact, all of their forces seemed to have been scattered anywhere but Hedilam, strung out in a hair-thin line along the state’s fringes. Even Golyna’s Pashan columns had been shipped southward.

  “Why aren’t they helping us fight?”

  “Get some sleep,” Anna whispered, nodding toward the girl’s unfurled bedroll. It did neither of them any good to think of him, after all. She still couldn’t bring herself to envision the Nest being surrendered, letting her precious one-way mirror shatter under the Council’s brutish touch. A tool to aid in war, perhaps, but at what cost? Her only comfort was the assurance that Ramyi and the other scribes, including herself, would be working from within the Nest once fighting broke out.

  But here, in the maelstrom of retreating spirits, there was precious flesh to mark.

  “Let the spirits soothe you,” Tarusa told the girl, drinking from her leather flask with eyes that gleamed madly in the firelight. “They will rouse you if the dreaded ones arrive.”

  Ramyi slid under the wool covers, frowning. “Remember to wake me up too. Just in case the wind forgets.”

  Anna found herself smiling at the purity of it all, at the way the girl’s lids closed so gently and didn’t stir as the wind moaned along the entrenchments and bunkers. In time the nebulae grew fainter to the north, bruising with dark clouds, and she lay back on her own bedroll and shut her eyes, straining to hear the Jilal chants somewhere beyond the fire’s crackling.

  * * * *

  “Kuzalem.” Tarusa’s voice tore Anna from sleep, sparking waves of hot tingles from her spine to her toes.

  She shot up in her bedroll, glancing around at the dim firelight and clusters of bronze skin through bleary eyes, vaguely cognizant of the horns blaring upon the ridge.

  The pyramid of interlaced timber to their immediate east, stacked upon the rock shelf just behind a Nahoran post, was wreathed in coils of flame. It burned with a furious red blaze, licking the skies as it drank up the wind and swelled. Set against the blackness of the jagged sprawl, it was a strange, violent blur.

  The beacons.

  Anna threw her covers aside and snatched her cloak from the nearby pile, cursing under her breath. “When did they light it?”

  Tarusa stood by the lip of the overhang, gazing out at the inferno with her hands set upon her hips. “Now. They burn as far as sight permits.” Her troops were scrambling out from their fighting holes and crevices in the rock, wearily assembling weapons and securing their vests in the beacon’s blinding light.

  Ramyi blinked her eyes open and rubbed at them, groaning. “Anna?”

  “Where did it come from?” Anna asked.

  “No telling,” Tarusa said. “Somewhere to the north. Runners should arrive soon enough.”

  Now more than ever, beacons demonstrated their crudeness. There was no telling where the enemy had struck the front line, only that it had happened. It could’ve taken six hours for the beacons’ light to reach them from the sheer cliffs at Lenkulah, or—in the worst case—a full ten hours from the northern coast. Anna’s mind revolved with the possibilities, certain that the coastal snares could buy an additional week for a naval response, but—

  “The wind is prescient.” Tarusa had turned toward the southern posts, her eyes glowing a burnished red-gold and face painted with dazzling firelight. But her voice was lower now, tucked away from some new threat. “Come here, Kuzalem.”

  “What’s going on, Anna?” Ramyi demanded, still huddled in her bedroll. “Has it started?”

  “Wait,” Anna snapped, bounding over the girl and joining Tarusa on a cluster of stones. She stared southward at the erratic string of peaks and valleys, the basins beyond, the marshlands huddled under argent moonlight at the furthest sliver of her vision. Every post’s beacon was ablaze, venting red tendrils and smoke into the sky.

  All but the two posts to their south, who hadn’t yet scurried out to light their own beacons. The candle was burning from both ends.

  Nahoran whistles pierced the encampment’s relative quiet. Orders in Orsas and flatspeak drowned out the wind, sending the dark shapes of Pashan and Chayam fighters hiking to their positions along the ridges, laden with ruji and spare vests and crates full of munitions. Dozens of Azibahli troops came slinking out from narrow clefts across the rock. Iron and weavesilk ropes whined as firing teams cranked back the cogs of enormous cannons, working within the shelter of rust-shaded camouflage nets and sandbag rings.

  A ga’mir, faceless with his back to the nearest blaze, appeared atop a nearby outcropping. “Make yourselves ready,” he called out. “Don’t leave any equipment behind.”

  “Have you spotted anything?” Anna asked.

  “No,” he replied. “It could be a horseshoe assault.”

  It was foolish to guess such things, since all of it was based on theories and conjecture anyway. A horseshoe, a needle-thin assault to the north and south, a false strike to illuminate every Nahoran position for bombardment. Every idea was as valid as the next, yet ultimately useless. There also hadn’t been any news from Kowak, as far as Anna knew. If Rzolka’s northeastern coast was lost, so was Golyna.

  “You should open the eye of the Nest, Kuzalem,” Tarusa said, gathering up her blades and sling-stones near the campfire. “The hour of death is upon us.”

  Ramyi stumbled out into the glow of the beacons. She gazed at the string of fires, aghast and tight-lipped, then looked to Anna. “Are they coming, Anna?”

  “Yes,” Anna said, buckling the final clasps on her vest and pulling the weavestring cording tight. “Ramyi, take your blade to the post and start marking the easterners. The other scribes are coming.”

  “I don’t have a weapon.” It emerged as a shy croak.

  “You don’t need one,” Anna said. “Just go. Please.”

  Tarusa moved closer to the girl, taking her wrist and whispering something in ruinspeak below the Nahoran shouts. “I’ll guide her. Make haste to the Nest, Kuzalem.”

  But everything
stopped in that instant.

  It began as quivering pebbles, shaking themselves into a grainy blur across the rock face. Then came the quivering through Anna’s boots, the pulsating shifts that stirred her ankles and calves, the rolling, primordial groans from deep within the stone.

  Three curt whistle blasts rose from the peak’s crest, drawing Anna out of her trance. She joined the flow of fighters intent on the ridge’s posts, squeezing through chasms and clambering up over rock ledges as the tremors intensified. Sheets of grit spilled past her. Atop the crest itself the gusts were relentless, breaking over the bunkers’ brick-and-weavesilk mounds like waves against a ship’s bow. The world below her was a dark, scrubby sprawl, emptying out into pine stands and rocky foothills, veiled by masses of low, fraying cloud cover. Barren, inert, even dead, or so it appeared from her vantage point. She gazed down the row of firing positions, spaced at every quarter-league or so, nestled so well among the bald crest that they were discernible only by their protruding cannon barrels and nearby beacons.

  But the rumbling carried on, sending silver-black ripples through the copses and overgrown fields below.

  Anna ducked into the nearest bunker, immersing herself in shadows and a deluge of hectic Orsas. She studied the officers huddled near the bunker’s firing slit, reading the panic etched across their faces in hard stares and silver moonlight, trying to parse what had suddenly awakened.

  “Reb’miri,” Tarusa called out, pounding the flat of her fist against the bunker’s doorway. “Prepare for your markings. Emerge by rank.”

  But nobody moved, nobody spoke. Their attention was robbed by a great swell of mist in the distant foothills, rising up like a tumor, stretching and thinning, before breaking away in hazy rivulets around a black dome. It repeated in a swift sequence across the sprawl, hammering the metallic grating and moaning deeper into the fortifications, each surge of fog blooming and dissolving in the enormous, boiling cauldron.

  Anna’s lips fell open. “Call up the reserves.” A moment later, still surrounded by motionless, silent officers, she cursed. “Call them!”

  It mattered little whether the officers had encountered the creations or not. The mechanical arachnids’ legs cranked up out of their soil covering, raining dirt down in silent black sheets, their sparksalt furnaces bursting to life in orange pinpricks. Shadowed cogs spun madly under a hazy golden nebula. Long, broad cannons sprang up out of the mist, swaying to bear on the mountains ahead.

  It would take several minutes for the machines to move into position, Anna knew. Ten, perhaps fifteen, depending on the—

  There was a muted white flash on one of the nearer rises.

  A dazzling cylinder shot up from the valley, drilling through the cloud cover in a blinding spiral, so abrupt and beautiful that even Anna watched in silence. It streaked out of the right corner of her vision in a flash.

  She glanced sidelong. A bunker far to the north exploded in a burst of light and pulverized brick, its back edge gushing smoke, torn open by the still-ascending bolt. She shrank back as a secondary discharge, likely a ruptured munitions cache, gutted the bunker with a thunderous black blast. She had no time to react; her eyes snapped to a dozen similar flashes across the foothills, lighting up the night skies with a volley of white-trail bolts.

  The western slopes erupted in a flurry of smoke and brilliant flashes, shaking grit down from the ceiling of Anna’s bunker. Three structures to the north were impaled by the bolts, and a fourth’s granite ledge cracked beneath it, sending the bunker and its occupants tumbling down the slopes in a dusty gray torrent. The world itself shifted with a deafening growl.

  “Halifen!” The bunker’s commanding officer, marked by Anna’s base rune and imbued with three branching gifts, slapped the track-mounted cannon and moved aside. His men worked to shake off their trauma, falling into the ignition routine they’d practiced countless times on milder days. It was easy to be brave when death was an illusion.

  The bunker’s cannon screeched, slammed back on its rails, rolled up on its track, and slid back down with a rattling crunch. Its payload, a dense block of sparksalt flecked with kerosene and iron shavings, arced away and shrank into the foothills. It was a wild shot, more reactionary than promising, but better than hunkering down in wait.

  The shell struck the base of a foothill, igniting in a soundless blossom of smoke and white-cobalt streaks and glowing shrapnel. It registered as a shock wave seconds later, drumming the air out of Anna’s chest. Black smoke swirled on the breeze, clouding the enemy’s vision and buying time for the ridge’s ensuing batteries to align their shots.

  “Kuzalem,” Tarusa barked from the doorway. “Reach the Nest!”

  Anna spun away from the cannon with ringing ears, stumbling out into the wind-raked darkness and passing lines of approaching Pashan fighters. She caught sight of Ramyi at Tarusa’s side, all too aware of the girl’s familiar panic in light of the chaos. And in that moment there was no scribe, no fighter, no easterner—only a frightened child. “Tarusa, give her to me.”

  Tarusa whirled away from the ridge. “The reb’miri require markings.”

  “Give her here!” Anna waved frantically to Ramyi. “Bring them down the slope, toward the city.”

  “We must not surrender the heights,” Tarusa called back.

  Anna watched the smoke and flames guttering along the ridge. “I need her for a moment,” she said finally. “Trust me!”

  Scowling, Tarusa nudged the girl down the path and took up a position behind the nearest outcropping. Ramyi came bounding down over the cracked steps and bare rock, panting the entire way, glancing back frantically at the spectacle.

  “Come,” Anna said, extending an open hand. She forced a smile as Ramyi’s touch met her own. “That’s it. Just walk with me, Ramyi. Stay close.”

  “We’re supposed to wait.”

  “We will,” Anna said, stepping past another stream of easterners. “We’re going to wait near the Nest, where it’s quieter.”

  “How will I mark them?”

  Anna just tugged Ramyi along, her feet crunching over pebbled shelves between the thumps and claps of exchanged volleys. Right or wrong, her mind was possessed by the girl’s sister, by promises made and sealed in blood.

  “Kuzalem!” Tarusa shouted from the ridge.

  Anna halted, turned, and listened to the curious warbling in the air.

  Dark shapes flitted against the nebulae high overhead.

  Blasts tore across the entire span of the crest, instantly plunging the world into muted ringing. Successive claps raced down the slope, buffeting grit and crushed stone into whirlwinds, clotting the air with an impenetrable black shroud.

  Every nerve in Anna’s body throbbed with the impacts. She staggered further down the slope, stealing wavering, labored steps through the haze, sensing gravel raining down across her shoulders and hair. As the smoke thinned she glimpsed the full extent of the bombing: Nearly every post for a league in both directions had been obliterated by the run, leaving smoldering shells where there had once been fighting positions and munition dumps. Luminous bolts punched through the ridge like shooting stars, fracturing and scattering in white shards past Hedilam’s dome. The skies were a curtain of churning ink.

  “Anna?” The girl’s voice trickled back into existence as they continued to descend.

  “Keep walking,” Anna said, though her voice was only a reverberation through her jaw. “Don’t look back, Ramyi. Just walk.”

  * * * *

  Dawn broke over Hedilam just after they entered the dome. The weavesilk mesh, underpinned by a latticework of interwoven beams and struts, diffused the burgeoning light into gossamer yellow threads. On any other day, it would’ve been a marvelous sight. It was the ethereal beauty Anna had dreamed about as a child, so exotic and unimaginable to a girl who’d spent her life in the confines of a secluded riding post. A girl who had
been certain she would spend her days slitting the throats of fowl and picking soil out from beneath her fingernails.

  But every experience came with a price.

  Anna could hardly breathe as she led Ramyi into the city’s main square, crowded by columns of disordered Chayam troops and raucous shabad masses. It was screeching, sweltering, violent; a sea of flailing arms and ceramic plating. Entering the dome’s three gateways, which were separated by portcullises and rows of shield-bearing urban units, had been far more trying. She had no idea how many leagues separated the city from the peaks, but they’d all been traversed without resting, without speaking, without any guarantee of safety as they threaded the countless trenches, bunkers, firing platforms, and cannon batteries of the outer defenses. Some of the senior officers had called out to Anna, desperate to know what had broken the ridge so swiftly, but there was no time to explain. Her steps had been taken with a sense of certain death, a prescient expectation of the arachnids scaling the crests and obliterating her flesh in an instant.

  The officers’ questions had been answered, after a fashion, by the enormous retreat that trailed Anna down the slopes. Losing the crest had yielded but a single boon—a sizable delay to account for the enemy’s ascent. Several units of Borzaq, Pashan, and Azibahli fighters were still nestled among the rocks, lying in wait for the enemy to show their underbellies as they climbed.

  Not for the first time, Anna wished her marks would fail them before they broke.

  “Kuzalem,” a marked ga’mir called, whistling until his men shoved their shields in unison and packed the shabad into a swelling crush on either side of the cobblestones.

  Shattered glass and blackened stones littered the ground. Setstone barricades formed a wide ring at the center of the square, staking off the perimeter of Shem’s tunnel. At that moment it was stagnant, devoid of its typical glimmer or mirror-like sheen, but it would soon spring to life.

  Anna dragged Ramyi closer, ducking her head to avoid a hail of thrown bottles and chipped bricks. She couldn’t bring herself to look at the crowd, though it had little to do with fear. She already knew their fate, imposed by the Council, recycled as a mantra, and enforced by ruthless officers: