In the absence of victory, embrace death.
“Are you beginning the evacuations?” Anna asked the broad-chested ga’mir as she drew closer, taking refuge behind a setstone block. She pulled Ramyi closer.
“We’re still mobilizing the columns,” the ga’mir shouted in reply.
“You won’t have enough time to get them out!”
“Then they’ll honor the state.”
Anna glared at the man and his rune, which still bore the ghosts of her steady hands, her perfect cuts. “There are shelters in the foothills. At least move your citizens.”
“Once we’ve arranged our wolves,” the officer said, “we’ll tend to the flock.”
As always, there was no room for discussion. Shem sensed her presence somewhere beyond the warp and weft of reality, conjuring the dimmest traces of hayat from stifling air. The tunnel’s edges flickered, hardening and materializing as an icy film, boiling the air until it became a solid screen within the barrier.
The crowds surged, redoubling their shouts and shoves against the wall of urban units. Several shabad men broke through and made a headlong dash for the tunnel, some with their wives or children in tow. Silhouettes shifted along the balconies hemming the square.
Anna glanced up at teams of Pashan fighters leveling their ruji on the runners, firing in mechanical tandem—
Blood burst across the cobblestones. Bodies pitched forward, twitching and spurting into the stone grooves, sending skull fragments skittering toward the barrier. Screams filled the dome, rising to a feverish din that drowned out everything beyond the most forceful ga’miri orders.
Ramyi covered her eyes, sobbing.
“What are you doing?” Anna whirled on the officer, her heart pistoning in her throat. “Hold your fire!”
But the officer hardly glanced at Anna. He seized her wrist, dragging her out from behind the barricade, and shoved her toward the Nest. “Don’t tarnish our sacrifices, Kuzalem.”
As she stumbled through the Nest, taking in a fleeting glimpse of Hedilam’s bloody cobblestones and thrashing masses, she saw only sacrifice.
* * * *
The silence of the gathered hall-mothers and sisters was deeper than any meditation practice could instill. They weren’t staring at Anna and Ramyi, but at the horrors just behind them, framed in an oval lens shaped from dissipating hayat. Even with that limited perspective, ignorant to the devastation upon the peaks and the countless souls that had joined the wind in the war’s earliest barrages, their tear-lined cheeks and red eyes reflected the truth that Anna already knew:
Hedilam had been thrown to the wolves, not by cruelty, but by pride.
She wandered away from the city’s tunnel, casting glances at the other openings along the warren’s walls. From that perspective, she realized that Hedilam wasn’t the only burden in the hearts of the Halshaf. The warren was a mural of devastation, thick with black smoke and piled bodies, staring idly at shell-pitted fields and flattened woodlands. Through some sealed tunnels she saw mesa-top cities entirely abandoned, the only hint of a possible cause being soil patterned with mottled Gosuri hoofprints and patches of bloody sand. In others, the Nahorans were uprooting their equipment to flee eastward, shakily glancing at the hordes of black smoke and venting steam in the distance. In one lurid display, Anna’s marked Volna captains, now bulging to the size of giants with unthinkable draughts and dark craft, were tearing their way up a forested scree slope to assault the Bala fortifications in the central cliffs, detonating their own explosive packs when they reached occupied holdouts. Within seconds, the bodies re-formed and continued their ascent. The most twisted view was one in which Volna appeared to have discovered the tunnel’s invisible eye.
Behind the thin veneer of the membrane, Nahoran and Halshaf bodies had been stacked into piles and carved to the bone by Hazani men wearing the sun-dried heads of mountain lions and rams. Giants sat atop the mass grave of small bodies, using their teeth to tear the corpses limb from limb and throw them to a host of ragged, bleeding hounds below. Hazani men and women, blindfolded and chained together, were being led away toward the Volna baggage camp.
“By the Grove,” one sister whispered.
But there was no Grove here. There was no dignity, no reason, no speech or soft touch to undo what had been done. There was only hate in the most universal sense. The only remaining tunnel was the link to the subterranean track in Golyna. Innumerable columns of atma’jani—warriors reborn in ten past lives, all the proud young men in the academy had told her, now each bearing their forefathers’ death mask— stood in formation, ruji loaded and held fast against their shoulders, staring rigidly as they waited for the tunnel to materialize. Anna closed her eyes against the flood of nausea and moved closer to Shem’s table. “Shem,” she whispered.
The boy’s lips drifted into a smile.
“Close them all, Shem,” Anna said. “Everything but Golyna. All right?”
Stiff and silent, the boy’s rune pulsed for an instant. The fallen tunnels sublimated out of existence, leaving only the republican guard reserves waiting behind their tunnel’s lid-thin covering.
Ramyi’s breaths emerged in twitching, startled huffs. Her eyes were a tangle of bloodshot amber veins.
Anna stepped in front of the tunnel. Everything in her rebelled against the words on her tongue, but she thought of Yatrin, of Shem, of the many needles the Council could use to pierce her heart. “Shem, do you trust the ga’miri?”
No reply, but it didn’t matter. He trusted whoever she trusted. That was his flaw.
“Take orders from the ga’miri until I return,” Anna said softly. “Do as they say and don’t be afraid of anything. No harm will come to you.” She glanced back at his slab, searching his face for the dim smile that never appeared. “Open it, Shem.”
The tunnel sharpened into full focus, allowing the atma’jani ranks to stream into the warren like a violet flood. A detached, chilling calmness settled over the room, nesting in Anna’s heart as the lifeless gazes of the atma’jani swept over her. No matter who emerged from the fighting, Anna had lost the war.
Chapter 14
Golyna made Hedilam feel like a vague, distant terror that Anna had conjured in sleep. Most disturbingly, it made the entire world feel that way. Checkpoints remained at the most frequented medinas and secure districts, but by and large, the city’s mood had reverted to earlier times, bringing out fresh faces and lean, sun-dark flesh by the seaside. Hedilam, not to mention the half-dozen other strongholds that had fallen in the past week, never rose in the course of market exchanges or café chatter, as far as Anna heard. She supposed it spoke to eastern tenacity, to the catalyst Rzolka had once needed to rebuild in the wake of annihilation, but Anna couldn’t shake her sense of some grand illusion. Were they undaunted or saving face? Bold or willfully ignorant?
As Anna sat by the boardwalk, spotting what she assumed to be Yatrin for the third time that morning, the passing stream of smiles began to gnaw at her. She wanted to seize them by the shoulders and scream that death was here, that their powdered faces meant nothing to butchers, that fighters like Tarusa had been ripped apart for their comfort.
She simply watched.
They wouldn’t understand, anyway. It was a world away—for now. It was similarly distant for her too, having been “granted” separation from the war effort in nearly any form. Somewhere in its wounded tower, the Council was surely gloating about how easily it had neutralized her. Wins and losses were temporary phenomena, anyway. When Volna arrived—and they would arrive, as Anna had surmised from Hedilam and scattered reports from her breakers in Golyna—there would be no laurels to rest upon.
“Did he forget about us?” Ramyi asked. She stood upon the rim of the seawall, holding the pleats of her dress up with tight fists and staring out at the countless ships crowding the harbor. In some ways she was more eager than Anna to see Yatrin;
she’d risen and stirred in their quarters that morning, no longer as broken as she’d been just after leaving the Nest. Her cheeks and nose sparkled with eastern mica that she’d dusted on herself.
“No,” Anna said, “he’ll come along soon.”
“What if he goes to the wrong boardwalk?”
“Just be patient.” There was little chance of missing him, regardless. It was the nearest harbor to Gal Asur, almost within its literal shadow, and the barrage of letters Anna had addressed to his housing block couldn’t have been ignored.
Unless they were never delivered, of course. . . .
Her attention then snapped to the tall, black-bearded stranger hobbling out from between a row of brick homes. She stood and hurried down the sloped boardwalk toward him, only remembering to turn and beckon Ramyi when the girl shouted for her.
His eyes had lost their luster and he moved with a heavy, struggling gait.
Anna didn’t know what she expected as she moved closer, hoping for an eastern smile that never quite formed. All of them were broken in some way, twisted and crushed and dulled down by everything that had happened, but Yatrin’s change was the first to truly turn her stomach. Anybody else could fall, but not him. Not her anchor, her guiding star, her immutable spark.
“Have I kept you waiting?” he asked hoarsely.
Anna didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. She settled for taking his hand, which seemed to tremble at rest. “Not at all.”
Ramyi’s clogs came slapping down after them. “Yatrin!”
He pulled on a smile now, but it was faded and cobbled together from older, better times. “It seems you may have grown taller.”
“Maybe,” Ramyi said, huffing as she came to a full stop. “Where have you been?”
“Me?” he asked. “You’re the one just arriving.”
“I was waiting for you.”
“Were you now?” Yatrin winked at the girl. “And what have you been doing?”
Ramyi said nothing, but her clamped lips and wavering brow explained in her stead.
“They’re selling cinnamon chews by the pier,” Anna said, luring Ramyi’s attention. She dug a small coin pouch out of her trouser pocket and passed it to the girl. “Get something for yourself, but make sure it’s not empty when you come back.”
Smiling faintly, Ramyi took the pouch and hurried off.
“She was fighting, wasn’t she?” Yatrin asked.
Anna nodded. “In Hedilam.”
“How is it holding up?”
“It’s not,” she said. “It’s coming apart, Yatrin. It’s all coming down.”
“According to whom?”
“I saw it myself.” Anna gazed out at the harbor’s sprawl of aged wood and rippling sails and proud, snapping banners. The blockade had only grown more intensive as the days passed, turning away any vessel aside from the occasional supply sloops from Kowak. “We’ve lost almost every region bordering the Behyam. I’m sure Khutai and the breakers know more, but I just can’t bring myself to hear it.” She shrugged. “The command councils are sure that their northern push will stop once they reach the mesa valleys. Or they’ll start to slow down, at the very least. But nobody’s talking about retaking ground. They want to use the Nest to reinforce the front line, not strike the enemy from behind or their flanks. Nobody’s talking about winning anything.”
Yatrin joined her in facing the water. He took a series of long, deep breaths, almost as though digesting the crop of bitter news. Surely he’d experienced worse in Gal Asur, but even those horrors had been tempered by the knowledge that he’d eventually be released.
“What did they do to you in there?” Anna asked after a long, gull-squawking silence.
“None of them took pride in their work,” he replied.
“Did they want to know something?”
He blinked, his eyes full of the sea’s dark blue expanse.
“Yatrin,” Anna said. “What did they ask you about?”
“It’s over, Anna,” he said. “You’ve had enough trouble trying to manage things here.”
She stared at the easterner, possessed by the old sense that there was something about his blood that forever divided them. No matter how close she grew to the east and its ways, she would always be an outsider trying to claw her way in. After the past weeks, however, she had no energy to spar with her words any longer. She shelved the question and sighed. “It’s far from over.”
“They’ll probably deploy me soon enough.”
“You?” Anna didn’t work to repress her shock. “After what they’ve done, they expect you to fight for them?”
His surprise was a bold, bewildering mask. “It’s my home.”
“They tortured you.”
“Love and honor should be unconditional,” he explained, gazing distantly at the water. “It’s a great comfort to know that you’ll be overseeing our forces from a distance.”
“I’m not overseeing anything,” Anna said. “The Council doesn’t want me involved.”
Yatrin lowered his head. “I see.”
“I don’t know how deep their schemes extend, Yatrin,” she continued. “We didn’t assault the Toymaker on that night. It was a settlement for Volna sympathizers.”
“That’s not possible.”
“But it is. Somebody forced our claws upon your people, and I’m not certain who tugged upon the scruff.”
Yatrin folded his arms. “Volna’s ploys are everywhere.”
“I pray it was Volna,” she said quietly. “Because the state just seized the Nest.”
“What?”
“We relocated the Halshaf and their foundlings to a district here,” she continued. “It was a poor trade, Yatrin. There won’t be anywhere left to run, and they won’t let them leave. I know that much.”
“You traded it?” he whispered.
For you. The words prickled at the back of her throat like kerosene fumes, threatening to spill out in some landslide of blood and bile, along with every other fear and horrid secret she’d tucked away deep in herself and left to rot. “I’ll have Khutai address the logistics council,” she said finally. “I’m not letting them send you out there.”
“What use am I here?”
“You’re a fighter,” Anna said. “There will be plenty of fighting here.”
“We have time.”
“Not every enemy is outside the walls,” she explained. “Some of the breaches are here, Yatrin, and nobody seems to pay it any mind.” Frowning, Yatrin leaned closer and nodded for her to continue. “When the ministers’ towers were attacked, there was a theft from the archives at the same time. Some kind of blueprints.”
“You found that out by yourself?”
“With help,” she said. “Do you have any connections to the archive? The curators?”
Yatrin thought on that, scratching his beard and staring out at the sunlit harbor until he began to nod. “It may be so.”
* * * *
At times Anna misread the strangers in passing crowds, blurring foreign faces with memories of kin and comrades. She’d done it since she was a girl, but it had only grown more severe as she made her way into a bustling world with an unthinkable amount of new eyes and noses and lips. Sigils had gradually become more important, almost supplanting the need for faces at all, but she couldn’t shake the truth: Her mind was still conditioned to search out the same hundred people she’d known in Bylka.
But those she’d grown to love and hate, respectively, also found their way onto strange faces.
Nearly every Huuri in the northern coastal districts reminded her of Shem, in one sense or another. Their skulls and frames and mannerisms were all distinct, and their essences moved in creeping glacial sheets or erratic flits, but there were binding threads—some tangible, no less—that pulled the Huuri closer together than the man-skins co
uld ever hope. They cared for one another. They were willing to die for something grander, something that would see its returns in the ensuing life or the one beyond that. They looked upon one another as branches stemming from a single sapling.
Anna could see it plainly from the rooftop of a café in the Tsalaf district—the frequent pauses to bow to one another and grant well-wishes, the familiar rattling of Huuri laughter, the way the children walked in great herds and carried grain sacks for aged passersby. If only the Ascended Ones could live like their worshipers.
“Just try your best,” Yatrin coaxed the archivist sitting across the table, smiling. “I know it was some time ago.”
The Huuri’s eyes were like stars in the table’s candlelight. Serala pondered the question as though savoring it, licking his lips and cocking his head to the side. That was Shem’s habit flaring up, perhaps passed down to him through countless generations. . . .
It was rare for man-skins to spend considerable time in the district, Anna had gleaned during their first round of coffee. Even rarer if the visitors weren’t Chayam officers or commerce officials looking to pore over ledgers and blueprints. Skepticism, unlike loyalty or equanimity, was not an inherent Huuri trait, and the state had made excellent use of that fact by installing them in roles that necessitated tight lips and unquestioning obedience. Of course, that only underscored the irony of their dominance hierarchy—their desired form, after all, was a brutal whirlwind of chaos and individualism. That truth seemed to escape them. Every café on their way to the meeting point had offered her and Yatrin free drinks, free meals, free lodging. The willing company of Ascended Ones was its own reward.
“Was there really an attack on the archives?” Serala blinked at them both, showing a prodding side that Shem had certainly never honed. “I’m not sure I understand the wisdom in it.”
“It depends on what they sought,” Anna replied.
Schisms Page 22