Schisms
Page 23
He drank his coffee. “Information is a powerful tool, Kuzalem. But the archives’ most sensitive contents are not related to defenses.”
“We shouldn’t rule anything out,” Yatrin said.
Most sensitive contents. Anna couldn’t get past that. “What are you referring to?”
“Legacies,” Serala said. “The state’s history, cornerstones of language, traditions. These things are the true worth of the archives.”
Yatrin gave Anna a worrying glance. “Volna’s already engaged in a war of ideals.”
“But it’s too esoteric,” Anna replied. “They were after something specific. If they wanted to destroy culture, they could’ve detonated something within the archives themselves. This was a targeted strike. I’m quite sure they knew what they were seeking and where to find it.” She stirred her coffee. “Serala, did the archives ever have their contents rearranged?”
“Not that I’m aware of.”
Anna reached down into her pack and produced a ribbon-tied scroll, then unfurled the paper on the tabletop near Serala. “Does any of this look familiar, then?” She gestured to the concentric rings of the archive, spiraling in toward the heritage entries Serala had described.
“It stitches lost days back together,” Serala said gently, nodding at the reproduced map. “This red mark here—what is this?”
“They breached the walls there,” Anna said.
“They wanted the infrastructure chambers.”
“That’s what we suspected.” Anna was impressed by the swiftness of the archivist’s memory, by the decisive certainty with which he regarded the ink. “But we were hoping you might know precisely what documents they keep in that wing.”
Serala leaned closer, squinting. “Are you certain they’ve taken anything at all?”
“It’s safer to assume they have,” Yatrin said.
“The state takes many steps to ensure that visitors do not access its secrets,” Serala replied. “If anybody managed to reach the inner chambers, they would still need to access the sealed boxes with the documents.”
Anna thought back to what Konrad had known of the vaults, realizing he’d never found out—or, if he had known, ever disclosed—whether the boxes had been breached or not. “How thick are the locks?”
“They’re prone to blasts,” Serala said. “Though this is intended. Any blast able to destroy the lock will also destroy the contents.”
They sat in silence, filling the expanse by refilling their cups and listening to the harps flowing from the medina. Finally the archivist grunted and leaned back.
“That chamber is for land deeds,” he said. “Mostly civilian holdings.”
Yatrin let out a relieved sigh. “All the better.”
“All the better,” Anna repeated distantly, still surveying the map. Something was wrong, in disarray that she couldn’t properly articulate. “Serala, you said the boxes were locked. Who holds the keys?”
“The archivists, of course,” he said. “I carried some myself.”
“Only the archivists?”
He blinked at Anna. “I imagine some of the intelligence commanders have access to them too.”
This city’s in its swan song. Anna’s breaths grew still as the bald man’s words reeled through her head. We’re already here.
“It’s curious that the breakers haven’t done your work, Kuzalem,” Serala said. His face remained placid as he drank the last of his cup and worked to form a smile. “Have you not earned a rest?”
“I’ve told her the same thing,” Yatrin said, regarding her with a raised brow.
“I’m sorry,” Anna said softly. “Would you excuse us, Serala?” She tried to keep the urgency from her eyes, but Huuri equanimity had never been her gift. She stood, leaving a clump of coins that was surely unnecessary, and began descending the stairwell toward the lower den. The clap of Yatrin’s pursuing steps halted her.
“Where are you going?” he asked. “We, I should say.”
“The archives need to check their boxes.” She was running a hand through her hair, aware of a rising heartbeat and nascent sweat on the nape of her neck and thoughts running rampant, slipping into the old and helpless fear she’d nursed so long ago.
“I’ll send a missive tomorrow.”
“There might not be tomorrow,” Anna snapped.
“A missive about land grants won’t make or break Nahora.”
“Not on its own,” she said. “But each choice molds the next.”
“Anna . . .”
“You all think I’ve lost myself to this,” she whispered, “but I see all of you sleeping, waiting for the next thing to happen.”
“Nobody’s doing that,” Yatrin shot back. His eyes had grown sharper at the word sleeping. Anger was rare on his face, somehow intimidating in a way that his pox scars and tar-black beard couldn’t manage. “You’ve seen the bodies being shipped back. We all have. So don’t pretend that we’re biding our time while the world ends.”
“Then why wait to send the missive?”
“Because we need to be alive, Anna,” he whispered, his face softening. “They might come. I’m sure the odds are great that they will, eventually. Everything has to fade eventually.”
“The only reason we’re alive is because we’ve resisted that notion.”
“And yet every living thing meets the same end,” Yatrin said. “When they come, we’ll give every mote of our flesh to protect these people. To protect you, I might add. But the night is cool and sweet and the city is quiet.”
Anna’s shoulders slumped. She breathed out, settling back against the setstone wall, and met Yatrin’s stare. “So what do we do?”
“We walk through the district,” he said. “We make sure to smile, laugh, and eat the sweetest things we can find. And then we return to Ramyi and tell her everything is fine, and we all sleep with the windows wide open. We dream to the whispers of the tides.”
She sighed, but didn’t let any of the dread in her gut manifest upon her face. “After everything you’ve seen, you still feel that way?”
“Death adds value to life, Anna.”
“I suppose,” she said. “What about knowing your fate? Knowing that they’ll come here and spend their last breaths to kill us? What does that add value to?”
Yatrin formed a dim smile and held out his hand. “Being with you.”
* * * *
True to his word, Yatrin sent the missive the following morning, long before Anna had woken to the golden mists blanketing the lower districts and harbor. It would take several days to worm its way through the various offices and desks, of course, but she hoped it would bring about something as a result. In fact, she found herself hoping that they uncovered a horrible and immediate threat, if only to give her something concrete to fear and ponder and target.
She rested a teakettle on the low table near Ramyi’s cot, allowing the girl to sleep in for the first time in weeks. The garrison had a nervous quietness to it these days, haunted by the trinkets and half-finished flasks left behind by Anna’s fighters. She meditated on the balcony until the mists had burned away, thinking little and feeling even less.
The harbor’s newfound clarity revealed something unexpected. Open water formed great swaths from the mooring platforms to the black mounds of the breakwater. The vessels and barge platforms once set into a thick blockade had thinned their ranks considerably, leaving only a skeleton crew of several ragged sloops and a bunker’s dock platform. They’d probably been deployed, though Anna couldn’t fathom where. The northern coast, the central horseshoe between Kowak and Golyna, the southern strand along the mountains—there were too many possibilities, too many variables.
But her worries soon ceded to potential. Anna hurried down from the upper levels and into the common room, where Khutai and his attendants were finishing their midday meals. “Where has the blockad
e gone?” she asked breathlessly.
Khutai glanced up from his plate with troubled eyes. “We’ve lost the plains.”
“All of it?”
He nodded. “They’re deploying troops to the south, a few dozen leagues beyond Rabahal. They’re hoping it’ll slow the tide.”
“I see.” Anna turned away, doing her best to appear similarly wracked with doubt. Inwardly she was shining for the first time in days, already piecing together the minutiae of the plan she’d conceived. It would have to be done by nightfall, of course, and the cramped space for supplies was daunting. But it was a start.
She went back up to their quarters and waited for Yatrin to return from the market, already rehearsing her proposal and what she’d tell Ramyi. To her surprise, the girl was kneeling away from her on a cushion by the window, immersed in sunlight and an apparently deep spell of meditation. Anna had never known her to meditate during trying times, which only made the moment more precious, more fragile.
“Anna?”
“Good ears,” Anna replied.
“It’s not hard to hear,” she said. “I can hear everybody now. Sometimes I think I hear Gideon’s stick tapping in the halls.”
The old breaker had been absent from the Nest for considerable time, though Anna had no complaints about that. Still, his ghost was everywhere. Anna often found Ramyi scaling trees and lifting stones in the courtyard, and sheets of parchment marked with practiced Orsas calligraphy were strewn across the girl’s desk.
“Ramyi, come here for a moment.” Anna settled herself on the edge of Ramyi’s cot and patted the blankets beside her. When the girl had joined her with a bemused frown, she cleared her throat. “I don’t know if you’ve been apprised of what’s happening.”
“We’re fighting a war,” she said.
Anna didn’t know what answer she’d expected from the girl. At her age she’d had the foresight and dread of somebody much older, but she’d taken great lengths to obscure the situation from Ramyi. Seeing death and brutality was one thing, but having certain knowledge of extinction was another. It made grappling with reality that much harder. “Has anybody spoken with you about how the war’s going?”
She creased her brows, appearing far older for a moment, then nodded. “Gideon told me that the enemy will return. They’ll come to Golyna, won’t they?”
“That’s what I believe. That’s what most of us believe.”
“And then we’ll kill them,” she said quietly. “It won’t be like Hedilam, Anna. They surprised us, but we’ll be ready this time. They’ll be tired from fighting in the mountains, you know. They won’t expect us to fight so intensely, but we will, and we’re going to cut them down while they run. We’ll fall upon them with every blade and ruj and rune that we have. We’ll cut out their eyes.”
Anna’s reply crystallized in her throat. She didn’t know if the girl had lifted such words from the other fighters, or if she’d conjured them herself and savored their bite. Anna’s own rage had been one of desperation and terror, but this was different. This was calm, concentrated wrath. “There are some things to discuss about the coming days, Ramyi.”
“Is this what you’ve been wanting to tell me?” she asked. “Before, I mean, when Gideon came to see you.”
“Yes, it is.” She drew a long breath. “The world is immense, you know.”
She nodded. “I’ve seen the breakers’ maps. There are even places they haven’t been to yet.”
“That’s right,” Anna said. “Would you like to explore? To find all of those places?”
“Someday. After the war is over.”
“Someday can be a very long time,” Anna whispered.
“I know, but this is important, like you told me.” Ramyi’s eyes lost their determined edge, but only for an instant. “I’m sorry I haven’t been a good fighter, Anna. I’m ready to be serious now. I won’t be afraid anymore. Not even if I’m going to die.”
“It’s good to be brave, but only at the proper times.”
“I don’t understand.”
Anna took Ramyi’s hand and settled it on her lap. She could feel the girl’s fingers tense up. “I care very deeply for you, and I don’t want to see any harm come to you.”
“Anna?”
“What if I told you that you could make a new life anywhere in the world? Out there on those maps, with the parts that are still gray and black, where nobody has been since the birth of time?”
“It’s a test, isn’t it?” Ramyi’s lips curled into an impish smirk. “I’m too quick for that.”
“A test?”
“To see if I’ll be a proper fighter,” she said. “And I am, Anna. Really. I’m going to stand with Golyna, no matter what happens. I want to be there when we hang the Toymaker. I was born for this cause.”
But Anna couldn’t mask her disgust, her immediate bristling at those words; her lips began to quiver. “Nobody was born to wage war.”
“Except us, the hayajar,” Ramyi replied. “Scribes.”
Anna squeezed the girl’s hand and glanced downward. “The world is too vast and beautiful for you to die here, Ramyi. Not now, not in this place. I brought you here and I need to rectify that mistake. Do you understand?”
“We won’t die,” she said. “We’ll stand against them.”
“You shouldn’t.”
Ramyi pulled her hands away. “What are you trying to do, Anna?”
“I’m trying to save your life.”
“I gave up everything for you,” she hissed. “I did what you asked, and I got stronger and I got wiser, and now it’s not enough. What do you want from me?”
Anna looked away. “I’ve made mistakes, but this is the moment that counts.” She studied the anger building in swift flashes across Ramyi’s face, struck by an acute sense of remembrance as she listened to her words. Giving up everything for a cause was the surest path to self-destruction, to blind cruelty, to martyrdom in service of those who cared little for you and even less for your heart. It had taken her years to understand the faintest revolutions of Bora’s mind, but now the cogs of the northerner’s logic were sharp and clear, as clarified to Anna as they were cryptic to Ramyi. “There’s more for you to experience than hatred.”
“You’re a hypocrite,” Ramyi said in a bitter, shaking voice. “You never wanted to fight. You wanted others to die for you.”
“That’s the last thing I want.”
“So don’t run away!”
“I’m not running from anything,” Anna said sharply. “I’m sending you away. You, and whatever foundlings we can manage to spare from this. This was my fault.”
“What makes you believe you’re our shepherd?” Ramyi was swiping at her cheeks, wiping away tears before Anna could even notice their glimmer. “You keep us moving and keep us fed, but you never let us choose our own way.”
Anna’s lips tumbled open, but her words were vapid and distant, utterly meaningless to one who’d suffered as much as Ramyi. There was truth in the acid, of course; those who hadn’t grown to become fighters or acolytes of the Halshaf had been left without a home, without ideals, without a trade or passion to guide them. They were her children and she’d failed them.
“If you care about me,” Ramyi whispered, “then you’ll let me fight.”
The silence in the garrison hadn’t felt so pervasive until Ramyi stopped speaking. Then the air was thick and hot and palpable, swarming with fruit flies and the sweat-stench of fear and anger, waiting patiently to be shattered.
“I won’t,” Anna said.
And as she shut her eyes she heard Ramyi snatching up the folds of her cloak and storming toward the door, the clogs she’d purchased in the Crescent markets slapping down the stairs and through the marble vestibule, thumping out across the packed clay of the courtyard.
A moment later there was a knock on the door’s fr
ame. Yatrin stood with a cocked brow, worriedly glancing back at the stairway. “Have you spoken with Ramyi?”
Anna rose and moved to the shutters. She’d spoken at Ramyi without question, but time would tell whether the girl had heard anything at all. More importantly, it would repeat what she’d told Anna. That much was assured.
Chapter 15
Three weeks passed before the front line had any pressing updates. Three weeks of recycled reports and platitudes handed down from the command bureaus, three weeks of combat missives that confirmed deaths rather than survivors, three weeks of waiting for annihilation. During that span the city had been more stagnant than ever, a stone driven into the riverbed as the world flowed around it, yet nothing was the same.
Every tavern and den once frequented by packs of young fighters was now a haunt for glassy-eyed, lonesome survivors with three or four fingers per hand. The orchestras and laureates that had once graced the arboretum’s steps were now a vague memory from spring. Even within the Halshaf, brothers and sisters and foundlings seemed to have been stricken by some plague of the spirit, tossing down their brushes and tongs and giving themselves to entropy. But the plague was a symptom of some deeper malady; it had spread from the front line to the shabad to the heart of Nahora’s principles, defying age and wealth alike as time wore on. “Nobody will see them anyway,” one of the scribes in the First Academy had said during Anna’s latest visit, sweeping away the fringes of her partner’s sand mandala in the gardens.
And at the core of it all, manifesting in soft, curt replies and ascetic meditative sessions, was Ramyi. There was no conflict between them—not outwardly, anyway—but that only served to unnerve Anna further. Reconciliation and forgiveness were the fruits of time, which was already in short supply. Death’s looming shadow would only push the girl deeper into her fervor.
Deeper into the state’s embrace.
There was ample time to think about such things as Anna’s unit rode the kator back out over the Crescent, intent on the defensive line just twenty leagues southwest of Golyna.
Sixteen columns of Volna troops—consisting mainly of Gosuri and cartel auxiliaries—had spent the past month thundering through the peaks, scourging every trace of infrastructure and every sanctuary holdout, compacting the entire Nahoran front into a haggard, squirming wing that unfolded across the upper lip of the Mahimur Valley. The only boon from that surge was how weary it had made the attackers; they were bedding down as they waited for Volna’s main spearhead, the breakers had said during the overnight briefing in the kator’s planning room. But it was a momentary grace. Most who were stacked against the Volna columns hadn’t returned, and those who did had little desire to speak about what they’d seen.