Schisms

by James Wolanyk

  “Merciful fortunes, pitiful fortunes,” Gideon carried on, waving his hands about as the tables began to murmur. “Such extraordinary leaps on the pendulum of faith seem to follow you, Kuzalem. Two faces of a single coin.”

  She felt Yatrin’s hand join hers under the table.

  “Let this meal be sanctified by the maternal roots,” Rashig announced, cutting off the next string of Gideon’s remarks. The Alakeph and Halshaf tables followed suit, uttering their sha’nuba blessings and bowing to those at the opposite end of the space. “Let us have breath at the fight’s end, earned and honored.”

  Some life began to trickle back into the shadows. People shifted dishes once more, poured out wine and liquor, spoke in their shared tongues.

  But Gideon’s voice refused to disappear. “Perhaps you can grant us some wisdom about our foe, Kuzalem.”

  “At any planning table, I’ll be more than pleased to do so,” she replied.

  “You can tell all of us what you’ve seen.”

  Again the silence percolated into the night, the joy, the wind itself, scourging everything beyond creaking chairs and coughs.

  “You’re too hungry for your work, Gideon,” one of the Chayam officers said, drawing a round of laughter. Even Anna smirked. “The best breakers always are, I suppose.”

  “A harmless request for such seasoned words,” Gideon said.

  “Better to savor a meal during a war than a war during a meal,” a Hazani man growled.

  “Yes,” the silver-haired man agreed from somewhere within the gathering. “Perhaps another time. We’ll have ample talk of fighting in the coming days.”

  “Yet few of us know what occurred at Hedilam,” Gideon said.

  A spell of nausea trickled into Anna’s gut. She glanced at Ramyi, who’d comfortably tucked her gaze into her bowl, then shut her eyes.

  “Another time,” Yatrin said, squeezing her hand.

  “Am I not the only one fascinated by Kuzalem’s heroism?” the breaker asked while swirling his wine. “How did you stand against so many of them, only to return unscathed?”

  “She has her ways.” Ramyi’s voice clawed down Anna’s back.

  Just as Anna pushed her chair back to leave, instinctively fighting to tear her hand out of Yatrin’s embrace, footsteps rose from the din and grew louder. She heard them emanating from the passage behind the Alakeph table, soon joined by breathless gasps.

  A young man emerged into a wash of lantern light, his face glossy with sweat, before offering a bow to the silver-haired man. He opened with a string of Orsas, but upon noticing the sea of whispers and jeers, wisely shifted to flatspeak. “Just two hours ago.”

  “From which post?” the officer asked.

  “On the ridge over Telem,” he explained. “The battalion commander wants a full response unit ready by dawn.”

  “Is it a full column?”

  “Three.”

  Anna scowled at the rash of chattering and gossip. “What happened?” she called out.

  Yatrin, who’d listened to the young man’s announcement with little more than a resigned slump of the head, drew a deep breath and pushed his own chair back. “They’ve crossed the Kamabad.”

  Chapter 16

  Slit-throat lambs tended to dash about in a vague panic, certain that something was urgent and horrible and unknowable. As a child, Anna had always held them down, pressing into their flesh to soothe them as open veins pumped themselves dry. Certainty was preferable to chaos.

  But that same pathetic terror was now rippling through the encampment, with wild-eyed Chayam units sprinting through the trenches, Azibahli pulling sleds of munitions and Borzaq teams toward the Mahimur’s wooded inner folds, and officers clumped together within their violet-laced sanctuary, bickering and arguing over the impossibility of the post’s glints.

  Anna didn’t have enough hands to soothe them all.

  “Two weeks,” spat Khutai. “You told us that we’d have two weeks.”

  “Nothing is guaranteed in these matters,” a Nahoran breaker said, their arms folded and fingernails chewed to red stumps.

  “But you’ve made two weeks into three days, at best.”

  “They’re only trying to provoke us,” another ga’mir added. “They know we’ll have to lay our arms bare for them to see.”

  More troops jogged past the dugouts surrounding the tent, wafting raw, sweet dust through the leather flaps. Then came their first dose of silence in nearly an hour. The issue had made its rounds several times, and the regional maps only confirmed what the commander had originally said: If Volna forded the first branch of the rivers, they’d be able to creep their defensive line into a hardened point. And anywhere the line went, it was joined by a growing knot of artillery and cleared tracts for their flying machines. There wasn’t a glut of space in the marshlands beyond the first branch, but there was enough for Volna to dig their claws in.

  Enough to make the second crossing, and thus enough to swing back for every shell the Nahorans launched across the valley.

  “What about the other posts?” asked Anna. “Have we dispatched any riders to check on them?”

  The commander shook his head. “Our riders are indisposed.”

  You must always keep one in the stables, Anna thought bitterly. “This might be the first of many. Just like their opening wounds.”

  “I’d be surprised if it weren’t,” Gideon said.

  “But it must be a show of force,” Anna replied, lifting the charts to her face and squinting. “The only columns they could send would be from the southern hills. Where else?”

  “Hidden movement, perhaps,” the commander offered.

  “Two more columns, moved without us knowing?” she asked.

  “Unlikely, I know, but the chance exists.”

  She couldn’t make sense of it, especially not by his logic. Whatever troops Volna had mustered were stripped from somewhere else, leaving an open swath for their forces. . . .

  “Her words are astute,” Gideon said, balancing on his walking stick near the commander’s dais. “Kuzalem, it’s rather fitting that you should speak in this moment. I believe our solution lies with you, no?”

  She blinked at the old breaker. “Come again?”

  “You’ll mark more of our forces,” he said. “Simplicity is divinity.”

  “That’s out of the question,” Yatrin said stiffly.

  “Is it?” Gideon pressed. “Are we not on our haunches? Do the hounds of nothingness not beat upon our doors?”

  “I’ve done my part,” Anna said. “Both with my hands and with my voice. So I’ll hear nothing more about it.”

  Gideon chortled. “I’ve done my part as a breaker ten times over. An additional three times in your employ, I might add. A passionate one’s work is never finished.”

  “Enough,” Yatrin said.

  “Yes, it’s quite enough,” the commander announced, decoding and silencing the wayward twist in the breaker’s smile. “In accordance with the Council’s mandates, we’ll not discuss Kuzalem’s applications any further. Let’s turn our gaze to matters of defense.”

  “And what awaits the most heinous question?” Khutai asked. “What happens when our lines fail?”

  “Marks are not the only affair that lies in the Council’s domain,” the commander said.

  “Is it not our charge?” Anna asked. “We’ve come here to protect them.”

  Khutai huffed with approval. “The days of delaying have long passed.”

  “When our . . .” The commander cleared his throat. “If our line collapses, the Council will issue orders. But belief in defeat will court its presence.”

  “It’s a belief in inevitability,” Anna replied.

  “Yet one could, by some folding of the thinking mind, conjure a fantasy in which we overcome the snarling hordes of Volna,�
� Gideon said, chuckling to himself. “We have legions of proud young fighters who would gladly bear their necks for your markings, Kuzalem. Imagine what two of them, or even one spirited soul, might do if they carried the same scars as the Exalted Shadow. This is the state’s hour of need.”

  “This is the innocents’ hour of need,” Anna said.

  “Would you not lend a single champion to their cause?”

  “You know that we’ve always had a remedy to this war,” she said, meeting the eyes of the room’s Nahoran officers in a wide sweep. “The Nest was formed to spare those who have no place in this killing. At any time, your leaders could open a tunnel to a breath-forsaken patch of oaks and begin evacuating Golyna. But they won’t.”

  “You suggest retreat?”

  “I suggest survival.”

  Several officers and captains began shouting, trampling over each other’s words in a flurry of accusations and hushes.

  “Our task,” the commander shouted, gripping the edges of his podium till his cheeks were blood-red, “is to form a strategy of defense for this valley. Everything else is tangential.”

  Murmurs trickled back into the vacuum of silence. Hurried proposals began bursting from the officers, with some suggesting a full bombardment of the marshlands and others a cease-fire attempt while they advanced their line. Neither plan was sufficient; neither was practical. All of their tactics were akin to staving off a blaze with buckets of well-water. Anna listened to them droning on about lines of sight and target distances, all the while thinking more broadly, more boldly.

  Waves, not buckets. Her eyes snapped open.

  “Yatrin,” Anna said, squeezing the easterner’s shoulder. She spoke softly enough to mask her voice under the tent’s rapid prattling in Orsas. “Now’s the time to show your valor.” Ignoring his questioning squint, she stood and waited for the commander to finish addressing a Hazani captain. “This attack will only keep them at bay, no matter how fiercely we push against the river itself,” she explained to the gathering. “We require the strength of two forces, two separate nails driving inward to pierce the serpent.”

  The commander waved down a rash of jeers. “How many columns are you suggesting?”

  “All of them,” Anna said. The taunts and shouts roiled up, but it had little effect on her. “Yatrin can lead a contingent of two columns in a direct assault. The rest of our forces should ride for the nearest tunnel’s opening. Once they’re inside, they can emerge from a point behind the enemy’s front line.”

  “It leaves nobody to defend the northern pass in the Crescent,” the commander said.

  “Is it so pressing?”

  “It’s our last fallback point,” he explained. “The Council made its mandates clear. Three units at the pass.”

  “Ten Alakeph will put three units to shame.”

  The commander fidgeted with his quill.

  “It’s quite a daring flank,” a Nahoran officer said.

  “It’s what she’s always suggested,” Yatrin said.

  “And where, sweet Kuzalem, is the value in such a rash assault?” Gideon asked, balancing on his stick like a banister railing. The room quieted at that. “Even if their boots are mired as you fall upon them, they wield the fire of dead, vicious gods. They would consume Yatrin’s blades.”

  “They’ll be weakened,” Yatrin said. “They’ll need to rest their cannons and vile machines upon the hard banks. And since I trust they believe they’ve strangled us out of this valley, they won’t expect us to meet them in the crux of dark and dawn.”

  “Never assume what your foe knows,” Gideon growled. “Nor what he is ignorant of.”

  “They’ll certainly know if we allow their flying beasts to pass overhead,” Khutai said in a reasonable voice, intent on the commander. “Their plan has some merit. Swiftness of action, hot blood upon warm iron.”

  A Hazani captain covered in fractal henna designs cackled at that. “A banquet of the chaos they’ve thrust before us for so long.” She shifted her jaw with a wet pop. “Ruin and ash for the interlopers. Why do we delay?”

  “My, the eagerness of the foreign blood,” Gideon laughed. “Viczera Company, how your bravery honors me.”

  “Are you giving your consent, Gideon?” the commander asked.

  He narrowed his eyes at Anna. “Will the engineer of this tactic agree to accompany the builders?”

  “Yes,” Anna said without hesitation. Without fear. “Two of our columns can make a push on the river just before dawn.” She turned to Khutai. “Your latest maps showed that there was a tunnel opening two leagues to the west of the enemy’s riverbank. Is that still true?”

  “It’s one of the few we haven’t had to seal,” the commander said quietly. “Even what we have is a burden.”

  Another Nahoran officer grunted. “There’s hardly a chance to move any sizable number of columns through the opening at one time. It—ahem, the Exalted Shadow—isn’t able to sustain much at once. He nearly snuffed himself out as my unit crossed last cycle. It would take three, perhaps four hours to move our remaining nine columns through. And an additional hour to reach the riverbanks….”

  “We could hold out,” Anna said, even as Yatrin’s jaw tightened. “As long as you can strike them from the west, we can make it.”

  “You seem so certain of its success,” Gideon said.

  “At the very least, it would force them to pull their columns off the nearby fronts,” she said.

  “At the very most, it would cost us a homeland,” he said sharply. “But the stars and state alike have some faith in you, Kuzalem, and so must I, it seems.” He nodded at Yatrin. “Assemble your two columns and begin moving when the Hanged Man crawls into the sky’s second notch. I shall be the shepherd of the Nest, guiding your comrades into their fated assault.”

  “Well enough, then,” the commander said at last. “My retinue know their places within the encampment.”

  Within the encampment. Immediately Anna thought of Ramyi and where they might settle her during the tide of violence. “Could we assign a unit to the encampment?”

  “It remains to be seen,” he said curtly. “I’d now like to meet with the picked officers—Ga’mir Domara, Ga’mir Shulam, Ga’mir Aramav, and their attendants. The rest of you ought to prepare. Further orders will be passed on immediately.”

  Just as the tent’s occupants began shuffling in a great herd, bench legs grinding and grumbles rising up like the wisps of burned earth, Gideon pounded his walking stick on a metal pan. “Kuzalem, have no fears about Ramyi during this maneuver,” he said. “She’ll be safely at my side.”

  The thinking mind coalesced somewhere between his toothy smile and her flare of mistrust. Whatever machinations were unfolding through his work, they could be dealt with. In fact, Ramyi being so close to him was an advantage. As she’d learned during her first week in a Gosuri settlement, the safest way to handle a serpent was to seize it with bare hands.

  * * * *

  The cloudy water snaking around their rowboat was a mirror for the nebulae overhead, painting the darkness with bursts of jasper and cobalt. Reeds and cracked stone and dry grass rose up around them in black tufts. There were fifty boats in all—most ahead of Anna, as she’d been settled near the rear of the formation—but vision was a scarce luxury. Most rowers seemed to orient themselves by the ripples of the paddles ahead, wandering down the maze of waterways two or three strokes at a time, pausing to dip their candles closer to the water’s surface, clicking their teeth and using their officers’ responses to proceed.

  Anna kept herself tucked low with her helmet fastened and hood drawn up. Her ruj was tucked under the rowboat’s long bench, locked into its hoops like the other fifteen of its kind, while her pack was already tightened on her shoulders, threatening to topple her backward with the weight of a full Nahoran combat kit. Her boat was a mixture of Viczera Compan
y’s fighters and Borzaq troops, though sorting anybody out while in the rowboats was an impossible task. At least at their landing point, with their cannons assembled and columns properly arranged, they’d have some semblance of order—and hopefully a candle or two to distinguish faces. All she knew was that Konrad wouldn’t be there. Even the most recent arrivals from Viczera Company had no idea what had become of his unit’s last skirmish, nor where they’d been deployed.

  “We’re nearing the landing,” a Nahoran at the front of the boat whispered. “Two minutes, perhaps.”

  She had no idea how they arrived at that conclusion, but she was thankful nonetheless. Their boats had waded through the marshes for nearly an hour, scraping and scratching through a gauntlet of branches and overhanging moss. All of that had been preceded by a four-hour dash through the woodlands, with an additional pause on the river’s eastern shore to apply markings, haul boats into the water, and let the celestial worshipers burn their incense.

  “Neshas,” one borzaqem whispered to another.

  “It’s permissible,” the other replied. They lifted a small cylinder from the rowboat’s floor and raised it toward the moon, appearing entirely alien with their weavesilk eyes and bulbous helmet. Sand was trickling down through the device, glittering like mica. “Our first barrage will come in ten minutes.”

  “Ten?” Anna hissed. “We need to hasten the landing.”

  “We’ll let the volley play out,” Yatrin said, “and then begin to move in. We can’t afford to lose anybody to a stray shot.” In the marsh’s darkness it was difficult to see his rune; it had to be tucked under his weavesilk shirt, or perhaps applied to a less conspicuous—and thus less potent—area, as some of the more savvy scribes had recently started to do.

  “We have no idea how they’ll react,” Anna explained. “They could rush our position before we’ve even set foot on the bank.”

  One of the Borzaq fighters—this one an officer—grunted, shifting with a rattle of ceramic. “Kuzalem’s concern is warranted.”