Another push of the rowboat sent it past a shelf of withered grass, exposing an open stretch of water and reflected nebulae and black, gnarled arms reaching up from submerged trunks. The branch’s bank was a dark mass against the skies and water alike, a swollen eye staring back at their fleet, crested by the broken remains of masonry and split mud walls.
“Anything?” the officer asked.
Nobody, including Anna, gave any reply. She quieted her mind’s chatter, listening for the odd coughs or thuds that indicated an enemy’s nearness, but detected only silence. Something in their reports didn’t align. If Volna had forded the branch six hours earlier, they should’ve been busy unpacking and redeploying their equipment somewhere on the isle. But beneath creaking oars was only stillness, only rigid blackness stretched along the landing site’s beaches.
The first set of rowboats drifted toward the shore in a formless cluster. Their bows jutted out of the water, hissing through sand and rock, as Borzaq fighters vaulted over their sides and worked to drag the boats toward a mass of reeds. Even plagued by sloshing boots and the clanging of oars being lifted from their pegs, it was as silent as a river landing could be.
Five landed, then six, swelling the beachhead as rowboats flowed out of the nearby tributaries and coalesced in the shallow water.
Just after Anna’s boat converged on the others, a pop bit through the marshes. Then came a faraway groaning, a ringing, a whistling, bleeding from one state to the next in rapid sequence. Anna found herself gripping the edges of the rowboat with aching fingers, though she didn’t understand why. Only she did know why. She had to. She’d heard the noise before—a primal, vestigial thing burned into her awareness.
Where?
The blast rang out behind Anna. It was a distant opening shot, a crash amid dark rushes and placid water, stirring the air faintly before curling off into a whisper.
“Go,” Anna said, softly yet fiercely.
But her words were already recycled. All around her rowers redoubled their paces, making for the shore as an additional pair of shells whined overhead.
Following the example of those around her, Anna unfastened her ruj and secured the pack’s final buckles. It was all she could do, given the circumstances, though the terror only managed to swell. Her mouth was dry, her stomach churning stones. There was no way that Volna’s shots had been directed at the valley—even the worst engineers could’ve landed a shell within three leagues of the trenches.
Several of the Borzaq approached the ruins at the far edge of the embankment, a single munitions crate hauled between the four of them. Things were hastening now, but not enough. Fighters were still awkwardly clambering out of rowboats, officers were hissing at their men to drag the boats toward the—
At first, Anna mistook them for shaking reeds.
Then the tinny rustling was joined by screams, shouts, boots pounding over sand and mud. Sparks blossomed along the masonry. Wood exploded and bodies slumped and water burst up in dark plumes.
Anna wiped her face, unsure if it was blood. Her ears were ringing with the officers’ whistles. She was staring at the shore, at the dark silhouettes of Nahoran bodies and Volna fighters behind the bricks, wondering when it had gone so wrong.
“Anna!”
Yatrin thrashed about in the water at her side, a vague blur threatening to be swallowed by colliding boats, extending one hand for her to grab and the other to hoist his pack above his head. All things considered, it was their best chance; iron shavings were whizzing past, spattering water and wooden flakes, sizzling down into the muck, tearing apart the flesh still stranded in the rowboats around them.
Sliding her ruj into her pack’s upper loops, Anna lifted her gear above her head—in spite of a shaking arm—and crawled overboard.
It was jarringly cold. Water surged up through her boots and trousers and ceramic-laden vest in an instant, billowing her fabric out in distended lumps, dragging her into the blackness until the tips of her toes found purchase and her calves burned. Everything was determined to assault her, to batter her down—rowboats colliding and ramming past her, flailing men sending choppy ripples over low heads, corpses floating like old jetsam. She could barely keep her head above the surface, let alone her pack. Every so often the water receded from her ears, and she could hear all the screaming, no longer divided by language but bound by agony. She shut her eyes and braced herself against the kicks, the errant strikes, the capsizing timber, the hard whumps that had to be shells bursting in the deeper water as they crept closer.
Don’t die here.
The statement forced itself into her mind, making her viscerally aware of her own state—paralyzed, frantic, quivering. She couldn’t be that animal. Not anymore.
Glancing about in a frenzy, she spotted Yatrin, who’d managed to worm between two abandoned rowboats as he pushed toward the shore. He was staring at her with a desperate sort of fury. Behind him there were dozens of others already on the bank, most gathered on the near side of the fortifications or crawling up at the shore.
Anna squeezed through the rowboats and followed Yatrin. Her arms were screaming for relief, ready to give out under the pack’s weight, but memories of Borzaq fighters and their ferocity wouldn’t grant her any rest. As she neared the landing site, which now seemed under tenuous Nahoran control, the water grew shallower. She waded through the reeds, occasionally stepping over bodies that had been weighed down by their kits, trying not to meet the open, gleaming eyes below the surface.
Much as she wanted to run, there was simply no use. Her uniform had become a setstone restraint with the added water, not to mention her exertion. But she could see the same weariness on the other fighters, even those from elite units, who strode steadily out of the water and toward the masonry as though exploring a city’s gardens. Yet further ahead the fighting was still raging; dust and grit burst across the fortifications as the fire exchange continued. Thrown explosives let off their muted pops throughout the underbrush.
Anna followed Yatrin onto dry land, then sank to one knee and fastened her pack. She glanced down the beachhead’s row of reeds and sand and trudging fighters, then back at the drifting rowboats, where jets of smoke and shrapnel were too close to ignore. After sliding her ruj out of its banding, she slapped a hand on Yatrin’s shoulder and jogged toward the low wall. It was a harrowing run, short but plagued by blasts and blood and bodies along the sand. Upon nearing the wall she threw herself to the mud, preferring a hard impact over a shattered skull. Three or four units were already deployed behind cover, huddled against chipped bricks as they waited out enemy volleys and blindly returned fire. Rancid, fearful heat roiled out of the darkness.
A Chayam fighter was slumped against the wall, his wet, glimmering chest heaving in the marshlands’ scant light. Three others, one a marked officer, had gathered at his side, not working to apply triage but rather whispering to him.
“Come,” Yatrin said, slamming himself into the wall beside Anna. “We need to keep advancing.” He saw Anna’s attention lingering on the dying man, both curious and wary. “There’s nothing to be done for him. He’s receiving the state’s rites.”
Nothing to be done? If he’d been a higher rank, there would’ve been. Anna followed Yatrin as he crouched and hurried along the length of the wall, finally advancing into a dense thicket of brambles and deadwood.
There were ten or fifteen Nahorans there, most on their stomachs and inching forward with their noses to the mud. Far ahead, though not beyond a ruj’s reach, were the silhouettes of Volna fighters. It was surreal to finally see them moving in the flesh, no longer some distant nightmare but real killers, real men, advancing to commit violence. This had to be the enemy’s flank; none of Volna’s fighters paid any mind to the thicket, nor did they pause in their cycles of firing, reloading, and aiming at the targets far to the right. They were entirely absorbed by their task; delighted, even. The fabled
blood fervor so often warned against by Anna’s tutors in Malijad.
Another volley of shells arced over the shore. Anna spun around in time to see a pack of rowboats exploding in a hail of wood and sinew, all encased in a surge of white water. There was no ambiguity now—their accuracy was increasing.
She tugged Yatrin’s sleeve. “If we don’t stop their firing, we’ll never make it inland.”
“That’s what our reinforcements are supposed to do,” he said, nestling himself down into a muddy depression. He slid his pack off and began sifting through it, seemingly in total blackness.
“We don’t know where they are.”
“Neither does Volna.” Yatrin temporarily removed his helmet to slip on a black weavesilk covering, concealing nearly all of his face and neck. “This is the only position we have.”
A Nahoran officer let off three sharp whistle blasts. The thicket came alive with shuffling and crunching as countless entrenched easterners rose to a kneel, shaking off their foliage, operating with such synchronous resolve that they might’ve been insects. Even Yatrin shot up and snapped his ruj to a firing position, seemingly by instinct.
As did Anna.
It was a terrible shushing sound, a sandstorm once overheard from the safety of a Gosuri tent, the slithering of a thousand serpents. The Volna fighters hadn’t seemed so close until Anna squeezed the trigger. Iron shavings stripped the bark from trees and eviscerated bramble clumps and sheared limbs from men. Several of the Volna fighters tried to stand, only to be met with reactionary shots from the Borzaq fighters advancing from tree to tree. Heads burst in the gloom.
In that sudden stillness, Anna heard the low whump-whump of the Volna mortars. She saw a flicker through the trees and undergrowth far ahead, little more than a pinprick of igniting sparksalts, followed by wisps of smoke. They still hadn’t been able to set up their main cannons, it seemed. But if they hadn’t been deploying them before, they certainly were now.
“Hard point,” Anna said to the surrounding Borzaq as shells rained down on the rowboats once more. “Three-quarters of a league ahead. Two mortars, perhaps more.”
Although the fighters didn’t reply, they conferred with one another in Orsas, then resumed their push through the thicket. Their direction had altered—they were intent on the mortars.
The surge began gradually. Anna followed the others in a ragged walk, quickening her pace as Yatrin and the others dashed onward, leaping over fallen logs and bodies alike, emboldened by the brisk night air and the thrill of slaughtering the unaware. The marshlands in her periphery were a monochromatic blur. Ruji exchanges, nearer than ever before, were empty noise. Her heart drummed faster, faster, nearing a steady stream as they sprinted through the brambles. Some ancient and petrifying Nahoran shout went up all around her, low and bestial, raising the hairs across the back of her neck.
They burst through the undergrowth, emerging into—
She noticed the row of bright sparks just as the ruji fired. A Chayam fighter’s mind burst out through the back of his skull, sending the corpse sliding down the embankment before her. Three others fell, screaming out as they toppled, rolling toward the Volna shooters and their mortar dugouts. There was nowhere to move, to crawl, to even breathe—every fighter to her left and right was cut down in an instant, be it in one piece or many.
Anna spied Yatrin lying near her feet in the undergrowth. Not lying like a soldier, but lying. Limp. How many hours had it been since his rune? Her throat burned.
“Yatrin?” she whispered.
“Be brave,” he managed with a croaking voice. His words were soft, almost accepting.
“Yatrin, look at me.”
He did not stir, did not breathe.
She stared at the rows of killers. Fifty, sixty of them, all lying in wait behind their sandbags and gnarled timber, whooping and cheering, backlit by a pair of lanterns near the mortars. Then she glanced to either side, spying the masses of dead and dying. She saw several officers with still-glowing runes squirming near the sandbags, though they were swiftly carried off—howling—into the depths of the Volna camp. She could see their main encampment across the river, burning bright with the strength of a hundred braziers. Their boats and rafts formed an enormous chain of beads from shore to shore.
“Yatrin?” she asked again, this time louder. Tears jabbed at her eyes, but she wouldn’t grant them that satisfaction. Not yet. “Yatrin, look here.”
Volna’s fighters erupted in mocking laughter. Some danced with locked arms and others sang, oblivious to the sounds of mortar shells bursting and fighters screeching and death itself. The death of a good man.
“Settle yourselves,” an old, bittersweet voice said in flatspeak. His tongue was an aggregate of all the languages he’d mastered, all the women and men he’d deceived, all the lands to which he’d brought ruin. Gideon Mosharan hobbled through a herd of ink-eyed, lip-sewn Jilal fighters, moving toward Anna with a pleasant, spirited gait. His walking stick crunched across the soil. “Never fear, Kuzalem. We’ve arrived.”
She could feel herself imploding. Not herself, precisely, but the thinking mind she’d cultivated for so long. The barrier between feral and dignified, girl and woman, victim and savior. It was cascading down with her blurry vision and rattling jaw.
“Stand with me, girl,” Gideon said. As Anna swatted at her eyes she realized that girl hadn’t been addressed to her. A short, lithe silhouette moved to his side. Ramyi. “Look upon this sight,” he said gently. “This is the end of all violence.”
“What have you done?” Anna whispered. Ramyi kept her head tucked to her chest, occasionally glancing at Gideon’s feet or tensing when a mortar shell landed.
“I’ve saved us all,” Gideon said as he moved closer. “I’m certain my apology means little to you, but rest assured that it lurks in my spirit.”
“You’re not with them,” she spat. “You can’t be.”
“Words are webs, are they not? A thousand layers exist beneath this covering.”
“You’re not.”
“Do you think it delights me to look upon the corpses of such brave fighters? Their flesh will water the state’s roots, take heart. They’ll not be desecrated.”
“You were supposed to bring them here,” she managed, more confused than broken. “You didn’t bring them.”
“Fear not,” he replied. “I guided them through a tunnel that’s far safer. They must be a dozen leagues away, if not more. Their blood won’t be on your hands, Kuzalem.”
A dozen leagues. “Why?”
“Oh, come now,” he pressed on. “It’s over. You must’ve known that one girl’s life wasn’t worth a thousand years of goodness. Your markings will not be forsaken by the state. In truth, I find it difficult to look upon this display. The cessation is so . . . perverse.”
Anna opened her mouth and found no words.
“Your tutelage of Ramyi was most enlightening,” he continued. “Young star, once you were the visionary of all to pass in this plane. But you hold little for the state in your heart, don’t you? Your progeny will bring about the salvation you always desired, Kuzalem.” He cleared his throat. “You’re magnificent, but she’s divine.”
“You led us to the defectors’ compound,” Anna said. “It was always you.”
“They certainly didn’t forget your face.”
“Coward.”
“I did what any citizen would be honored to do,” he explained. “I preserved the state.”
“Through this?”
“Why do you contest your path? Is this not how our fabric churns? Growing, striving, an eternal wheel of change? Soon we’ll both depart our bodies—one by time’s hand, the other by a blade. Be at peace in our hour of death. Embrace the countless lives that will be spared.”
But thoughts were difficult to form in her animal mind. They were transient, empty scraps of a wor
ld passing before her, fraught with rage and chaos. She could only stare at Gideon and envision herself tearing out his throat. Whether he’d surrendered or was in the midst of a larger ploy, nothing could ever be the same. She swore she could feel the heat rising off Yatrin’s body. If only she had a jar, so she could keep his soul safe forever. . . .
“Girl,” Gideon said, unsheathing a dagger and handing it to Ramyi, “go and see if any life stirs within the fallen. The state’s love must deliver them into eternity, so make their ends swift.”
Anna stared at the girl as she worked her way up the gentle slope. “You’re not like him,” she said. “You’re not a butcher.”
In a glint of firelight Anna saw the tears streaking down Ramyi’s face. Once, in another life, she’d been that girl. In this life, in fact.
Ramyi made her way down the row of black-masked corpses, at times weeping and proceeding to the next body, at others struggling to saw through Nahoran throats. When she reached Yatrin she lingered over the corpse, sank to her knees, and rested her head on his chest. Her back swelled and shrank with heavy sobs.
“Is it done?” Gideon called.
The longer Anna stared at the body and the girl, the more the feeling mind receded. There was already too much pain between them. Ashes couldn’t be burned.
“Go,” Anna whispered. “Don’t let them break you.”
Ramyi spun toward her for a moment, swollen-eyed and trembling, then wandered back to Gideon’s side. She nodded with closed eyes.
“Your masters await,” Gideon called to the Volna fighters, drawing a roar of approval that drowned out the shells’ impacts. He turned back to Anna and smiled. “Your sacrifice won’t go unnoticed, Kuzalem. I know how long you sought Volna’s engineers. With that in mind, I suppose this will be the final fulfillment.”
* * * *
She was more concerned with the dead than her own death. Within the Nest she was no longer a master nor an architect, but a witness. The warren was crammed with the defiled corpses of Halshaf sisters, Hazani fighters floating in reflective pools; dark, wet sacks overflowing with limbs and heads—
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