Schisms

by James Wolanyk

  He found her memories.

  Fragments of dark, distant days exploded into being, filling Anna with flashes of jagged parapets and bloodstained tomesrooms, hoof-trodden courtyards and bleeding sunsets.

  The keep.

  Her lips shot open; her mind reeled to wrest itself from the mental link. But a fresh tunnel had already sparked into being across the warrens.

  “Shem,” she whispered, fixated on the glistening nightmare.

  Glowing eyes spun toward her. “Nowhere else.” His voice was cold, forceful.

  Anna tore her gaze from the crumbling stonework and willed herself to nod. Sooner or later, she’d need to accept her own wisdom: There was no time, no choice. “Forge whatever tunnels you can manage throughout the city,” she said softly. “Try to burrow near the markets and the docks. Anywhere you remember seeing crowds, Shem.”

  Muscle fibers tensed and oscillated beneath the sigils. His awareness was roaring through the warrens, gnashing veins of hayat and shredding them into pulp, raking the membrane that divided the real and the woven. Tunnels blossomed in sequence around the warrens—four, seven, ten of them, all pumping ice water through the gathering’s collective awareness.

  Rows of scribes cried out in the blackness, folding over like snapped twigs under a huntsman’s boots.

  Anna gritted her teeth against nerve-scraping shock and surveyed the nascent openings. She recognized several of them as medinas or main squares by the throngs of passersby and Ashoral-led reb’miri and stirring banners. Others, offering slivers of shadowed bunkrooms and abandoned offices, were carved out of the lodges and chambers Shem had come to know intimately during his first weeks in Golyna.

  “Can you hold them, Shem?” Anna asked. Her spine was aflame, threatening to buckle her knees and blacken her vision with every jolt.

  Again the Huuri’s arms rattled against the stone. It was more than the swell of energy, surely; it was pain. Haunting, flesh-rending pain. An ocean of the droplets now trickling into Anna. “Yes.”

  Wincing through another barrage of twinges and shearing waves, Anna faced the gathering and raised her arms. “Hold the compound at Keshannah in your minds,” she said. Beads of sweat slid down her cheeks. “Keshannah, Keshannah . . .”

  Between the blackness and white, stabbing pulses behind her lids, a sense of unity bubbled into her awareness. She found herself flashing between clay and sky and marble, threading into the shared vision being woven in their minds. Brick by brick an image emerged, clawing up from the chaos, firming into musty storerooms and vaulted ceilings.

  Barrels hooped with rusted bands.

  Mounds of dark powder, glimmering in pools of lantern light.

  Pain clamped over Anna’s bones; she cried out, grasping at the slab’s edge to remain upright, gulping for breaths as the cracked-nail sensation danced across her hands. Forcing blurry eyes open, she found herself facing a newborn tunnel. Her attention flickered between the atrium’s hurrying shadows and Halshaf sisters, who were leading clusters of foundlings toward a low doorway.

  Their steps were graceful, unaware. Their soft rebukes, filtered through hayat’s warping lens, were delivered to laughing children in silence.

  Then they whirled about, startled by a flood of Chayam and Borzaq fighters that erupted from the western facade. Muted orders broke out through the atrium. Dozens of foundlings and crooked-leg Hazani men and gangly Huuri children went flitting through the doorways, being herded and gathered in soundless drills. A hard-faced southerner dashed past the tunnel’s eye.

  Konrad.

  “Stay here,” Anna whispered to Shem, battling the aches racing up and down her legs. As she stalked toward the Keshannah tunnel she noted the glistening in Ramyi’s eyes. The girl was focused, but it wouldn’t hold forever. Anna placed gentle hands upon the sides of the girl’s head and breathed with her, feeling her pain, sharing her burden. “Be brave, Ramyi. Be as I know you are.”

  Halfway through the tunnel, Anna wished she’d wicked away the girl’s tears.

  Chapter 19

  No amount of fighters could bring order to the madness. Every corridor was a shoving, shouting mass of Orsas and flatspeak, ceramic plates and dark flesh, whimpering foundlings and shaken hall-mothers. It was a microcosm of the madness breaking out across the city, stemmed but hardly ceased by Ga’mir Ashoral’s officers in the surrounding districts. Rashig and his men, marked by their flapping white cloaks, were the only beacon of clarity amid the disorder; they settled the worst choke points with the wordless assurance known to every Alakeph brother.

  But calmness was a luxury Anna could not spare.

  Her heart pounded in her throat as she dashed from corridor to galley, bunkroom to rooftop garden, stairwell to undercroft, seeking out every foundling and sister and poppy-dulled Gosuri band still scattered throughout the compound. There were too many motes of memory—and indeed, alarm— flaring through her mind: Yatrin’s black beard, the bashful hands of Konrad’s boy, the twisting scar that bisected Jenis’s brow. . . .

  “Konrad?” Anna called into the gloom of the vaults, already knowing it was a waste. Her broken voice was yet another scratchy echo amid the stonework, buried beneath stomping boots and whimpering children and bursts of Orsas. She’d forgotten the sensation of bone-creeping cold, of the hard, stagnant air that lingered in crypts and cellars.

  For an instant the din fell away. Then there was a hushed voice, a glimmer of some tongue rooted deep in Anna’s mind.

  River-tongue.

  Anna heaved her pack higher across her shoulders and ran to the doorway, opening her mouth to call the southerner’s name, sensing the nascent click of a K upon her tongue—

  Two figures were squatting near the barrels that had once flashed before her mind’s eye. Rusting hoops, dark powder. Thin, scarred arms. Wicked grins and rabid eyes.

  Her reaction was a glint, a temporary moment of awareness fueled by years of training. She slung her pack around, glancing up as they sprang up at her, their clawed hands slowing and freezing. She peeled back the flap.

  Jagged, chipped teeth dripping yellow spittle.

  Wood in her grip.

  The yuzel sprang out as though possessed. There was a sudden, shushing burst, then a spattering of pulp on stone.

  Anna stared at the mangled rag dolls. Blood was just beginning to spurt from red, gaping openings. Fingers were still twitching, writhing. She was sunken on one knee, trembling, uncertain of the creature in her hand. Volna, she whispered to herself. They’re Volna, Volna . . .

  But the bodies were not Volna, were not Nahoran fighters, were not humanoid. They were strips of red flesh and sinew, once breathing, now torn open across the stones. Never before had it bitten so deeply, been so visceral. Ripples of what she’d known in the warrens came over her. She was there, lying upon the tiles, draining rapidly. She scrambled forward on hands and knees, slapping the pale cheek of half a head, nervously willing it to stand, to breathe, to speak. Willing herself to do those things, no less.

  Yet the thinking mind understood. It pulled a hard breath into Anna’s lungs, settling her back on her knees, granting her a moment to stand and stagger away and retch.

  She wiped her lips and tasted the acidic remains, reminding herself: Stand. Breathe. Speak. She was here, alive. Looking at rows of crackling fuses set into the walls with studs, thinking of how many sparksalt barrels the fuses bridged, imagining how deep the vaults extended beneath and beyond her, associating breached archives with heaps of dark powder and even darker plots. Preparing to die.

  Be here.

  Anna turned and dashed out of the chamber, fighting to raise her voice beyond the slit cords. She was calling for everyone to run—or so she thought. Her world was a haze of shadows and stone, Hazani and Orsas, a great rumbling in her bones that spoke of death, just as it had so long ago in Malijad.

  She burst up into th
e light, toward the courtyard and the rippling of Shem’s tunnel. The last of the officers stood near the entrance, madly waving stragglers onward or lifting bowlegged old men through the divide. She rushed past them, plunging back into pain, into a labyrinth of hayat now ablaze with vigor, with intensity, with light and darkness pulsing together in great swells.

  Focusing through the rush of agony in her temples, she looked out through the tunnels that spanned the city. Hundreds of bodies were crowded in every place, all crying out, all stampeding, all pouring through the warren’s tunnels and streaming toward the old keep and its courtyard. But there were already thousands in the keep and the surrounding woods. Every essence was collapsing inward, bearing down upon Shem and Anna and Ramyi and all the scribes now screaming out for mercy, for cessation of their torture.

  Anna staggered toward Ramyi with blood in her mouth. “Ramyi, where is Yatrin?” The girl’s eyes were tightly sealed, leaking raw, painful tears. “Ramyi, where is he?”

  “He passed!” Ramyi screamed.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes!”

  “Seal it,” she called out to Shem, unsure if any air emerged with her gasp. “Seal the tunnels!”

  The order echoed all around her, growing louder and fiercer as the urgency became clear. In an instant, the tunnels became barriers, their membranes thick and invisible to those on the other side. The crowds grew ominously still, letting curses unwind and swinging fists come to rest.

  The officers at some posts began crying, while others smiled faintly. They understood what the masses did not.

  Then Anna noticed the silhouettes in her periphery. She turned to look through the window into Keshannah’s courtyard, to the breathless reb’miri holding one another, to a young man pulling a woman and small boy into the dusty sunlight.

  “No,” Anna whispered.

  Konrad halted mid-step, dropping his shoulders and gazing through the void, through realization, through Anna. He pulled his family close. Then he rested his chin upon the boy’s head and clasped the back of his wife’s neck.

  “No, wait,” she tried to say.

  She tried to scream.

  Every tunnel erupted as a curtain of roiling dust and smoke. A soundless, shifting haze that dug its nails into Anna’s stomach.

  Absolute silence fell over the warrens.

  She pounded her hands against the opening, shuddering, seizing up, struggling to take jerking breaths. If hayat just spun the right way, it could undo all of it, put them back together. . . .

  Tremors shook the warrens, forcing threads of crimson light through the hayat. It spread all around Anna, up and over her like septic veins, driving pins through her flesh and lancing her mind with a dark, seething blade.

  She whirled to find Shem writhing upon the slab.

  Hot coals in her throat, on every patch of her innards.

  Cracks worked their way across the Huuri’s flesh. Flakes of his body and essence alike curled off into the air, twisting frantically like cinders from a bonfire. Several scribes knelt with their heads tucked to their chests, blood running in thin rivulets from their eyes and noses and ears, bruises welling up beneath their bronze flesh. The others were sobbing, calling out, breaking.

  It was all coming undone. The tunnels—including those linked to the keep—evaporated.

  Yet beyond Anna’s agony, there was a greater pain. A city drowning in its own tears, wheezing through dust and blood. There was no hope of repeating the ritual that had led them to the keep. There was only memory. “The tree we shared, Shem,” Anna whispered over the warrens’ crying. “The tree on the hill—can you recall it?”

  The fissures slowed, but did not cease. “Yes,” he gasped.

  Her tears were hot and stinging. “One more tunnel, so we can go home,” she managed. “All of us can go home.”

  Pinpricks of light burned up through his sternum. His eyes flickered between starlight and a fading candle. Hayat boiled from his chest, sublimating in a flash that spawned a ragged opening near the gathering of scribes.

  Anna studied the sycamore and the hill’s sunlit grass, then the vast oceans of dust stirring in the districts below. Glowing embers drifted through the tunnel and skittered across the floor. “Everybody go,” she snapped. “Secure the harbor.”

  But her scribes were slow to stand or even react. They were occupied with the bodies of their dead sisters, the eruptions of welts and lesions beneath their own flesh. The fighters and officers who’d remained in the warrens—several dozen, it appeared, though Yatrin was not among them—moved to raise the scribes and carry them through the opening.

  Anna couldn’t bear the shambling parade. There was no victory in it, no sense of achievement or salvation. She moved to Ramyi’s side, noting the girl’s outstretched hands and open palms and beads of sweat winding down her neck. “You need to leave, Ramyi,” she whispered. “Do you hear me?”

  “I can’t,” Ramyi said. “It’s only me.”

  “You need—”

  “If I go, he’ll die,” she hissed.

  Anna sensed the truth in her voice. The hard, pained truth that she’d never wished upon the girl. But there was no room for sacrifice anymore. “I’ll bear the weight. You’ve done enough.”

  “It’s my fault.” She was sobbing again, fighting to breathe. “Anna, this is all my fault. All this pain, I can feel it. It’s mine.”

  She moved closer and forced the girl’s arms to her side. “It never was.”

  “Let me stay!”

  “Go,” Anna said. She felt Ramyi’s arms twitching, fighting to rise once more. She felt Shem’s body burning itself into oblivion. She felt emptiness. “Go!” Anna pulled her arms back and shoved Ramyi away, sending the girl crashing to the floor.

  Ramyi glared up at Anna with hard, shaking lips, then scrambled to her feet and ran toward the sycamore, the sunlight, the mass of dead and dying scribes trickling down toward the haze.

  When the warrens were entirely empty, rattling into dissolution, Anna looked at Shem.

  Hayat was wreathing him in thorny bands, struggling to hold him together as his limbs pulled apart and his tendons severed and his innards imploded. His jaw cracked further with every attempt to stifle his grunts.

  “Do you know that I love you very deeply, Shem?” Anna asked.

  His spine shattered as he nodded.

  “I’ll be here with you,” she said. “I’ll always be here.”

  Anna laid her hands on Shem’s chest, breathing gently, forcing her calmness into the boy’s awareness. But he was equally worming into her mind, threading it with pain and helplessness, with panic and dread. A whirlwind of essences cut into her—strange sigils she’d never seen, glimmers of the dead and the living, a thousand years past and a thousand to come—and at once she was dissolved into that fabric, into the very nature of existence.

  Again she surrendered her hand to hayat.

  She felt herself drawing the blade with her broken hand, putting it to Shem’s throat, curling around the boy’s markings with a circular sweep. An immaculate circle, perfect in every curve, joined without gaps or hesitation.

  The circle flared to life.

  Shem’s runes and essence faded.

  And as his armor of hayat fell away, unbinding him, breaking him down into his simplest strands of being, he began to laugh. A high, childish laugh, something primordial and gleeful, far older than Shem, manifesting joy in its purest state. His cracked lips formed a deeply contented smile. “Do not worry, Anna,” he said with dying cords. “There’s so much more.”

  “Shem?” she whispered, glancing down at her hand, the blade, the vanished circle—

  But Shem was not there, only his body. Shem was nowhere; Shem was everywhere. She could feel him within her chest, within her mind, beyond both recognition and destruction.

  The warrens roar
ed and burst with reddish light.

  Anna dashed toward the tunnel, focusing through torrents of agony as the hayat clawed at her flesh and thinking mind. She could feel it collapsing upon her, shrinking, cutting into—

  She dove through the tunnel. There was a moment of nothingness, then her shoulder slamming into the sycamore, crackling with pain, slumping her down against the grass and roots and dirt.

  The tunnel was gone.

  The Nest was gone.

  Rising on aching legs, Anna stared down at the devastation. All of the lower districts were blanketed in the ocher shroud, still glittering with metallic flecks as shafts of light poured down into its depths. Survivors were staggering through the haze, screaming and moaning, herded by the remnants of units that had survived the blasts. Her scribes were picking their way down the slope with the escorting fighters, intent on the harbor and the billowing walls of dust that had jetted out into the water and beyond.

  But further to the west, stretching along the coast in pristine rows of temples and markets, were the untouched Huuri districts. There was an enormous river flowing through their streets, glimmering in sunlight, sparkling and coursing closer in a bizarre, creeping flood.

  Not a river, Anna realized. Saviors.

  The Huuri columns were just beginning to trickle into the edge of the storm, most bearing baskets and herb pouches. Their chanting was sweet and calming, a birdsong on the first day of spring, waking the dormant from winter’s clutches.

  Then Anna realized she was crying. It was neither joyful nor sorrowful; it simply was. Her thinking mind was a razor, studying her thoughts and loss and tears with a sense of curiosity and utter helplessness. But she could do nothing to stop herself. She sat down against the tree and buried her face in her hands, feeling such envy for Shem and how he’d left this world.

  Wondering what she’d done to him.

  A great rumbling forced her eyes open once more. In the distance, threading through the mountain passes and into the trench-laden valleys of the shabad, were dark masses of cloth and iron, smoke and flesh. Hordes. Butchers. Vultures coming to pick their corpse clean.