Schisms

by James Wolanyk

  A swarm arced over the peaks, as dense and alien as a cloud of locusts, dipping down into the notch of the Azibahli catacombs. Then there was a horrible rumbling, a chain of shrieking blasts that tore the stone face from the mountains, a landslide of dust and rock and black smoke that buried the entire valley like a hammer upon an anvil.

  Their machines had never been meant for the city itself, Anna realized. They had always been one step ahead.

  * * * *

  The officers were in disbelief. Not with a sense of refusal, but an inability to grasp reality, to make sense of whatever madness was sweeping toward them.

  “We have barely anything,” a Hazani from Viczera Company mumbled, repeating it over and over. His comrades moved through the boardwalk’s dust and smoke as specters from some other plane, their eyes like dead coals as they searched for chalky hands and ankles jutting out from ash, setstone, timber, grit.

  But there was hardly anyone to find. Anna’s run to the lower district had revealed the scope of the massacre: Those fortunate enough to survive still had the hard task of tethering their minds to their bodies, coming to grips with bloodstained faces and discarded limbs strewn about them. Only the Huuri seemed able to cope with the obliterated city, the obliterated bodies. She now watched them combing through collapsed buildings along the harbor’s edge, rattling their sacred oak sticks and blowing herbs into a hot, coppery breeze, hauling corpses and still-breathing bodies to the docks like cargo.

  “Have you found Ashoral?” Anna asked the gathering of officers, who were dust-smeared, blood-eyed, disoriented.

  “No,” one of them managed. “Nobody.”

  “And the ships?”

  “They already cut loose,” another croaked, coughing through her cloth wrap.

  Anna looked at the growing pool of survivors now clustered on the mooring platforms and boardwalk, all stirring as they waited for salvation that would not come.

  Her scribes were among them, gathered into a sitting circle with joined hands, forming a rare blot of equanimity amid the panic. The Nahoran survivors studied them with equal measures of awe and repulsion. There was nobody—and nothing—else for the masses to fault.

  Except Anna.

  Further down the boardwalk, the remnants of the Nahoran officers were arranging their men in feeble columns. There were fewer than a hundred fighters remaining, trained or otherwise, and some were without ruji, without packs, without vests.

  Horrible, piercing howls sounded from within the city. Horns bellowed and leather skins thumped to the beat of an animal’s heart.

  Waves of fear rippled through the assembly on the docks—sobbing, gasping, clutching at slack-gazing children. Several officers did their best to quell the panic, but there were no words to spare them their fate. Platitudes could not delay the inevitable.

  Yet the scribes’ circle remained tranquil, a mass of bloodied and ashen faces, led by the most steadfast and ardent among them—Ramyi.

  Whistling rose somewhere in the neighboring district, sending nearby fighters scrambling into the rubble once more. Several officers remained on the docks to tend to the wounded, stealing cursory glances at Anna as though she held answers.

  “Runes,” Anna said to the scribes’ circle, drawing the attention of the most nervous girls among them. “Get to the fighters and give them whatever you can. Make your work last.”

  After a bout of anxious whispering, the scribes rose and hurried past Anna. They had the startled, vapid eyes of stags caught in a hunter’s iron-tooth trap. But as Ramyi rose from her meditation, brushing dust from the pleats of her ceremonial gown, Anna approached her.

  “Give them strength,” Anna whispered. “This is what you’ve been preparing for.”

  Ramyi regarded her with a rigid stare. “Nothing could’ve prepared anyone.”

  “But you’re ready,” she said. “You’re the only one who’s ready.”

  She looked at Anna’s bandaged hand, blinking with a raven’s cold curiosity.

  “It’s upon your shoulders now,” Anna said.

  “Death is waiting for us,” Ramyi said calmly. “Did you feel it, when he died? Could you feel it in your heart? There’s nothing for us.”

  “What are—”

  “He was formed from this world. We were not.”

  He. It was a somber word for what the boy had been, all he’d meant and all he’d provided. Yet Anna couldn’t find sadness in her heart. His existence—his enduring presence, it seemed—was still a fact known in the deepest notch of herself. “They still need you, Ramyi. Everyone here is looking for somebody to help, and that’s you now. Do you understand me?”

  Her jaw was quaking. “There’s nothing in this world for our kind,” she whispered. “Did you feel the void, Anna? Did you really taste it? We’re damned.”

  “They aren’t.”

  “Once I thought that.” Her eyes glistened and her lips worked in furious circles. “Do you know what it’s like to lose every trace of love? You could never know. But I do and I’ve seen it, and I’ve seen things that shouldn’t be in this world. They destroyed life, Anna. They only want to destroy.”

  “But you don’t,” Anna whispered, “and that’s the divide.”

  “You speak as though you know.”

  “Ramyi, listen to me.”

  “I did. I had so much faith. I did everything you asked.”

  Anna moved a hand toward Ramyi’s shoulder, but the girl spun away, a pair of tears working down through powdery cheeks.

  “I’m going to do what you won’t,” Ramyi said. “I’m going to save us.”

  Then the girl was yet another silhouette slipping away into the haze, moving up and over the enormous heaps of crushed glass and pulverized setstone lining the boardwalk. And when she disappeared, Anna could not feel her.

  She did not know if Ramyi existed.

  * * * *

  Two blocks from the Weaver’s Market, Anna saw the mortar shells bursting in dark blossoms. Every impact registered with a shock through her ankles, a rolling clap that struck her eardrums, a screaming wave of shrapnel raking the ruined facades and cobblestones.

  “Where are Rashig’s men?” Anna aimed her yuzel over the low wall, scanning every window and doorway across the road, honing in on rippling fabric and creeping shadows. Neither of the runners she’d dispatched to the central garrison had returned.

  A young Chayam fighter grunted at her side. “They were in the upper districts.” He was nestled down against the stonework, struggling to load the iron shavings into his cylinders. “We should not rely upon their salvation.”

  That much was certain. Anna studied the weary string of fighters behind the wall, wondering if they would be able to hold out for minutes or hours. It was startling to realize how quickly their eyes had dimmed upon noticing her broken hand.

  “Wait here,” Anna said to the nearest clump of fighters. “There’s a Borzaq unit three blocks away and the scribes will come soon. Just don’t fall back.”

  They nodded, but what did assurances mean in the face of death?

  She moved in a low dash from post to post, cluster to cluster, all the while listening to the whumps grow closer, whispering certainties beyond her control and seeking out scribes she didn’t have at hand. Smoke was creeping toward her district, thick and turbulent, choking out the last glimmers of afternoon sunlight. From some angles it appeared to her as a cascading black tumor, fuming down off the slopes to the beat of drums and shells.

  But as she came to the corner of a café, peering out at a square and its gouged cobblestones with hot, bitter air in her throat, something pushed back against the tide. They were flitting shapes, distinguishable amid the haze only by pale runes, but they were there: marked Nahoran fighters.

  Her scribes had to be close.

  Across the square was a broad white manor house, its u
pper balcony lined with sandbags and Borzaq fighters. Its rooftop of smoking red tiles had been raked and stripped in spots, likely by a recent barrage, and its windows revealed slender, robed figures rushing between chambers and corridors.

  Anna sensed their lure, their focused afterglow still wafting into her awareness. She stole a glance at the rubble pouring out of the smoke, tracking the bright, pockmarked vests of Nahorans trekking deeper into the pall, then set off over the shattered sprawl. Every hissing ruji and popping shell made her flinch, made her remember the firelit courtyard of the kales.

  “Quickly, quickly!” A tall borzaqem came into focus in the manor house’s doorway, waving her onward with a ruj tucked under his arm. His neck shone with the gossamer glow of a fresh rune, five-sided and honeycombed. Soot coated his cheeks.

  She thundered into the atrium, doubling over and heaving to catch her breath. Her lungs were burning, her legs buckling.

  The borzaqem moved closer to Anna. “Upstairs. Make haste to them, Kuzalem.”

  “How many scribes,” she gasped, “made it here?”

  “Whoever survived the shelling,” he said grimly.

  She didn’t want to know the details. “Anything from the upper districts?”

  “Words mean little now,” he said, aiming his ruj through the doorway with a practiced, solid stance. “Whatever positions we occupy are the totality of our world. Stand with us, Kuzalem.” He glanced at her somberly. “Stand until it’s done.”

  She mumbled something, perhaps in agreement or perhaps not, and wandered up the marble staircase. Her yuzel was suddenly an enormous weight in her hand. Upstairs she could already see the fighters rushing through the maze of columns, passing oil portraits and murals with munitions crates in their hands, hauling legless, tongue-lolling bodies on stretched canopies, leaning against doorways and shutters with ruji clutched like their own children. Huuri were attending to the dying and laying herbs upon ravaged corpses.

  “Stop crying,” a high, familiar voice barked from the nearest chamber. Flatspeak, stemming back to eastern valleys and dry riverbed markets. Ramyi was standing over a younger girl, staring with bright red eyes and bleeding cheeks and tight, trembling fists. “You’ll kill him.”

  The scribe nodded, doing her best to settle the jerking swells in her back as she pressed the scalpel to a Chayam fighter’s throat. They were both kneeling, quivering, shying away from the blade.

  “It’s useless,” Ramyi hissed. She knocked the scribe’s hand away and nudged the girl aside, sinking down on one knee to apply her own marking. The cuts were swift and certain, deeper than Anna had ever seen, undeterred by another rain of shells west of the square. When the rune flared into existence, though, Ramyi continued her cuts. Three branching runes enveloped the central marking.

  Anna stepped into the room. “What are you doing?”

  “What everyone else is afraid to do,” Ramyi said, continuing her marks without turning to acknowledge Anna. “They need to suffer.”

  But the marks continued, a flurry of blood bursting and shrinking back into the skin, winding up to the fighter’s jawline and down into the crux of his collarbones. Six, seven, eight runes, each one a strain on the body—

  “That’s enough,” Anna snapped. “He can’t bear it.”

  “Then we’re finished.”

  “Ramyi!”

  With a final sweep to the man’s sternum, Ramyi tossed her blade aside, sending it clattering over the tiles. She stood, wiped the blood from her hands, and studied her work. “Make them regret this,” she told the fighter.

  The man tucked his head to his chest, wincing in spite of the runes’ protection, and carefully rose from the floor. Tremors played out across his hands and wrists. He gathered himself, shook the pain from his face, and shouldered past Anna.

  “You don’t understand,” Anna said. “It will kill him.”

  “Death is waiting for all of us.” Ramyi turned and regarded Anna with a doll’s porcelain stare. “I’m the only one trying to resist it.”

  There was no reaching the girl now. Even Anna’s runes, immortal as they appeared, hadn’t fed enough hayat to the markings she’d given a young boy. Ramyi’s runes were a conduit for mere hours, perhaps a day, and a smith’s blades could hardly be quenched by a mugful of water.

  “It doesn’t need to be done,” Anna whispered. She sensed herself holding back some great reservoir, some hideous thing that had been buried and left to claw its way free.

  Toymaker.

  Footsteps came pounding up the atrium’s staircase. Anna spun to find the Borzaq fighter from the doorway, his face flush red and hair slick with sweat.

  “The wind shifted,” he huffed. “We have glints from four stations.”

  It put a transient flicker in Anna’s heart. “Have you identified them?”

  “Ga’mir Ashoral made contact with the canal garrison. Rashig is with them. Ga’mir Ondral is leading a push back into Keshannah.” He stole a hard breath before resuming. “There are some points deeper in the city, but they’re certain to collapse soon.”

  “Where?”

  “The ministers’ towers will fall soon. Viczera Company has a contingent in the outer ward, but the hilltop is too vulnerable.”

  Viczera Company. She cursed under her breath, wondering if she’d caused them to make an assault on the base. There was no time for blame now. “Who dispatched the glints at the tower?”

  “Khutai,” the fighter said. “He said they’re being shelled. The captains Guradan, Arqa, and Telayn are fading.”

  Anna nodded, though the reaction came before her mind had processed the names. Needles cut into her awareness. Telayn, Telayn . . .

  Yatrin.

  Her mouth went dry. “Gather your men and have them marked,” Anna said. She whirled on Ramyi, teeth gritted and brow aching, fighting down the screams in her throat that spoke of mistruths and mistakes, but the girl understood. Suddenly her pupil was sheepish once more, with wide, golden eyes and hunched shoulders. “Bring two others with you—we need their best.”

  “All right,” she mumbled. She set off across the chamber, shouting in broken Orsas and tugging scribes by the collar of their violet robes, swatting at her eyes to blot out newborn tears before they ever reached her cheeks.

  Anna lifted her yuzel and pried the rear cylinder back. She slotted new iron cartridges, tucking them into magnetized chambers, then snapped the weapon shut.

  Hold on.

  She wondered who the thought was for.

  * * * *

  The canals burned with rippling sills of heat and black smoke, conjuring memories of the sparksalt fires once raging on the outskirts of Malijad. Surely it was not a coincidence; it was their gesture of extinction, dominance, terror. In just over an hour, the skies had become a lightless dome. It seemed to press down over the ascent to the ministers’ towers, settling in dark blossoms and swirling knots.

  Anna kept her neck scarf wound tightly over her mouth and nose, but it did little to stem the prickling in her lungs. Her only focus was the sequence of steps before her, occasionally tearing her attention away to scan the alleys and doorways that lined the slope. The Borzaq fighters in her company had staved off most of Volna’s stragglers in the district, but they hadn’t been able to stop the incessant rain of shells.

  One of their scribes, bleary-eyed and bone-thin, had learned that truth minutes ago.

  “Keep glinting,” Anna wheezed, turning back to the mirrorman in their unit. “They need to know it’s us.”

  “We’re not certain if they still hold the position,” a Borzaq fighter commented from ahead. His rune gave a fresh edge to his voice, shielding it from the scorched whining and crackling that festered in the scribes’ lungs. “Wait for a moment, Kuzalem.” He waved to his men, gathering them higher on the steps in an orderly firing line. “Erfashal.” With mechanical coo
rdination the fighters advanced, ruji tucked to their shoulders and packs giving them black, bulbous shapes in the gloom.

  Iron flecks pinged off stone and shattered glass. Bestial screams echoed down toward Anna.

  “Approach,” the Borzaq fighter called down.

  Anna didn’t need encouragement; she bounded up the steps, listening for the clapping soles of Ramyi and their final scribe, finally coming upon a grisly arrangement of burst chests and bloody walls and splintered heads. Some of the brickwork was fused together, still dribbling in spots from hayat’s force. Skin and ink dissolved upon a disemboweled Volna fighter.

  Ramyi’s marked Borzaq stood ready, taking in their work with grim, restrained approval. Their mirrorman was flashing something into the haze ahead, shielding his candle with gloved hands.

  The wind shifted, howling up past Anna, stirring the smoke until it revealed the outline of the courtyard’s southern gate. A small, firelit square glinted back at them.

  Still alive.

  “Come on,” Anna said, coughing until her mouth tasted of copper and lye. She led them in a sprint up the final stretch, gaining a burst of energy when she recognized Khutai’s sun-darkened face behind the row of sandbags. Shells popped in the streets around her, vomiting ceramic flakes and dust into the alleys, but she paid it no mind. At the sandbags’ edge she leaped up and over the divide, sinking down against the burlap with a knot in her throat, sweat stinging across her scalp, hands tingling and shaking.

  “The stars haven’t failed us yet,” Khutai said hoarsely. Rivulets of blood ran from his right temple, but he wore a tired grin as he helped Ramyi and the younger scribe over the divide.

  Last to cross over were the Borzaq fighters, who kept their weapons leveled on the stairway at all times.

  Anna struggled to draw the slightest breath. “Where is he?”

  Khutai’s lips shrank. “He’s in the atrium, Kuzalem. Be swift with your cuts.”

  “She can’t,” Ramyi said, pointing at Anna’s hand with a jagged finger. Her tone drifted somewhere between pity and accusation. “I’ll get to him.” She gave a cursory nod to Anna, seemingly frightened of her mentor’s eyes, then set off jogging across smoky, churned-up flats.