Anna shut her eyes and rested her head against the sandbags. The sense of helplessness was crushing, nearly breaking. Finally she sat up, surveyed the surrounding gates, and tugged on the hem of the third scribe’s robe. “Mark them. Mark as many as you can.”
The girl’s lips quivered.
“Be brave,” Anna said. “Have faith in your marks.”
Her gaze flashed over the courtyard in helpless sweeps. Without words, the girl set off running.
Anna suspected it was the last time she would see her.
A bellowing howl rose from the depths of the stairway, prompting Khutai to aim his ruj into the smoke and study its shifting coils. Boots clapped toward them like surging rainfall.
“Be with Yatrin,” Khutai said softly.
“We don’t have any forces,” Anna huffed, “to hold this gate.”
“I’m here.”
“You’re alone.”
“I’ve lived for this moment long enough,” he whispered. “I can die for it once.”
Anna glared at the Hazani fighter, but his attention was fixed on the approaching storm. She could ask nothing more of him, in the end. Nodding, she scrambled to her feet and raced toward the towers’ black blots.
An ear-piercing blast shook the courtyard. It was a burst of ink amid the smog, a whistling barrage of shrapnel that left the northern ring in shambles. Ruji fire broke out between silhouettes in a flurry, trailed by inhuman screeches, tinny pops, and the whine of swooping machines. Several deafening cracks, joined by blossoms of setstone and glimmering adhesives, signaled the detonation of shalna charges.
But it would not be enough to stem the tide.
Anna tucked her head lower and continued, reaching the base of the tower just before another whump cut into the soil at her back. The shock wave hammered her lungs as she raced past a team of bickering Chayam fighters and felt her boots pounding over marble.
The atrium was alight with echoes and chaos.
Something of a triage station had been cobbled together at the foot of the central lift, extending along the obsidian walls and under the shade of the winding stairwells. Shrouded bodies were laid out in rows, so thin and powerless after having been stripped of their equipment.
She scanned the room for Ramyi’s ceremonial garb, for Yatrin’s fading eyes, for anything to assure her that things would be all right. Yet the thinking mind knew the uselessness of such sentiments. Several Borzaq fighters ran toward her, shouting something in flatspeak and then muddled river-tongue, but Anna hardly heard them. She found herself staring at a bloodied face with a black beard. Staring at a man with ragged stumps for his hands. Staring at stained, swollen tourniquets.
“Yatrin,” she called, cursing the broken wheeze in her throat. She shoved past the fighters and ran to his side, faintly aware of Ramyi’s hand and the wobbling blade it held. “Yatrin, I’m here,” she whispered.
His eyes had a dreamer’s seal and his chest scarcely shifted, but his sigils were still creeping over the skin—albeit with a muted, languid flow. Death was approaching.
“Focus, Ramyi,” Anna said weakly.
Ramyi’s eyes lost their misty sheen. She stared at Yatrin’s throat, letting her brow relax and shoulders settle into a soft slope, studying the man’s stubbled flesh as though it were a tinkerer’s puzzle.
With some effort, Anna stood and backed away. There was nothing more she could do to aid the girl’s cuts. Now her presence was merely a ghost in Ramyi’s head, the aggregate of memories and long nights spent practicing on sow corpses and leather.
It was a terrifying notion.
A flash threw Anna’s shadow against obsidian slabs. She whirled to face the source, overwhelmed by a maelstrom of dust and silhouettes and formless horrors rushing through the main doors. Nahoran fighters fired madly into the gloom.
Once again the wind spun and coiled over on itself, clearing the courtyard for a glimpse of their allies’ fallen positions. Chain-wreathed giants lumbered closer, some aflame and others run through with Borzaq pole arms, all emboldened by Anna’s runes, by decayed minds, by tumors rife with pus and duzen draught. Behind them were waves of faceless fighters, sporadically glimmering with markings or lit kerosene canisters. Nahoran bodies formed a low barrier in the doorway, shifting and bursting as ruji payloads tore into it, and the mound of flesh continued swelling with bodies from both sides. Flailing arms, dissolving heads, ragged torsos.
“Pay it no mind,” Anna said to Ramyi, lifting her yuzel and moving gracefully toward the slaughter.
Ramyi’s marked fighters remained in the doorway, appearing bold and monstrous against the tide of raging fires and black smoke. Every jet from their palms brought a hail of bone shards, an ear-bleeding clap, a ray of light that sublimated the blood within the corpses before them. And the runes were holding. More than holding, in fact.
Until Anna noticed the rupture of hayat.
The fighter at the center of their line began desperately swatting at his upper back, spinning like a rabid hound, convulsing until he toppled from the corpses.
No.
The hayat bled off in icy-blue tendrils. Cracks formed across his flesh, burning down his arms and legs in knotted webbing. Shards of his essence broke away and evaporated.
Those at his side noticed the eruption too late; pinpricks of hayat were already burning through their skin, lost to their awareness in the rush of combat.
But Anna could do nothing for them. She turned with her breath in her throat and raced across the chamber, barreling through oncoming fighters, screaming words that she could not scream.
“Wait,” she strained to shout as she came upon Ramyi, “wait!”
“You’re here,” Yatrin said.
She halted just behind Ramyi. Yatrin was staring up at her, smiling with eyes that did not understand, that could not have been any brighter.
His neck shone with a flawless rune, but what lay beneath it sent acid pumping through Anna’s stomach. He bore six branching runes, each a concoction of Ramyi’s mind, woven from years of pain and wrath. Each sure to consume him.
Anna fought to blink away tears, but it was futile. She wandered to Yatrin’s side, oblivious to the pops and screams at her back, and sank down against the obsidian.
Ramyi was grinning from ear to ear, glancing at Anna for approval. For a sugar cube, for a pat on the head.
Until she faced the doorway and recognized her work.
“Anna,” Ramyi whispered.
Anna nodded. “Find an empty room,” she said gently. “Hide.”
Her upper lip was twitching. “Anna, I’m sorry.”
But Anna did not say anything. She could not form thoughts, could not feel, could not do anything besides taking Yatrin’s hand and grasping it firmly. She watched the girl run to the stairs and vanish from sight.
“You’re not supposed to be here,” Anna said.
Yatrin squeezed her hand. “I came back.”
“But you shouldn’t have.”
“They needed me.” He stared at the embattled doorway, his pupils reflecting stripes of black and beige. “My home needed me.”
“But I needed you more,” Anna whispered. “I still need you. I want you, and I do love you, and when I said I’d marry you I—”
“And I’m here.”
She drew a sharp breath and dragged her sleeves across her eyes, wicking away the first tears. “But I want you forever, Yatrin, and I never said that. And now it’s too late, isn’t it?”
“For what?”
“For what it should’ve been.”
“It’s going to be as it is,” Yatrin whispered. He leaned closer, placed soft lips upon her neck, and took up the ruj lying near his pack. His grip became frigid.
Anna glanced up at the violence, wondering how long Ramyi’s marked fighters could maintain their grip on the th
reshold. “If you channel her hayat,” she said quietly, “it will destroy you.”
“I know,” he said.
“So you can’t.”
“So I must.” He lifted their shared hands toward her face. His fingers were very still. “Look at it, Anna.”
She couldn’t hide the tears now. She didn’t need to.
“Look,” he said again.
“I’m looking.”
“It’s like water, Anna,” he whispered. “Nobody can tell us where you end and I begin. Nobody can tell us that we’re separate.”
Glimmers of jagged memories played through her head—the essence unwinding itself, the core of their being evaporating. . . .
“Let me take it away, Yatrin,” she pleaded. “I can cease it all and we can be together—truly together. Without all of this—” her breath seized up and she huffed for fresh words—“without this pain.”
He wrapped an arm around her shoulder, kissed her on the forehead and smiled, his lips sweeping gently over her skin. “We never were apart, Anna.” Then he was standing, walking toward the roiling smoke and corpses, carrying himself like the wind through grassy fields.
She scrambled to her feet and rushed after him, half-shouting something through her breathlessness. Then the soles of her boots scraped over tiles, lost their purchase, flailed helplessly in the air. Her own weight vanished, supplanted by some eerie lightness that swept her higher and higher, slowing her kicks until she hovered by the upper spiral of the atrium’s stairwell.
Yatrin looked up at her, his skin fizzling with an opening flash of hayat. Again he smiled and Anna’s limbs grew heavy, useless, contented.
Don’t go.
His shadow moved into the blinding shroud of dust and flames, bursting with a blue-white shell. Plates of thick amber sprouted across his flesh and encased him in a matter of moments. Jagged, segmented limbs emerged from his spine, giving him a monstrous arachnid’s silhouette.
Ramyi’s marked fighters were dissolving upon their final holdout.
But as a wave of Volna’s men surged up and over the mound, clubs and ruji and axes in hand, Yatrin’s runes smoldered in tandem. The immediate row of fighters liquefied, exploding across the tiles as dark liquid and metallic beads. Their comrades collapsed over the mass with shards of black diamond bursting from the sockets of their skull-masks. Shadows amid the smoke began to thicken and stir, hammering through the masses like great, twisting serpents, thrashing corpses and the living alike, filling the atrium with wretched screams. Yatrin’s appendages pulled him toward the slaughter, striking forth and jerking back with corpses run through their tips, bits of rabbit meat strung out upon a hunter’s skewers. . . .
Anna willed her limbs to move, but the hayat bound her in place, lifting her higher and higher until the atrium’s spiraling steps became a maze of dark slashes and candlelit alcoves. She glanced about helplessly, now sensing her flesh dissolving, her very being shearing itself into a thousand strands, just as it had done so long ago in the machine’s wake. Once it had required touch, some close embrace, but her pupil’s markings had grown since then.
They’d become unthinkable.
Pockets of the atrium were rippling, playing out in bizarre, spastic shifts that made Volna’s fighters run backward, stretch and meld, turn inside out, fold over on themselves until they ate their own forms—
What have you done, Ramyi?
Then Anna was not there.
She was gasping for air, taking in dust and chalk and burned flesh, pounding on the aged wood of the boardwalk so far away. All around her were countless bodies, heaving and sobbing, patting themselves down to ensure that they hadn’t been lost to nothingness.
Anna forced herself to stand, staring out over the black shroud and searching for the ministers’ towers, which—
A blinding flash tore through the city. It shot tremors through the setstone and cracked the sky with a towering plume of dust, plunging Anna into a hazy, silent world full of ghosts and faint ringing.
Anna sank to her knees. She stared into the darkness, struggling to wrap any thread of her mind around the sudden emptiness, the crushing certainty of an entity forever undone. She felt nothing from him—in fact, she could not recall his feeling. Memories of his touch were like sand upon vast dunes, stripped away by blustering winds, as transient and bittersweet as recalling the course of a dream. And caught in that panic she struggled to hold onto him, to anything about him, to the way he’d been and the love he’d had and all of the other things she knew she ought to recall. Each new attempt at grasping seemed to burn away even more of him.
Him.
What had he been?
She cried for something, not someone.
Within that vast, blank silence, rife with specters clutching their knees and shuddering in tight circles, violence itself found its grave.
She did not know how long she knelt there, nor how many times she was asked if she was all right, if she was breathing, if she was able to recall anything. Everyone moved around her in a static haze, mostly wordless, dragging bedrolls and braziers to the docks as daylight faded. Even at dusk, the smoke lingered before her, begging her to wonder if he’d survived within the black mirage.
After some time, a group of Borzaq fighters helped Anna to her feet, then guided her to the tents arrayed along the boardwalks and neighboring canal parks. They told her to wait there, to eat whatever rations had been left out—not that she had any hunger.
She meditated with open eyes and a blank, cutting mind, staring at the dark, womb-red walls of the tent at sunset, watching silhouettes slip over the canopy’s curves, studying the gradual descent into blackness. There was an omnipresent sense of control, as though she could simply choose to die at any moment, to cease breathing and unbind herself as Ramyi had feared.
Then she heard their song.
She recognized it from more hopeful days, whistled by children or echoing from the choirs of shrine assemblies—a hymn celebrating the endurance of the state. It had been one of Khara’s favorites. Here and there she caught Orsas words for light and joy, sacrifice and unending love, obligations and duties, but lyrics for such a song felt redundant. She simply understood what Yatrin and Khara and Gideon had always told her, yet never shown her—Nahora’s heart.
A thousand voices, all harmonized and sweet and airy, rising up over the crackle of flames and the rasping of final breaths.
Anna felt cool air brushing the back of her neck.
“Is it really you?” Konrad’s voice was flat, trampled.
She shut her eyes. “Yes.”
“Maybe you can do something,” he said, moving further into the tent while avoiding Anna’s sight. “The herbmen say it’s finished, but you can help them, can’t you?”
“They survived?” Anna whispered.
“No, not quite.” Hard, dissonant breathing. “Can you fix them?”
“My hands wouldn’t be able, Konrad.” Her voice did not seem like her own; it was some imitation from a distant dream, a memory, a projection. “You should fetch Ramyi.”
“They couldn’t find her.”
Anna tried not to think. “One of the others, then.”
“But they’re not enough.”
“Anything I had rests with them.”
“They can’t overcome death,” he hissed.
Anna glanced back at him. She was stunned by his plainness, his rune-shielded features and fresh change of linen garments. But she could see the taint of lunacy in his fidgeting, candlelit eyes. His break from reality. “Neither can I.”
He paced for a moment, scuffing over the tent’s packed earth floor and murmuring to himself.
“I wanted to help them,” Anna explained. “But it was falling apart with every moment. Shem was falling apart. And if we’d waited, everything—”
“It’s not your fault.” C
hoking through each breath, Konrad moved to Anna’s side and knelt down. Even in the scant lighting, his body’s twitches and tremors were obvious. “You didn’t do this; I know, I know. It’s known. But someone did. Someone.”
Anna placed her hands upon the sides of Konrad’s head. “Whoever did this is dead now.”
“How can you know that?”
“There has been enough killing,” she said weakly.
“So bring them back to me.” His tears were fat beads of smelted iron in the candlelight. “You can do that, can’t you, panna? You can give life.”
Julek’s white, cold fingers dangled before her. “I never could.”
“How else will it end?” he whimpered. “It was never Volna grinning at us, was it? It was always death.”
Anna looked away. “No. It was hatred. It had nothing to do with death.”
“Then why can’t they come back?”
“You’re still here,” Anna said, far more harshly than she’d intended. “Don’t forsake that gift, Konrad. You still have choices to make and you have oaths to keep. We all do. That’s the pain of living. If you crave the simplest path, oblivion will not turn you away. But that’s a choice.”
“They made my choices for me.”
“And you made mine!” She drew up to her full height, seething, glaring down into Konrad’s glistening eyes. “You took away everything that mattered. You, and them, and all the rest. So just who do you think you’re addressing?”
“I’ve made every amend I can.” Sniffling, sobbing. “Anna?”
But the child was still standing there, weeping for a lost brother. She sensed it as herself and yet it was everything she could not be.
“Is this my penance?” he cried.
She relaxed her fists. “Once they were us.”
“No.”
“This choice was given to them too,” she said. “To hold their children or take a blade into the world. And they made their choice and they’ve paid for it.”
“We aren’t them!”
Schisms Page 33