“Does it really sound so distant? The winds of this world delivered us—all of us—to our own ends. You’re not the only one who lost something.”
“But you can help me,” he whispered.
“You need peace, Konrad.”
“There will be no peace.”
“There are already ashes,” she said curtly. “There’s nothing left to kill for.”
He looked away, lips and jaw quivering, before sucking down a bitter breath. “I wanted to bury them, Anna, but I just couldn’t find all the pieces. Strange how you’ll settle for that, for some small token, in the end. Even that was impossible.” His gaze resolved into a stern, patient stare. “So all I have left is killing.”
Fatigue bled the boundaries into nothingness—here, there, life, death, love, hatred. But the child Konrad had once been remained. Anna saw that boy as clearly as herself, as clearly as the rippling tent walls or dancing shadows or bodies lining the streets.
Konrad produced a small, thin blade from his belt, then held it out for Anna.
When she took it, she felt everything withering.
“I’m sorry, Konrad,” she whispered. And within the man’s eyes she could see the question budding, sprouting out from rage: For what? But her hands were swift and merciful, a feather across his throat, a lone sweep to free him of his miserable burden. With that cut she killed who had been and who would be. “It’s easier this way.”
She finished the circle’s sweep.
The last traces of hayat flickered and vanished, taking Konrad’s essence as it went.
A sudden, pervasive stillness came over Konrad’s face. His eyes were full, bright, blank, gazing up at her like a newborn, brimming with tears for a world he no longer knew. He gently wrapped his arms around Anna’s waist and laid his head upon her chest. And there, in that womb between heartbeats and forgetting and forgiveness, he wept.
“It will pass,” Anna whispered, dully staring forward, hoping, wishing. Before long she saw faces forming amid the shadows—Yatrin, Julek, Dalma, Bora, Shem—and her words became tears too.
* * * *
It took three days for Kowak to send its first boats into the harbor. They arrived like billowing phantoms, cutting through the pall of morning mist and coal smoke, looming with steep barge walls and thick masts. People stood along the boardwalks and awaited them with their arms raised and bellies aching, weeping and cheering when the first Rzolkan fighters emerged through the haze.
But Anna’s salvation was not coming from the seas, nor from anywhere else.
She’d spent those days listening to recycled platitudes about the war’s closing negotiations, the decades it would take to rebuild the city, and the councils that needed to be convened. Ashoral was a welcome voice of reason, but most meetings were tense, exhausting battles between weary speakers. Her place was not at the table, but in the courtyard.
She stood waiting in the shaded archway, her hands joined and eyes as bright as she could manage. “Good morning, Galda.”
The young Nahoran offered her a nod and a brief curtsy.
“The others are waiting,” Anna said. “We’ll begin soon.”
Galda glanced back at the slope toward the harbor. “The new hall-mother says we’ll go to Kowak tomorrow.”
“Yes, that’s right.”
“It’s frightening, don’t you think?”
Her own head had lately been swimming with visions of Rzolka, of burlap-masked men and waterlogged fields and the ribbon-wrapped scroll in her pack. Of coming bloodshed and the peace she’d need to break within herself. “We don’t need to think of that now, do we?”
“I suppose not.”
Anna patted her on the arm. “Run along and get settled.”
When the girl had hurried past and it seemed that her flock was assembled, Anna turned away from the craggy stone path. But the whisper of soft, cautious steps slid into her awareness, and she looked back to find a cloaked figure shambling closer. Broad shoulders, a soldier’s oiled boots, bronze hands free of an essence.
“Is this the place, then?” Konrad asked.
Anna leaned against the masonry. “It depends what you’re seeking.”
“A break from filling sandbags, to start with.”
She waved him closer.
“Do you suspect this is the place for me?” he asked, gazing in at the rings of Alakeph brothers and scribes. “I’m not so certain it’s a killer’s haven.”
“If one spends some time here,” Anna said, “they won’t be a killer.”
Konrad glanced away, smiled faintly, and wandered into the courtyard.
During that meditation Anna could feel their presence, their collective awareness seeping into her and dancing over her own mind. Their bodies were everything she had been, everything she could have become, everything she was not. But their minds extended beyond that. They were autumn leaves, the first snowfall, the faintest sweep of a fox’s paw. Everything flowed over her at once, ash-black and bloody, but she did not stir, did not cry out against the torment. She let the countless deaths wash over her. She held as the column at their center, forever whispering for their awareness to burrow onward, to find some strength that could be starved and burned, but never killed. Yet beneath their suffering was deeper pain, deeper rage. Things that could not be expressed. Undelivered farewells, vast stretches of silence—
You are loved, her awareness whispered into the void. You are not broken. You are not in pain. You simply are.
Swirling tendrils of ruby and violet. Bright, hazy bands of gold. Countless essences wreathed her and enshrouded her and called out, each flowing into the nothingness she knew to be her center. That emptiness, somehow, was full beyond belief.
Yet one mind resisted.
Is that you, Anna? it whispered.
Who are you?
Childish laughter crackled through her awareness.
Gideon told me everything before he died. About my sister, about what they intended.
Anna’s fingers went cold. Ramyi, can you hear me?
They treated us like animals, Anna. They made me destroy people who cared about me, and they made me burn what I loved too. I know they did the same thing to you, because you helped them. You lied to me.
Ramyi, listen—
I’m going to do what you never could. I’m going to show them who they ought to worship.
Images burst into Anna’s mind:
Hanging bodies.
Burning cities.
Black skies.
This isn’t the way, Ramyi.
This is the only way. And they will know my name when the dust settles. You made my mind what it is, Anna, but I’ll make this world something unimaginable.
Swollen corpses.
Ribs jutting out against starving flesh.
I’m going to the source, Anna, and I’ll change everything. No longer will they be able to threaten us with death. We can defy it.
Charred skulls.
Tell them of this new world. Tell them that they can prosper under our reign, or suffer under our heels. But salvation is coming, and every man will answer for his role. I will not be merciful, and I will not be patient.
Ramyi, what are you doing?
But there was only silence. The girl’s essence was gone, leaving little more than a scorch across the devastation.
Anna opened her eyes.
“We’ll end our session early,” she explained to the red-eyed, blinking masses. “There are preparations to be made.”
Scions
If you enjoyed Schisms, be sure not to miss the third book in
James Wolanyk’s Scribe Cycle.
Keep reading for an early look!
A Rebel Base e-book on sale 2019.
Chapter 1
Anna heard the old steward long before his lantern’s chalky orange blo
om appeared. She’d first sensed his presence from the creak of an oak door further down the slope, cutting through the hush of the predawn drizzle, the twisting wail of the mountain winds. She waited in stillness by the open shutters, watching the fog shift and creep over blue-black rock, studying the ethereal glow as it grew sharper and nearer. Her legs were still awash in the prickling numbness that accompanied rising from her cushion.
Four hours since the midnight bell, seven since she’d snuffed out her chamber’s lone candle and sat to follow her breath.
The razor-mind did not stir, did not blink, did not wander as the steward came to her door and rapped on the bronze face. Instead it curiously trailed the seed of a thought blossoming in absolute stillness: Why?
“Knowing One,” the steward croaked in river-tongue, “have you risen from slumber?”
Anna lifted the latch and opened the door. Her steward’s wide-brimmed hat dripped incessantly, flopping about with the breeze, but it did little to hide his concern. Every wrinkle and weathered fold on his face bled the truth of his heart. “What’s happened?”
“Nothing so severe, I imagine,” he replied, wringing his hands within twill sleeves. “Brother Konrad has sent for you.”
“At this hour?”
“Yes,” the steward said. “Precisely now. Yet the reason for this summoning will not pass his lips, Knowing One. Forgive me for my vague words.”
Nothing so severe. She met the steward’s blue-gray eyes, full of haunting curiosity, then gazed down at the monastery’s craggy silhouette. Few truly understood the austerity of Anna’s practice, the importance of cloistering herself for weeks on end. Even fewer knew better than to summon her during the rituals of purification. She counted Konrad among those few.
As she followed along the narrow, stone-lined path carved along the slope, she took in the foggy sprawl of the lowlands and the black clouds blotting the eastern skies. It was dead now, free of the ravens and hawks that often wheeled over the ridges, utterly silent aside from their boots crunching over gravel and earth. The monastery was a dark mass, not yet roused for its morning rites. Not even the northern bell tower, looming as a black stripe against muddy slate above her, showed any sign of the watchman and his lantern.
Yet something had come.
Jutting out over the lowlands was the monastery’s setstone perch, which hadn’t seen a supply delivery in close to three cycles. Only it was not empty, nor was it occupied by the violet nerashi that Golyna or Kowak often dispatched. Anna glimpsed a sleek, battered nerash resting behind a sheen of mist, seated directly above the iron struts that bolted the perch to an adjacent outcropping.
“What is that?” Anna asked the steward, clenching her hood against a howling gust.
“I know not.” His words were thick with unease.
In the main hall, a group of Halshaf sisters worked to light the candles lining the meditative circle. Each new spark and flicker drove away another patch of blackness, revealing glimmering mosaics upon the walls, banners emblazoned with Kojadi script, the reflective bronze bowls that hummed their ethereal song each morning. The sudden flurry of footsteps upon crimson carpeting did not interrupt their soft, tireless chant in a dead tongue:
With this breath, I arise. With this breath, I pass away.
After hours of meditation, the monastery always felt like another plane, another realm described in the ancient texts. It was a consequence of the formless absorption Anna invariably fell into, stripping her world of boundaries between things, of objects and observers, of concepts that lent meaning to the tapestry of colors and sensations around her. But the strange urgency in the air divided the world into definite components once more.
In some sense she hoped that Konrad had summoned her to bring news of his progress. Even his occasional plunge into panic, spurred by transient insights into a world birthed from emptiness, reflected how profoundly his mind had developed.
“Do not shy away from existence,” she’d always whispered to him, holding the sides of his head as she’d done years ago in Golyna, brushing away the man’s tears as they rolled down in golden streaks. “Soon this dawn will clear away the darkness.”
He was not the only one who’d changed since the war. His Alakeph brothers had grown still and sharp in the isolation of Rzolka’s mountains, perhaps closer to their Kojadi roots than they’d been in a thousand years. At the very least, they were at their most populous, posted in monasteries and settlements that extended far beyond Anna’s awareness. The same held true for the Halshaf. And it had all stemmed from her guidance, they said—without her, the orders would have crumbled.
Yet she could not shake the sense that their central pillar was decaying.
Sleep brought dreams of Shem’s flesh breaking apart, dissolving into the nothingness she could only experience in passing glimmers. Flashes of ruins and bodies plagued her breathing during extended sits. Months ago, all comforts had come with a sense of imminent loss, and all pains had arisen with the dread of permanent existence. She felt herself resting on the precipice of something tremendous, something overwhelming and terrifying, yet fated to occur. Something that would shatter her mind if she was not ready.
But for the sake of the orders—for the sake of those who looked upon her as their pillar—she buried those thoughts. She turned her mind toward the mandala-adorned doors that led to Konrad’s chamber.
“Shall I bring parchment?” the steward asked. “Perhaps we should preserve your words once again.”
Anna grew still with her hand on the door’s latch. She turned to examine the old steward, whose eyes now gleamed with expectant hopefulness. “Forgive me, but I would prefer to see Brother Konrad alone.”
“Of course.” He looked down at her broken hand and crinkled his brow. “Brother Konrad could transcribe your wisdom.”
“Another time.”
“Very well,” the steward said softly. “As the Knowing One desires.”
His footsteps whispered off over the carpeting, fading into morning chants from the adjoining hall. Soon there was a storm of footsteps shuffling behind thin walls, moving to wardrobes and chests, padding toward the main hall.
Anna opened the door.
Konrad sat on the far side of the chamber, leaning heavily upon the armrest of his oak chair. A pair of candles burned in shallow dishes near his feet, throwing patches of dim, shifting shadows over his nascent beard and haggard eyes. The return to aging—to true living, perhaps—had been a painful transition. But the worry on his face was deeper than the days when he’d toyed with his mortality. He looked up at Anna with sluggish focus.
“What’s wrong?” Anna asked.
Konrad beckoned her to approach. “Close the door, Anna.”
Something about his manner disarmed her. It was a consequence of days and faces and terrors that had been stained into her memory, infusing anything cordial with the expectation of pain. She wavered for a moment, glancing around at the chamber’s sparse furnishings and shelves of Kojadi tomes, then entered and sealed the door behind her. The air was stale and pungent with sweat.
“Are you leaving us?” she asked.
Konrad squinted at her, then shook his head. “You saw the nerash, didn’t you?”
“Whose is it?”
“Somebody arrived during the night,” Konrad whispered. His gaze crept along the floor, edging toward the cotton partition that concealed Konrad’s sleeping mat. Every swallow was a hard lump upon his throat.
Anna grimaced. “Come out.”
“Very well, Anna.” A voice nestled in dark dreams. Crude, low, familiar in the most inhuman sense. The song of a bird from autumn woods.
No.
He emerged from behind the covering like a specter assuming its mortal form, letting candlelight wash over his tattered burlap folds, his bloodshot eyes, his twitching fingers. Three years of evading the vindictive masses, fle
eing from whatever claws Anna could rake through the Spines and the lowlands, yet now he stood with some twisted semblance of pride.
Of comfort, even.
Anna could not speak. She longed for something—anything—to open his throat and make him scream.
“The years have been kind to you,” the tracker said. He reached into the folds of his cloak and drew a rusting, serrated blade, then waved it in the candlelight. “An honest partnership, girl. Let’s tie off this loose end.”
Meet the Author
James Wolanyk is the author of the Scribe Cycle and a teacher from Boston. He holds a B.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Massachusetts, where his writing has appeared in its quarterly publication and The Electric Pulp. After studying fiction, he pursued educational work in the Czech Republic, Taiwan, and Latvia. Outside of writing, he enjoys history, philosophy, and boxing. His post-apocalyptic novel, Grid, was released in 2015. He currently resides in Riga, Latvia as an English teacher.
Visit him online at jameswolanykfiction.wordpress.com.
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