Scribes

by James Wolanyk

  “Protection,” Konrad said, paying more mind to the shape of the room. He paced around the bed, the tables, the cabinets, hands looped firmly through his belt.

  “I make protecting,” Shem said. “He should go.”

  Her heart sank when the boy looked at her. “You can both protect,” she said softly. “There might be bad men coming here, Shem. He’s only here to help us.”

  The Huuri’s shoulders, bare and strong and rippled with bands of light, sank in a heap. “You trust him.”

  Anna hardened her eyes. “I trust you both. Be reasonable, Shem.”

  “Ol’achim mosham Orsas?” Konrad asked, peering at Shem curiously.

  It gave Shem some pause, but he regarded Konrad with the same cold manner. “Kep,” he said quietly.

  Konrad rattled off more Orsas, the regimented edge to his voice slipping away as he went on. There was some familiarity to his tongue, if not camaraderie. Anna couldn’t imagine that he’d learned his dialect from anything less than a professional tutor.

  After several exchanges in Orsas, Shem glanced at Anna. Nothing in his eyes suggested the bitterness had gone into remission. “Trust me. Not trust him.”

  “I trust both of you.” Harshness bit into the end of her words. It all seemed so ridiculous, warring for a girl’s trust, arguing, when trained killers were intent on her door and throat. She wondered how Shem would feel if he had to stand over her body, ruminating over every pathetic whine he’d made that night. Anna gritted her teeth. “Isn’t that enough for you?”

  “Me, not him,” Shem said.

  “I don’t belong to you,” Anna hissed. She pointed a shaking finger at the Huuri, her arm drained with the effort of staying upright and taut. It was her last ounce of nervous energy, her last fuel in the war against exhaustion. Her arm collapsed at her side, and she stared at Shem, eyes watering. “I’m not yours to claim.”

  Shem’s brows shifted, beneath which his eyes grew and shrank in slow cycles as though he couldn’t understand her words. Finally his gaze grew still. “I go.”

  “Where?” Her voice faltered.

  “The hall,” Shem said. “Always wanted in the hall.”

  Anna watched the boy slip past and disappear behind the closing slab, leaving behind only the whirs of the bolt mechanisms.

  “Panna,” Konrad said at last. “I advise letting it settle overnight. He’s capable.”

  She nodded dimly. The boy’s absence was palpable. “You’ll sleep by the door.”

  “And so I will,” Konrad said, unbuckling his final knife from a strap beneath his cuirass and twirling it in the lamplight. He slumped down against the door, hardly casting a glance at Anna.

  She extinguished the lamps early that night. Rather than sitting on her bed and meditating for an hour before sleep, she simply crawled under the covers and pulled them close to herself, then rolled over to face Konrad and the main door. Moonlight filtered through the fabric on her balcony doors, staining the captain in pallid gray and sharpening the glow of his neck rune. From her vantage point and angle, she was shrouded in enough darkness to stare at Konrad without being detected. Even so, his eyes were so vigilant that they chilled Anna. Rarely did he stand or stretch, and when he took such liberties, his patrols were swift.

  Yet over several hours, through the distant pop of explosive shells and the flashes of light from disintegrating stars, he didn’t notice that Anna remained awake beneath her blankets, scheming. She calculated logistics she’d already put in motion, trying to form the proper words to twist a man’s heart to her own ends. And when—

  A pair of soft, wispy lights blinked into existence behind the balcony’s glass, cooling from white to pastel blue in a matter of seconds. A flicker of blackness hinted at blinking eyes, in some form or another. They hovered on the railing, gazing inward, giving little form to the metallic framework housing them.

  There was nothing immediately threatening about them, nor as overt as the breed of cruelty the Dogwood employed. Anna sat up in bed, staring back, gauging whether it would be prudent to fetch her ruj.

  “Anna,” a tinny voice droned. Its words were wracked by quick, constant ticking. “The Council brings goodwill and the desire for salvation. Open this barrier and hear our words.”

  The Council. It wasn’t about Malchym’s council, surely. The river-tongue was too fractured, too sweet and flowing to be southern in origin. No, it had to be the Council she’d probed in tomes, with origins buried alongside terms like statehood and obligation.

  Nahora.

  Anna slipped out of bed, retrieved her ruj, and approached the balcony’s door. As she drew closer she discerned the speaker’s true form: a narrow, chattering raven composed of brass plates and cogs and silver tubes. After reading about Kojadi machine schematics, it was too tempting to ignore. Despite her dread of a Dogwood ploy, Anna threw open the doors and aimed at the bird. “What are you?”

  Its brass head twitched to the left, followed by a spooling noise. “Her voice is known.” The cast beak clicked open and locked in place. An eastern woman’s voice, marked by its grace and sense of whispering, emerged. “Make no sounds, dear, for we bring salvation. The Council of Nahora hopes that this message will find you well. My name is unimportant, but my offer is not. The Council extends full amnesty for your service to the interlopers, as well as citizenship upon the terraces of Golyna. You would be loved and attended to.” The spooling noise slowed, and with it, the words gradually deepened and slurred. “Our voice is limited here, but consider our words carefully. Say the word peace, dear, and you will be preserved. Remain silent, and we will be forced to destroy you. Our home is a living body of breath and bone.”

  Anna could only gape at the stagnant creature. Beyond her confusion about its mechanisms was a sense of urgency, an impulse to scream peace and make it carry her, on gleaming wings, away from this world and its wickedness.

  A dream. It must be.

  But its fading words resonated in her. We will be forced to destroy you. It was the same as all the others. Nahora, the great and powerful, would put a blade to a child’s throat. How many others had they snuffed out? Anna inhaled sharply, now glaring at the bird and its hypocrisy. Visions of its engineers and hateful Council passed through her awareness, clouding the machine’s true form.

  You’re all the same.

  “Are you—”

  Before she could finish speaking, the small bird sprung up and fluttered back, catching a gust of wind as it banked away from the tiles below. It twisted and soared off into the blackness, then vanished.

  She stood still, staring, wondering if she’d burned the world’s final kindness. “Come back,” she whispered, unsure if she meant it.

  And when she finally slipped back into bed, waiting for the bird’s return, it was with a ruj cradled in her arms.

  When the sun rose and shards of orange light fell across Konrad’s face, Anna hurried into the antechamber. She found the southerner sitting with a lopsided smile and hands folded across his lap. Disoriented memories of Nahora’s bird came to her, but they were too outlandish to be true, too mired in wishful thinking to exist beyond dreamscapes.

  “I have to visit somebody,” Anna said. “Can we go?”

  Konrad bent a brow. “The Huuri?”

  A wave of panic rolled over her. Shem hadn’t returned home during the night. She swallowed the lump in her throat and fought to stay composed, even as nightmares long gone resurfaced in her. “He’ll be there.” Foolish as it was, she clung to the hope.

  “Oh. The recluse. By now, I’d wager they want his head.”

  Anna walked to the table, littered with Konrad’s assortment of weaponry, and caressed a dagger’s flat edge. “If you don’t take me there, I’ll find a way.”

  Konrad stood, groaning, and moved to Anna’s side. His shoulders loomed over her. “The old hounds didn’t take kindly
to your last trip. The last that they knew about, I should say. Do you have any idea what they’d do to you?”

  “No.” She envisioned cracking bones, the stretching and splitting of flesh.

  “They believe it’s his fault,” Konrad explained. “Your fire, so to speak. They think the orza and her husband have dark plans for such an important girl.” He grew quiet, and cleared his throat. “You shouldn’t feel condemned for what you chose, panna. Whatever happens to him—”

  “Is my consequence.” Anna traced the dagger’s handle. “I’ll reach him, one way or another. Make your choice.”

  Konrad circled the table, inspecting the array of iron and steel. “And you’ll tell him?”

  “To be vigilant.”

  To take the foundlings. To leave and never look back. She kept her true intentions folded beneath her tongue, confident that the Dogwood captain was ignorant of the lies.

  “Pertinent to many of us,” Konrad said. He met Anna’s eyes across the table, dark hair spilling across his forehead. “You know, they say that in Hazan, only the wind and the jackals can outrun their fate.”

  “I don’t care for fate.” Anna moved to the door. “If we leave now, they’ll have time to make themselves ready.” She held her plan behind sealed lips, since cracks in a wall tended to widen. Cracks about the Days of Seed, about upcoming festivals with more than enough distractions to conceal the movement of a few foundlings and their guardians. Then again, the north was a cruel place. The sudden absence of anything pure would arouse suspicion.

  It was their best hope, Anna reasoned.

  And hope had a habit of souring in Hazan.

  They crossed through a branching courtyard flanking the kales, its low walls crowded by hooded growers with beige gloves and trowels. Konrad led her along a stone path, watching the growers sort seeds and bulbs, tuck roots into patches of fresh, black soil, dig small channels with wooden coverings to ferry water from the nearby canals. For once the air reminded her of Rzolka, where soil was always churning and sprouting and darkening, and water remained after hours of sunlight. It was a rich, raw smell that came every spring and summer, but only existed for a few moments in Hazan.

  The Days of Seed.

  What should have been rebirth.

  “With all intended respect,” Konrad began, over the crunching of soil beneath iron spades, “I think the storm may have passed.”

  Anna frowned. “Meaning?”

  “Teodor’s likely found his wits in an empty flask,” Konrad sighed. “This could be risk without any reward, panna.”

  “It’s riskier to assume that,” Anna said. It was a forgone thing, whether she would live or die. Now she focused her mind to things beyond survival and personal importance, working through scenarios of misdirection. She wondered, distantly, if the Nahorans could’ve helped the foundlings. “When do the Days begin?”

  “If I had to guess, the orza’s judgment is the only timetable for Malijad. For Hazan, might even be. Cartels everywhere have hands on the scruff of their neck.”

  That was all it took to remind Anna that, at his core, he was still a soldier. No matter how many smiles he offered or flowers he brought from the orza’s garden, he was still sworn to Rzolka above all else. Above her.

  “Just don’t do anything rash.” Konrad’s words jarred her back to the wash of pungent earth and clay. “You know how a southerner’s temper is. White-hot one day, quenched the next.”

  “Of course,” Anna said. Her thoughts flickered back to the Marchblade’s words about chaos, about their sort. Teodor and the others, southerners warped by a lifetime of war, had devolved beyond tempers. They held spite and cruelty and sadism.

  She’d seen their hearts in ash-laden districts.

  * * * *

  When they slipped through the garden’s low doorway and reached the dusty expanse of the main courtyard, the foundling hall’s door an iron square in the distance, Anna froze. Her toes curled and rooted her in place; her hands shook within damp sleeves.

  White-hot one day, quenched the next.

  Their ranks were arrayed in endless columns, a sea of shrouded glares and black wrapping and dangling blades. Ruji jutted up from the gathering, a forest of barren pines, with their spines and pouches supported against ceramic-plated shoulders. Behind the mass of head scarves and crow-like sentries on the distant walls, the trade gates were sealed. Every stretch of the courtyard was swallowed by dark leather boots and silent, anxious killers. The only gap in their formation was a narrow, twisting path leading to the foundling hall.

  “Kuzashur,” the voices droned in unified river-tongue, rattling the earth below Anna’s feet and piercing the air. “You have been summoned at full dark by Orza Dalma and the eminent liberators of Patvor. You will be escorted to the theater for a night of wonder. Garments will be provided. If you decline, slaughter will follow.”

  Until that moment, Konrad had seemed anything but feeble. Yet his hands, slack to grasp his blade, revealed how many heels he lived beneath. How many complex layers of wickedness and betrayal were woven into the kales, and how one man could never sway every heart. His sullen eyes stared at their front row.

  “Wait for me,” Anna said. She forced herself to walk forward, certain that if she waited for the captain’s reaction—indeed, if she heard her own thoughts at all—she would flee. Wicked men had a passion for ritual fear, and Anna felt it under the press of a thousand soldiers, under words that echoed through the distant streets with a phantom’s wailing. But fear was preferable to subjugation. Blinking against har-gunesh and a thousand dark gazes, hearing only her clipped breaths and the scrape of soft leather on earth, Anna approached the shaded walkway.

  With another breath to steady her hands, Anna entered their ranks. It was a familiar world of stark shapes and gloom, of trees rising up through a haze, of oncoming death. The air was caustic, muddled by polishing oils and the urine they used to soak their garments.

  They haven’t killed you, Anna thought, trying to swallow past a dry mouth as she neared the end of the path. Therefore it isn’t real. Don’t fear the unreal.

  Anna was still deep in Bora’s proverbs when she reached the doorway. She drummed out three quick knocks, unwilling to turn or focus on the killers staring in her periphery. There was a nauseating stretch of silence before the door’s hinges squealed, leaving High-Mother Sharel with luminous heptagons in the doorway.

  The northerner smiled at her, and the terror evaporated.

  In the main chamber, Anna strode past children learning to sit still and use their quills with practicing ink. She eyed packs of Alakeph and offered them a bowed head, recalling the threat in the courtyard when she noted how vigilantly the Alakeph watched the atrium’s doors. They’d spill blood if the Dogwood entered, but there were dozens of invincible fighters for every one among their ranks.

  Jalwar’s office was stagnant, animated only by the heavy sweep of the Hazani’s hands over his podium. Documents sat in neat stacks along the shelves with ribbon binding, just as Anna had left them days before, and a shaft of daylight fell through a wall slat and across Jalwar’s arms.

  “Jalwar.” Anna stood in the doorway, one hand holding the hanging open. Jalwar peered up and caught sight of Anna, but before he could set his quill aside or finish the thought hanging on his open lips, Anna stepped inside. “We need to talk.”

  “Please, do sit,” he said, his relief souring as he gestured toward the stool. “Who brought you here?”

  “Nobody.” She seated herself, trying to make sense of the missive before Jalwar, which was covered in half-finished sentences and erratic characters. “I came by myself.”

  “To negotiate?”

  “To talk. You and I.”

  With a shaking hand Jalwar picked up the sheet and tossed it to the floor. “When he came, we should know better.”

  “There was no way to kno
w.” Anna thought of the tracker and his wounded eyes. “And he didn’t tell them. He wouldn’t.”

  “You trust him so much?”

  “No.” Anna glanced away. “I understand him.”

  “Yet things are known.” Hardly any white remained around his eyes, now darkened by bloodshot clouds and veins. “You see the many men they have gathered outside of our walls. What interest do men take in foundlings, Anna? What war do they fight?”

  “They wouldn’t do it,” Anna said, more hopeful than assured. “Did Shem come here?”

  “It is said you defy these men,” Jalwar whispered, ignoring her question. “I cannot speak to Dalma, nor my cousins within the kales. These men are hateful.” His gaze refocused. “Surely it was not Dalma who organized this.”

  “Does it matter who did?”

  “It may,” Jalwar said. “Not all can be reasoned with.”

  It was true enough, she supposed. Chilling, but true. “How did this happen, Jalwar?”

  The northerner’s eyes flickered with curiosity.

  “With Dalma,” Anna continued, “with the Emirahni. The scrolls said they’ve controlled a district of Malijad for generations. And now what?”

  “I was a fool,” Jalwar whispered. “A fool’s fool. Such things are over, my friend. Their line was damned before the first bricks of this hall were placed.”

  “Just explain it,” Anna said. “I’m not a child. I need to know what they wanted out of this place. Why they chose Dalma, I mean.” Deeper still, she needed to know the approaching designs of wicked men. Of men who were beyond reason, but perhaps seeking conquest untarnished by bloodshed. Perhaps it was all they wanted. After all Anna had seen, her greatest terror wasn’t the promise of violence, but that she’d be spared from it. “Is there anything to gain from breaking the same line twice?”

  Jalwar seemed wary to speak. Something twisted sat in the approaching words, burning his tongue and forcing him to silence. “They had nothing to do with her line’s fall. Long before those men drew breath, the Emirahni were strong.”