Scribes

by James Wolanyk

  She found no answers.

  When all of the Alakeph in the advance group had reached the bottom, those remaining above picked up the foundlings and lowered them into the darkness. The hall sisters went with them, offering gentle shushes if the children cried out or whimpered.

  Anna took hold of Shem’s waiting hand, slick with sweat or perhaps the last traces of the hayat’s water, and squeezed.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked.

  “Nothing,” Anna lied with a weak smile. “Nothing at all, Shem.”

  When all the foundlings and hall sisters had been lowered into the basin, the pattering of furtive steps echoed from below. Anna examined the faces of the Alakeph, of Bora, of Shem, enduring the silence while they waited for the procession to forge ahead.

  “Shara,” Bora said at last. She tucked her blade into her waistband and swung herself down into the basin. There was no preamble, and none of the dread that festered in Anna’s stomach.

  When it was Anna’s turn to descend, assisted by the callused hands of the Alakeph and listening to her breaths reverberating in the stone chamber, she closed her eyes. She begged reality to reverse its course and grant her the freedom she deserved.

  But that was unreal, and she pushed it away. Reality was only the darkness below her, the trembling muscles in the forearms of the Alakeph, and Bora’s discolored cloak.

  It was screams of river-tongue in the gardens.

  Chapter 31

  The canal was darkness and rot and footsteps louder than hammers upon anvils. Above were the parallel tracks of the canal’s lip and the hooded canvas, and in their empty space, the metal grating that choked out everything but the harshest starlight in the eastern skies.

  Anna refused to cry out, even as the foundlings ahead screamed in flatspeak. Pain tore through her legs as the pulp’s effects lessened, and each step, uphill and against the slick paste of filth and mold underfoot, threatened to send her crashing to her knees. Everything around her was swift and formless in the shadows, and the boots clapped and crushed past her, the hands of the Alakeph occasionally working to support her and hasten her steps.

  Violence roared behind her. The Dogwood had lobbed their bombs down into the basin and torn apart the last Alakeph to descend, and two more had been killed trying to drag his body from the mire.

  Bora’s words flooded Anna’s ears as she ran:

  Faster.

  Hasten yourself, child.

  Shara, shara.

  Shem’s flesh was the guiding light at Anna’s side, refracting starlight and scattered braziers aboveground as he ran. Yet he pulled ahead as Anna faltered, her lungs burning and tendons seizing along the backs of her legs. She gripped the ruj tighter, resolute to keep herself armed and ready if she ever fell. Not that her odds of survival would change.

  Again she was in the woods at sunrise, and Julek’s weight pressed down upon her back.

  Hold on, little bear.

  She’d failed then, and she’d fail now.

  “Anna,” Shem managed, raising his voice above the striking of boot soles against wet stone. “I kill?”

  “Wait,” Anna said, the words burning her throat. “Soon.”

  Hayat spoke to her with its will, with its design for murder. She saw their numbers swelling behind them in the canal, overflowing like vermin before the waters reached them. Before air drained from their lungs and bones shattered in the darkness.

  Footsteps pounded from the recesses of the basin, and the screeches grew.

  Hatred flared up the canal. “Sukra!”

  Laughter met the screams of the foundlings.

  Ruji whistled from behind, followed by the shearing of raw flesh and sparks in the shadows. Bodies collapsed with hollow thuds as the Alakeph at Anna’s back absorbed the fire. A flatspeak command for churning winds raced down the tunnel, and in the same breath, the Alakeph and their joint footsteps slowed, fell away, drummed in the opposite direction.

  Anna spun and watched their white mass descending, accelerating, crashing into the mass of Dogwood men with the force a horseman’s charge. Bora seized Anna’s shoulder and pulled her along, forcing her legs to work through the agony. Her ears were full of the ringing from the blasts, the shrill clanging of metal on metal, the screeches of men’s final moments.

  “Don’t squander their breaths, child,” Bora said. She tugged harder on Anna’s arm. “There are only the steps beyond you.”

  Pain came in harsh waves, distorting Anna’s vision. Each step was a tremor up her legs and into her hips, amplifying with the jumble of luminous sigils hovering before her in the darkness, a reminder of every life she wouldn’t be able to save.

  Two more concussive blasts broke out. Sound vanished.

  “Now,” Anna said, seizing Shem’s wrist and repeating the word despite the silence of her own voice.

  Shem obeyed.

  The Huuri braced himself against the canal’s wall, both hands held downward. His eyes lit up the stone around him as his hands bled water, the droplets surging through his skin and trickling to join the stream beneath his boots. They congealed into unbroken rivulets, then into spouting that drained through his fingers, then into a rush that frothed with white and ran down the canal in a dark, snaking river.

  It wasn’t enough.

  “More, Shem,” Anna called. She saw the dark forms of the Dogwood crawling over the dead, their sigils streaking in wild arcs. Water splashed up and against her legs, but it was still too mild, too thin to slow their advance. “Shem!”

  The Huuri’s fingers widened with a snapping motion, and water roared forth. Geysers pulsed free and tore down the canal, riding up its walls and curling over on themselves in grayish peaks, bubbling and roiling and breaking in waves.

  Yet the Dogwood pushed through the torrent.

  “Don’t think, Shem!” Anna barked in his ear. “Kill them.”

  That was all he needed.

  His hands snapped upward, and at once the water was a wall rather than a push, exploding from his palms and overtaking the entirety of the darkness in a single swell. Through the shifting wall, some of the Dogwood seemed to endure. Yet as the torrent bellowed and crashed to the basin below, leaving behind a slick afterglow on the walls, it became clear that the canal’s track was purged of life. There was only a hollow dripping, and the bobbing of broken corpses in the pool far beneath them.

  There was only death.

  Shem slumped down against the wall. His hands fell away to a trickle once more. Nothing about his body seemed taxed, save his eyes. He gazed at the devastation with a quiet sense of pride, gripping his kneecaps with still-dribbling palms and squinting to discern the full scene before him. Light grew in his eyes as he watched, taking in the slow rise and swirl of the bodies, the gurgling water draining into overflow pipes, the—

  “Shem?” Anna laid a hand on his shoulder and set the ruj down. She shuddered as she glanced down at the crowded basin, its bobbing ceramic, its mass of crippled flesh. “Shem, we need to go.”

  “Did you see?” Shem asked. He grinned up at her.

  “I did.” Anna forced her own smile, then took hold of his wrist. “Come with me.”

  As Anna pulled up on Shem’s wrist and whirled to face the canal’s ascent, she brushed against Bora. The northerner stared down at her with dark eyes, shoulders low and resigned. Behind her the masses of foundlings, hall sisters, and Alakeph alike had fallen silent. They stood and stared at the black waters, at the bodies, at the marked boy sitting and marveling at his work.

  “Shem,” Anna whispered, pulling harder. “Let’s go.”

  Bora said nothing as Anna picked up the ruj and pulled Shem past her. For the first time in several cycles, she couldn’t envision an inkling of what the northerner might say. She wasn’t sure she wanted Bora’s counsel either.

  They trudged up the canal quietly
, threading through the press of foundlings, hall sisters, and remaining Alakeph like animals in a traveler’s menagerie. Anna fastened her eyes to the dark strip of runoff below and walked with a mindless gait. Her sensitive hearing restored, she detected every instrument being played in the streets above, every midnight call to prayer for the astral worshipers, every creak of every wagon wheel that passed through Malijad.

  We’re free, Anna told herself, if only to fight the nausea in her guts.

  We can go anywhere.

  Yet as they moved in a wordless procession, accompanied only by boots on tile and their raw breaths and coughing, Anna wasn’t sure if there was a place for her on the surface.

  For her, or for her creation.

  Chapter 32

  Before Julek had even been born, a rider in Radzym’s service had arrived in Bylka and demanded the arrest of a sow thief. His words to the angry crowd had never left Anna:

  There is no justice in the world’s womb. Justice is forged by men.

  Both the world and men had failed, Anna supposed. As she wandered up the canal with the first stains of pale orange light breaking across the sky, she tried to imagine what horrors she’d find. She’d been walking for hours, or so it seemed, and it was impossible to resist the flood of memories that she’d become so adept at blocking out. Thoughts of an old home, of dusty towns where the wicked resided, of childhood dreams involving living somewhere lush and peaceful. Physical sensations barely registered with her anymore, having congealed into a wash of pain and dying nerves. Several times her legs had failed entirely, and Shem lifted her beneath her shoulder and returned her to her feet.

  Light beamed down from a grated opening in the distance. It had come into view after turning a rare corner in the canal, but there was no celebration at the sight. Even the children held back most of their elation and conversed in tired mumbles; the hall sisters had abandoned quieting the children long ago. In fact, the din of the streets above, which was curiously absent of river-tongue or commands, drowned out any hope of steady conversation in the shadows.

  Nothing about their march was inspiring, let alone victorious.

  A hushed exchange of flatspeak echoed at Anna’s back, and soon Bora appeared at the girl’s side. Her eyes were glassy but present, betraying the exhaustion that was surely taking its toll. “You can leave the ruj, child.”

  Anna had almost forgotten she was carrying it. The weight was a constant presence in her hand, pulling her down as much as her pack and the burning in her legs. “I’ll hold onto it,” she said, her voice scratchy.

  “I don’t know what we’ll find when we emerge.”

  It seemed surreal to discuss the surface. It was just above them, but the horrors that had transpired near the basin kept Anna’s mind tethered to the depths. It wasn’t pity for the Dogwood, but fear of the unknown. Fear of worse things to come. “Do you think we killed them all?”

  Bora raised her head to the grate. “No. But they lack the gift of true seeing and prediction. They may believe you dead.”

  “Then I don’t know what we’ll do,” Anna said. She was stunned by the honesty in her words. “We can’t stay in the city.”

  “A kator’s rail sits above us,” Bora explained. “They ferry the water to this place, child.”

  A kator. After so many hours of terror and fleeing, hearing the word lifted her heart and mind. They could go anywhere. They could leave Malijad and never look back, and—

  And Anna didn’t know where to go.

  Even in the sands of Hazan they wouldn’t survive more than a week. Shem could provide water, but there was no promise of it being drinkable, or even infinite. There was nothing to hunt, nothing to farm, and nothing resembling safety until they reached the plains, which were just as foreign but hardly as sun-scorched. Better than anything else, however. Especially if they could find the Halshaf monasteries.

  “Bora,” Anna said, working past the dried saliva along her tongue, “how much do you know of the plains?”

  “War will come to them, in time.”

  Anna’s chest tightened. “So where will we go?”

  “Your mind will guide you.”

  “I don’t want my mind,” Anna hissed. She fought to conceal her bitterness from the foundlings, who could no doubt read her tone better than her tongue. “I want your guidance, Bora. We’re not cornered anymore. Don’t make me fight my way out.”

  “You assume I have a path to follow,” Bora spat back.

  “You always did.”

  “And now her breaths are gone. At one time, I told you that we were beholden to masters, child. But perhaps there is greater enslavement to be found in total release.”

  “I don’t understand,” Anna said.

  “Exactly.” Motes of daylight shimmered in Bora’s eyes. “You’ll be a slave to the end so long as you exist without a calling, child. Leave your marks while you still can.”

  Anna drew in a long breath. “Then we’ll go to the Halshaf. Wherever we can find them, I mean. They’re already expecting the foundlings.”

  “So we will.”

  “But not me,” Anna said. “Nobody was ever expecting me, were they?”

  Bora shot her an inquisitive glance.

  “The tome-men,” Anna explained.

  “What of them?”

  “They don’t exist, do they?”

  “No.”

  It was a question that had crept into Anna’s mind during meditation, but fear of the answer always drove her thoughts away. Hearing Bora confirm her nightmares did little to calm her.

  “I’ve taught you as much as I could.”

  “I don’t have any answers,” Anna whispered.

  “Nobody does, child. But you have the clearest concept of the void. In time, you might master the markings.”

  I won’t master anything without masters.

  They trudged closer to the grate in silence, though Anna’s unspoken words burned on her tongue. It was futile to ask further questions about hayat, but there was so much to ask, so much to discuss. “Bora,” she said grimly. “What do you mean about war?”

  Bora took the ruj without contest from Anna’s hands and moved to the ladder before staring up into the grate’s latticework. Wreathed in day’s nascent light, and in spite of the bloodstains and soot and mud, she was radiant. “It’s best not to think of such things, child.” Then she clambered up the ladder, as lithe as ever, and unlatched the bolt on the grate’s underside. “Shar’oz.”

  Shem lumbered back to Anna’s side after having walked with some of the hall sisters for the final leg of the journey. His rune staved off the need for sleep, but his stubborn insistence on appearing strong for Anna made him smile. “I help you up,” he said. He moved toward the ladder and up the first two rungs, then held out a vein-wrapped hand. “Come, come.”

  Bora had already ascended. She now loomed over the opening like a watchful raven, squatting down to make eye contact with Anna.

  The procession was eerily quiet at Anna’s back. She wanted to turn and command them to speak, to move past her, to look anywhere but upon her. I’m like you, she wanted to yell, but reality disputed the words. Instead she approached the ladder, straining to lift her leg onto the slick metal. She winced away from the blackened, fraying flesh along her shins. Reaching upward, she locked hands with Shem and let him draw her up easily. The pressure and pain fell away, and she climbed toward orange tendrils in the sky, toward Shem’s unbroken gaze.

  Bora and Shem pulled Anna through the opening when she reached the final rung. Her eyes were shut against the light and the throbbing in her legs, but she felt the warm winds rushing over her, brushing hairs past her face and dancing through the folds of her ruined dress. Through a bleary gaze she saw the black forms of setstone rising to the morning clouds and beyond. She saw passersby glancing at her and stalking past in clumps, too
absorbed in their own chatter to take note of a pale-skinned, broken girl.

  As she glanced sidelong, she realized she wasn’t lying on the packed street at all, but was cradled in Shem’s arms. His knees supported her back, and he tilted her upward to look at the streets that reached in all directions, at the low arches and swooping canvas of bazaar stalls near the markets, at the nearby kator at its docking platform. Soft sunlight played over its surface in orange bands, and Anna couldn’t imagine anything more enchanting.

  “Help her to her feet,” Bora said, pacing in tight circles around the grate’s opening. “Shara, Shem.”

  Anna’s eyes drifted shut as she listened to the drumming of tiny hands and feet ascending the ladder rungs.

  Every time she plunged toward sleep, shocks ripped through her spine. Her eyes remained still and sealed, dimly aware of Shem’s prodding to keep her up. She pressed herself against him and trusted him to guide her up, leaning upon his shoulders and arms, confusing his movements and strength with the way her mother had carried her to bed on long summer nights.

  “Child.” Bora’s voice cut through memories of auburn hair and sap-smelling hearth fires, forcing Anna’s eyes open. The northerner stood midway down the street amid a stream of passing merchants and laborers, beckoning her and Shem toward the kator.

  “That’s strange, Shem,” Anna whispered, wiping at her eyes to clear the blurriness.

  A pace away, his hands still wrapped around her shoulders, Shem cocked his head to the side. “How you are feeling?”

  Ignoring the Huuri’s question, Anna continued to stare at the kator beyond Bora. She tried to parse its sedentary quality, how it dominated the entire street without any trace of watermen or Dogwood or the scavengers that pilfered shipments. “It shouldn’t be here, should it? It’s empty.”