Hayat smoldered in its new vessel.
While the world was still silent and Shem’s eyes wrenched open in terror, Anna leaned forward, took hold of the boy’s shoulders, and brushed her lips past his ear.
“Kill them,” she whispered.
It may have been devotion, or panic, or the decisive thinking of the Huuri mind. It may have been the whispers of hayat, just as irresistible to the boy as to Anna or any other scribe who knew its tongue.
Whatever compelled Shem to follow her order was potent enough.
Shem gazed past Anna and adopted the long stare of a broken man, but Anna saw the hayat boiling from his eyes, radiating so quickly that it thickened the air with hues of cobalt and azure. He was staring at the Dogwood with equanimity, as though they were nothing more than passing clouds or gentle swirls on a pond’s surface.
Anna turned to see the first man writhing. His ruj fell to the dirt as he clawed at himself, desperately peeling at the gaps in his armor, contorting his limbs and neck. Blood seeped between the armor in slow trickles before it began to gush. Then came spatters of pink mist and micronized gristle.
The Dogwood man sank onto bowed legs, and collapsed.
Those flanking the warrior, bearing armor with dappled crimson sand, had barely enough time to step back before they were stricken in turn. It was a slow wave across the streets, ruji twisting and clattering and rolling, armor crunching and reddening and clashing, a thousand screams distantly flowing to Anna’s ears like a field of crickets.
You earned it.
Anna marveled in their agony, their painful ends that bloodied the streets and their comrades and the air alike. In every direction the Dogwood let out their murderous screeches and thrashed until they were lifeless, piling atop one another, crawling over the packed earth and whimpering, praying to gods who could not save them.
You all earned this.
Again came the stillness. It crawled from the last clinking of armor plates and the final gurgles of fluid-choked throats. Shem wavered in place for a moment, his face speckled with innocent wonder, before leaning against Anna and slinking down against her hip.
She stood in the center of the devastation, ignoring the bodies and their red presses that formed a halo within the firing ring. She looked down at Shem and into the translucent shine of his skull, her hand resting on the back of his neck.
“It’s okay now,” she whispered. “It’s all over.”
But Shem did not speak. His breaths were slow and shallow.
“Shem,” she whispered. Anna squeezed the boy to rouse him, but then a dark shape appeared at the edge of her vision. She glanced up at the tracker, whose burlap mask and tunic were bathed in blood but still intact. Deep beneath the stained fabric she saw the rune’s persistent glow.
“By the fucking Grove,” the tracker said. “How wrong I was about you.”
“Get back.”
The tracker laughed, the sound dampened by the wetness of his mask. He raised his arms in mock surrender. Footsteps drummed from out of sight, and soon the Alakeph rushed past Anna in an off-white tide, their blades and ruji poised for combat. Their half-circle forced the tracker away, though he took his steps with great deliberation.
“Simple cuts,” the tracker sniffed. “Do you remember when I called them that?”
Anna held Shem closer, squeezing at his neck to wake him. She felt for his heartbeat, wondering if even a rune could be broken.
“Remember Rzolka, Anna.”
“Leave,” Anna said.
The tracker’s voice grew deeper. “We could change everything. You and I, partners.”
“Leave now.” Her arms tensed as she held Shem, waiting.
“Or what, Anna?” the tracker asked. “You’ll have me strung up by these korpy, tortured until I can’t tell black from white? Think about it. You wouldn’t do it to your kind. I know you far too well.”
Her hands gripped Shem’s neck. “You know nothing about me.”
“Know enough,” the tracker said. “Know that you wouldn’t put a blade to my throat.”
Something faint stirred beneath Anna’s touch. Her own heart surged when she felt Shem’s pulse, no matter that it was weak and fleeting. “No, I wouldn’t.” She raised a hand for one of the Alakeph, drawing his attention out of the corner of his eye. “Take him, please.” She kept Shem upright until the Alakeph moved to her side and lifted the boy over one shoulder. “Put him someplace safe.”
“It’s almost touching.” The tracker’s eyes trailed the Alakeph warrior as he hurried to the kator. “Sweet enough to scar the tongue.”
Anna straightened up. “We’re leaving.”
“We?”
“Go back to him,” Anna said. “Tell him not to pursue us. Tell him to disappear. Tell him to break up his warriors.”
“You know he won’t,” the tracker replied. “Not after what you did here.” He clicked his tongue, gazing at the array of corpses. “He’ll want your flesh as a hanging. Believe me, Anna, he has the blades to do it.”
Anna held his gaze. “Tell him what I told you here.”
“Best tell it to your own blades too,” the tracker said, nodding at each of the Alakeph in the crescent formation. “Gifts like you have, Anna. . . . It’s only a matter of time. You’re wild, untamable.” He laughed. “Wild things are born to be bled. And when it happens, some sukra will line their pouch with salt for it. Maybe even the Huuri.”
The words meant nothing to Anna; they crossed over Bora’s once-body, which now whispered its truth in Anna’s ear:
In time, it will outrun the fastest among us.
“Tell him.” Anna turned away, gazing at the kator and the silhouettes of its foundlings along the outer rails. She glanced back over her shoulder. “If you follow us, just remember what you saw here. I’ll do this to everything you ever loved. Anybody you ever trusted.”
Something in the tracker’s broken stance told her that it was an empty threat.
Somehow, at some time, such horrors had come to fruition.
Anna started toward the kator. “Tell him,” she repeated as the Alakeph’s footsteps drummed in tow. Her voice was fractured, worn down by days without rest and the scars upon her cords, but it didn’t matter.
No matter how loudly she spoke, wicked men would never hear her.
Chapter 33
The jinn returned that night. They were streaks of color and life upon the black crests of dunes and rocky steppes, and at times they drifted so close to the kator’s rails that Anna wanted to reach out and touch them. Even with their motes of neon and pastel and hazy tints, she resisted the urge. She admired them at a distance, concentrating on the glowing pools they shed beneath their forms to brighten the sand and grit and cracked earth, unwilling to break their illusions.
It was exactly what Bora would’ve wanted, but there was no clever loophole of the mind to distract her from the last glimpse of Bora’s eyes. To lure her thoughts from the way she’d told the Alakeph to leave Bora’s remains behind, since it was merely a body and would be a nuisance to burn. It was what the northerner would’ve wanted, surely.
Maybe someday Anna could leave bodies behind without remorse. She could master more than hayat in herself.
She’d retreated to an empty capsule not long after they departed, delaying sleep only long enough to check on Shem and ensure that he was breathing. She’d rested for countless hours, occasionally waking to her own screams within the lightless chamber. She didn’t eat, didn’t drink, didn’t peer outside. Instead she cycled between sleep and wakefulness in her black, thinly blanketed space, unaware of time as she meditated upon her breathing to sidestep memories of canals and theaters.
At times the pain had also woken her, and she’d been forced to douse her shins with the nearby liquor and sap mixture. Between some bouts of consciousness she fell into fever dreams o
f crawling around the chamber on stumped limbs. Most comforting were her dreams of Shem, of lying beside him and hearing his stories and drinking his bowl of broth on stairwells.
When the chamber had grown cold she’d opened the doors and met the waiting stares of two Alakeph warriors, who were quick to clean out her resting space and bring even more untouched rations and drinks.
Anna had merely sat down and clung to the railing, watching.
Her eyes were still latched onto a sprinting jinn when a familiar voice, both calming and Orsas-tinged, cracked her focus. “Anna?”
She turned to find Shem and an Alakeph escort just five paces away. Moonlight and starlight sank deep into the boy’s skin, making his bones lustrous and his veins crystalline. He was more beautiful than anything she’d ever seen.
“Shem.” She struggled to whisper, to pull herself up on the railing. Soon she felt the Huuri’s hands on her arm and back, and she was upright, glancing down at the rainbow spectrum along his wrists. “Thank you.”
Creases of skin around his eyes gave him a hollow, battle-fatigued stare. After the day he’d endured, it was an expected trait in any other man. But his rune should’ve given him a surplus of energy. “You sleep?”
Anna nodded and looked over the boy’s body, searching for wounds that couldn’t possibly exist. Not on the surface, anyway. “Did you?”
“Some.” He struggled to focus on Anna, his attention falling away and grazing the sands. “They wait a long time to let me go. I always ask to see you.” An ember of his normal self flickered in his stare, and he smiled at Anna. “You are living.”
“Of course,” Anna said. The low whispers of Hazani winds passed over the kator and crackled in her ears. She imagined that the Alakeph pacing the walkways heard the same sounds, but could somehow glean secrets and tales from their gusts. Old lands couldn’t keep their sins buried forever. “I was worried for you, Shem.”
He blinked at her. “For me?”
“I did things to you,” Anna said, wondering if her words seeped into the breeze and found their way to the corners of Hazan. “What I did to you could have killed you.”
“I’m protected,” Shem said, touching his neck. “You see?”
“It’s not about that.”
“Don’t fear.” He grinned, but the fatigue was thick and draining in his stare. “You save us, Anna. Such blessings could not be given to me. Perhaps this is all dreaming.”
Beneath his fatigue there was a thread of fanaticism that Anna could never truly unravel. After all they’d been through, his appreciation should’ve meant so much more than it did. She’d seen fever dreams of Shem glaring at her, crying out for the way she’d experimented on him, but neither of those came to fruition. She didn’t know whether she expected his mistrust, or desired it.
“You must know you bring goodness,” Shem said, drawing Anna out of her thoughts. “I protect always.”
“I know,” Anna whispered. “You did the right thing, Shem.”
“Right?”
“To the soldiers.” She gazed out at the jinn as they raced one another and plunged through dunes. “You had to kill them, I think.”
“You ask, so I do.”
Anna met Shem’s eyes, but there was nothing to dissect. Obedience smothered what had once been innocence. “Do you feel anything for them?”
“I kill them,” he said proudly.
“But did you feel anything?”
“Confusion,” he said with a distorted brow. “I was confused because they want to hurt you. But I protect.” His smile widened until it filled with curving bands of starlight. “I always protect.”
She sat with Shem by the railing for some time, studying the silvery wash of moonlight as it crested the basins and carved notches out of rock stacks. Her mind juggled visions of burning cities, Galipa’s weathered face, the nameless wicked men of her homeland, soldiers strung up at the gallows, fields wreathed with the black cotton over Malijad—
Her only conscious thoughts concerned the innocents aboard the kator, and what she had to do to ensure their survival.
Including her own.
Some hours later the clouds grew thick overhead, and the night became a chilling black expanse. It was silent for a time, devoid of whipping winds and Shem’s tales, until a set of clanging footsteps approached from further down the walkway.
Anna jerked her head up to a blur of white fabric. Deep in her mind, somewhere juvenile and desperate, she expected Bora.
“Forgive my presence,” the figure said, standing between a pair of his brethren and offering a shallow bow. It was the commander Anna had seen in the foundling hall, his voice sounding no worse for wear. “Some of the foundlings grow restless, as do our sisters.”
Anna looked him over sadly. “I’m not sure what I can do.”
Shem tugged at her sleeve. “See them!”
“The High-Mother does not breathe,” the man said after a time. “There is a lack of guidance.”
“I’m not sure I could help,” Anna said. Being a leader had never been comfortable to her, much less in her current state. “I don’t speak their tongue.”
“We will transform your words to the most accurate flatspeak,” the man said. “Nothing shall be lost.”
She was certain that language was far from the largest barrier between herself and the foundlings. What could she say to those who had lost everything? She’d lived for seemingly endless cycles with the very same question for herself, and even then she’d never found true answers. Only platitudes and tricks to gaze ahead.
Maybe that was all they needed.
“I could try,” Anna said.
“If you wish,” the man said, “you need not use words. It is certain that your presence will be sufficient.”
It chilled Anna. Nevertheless she stood with Shem’s aid and made her way down the walkway, one hand gripping the cool metal of the railing and the other tucked around the small of Shem’s back. She focused through her pain by staring at the Alakeph commander’s bright blur in the night, burrowing into its faded whiteness and pushing on.
“Here,” the man said at last, pausing at a capsule with no markings or special distinctions beyond a pair of Alakeph guardsmen. Its reflective sides receded into the dark, offering a limited suggestion of its true extent. “Low suns be upon you, Kuzashur.”
She was sure her birthday had come and gone, but couldn’t recall when.
Metal crunched along its rails as the Alakeph guardsmen hauled the door open, painting a square of the walkway in soft yellow light. Swells of warmth, wafting free with lavender and rosewater, bled into the night as Anna wandered closer. Scattered cries and hushes overtook the whistle of the winds.
She stepped into the capsule on her own, having released Shem and concentrating her efforts on dousing the pain. There was no strength to be found in a girl who walked on the legs of another.
They were huddled in circles around small oil lamps and candles, their faces scarred and rosy-cheeked and etched with lines far deeper than their youth deserved. Blankets bundled them together, and the hall sisters wrapped their wide arms around the outside of the clusters, whispering assurances in flatspeak. The more she stared at them, meeting the eyes of boys and girls—some a bright Hazani gold, others pale blue or green—the more she realized that their ages were of no import. They were all bound by suffering. They all breathed.
And as the attention of the chamber rolled toward her, an unstoppable force that demanded silence with each set of new and reverent eyes, Anna realized that the commander was correct: She wouldn’t need any words.
And yet she opened her mouth to speak, to offer whatever comfort could be derived from one sufferer to another.
At the back of the chamber, almost dwarfed by her lone candle and the shawl draped over her head and shoulders, was a Hazani girl.
U
nlike those around her, her skin was dark and featureless.
She had no sigils.
No essence.
And as Anna’s eyes lingered upon her, the gesture returned with a burnished stare, they looked upon one another as kin.
Schisms
If you enjoyed Scribes, be sure not to miss the second book in James Wolanyk’s Scribe Cycle.
Keep reading for an early look!
A Rebel Base e-book on sale July 2018.
Chapter 1
When Anna donned the wool shawl of a goat herder, she’d thought nothing of murder. There had been only wind skittering over the lip of the rock overhang, the dry shuffling of boots and cloth wraps, the creaking of trigger mechanisms being locked in place. Four hours of collective meditation had settled her mind and made violence foreign to the core of her being. Of their being, she supposed. They’d stared at one another, through each other, so inwardly naked and still that anything beyond compassion was unthinkable.
But violence was a language imposed from birth to death.
“Where’s the fifth pebble?” Anna asked the Hazani girl as they knelt in shadow.
Ramyi gave a petulant sigh. “Five paces behind me, on the third ledge.”
“Second.”
By the time the girl had memorized their shelter the skies were endless mica and tufts of violet. Anna led the herders-who-were-not-herders and their goats down hills threaded by narrow switchbacks. They were a ragged procession of silhouettes and bleats and tin bells, bronze skin and threadbare coverings, a stream mingling with the wagons and traders flooding the valley’s night markets. It was jarring to see how many travelers had resorted to using century-old footpaths to reach a city’s outlying districts. But with the region’s kator networks torn up or taxed to the point of bankruptcy, a return to the old ways was inevitable.
Some of the foundlings jogged after her and called out and rattled handfuls of beads. Years ago the children of Leejadal had been charming, practiced sellers, but eagerness had soured to hurried barks at her back. “Five stalks, five stalks only. Just for you, morza.” Old men with milk-white eyes and mouthfuls of khat swiveled their heads as she passed.
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