Читать книгу Scions - James Wolanyk - Страница 10

Chapter 2

In the womb of the Halshaf monastery, reborn under every mica-strewn nebula and passage of the shattered moon, Anna had grown to perceive herself as the world rather than its wanderer. In fact, she’d found kinship in the world. She’d fixed it in her mind as some macrocosm of what she was, some seed that had germinated before time itself. No matter how often its shoots and saplings were cut down by the swings of a woodman’s ax, it had held fast to its roots within the soil, waiting for the mercy of spring to venture forth once more. But even that had been a concept that she’d wishfully forced upon the world.

It was a child’s fantasy, a projection of forlorn hopes.

Soaring high above the patchwork fields and forests of central Rzolka, Anna saw—seemingly for the first time—the truth of her enduring seed. It had been torn from the earth, scorched and cracked, scattered to the winds like the ashes of cities she’d once known. Between masses of wispy ashen clouds, the lowlands stretched out in blackened meadows, in freckled expanses of cut and cleared logging sites, in great tracts of empty huts and halls that jutted from the mires as rotting bones. Most of the sacred groves had been abandoned to overgrowth, or worse, trampled and desecrated by the heretics that had flooded the region in Volna’s absence.

Roads that had once been knotted with caravans now appeared as desolate, withering veins, slashed here and there by rusting kator tracks. Furnaces bled their black fumes on the horizon.

Perhaps it had always been this way, Anna considered. Perhaps the higher she ascended, the further back she drew from her insect ignorance, the more the truth of the world revealed itself. But mutation was a constant truth, for better or worse. There were no marking stones for the grave of the Rzolka she’d known—only the soot-stained, oily shrine of what it had become.

“What’s that glint in your eyes, girl?” the tracker asked. Seated directly across from Anna on a quilted bench, his hands iron-bound and tucked snugly into his lap, it was nearly impossible to avoid his chilling stare. “Not what it was, is it?”

“Your comrades did their work tirelessly,” she replied, sparing a momentary glance at his reflection in the window before gazing outward once more.

“My kind? Wasn’t a grain of cartel salt in Rzolka before the war.”

“Of course,” she said. “Mass killings were the lesser evil, I’m sure.”

“You laugh, but time’ll tell. Mark my word on that. Not even the Moskos managed to sell our flesh at a whore’s rate, Anna. Doesn’t take a diviner to see the way of it, figure out why the gods want nothing to do with us. Ever learn the word forsaken, girl?”

Anna met the tracker’s rigid gaze. “I’m no girl.”

“The Southern Death’s more fitting, eh?”

She looked away.

“Titles, titles,” the tracker cackled. “Such a sickness in the world for titles. The runts in Malchym would slit their mothers’ throats for a fitting one.”

“You share the disease of pride,” Anna said.

The tracker clicked through his teeth and jingled his iron links, needling Anna’s mind with barbs of panic, of latent violence. Narrowed eyes seemed to drink in her fear. “Keep looking for river flowers, girl. This entire world is sickness.”

At midday, the nerash wheeled over the outskirts of Kowak with a sickening lurch. It sliced through stormy billows, offering vignettes of a black, turbulent sea and a sprawling city that gathered like froth at its shores. Twenty of the order’s scribes had deployed there over the past year, but their runes—those that sprouted trees, cleansed wells, reamed in brush fires—hadn’t changed the face of the land much at all.

Anna held onto rattling straps near her head as they dove into the downpour. Her stomach knotted like it had in the capsules of the kales, but the sensation soon receded in a backdrop of bewilderment, of screeching wing flaps and crackling eardrums and oscillating iron panels. She wrinkled her nose at the sudden burst of sparksalt fumes; they seemed to bleed from dying turbines, wafting into the cabin and stinging her throat in seconds.

Beneath her the forests swelled, rising up in a stark, threatening mass through screens of mist and smoke. A vast mesa—formed from compacted soil and timber, it seemed—drifted into view in the adjacent clearing. It grew nearer and nearer, fringed by towering pine masts that sharpened to gust-raked canopies, then to quilts of silvery needles, then to ravens perched on gnarled branches and—

The nerash’s skids struck the mesa with a teeth-jolting thump.

Anna’s head jerked forward, bobbing with every hop and crunch over the ragged landing platform. She shut her eyes as the nerashif cranked back on his lever, digging the skid’s talons into the damp earth and its evergreen skeleton.

They twisted and skittered over the soil, filling the cabin with horrible crunching each time the talons caught a buried log and tore across its bark. Finally there was a clap, a groan from deep within the beast, a hiss as the nerash’s cylinders stretched and dampened their halt. The craft rocked back on its haunches, calming the blackness behind Anna’s lids, and grew still.

Its turbines slowed with a pup’s whine.

“Not dead yet,” the tracker said, equally surprised and amused. “Could hardly tell it was an easterner at the helm.”

Anna opened her eyes and worked to undo her harness.

“Never been to Kowak, have you?”

She shook her head. “Let’s go.”

“Swore I’d only visit this pit again when we’d drowned it in ashes,” he said. “Then again, you’d know more about that than I would.”

“Be silent and hear me well,” Anna snapped, snuffing out the tracker’s rising giggle. “If you truly desire an escape from your marking, then you’ll come to heel. From this moment onward, you’ll resist your animal instincts. Not a foul word, not an errant gesture. I have no qualms with casting you back into this world. You are nothing.”

She undid the final buckle in their newfound quiet.

* * * *

Between chest-stirring cracks of thunder, silence found its deepest notch. That murderous silence, so thick that it leeched the breaths from one’s lungs, hung palpably over the inner districts of Kowak. As palpably as the odors of kerosene and rotting bodies, which now lay in heaps at the bottoms of flooded mass graves. It had been impossible to ignore them; they flanked the last stretch of the kator’s tracks like pale, bloated flowerbeds.

“There was a riot last night,” a ruddy-cheeked militia boy had explained while leading Anna through the moot hall’s smoky corridors. “We told them to go home. But that sow’s been milked now, hasn’t it?”

Anna could not bring herself to look at the tracker’s cloaked face. To behold his glee, to know whatever vindicated thoughts he might exclaim with wild eyes.

Waiting in the Chamber of Antlers, she found herself surveying the clusters of empty brown bottles strewn across the table. Their stench, biting and tinged with the same rot that had clung to the drifters who staggered through Bylka, assailed her with every swell of the hearth’s dry heat. Amber liquid had pooled into thick, glossy splotches upon the sacred wood of the eastern groves. Decrees and writs and missives were plastered together in stained piles. And high up on timber walls, illumined by grimy lamps that had gathered mounds of shriveled gray gnats, were the dust-covered and club-cracked skulls of the city’s earliest pinemen and seers.

This was the seat of Rzolka’s eastern power. This was where infallible men had decided the lives and deaths of those with soil beneath their nails.

Anna studied the bitterness creeping through her chest.

The doors creaked open to reveal a mass of grim-faced, heavyset men shambling toward them. They offered little more than nods or grumbles of clan-speak to the flesh-branded young women stationed in the threshold. Jenis was among them, muttering to his captains in a sour, guarded tone, but it was difficult to distinguish the remaining southerners. They all wore the strange pastiche of traditional vestments and northern luxuries that had flooded the region in the past year or so: quilted doublets, the bristly skins of bears and wolves, dozens of layered amulets and trinkets that gleamed with emeralds, amber, Hazani rose gold. Some even had their faces stitched and studded with the turquoise droplets from Nahora’s coast, which had been one of Kowak’s most demanded tributes for bringing aid to their shores.

Upon noticing the tracker, however, their jangling and murmuring fell away. Konrad’s old habit of omission was hard to break, it seemed.

“Well,” the tracker said, lifting his muddied feet onto the table, “I’m glad you lot haven’t been too busy to tuck into your suppers.” His laugh was barely stifled. Then his eyes fell upon Jenis and there was an absence of mirth, of base composure. He gazed at the commander with the hatred of a wronged man.

“What is this?” a gray-bearded man spat. “Brought the korpa here to string him up, have we?”

A bald, scowling captain stepped forward. “Honor would be all mine.”

“Not yet,” Anna said. “Sit. There are matters to discuss.”

“Konrad said we had a new trail,” Jenis said, shouldering his way to the head of the gathering. His scars were dark and mottled in the lamplight, flashing bright pink as a serving girl moved past them with a dribbling candle and a bushel of bread.

The tracker smoothed out his shirt. “In the flesh.”

“Best tell me you’re toying with us,” Jenis growled at Anna. “This city’s already stomped on enough slugs. One more’s nothing to us.”

“I’ll explain,” Anna said.

“Explain what?” Jenis asked. “Break his marking. We’ll cut him slow and proper.”

Anna rose from her chair and swept her gaze across the Rzolkan ranks, making no attempt to uncoil the knot in her brow. “Sit down.”

The men shared glances and curled lips, shifting anxiously until they found the courage to wander to their armchairs. Several of them, including Jenis, instinctively lifted corked bottles from beneath the table and passed them around the crescent. There was a long stretch of squeaking, fizzling, chugging, all underscored by the hum of sleeping violence with which Anna had grown intimately familiar.

She could almost feel their liquor burning through ulcerous guts, dulling their minds further with every sip and gulp…. “I don’t care what’s gone on between you,” she said, her stare cutting a wide arc around the table. “This day will be immune from your squabbling.” Nobody heeded her words as promptly as the tracker, who was quick to straighten his spine and disarm his glare.

“Be quick of it,” Jenis said as he wiped his chin with a velvet sleeve. “What’s he got to do with the hunt? He ought to be in fetters, far as this city’s concerned. Maybe on a stake.”

“Konrad was supposed to address you fully on the issue,” Anna said. “Yet I now understand his reservations. If finding their remnants is truly your focus, then you’ll need to trust me when I ask for your cooperation. You’ll need to bury whatever judgments you hold in your hearts.”

“Judgments,” Jenis laughed. “Look upon him as a babe, shall we?”

The others offered a round of curt, vacuous laughter. It was difficult to laugh—earnestly or otherwise—in the face of men who had taken so much.

“It’s our only path forward,” she explained.

“That’s what splits us, Kuzalem. You tossed your Breaking around to scrape out what’s between haunted ears. But sometimes, a man needs his wrath. Any widow here would burn an offering to that.”

“What end would come of it?” she asked, examining the rusty age spots and creases on the old fighter’s face. His weariness was a constant pall rather than a mask, bubbling up like a spring that merely hinted at some abomination beneath it all. But she understood his breed, his predicament: An old hound, starved of masters or vigor, knew only of gnawing flesh and barking at shadows. “His death is, and will be, a simple matter. He’s accepted that. But he’s also the antidote to their pestilence. How many times can you apply the same balm to pox-eaten flesh, Jenis?”

“Slishaya,” Jenis snapped. “We’ve made good on giving you silence, girl. Not a doubt that they tore up your soul in the east. But now you drag your mountain mud in our hall, speak to us like our stones are high up in our bellies—not a fucking chance.”

“Bold words from the Bala,” the tracker said.

A rash of curses exploded from Kowak’s council, flowing between river-tongue and the grymjek alike until Anna slapped the table with a rigid palm. “Enough. What would you have me do, Jenis?”

The old captain stroked his beard. “Balm. You call our blades and ropes a balm? Your soft-skin girls in the monasteries would let us burn every notch of the flatlands. That’s where they’re prowling, you know. Everyone knows it.”

“Blood begets blood,” Anna whispered. “I’ve seen how you track them down.” The term Kowak confession had made its rounds in most cities, according to the Alakeph captains still operating across the Hazani chapters. It was no secret that the southerners craved names and names only.

No matter who owned them.

“You’d trust this beast?” asked another man with scar-threaded lips. One of his eyes stared off into the darkness of the neighboring chamber. “Harden your skin, Kuzalem. This is Volna’s death.”

“I’ve seen how these movements die,” Anna said, glaring at Jenis. “They can be hanged and bled and beaten, but they’re never truly extinguished. Our victories are what puts divine fire in their hearts.”

“Seems she knows a fair bit about us beasts,” the tracker said.

She stared into those bloodshot eyes, her lips pursed so tightly that they began to quake. “I do.”

Studded soles came clapping down the corridor at Anna’s back, muffled by the ancient wood of the chamber’s doors. Stillness descended over the gathering.

Anna turned just as the branded women slid the oak bar from its brackets and drew back on iron handles. The doors parted with a deep, aching groan, allowing Konrad to rush into the assembly and its pooling silence with white robes billowing behind him.

“Apologies for my delay,” he said, settling into an empty chair at Anna’s side.

“Ought to be the least of your regrets,” one of Jenis’s captains said darkly.

“It was only sensible, wasn’t it?” Konrad asked. “How many of the cartel’s blades keep an ear to the privy chambers on the Broken Knoll?”

“We’re not children,” another man snarled. “Hazan’s not some beast in the fen.”

“You’re right,” Konrad replied. “They’re in every tavern and foundry from here to the plains.”

“Lying’s a way of life for you,” Jenis said, unsealing his second bottle with a faint pop.

“He told you what was necessary to bring you here,” Anna said. “Now, the choice of whether to listen or bury our words is yours alone. But I caution you against turning us away, Jenis.”

“That so?”

“I’ve come here to safeguard your claim, not usurp it.” She watched the old man’s eyes flitting around the assembly, weighing his prestige in the eyes of fresh captains, his trust in comrades from dead wars, and his hatred of everything Volna had been, now distilled like some vast reservoir of tar and ash in the tracker’s stare. Volna’s fall had done more than left the world in need of wardens and governors; it had awoken the ambitions of cruel, long-spurned men with coffers too barren for their liking. “Will you hear me, Jenis?”

Jenis braced his hands on creaking knees and cast his gaze away sharply, almost as though bristling at a bitter swill of his drink. “What’ve you come for?”

“Eyes and ears,” she explained. “He’ll give us the shards that have been missing from your operations. All the missed movements, the names, the intermediaries. It’s systemic, Jenis, and it needs to be severed at the root.”

“Seven hundred marsh-born men went to the plains,” Jenis said. “Not one returned. Boys too young to know the feel of a tit are carrying their fathers’ blades.” In one tremendous swig, he drained the last of his bottle and set it down gently at the edge of the table. “We’ve nothing to spare your errand.”

Anna sighed. “We’re not asking for men. The Alakeph can bear that burden well enough. What we need are your breakers, your reports, your—”

“Your,” Jenis said, scowling at Anna and Konrad. “Got a knack for that word, girl. Wasn’t so long ago that we gave you everything we had.”

“And now we’ll finish it.”

“Quit spying at stars.”

“If it’s not your problem now, it will be.”

“Our problem’s with the scalp-trimmers in the bogs,” he said, spittle bursting from his mouth as he raced on. “No, no, it’s with the mad korpy in the market, raving about spirals and lines and angles, world-eaters and all the rest. Maybe with those province-breakers, burning their own fields.”

Anna’s jaw was aching once more. “You’re not—”

“Head in the reeds, like all the others,” Jenis rasped. “Know how my breakers spent their dawn, Kuzalem? Tracking up and down the Nekresa’s banks, dragging farmers out of those shit-stained hovels, asking who saw what? and when was that? to know about those scribes of yours. Two young ones—must’ve been eleven or so, says my men—skinned, cut up, left in sacks by the road.” He met Anna’s eyes directly and at once his gaze was piercing, stripped of its languid veil and haziness, so startling that it forced her to glance away. “That’s a wild dawn. Something’s burning, all right, but not in Hazan. It’s in your fucking nursery.”

Anna strained to repress the sudden rush of bile in her throat.

A dozen in a cycle, and that tally was still mounting. She should’ve expected it from those who’d known the war’s cost firsthand, especially in the rural provinces, where fear prevailed over wisdom in matters of resolve. That which they could not explain had to be destroyed, lest it destroy them, too.

How often had saviors been mistaken for serpents?

“Done here?” the tracker asked, stretching forth with a dull crack down his spine. “Heard wiser words minced between field oxen.”

Anna nodded at Konrad, then gathered up her robes and stood. She studied Jenis’s face with dispassion, with doleful rebuke. “Not so long ago, Nahora also paid no mind to the stirrings beneath its shadow.” She then regarded the assembly with a placid stare. “I suppose we all find the Grove eventually.”

* * * *

At sundown Andriv and his Alakeph company reached the nerashi mesas. They arrived in a pure white beam, a narrow lance that shone like sunlight through the dense fog, distended by swollen combat packs and iron harnesses beneath their cloaks. Their silence, which still must’ve registered as spectral to those beyond the order, managed to sever whatever disputes had been erupting between the third platform’s merchants and Huuri attendants.

“Just how I remember ’em,” the tracker whispered to Anna. “In sore need of a fuck.”

Crude as it was, those words reflected a grain of what Anna now saw in the brothers. They had grown ruthlessly efficient under the order’s new leadership, growing ever closer to a stark, rigorous incarnation only known through the cardinal Kojadi scriptures. But that theoretical return to form mirrored their strength: Not a single monastery or foundling hall had been raided in the past year, which was not to say that zealots hadn’t devoted serious time and manpower to such attempts.

Upon each brother’s back was a sleek, leather-wrapped ruj, likely bearing the stamped emblem of a cartel based in Nur Kuref or Leejadal. They were vicious instruments, as precise and honed for killing as any other works that had stemmed from the north’s postwar patents. No longer were their models burdened by cranked cogs or chaotic sprays of iron. Now they were slotted with tin boxes, their cartridges filled with fléchettes and copper bolts and whatever else the tinkerers could devise, primed to open a man’s skull at a hundred paces—or more.

Even their polished ceramic vests had become a vestige of the old ways, no more effective than the straw cuirasses Anna had seen on Gosuri huntsmen. The only protection was a keen eye, a lack of hesitation.

Anna studied Konrad as he made his way over the battered, windswept surface of the mesa, bowing deeply to Andriv near a row of slumbering nerashi. It was impossible to determine how earnest his words and gestures were. She considered that Jenis might’ve cut to the core of the brother’s character, perceiving something within Konrad that she’d overlooked since his Breaking:

His truths were malleable.

His truths were weapons.

“You didn’t mention the girl,” the tracker said. “Slipped your mind, did it?”

Anna glanced sidelong, watching the tracker’s breaths leak through the satin shroud and bleed off as ashen wisps. “I didn’t have time to get around to it.”

“Strange.” He grunted and folded his arms. “Running those pretty lips never used to be a problem.”

“He didn’t want to hear anything that extends beyond Kowak.”

“Huh,” the tracker said. “That’s the way of it, then?”

“That’s the way.”

“I’d reckon the old crow would want to know about your sukra.” He shrugged. “Then again, you really don’t know anything about him, do you? You don’t know what his hands have done.”

“Nobody needs to know everything.” Anna turned her head slowly. “And you’ll hold that wicked tongue, or I’ll cut it out.”

The tracker’s satin shifted, hinting at a broad, blackened smile beneath the veil. “Wouldn’t be the first time.”