Читать книгу Scions - James Wolanyk - Страница 11

Chapter 3

Nightfall descended as their nerash broke away from the mainland and thrust out over the Eastern Sea. The remainder of their flock—four weathered Hazani models, bloated to haul immense quantities of freight or fighters—soared alongside them, marked by crimson everburn flares that gave the illusion of abominations worming through black depths.

Anna wasn’t certain that the crafts could ever grant her something akin to comfort, nor could she understand the appeal of being sealed in the stomach of a howling bird, but their role was vital. And as far as nerashi went, this design was better than most. Ration trunks, padded inner walls, a heating strip along the floor panel—it was far from welcoming, but it was bearable. She could learn to appreciate bearable.

No longer enthralled by the drifting red baubles, Anna slid away from the window and shifted to the edge of her cot. She was dimly aware of the river-tongue flowing between the bunk aisles, so chaste and formal that it had to be among the Alakeph, but the tongue no longer felt like her own. It was the price of constant exile, constant burning bridges, constant rebirths in the womb of meditation.

She suspected that when it was all over, she would not know her own place.

“Kuzalem?”

Anna spun to find Andriv holding a bundle of scrolls beneath his arm. She’d only seen him in passing, but now she noted that he had the sharp, clear gaze of a man with known intentions. That was more than she could say for most.

He was older than Yatrin, but still rather young for a captain, much less a commander. His hair was a dusty brown, cropped and swept to one side. Every feature was pronounced, yet narrow, somehow shrunken; in fact, if not for the deep green of his eyes, pure Hazani blood might’ve been a fair bet.

“Low suns,” Anna said, rising to offer a slight bow. She held onto the aisle’s tether as the nerash bucked to the left. “We appreciate your assistance.”

“The honor is ours entirely,” he explained. “You couldn’t imagine my joy when Brother Konrad told me of your predicament. Our tomesmen often recite tales of your involvement in the War of Ravagers and now, to behold you in your corporeal form….”

Anna looked away. “Your chapter has done considerable work for the order, as I understand it. I suppose it was a natural choice.”

He offered a meek smile, then gestured down the aisle, indicating a low table cluttered with charts and unfurled missives. A soot-stained lamp swung overhead. “Brother Konrad and I spoke with this tracker of yours,” he said, trailing Anna as she made her way along the cramped passage. “His insights were rather fresh, I must say. We had no idea how many of their architects were still inhabiting the flatlands.”

“Weigh his speech with caution,” Anna said. “He knows what men are fond of hearing.”

As they reached the table, Andriv knelt on the cushion opposite Anna’s position. He cleared his throat, shifting incessantly, caught in the clutches of sudden and bashful unease. “Lay mercy upon my words, Kuzalem, but such curiosity arises quite fiercely in me: Why have you placed faith in his words at all?”

The girl. Anna channeled that thought into a shallow nod, a delicate smoothing of her robe’s pleats. “Not even the inquisitors have managed to make his comrades speak. I would be remiss to surrender this chance.”

“As my thinking mind assumed,” Andriv replied hastily. “Forgive me.”

“Doubt is the sign of a shrewd leader, Brother Andriv. Guard your suspicion well.”

He smiled deeply, but did not meet her eyes. “My only task in your service, Knowing One, is to act as the eye that guides your blades.”

“Unfortunately, our vision stems from the tracker.”

“Of course,” Andriv said. “But his words trouble me.”

Anna tensed at the newfound edge in the brother’s voice. “Speak your mind.”

“I would not presume to doubt you, Kuzalem.”

“Speak, brother.”

Andriv’s lips trembled. He joined his hands in his lap, but could not stop himself from wringing them. “He mentioned the Starsent. The one who was Ramyi.”

Her breaths slowed and seized in her throat. Starsent. That old Kojadi title was like poison. It did not refer to a girl, but to one who could pierce the mind of a man and splay out his thoughts in a constellation. One who would bring about a new world from the ashes of the old.

“Is it true, Kuzalem?”

“What did he tell you?”

“I hold none of these words in my heart,” Andriv explained. “But he claims to know where she nests.”

Anna gestured to a faded map of the flatlands. “Show me.”

“Her notch upon the sands is not what troubles me,” Andriv replied. “Her place is said to lie in the den of Volna’s engineers. By what divination he knows this, I dare not presume. Nor do I lend him the faith that I reserve for the order, you see. But such a notion pains my mind.”

Memories of the girl’s essence pierced her awareness. Frigid, searing visions of a world lost to hatred, of words that festered in the recesses of buried dreams. Flashes of the blade she’d put to a sister’s throat, of a youthful stare that had traced the lapis lazuli and jade of ceiling mosaics, of blindfolds she’d slipped over a girl’s eyes to shroud the skeletons of her kin.

Your violence has come home to you.

“Kuzalem?” Andriv whispered. He was leaning over the table with crinkled brows. “Have I troubled you?”

“It’s not you,” she said. “Is that all he said? Did he say anything of her purpose in their company?”

“You believe it to be true?”

She shook her head. “Knowing takes precedence over belief, brother. Tell me what he claims to know.”

Closing his eyes for a moment, the brother’s face grew decidedly somber. His lids flickered with repressed pain, a sense of something hideous and inescapable, as though he’d begun to dissolve from the inside.

Anna knew the sensation all too well.

“She imbues their forces with hellish scars,” Andriv said finally. “Those who know of the defiled flesh have given her refuge in their knowledge. Yet there are others, too. Legions of the damned and the savage lend their blades to her cause.”

Her fingertips prickled with numbness and the pit of her stomach fell away in a slow, burning ache. Was he truly describing Ramyi? It felt like yet another apparition in meditation, unreal; yet as vivid as waking life, jarring her out of time, out of space.

“It wasn’t my fault,” she whispered, so softly that it was stifled by the nerash’s oscillating plates.

Andriv frowned. “Forgive me, Kuzalem, but I heard not what—”

“Nothing,” she cut in. “It was nothing.” Then came a span of true nothingness, of shared terror in the understanding of what had passed and what was yet to come. “Brother Andriv, I should lead the others in their practice before we put out the lights. I ask you to confer with Brother Konrad and the tracker once more, if only to know her location more precisely. We’ll need a staging area.”

“Yes, of course,” he replied, raking in his charts in a nervous rush. “We have several chapters in mind, though we’ll need to pass over Nahora before we enter the flatlands. There are still batteries to the north.”

“The chapters won’t do,” Anna explained. “We’ll need to make our presence scarce.”

Andriv blinked at her, seemingly in awe of whatever counsel she might offer—nonsense or otherwise.

“A hunter’s terror is the surest path to driving a fox into its hollow,” she continued, gazing out at the black, misty skies once again. “I won’t risk any lives on an assault until we’re certain of her position.”

Andriv nodded, bowed, and rose from his cushion, sparing a final glance at the table and its scattered documents before he entered the aisle. But his steps were slow, sporadic, nearly dragging between the bunks. Abruptly he turned to face Anna once more, shadows etched across his face in dark splotches. “Kuzalem, do you believe it’s actually the Starsent? Will we look upon her?”

“Do not believe,” Anna said coldly. “Know.”

* * * *

It was a safe house nestled among apple orchards and wide, reed-clogged wadis. Patrols made their rounds six times per day. Two mountains, the transfigured lovers Tuchalla and Qirpek, presided over the compound with the boons of creeping shadows, slope-borne whirls of sand, and treacherous passes. None of the traders or caravans from Nur Sabah had cause to venture there, and even the lowest nerashi runs—whether dispatched by the Nahorans or their neighboring qora—would detect anything worth probing.

That which did not exist could not be killed.

Anna studied the tracker’s map of the region, concentrating intently on his dried inkblot. It was plausible enough, and several of the northern-born Alakeph brothers had lent credence to his words.

“Those are foul lands,” one had said, examining the countless latches and cylinders of his disassembled ruj with a falcon’s absorption. “Death itself could dwell there and he would only find his own.”

She’d awoken to the hard, biting gaze of Har-gunesh, unsure if she’d managed to sleep at all. Her mind had been ablaze with the tracker’s eyes, with his constant stench, which had seemed to effortlessly penetrate the walls of his holding cell. Gazing out at the land beneath them during the night hadn’t been bearable, either: No matter how much time had passed, the trampled, shell-scarred remains of Nahora still snuffed out whatever spark she’d nursed in her heart.

Yet now she rested by the window once more, her cheek pressed to warming glass, wondering how many leagues lay between Leejadal and their target. Setting the map aside, Anna turned her attention to a barren sky, to the silvery strands that broke over the nerash’s wings and held them aloft. Her instructors in the academy at Malijad had called the substance danha, the dissolving matter of the world. They’d said it could not be touched, nor felt, nor truly glimpsed by the living. But it was not the same world her instructor had known, and Anna no longer accepted the truth of others on faith alone.

The danha over Hazan was smooth and still, as stagnant as the parched heat that pooled over its flats and gorges. Hours ago, the endless sand seas had been dotted with the half-devoured corpses of Volna’s machines, often encircled by the tent towns of tinkerers and bargaining caravans. Now the land was cracked and naked. Far on the horizon, Leejadal glimmered with its amethyst-tiled skyline, its vast domes that resembled the growing chambers in the kales, its kator lines that spooled out like diamond thread in every direction. Fumes billowed from chasms and pits drilled into cracked plains. At the heart of the sprawling tumor, thrusting up into the danha and beyond its impossible boundaries, seemingly able to pierce the nebulae themselves, was a rod of iron and black stone. The vision was wholly alien, an aberration that her mind could not have fathomed nor accepted in younger years, even after the heights of Malijad.

She watched the flanking nerashi broaden their wings and fan out their leather tails, drifting lower for the approach on the mesas. Sparksalt vapors bloomed in rippling sills beneath the machines.

Andriv came to her side with a patchwork brown cloak draped over his arm. “Merciful stars, Kuzalem,” he said. “The quartermaster issued us a spare.”

Years ago, leagues away, she’d donned a covering of the same sort. She could still feel the dirt stinging her cheeks.

“Does it suit you?” Andriv asked.

“My thanks,” Anna said, taking the cloak and laying it out across her lap. “Though I have my reservations about this place.”

“They’ll be none the wiser about our arrival.” Andriv peered through Anna’s window, fixed on the mirror glints of a captain within the neighboring nerash. “It seems that this tracker has comrades in the most unexpected of burrows.”

Anna followed the man’s gaze, though she found her attention lured by the swelling expanse of setstone and pilfered abundance. Its wealth was little more than an artifice for the ignorant. Such cities had inherited a lineage of mindless indulgence, a haze of decadence, a gluttonous frenzy where goodness could be bought and sold. “It’s not so unexpected, Brother Andriv.”

* * * *

Nuhra of the Fifth Martyr did not look like the sort of woman who could saw through a throat with ease. In fact, she looked like the sort of woman who was disturbed, even repulsed, by the mere sight of blood. The sort who was decent and virtuous. The trailcarver had highborn flatland features, a lithe form that spoke of restraint in all things, a well-tailored silk and cashmere garment unsullied by mud or drink. She smelled of fragrant oils. Atop her head was a narrow ribbon that bound smooth, glossy hair into a black mass, free of knots or splintered ends.

But Anna could not bow to her, nor could she clasp her hand on the mesa’s walkway.

Not after the tracker’s words.

“Always said there was no sense in stuffing their mouths,” he’d explained as the turbines wound down. “Liked to hear ’em sing.”

There was no question of moving in a single unit. The crowds were bustling, swarming at every intersection and junction of shops, flowing overhead on rusting gangways and below in shaded tunnels. Cardamom swirled alongside the odors of scorched stone and flesh. Anna’s eyes could hardly track specific faces as they streamed past her: sun-beaten Hazani children, blindfolded Huuri, whip-marked flagellants, henna-streaked women, flesh crowded with beads, piercings, pustules, amulets—it was a vast mélange of rippling fabric and teeth, just as jarring as it had been to her youthful mind.

But it was worse now.

Years of monastic stillness had left her defenseless against every new jolt and sharp cry, every flash of vibrant thread, every sweltering breeze that bled the moisture she’d ceased to cherish. She was skinless, raw, apt to be drowned by every eruption of her senses. And she was trembling. Numbness trickled down to her legs. Spasms burst through her chest.

You are not here. she whispered to the thinking mind. You are the sacred watcher.

Her next breath brought stillness.

And with stillness came clarity, a sour realization of what the war had done to Hazan. River-tongue was plastered over most of the signs and banners. Southerners moved in velvet-cloaked packs, encircled by throngs of hired blades and dancing girls. A presence that had once been fortified by terror was now sustained by salt, by metal, by prestige. In a land with nothing, those with something could have anything they wanted. The noble qora, with or without their old masters, had made sure of that. Shop after shop was overflowing with Rzolkan fabrics and gems and weapons, far too lavish to be uprooted or overlooked.

“Can’t say they never did anything good for us,” the tracker whispered in Anna’s ear.

She pretended not to hear him.

At the edge of a spice-peddling row, standing beneath a web of ochre awnings and flapping wings, the city opened into a cluster of earthen paths and shell-pocked setstone. Bodies lay scattered upon the roadways, some crushed and others wilted in on themselves like blistering leather, all picked bare of whatever trinkets or salt pouches had once rested upon their hips. Dry blood was thickening to a burgundy paste in the grooves left by wagon wheels.

Nuhra glanced back at Anna and Konrad, sparing a particularly indulgent grin for the tracker. “Fear not.” Her voice was silk and honey. “The holy are spared in this place.”

“Comforting,” Anna said. She avoided Konrad’s warning stare. When dealing with the vicious and the cruel, she’d come to learn, there was no refuge in caution. Intuition had spared more lives than sense ever could.

“Indeed it is,” Nuhra replied. “There’s little to be gained from the blood of the saltless.”

The tracker laughed. “Makes you swoon, doesn’t she?”

Scanning both directions of the nearest path, the trailcarver reached into her tunic and produced a thin wooden talisman. She lifted it high above her head, waiting for the bare-legged running boy across the road to acknowledge her and bolt into a nearby alley.

Anna glanced over her shoulder to ensure that the first cohort of Alakeph hadn’t been lost in the press. By the time she’d spotted their drab coverings, which did little to obscure the procession of pale flesh and broad frames, a barrage of violent thumps forced her attention back to the path.

A hulking machine trundled through the churned-up earth, towering above Nuhra as it came to rest in a wreath of steam. Along its base were oil-smeared, flaking cogs bound by black treads, worked by a set of struts that bore the marks of constant snapping and welding. Squares of overlapping ceramic and dark leather covered its flat sides, forming a pattern Anna could only liken to the shell of a tortoise. Everything about the beast—from its twisting copper vents to its ruj-inflicted gouges—exuded a sense of sheer brutality.

“Oh, Nuhra,” the tracker said. “How you spoil us.”

The trailcarver blinked at Anna, evidently catching her vague aversion. “A temrus is the most dependable refuge in the Martyr’s Ward.” A coy, knowing smile cut across her painted black lips. “Unless they learn of the hayajara within.”

* * * *

Threading the slender roads and underpasses of Leejadal carried a sense of incurable panic. The world beyond the temrus could only be glimpsed through hair-thin slits in the walls’ armor, giving Anna the sense of gazing through a hellish keyhole. Konrad had initially leaned inward to share her vantage point, but his curiosity waned in a matter of moments. It was a blur of cinders and split skin and fur, at once exotic and repugnant. And as the machine rumbled onward, filled with the distant chatter of two old friends and their murderous, half-heard tales, Anna realized she was plunging into an abyss.

An abyss below the densest soil, below the Grove-Beyond-Worlds.

But out of that chaos, which had unraveled over the span of two hours in the temrus’s sweltering confines, gratitude had emerged. Their journey concluded at a walled compound on the western edge of the city, steeped in the shade of the impossible spire. Bloated flies swarmed the air and danced over the central lot’s kerosene pools. Men clad in rawhide masks, tattered hoods, and veils paced around stacks of crates and twisted scrap, barking to one another in flatspeak variants that Anna had never heard. One by one, the ensuing temrusi chugged through a blackened, iron-patched gate, lining up in ragged succession like behemoths seeking arid land to graze, still bleeding their fumes as Alakeph brothers filed out and paced around the lot.

A crooked, battered structure stood at the center of the compound, rising nearly as high as the bricolage watchtowers in the adjacent ward. Sand-worn paint freckled its walls, standing out amid cracked bricks in patches of indigo and ruby. Every window had been blown out or carved out, replaced by sandbags, firing holes, nail-strewn barricades. Most apparent were the gaping clefts in the upper levels and eastern wings, which left the building’s perimeter girded by piles of crushed setstone.

Anna shifted her pack higher onto her shoulders and wandered toward the ruins. Devastation, somehow, brought more security than the city beyond the gates. After all, devastation was stagnant. Devastation had nothing to defend, nothing to lose.

Nuhra appeared at Anna’s side and placed a hand on the small of her back, urging her toward the doorway’s partition of shredded linen and beads. “Our tea will grow cold, sister.”

Despite her best efforts, her spine tensed against the woman’s touch. It was not the sensation, exactly, but the suggestion of what her hands had done. “I’ll be in soon enough.” “I suspect so,” Nuhra giggled.

Anna narrowed her eyes at the trailcarver.

Nuhra gently lifted a hand, turning her ink-laced palm to the sky, and smiled. A granule of sand fluttered on the wind, skittered over her wrist, and came to rest between the smooth skin’s creases. Then came another and another, tossed about by a nascent breeze. “The Howling Wall approaches.”