Читать книгу Scions - James Wolanyk - Страница 12

Chapter 4

Beyond the shutters was a black, screaming lament. It had materialized as a silent wave, draping itself over the city’s wards in beige folds. But the northerners had known better than to watch its approach; they had huddled with tawdry fetishes and carved constellations into their forearms, whispering fervent prayers into the still-gushing wounds. Its thin haze smoldered from cream to mud, then to ruddy soil, then to an absolute void. It battered the compound’s doors and shrieked through every crevice, crafting a gloom so thorough that Har-gunesh, cruelest of the northern gods, was driven back into the cosmos. It was the devourer of all things. It was malice incarnate.

Breathe in.

The rug beneath Anna’s legs was slithering, hissing, hushing her as the Howling Wall spilled into the chamber and grazed her skin. Her mind was aware of its eternal terror, its primordial sludge that had been nursed and sustained over eons of annihilation.

Breathe out.

Nuhra struck a match, purging the darkness around her chin and bony fingers, then guided the flame to an orb-like lantern atop a serving table. The chamber bloomed with waxy light. Faint flurries of sand and mica seemed to seize in midair, glittering in a sea of momentary frost, then sift down into the shadows.

“Their words align with truth, it seems,” Nuhra said. Her stare was wide and eager, her head canted impishly to one side. “You bear the traces of the old ways.”

“Whose words?” Anna asked.

“Many speak of you,” Nuhra replied, “yet few recognize the marrow that lurks within your bones, Kuzalem. My vision knows it by its true name.”

Anna met the woman’s eyes, sensing a fanatical storm that lurked behind decorum. She was right about the rarity of true perception—Bora, and perhaps Yatrin, had been the only ones to decipher her spirit. Not even she herself could claim that feat. Not yet.

“You were initiated into their folds, weren’t you?”

“I’ve learned not to be vague with my speech,” Anna replied.

Nuhra smiled at that. “Abandon your pretense of separation, sister. Does the light of sacred wisdom not shine through our hearts and minds?”

“We are not the same,” Anna said. “Hear me when I tell you that we are not sisters. We are not kin. We are not friends or comrades. We are bound by a task and when that task is complete, we’ll return to our worlds and never speak of this.”

Nuhra drank her tea, taking in Anna’s words with subtle delight, then reached across the table to refill Anna’s cup. “Which mind compels you to say such things, I wonder? Which mind holds to the illusion of distinct worlds? Do we not breathe the same air and die with the same agony?”

The trailcarver’s attainments were obvious: She’d endured the same experiences as Anna, whether through tomes or meditation, and her actions carried a similar aura of efficiency and diligence. Even her eyes reflected the vast stillness of the nebulae. But not all who saw emptiness came away with the same insights, and not all who sought reality were willing to embrace it.

Anna felt her breath trickling across her upper lip, grounding her in Nuhra’s words. Every being had a lesson to offer, if one sufficiently expanded their perception. “What do you see in me?”

“Something ancient.” Nuhra’s voice had grown softer, though no less zealous. “Do you sense it within?”

Yes. It crept toward her lips, but Anna resisted the urge. “Senses can rarely be trusted.”

“As wise as it is true.”

“The work of a scribe is to know what lurks within every being,” Anna explained. “So I caution you against speaking of certainty regarding my nature. I am what I am.”

The chamber’s door opened with a weak squeal, cutting through the storm’s moans and bellows. Konrad stood in the threshold, radiant as lamplight shone upon his white garments, weighing the exchange with pursed lips.

“Is everything all right?” he asked.

Anna glanced at Nuhra, taking particular interest in the woman’s budding smile. “Yes,” she said at last. “We’re discussing the approach.”

Despite his hunched shoulders, Konrad nodded and bowed his head. “Right. Well, the other breakers have given their support to the strike. Andriv will speak with you when you’re ready.”

“Thank you.”

He lingered in the doorway, probing Anna for some sign of distress that she’d sealed in her gaze or joined hands, then dragged the door shut. The iron latch clicked into place.

“How dutiful he’s become,” Nuhra said.

“You know little of him,” Anna replied.

“Surely you jest. I knew of him when he was a mere boy in the Dogwood and I, a lowly aspirant of my sect.”

“Your name never reached his lips.”

“We were not permitted to speak with them,” she explained, fixing her stare on Anna’s scarred throat. “Men of the blade were looked upon as beasts.”

“Do you still believe that?”

Nuhra shrugged. “Some may be.”

“I’ve known beasts,” Anna said softly, “but not all of them carried blades. And some with blades were crueler than any beast I’ve known.”

“Is that so?”

“Beasts lack a mind capable of understanding wrath, but men—men choose to ignore their thinking mind. There isn’t a beast in this world that roams the land, eternally seeking out things to burn or bleed or rape. Men look upon those pursuits as games. Worse yet, they look upon them with honor.”

“Ah,” Nuhra said, widening her grin. “That’s why you hold your heart from me, is it? Do you think that of me?”

“You know yourself well enough.”

“We’ve all done beastly things,” she whispered, “but only lambs and sows can survive through goodness alone. Your Alakeph ensure that, with their claws and teeth.”

Anna tensed her jaw. It had been a mercifully long time since she’d considered the mind she possessed during war, during slaughter. But it would return soon. It had to.

Nuhra broke the silence with a sweet, delicate laugh. “Your shepherd, Bora, was certainly no lamb.”

“Watch your tongue.”

“My tongue? I speak of her with the utmost reverence.” A surprising mask of hurt, of stinging reproach, suddenly came over the woman. “For a time, she shared my quarters in the sanctuary.”

“She was an adherent of Saloram.”

“By birth, yes,” Nuhra said. “But she was sent out into this world to seek truth in all forms. I knew her when she was barely a woman.”

Anna suspended the words in her mind and spun them like wind chimes, struggling to reconcile what Bora had been with the barbarism of what Nuhra was. There was a harsher, more savage element within the adherent. “Now I understand the thread that binds you all together.”

“You speak of your tracker, don’t you?”

“You know him by a different name.”

Nuhra’s smile was dim, fleeting. “Does it trouble your heart to know that he was born as a babe like you or I, Kuzalem? That his mother anointed him with the name Lukas?”

Anna’s breaths ground to a halt. Lukas. She rolled the name through her awareness over and over again. After all this time, it seemed impossible that he could have a name at all. That a woman could force him into the world, smeared in the blood of a living womb. That somebody could love him and hold him, and know him as anything other than a killer.

“He used to be so handsome,” Nuhra said sadly, her eyes wandering through memories and longing alike. “You never asked him to bare his face, did you?”

Her throat worked to produce words, but they were slow, disjointed. “I have no need for it.”

“Lukas, Sixth of Dariyesz.” She smiled. “How long has it been since I’ve spoken those words?”

“I’m certain he’s lingered on your mind, by whatever name you choose.”

“Certain?”

Anna drew in a hard breath. “The wicked rejoice in one another. He brought you every trinket and puppet you ever wanted, didn’t he?”

“It was never him,” Nuhra said. “It was you, Kuzalem.”

“Be clear.”

“Oh, it’s glaringly clear for those who have become attuned to the machinations of this plane. Within your thinking mind, my intentions are as clear as dawn.”

“I know nothing of your intentions.”

“Quell your suspicions, sister. You are the tether that binds me to the savior of my lineage. I would not destroy you, nor your search, in this vital hour.”

One by one, Nuhra’s suggestions and half-concealed truths condensed into a chilling, logical chain. It was never about Anna and never had been.

It was Ramyi.

“She won’t serve you,” Anna whispered.

“Serve me?” Nuhra threw her head back with laughter; the gesture was explosive, bordering on nonsensical, from a source of such composure. “There is no lust for power in my heart, Kuzalem. I seek to shelter the Starsent and nurture her, nothing more. I am her supplicant.”

“Forgive me if I doubt your kindness.”

“The Kojadi slumbered for millennia, lost to the ravages of those who could not endure or sustain their ways. But once again, their divinity has returned to this world. She will bring about a new age.”

Anna glared at the trailcarver, keenly aware of the tremors leaking out across her lips and nostrils. “Volna already has her.”

“A splintering of it, yes,” Nuhra said. “But I cast off the shackles of their ways long ago. Whatever shelter they could once offer to the Moraharem has fallen away. Now, my sacred task is clear: I must cleanse the mind of the Starsent.”

In spite of Nuhra’s fervency, Anna detected an undercurrent of something ardent and honest. For a moment she gazed beyond the tales she knew of the woman, beyond the blood that had surely been washed from smooth hands, beyond the stagnant rot of the city and its incursion into her essence. “What makes you think she would accept your instruction?”

“You are a being of light, Kuzalem, but your breed drives out every shadow that it touches. She was woven from darkness. What could you know of her world?”

Anna stared into her cup.

“I would still her bleeding mind,” Nuhra explained. “You may not understand our ways, but you know the fate of animals beyond taming. Give my lineage a chance.”

“And if I refuse?”

“Then the butchers will do their work.” Nuhra gently sipped her tea, studying Anna’s eyes over the rim of the porcelain.

Anna lifted her own cup for the first time. It rattled against her lips and the anise tea was cold, bitter. As with all things, whether through volition or the command of existence, there came a point of relinquishment. Ramyi was no longer her pupil, her cherished kin. By now, she wasn’t even a girl: The Starsent was as immune to Anna’s sway as the cosmos itself. Several moments passed before Anna realized she’d drained her cup.

“What stirs your mind, Kuzalem?”

“I have no guarantee that you won’t use her for your own ends,” Anna whispered. “Just like everyone else.”

“Am I a beast to you?” Nuhra asked, refilling Anna’s cup with uncanny precision.

“Everybody wants power. And if they don’t want that, then they want to destroy. But everyone wants something, and it damns us all in the end.”

“What do you want, then?”

Anna nestled her trembling hands in her lap. “I want this world to be purified.”

“By whatever means,” Nuhra added.

She let the screeches of the Howling Wall fill the ensuing silence. “Yes,” she said at last.

“The Starsent is the survival of our lineage,” Nuhra said, glossing over Anna’s reply as though she’d taken it for granted. “I would see my bones crushed and my mind obliterated to ensure her path in this world. Do you sense my heart, Kuzalem?”

“You can’t prove such devotion.”

“Ah, but you have the means,” she said, loosening the wrap around her neck. The flesh was stretched taut, yet supple, crawling with a flurry of briar-like sigils. “Dissolve my ambitions, sister, and the core of my being will remain. Let the Breaking affirm my truths to the highest masters of this plane.”

Two swift knocks rattled the door.

“We’ll be along shortly,” Nuhra called, keeping her attention fixed on Anna.

The trailcarver’s gaze was mesmerizing, rife with the steadfast faith and fear she’d cultivated over a lifetime in ritual chambers. To such an adherent, death could only be seen as an impediment. Her true path was assured, predestined, a ceaseless progression from seed to sapling to towering oak.

With a gentle nod, Anna reached into the folds of her robe.

* * * *

Nothing definite could be ascribed to the Breaking aside from its mechanism. A lone circle, formed with one flawless sweep of the blade, unwound a lifetime of separation. That was how Anna had described it to her disciples, at least, as the Kojadi tomes held no mention of such things. It sparked revelations about the defilements of a being’s old ways, about the harm they’d thrust upon those that they once considered foreign by flesh alone. And in that fateful moment, when the mind bore the weight of horrible knowing, there was no telling what might happen.

Anna had seen hired blades hang themselves from attic rafters. She’d watched concubines chant sacred words for days at a time, and farmers run to their forsaken children, and killers strip themselves bare, offering their garments and ill-gotten salt to the lowliest beggars of their city.

But Nuhra had already been on the cusp of awakening.

Emptiness gazed into her and she gazed back in wonder.

“Will she be able to guide us?” Andriv asked. He was peering through the sliver of the open doorway, examining Nuhra like an animal stalking the confines of its cage. The woman knelt by a bare, pitted wall, staring blankly into some realm that few could hardly envision. “She’ll return to us. Won’t she?”

Anna said nothing, because she did not know. Yet she was certain of one thing: Despite the appearance of a woman, Nuhra was no longer there. They were looking upon a being without a given name, without memories it could claim as its own, without the host of delusions that had dictated its former path.

“Can we trust her, Kuzalem?” Andriv asked.

“If we couldn’t before,” she replied, “we can now.”

“Does she not seek the Starsent?”

“Soon enough, we’ll learn precisely what she seeks. We should turn our attention to more pressing matters.” She moved to the threshold of the neighboring chamber and took stock of its dim, candlelit space. Bodies shifted under thick sleeping covers, arranged in rows that bore an unsettling resemblance to linen-shrouded corpses. Konrad and the tracker—Lukas—sat near a beaded rug, slumped over a table and its horde of charts. She heard them murmuring about something, exchanging snappy bouts of river-tongue, but hidden words no longer troubled her. Now the world’s terrors were raw and plain. “Andriv, are you certain she’s there?”

The brother moved to her side. “Beyond question. Even the Gosuri herdsmen confirmed as much.”

“Men will say anything for salt and broth in their bellies.”

“One of Nuhra’s cadre flew over the area just before the storm descended,” Andriv replied. “He marked a safe house near the western wadis. It was exactly where the tracker claimed it would be.”

“Lukas.”

“Kuzalem?”

She shook her head. “Sleep in the refuge of the Pale Crescents, brother. There will be little time for rest tomorrow.”