Читать книгу Scions - James Wolanyk - Страница 13

Chapter 5

By the time their convoy of shrub-blanketed temrusi had reached the western expanse, Har-gunesh stared down from his highest perch. Every slat and vent along Anna’s transport had been cranked open, bleeding near-boiling air into the sprawl of crumbling stone walls, bushy pines, and scorched soil. It was flat here—threateningly flat. One could gaze over the fields and into the flux of scrambled, faraway mirages, picking out the dark smudges of settlements and peddler caravans alike.

Not that it made any difference now. It had been six hours of crunching over sand and earth and bleached bones, occasionally stopping at dust-shrouded wells to refill the coolant tanks and allow the brothers to retch into dry riverbeds.

Anna’s shirt was soaked with sweat, as thick and tacky as a trapper’s furs upon her skin. She’d taken a cue from the Alakeph and northern fighters in removing her ceramic vest, bandolier, and rucksack, tossing them into an enormous mound in the rear of their temrus, but even that was a token gesture. Her throat was clogged with fumes, stinging from the arid heat that seemed to leak into her lungs and shrivel her from the inside. Every jolt and bump that rattled through the undercarriage bit into her bones and chafed her flesh, conjuring images of leather stretched over its rack.

Yet as she surveyed the others, noting the creeping dullness in their eyes and the habitual picking at their lips, she understood that she was suffering least of all. A sharpened mind would always outlast a hardened body.

Nuhra sat across from Anna, her face a reflection of dreaming tranquility. Her posture was flawless, as rigid and composed as the guardian statues that had lined the outskirts of Leejadal, seemingly immune to the decay of heat and drowsiness. Sweat trickled down her cheeks in smooth, glimmering bands. Even the northern scribes seated near the front of the temrus, who’d worked under her guidance to apply markings to the better part of the qora fighters, now regarded her as a pariah.

But not everyone was so unsettled.

That morning, Lukas had hardly detected a change in the woman. Even if he had, he’d remained mum on his insights. His only sign of knowing had been a drawn-out stare in the compound’s lot, carefully weighing Nuhra’s silence, her dispassionate lips, her mechanical gait.

“Weird way about her,” he’d muttered to Anna as he wandered toward the third temrus, fishing through his pouch for a fresh wad of khat. “Northerners.”

But the trailcarver’s mission had not been burned away with the rest of her old self. Her every action—indeed, her every step and breath—had become perfunctory rituals, living cogs stripped of all pleasure and craving in service of a grand machine. There was no longer an observer within her mind; there was only a task.

A singular, hallowed task.

Anna was still examining the woman when the temrus bucked, slamming them both into the harnesses. Gaslights sparked to life along the central aisle, casting a pallid glow over rusting wall panels, twisting brass tubes, opposing rows of fighters. Anna clawed at her buckles in disarrayed panic as the others silently snapped to attention, locking the bolts of their ruji and filing toward the stockpiled equipment with unnerving expediency.

No sooner had she wrenched the buckles open than blinding white light flooded the temrus. The transport’s rear panel unspooled to the furthest extent of its fraying winch lines, screeching and pounding down upon the soil in an instant.

Sweet, coppery dust wafted up and consumed the first wave of fighters to storm down the ramp. Their brethren trailed them, soon reduced to white cloaks whipping and stirring in the haze.

This is it. This is what we’ve come to.

She stood and wandered toward her gear, dimly aware of Nuhra striding out onto the field with her men.

Anna blinked at the mound.

A ruj. A ruj for killing. Yes, that had to be hers. She picked it up, looking upon her hands as a puppet’s limbs, and slung the leather strap over her shoulder.

A vest to keep her innards off the sand. She’d need that, too. Her hands tingled as she lifted it over her head, pausing in its deafening blackness, then let its weight slap down across her shoulders. She tightened the straps until she could hardly breathe.

Then a rucksack, full of things that would keep her alive. But most men she’d known to wear them did not survive long enough to open the flap. She hefted it onto her back, cinched the buckles, and stumbled toward sunlight.

She was halfway down the ramp when she realized she’d forgotten how to kill. Turning the ruj over in her hands, she noticed—for what seemed like the first time—how alien and brutal and unwieldy it was. Point, pull, kill. That was it.

Or had she missed something?

Was it even loaded?

“Kuzalem, conceal your form.” Andriv’s voice, hard, yet restrained, burst into her awareness. “Their horrors may soon assail our ranks.”

Anna turned toward the stream of fighters, who were scrambling off the raised path and into a shadowed underbrush thick with gnarled shrubs and wadis. Tracking their course further into the distance, she noticed a series of beige lumps hemmed in by pines and crooked walls and drooping nets. Sunlight gave the mottled mud structures the distinct appearance of flaking limestone. Some of the Alakeph brothers appeared to her as white glimmers, threading in and out of sight as they traversed the network of canals. She squinted at the meandering company; each emergent head and ruj barrel provided Anna with a more precise calculation of distance, no matter how the heat managed to distort their forms. The compound was a half-league away at most, which put their fighters squarely within firing range.

But such measurements held true for both sides.

Sinking down to a kneeling stance, Anna nodded at Andriv and crept to the edge of a broken wall. Konrad and the tracker were scurrying into a wadi farther down the road, trailed by a detachment of northerners in reed-sprouting camouflage smocks. Their attempt at silence was wasted; even if the safe house was deaf to their approach, slumbering during Har-gunesh’s daylight pass, the groaning and chugging temrusi had surely revealed their presence.

“Do they know their orders?” Anna whispered to Andriv.

The brother was nervously scanning the path, passing cryptic hand signals to mirrormen and captains scattered along the column of temrusi. “The Starsent will not be ended.”

“We may not have that luxury,” she hissed.

“The brothers are well-trained, Kuzalem.”

“So is she.” Anna peered around the wall’s chipped edge, straining to detect any movement within the compound. “Your men will know their course when the time arrives.”

Andriv settled back against the wall, his eyes roaming the dirt with the telltale glaze of a commander’s imagination. A moment later he reached out, patting Anna’s shoulder to urge her to remain in position. “We will not fail you.”

“I’m accompanying you,” Anna said. “It’s not under discussion.”

“We should wait until—”

“Nothing lurks in the shadows.” Nuhra’s voice was a faint razor, possessed by the certainty of knowledge beyond her mortal senses. She sat in the center of the road, her legs crossed and fingers twisted into a strange knot upon her lap, gazing raptly at a void beyond the sands. “They dwell in restless dreams.”

“Untangle your tongue,” Andriv snapped. “Are their watchmen asleep?”

Nuhra closed her eyes. “No.”

Flickers of encroaching violence filled Anna’s chest with hot, painful throbbing, and her heart knocked against the ceramic vest like war drums. Such dread was familiar to the helpless, to the feeble, and it screamed through Anna’s mind as silence spread and cemented around her.

Slinging her ruj around and over her rucksack, Anna scrambled down the embankment and into the underbrush in a shroud of dust. Ahead, the fighters advanced in low, sun-dappled ranks, emerging and vanishing with every swell of the ochre haze. Blood rushed through her ears in resonant pulses, as imminent and invasive as the drone of fat red wasps and studded boots trudging through soil. Several brothers called her name, but she hurried under the canopy of budding apples and stunted leaves without glancing back, without wiping the hot sweat that gnawed at her eyes.

This was her burden. It had to be.

She probed her awareness for the red lashes of Ramyi’s presence, which had once been as tangible as sunlight or scars or the bodies left in the girl’s wake. Those days had passed, their memories as disjointed and unreal as a fleeting dream, but she grasped at their power nevertheless. Behind closed lids she honed in on labored breathing, glossy orange biting through blackness, a—

Emptiness washed over her.

There was no sense of stillness, for there was nothing to move, nothing to agitate. No sense of time, nor its imagined passing. Not even blackness persisted in that hollow space.

Torchlight and sullied limestone burst into being. Then came the warm, dazzling flickers of flame and cinders, glowing brands steaming against open flesh, spittle glistening on sharpened teeth. Black pigments, made from the bones that her tribe had burned and crushed during the last harvest, coated the floor and ceiling in the form of glimmering murals, glyphs, inscriptions. Beads of blood and sweat sparkled around her.

Lifting her hands into the light, she found dark flesh banded with pink scarring. The cuts were fresh, still dribbling waxy crimson onto pitted stone. But her fingers were thicker than she recalled, more weighty and callused, capable of clamping around a Gosuri’s matted throat and choking it to stillness. Capable of slicing through the thin, pale belly of a southerner. Capable of endless savagery that played through her mind as a tapestry of faces, wounds, howls, an immense wilderness of memories that stitched the divide between the self and the other.

The other.

It was a needle driven into her awareness, a surge of animal fear that destroyed the will to move, to speak, to breathe. This is not me. The fear swelled to horror. Spasms tightened her hands to fists, but they were not her hands, and that sense of volition immediately felt wasted, illusory, a pathetic attempt of the mind to grasp at flesh beyond its control.

There was nobody to rescue.

There was simply nothing.

Yet every step forward was a desperate scream within, an affirmation of the truth that she was not there, that an abysmal emptiness pervaded all things, that the world flowed around an intangible captive.

The elders threw their heads back, mouths wide and gushing black torrents. Fluted fox bones, protruding from their windpipes in ashen stubs, rattled as the men began their hideous calls. It was a monstrous, baleful harmony, growing ever-lower until it coalesced into a chest-thrumming wave.

Primordial words, stripped of all language and logic, intelligible only to the innermost kernel of awareness, consumed her.

We are.

Anna opened her eyes to dust, to blinding sunlight fighting through the canopy overhead. She was standing at the edge of the narrow wadi, gazing out at the compound’s cracked walls and ramshackle wooden gate. Her breaths pooled in her lungs, burning air beyond conscious will, almost as though that vital rhythm had been forgotten, somehow overlooked.

Overlooked as easily as awareness itself, as entire moments of existence:

Crossing over crumbling soil, hunting prey she could not hate, bearing a tool designed to maim and murder.

Anna dropped her ruj and studied its fall, its clouded impact upon the soil. Her hands wandered to her sides, quaking, throbbing, bleeding precious sweat into the earth. She opened her mouth, but did not know the words to scream. Thoughts and senses flickered in and out of complete dissociation. Was it her sight, her terror, her—

“Fuck are you doing?” the tracker snarled, seizing Anna’s shoulder—the pain assured her that it was her shoulder—and forcing her down to a wobbling crouch. His gaze darted between rows of apple trees and waves of Alakeph brothers, who were beginning to edge along the compound’s inner wall with ruji tucked to their shoulders.

“What is it now?” Konrad hurried to them, clutching his ruj by its barrel using a gloved hand. His face was flush, shining with broad ribbons of sweat, as frustrated as it was bemused. “Anna, what’s wrong?”

She struggled for gulps of dense, throat-prickling air, staring blankly at both men as she struggled to ground herself. “I don’t—” she began. A pause, a shallow gasp. “I don’t know.”

“Cracked your mind?” the tracker asked.

“No,” she said, glaring at him. “There’s something wrong with this place.”

“You hurt?” Konrad frowned at her vest, her legs, her neck and its ancient scars. “Take it gently. What do you mean by wrong?”

A sharp clap issued from behind the mud walls. Their entry was a storm of drumming boots, a smattering of shouts in river-tongue and Hazani, a surge of white shapes flowing into the compound’s inner ring. Then it fell away. There was no gargled screaming, no shattering glass, no ruj payloads thudding into mud or flesh with muffled shushes.

Wasps hummed around Anna.

“Think it’s over?” Konrad asked.

“I don’t feel her,” Anna whispered. “Konrad, we shouldn’t be here.”

Shrill whistling filled the air, accompanied by several Alakeph brothers appearing in the compound’s doorway and waving their comrades closer. Most of the men had their ruji slung across their backs or gripped like walking sticks.

But Anna found no relief in their demeanor.

Lukas stood, his knees popping like snapped kindling, and gave a bitter laugh. “Nothing left to raise those hackles, Anna. Just a matter of digging your panna a pit or leaving her for the tribes.”

* * * *

A brittle stillness hung over the compound’s inner courtyard. Many of the Alakeph were gathered into clumps along a fissure-riddled wall, basking in slivers of shade, overcome by a silence that extended beyond the terse ways of their lineage. Others squatted deep in Halshaf prayer, mumbling ancient words to themselves as Anna strode past. Even the northern fighters, adorned with crudely stitched flesh masks, seemed reticent to stand beside the mud-and-timber house.

The stench reached Anna halfway to the door. It was pus and sun-swollen guts, vinegar and stale piss, bile and fermenting sweat. Death. During past campaigns it had become a constant miasma, as tangible and ominous as smoke stirring on the horizon.

It was not the mark of recent death, of course. Fresh blood alone was not so putrid; it was metallic, consistent, woven into Anna’s memories of thrashing lambs and errant shells that had left bodies strewn down entire streets.

Anna’s stomach clenched.

If Ramyi was inside, the fighters’ work had already been carried out.

“Kuzalem!” Andriv burst through the gates with his ruj in both hands, panting like the wild, sunken-ribbed hounds that trotted alongside kator tracks. His eyes were just as fierce. “I feared the worst.”

“Trust in my ways,” she replied, immediately returning her focus to the mud structure. Somewhere in her periphery, her companions were padding across the dust and clumps of silvery weeds, speaking to the first waves of fighters in low tones. It registered as clearly as the pitter-patter dripping that leaked through the doorway, through narrow windows housing blackness. The normalcy of it all was the most chilling aspect: straight, unmarked walls, a copper spigot protruding through the soil, and a set of nearby furrows lined with still-sprouting herbs, basking in the shade of a red tarp. Had it not been for that fetid pall, it would’ve been any other home amid the flatlands.

“I’m not certain you should enter,” Andriv whispered, almost as though tucking his words into Anna’s ears alone. “The brothers assure me that this is a sinister domain.”

“I’m no stranger to it.”

“Kuzalem—”

“Did they find her?”

The brother’s silence bled into the hum of corpse-gnawing flies.

Anna looked sidelong at Andriv, sensing the subtle heat building between her ribs. “Did they?”

“They don’t know,” Andriv said, lowering his head.

“Their sole task is to know,” Anna snapped. “We came here with certainty, brother, and I will not leave without it. Empty words lost their comfort long ago.”

Again the brother spoke, his tone rising with the vigor of the chastised, but she did not listen. She moved into the cool, rancid shade of the porch, unable to cease the restlessness in her heart. They don’t know. Those words sickened her as much as a swell of acidic fumes as they wafted through the threshold. Then she was inside, forcing herself not to inhale, not to think. Her first steps—squelching, wet—echoed with startling effect, and soon the darkness resolved to a bluish, murky landscape, crowded with blunt shapes and—

It had been too long since she’d witnessed such violations of flesh.

Blood covered every patch of the room, oozing and crusting in various stages. Bright red spattering across the ceiling, maroon streaks that stretched from wall to wall, pools of glossy garnet that had been smeared by careless steps. Yet blood was the least of their defilements. Mounds of deconstructed bodies littered the floor: severed arms, bludgeoned heads, maggot-riddled torsos, jawbones and tongues and cracked rib cages, all left in disarray like the remains of an inhuman feast.

Pale, naked bodies had been hung from the walls using iron stakes. Their eyes were raw pits, gouged out by blades or beaks. Their limbs extended from their body with grotesque, impossible length, each bone and socket and fleshy mass stretched out along a line of sinew, resembling the anatomical displays in the academies of Nahoran herbmen.

Anna’s throat clenched. The bodies were full-grown, largely men, and the few women among them were marked by southern flesh.

Something scratched, breaking the stillness.

A cluster of knucklebones, still draped in layers of withering tissue, stirred against the soil. They clacked against one another, hovered a hair from the ground, revolved in spastic rhythms end over end. Hayat’s scorched odor rose from the bones.

“By the fucking Grove.” Lukas’s voice barely pierced Anna’s awareness. More footsteps tapped over the porch.

The gentle drumming of blood resumed. Anna tracked its source, honing in on the soft splashes and slurping. And as she matched the pattering to the mutilated bodies lining the walls, her skin prickled into gooseflesh.

None of the droplets reached the soil. Nothing flitted downward at all, in fact. She watched the bright, shallow pools beneath the bodies contracting, wadding up into crimson orbs that began an impossible ascent to the ruptured bellies and sliced legs above. Their sounds were erratic, hollow, as though refracted through some warbling membrane and stitched together to make them whole again. Now she could see the floor slithering, churning about in weird maelstroms, spawning pockets of jumbled whispers that swelled and devolved into broken rattling.

“Anna.” Konrad’s voice cut through the gore, the nausea. “You don’t need to see it.”

But her gaze crept over every bit of marrow and glistening flesh, shutting out everything beyond traces of the Starsent. Near the room’s center a set of shriveled lungs twitched and shifted over the soil, exposing the corner of a wooden frame. Shadows lined the inner lip of the boards, hinting at the sort of storage spaces she’d raided in flatland dwellings, the cold recesses of clay pots and honey jars and cowardly men.

“Now, I’ve known wicked sights,” Lukas growled, “but this is something else, girl.”

She turned to face the fighters.

They were huddled in the doorway, eyes wide with this proof of true malice, true barbarism, true hatred in the world. The tips of their boots were aligned across the threshold, but none passed it. Several northerners paced along the windows, sparing momentary glances before returning to their ritual chants.

“Did you search the lower level?” she asked them.

“Best have a worldswalker burn out whatever the fuck’s seeped into this nest,” Lukas said, backing away with his ruj against his shoulder. “Or just put it to the torch. But take this from the bloodied source, would you? That’s no place for life.”

Konrad clutched at his stomach. “Never thought I’d find a day when our truths collide.”

Flowing silk garments dazzled in the sunlight beyond the porch. Nuhra approached like a scalpel’s sweep; she shouldered through the crowd with swift, certain steps, maintaining her porcelain visage as she looked upon the bodies and their hexed stirring. As she waded through the remains, her spine rigid and gaze leaping about, her curiosity only seemed to deepen.

“You know what happened here,” Anna whispered, “don’t you?”

Nuhra blinked at her.

“If you know what’s below us, you should speak now,” Anna said.

“I see what you see, Kuzalem,” Nuhra replied. “My form is blind and deaf to the presence of the Starsent. Yours is not.”

Sparing a glance at the fighters, who had now leaned inward, yet still resisted the urge to wander closer, Anna moved to Nuhra’s side. Cartilage slid and cracked beneath her heels. “Outside,” Anna said softly, “you knew that something was here.”

“I knew only of suffering,” Nuhra said. “This vessel has an animal’s senses.”

“So it seems.” Moving to the room’s center, Anna used her boot to clear away the dissolving remnants of a head and splintered spine. Beneath it was the cover for the wooden frame. It was thin and dripping and resting lopsided over its hole, covered in writhing maggots. As Anna brushed it aside with her foot, it began to vibrate against dampened soil, humming with arcane fervor.

Faded daylight spilled down into the storeroom, illuminating a dusty square of setstone and dried blood. Lining the surrounding shelves were dark, leathery slats and circular bronze caps. Tomes and scrolls.

“Just what we need,” the tracker mused. “More sacks to haul out.”

“Get a rope,” Anna said, mustering a forceful voice that drowned out the assembly’s muttering. She waited for their footsteps to trot off over the soil, soon joined by whispers and retching and foul southern curses.

Nuhra moved to the frame’s edge and peered down. “A most curious crypt, sister.”

“What was this place?” Anna asked. “Some sort of ledger archive?”

Her giggle was cold, cutting. “The Nahorans hunted my lineage with undying tenacity. A shelter from the storm was all we had.”

Anna narrowed her eyes. “Your lineage held her?”

“No, no, this was a serpent’s den,” Nuhra said soothingly. “But a shard of our knowledge slumbers here.”

Gazing back into the musty shadows, Anna spotted the empty slots and racks that had surely held compendiums, treatises, rites. “Did they bring her here?”

“The serpents were delighted to host the Starsent, sister.”

“Then she came for what they had,” Anna whispered. All around her the bones scraped and blood slurped and cartilage creaked in decaying sockets, thick with the whispers of the dead. Thick with Ramyi’s indiscretion. “She came with help, too.”

“You sound certain.”

“Even the Starsent is bound by our nature,” Anna replied. “Whatever did this was imbued with her markings, but it wasn’t her. Not alone.”

Nuhra lifted her nose and breathed deeply, creasing her black lips in what could’ve passed for a smile. “Her nature, her bindings. Semantics, dear sister.”

“Those bindings are the only thing staying her hand.”

“Our lineage believes in liberation from all bonds,” Nuhra said. “Even the bonds of nature.”

Anna stepped closer to the trailcarver. “What are you saying?”

“The light of knowing will shine upon your restless mind, Kuzalem. This world is a constant act of taking, is it not?” Nuhra bent down, tapping a blade-grooved nail against the wooden frame. Then she leveled her gaze on a scroll shelf riddled with gaps. “One may learn the world from what is present, of course, but one stands to gain insight from what has departed.”

* * * *

The smoke was rife with charring skin and lavender. It billowed from shallow, corpse-laden pits strewn across the nearby wadi, twisting skyward in thin black columns that resembled poplar trees in the gloom.

Anna tore off another crust of bread as she examined the northern Falaqor adherents trudging over the road, noting bright splotches upon their gloves and fragrant herb pouches wound into their neck scarves. She was glad for their ways, superstitious or not: None of the Alakeph had been willing to touch the bodies and most of the local fighters—raised in the mires of village rites or Volna’s indifference—had unfurled their bedrolls a full pence-league from the compound. Even Andriv was occupied with arranging patrols through the wadis, sentries upon the flanking hills, searches within the winding canals.

“Sixteen.” Lukas’s dark form loomed at the edge of her vision, waxing and waning as the wind stirred his cloak. “Nine tomes, seven scrolls.”

Konrad lifted their iron pot from the coals, his hands wrapped in coarse yellow cloth. “Such impressive arithmetic. You must’ve been one of Malchym’s dobraludz in the academy, no?”

Lukas did nothing, said nothing.

It gouged old fears into Anna’s gut.

“How do you know there weren’t more?” Anna asked.

“I dunno a lick about it,” Lukas said. “Had a spot of help.”

Nuhra came crunching over the soil, her hood raised and hands plastered to her sides. Shadows stripped her highborn features of their grace.

Beyond her slim silhouette, the Cruel Sage’s Maw continued to devour a ruby sky, growing vast and thick and still as it birthed swaths of nebulae in the east. Its ragged tendrils stretched to mountains and gauzy city lights far beyond the flats.

“Do you fear the darkness, sister?” Her smile was pale, knotted thread in the glow of pulsing coals. Dying wicks glinted in her pupils.

“Take the rest of the works if you desire them,” she said to Nuhra, turning her attention to the steaming pot. “We should burn whatever remains of this place.”

Nuhra squatted by the coals, bewitched with a hound’s ignorance by its heat. “Has it not been desecrated enough?”

“Something lurks here.” Anna glanced up at Lukas. “The wicked never abandon the fields they’ve trampled. We all know the force of rituals.”

“This presence will not be banished by flames, Kuzalem.”

“Enough of this haunted speak, eh?” Lukas cut in. “Only spirits I’m after come in flasks.”

Anna met the trailcarver’s bold, luminous eyes. “What was she after?”

“Such answers are beyond the realm of fireside talk, are they not?”

“This is no place for decorum.”

“Nor for tongues that wraggle on about truths beyond their reach,” Nuhra said, her voice deepening, sharpening in an instant. “This is a matter for those who have given their flesh to the knowledge you seek. But since you lust for the nectar of certainty, sister, know that your answers reside in the cloisters of my lineage.”

Wind whistled through the encampment. The woman’s words carried a sense of luring, a dreadful prescience that could only lead into the belly of beasts. Years of being used, jostled, beaten, starved—all of it had left bruises that Anna couldn’t ignore, even if she wanted to. Salvation was always one stranger’s promise away, one kindness she was compelled to take and repay in blood.

Every outstretched hand had been glinting with razors.

“Settled, then.” Lukas huffed and yanked Nuhra to her feet, honing in on a nearby coalpit and its crowd of drunken northern fighters. His hands roamed her body. “Put some spring in those heels, sister. Had enough of this fucking day.” He led the trailcarver off into a haze of shadows and smoke, his footsteps slithering over baked earth.

“Do you think she’s holding back?” Konrad asked as he lifted the pot’s lid and shied away from the swell of steam.

Anna was still watching their dark shapes slink away. “I don’t know.” She breathed in curry and saffron. “You shouldn’t prod at him, Konrad. He’s not the drunken fool you take him to be.”

“We have enough history to withstand some ribbing.”

“Something’s different about him,” she said softly. “You felt it when he came to us, didn’t you? He’s empty.”

“There wasn’t much in there to begin with, was there?”

“That’s what frightens me.”

Shaking his head, Konrad set out their clay bowls and began ladling the stew over squares of hardtack. “He’s not the wolf that you knew, Anna. Not anymore. I’m not sure what happened to him, but his claws are chipped.”

“You also thought he could bring us to Ramyi.”

Konrad dropped the ladle into the pot. “He’s gotten us closer than anyone else.”

“Nuhra did his work,” she replied. “There’s nothing safe about this. If Volna’s keeping ties with him, then I can’t turn a blind eye to his role in this. He can’t just be an intermediary, Konrad.”

“Maybe you have your sight on the wrong threat.”

“The Breaking did its work.”

“And what?”

Anna clung to that long, stagnant silence, glowering over the coals as coyotes whined in distant hills. The Breaking was all she had left. Her hand began to throb, almost as though remembering that old pain, that death of everything she could have been.

Finally, Konrad sighed. “I’m just asking you to take a wide perspective. Nothing more.”

“If she can’t be vindicated by the Breaking,” Anna whispered, “then nobody can.”

“Anna.” Konrad set one of the bowls before her, keeping his eyes tucked to the soil as he did so. “I know how much this means to you. I do. I’ve seen what you’re willing to give for the truth in your heart, time and time again. That’s precisely why you need to sharpen your ears like never before. Because these people know you and they know how far you’ll go, and they’ll take everything from you if you ever stop baring your teeth.”

Anna nodded. “I won’t.”

“Not even if it comes down to you and her,” Konrad pressed.

“Konrad—”

“That’s how these things go—trust me. You’ll need to look that girl in the eyes, shut out whatever’s inside of you, and run a blade through her.”

“I’ve known this longer than you can fathom.” As she unrolled her burlap mess kit, digging out a warped spoon and knife and laying them beside the bowl, she wondered who had encountered that truth first. Some fierce notch of the thinking mind was adamant that Ramyi had branded that sentiment upon her very being.

When the time came, one of them would not hesitate.

And with that first spoonful, which trembled so fiercely that Anna could hardly bring it to her lips, she understood the divide between the slayer and the slain.