Читать книгу Scions - James Wolanyk - Страница 14

Chapter 6

Tormented vessel. Moraharem. Most of its adherents wore their disdain for vessels plainly, marked by scourges and whips and hammers, breaking their flesh however they could. Breaking it in any way that would shatter the perennial illusion of existing within a body. But the studded turquoise walls and engraved front gates of their jinkaral—the domain of maiming or disfiguring, as Anna’s tutors had variably translated it—were as elegant, even as inviting, as Nuhra herself.

“Can you sense its radiance?” the trailcarver asked, taking an Alakeph brother’s hand as she stepped out of their temrus.

“I can’t sense much,” Anna replied. She glanced around, examining the chill, smoky shroud that heralded dawn in Doreshna Ward. Cogs churned and locks gushed open within underfoot canals, filling the street with an incessant, whispered roar. Packs of hired blades and qora fighters, swollen with bulky scarves and ceramic helmets and quilted wraps, wandered past and trickled into crooked alleys, marked by the cherry-blossom glow of their dusk-petal pipes. Ribbon-tagged hawks trotted over banners and awnings, gazing down from the perches that lined the surrounding setstone ascents.

“It’s quiet, isn’t it?” Nuhra asked.

“Slow morning.”

“Oh, anything but,” she replied. “Did you not hear the bombs, sister? At least three in this ward.” She smiled at Anna. “Although I suppose death is slowness in all things.”

Towering black shapes shifted in Anna’s periphery. She angled toward them, taking in the colossal form of an arch, bronze gears spinning in sequence upon the walls of setstone canyons, dust raining and metal screeching and skylines shifting in the gap beneath the monstrosity. Hundreds of bridges, laden with shadowed humanoid blots, crossed the span in needle-thin webs.

“Come now,” Nuhra said, clicking her tongue and wrapping cold fingers around Anna’s wrist. “We can look upon the market’s gowns another day.”

Anna stole a glance at the second temrus in their formation, noting the beast’s sputtering kicks as it sank onto alloy-woven coils and lowered its rear hatch. She found it oddly difficult to center herself without Lukas or Konrad accompanying them, although their task—interrogating another cell of caravan drivers in a market ward—seemed more prudent for the hunt.

Andriv and his men filed out of the temrus in a neat, compact string, gazing up at the enormous walls and calcified aqueducts that now hemmed them in. Their ruji were propped against deflated rucksacks, unloaded, fastened in place by taut slings. But even without that display of force, passersby hurried onto the walkways and stoops flanking the road, pulling scarves across their faces and dragging sluggish children out of the brothers’ sight.

A land’s tales—especially those spawned among witnesses in charred villages—were truly the most devastating weapon of all.

“Wait here,” Anna said to Andriv, using her finger to trace a vague perimeter along the road.

The brother nodded, whistled to his men, and went to work arranging them.

“Will such a presence not cast ripples, sister?” Nuhra squinted warily at the Alakeph brothers. “Leejadal has not forgotten the white cloth.”

Anna looked upon the jinkaral’s walls and their wind-worn paint, transfixed by rows of lightless firing slits. “I certainly hope it hasn’t.”

* * * *

Beyond a courtyard of swirling ashes and withered, hornet-laden juniper trees, the jinkaral bloomed as a forest of soaring basalt facades. Concave domes, flooded with red, clotting sand and putrefying bodies, lined the walkway that led to the main hall.