Schisms. James Wolanyk
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Their only chance, after three years of frayed leads and compromised operations.
Anna bent down and turned the man’s head from side to side, noting its coldness, its turgid and leathery texture as a result of beatings. His lips were dark, and—
Ink.
A dark, narrow stripe of ink ended at the crest of his lower lip, originating somewhere far deeper in his mouth. The application had been hasty, forceful even. Using her middle finger, Anna peeled the mirrorman’s lip forward. A triangular pattern had been needled into the soft tissue, still inflamed with networks of red capillaries but recognizable all the same: It was an old Nahoran system, more a product of surveyors than soldiers, aiming to meld coordinates with time.
Here, now, her only chance.
Anna reattached her yuzel to its hook, slipped her pack off, fished out a brass scroll tube and charcoal stick. With a moment of silence to listen, to observe the empty doorway and the night market’s routine din, she copied the symbol onto the blank scroll. She then furled the parchment and slipped it back into its tube.
Its weight was eerie in her pack, crushing with importance she understood both intensely yet not at all.
She hurried out of the chamber and toward the stairwell, but before she’d cleared the corridor she glanced outside, where she noticed a dark yellow cloth waving atop a post near the paddock. It hadn’t been there when they arrived. Her breath seized in the back of her mouth and—
A door squealed on its hinges.
Anna pivoted around, yuzel unclasped and drawn in both hands, eyes focused to the slender ruj barrel emerging from the seventh doorway. A dark hand followed, swathed in leather strips far too thick for northern fighters. She slid to the left and squeezed the trigger.
It was a hollow whisper in the corridor, perhaps a handful of sand pelting mud, a rattle down her wrists. Iron shavings collided as the magnetic coils accelerated them, sparking in brilliant whites and blues and oranges. The wall behind the shooter exploded in a burst of dust and dried grass, sending metal shards ricocheting and skittering across the floor. A scream ceased in a single gust, as bone and cloth and flesh scattered just as quickly. The shooter staggered forward in the haze, howling as he stared at the stump of his wrist.
Anna fired again.
When the dark cloud vanished, the shooter’s upper half was strewn down the corridor and dripping from the ceiling.
She spun away, sensing the tremors in her hands and the hard knot in her throat, and started down the stairwell. Three years of violence hadn’t made killing any more pleasurable, nor even easier, but decidedly more common. In fact, time had only made her more aware of how warriors were shaped: The nausea and terror remained, but everything was so perfunctory, done as habitually as breathing or chewing. Not that she had the luxury of being revolted by that fact. As she descended she unscrewed the weapon’s empty shaving pouches and replaced them with fresh bulbs.
Footsteps echoed up from the staircase’s depths. Yatrin appeared a moment later, his face a mass of tension and pockmarks in the light of an alcove’s candle. He had a black beard—dense, verging on wild—that nearly hid the tight line of his mouth. It wasn’t that Anna forgot his youth at times; to the contrary, she often remembered it. Especially when he was afraid.
“Did I hear it?” he whispered in river-tongue.
Anna nodded. “We’ll go in pairs.”
“They could’ve had you, you know.”
“But they didn’t.” Anna stepped past him, lingering in his shadow. “Dragging him out is too much of a risk.”
“You didn’t even tell me.”
“We have our tasks,” she hissed. “Listen to what I’m telling you now.”
Yatrin seemed to be peering within himself, searching for some mote of calmness in the eye of the storm, as Anna had taught him so long ago. His brow relaxed. “Kill, then?”
She held Tensic’s face in her mind, envisioning the creases set by a long and cruel life, the distance in his eyes that was surely born from stillborn babes and dead lovers. “Kill.”
Anna picked her way through the hall and its huddled travelers, flashing hard stares at Khara and Baqir as they carved wood by the doorway. She rarely had to say more to them. As the pair stood and slipped out into the darkness, two bulky shawls among many, Anna searched the room: blankets, ceramic cups, pipes, rolled burlap covers, dark and clear bodies—
Ramyi.
The girl was a thin, motionless shape in the corner of the room, a purple silk cushion tucked under her head and black hair pooling at her back. Her shawl rose and fell with the rhythm of a dreamer’s breaths.
Anna stalked toward her as Yatrin did his work behind the partition—the soft opening of skin, the gurgling of open veins, the muted final words buried behind a killer’s hand. She stood over the girl and prodded her with a mud-spattered boot. “Get up,” she hissed in flatspeak.
Ramyi stirred and rolled over with a scowl. “What is it?”
“Come outside.” Anna glanced sidelong at Yatrin, who’d emerged from behind the curtain, wiping a short blade with the inner fold of his shawl. “I said, get up.”
“I’m not some hound,” Ramyi whispered. She lay still, staring up at Anna with clenched hands, but finally shifted to stand.
“You need to listen,” Anna said, leading the girl to the door and holding it open as a gust of cool wind rolled down from the hills. She waited till Yatrin and Ramyi had both passed, then closed it gently. Sound carried easily in the valley. “I address you as you behave, you know. Some things have to be earned.”
Ramyi’s jaw tightened, ready to spill all the bitter words she’d learned in the streets of Nur Kalimed, but the anger drained from her eyes at once. She was staring past Anna, more curious than concerned.
That was a warning in itself.
Anna whirled around, catching a fleeting glimpse of the shadows darting between market lanes. She spotted Khara and Baqir near the road, their shawls lit by firelight and dancing in the breeze, walking with the gait of soldiers who mistook silence for safety.
“Call,” Anna said to Ramyi. “Call!”
“What?” Ramyi whispered.
“Am’dras!” Yatrin shouted. Heads swiveled toward them from all corners of the artisan flats, drinking up the eastern tongue with a mix of fear and awe, but secrecy was now a wasted effort.
The two soldiers dropped to their stomachs.
The blast was transient, little more than a flash amid fire pits and a blossom of dark smoke. The air itself burst, fanning dust up and out in a tight wave, scattering caravan attendants, sending screams into the night. Shrapnel whistled overhead and smoldered in pockets of sand.
Ramyi stared at the wisps of smoke, huffing, fumbling for words. “So close.”
Anna’s hearing trickled back as Yatrin rushed past her. She seized Ramyi by the arm, pulled her into a low run toward Khara and Baqir. “That was their first strike.”
More pops sounded, muffled but prominent, no longer frightening her as they had years before. She watched the bakers and clothiers and spicemen scrambling from the market, awash in dust and soot, and beyond them, killers flooding out of walled compounds and the cover of awnings. Six, perhaps seven, all bearing ruji and blades.
Anna froze, fixing Ramyi in place at the edge of the haze. She’d expected more.
A moment later, she found it.
Black shapes squirmed on the crest of the surrounding hills. Rusted plates reflected moonlight in jagged stains, gave shape to dozens of churning cogs and cylinders and an enormous firing tube. Even the southern nebulae were soon blotted out, smothered by the fumes