Schisms. James Wolanyk
Читать онлайн книгу.
drilling through a granite outcropping, fountaining dirt over a terraced opium sprawl.
The machine’s cannon wobbled on its suspension cables, coming to rest as a ruj’s payload bit into the low wall near Ramyi. More blasts tore through the sand around Khara’s head.
Ramyi gazed wide-eyed at the machine. “It’s going to fire.”
“Keep moving.” Anna pulled her along, even as she stared at the cannon herself. “Yatrin, Khara, Baqir. Do you understand?” The order was practical, not personal. “Do you?”
“Yes!”
“Calm down,” Anna said. “You need to still your hands.”
Yatrin cut to the right, dashing past a dying peddler and into the cover of a tailor’s shop. It was a low, sturdy box, their best hope of surviving the machine’s volley. He called to Khara and Baqir, but the blasts were constant now, drowning out his words.
Another curtain of smoke and sand brushed past the flats, and when it cleared Anna saw the two fighters kneeling by a ruined brick wall, their ruji assembled and loaded. She pulled Ramyi toward the tailor’s shop, whistling as she ran. Before she trained with Nahoran fighters, she hadn’t known the force of proper whistling. It was loud enough to pierce utter chaos.
Khara lifted her head to the sound. She slapped Baqir on the arm, pointing.
Anna sprinted into the shop’s cover, which was cool and dark and deafening with the sound of boots scraping over packed earth. She spotted Yatrin by the slit of the far window, peering out with his yuzel in hand, calmly selecting his target in that haunting eastern way. Another blast thudded against Yatrin’s cover, flooding the room with a flash of white light and sparks.
Ramyi was hunkering down behind a crooked wooden table, digging through her pack for supplies she’d memorized a thousand times in training. She fumbled and spilled a set of vials into the shadows around her knees.
Anna knelt beside Ramyi as the other two fighters dashed through the door, ruji smoking and ripped shawls exposing ceramic panels. “Be still, or we’ll die.” Glancing at the window slit’s firing position, she saw Baqir changing places with Yatrin.
“I can’t help it,” Ramyi said.
“Focus on me.” Anna waited for Yatrin to scramble behind the table before taking the girl’s hand. It had gone cold with panic. “Remember the moment before your birth.” It was an old Kojadi meditation, a paradoxical challenge to conjure vapidness, but it worked. She watched Ramyi’s irises settle back into the notch of her lids.
Yatrin angled toward Ramyi, unwound his neck scarf and lifted his chin, exposing a smooth canvas. It had been marked countless times, but Ramyi’s cuts were accurate: She hadn’t marred a single fighter’s throat, and her runes faded as delicately as tracks in the southern woods.
When she was calm.
“There are too many,” Khara called out from the firing position near Baqir’s. Her voice was as measured as ever, but the urgency of her shots—rapid, snapping between targets as she leaned in and out of iron-flecked cover—betrayed her concerns.
“Focus on the essence,” Anna said. Ramyi’s blade lingered over Yatrin’s throat with a wavering edge. Two volleys clipped the edge of Baqir’s cover, showering them with plumes of pulverized clay and mud, filling the shadows with the odor of scorched dust. “Nothing but the essence, Ramyi. Become it.” While counseling the girl, Anna slid her own pack off her shoulders and withdrew the two ruj halves from their webbing. One trigger mechanism, locked in place for sixteen clicks of a cog’s teeth, and one barrel, heat-tempered with webweave. “Don’t be afraid.” She slotted the barrel in its housing, threaded the components together, and slid the sixteen-pouch cartridge into the central chamber. An explosive burst near the door as Anna disengaged the bolt lock and shouldered the weapon, training her eyes on the blast zone and its gray wisps. “We’ll make it out of here.”
Ramyi’s first cut was uncertain, yet manageable. Anna could feel it in the hayat’s bleed-off, the way Yatrin’s crescent configuration swarmed toward the open wound with hungry curiosity. In her periphery she watched the girl’s hands sweep with increasing confidence, arcing over the windpipe and past the major arteries, sweeping up to join the lines at their apex. Beyond the doorway, shadows flitted past her ruj’s barrel and Anna fired once, twice, three times, raking a still-smoldering brick oven and patches of blackened sand with her shots but failing to connect.
Yatrin’s neck gleamed with hayat’s pale luminescence.
“It’s done.” Ramyi’s smiling lips were an icy blue shimmer in its light.
“You’re not finished,” Anna said, firing once more as a fighter dashed from wall to wall. “Add the bridge.” Every second of pride gritted her teeth further. For all of Anna’s meditation and prolific rune revelations, she hadn’t been able to mimic—or merely parse—some of the designs Ramyi had gained while simply toying with awareness. It was a skillful waste. “Add it now!”
That startled the girl to action. Her blade slid back into the fresh protection rune, channeling hayat down parallel tracks to form a branching addition. As she carved the third line, a pair of fighters burst out of a nearby compound’s entryway and unleashed a coordinated volley, their shots chipping away the doorframe and drilling into Yatrin’s back. Plates across his ceramic vest exploded in white puffs.
Yatrin’s cry was low, buried. His flesh sizzled as it ejected the iron shavings, re-formed, and grew glossy with a sheen of sweat.
Rage flickered through Anna. It was a shadow of her former self, of the days before she’d tamed her mind, but forceful nonetheless. She let off three shots and eviscerated one shooter’s knees, forearm, and skull, picking apart his body before putting a fourth payload squarely into his partner’s jaw. The dust ceded to a sprawl of stringy limbs and blood. Khara’s desperation was resonating in her, fed by the fact that Ramyi’s best markings endured for an hour. Terror and haste would only bleed their efficiency.
“There!” Ramyi jerked her blade away, revealing the bridging rune: long, intricate rows, bisecting sweeps, clusters of dotted gouges, and an alien labyrinth encircling the entire design. It was beyond comprehension, stranger than anything Anna had ever glimpsed, and beyond memorization. Every bridge was unique and folded space itself, requiring meditation so thorough that there could be no divide between Ramyi and the tethering site. Not if they wanted to emerge intact.
Anna whistled again, this time competing with a tortured, rumbling scream from the market. Giants, she realized, wondering just how far they’d go to destroy her. She heard timber cracking and clay panels shattering and duzen-swollen feet stomping closer as Baqir slid behind the table.
Khara joined them when the air grew hot and charged, heralding the first volley from the hilltop’s machine. Both of the Nahorans’ faces were streaked with blood, dotted with wasp bites of shrapnel and scalding grit. She and Baqir knelt with their hands on Yatrin’s shoulders, shutting their eyes to the shop’s smoke-laden dust and shouts in river-tongue.
When Yatrin’s runes began to pulse, oscillating between cobalt and ivory, Anna gripped Khara and Ramyi’s shoulders. She glared at Ramyi, who then held them to join the circle in tandem with the cannon’s tinny howl.
Everything crystallized for an instant. Anna had no body, no singular mind, no presence beyond mere awareness of the shop as it imploded and vaporized in a hail of liquefied iron pellets.
She was there and not there. She was everywhere.
An unbroken ring consumed her awareness.
In the darkness of the overhang, which materialized as though she’d been plucked from a nightmare and thrust back into wakefulness, frigid wind kissed her face. Her fingers vibrated as they vented the energy that had, in some sense, killed her.
Baqir was lying on his side and coughing up bile. Khara knelt by his side, gently caressing his back and its chipped ceramic covering. Yatrin’s rune had taken most of the load,