Schisms. James Wolanyk
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away on the breeze.
Rising from her knee, Anna slid off her pack and retrieved the scroll case. There was no guarantee it was worth anything, much less reliable in her hunt, but it was her only chance for progress amid ruins. A seed of sorts.
“Just breathe.” Khara was still touching Baqir, but she’d shifted her attention to the mirage-like flickering of the rear wall’s basalt. “Anna, it’s open again.”
Far in the distance, beyond an expanse of rock and silver dunes, the valley twinkled with blossoms of white light. Distorted aftershocks arrived with groans and playful flurries of sand.
She turned away and stared at the Nest’s warped opening. There was no salvation for those trapped in a war they hadn’t engineered nor fed—only sacrifice.
Anna gripped the scroll case till her knuckles ached. You have to sprout, little seed.
Chapter 2
The Nest was never somber, never sleeping. There was no nightfall to settle it and no sunrise to rouse it and besides, there was far too much to be done. For every hour that passed in the true world, the Nest had another rotation of fighters deploying or returning, another lesson for foundlings, another intercepted communiqué being dissected in the tacticians’ chambers. Everybody labored and hauled themselves to their bunks on their own schedule, but nobody truly rested.
At least Anna didn’t.
She’d received High Mother Jalesa’s request for a meeting just after slipping into her bath and dabbing a cloth at her scrapes. Less than an hour after their return, judging by the thick glob of sand still bleeding downward in her hourglass, and certainly before the breakers had any hope of parsing their recovered pattern. Even so, she hurried to dress and join the others in the lower chambers.
On her way she passed a group of fresh arrivals: foundlings that had been pulled from the cinders near Tas Alim’s monastery. They marveled at the corridors and caverns just as Anna had once done, taking in the ethereal warp and weft of it all, gaping at how the hayat’s blue-white strands pulsed like arteries within obsidian tiles and walls and vaulted ceilings. Their guide was Mother Basarak, whose smile never seemed to falter.
“It was all his work,” Basarak said in flatspeak, running a hand over marbled wall panels. Her eyes were as bright as the children’s. “Shem loves you so much that he built this place, all for you.”
They giggled and murmured to one another, giving Anna pause in the adjacent doorway. Seeing children be children was everything she’d hoped for, but after all the misery they’d endured, she couldn’t fathom it. Some burdens never truly faded. She ascribed some of it to Basarak’s charisma, of course—the Mother was patient and loving, perhaps on account of her youth. Youth. Anna’s thoughts snagged on that word, on the irony that Basarak had as many years as her, if not more. But Basarak was young. She’d notched more years on her belt, but had lived through far less.
Anna heard the world-worn age in the children’s laughter, and it gnawed at her stomach.
After descending a stairwell with breathing steps and traversing a garden with a reflective pool on its ceiling, the latter swirling with Halshaf adjutants and scribes in meditative circles, she slid aside the meeting chamber’s screen and entered.
Most of the vital faces were already seated at a circular table with a needle-thin coil as its base, hands wrapped around glass bulbs filled with steaming mint tea. The hayat walls in this room were darker, as though some molten material in the linking corridors had cooled and coalesced into droplets behind sealed doors. Lamps glowed atop the bookshelves encircling the chamber.
“You don’t need to wait for me,” Anna said as she settled onto her cushion. Nobody replied. They all just watched her with tight lips and hunched shoulders. She could sense unspoken sentiments as intrinsically as the sigils beneath their skin. “You have our attention, High Mother.”
“We’ve exchanged some words,” High Mother Jalesa said. Everyone appeared guilty, but she was the most skilled at hiding it. “If I’d known how long your excursion took, I wouldn’t have—”
“I’m here, so speak freely.”
Mesar, one of the Alakeph veterans from Malijad, cleared his throat. “Have you seen the combat reports from last cycle?”
Sixteen dead, fifty-two wounded. “Fewer and fewer with every engagement,” Anna said.
“True enough,” Mesar replied, “but it’s not purely a game of numbers.”
Anna frowned. “Do you think their deaths brighten my dreams?”
“That’s not what I meant, morza.”
“Volna can afford to bleed,” Jenis rasped. He was an aging man, scarred from forehead to chest, and his six years in Kowak’s first ranks added some gravity to his insights. “Means nothing if we hit a column and slit every last throat. Next dawn, twice as many come marching for us. Like locusts.”
Anna drew a slow breath, trying to fight the first bristles of anger in her jaw. “What do you think our aim is? Mere slaughter?” Some of the Alakeph captains and Nahoran defectors exchanged glances, but none dared to speak. Her voice was broken but biting, and her gaze tucked the fighters’ tails between their legs. “High Mother Jalesa, how many foundlings have we sheltered in the last cycle alone? How many settlements did we evacuate?”
“Bandages merely hide an infection,” Mesar said. “Your vision is admirable, morza, but you tasked us with handling matters of violence. We must be practical.”
“If casualties are your concern,” Anna said in cutting tones, “perhaps you should restructure your tactics.”
Jenis grunted, shifting his legs on the cushion with an audible crack. “Nothing’s free.”
“Ask the foundlings if the trade was fair,” she whispered. “Better yet, ask the brothers who died for them.”
“It’s simply not sustainable,” Mesar said.
Five or six captains mumbled in agreement, pretending to stir their tea or smooth the folds of their robes to avoid meeting Anna’s eyes.
“Chasing ghosts doesn’t help,” Jenis said.
Anna bit the lining of her cheeks. “If we sever the head, the body withers.”
A wheezing laugh, short but easily discerned from the murmurs, brought silence. Gideon Mosharan, the old Nahoran breaker, crinkled his white brow and meshed his crooked fingers on the tabletop. “A beast with a thousand heads. Who’s to say which directs its hands?”
True or not, it lent doubt where plenty already existed. Anna had seen their faces turning grimmer, if not more jaded, with every strike she carried out in the tracker’s footsteps. Nobody doubted the stillness of her mind, or the way she sublimated her fears as force, but they recognized the vengeance in her, an ever-burning coal at the center of her being. It enslaved her.
“There are other avenues to consider,” the High Mother said.
Anna scoffed. “Such as?”
“Golyna’s proposal was never retracted.”
“And Krev Aznaril turned down our offer yesterday,” Mesar cut in. “And Krev Sul’afen and Krev Hefasha shipped their best columns to Malchym just before that. Three families in one cycle, turned or swept from the bargaining mat. And not for lack of salt or bars, but from fear. There’s enormous danger in placing hands upon the backs of the damned.”
“I trained Suf’afen’s frontline sukry,” Jenis cackled. “No sweat shed. I know how to break ’em.”
“That’s not the point,” Mesar said. “We need a standing army’s spine to brace ourselves.”
“Kowak isn’t off the table, either,” the High Mother added.
Mesar’s eyes hardened as he lifted his cup with both hands.