Schisms. James Wolanyk
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“So what do you suggest?” Anna’s ribs were shrinking. She throbbed with an anger she couldn’t dissipate outside of meditation. Condemnation for things she couldn’t control—that was the trigger, she’d come to understand. Her mind was still alight with the valley’s firefly blasts.
“We’re squandering a precious resource,” Mesar said.
Jalesa nodded. “It’s a matter of necessity.”
“I’m not a child,” Anna said. “Speak plainly, would you?”
“You’ve seen how the Scarred Ones fight,” Mesar said. It was a bitter term among the fighting units, but at least it bore none of Anna’s involvement, no obvious watermark from a creator. For many of the Alakeph’s newer blades, facing them had become a brutal rite of passage. “Eventually we’ll need to match them, Anna.”
She’d felt their sentiments looming like a thunderhead, waiting to burst when her restraint was at its weakest. Dragging the feeling mind to the surface was the surest way to discredit the truths she held in her heart. “If you think they’re unbeatable, why waste time under a doomed banner?” She dug her fingernails into the back of her hand until she broke the skin. “They’re not champions. They’re mistakes.”
“And they can’t be undone.” The High Mother’s stare was haggard, pleading. “You can sway the present. You possess a weapon that none of us can fathom.”
Anna gazed into the amber depths of her tea. “But you want to control it all the same.”
“We want to live,” Adanna, one of the younger Halshaf hall-mothers, added with a twitching stare.
Mesar pushed his tea aside. “If we won’t apply markings, then we’ll need to put our weight behind Nahora. Not as mercenaries, but as allies.”
“I’ve seen Nahora’s heart,” Anna said. “We will not stand by them.”
“How can you be so stubborn?” Adanna asked.
Anna thrust a finger across the table. “If you live in fear, you’ll die in it too.” In the ensuing silence she realized how her voice had run amok, stunted though it was. She softened her brow and knitted her fingers on the tabletop, drowning in the Nest’s ever-present hum to center herself. Recently her rage had been a stitch woven into every action, every thought, every memory; it was something everybody sensed, including herself. But that which could be observed could be beaten. “Death has never been able to smother death—that’s the reality we need to accept. When we marched against them, we shared a vision: No one else would be marked. Whether you’ve sat here since the beginning or are still breaking in your boots, you know our path.”
“All paths lead somewhere,” the High Mother warned.
“Somewhere sounds like the Grove, right about now,” Jenis said. “Two hundred bodies and not a scratch of sand under our control.” He reached under the table, produced a bulbous flask of arak, and poured the clear liquid into his tea. “Ideals are the playthings of the dead.”
“Your ideal is slaughter,” Anna said. Words rusted in the back of her throat, vying for attention with memories of burning-eyed men and blood mist darkening the air and blades being forced out of unbroken flesh. “Even if you turn against them, my principles endure. We’ll keep trickling our operatives into their ranks, but nothing more. I’m not a hound you can bring to heel.” She stood, bristling at the military leaders’ emergent groans and folded arms and overplayed masks of frustration. “If anybody has words of value, I’ll be in my quarters. This chamber is plagued by echoes.”
* * * *
Even in solitude, stillness was an absent luxury. Her meditation was broken, constantly warped by visions of skin flapping in the breeze and a hawkeyed woman. Every time she lost her focus she opened her eyes to a towering mirror, but even that ritual was becoming tainted, reminding her of the scared, wrathful girl she’d once been. She practiced in loose robes to perceive herself: long, tangled, sun-bleached hair, scar-matted forearms, a rigid jaw sheltering a lifetime of secrets. When her mental fragments became too grotesque, she wandered into a small, dimly-lit study and delved into Kojadi tomes, somehow fueling her own loathing with the discrepancy between written wisdom and her inner state. Her garden of mindfulness, sprouted from Bora’s seed, had been growing blighted and fallow.
You were granted gifts, she thought while running her fingers along leather spines. How many breaths were stolen to bring you here?
Some breaths were still bleeding away, fed by the hayat she’d infused in their bones. Breaths like Shem’s, flowing into the fabric of this place, somehow both its lifeblood and output. In the earliest days she’d meditated by his body for hours at a time, but it demanded detachment. Nothing about the boy’s condition could be reckoned with in a lesser state of mind; she’d attempted it enough times to know its trauma.
Her finger hovered over a tome about reconciling with death, but—
“Anna.” Yatrin’s voice cut through meditative trances and jumbled, vapid thoughts alike, rooting her to the present and its ocher candlelight.
She turned to find his silhouette framed in the doorway. “How are you feeling?” Her flatspeak was more colloquial than ever, on account of its use as a shared tongue between them, but she’d never grown truly comfortable using it. She got the sense that Yatrin hadn’t, either.
“I’ll rest soon,” Yatrin replied, stepping into her chambers with a rushed bow. Without his plated vest he was narrower, as lithe as the leopards stalking Nahora’s steppes, but no less intimidating. His conditioning and awareness separated him from the brutes Anna had once served. “The others already are. The herbmen are nearly done with Baqir.”
Anna moved to her desk, rifling through ribbon-bound missives she’d yet to scan. “And Ramyi?”
“With the sisters. She’s shaken, but by tomorrow she ought to be settled.”
Anna was silent as she uncoiled the first ribbon. Two growing fields and a quarry settlement cleansed. Recommend evacuation of third territory. She set the scroll down, rubbing her temples. “Did they send you to talk some sense into me?”
“Sense?” Yatrin raised a brow. “The breakers came looking for you. Something about the coordinates you picked up.”
“That’s all they said?”
“All they’ll nestle in my ears,” Yatrin said. He examined the library’s crowded shelves with a distant gaze, as though mired in thoughts he didn’t care to entertain. “And there was one other thing, though I’m not sure if you’ll appreciate it.”
The inevitable didn’t sting as much as she thought. “It was a plant?”
Yatrin shook his head. “It’s authentic. Nahoran, that is.”
Relief and unease swelled through her at once. “So they must’ve broken it.” Their intelligence operatives retained their knowledge of the state’s encryption patterns with frightening accuracy, if Anna’s experience with their defectors was any indication.
“Not quite.” Yatrin clasped his hands behind his back and stared at the scarlet rug. “Foreign units rely on their own systems. No two are identical, really. Most of this cell’s fighters were lost after Malijad, not to mention the Scorch Campaign. You might recall the missives.”
Foreign agents. Yatrin’s forthcoming revelation was already festering in her mind by the time he spoke. It wasn’t difficult to recall the red-ink obituary of 407 Nahoran fighters they’d intercepted last spring. Most of the casualties had been from their Borzaq special units and a subsection of their Foreign Guard battalion: Viczera Company, led by—
“Konrad’s unit uses the system,” Yatrin said grimly.
It was jarring to think that the Rzolkan was still alive, considering how Anna’s parting glimpses of him had been stained by massacre and a crumbling city. At times