Schisms. James Wolanyk
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girl was ready, even if she didn’t know it. But readiness meant little in war.
Ramyi shifted her burlap bag’s strap higher up on her shoulder, stared into the tunnel’s burned sprawl, and stepped through. Despite her faltering steps across sand she remained upright, though wavering. She cast a final glance back at Anna, but now there was only dusk and broken flats. Her lips tightened and she issued a wordless command to the fighters before they started their long trek eastward, intent on the compound tucked within canyon walls.
Anna’s breaths faded, squirming in her throat.
She would’ve wished the girl luck, but luck meant nothing in war.
“Mesar,” Anna said to the white-clad masses gathered at the back of the warrens. The Alakeph commander shouldered his way into the candlelight, bowing his head. “Bring another ten men and a spare engagement kit.”
* * * *
There was ritual agency in donning weavesilk garments and a ceramic vest. Each time Anna pulled on the coarse layers and cinched the straps and fastened the buckles, she felt that she was omnipotent, that she could march against Volna and all its columns unscathed. When she crossed the tunnel and entered an expanse stricken by hot, parched wind, she was capable of saving anyone, stopping anyone, killing anyone.
But an hour into their march on Sadh Nur Amah’s outlying cliffs, she saw the truth of things.
She scaled the loose gravel and clay that spilled from the canyon’s throat, awash in sweat and shade, focused on the sound of gusts whistling into crags and boots hushing up the sand all around her. Her fighters were mum, vaguely crestfallen, with their ruji slung over their packs and shoulders slumped. There was no need for urgency, no expectation of recovering anything beyond the shriveled bodies Volna had left at its previous slaughtering pens. They were simply too late. The realization came as threads of smoke on a bone-white sky, as utter stillness where she expected groaning cogs.
“There could be survivors,” Yatrin said to his column, still picking his way up the slope with calm, labored steps.
Mesar stopped at Anna’s side and drank from his canteen. “Mercy isn’t their language.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Anna said. She spun to face the fighters in their loose columns, scowling at the flippant faces and wasteful, meandering tracks up the slope. If they had any bitter thoughts about her refusal to contact Nahora, they hid them well. Better than she hid them from herself. “Save your water for the ones we find.”
But deep down, perhaps worst of all, she suspected there was no one to find. She led the columns down trampled fissure paths and through canals embossed with overgrown kator rails, bringing them deeper into the maze of the canyon and its mandala-blossom awnings. There was no shock when they came upon the first body: a Gosuri woman shrouded in a patina of dust, her blood running down a hallowed staircase, sprawled out beside a torn blindfold and ritual beads. Next were the children tied to the splintered northern gates, their throats slit and eyes glinting like marbles under Har-gunesh’s kiss. The district’s refugee encampment still smelled of sparksalts and copper. Its soil was pitted and churned up and strewn with discarded signs of life—shredded tent fabric, crushed tin dolls, abandoned ovens spewing black smoke. Wrists and cheeks poked through the earth in patches of bronze and pale yellow and black. Tangles of iron bolts and wire-wrapped timber, fitted with wing-like canvas frames, dangled from the crags above like skinned fowl.
Anna’s nausea only rose when she realized their safe house was the epicenter of it all. Halfway down the corpse-strewn market road, surrounded by blackened sand and smoldering gouges in the cliff dwellings above, was the underground storehouse they’d rented from a sympathizer. Around its iron shutters were bodies, all curiously similar in death save for their armor, which ranged from Mesar’s handpicked fighters to bare-chested Huuri and disemboweled Volna raiders. Blood was a splotchy garnet wash across the path and its shawl-shrouded grain stalls.
“Search for Ramyi’s unit,” Anna said. She braced herself to find the girl’s corpse anywhere within the compound. Then she gazed skyward, listening to her fighters’ boots pad off into the ruins.
Several of Mesar’s men descended the ladder pits into the storehouse, prodding around and whispering in flatspeak until their captain whistled. “Vaults keep things in,” one of them later said, brushing the soot from his tunic, “but the sisters needed to get out. They must’ve flooded it with kerosene.”
“There aren’t many remnants to bring up,” his comrade added weakly.
But Anna’s attention remained with the rest of the compound, still glancing skyward to avoid any dark-haired Hazani girls who might’ve been sleeping in the dust. Screams from high up in the canyon, nestled within smoking wooden terraces and winding limestone passages, were her only relief.
Mesar’s men emerged from the cliffs’ wicker doors bearing ash-smeared babes and limbless, babbling Hazani. A pair of Huuri children with whip-scarred backs stumbled out of a potter’s lean-to, squinting against a blinding sun, offering their last scraps of flatbread with broken hands.
“We nourish the Ascended Ones,” the larger child rasped, flashing a bloody smile. “Accept our penance.” His legs buckled and he fell before Yatrin, before Anna, before a dozen fighters holding their breath high in their chest. “Absolve us of our punishment…”
Yatrin moved to lift the boy, aided by two of Mesar’s Alakeph, but Anna turned away. She bit back her tears with a grimace, training her gaze on Har-gunesh and his piercing rings above the canyon wall. This isn’t war, she told herself as another pair of children were carted past her, this is slaughter. It was unthinkable that anybody, even Volna, could sanction such madness. Even more unthinkable were the repercussions of her pride.
Nahora could’ve intervened. Nahora would’ve intervened. Her resignation blossomed with Mesar’s voice and High Mother Jalesa’s condemning stare.
“Anna,” Yatrin shouted. “They’re alive.”
Her fighters were waiting near a rusted water tank beside the gates, strung out in a weary row. Ramyi sat in the tank’s shade, cradling Baqir. No, not Baqir, not anymore. She was cradling a body. Blood had dried in crevices of his vest’s plates, on his leggings, on Ramyi’s hands and lap. It all stemmed from his jugular, slit by an excited cut any novice was apt to make. Even with a still face, his lips were curled like the edges of burned paper, smiling vaguely. Yet his dead stare was fixed on stained sand and pulverized bricks. Ramyi’s face was bruised, scratched, bleeding in bold red stripes. Her eyes flicked up at Anna and darted downward, and then she shifted the body onto the sand, shying away. The closer Anna drew, the more her fighters shrank back.
Anna towered over the girl. Any flutter of hope she’d experienced upon seeing the girl had fallen away, ceding to reality. Now there was only rage. “What did you do?”
“Anna,” Yatrin warned.
But she was still glaring at Ramyi, at the crown of black hair she bore as she gazed into the soil. The girl knew her order: Mark three others before Baqir. Three others who would be pulled from the catacombs in pieces and buried beside her chosen boy. “Did you leave them to die?”
Ramyi tucked her arms around her knees. “There were too many of them.”
“Did you hide while they were burning?” Anna whispered. “Did you hear them?”
“We were already too late!” Ramyi looked up with swollen eyes. “Half of us were gone before we even got to the ladders. They had these flying machines, I swear it—they came down on us. They rained fire on everything. On everybody.”
“But not you.”
“We should make our way back,” Mesar said from somewhere in the crowd.
But Anna wouldn’t—couldn’t—look away from the girl. “You could’ve saved more, you know.” She looked at what had once been Baqir, with its mask of dark sap and its soft grin. “You killed him.”
“They