Scions, page 13
“Was it?”
A hard swallow. “Honest dealings, Anna.”
“I never said I was honest,” she whispered. “Perhaps I’m something more horrible than you could ever fathom. Perhaps I’ll make you walk this world to the end of your days.”
Lukas’s eyes snapped to Nuhra, but the woman did not look at him. She sat on the edge of the bed, eyes scampering back and forth amid chaotic thoughts.
“Do you think these comforts will save you?” Anna paced around the gloom, running her fingers over the tables’ spreads of flowery nerkoya piles and smeared ashes. “What happens when you lose your taste for these base stimulations? Will you turn to carving your own flesh, just to feel something?” She loomed over him, her lips aching in the curve of something that was not quite a smile. “I own you and you will not be released until we have her.” Anna glanced at Nuhra. “Either in shackles or in the Grove.”
“She must be preserved,” Nuhra whispered.
“Shut up,” Lukas said, whirling toward the woman as though he intended to strike her. “You and your scarred sukry can burn in the flats, for all I care. Only deal she’s got is with me.”
Nuhra’s gaze did not falter. “Her life is—”
“Heed my words,” Anna said coldly. “She’s lost to the sands. This is no time to speak of her fate—not yet. If she lives, she’s wounded. But she’ll burrow now.”
“Burrowing,” Lukas growled. “Seems you’ve mastered that.”
Anna folded her arms and drew a long, bitter breath. She could not hold rage within herself; not as she once could. After a moment of creaking floorboards and brittle silence, she leaned against the wall.
“Did the dead man speak?” Nuhra wandered out of the nerkoya haze and into the light, her eyes bold and questioning.
“Barely,” Anna said. “His breaths were fleeting.”
“He revealed something, then.”
Anna looked away. “He knew Bora. He said she waited for me.” She met Nuhra’s eyes, sensing the woman’s bewilderment, then looked to Lukas. “Did you know about this?”
Silence returned.
“He was all we had,” Anna continued. “His people are out there. They could help us, I know it. Bora’s people.”
“Didn’t have any people,” Lukas snapped.
“So you believe,” Anna said. “Spare me your ignorance.”
“Perhaps his face is known to our breakers,” Nuhra said. “They could come by morning.”
“Perhaps.” Anna thought of the man and his pain, of how he’d refused the runes that could’ve preserved him time and time again. Few men held such conviction. His death felt like something ancient, something she’d learned about in the kales and memorized like a poem, thick with his fading words and pervasive stillness. Some of his words cycled into her awareness, lingered there, pricked at her: the Apiary. It roiled up from the maelstrom of the day’s violence in a black surge. “The Apiary,” she said softly.
Nuhra tilted her head. “Sister?”
“He spoke only about that,” Anna said. “The Apiary. That was all he could think to say.”
“Perhaps you misheard.” There was a coy edge in Nuhra’s voice.
“What is it?” Anna glanced at both at them, reading the subtle cues that they passed between themselves. Something dark hung in their stares. “He said I would know myself there.”
“And what?” Lukas asked. “Doesn’t matter what you know. The girl’s the aim.”
“He said I could find his people,” Anna said to Nuhra.
“Initiation,” Nuhra whispered.
“Abandon this vagueness,” she said sharply. “If you know what it is, you’ll tell me.”
Nuhra offered a gentle, trembling bow. “I’ll have a runner sent to the nerashi platforms. Prepare a pack, dear sister, and spend the darkened hours bringing stillness to your mind. You will need such clarity for what lies ahead.”
“A nerash?” Anna blinked at Nuhra. “Where are we going?”
“To the kales of the fallen Emirahni.”
The name was old, rusting over in her mind. Emirahni. She recalled its jagged edge as Lukas cleared his throat.
“We go alone, no boys in white,” he whispered. “Malijad surely remembers their scent.”
Chapter 10
It was difficult for Anna to hate Malijad. It was not a testament to the city’s allure, a concession to some conflicted note within herself, but rather a blunt, practical truth: It was the nature of men and deeds to be hated. Malijad was an entity beyond fixing, vast and convulsing and woven from the flux between things, blossoming into and out of hateful affairs.
Or so her memory had assured her.
But as the nerash cut down over the mesa’s shoulder, unveiling an expanse of shadow-raked flats and cracked basins, all of it arid, desaturated by the wooly drift of the evening’s cloud cover, she realized that Malijad had died long ago.
All that remained was a cancerous husk with its pustules spread to the horizon. The skyline was craggy and eroded, swelling up from districts fanned out like black rose petals below. Every canal was dry and dark, an infected vein, snaking out into the gullies that ringed the basin.
She did not hate it; she feared it.
“Seems like yesterday,” Lukas said, his burlap face pressed to the window. “Does it call you back, Anna?” The engines thrummed. “Calls me back.”
“I didn’t believe what had been said of this place,” Anna said. A set of terraced cliffs passed beneath them, cluttered with the ragged encampments of Gosuri tribes. Below the flesh-walled tents she saw fire-lit droby pacing within their pens, Huuri and manskin alike, gazing up at the nerash in mute wonder. “We never marched on Malijad.”
“You severed its head. Wasn’t long after that when it marched on itself.”
It had crossed her mind once or twice while in the monastery. Somehow Volna had always seemed insatiably evil, sustained by its own wrath, far beyond the consequences of assassinations. She’d envisioned new leaders rising from the depths of the hive and clawing their way into power, seizing whatever gaps had been left in the wake of death. But that did not occur. It had only taken a year for their territories to devour themselves from within, to splinter and dissolve into something malleable for the new order.
Nobody dared to mold Malijad with their hands, however. It was a rotting corpse, still crowded with blood-bloated flies, withering into dust under the Cruel God’s stare.
Nuhra’s breathless chanting bubbled up through the engines’ drone. It was strange to hear her voice after a day of silence. She’d been withdrawn since mentioning the Apiary, not only wordless but numb to the world at large, tucked away in a shell of constant meditation. If she had anything to say about their destination, she seemed resolute to stifle it. Lukas only mirrored her reservations, and at times he’d appeared hesitant to harm her with that truth, deeply concerned by what it might do to her.
That was the most unnerving thing of all.
“You know what it is, don’t you?” Anna asked. There was no time for further pretenses, for comfortable silence. There hadn’t been any semblance of those things since Anna had left the brothers and entered the jaws of a beast.
Lukas was slow to answer. “Little to be gained in what I know.”
“Tell me what it is.”
“It’s northern madness,” he said. “You really think Bora’s kin are drifting around? That we’d find ’em like this?”
“This,” Anna echoed. “What do you mean, this?”
“It’s all built on whispers and smoke,” Lukas said. For a moment that seemed to be all he’d surrender, but eventually he glanced down the aisle toward the nerash’s operator, paused, then checked if Nuhra was still in her trance. His voice lowered until it was a razor upon iron. “You know the flatlands, don’t you? All that harping on fate?”
Anna nodded.
“Back before the pup, the Emirahni were headed by the old hound. Real fire in his eyes, I’ll tell you. But he lived for the days of ruins, you see, with all his relics and broken jars and tongues that sleep in dead cities. Drove him to the edge.”
“The Kojadi,” Anna said, recalling the vast galleries and sealed chambers she’d once explored in the kales. “Their relics were from the Kojadi.”
“Don’t tell me you believe it.”
“They left their markings upon this world, did they not?”
Lukas sighed. “Doesn’t matter, when you reach the thick of it. The Orzi’s cracked head was stuffed with it all. Wanted to know the old rites, the old ways…wanted killers from the old breed.”
Even Anna’s gaze fell upon Nuhra, wondering if the northerner could hear the tender words passing between them.
“See, in the old way, it wasn’t a qora’s business to sort out corpses from saviors,” Lukas continued. “They had the Apiary for that.”
Anna’s mouth was dry. “Is it alive?”
“In a sense,” he said. “Make it out and you’ve got the weight of the stars behind your blade. If you don’t leave, your trail ends there. The purest test, he called it.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You think I do?” Lukas shook his head. “Not even Teodor would set foot in the fucking thing. Still had bones from the last sukry they tested.”
“But he was certain,” Anna whispered, remembering the dying man’s fervency and haggard breaths. “He told me I would find something here.”
“Don’t get your truth from me, then. This is Nuhra’s realm. Korpa’s mind might be gone, but she has a way of things.”
“You wouldn’t have let her bring me here if you thought it was for nothing.”
Lukas leaned his head against the glass, folded his arms stiffly, and shut his eyes. “She has a way.”
* * * *
Even while traversing the nerashi strips west of the city, where retaining walls cast ripples of deep, frigid shadows over the flats, Anna sensed Malijad’s reluctance. It was reluctance in a stark, opaque form, as tangible as the fumes that streamed up into cooling air. Travelers trudged past with heavy shoulders and heavier brows, scowling at the embers of daylight on the horizon.
At the nearby terminal, they boarded a kator that had trundled out of the northern expanse. It was soldered in spots, blackened in others, stippled with the bite marks of shells and ruji alike. Flesh-peddlers claimed the rearmost pods, smoking pipes in the doorway while their crop of fresh bodies stirred and groaned in the darkness.
The only place to stand was a patch of rusted railing, well within eyesight of several provisionary fighters. There was nothing threatening about them, not yet: Most of the new breed were young, orphans; if not merely living like them, eager for salt or a minor land writ or a morsel to eat. They did not seem to know Anna’s face, and if they did, they did not care. The vacuous nature of their stares suggested that they did not care about much at all.
Their kator howled with the crack of bursting cylinders, then lurched and squealed forward, chugging along a mottled track.
Metal rattled beneath Anna’s feet, but it was too dark to see anything aside from her hands gripping the rail, thin and ghastly, almost glowing. Her vision was consumed by the city, by its skylines and shattered towers, by the sun smoldering like red filament as it shrank away, by every ruined peak rising and darkening by the instant. But the city lent her the gift—that rugged, fearless defiance of death—that she had cultivated as a girl she no longer knew. She gazed at the lights now flickering in distant recesses because she was curious, not beholden. She considered how small they were, how insubstantial they seemed when weighed against the city’s lightless veil. For a moment, she felt that she could lift a finger, touch it to the yellow blots, and snuff them out one by one.
They arrived at the terminal, but even there, Anna could not shake the strange sadness of that thought.
Malijad colored them in turn, sapping Lukas of his barbs, pulling Nuhra deeper into whatever state she’d reached on the nerash. Near the markets, a lanky, sallow-skinned guide exchanged brief words with Lukas before leading them to a group of rib-lined horses near the markets. The shallow glint in his eyes practically sang for Volna’s return.
“Quick on their feet,” the man babbled in river-tongue, droning off as though he’d forgotten he was even speaking to them. “Not ones to spook, either.”
Anna noted the pink scars wreathing their torsos. It was no wonder that they’d lost their fear. What puzzled her, above all else, was how the man had kept them out of a butcher’s stall. Most of the monastery’s horses had been stolen over the past two years, carved up or otherwise sold in Kowak, but there was no sense in punishing the desperate.
They rode in a column under the pink baubles of hanging lanterns, moving in a nervous canter between the districts that were not lined with high, serrated fences and perched marksmen. The silhouettes of discarded machines, haunting and black and teeming with sparrows, ascended from the ruins around them like an iron forest.
There was danger here, Anna knew, but somehow she felt above it all. She rode with her hood down and the mare’s reins loosely in her grip, slumping back so she absorbed the saddle’s every thump. To these people, she was nobody, another faceless killer they judged from the shelter of shuttered windows and latched doors.
But when they reached the gates of the kales, she was a girl once again.
Not a girl, but the girl, the one she encountered in dreams and warm, fleeting memories of spring fields and blackberries. The girl who had slept with teardrops drying on her cheeks, waiting, wishing for the day when wicked men begged her to kill them. The girl who had not seen wickedness in herself.
They descended from their horses and stood beneath the arch. There were gouges in the masonry, entire blocks removed where hinges had once been fixed.
“Best to be quick,” the guide murmured. He gathered the horses by their reins and led them across the road, pausing briefly to eye the Huuri beggars huddled nearby.
It was difficult for Anna to remember how the courtyard had looked—it was empty now, picked bare of whatever tools or tiles had been left for the scavengers. All that remained was a stretch of darkness and silvery moonlight upon broken soil, and behind that, the looming shape of the kales. Smoke did not leech into the skies as it had during Anna’s stay, nor did lanterns burn in the countless notches and chambers of the southern facade. There were a few guttering fires that shone here or there across the upper levels, but they did not belong to the artisans and poets that had once graced the halls.
“Do you feel it calling, sister?” It was Nuhra’s devotion, not her abruptness, which made Anna flinch. Surely she felt that call—her voice was even, smooth. She looked at Anna and blinked.
Anna’s hand strayed to the yuzel beneath her cloak. “Let’s go.”
* * * *
The emptiness was truly what gnawed at her. War had familiarized her with darkness and stillness, even the sort of stillness that caused every step to screech and snag on her attention, but it had never lent comfort to desolation. In its death throes the kales had remained seemingly immortal, writhing and crumbling, but never able to be killed. In fact, Anna had occasionally wondered if it took some delight in the spectacle it hosted. But as she wandered past scorched marble frescoes, shattered statues, and fountains buried by mounds of windswept sand, she was struck by the tragedy of it all. Now it was a gallery of dead things, dead times, of man’s foolishness in believing that beauty could endure in such a place. Every chipped banister and blackened parlor carried a sense of guilt beyond explanation.
Lukas and Nuhra were the only shapes that moved around her in the gloom, marked by lanterns that swung on whining metal hooks. Anna had not heard anybody else during their ascent. It was an enormous structure, certainly, but even the most delicate sounds—a muffled cough, a foot scraping over stone—could roll through an entire wing with ease. She wondered if the scavengers were asleep in spite of the city’s nocturnal tendencies, then wondered if they had stumbled upon other visitors before, and had simply learned to hide from those who would hurt them.
She chose to believe that they were sleeping.
Halting at the top of a narrow staircase, Nuhra lowered the lantern to her waist and stared out into the blackness. Her eyes had a milky gray gloss in the scant lighting.
Anna examined the woman sidelong. It was not indecision, as far as she could tell. She’d never seen this wing, had not even known it existed, but Nuhra’s steps were too assured to cast doubt on her familiarity with the kales. The woman had led them in constant ascent, taking them far higher than Anna’s former chambers, pausing only to listen to the wind that raked through colonnades and shattered oriel windows. They had to be nearing the rooftop gardens that Anna held at the fringes of her memory.
“Keep those boots shuffling,” Lukas growled at Anna’s back. “No place for you two to lay a bedroll.”
“The call,” Nuhra said gently.
And in the breathless quiet that followed, Anna heard the call, too. It was a muddied drone, rising in dull crescendos, withering to a weird hum, folding in on itself in sporadic cycles. But it did not call her to come forth—it warned her.
Just ahead, scarcely illuminated in rusty shades by Nuhra’s lantern, was a thin wooden door that had been sealed with crossbars and flaking latches.
“This is the farthest I’ll go,” Anna said. She looked at Nuhra, then at the blackness gathered around Lukas’s mask. “I’ve given you both grace in holding back your words, but this is where it ends. Tell me precisely what’s ahead.”
“Clarity,” Nuhra said, as though it somehow eased Anna’s mind. She studied Anna’s hard lips, her furled brow. “None have been called to this ritual in a hundred years, sister. But this world has chosen you. You will be our warrior.”
