Scions, page 24
“Volna would’ve slit every throat in Kowak.”
“Yeah,” he said, snorting, “maybe. It would’ve been better than what came next.”
Anna had heard tales of the famine, but they told her little in comparison to the southerner’s gaze. The war had bred corpses, but its aftermath had stolen the world’s spirit. How could she blame him for his wishes, his delusions? His mind was like her own—a product of all it had endured.
A tangle of voices rose just beyond the hut’s leather flaps. One voice stood out by virtue of its strangeness, its absence from her thoughts….
Ramyi entered the hut—or so it seemed.
There was no flesh to speak of, nor eyes, nor lips, nor strands of hair. Her entire body, peering out beneath dark cloth and a crumpled hood, was a mass of pulsing energy. Hayat. It hummed as though attuned to some resonance in the air, cool blue and scintillating, so utterly hypnotic—indeed, so familiar—that Anna could not look away.
I am you and you are me.
She rested her head against the splintered post and began to laugh. It was a deep, side-aching laugh, the sort she hadn’t known in too long. She laughed through the thumping of Ramyi’s boots, carrying on until she was breathless, until tears muddied her vision and spilled down wind-scratched cheeks.
“Did you crack her?” Ramyi asked the young man.
“No,” he said hastily. “She just—”
“It’s so simple,” Anna cried, her hair strewn across her face. “It was always so simple.”
Ramyi faced the young man. Her hayat condensed into a firm, oscillating sheen. “Leave us.”
The southerner gave a jerky nod and ducked through the flaps. His frantic steps crunched over snow, tapering away until they bled into the wind’s whispers.
“It’s over,” Ramyi said. “Is this what you wanted, Anna?”
Anna. What did it mean to be Anna, to be Ramyi? They were halves of a whole, something unbreakable and indivisible, their voices flowing between them like vibrations along a string.
“Don’t you see it?” Anna whispered.
Ramyi cocked her head to the side, studying Anna as though she were a deranged, pathetic beast. “I didn’t want them to die that way. You brought this upon them—you made me into a scourge.”
“You don’t understand,” Anna said. “I see what you—we—are.”
“Whether or not you’re cracked,” Ramyi replied, moving nearer and squatting at Anna’s eye level. “I need to know what you encountered. That knowledge is mine, Anna. It was always meant to be mine. I don’t want you to suffer like them, but we’re all bound by what we must do.”
“We’re hayat, Ramyi. Nothing more, nothing less. That’s our nature.”
“And what? Hayat sutured your throat? It set the bones in your hand?”
She nodded.
“Do you think I’m a fool?” Ramyi whispered.
“No.”
“It gave you its blessings,” she said, almost choking on the words, “and now you disgrace its name?”
“There is no it. We are it, Ramyi.”
“Where are its cuts? Where’s your essence?”
There was no way to make her understand. Even an essence was a barrier, a wall between it and others. No better than words, Anna supposed.
The northerner’s almond-shaped eyes, now gleaming like pearls, scrunched into wary slits. “You must believe yourself to be divine,” she said quietly. “All of these effigies—and for what? A coward?”
“Ramyi—”
“Once, I cared for you. I could spare us from this pain, Anna, but you resist me at every junction.”
“We can still preserve this world.”
“What’s worth saving, Anna? The selfishness? The wars? The pain of it all?”
“There are no boundaries,” Anna said hoarsely. “We are all of those things.”
“We are not,” she snarled through gritted teeth. “I don’t know what you’ve done with your time, but since my birth, I’ve sought one—just one—thing: To survive. This world takes and takes until we’re nothing but dust. We’re forced into birth and dragged into death. Why, Anna? Why?”
“Nothing survives forever.”
Ramyi’s hand slashed across Anna’s face in a powder-blue flash.
Her ears rang and her cheeks stung, raw with the bite of bony fingers. “You asked me what I saw,” Anna said, using her tongue to probe the bloody lining of her cheek. “I didn’t see anything, really. How can I explain it to you? Before I wasn’t seeing—I was living in a realm of illusions.”
“Then you’ll die with clarity, won’t you?”
Anna watched the northerner’s form swaying vigorously in the candlelight, splendid and cobalt, alluring by virtue of its utter strangeness. “If you wish to kill me.”
“Is this what it comes to, Anna? Making yourself into a martyr? Is that why they’ve scrawled your image on these wicked stones?”
“Perhaps,” she whispered.
“You can’t even make use of its power.”
She felt the air stirring over her skin, the warmth in her fingertips, the kernel of hayat in the center of all she was….It coursed through her entire being as a silent symphony, formless, limitless, a seed of all that could ever manifest. “Yet.”
“Show me its truths,” Ramyi said, “or I’ll bleed them out of you.”
“Start cutting.”
Ramyi stood and squared her shoulders. “After all these years, it doesn’t surprise me that you’d squander this sacred knowledge. In my hands, it could shape any world we desired. We could purge every wicked being.”
“You, not we,” Anna said. “My life is not worth annihilation.”
“You must think I’m seeking the revelations for my own gain.”
“Jenis is. He used me and he’ll use you, just like—”
“Keep his name out of your mouth.”
“Like Gideon,” Anna finished. “It ends here, with me. We’ve paid for peace in blood.”
“My sister’s blood.”
“She never would’ve wanted this.”
Ramyi’s eyes narrowed. “How dare you speak of what she wanted? Her purpose lives on through me, and through me alone.”
“Her only wish was to spare you from war.”
“Ignorance,” she hissed. “That’s all you cling to. You’ve never known the way of her circle, nor their aims.”
“They were her aims, not yours,” Anna said sharply. “Perishing is not peace.”
“If she were here, I would know everything: every word and wish she ever had. But she’s gone, Anna, lost to the void for which we’re all destined. You sent her there. But the vision of the Starborn will not be killed so easily. I’ll ensure that it comes to pass. A world without whips upon our backs, and without the poison of blasphemous tongues.”
Again, Anna listened to the silence—the silence in her mind, in the wind, in the encircling forest. She met Ramyi’s stare until the room darkened around them. “When I’m given the chance, I will kill you. Forgive me.”
The northerner’s flesh took on a static haze, burgeoning with something just beneath the surface. Something furious, something vile. Ramyi pulled a blade from the inner folds of her cloak. “This will be your penance.”
* * * *
Near the end of the first hundred cuts, Anna lost count. The marks were short and shallow, evoking the ridged flesh of the crocodiles Anna had seen in the kales’ menagerie. At times she imagined she was still in Malijad, still in the Apiary, still young and afraid of everything. But now she was drained of fear. Pain was a liquid sensation, a second skin that sheathed her and radiated from the crown of her head to the cracked nails of her feet, tethering her to now, to this eternal instant.
She’d spent an hour watching Ramyi, trying to parse the torpor in the northerner’s eyes between every prick of the blade. There was nothing to decipher, however. Ramyi worked mechanically, wordlessly, seeking out bare patches of flesh like a crow prowling worm-laden fields.
Anna’s attention now lingered on her upper arms, which were webbed with veins of trickling blood. She was captivated by the sight: bright red upon hayat’s opal tones, a weird landscape of rivers and cracked-flesh tundra and energy. Is this how I dissolve? She’d experienced the mind’s unraveling, of course, but a body was something tangible and fragile. It heightened its own senses, almost as though courting death, tempting it with percussive heartbeats and swells of ecstasy.
Then the slicing ceased. Ramyi stepped back, her form reduced to a shadowy blot in Anna’s periphery.
“Enough of this,” Ramyi said meekly. “Please, Anna—just teach me.”
Anna felt the blood race down to her ankles. “I am.”
“No, you’re dying. Why are you making me do this? Do you think it brings me joy?” Tears flowed over her cheeks in crystal threads. “I just want the pain to end.”
“Come closer,” Anna whispered. “Let me teach you everything.”
Ramyi approached her post with timid steps, almost as though being dragged forward, compelled by something foreign to her own mind. She came so close that her breaths, warm and faint, tingled over the gashes on Anna’s neck.
Anna craned her neck forward, grimacing through the pain. She couldn’t decipher the bulge in the easterner’s eyes—was it fear, regret? It didn’t matter, did it?
She kissed Ramyi’s forehead.
“What is this?” Ramyi whispered, jerking away in an instant. “Why?”
But the strain was too much. Anna’s head slumped forward, her vision suddenly dark, thick with impending death. Her chin rested upon slick, stinging flesh. She smiled faintly at the pressure across her lips, although now it was a memory, a fading, weightless thing.
Shouts rose in the nearby woods.
Anna opened her eyes to the muddy sight of figures streaming into the hut, unable to discern anything beyond the sloshing of snow and the drumming footfalls and a large, intrusive silhouette.
“Stand him up there.” The speaker’s river-tongue commanded familiar attention, still carrying the rasp of every order it had barked and every watchtower fire it had tended.
Jenis moved into Anna’s field of vision with the jingling of buckles and chains. He smelled like wet straw and ale. “Seems you’ve had better days, Kuzalem.”
She glanced into the man’s tangled, shadowy features. “I’ve known worse.”
“Southern, through and through.” His belly laugh clawed at Anna’s ears. “The sooner you share, the sooner we cut you down. Figure you know the formula well enough by now.”
“You’re in for a long wait, then.”
Jenis seized her chin. “Listen here, sukra.” He squeezed till her teeth ached. “Haven’t forgotten the days in the Nest, have you? Said you’d do anything to win. Anything to break their backs. This is it, this is the time. Hero or traitor—what’ll it be?”
“We won,” Anna managed through the blood. “There’s nothing left to break.”
“Soft belly you’ve got. You think ashes mean we’ve won? Babes starving, our men in fucking chains? Is this what we buried our sons for? We’re not dead, girl, but we’re not alive, either. Just got new handlers. Don’t you think we’ve fought under their banners long enough? Malchym, Kowak, Golyna—they fancy us as hounds, nothing more. Now we’ll seize the yoke.”
“And how will you take it? Killing those who have never harmed you?”
“Never harmed us,” Jenis sneered. “Happened the same as it’s gone to you—a thousand little cuts: writs, selling land, binding families. When nobody’s got blood on their hands, they all do.”
“You do, too,” Anna said. “You’ve just given Volna new life.”
“We’ve cut away the fat.”
“You mean Hazan.”
“And all the rest,” Jenis said, leaning ever closer. “No more masters. They won’t use us again.”
“You don’t want any masters,” Anna breathed, her tongue slick with a film of blood, “but you’re still a slave to the hatred in your heart. Death will liberate me.”
“Still believing those bedside tales, Kuzalem? Prayin’ for the Grove and its soft moss?”
“I don’t believe,” she said. “I know.”
“Then you’re more fucked than the rest of us.”
Jenis angled himself toward Ramyi, briefly affording Anna a glimpse of the hut, the assembled southern fighters, and the towering slab that had been propped up near the doorway. The latter sight was the only thing alarming enough to capture Anna’s attention, however. The rest of her world was washed-out, transient: Light and shadow smeared together as a blurry canvas; dull, knotted voices crept past her. Focusing through a wildfire of pain, Anna examined the rusted back panel of the slab.
A pair of limp, muddy hands protruded over the upper lip. Prickly blossoms, fifty-pronged and immediately recognizable in spite of the distance, wormed over their fingers like a second skin.
It was one of the few sigils she could never forget:
A tracker’s essence.
“No sense in drowning the unruly pups,” Jenis said with a nod toward the slab. “Just need to change the hand that feeds.”
Anna strained against the ropes. “You won’t gain anything from him.”
“Oh, it’s well past gaining anything,” Jenis said. “Time to build a new order, Kuzalem. And orders need throat-cutters just as sorely as visionaries.”
Ramyi pushed through the cluster of fighters. “Jenis—”
“Bogat,” he snapped, rounding on the northerner with clenched fists. “What’s it now?”
“If she dies, we lose it all,” Ramyi whispered.
“No way ’round it,” Jenis said, glaring at Anna. “Not the first time her ilk’s been stretched out. Stubborn ones, that’s what they are.” He paused, eyeing Ramyi with disdain that soon crumbled into groans. “Perk your ears: If she won’t make her marks here, she’ll do it on some other scrap of soil. Simple choice.”
“We can take her with us.”
“What for?” Jenis asked. “Want us at her feet, slack-jawed and needy? Just how she wants you—just how she’s had you.”
Ramyi’s lips tightened. “Let’s finish it.”
Glancing at the slab’s attendants, Jenis stepped aside and gave a shrill whistle. His beard was liquid silver in the candlelight, still damp with its crust of melting snow, so thick that it nearly buried a savage grin. It seemed that he’d never known a greater pleasure. He squirmed as the slab rotated, his eyes hungry, passionate….
Anna understood why.
Dozens of thin, rusting stakes jutted up through Lukas’s flesh, pinning him to the slab as though he were nothing more than a doll, or a butcher’s latest carving. Living, dead—the distinction felt arbitrary. His sigils pulsed along in a torpid rhythm, but his body was curiously still, as slack as any beast lifted by the scruff of its neck. A forest of blackened tips sprouted from his eye sockets, his lips, his tongue, his throat, his chest, his belly, his manhood, his fingers and legs and the expanses between them.
“What’ve you done to him?” Anna whispered.
Even Ramyi’s stare traversed the ceiling of the hut, desperate to flee somewhere, anywhere. Her throat bobbed spastically.
“Done nothing to him.” Jenis clapped a palm against the slab’s back plate. “Couldn’t do a thing if we wanted it—this kretin’s rune has bought a name of its own.”
Anna’s breaths were hot, short. “Take him down.”
“Just what I had in mind.” Jenis whistled again, this time adding the flourish of a mocking bow.
The southern fighters gathered around the slab, gingerly angling their hands to grasp Lukas’s punctured limbs in a sea of points and oxide-crusted stumps, then began working to free the body. Even as they strained and tugged and tore, Lukas was slack, silent—the hut filled with soft squelching. Blood frothed around vanishing wounds.
Then, in one concerted tug, they lifted Lukas’s torso from a row of stakes, leaving his eyes and cheeks and tongue freckled with blubbery crimson tissue. Spinal fluid crackled in fresh cavities.
Jenis pointed to the packed earth before Anna. “Here.”
Still gripping his arms, the fighters carried the body as instructed and stood it upright. For a moment, Lukas remained unresponsive, his fingers dangling and blood twisting in whirlpool pinpricks. Then his nostrils twitched.
Lukas jerked his head back and let out a bestial scream, but the pain was surely nothing more than a fading inconvenience: Patches of split flesh converged; his sigils leaped to startled attention; eyeballs sprouted like lustrous eggshells, their sclera clouding as a raw stream of pigment birthed irises and pupils.
Anna shut her eyes. She should’ve been able to watch—perhaps been able to enjoy it—but she couldn’t. It wasn’t like her dreams at all. In that world, she had despised him, blamed him, wanted him to suffer as badly as herself. She had torn out his teeth and burned his kin. Yet now, with the mental constructs of the old mind vanquished, what remained? There was no villain, no victim—those were labels she had imposed upon reality. There was only a living being in pain.
There was hatred toward life itself.
“Ears still sharp?” Jenis cooed, propping up Lukas’s chin with a single finger. “Dunno how much you caught of our jabbering.”
Lukas gazed at his once-comrade. “All of it.”
“So, what’ll it be?” Jenis asked. “Slit the sukra’s throat and you’ll be pissing wine in Kowak by the full moon.”
“If not?”
“If not,” Jenis echoed, laughing at the suggestion. “You fell in with the wrong lot. This is how you redeem it, boy.”
“We should’ve stomped you out.”
“Us?” Jenis asked. “Interesting eye for history, you’ve got.” He turned toward Anna, gesturing up and down at Lukas’s shaking form. “Hasn’t told you a lick about where he’s from, has he?”
