Scions, page 5
“Do you still believe that?”
Nuhra shrugged. “Some may be.”
“I’ve known beasts,” Anna said softly, “but not all of them carried blades. And some with blades were crueler than any beast I’ve known.”
“Is that so?”
“Beasts lack a mind capable of understanding wrath, but men—men choose to ignore their thinking mind. There isn’t a beast in this world that roams the land, eternally seeking out things to burn or bleed or rape. Men look upon those pursuits as games. Worse yet, they look upon them with honor.”
“Ah,” Nuhra said, widening her grin. “That’s why you hold your heart from me, is it? Do you think that of me?”
“You know yourself well enough.”
“We’ve all done beastly things,” she whispered, “but only lambs and sows can survive through goodness alone. Your Alakeph ensure that, with their claws and teeth.”
Anna tensed her jaw. It had been a mercifully long time since she’d considered the mind she possessed during war, during slaughter. But it would return soon. It had to.
Nuhra broke the silence with a sweet, delicate laugh. “Your shepherd, Bora, was certainly no lamb.”
“Watch your tongue.”
“My tongue? I speak of her with the utmost reverence.” A surprising mask of hurt, of stinging reproach, suddenly came over the woman. “For a time, she shared my quarters in the sanctuary.”
“She was an adherent of Saloram.”
“By birth, yes,” Nuhra said. “But she was sent out into this world to seek truth in all forms. I knew her when she was barely a woman.”
Anna suspended the words in her mind and spun them like wind chimes, struggling to reconcile what Bora had been with the barbarism of what Nuhra was. There was a harsher, more savage element within the adherent. “Now I understand the thread that binds you all together.”
“You speak of your tracker, don’t you?”
“You know him by a different name.”
Nuhra’s smile was dim, fleeting. “Does it trouble your heart to know that he was born as a babe like you or I, Kuzalem? That his mother anointed him with the name Lukas?”
Anna’s breaths ground to a halt. Lukas. She rolled the name through her awareness over and over again. After all this time, it seemed impossible that he could have a name at all. That a woman could force him into the world, smeared in the blood of a living womb. That somebody could love him and hold him, and know him as anything other than a killer.
“He used to be so handsome,” Nuhra said sadly, her eyes wandering through memories and longing alike. “You never asked him to bare his face, did you?”
Her throat worked to produce words, but they were slow, disjointed. “I have no need for it.”
“Lukas, Sixth of Dariyesz.” She smiled. “How long has it been since I’ve spoken those words?”
“I’m certain he’s lingered on your mind, by whatever name you choose.”
“Certain?”
Anna drew in a hard breath. “The wicked rejoice in one another. He brought you every trinket and puppet you ever wanted, didn’t he?”
“It was never him,” Nuhra said. “It was you, Kuzalem.”
“Be clear.”
“Oh, it’s glaringly clear for those who have become attuned to the machinations of this plane. Within your thinking mind, my intentions are as clear as dawn.”
“I know nothing of your intentions.”
“Quell your suspicions, sister. You are the tether that binds me to the savior of my lineage. I would not destroy you, nor your search, in this vital hour.”
One by one, Nuhra’s suggestions and half-concealed truths condensed into a chilling, logical chain. It was never about Anna and never had been.
It was Ramyi.
“She won’t serve you,” Anna whispered.
“Serve me?” Nuhra threw her head back with laughter; the gesture was explosive, bordering on nonsensical, from a source of such composure. “There is no lust for power in my heart, Kuzalem. I seek to shelter the Starsent and nurture her, nothing more. I am her supplicant.”
“Forgive me if I doubt your kindness.”
“The Kojadi slumbered for millennia, lost to the ravages of those who could not endure or sustain their ways. But once again, their divinity has returned to this world. She will bring about a new age.”
Anna glared at the trailcarver, keenly aware of the tremors leaking out across her lips and nostrils. “Volna already has her.”
“A splintering of it, yes,” Nuhra said. “But I cast off the shackles of their ways long ago. Whatever shelter they could once offer to the Moraharem has fallen away. Now, my sacred task is clear: I must cleanse the mind of the Starsent.”
In spite of Nuhra’s fervency, Anna detected an undercurrent of something ardent and honest. For a moment she gazed beyond the tales she knew of the woman, beyond the blood that had surely been washed from smooth hands, beyond the stagnant rot of the city and its incursion into her essence. “What makes you think she would accept your instruction?”
“You are a being of light, Kuzalem, but your breed drives out every shadow that it touches. She was woven from darkness. What could you know of her world?”
Anna stared into her cup.
“I would still her bleeding mind,” Nuhra explained. “You may not understand our ways, but you know the fate of animals beyond taming. Give my lineage a chance.”
“And if I refuse?”
“Then the butchers will do their work.” Nuhra gently sipped her tea, studying Anna’s eyes over the rim of the porcelain.
Anna lifted her own cup for the first time. It rattled against her lips and the anise tea was cold, bitter. As with all things, whether through volition or the command of existence, there came a point of relinquishment. Ramyi was no longer her pupil, her cherished kin. By now, she wasn’t even a girl: The Starsent was as immune to Anna’s sway as the cosmos itself. Several moments passed before Anna realized she’d drained her cup.
“What stirs your mind, Kuzalem?”
“I have no guarantee that you won’t use her for your own ends,” Anna whispered. “Just like everyone else.”
“Am I a beast to you?” Nuhra asked, refilling Anna’s cup with uncanny precision.
“Everybody wants power. And if they don’t want that, then they want to destroy. But everyone wants something, and it damns us all in the end.”
“What do you want, then?”
Anna nestled her trembling hands in her lap. “I want this world to be purified.”
“By whatever means,” Nuhra added.
She let the screeches of the Howling Wall fill the ensuing silence. “Yes,” she said at last.
“The Starsent is the survival of our lineage,” Nuhra said, glossing over Anna’s reply as though she’d taken it for granted. “I would see my bones crushed and my mind obliterated to ensure her path in this world. Do you sense my heart, Kuzalem?”
“You can’t prove such devotion.”
“Ah, but you have the means,” she said, loosening the wrap around her neck. The flesh was stretched taut, yet supple, crawling with a flurry of briar-like sigils. “Dissolve my ambitions, sister, and the core of my being will remain. Let the Breaking affirm my truths to the highest masters of this plane.”
Two swift knocks rattled the door.
“We’ll be along shortly,” Nuhra called, keeping her attention fixed on Anna.
The trailcarver’s gaze was mesmerizing, rife with the steadfast faith and fear she’d cultivated over a lifetime in ritual chambers. To such an adherent, death could only be seen as an impediment. Her true path was assured, predestined, a ceaseless progression from seed to sapling to towering oak.
With a gentle nod, Anna reached into the folds of her robe.
* * * *
Nothing definite could be ascribed to the Breaking aside from its mechanism. A lone circle, formed with one flawless sweep of the blade, unwound a lifetime of separation. That was how Anna had described it to her disciples, at least, as the Kojadi tomes held no mention of such things. It sparked revelations about the defilements of a being’s old ways, about the harm they’d thrust upon those that they once considered foreign by flesh alone. And in that fateful moment, when the mind bore the weight of horrible knowing, there was no telling what might happen.
Anna had seen hired blades hang themselves from attic rafters. She’d watched concubines chant sacred words for days at a time, and farmers run to their forsaken children, and killers strip themselves bare, offering their garments and ill-gotten salt to the lowliest beggars of their city.
But Nuhra had already been on the cusp of awakening.
Emptiness gazed into her and she gazed back in wonder.
“Will she be able to guide us?” Andriv asked. He was peering through the sliver of the open doorway, examining Nuhra like an animal stalking the confines of its cage. The woman knelt by a bare, pitted wall, staring blankly into some realm that few could hardly envision. “She’ll return to us. Won’t she?”
Anna said nothing, because she did not know. Yet she was certain of one thing: Despite the appearance of a woman, Nuhra was no longer there. They were looking upon a being without a given name, without memories it could claim as its own, without the host of delusions that had dictated its former path.
“Can we trust her, Kuzalem?” Andriv asked.
“If we couldn’t before,” she replied, “we can now.”
“Does she not seek the Starsent?”
“Soon enough, we’ll learn precisely what she seeks. We should turn our attention to more pressing matters.” She moved to the threshold of the neighboring chamber and took stock of its dim, candlelit space. Bodies shifted under thick sleeping covers, arranged in rows that bore an unsettling resemblance to linen-shrouded corpses. Konrad and the tracker—Lukas—sat near a beaded rug, slumped over a table and its horde of charts. She heard them murmuring about something, exchanging snappy bouts of river-tongue, but hidden words no longer troubled her. Now the world’s terrors were raw and plain. “Andriv, are you certain she’s there?”
The brother moved to her side. “Beyond question. Even the Gosuri herdsmen confirmed as much.”
“Men will say anything for salt and broth in their bellies.”
“One of Nuhra’s cadre flew over the area just before the storm descended,” Andriv replied. “He marked a safe house near the western wadis. It was exactly where the tracker claimed it would be.”
“Lukas.”
“Kuzalem?”
She shook her head. “Sleep in the refuge of the Pale Crescents, brother. There will be little time for rest tomorrow.”
Chapter 5
By the time their convoy of shrub-blanketed temrusi had reached the western expanse, Har-gunesh stared down from his highest perch. Every slat and vent along Anna’s transport had been cranked open, bleeding near-boiling air into the sprawl of crumbling stone walls, bushy pines, and scorched soil. It was flat here—threateningly flat. One could gaze over the fields and into the flux of scrambled, faraway mirages, picking out the dark smudges of settlements and peddler caravans alike.
Not that it made any difference now. It had been six hours of crunching over sand and earth and bleached bones, occasionally stopping at dust-shrouded wells to refill the coolant tanks and allow the brothers to retch into dry riverbeds.
Anna’s shirt was soaked with sweat, as thick and tacky as a trapper’s furs upon her skin. She’d taken a cue from the Alakeph and northern fighters in removing her ceramic vest, bandolier, and rucksack, tossing them into an enormous mound in the rear of their temrus, but even that was a token gesture. Her throat was clogged with fumes, stinging from the arid heat that seemed to leak into her lungs and shrivel her from the inside. Every jolt and bump that rattled through the undercarriage bit into her bones and chafed her flesh, conjuring images of leather stretched over its rack.
Yet as she surveyed the others, noting the creeping dullness in their eyes and the habitual picking at their lips, she understood that she was suffering least of all. A sharpened mind would always outlast a hardened body.
Nuhra sat across from Anna, her face a reflection of dreaming tranquility. Her posture was flawless, as rigid and composed as the guardian statues that had lined the outskirts of Leejadal, seemingly immune to the decay of heat and drowsiness. Sweat trickled down her cheeks in smooth, glimmering bands. Even the northern scribes seated near the front of the temrus, who’d worked under her guidance to apply markings to the better part of the qora fighters, now regarded her as a pariah.
But not everyone was so unsettled.
That morning, Lukas had hardly detected a change in the woman. Even if he had, he’d remained mum on his insights. His only sign of knowing had been a drawn-out stare in the compound’s lot, carefully weighing Nuhra’s silence, her dispassionate lips, her mechanical gait.
“Weird way about her,” he’d muttered to Anna as he wandered toward the third temrus, fishing through his pouch for a fresh wad of khat. “Northerners.”
But the trailcarver’s mission had not been burned away with the rest of her old self. Her every action—indeed, her every step and breath—had become perfunctory rituals, living cogs stripped of all pleasure and craving in service of a grand machine. There was no longer an observer within her mind; there was only a task.
A singular, hallowed task.
Anna was still examining the woman when the temrus bucked, slamming them both into the harnesses. Gaslights sparked to life along the central aisle, casting a pallid glow over rusting wall panels, twisting brass tubes, opposing rows of fighters. Anna clawed at her buckles in disarrayed panic as the others silently snapped to attention, locking the bolts of their ruji and filing toward the stockpiled equipment with unnerving expediency.
No sooner had she wrenched the buckles open than blinding white light flooded the temrus. The transport’s rear panel unspooled to the furthest extent of its fraying winch lines, screeching and pounding down upon the soil in an instant.
Sweet, coppery dust wafted up and consumed the first wave of fighters to storm down the ramp. Their brethren trailed them, soon reduced to white cloaks whipping and stirring in the haze.
This is it. This is what we’ve come to.
She stood and wandered toward her gear, dimly aware of Nuhra striding out onto the field with her men.
Anna blinked at the mound.
A ruj. A ruj for killing. Yes, that had to be hers. She picked it up, looking upon her hands as a puppet’s limbs, and slung the leather strap over her shoulder.
A vest to keep her innards off the sand. She’d need that, too. Her hands tingled as she lifted it over her head, pausing in its deafening blackness, then let its weight slap down across her shoulders. She tightened the straps until she could hardly breathe.
Then a rucksack, full of things that would keep her alive. But most men she’d known to wear them did not survive long enough to open the flap. She hefted it onto her back, cinched the buckles, and stumbled toward sunlight.
She was halfway down the ramp when she realized she’d forgotten how to kill. Turning the ruj over in her hands, she noticed—for what seemed like the first time—how alien and brutal and unwieldy it was. Point, pull, kill. That was it.
Or had she missed something?
Was it even loaded?
“Kuzalem, conceal your form.” Andriv’s voice, hard, yet restrained, burst into her awareness. “Their horrors may soon assail our ranks.”
Anna turned toward the stream of fighters, who were scrambling off the raised path and into a shadowed underbrush thick with gnarled shrubs and wadis. Tracking their course further into the distance, she noticed a series of beige lumps hemmed in by pines and crooked walls and drooping nets. Sunlight gave the mottled mud structures the distinct appearance of flaking limestone. Some of the Alakeph brothers appeared to her as white glimmers, threading in and out of sight as they traversed the network of canals. She squinted at the meandering company; each emergent head and ruj barrel provided Anna with a more precise calculation of distance, no matter how the heat managed to distort their forms. The compound was a half-league away at most, which put their fighters squarely within firing range.
But such measurements held true for both sides.
Sinking down to a kneeling stance, Anna nodded at Andriv and crept to the edge of a broken wall. Konrad and the tracker were scurrying into a wadi farther down the road, trailed by a detachment of northerners in reed-sprouting camouflage smocks. Their attempt at silence was wasted; even if the safe house was deaf to their approach, slumbering during Har-gunesh’s daylight pass, the groaning and chugging temrusi had surely revealed their presence.
“Do they know their orders?” Anna whispered to Andriv.
The brother was nervously scanning the path, passing cryptic hand signals to mirrormen and captains scattered along the column of temrusi. “The Starsent will not be ended.”
“We may not have that luxury,” she hissed.
“The brothers are well-trained, Kuzalem.”
“So is she.” Anna peered around the wall’s chipped edge, straining to detect any movement within the compound. “Your men will know their course when the time arrives.”
Andriv settled back against the wall, his eyes roaming the dirt with the telltale glaze of a commander’s imagination. A moment later he reached out, patting Anna’s shoulder to urge her to remain in position. “We will not fail you.”
“I’m accompanying you,” Anna said. “It’s not under discussion.”
“We should wait until—”
“Nothing lurks in the shadows.” Nuhra’s voice was a faint razor, possessed by the certainty of knowledge beyond her mortal senses. She sat in the center of the road, her legs crossed and fingers twisted into a strange knot upon her lap, gazing raptly at a void beyond the sands. “They dwell in restless dreams.”
