Schisms

by James Wolanyk

  Yatrin’s lips shifted. “Most of the others refused to touch the dishes and drinking water.”

  Anna sighed. Others had a pointed meaning, in that context: Those who weren’t Nahoran by birth.

  “They’re suspicious of everything,” Yatrin explained.

  Anna bristled at that; it was yet another setback to cooperation, even if she harbored her own misgivings. An army with hairline fissures could only hold until first contact with the enemy. “Where’d they get it?”

  “Ramyi marked one of the southerners. I’ve never seen the rune before, but it made nectar flow from his palms.” Yatrin watched one of the Jilal fighters swaying on their cushion. “Sweetness alone is too boring for some of them.”

  “Is she drunk?”

  “If she isn’t now, she will be. Something about your meeting put her in a huff. Should I pull her aside?”

  “No,” Anna said. The surest way to seal off a child’s heart was to scorn them. “Let her drink if she wants to, but keep a blade out of her hands.” She glanced around. “I haven’t seen Mesar lately.”

  “He’s meeting with some Chayam captains.”

  “He never told me,” Anna sighed.

  “Do they make you nervous?” Yatrin asked. But they was too vague, in Anna’s mind. “Those who serve the state,” he added.

  “Not so nervous.” They were just one tier on a hierarchy of mistrust, but they were far below Volna, the nationalists in Kowak, and the various hired blades setting up shop in Hazan and the plains.

  “Those bearing the state’s blood are trustworthy,” Yatrin said. “I’m not speaking about Konrad, of course, but I know my people. You can breathe.”

  “I trust you,” she said honestly. “And that’s enough.” But her mind was fixed on an endless track. “I ought to find Mesar.”

  Yatrin took her arm gently. “Sit, stay. He can handle the logistics for one evening.” He gestured to Khara, who was poring over the depths of her cup with distant eyes. “They need you.”

  The monotony of recent years washed over her with the phrase one evening, with all of the death and sleepless nights and empty words revived as a hideous, wasted mass. Joy had become a foreign thing. The world had done its part to assure that, but how much of it stemmed from her own mind? A need to be busy, to be so forward-thinking and wary that she would’ve earned Bora’s rebuke. Be here, be now. Easier said than done.

  With some effort, she smiled and met Yatrin’s creased eyes. “You’ll need to teach me how to breathe.”

  Yatrin laughed. “Hasn’t meditation taught you that?”

  “I’m forgetful.”

  “Whatever they’re drinking seems to help,” Yatrin said.

  Some of her fighters, too deep in their cups, had copper-red cheeks and glassy eyes. “I’d like to think too.”

  “One cup won’t put you under,” Yatrin said, the corner of his lip peeking out through black hair. “So, what do you say?” He went to the table, took a pair of tin cups, dunked them into a small tub and pulled them up full, and returned to Anna. The liquid within reminded her of honey wine her father had once kept in the rafters. “If you’d rather not, I understand. But maybe we—you—deserve it. When was the last time you really lived, Anna?”

  “The Kojadi said that pain is living,” she said, arching her brow.

  “They had their time,” Yatrin replied. “Nahora savors peacetime, and it always has. We refuse to linger in wariness like our sisters. Give bliss a try.”

  Over the past years, brooding in dugouts and hayat-woven bunks and underground tents, she would occasionally recall the offer she’d received in Malijad. Yatrin and his fellow easterners had proven everything Nahora had offered, including the serenity she’d seen in meditation, and it was chilling to consider that she—a half-forgotten, untrained, broken girl—had damned the path of every future self by refusing their aid. But it wasn’t too late to right things. Anna took the cup, gulping in spite of the throat-burning fumes and bitter tongue-prickling.

  With every sip, it became less repulsive.

  She drank until she hardly thought of Konrad.

  Soon Anna was dancing like everybody else, adrift in the strange melody of flutes and small, hard drums, though she couldn’t recall when she’d decided to join the others or set her short blade on the tabletop or pull Yatrin closer. Within Yatrin’s shadow, where the air was humid and dark and tinged with peppermint, she was more vulnerable than she’d been in nomadic encampments or bathing chambers. It was worrying to lose caution in that place, but even more worrying to find comfort. Her feet swept in quick, synchronized rushes beneath her, and her hands grew slick upon Yatrin’s tunic, upon the fabric she rustled as she felt along the small of his back and all of its hidden scars. Then her eyes were closed and her lips sensed warm, damp pressure, even as her mind revolved with coordinates and wicked names and—

  “Are you all right?” Yatrin asked.

  Reality’s fragments slid back into place, returning her to the pod’s ethereal oscillating and the pockmarks across the easterner’s cheeks. “Yes,” she said, surprised—but not alarmed—by the lack of control in her voice. “Keep dancing.”

  Yatrin’s hands moved back to her hips. She heard every clinking tin, every rising word that warned of violence. Anna pulled away.

  “Yes, you,” Khara barked, stalking closer to Ramyi. Her eyes were wild, purged of their usual Nahoran composure.

  Ramyi too had her brows scrunched and fists balled, but Khutai grabbed her wrist and pulled her back just before Khara came within striking range. The girl grunted, spun around, and nearly tripped on her own ankles.

  “I wish it had been you,” Khara said. “You wretched little worm.”

  Ramyi tore at Khutai’s grip, ignorant to the spectacle forming around them.

  “How dare you cast your foolish words at the state?” Khara continued.

  “I hope it burns,” Ramyi said.

  “Your breed knows nothing about sacrifice,” the easterner said. She carried on as Yatrin hurried toward her, hissing his commands in Orsas. “The Halshaf should’ve let you shrivel.”

  Yatrin took the woman’s shoulders and led her aside, but it was too late. Shouts and slurs were breaking out among the fighters, some of whom were still drinking from their tin cups; in fact, many rushed to scoop more from the trough. Drunken barbs overtook the music:

  “The state? Fuck the state.”

  “Uz’nekkal, you coward! Show me your teeth!”

  “Control your runt.”

  “Will you bleed, or just bitch?”

  Their voices swelled until Anna could no longer tell Nahorans from Hazani, old comrades from new, youths from elders. Pale and bronze and black, their flesh melded together in a dizzying blur. There was no way to calm the storm, especially with Anna’s mind so unfocused, so clouded—

  “What’s going on?” Mesar’s voice, though weaker than his men’s, stilled most of the quarrels. His bone-white robes glowed like a beacon in the shadows. Two of his picked fighters wandered ahead of him, gently parting men about to exchange blows and lifting bruise-eyed stragglers from the rugs. Mesar wore a father’s mask of disappointment; it cut deeper than any curse or shout. “Is this how we treat our hosts? Brothers, I address you with particular severity.”

  The Alakeph in the crowd, who’d become indistinct from their fellow fighters by shedding their robes, bowed their heads.

  “Even those beyond the fold,” Mesar continued, glaring pointedly at Anna. “Have you come here to preserve life, or grapple like children?” When he regarded Ramyi, he grew crestfallen. “And you, a blossom of our order. Must we be your keeper at all hours?”

  Ramyi paid it no mind. She was busy muttering curses, thrashing at Khutai’s arms and broad chest, on the verge of tears she smothered with rage.

  Summoning her composure, Anna approached
the girl. “We’ll take her,” she said to Mesar. No matter how much authority she conjured, the others would see her as incapable, scrambling to make amends with their leader. Ramyi’s mindlessness was her burden. That burning realization bled into her hands as she seized the girl’s shoulder and pulled her away from Khutai, nearly bruising her shoulder as she did so. They left in silence.

  Later, in Anna’s personal quarters, she knelt before an oval-shaped window and the blackness beyond it. Kneeling was all she could do. Meditation had always been her place of refuge, unchanging in spite of the chaos surrounding her practice. Now it was her prison, trapping her with words of rebuke and stinging memories, too painful to be surveyed in long stretches. Every so often she opened her eyes to Ramyi’s reflection and felt that same spark of anger, however old and conditioned it was. The girl had fallen into an immediate slumber on the sofa, long before Yatrin was able to fetch blankets to cover her, but it made no difference: Her shame was Anna’s and there was no simple way to release that. Nor was there any way to repair the rifts she’d surfaced, if not created, within the unit.

  Yatrin’s touch chilled her; she sensed it before her eyes shot open, before she saw his silhouette looming behind her in the glass. He gently squeezed the sides of her arms, forceful enough to lure her out of focus without alarming her.

  “This will pass,” he whispered. “You ought to get some sleep.”

  “That’s the trouble, isn’t it?” Anna asked. “Everything will pass.”

  “And what?”

  “They’ll walk right over me in Golyna.” She shrugged her arms to loosen his grip, staring at her reflection and the passing black shapes that framed it.

  Yatrin settled himself beside her. “Mesar’s a cunning man, but a good one. He has my trust.” In fairness, that meant a great deal. “Do you know what you’ve managed to assemble under your banner? All of those creeds, those strains of blood? They—we—left our homes and families for it. For you. So nobody is walking over you. We won’t allow it.”

  Anna tried not to dissect the easterner’s words. He meant well, after all. She flashed a smile and put her hand atop his. “I wish trust came easily.”

  “Anna.” His smile was monumental amid the scars and blemishes. “History remembers grand figures, but none of the advisers and stepping stones that made their vision possible. You ought to remember that.”

  “I’ll try.” She glanced back at Ramyi, watching her blankets softly rise and fall. “And in the meantime, what do I do with her?”

  Yatrin shifted closer and kissed the back of her neck. “Breathe.”

  Chapter 6

  From a distance, it was natural enough to regard cities as beings. Growing, shrinking, weeping, rejoicing: One could glimpse a city’s inner life if they were patient and perched atop the right vantage point. And after the Nahorans’ strange babble about states and pieces and living bone, it didn’t take much for Anna to treat Golyna as Nahora’s heart, some pulsing shard of its spirit.

  The kator’s silent descent from the mountain passes to the central station seemed to mute the issue of loyalty and factions, if only for a short while. Yatrin had led Anna to the officers’ dining pod just before its panoramic windows revealed a world beyond blackness and carved stone, exploding into sunlight dancing on distant waves and mist rolling in the green thickets and Azibahli railways arcing away in argent strands, their kators resembling beads of water on string as they passed. Enormous reservoirs and patchwork plots of tilled farmland, some dotted with growers and their harvest baskets, covered the outlying western sprawl—the Crescent, by its eastern name. Boats crowded the four rivers winding north from Golyna’s canal gates. To the south, set black and bold against the morning sun, was a string of keeps and bunkers that extended from the mountains to the city’s outlying districts. The central city was nestled between cloud-shrouded, punishing mountain passes and a gleaming eastern sea, its surroundings more verdant than any of the stormy valleys that had broken the monotony of endless peaks and hillsides.

  Anna was captivated by its ivory spires, its towers and terraces jutting out on impossibly thin, gossamer struts, its lush forests springing up from fortress rooftops and manor courtyards. She sensed something alien in its architecture; the needle-thin handiwork and fractal walls of the Azibahli were everywhere, forming sparkling bridges and railways and balconies in arrangements that defied logic. Malijad dwarfed it, of course, but that only meant that Golyna was less likely to consume her.

  There was ritual importance to witnessing the transition from blackness to refuge, Anna gleaned: The walkways and dining terraces lining the windows had been swarmed with reverent easterners, both from Anna’s unit and the Nahoran military detachment onboard, long before Anna arrived. Little by little, the rest of Anna’s unit had trickled into the dining pod and stood along the glass, brushing shoulders with fighters they’d sworn to butcher just hours before.

  “See?” Yatrin said, nudging Anna’s foot as they peered down from their dining platform at the line of wordless observers. He’d nearly finished their first course, a salad with slices of red and yellow fruit, though Anna couldn’t stomach it so early. “Sometimes knots undo themselves.”

  But she knew how well grudges could sleep. Her attention revolved between Khara, Ramyi, who was miserably slumped over the window’s railing, and Konrad, whose laughter at a nearby Ga’mir’s table was too indulgent to be genuine.

  “Many things do,” she said.

  * * * *

  Anna and Mesar assembled the unit in the rear of the kator, where a canvas-walled tunnel tethered a dimly-lit staging capsule to a secondary railway station. Konrad paced up and down his purple-cloaked ranks with as much austerity as his fellow officers, scrutinizing crooked buttons and scuffed boots. Meanwhile, Yatrin did his best to keep Ramyi upright, occasionally hurrying her to a grate where she could retch and compose herself away from the others. The other fighters seemed to hold pity, not rage, for the girl—exempting Khara.

  One of the officers, a terse woman with short black hair, brought a crate with freshly pressed cloaks. She offered no explanation, but Anna and many of the easterners slid them on anyway. They were a typical eastern blend of weavesilk and wool; soft, yet dense, probably worth a small fortune in a cartel’s market. Certainly superior to the threadbare, ragged combat uniforms Anna’s fighters had patched for years at a time.

  But Anna could read the hesitation on the southern and northern faces, the way they balked at the Nahorans and their patronizing gifts. “Come off it,” she said to them in river-tongue, seemingly to Mesar’s liking. “We’re guests.”

  We’re at their mercy.

  Guided by Konrad, Anna led their unit to a transfer station on the hills just east of the city. A sprawling canopy of weavesilk and thin leather covered the platform terminals, casting amber light over countless Nahoran fighters and auxiliary forces. Only there, above ground and basking in the winds that rolled down the mountains and howled off the tide, did Anna appreciate Nahora’s gentle breath. It wasn’t scorched like Hazan’s, nor frigid like Rzolka’s.

  Opaque, tightly woven tubes rose from the misty slopes below, joined at their apex to the transfer station before curving back down toward the city proper. White cylinders bolted up the tubes, rattling the weaving and scarring it with smoking black streaks that teams of scurrying Azibahli engineers were quick to dissolve and patch. “The speed might rattle your bones,” Konrad said as he led Anna through the crowd, grinning at the unease of the Nahorans that stepped aside, “but you’ll get used to it by the third jump. Hopefully.”

  They piled into the cramped cylinders and used weavesilk webbing to secure themselves along cushioned walls. Between kicks and glides along the tubes’ magnetic coils, Anna disembarked and allowed Konrad to guide her unit to the next transfer point. Anna had to admit that the Nahorans had skillfully used the terrain in their designs, carving their complexes into
cliff faces and underground caverns. It was an alliance with nature rather than a brash challenge to it. Every new destination was undoubtedly closer to Golyna, but it didn’t feel that way to Anna: Many of the stations were manned by skeleton crews, grim-faced and worrying behind lever terminals, and the atmosphere grew more industrial with every jump. Anna did her best to analyze the plaques and convoluted capsule schematics they passed during their brief walks, but even the most basic Orsas script was lost on her. As long as Yatrin and his fellow easterners were calm, she supposed, things were under control. But there was nothing comforting about the ensuing stations, where copper pipes snaked along the walls and steam burst up through grates set into the rock.

  At the final station, the corridor opened into an empty atrium hewn from black stone. Anna saw slits in the walls, backlit by dim red lanterns, with the silhouettes of ruji barrels and compact Nahoran helmets materializing a moment later.

  “Keep your wits,” Konrad said, allowing his unit to file into the room and form a tight firing line. “It’s all procedure, nothing prejudiced. Leave your weapons and equipment at your feet. All of them, if you’d be so kind. You’ll have your inert tools returned by tomorrow, and your weapons carted to the deployment areas. Rosumesh?”

  Anna rested a hand on Ramyi’s back to quell her, but the rest of the unit complied without needing to be talked down.

  They placed their ruji in neat rows across the floor, then stacked the remainder of their equipment into a sprawling pile. A Nahoran quartermaster furiously recorded every curved knife and sling and explosive device they tossed. Anna’s pack, containing the encoded scroll tube, was the final addition.

  When it was finished, Konrad nodded to an attendant behind the firing slits. The room trembled, grinding stone against stone like some primordial yawn, until the ceiling parted with a shower of grit. Metallic capsules descended on weavesilk tethers, chilling Anna with memories of spider eggs encased in webbing. Pristine black doors slid aside as the capsules finished their descent.