Schisms

by James Wolanyk

  “And one last thing,” Konrad said, now somewhat somber. “I’m sure you understand the value of secrecy.”

  Purple-robed figures emerged from the capsules with long, black strips of cloth folded over their arms. The foremost among them, a tall and gaunt man, held a strip taut between both hands.

  Mesar hummed appreciatively. “Are blindfolds necessary?”

  “Necessary, safe,” Konrad said. “What a thin line.”

  * * * *

  Each time Ramyi brushed against her, Anna fought to steady her breathing and seat her panic somewhere deep in her chest. It wasn’t the darkness that provoked her fear—meditation done in blackness was the most powerful, yet placid experience she knew, after all. No, she saw the stonework of her unease as she was led from capsule to capsule, echoing corridor to sun-kissed terrace, stairwell to walkway, all the while feeling like an animal on its way to slaughter. Death was a small, muted fear when placed beside the guilt of damning her followers. The guilt of extinguishing the world’s final streak of goodness, perhaps.

  But it was too late to change anything.

  “Anna, who are your officers?” Konrad’s voice rose amid a sudden halting of footsteps.

  “Mesar,” she managed. Her voice was spooked, reminiscent of the young girl who’d once shivered in a Hazani theater. “My other adviser isn’t here. Yatrin will substitute for him.”

  “Very well,” Konrad replied. “Bring them here and take the rest to their lodging.”

  A raw wave of fear swelled in Anna. “Where are you taking them?”

  “Is resting some eastern phenomenon?”

  “Ramyi should stay,” Anna said. “Please.”

  “The Council’s orders are clear, panna.”

  Anna took the girl’s upper arm and leaned closer to her. “Don’t be afraid,” she whispered. “I won’t let anybody harm you. Do you understand?”

  Ramyi’s cloak rustled with her nodding.

  “All right,” Anna said in Konrad’s direction. “We’re ready.”

  Nahoran boots clacked around her, joined by murmurs in a half-dozen dialogues and tired, shambling steps that pattered off down a western corridor. In moments, all that remained was warm, stagnant darkness.

  “Come along,” Konrad said, his vigor returned. “They’ve been eager to meet you all.”

  Anna led their procession, guided by the vibrations of Konrad’s boots just ahead of her. After some time the ground lost its rigidity, growing malleable, yet strong, like some plane of congealing sand. Sound also lost its crispness, with breaths and coughs fluttering away into an airy void. An ethereal breeze stirred the hem of Anna’s cloak. She had the sense of dissolving into this new space, losing her flesh to a world of smoke and vast emptiness.

  Anna stepped onto solid stone, passing into a colder, yet smaller space where echoes returned with a tinny ring.

  “You can remove them,” Konrad said quietly. “I’d advise you to be prepared.”

  Before Anna could ask for what, she tore away her blindfold and saw the monstrosity.

  The arachnid—what could be discerned of it within the blackness—hunkered down in its weathered stone amphitheater. Crimson baubles that had been entombed in the ruins’ weavesilk shroud cast light upon its edges, offering mere suggestions of its true scale, its milk-white clusters of eyes, its countless leg hairs twitching and spasming like a sea of razors. Light trickled away somewhere along the mottled curve of its bulbous egg sacs and oozing pustules, giving it the illusion of a nightmare weaving itself into existence. Beyond the creature, set deep into the recesses of the cavern, were walls and catacombs spun from weavesilk, tarnished to dead white bundles overhead.

  Fabric hissed across stone. Anna’s attention shot to its source: A slack, desiccated man’s body wreathed in scarlet and violet, dragged across the pitted stone floor like a puppet. He was hairless, his tongue lolling and eyes cloudy, hands curled into gnarly brambles. The hissing grew louder. More dangling bodies rose from shadowed nooks or came to life among crumbled archways, drifting out before the creature like gnats, men and women spanning all years, ten, eleven, twelve of them—

  Anna spotted the puppeteer’s trick. The creature’s bony, ribbed forelegs were guiding the bodies in their eerie dance, having drilled through the back of its victims’ skulls and sprouted a sort of throbbing fungus around the puncture.

  Yatrin bowed his head and gripped his shoulders with opposite hands, then sank to a knee. His whisper was breathless: “Our home is a living spirit born of breath and bone.”

  “Your presence is unexpected,” an aging woman’s body said, its jaw working in strange circles to form flatspeak. “But we are pleased by your sight.”

  “Even you,” a bald child’s body added as it hovered toward Yatrin. “Flesh does not forget its own. Brothers do not forsake brothers.”

  “An ocean does not rage against its waves,” the woman’s body said.

  A round-faced, bearded man’s body rose toward a glob of red light. “We have felt the tremors of this world. Kuzalem, why do you merge with us in this latest hour?”

  “Merge?” Anna asked. She fought to ignore the creature’s shivering, mucous-choked breaths, meeting the eyes of its puppets as her focusing anchor.

  “She is not ready to be accepted,” a shadowed body said.

  “She is fearful,” another said.

  But shock was rapidly giving way to wonder at the creature’s strangeness. “What exactly are you?” she asked. Yatrin’s eyes widened, as did Mesar’s, but Anna continued. “Who’s speaking?”

  “We are,” the child’s body said. “We are the Council of Nahora.”

  The Council. It struck Anna as a chilling wave, a wild flare of repulsion with the memory of what they’d ordered and carried out above their tomb. All of that horror, derived from something so grotesque that it undermined everything the world knew of Nahora. So grotesque that the word merge became terrifying, choked with visions of sprouting skulls and decaying flesh. “We’ve come here to aid Nahora, nothing more.” She vented the air that was burning high up in her chest. “We have no intention of joining you.”

  “It is as we thought,” the Council said through the old woman’s body. “She seeks death.”

  Mesar cleared the tremors from his voice. “Honored leaders, we seek cooperation.”

  “Leaders,” one of the bodies said, mimicking laughter with guttural staccato huffs. Another swayed past it, calling out: “We do not adhere to your division of selves. We are. Do not divide our sovereignty among expressions of flesh.”

  “We’re not here as your subjects,” Anna replied.

  Yatrin passed her a warning glance.

  The Council’s humanoid appendages swiveled toward Anna, dozens of vacant eyes aimed at her like arrowheads. “You cannot comprehend what we are.”

  “I know that you control Nahora,” she replied, “and I know that Volna has wasted no time on semantics.”

  “You may be a wellspring of might, young one, but you’re imprisoned by the delusion of a single vantage point.” The bodies shifted in and out of animation, expressing the Council’s thoughts in a maelstrom of shifting speakers. “How can you survey reality when you mistake a single plane for the wholeness of a form? Insight is not an examination, but the interlacing of observations. Vision must align with itself before it holds any worth.”

  Anna forced herself to meet the maggot-like eyes on the Council’s arachnid portion, fighting down nausea as she did so. “Do you believe they aren’t a threat?”

  “We have known. Our winged emissary once offered you a notch in this sacred tree.”

  “Things have changed since then.”

  “An obvious verity,” the Council said. “Violence blossoms in fractals. It will devour.”

  It seemed ludicrous that her first brush with Nahoran sanity came from this h
orror. Even so, she nodded and glanced at Konrad pointedly. “And you can help to stop them.”

  “We can,” the Council groaned. “We. A merging. If not by chosen flesh, then by the flickers of your hands. Merge this divined wisdom with the state. Cast light upon the shadows of ignorance, until no hollows are left untouched.”

  She shuddered at the term merging, especially when she studied the sunken cheeks and atrophied arms of the Council’s bodies. “We have talented scribes in our ranks. If you’re willing to cooperate, they’ll be at your disposal.”

  “They wish to merge?”

  “No,” Anna snapped. “They’ll mark your troops, even be stationed with them in the field. But all of that is pedantic. It’s business for your commanders’ ears. Right now, we need to establish trust.”

  “It would be a fair exchange,” Mesar said. “We don’t require much to be effective.”

  The Council’s looming thorax bulged and oozed. “The state is already woven with the fabric of knowing.”

  “My scribes can do things that yours can’t,” Anna said.

  Collective curiosity spread through the Council as a wave of rising bodies.

  “They can sprout trees from barren soil,” she explained. “They can make the air burst into flame, or buildings crumble to sand. I’ve seen time flow backward, bones grow over flesh, and sand turn to copper.”

  “It’s true,” Yatrin said immediately, his eyes wide and bright with fervor. “They have good intentions for the state. I’ve lived in their way.”

  “I could offer your scribes our insights,” Anna said.

  The Council’s appendages descended to the dais of stone and webbing, growing eerily still. “What do you require of our eminence?”

  “A joint fighting force,” Mesar cut in. “As it is, we lack the equipment and intelligence reports to oppose Volna, not to mention the adequate numbers of troops.”

  “And shelter,” Anna said. “We don’t know how long our refuge will last. We have foundlings from every corner of Hazan and Rzolka to contend with.”

  Konrad hummed. “Rather heartwarming.”

  “What of the Huuri who brings death?” the Council boomed.

  Shem, lying flat on a stone slab, breached Anna’s awareness. She could feel Konrad’s eyes burrowing into the back of her skull. “What about him?”

  “Will he grant us the force carved into his flesh?”

  “He won’t be your soldier,” Anna whispered. “He’s not fit for that.”

  “What, pray tell, will he do?” Konrad asked.

  Without turning, Anna lowered her head and exhaled. “You may have noticed that our force is limited, but capable.” Mesar’s bulging eyes weren’t enough to dissuade her. “We found a way to pierce the world’s fabric. If he’s familiar with a place, he can open a tunnel there. A doorway, of sorts. And that’s our hope of winning.”

  “Imagine the great stillness that would follow our merging,” the Council said. “You obfuscate your divination, Kuzalem. With the Huuri’s joining, this war would cease in an instant.”

  “I see things from more than one vantage point,” Anna said darkly.

  “Rousing words,” the Council replied. “For eons, since the state’s life coalesced in waves and soil, it has sought the preternatural wisdom that you hold. But you ask us to trust that which is not us, that which is not integral. Who might declare that your imperfect form’s blood is unworthy of being spilled, if it would spare the flesh of the state?”

  Ringing silence descended on the gathering. Anna’s legs trembled as she stared at the ancient creature, at its shriveled bodies, at the enormous mandibles and forelimbs that could extinguish her life in an instant. “If you kill me, the war is lost. So are you. Your precious state won’t survive.”

  “Merging is not an end, but a beginning.”

  “If my mind is as powerful as you suspect,” Anna said, “you ought to be afraid of being torn open from the inside.” She sensed the creature’s reticence as it drew its forelimbs back, tucking the bodies behind stone and curtains of weavesilk. Even Yatrin’s fingers curled into nervous talons; it was as though some pulse of the state’s hive mind had flared through him. “A single spark can never be drowned by kerosene. Remember that when you speak to me.”

  “Your eminence,” Mesar blurted out, fumbling to undo Anna’s barbs. “We—”

  “We will not bow to you.” Anna stepped closer with hands loosely by her sides. “Make your choice: Grant us refuge, or end us.”

  “She’s certainly grown bolder,” Konrad called out, filling the silence that had settled like a choking fog.

  “Our words are merged,” the Council’s bodies spoke in unison. “Embolden the fabric of the state, Kuzalem, and we will bring mirth to your adherents. In time, you will see the radiance of our way.”

  Anna squared her gaze on the center of the arachnid’s wet, beady eye cluster. “For your sake, I hope that you’ll keep your word.”

  * * * *

  Hours later, among the orchard paths and sloping villas that ringed central Golyna’s mottled wall of white stone, Anna considered the implications of their deal. She’d come to regard contracts and agreements as things in flux, apt to be bent and broken by wicked forces when it was convenient. Most of the fine details had been hammered out by Mesar and Yatrin at the negotiating table, where they’d met with some of the foremost officers from the Chayam and foreign Pashan divisions—Konrad among them. Anna had waited for a long, silent spell in the palace’s meditative wing, working to purge her mind of the creature’s visage in a cell of polished marble. When they’d returned, stone-faced and plainly bitter at one another, their Nahoran escorts left little room for discussion.

  But now, with Mesar addressing their troops in a hilltop garrison and Yatrin at her side, she was drowned by every facet of their bindings.

  No residence in the central city, no drinking from the sacred wells, no courting the Nahoran women (or men, for that matter), no liquor from sunup to midnight. The list of stipulations and minutiae and limitations were maddening, especially to the foreigners among her unit, but Anna’s disgust slumbered close to the bedrock of their situation: Nahora was treating them like enemies in the wake of their joint annihilation.

  “They were generous,” Yatrin said assuredly as they walked, traversing grassy trails crosshatched with the shade of olive trees and their sweeping boughs. “They’re shrewd officers, Anna. You can’t expect to gain anything without some concessions. It’s an exchange, like you wanted.”

  She simply nodded. A thin, black sheath of weavesilk covered her hands, constricting yet intangible. No matter how hard she tried, it was impossible to form a fist—or, more pertinently, to hold a blade. She and her scribes had all been fitted with them, in accordance with the officers’ mandates. Only an Azibahl’s secreted solvent could remove them.

  “But Mesar’s as tough as I thought,” Yatrin continued. “It’s worrying, the way he speaks. It’s hard to nail down what he wants.”

  “He must be desperate to rebuild his order.”

  “There was talk of repairing and reopening the monasteries. Those in Nahora and the mountains, at the very least.”

  “It’s always an exchange,” Anna warned. “What did he offer in return?”

  “As of now, nothing concrete.”

  Anna didn’t reply. Her silence spoke well enough for her: When nothing was specified, anything was at risk.

  “I can’t believe we made it here,” Yatrin said. He pulled in a long, easy breath, releasing it like water cycling through a fish’s gills. For him, it was safety. It was home. “Is it like this where you grew up? The trees and the fields, I mean. It settles you.”

  “Something like this,” Anna said. A thought occurred to her. “Where do your mother and father live?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  She arche
d a brow. “You don’t want to see them? It must’ve been years.”

  “It’s not our way to have that sort of attachment,” Yatrin said. “The man and woman who raised me were not my father or mother, by blood terms.”

  “You were a foundling?”

  He grinned at her. “No, of course not. Those who raised me visited the rosi chalam, just like any citizen would.” When he glanced back, he caught Anna’s bemusement. “Citizens don’t spawn babes together, joined or not. When we visit the rosi chalam, we offer our seed or receive it. It’s a ritual, not lust.”

  After spending two grueling months in a Gosuri encampment bordering the Abumar province, where tribes gathered under the nebulae and performed mass-mating ceremonies, Anna’s view of lust was far cruder. “But this man and woman,” Anna said. “They still raised you.”

  “The state raised me.” To him it was fact, as certain and immutable as the orbit of the stars. “I’m not sure an outsider will ever truly understand it. These people were products of the state, just as their womb and seed before them.”

  “It’s not just about seeds,” Anna replied. “What about love? Didn’t they love you?”

  “We all love one another.”

  Anna nodded as though she understood. As though she were not an outsider. She was hesitant to ask about anything, to broach topics she read as sacred in Yatrin’s mind, but all knowledge was discomfort, on some level. “Was this the first time you’ve seen it?”

  “It?” Yatrin asked.

  “The Council,” she said. “Doesn’t it frighten you?”

  “It was incredible,” he said, gazing skyward through the web of branches. “In our creation myths, they speak of the First Merging—the man-skins and Azibahli, shedding what they were to become what we are. They bridged our languages and cleared away whatever veils separated us, including flesh.” He paused, inspecting Anna’s face. “Did you feel threatened by it?”

  She glanced away. “No.”

  “But you spoke to it with malice. Fear is what brings it out of us, isn’t it?”

  “I’ve never seen anything like it.” Had it not been for thousands of hours in the vast emptiness of meditation, the creature might’ve petrified her. But she’d probed the depths of her mind until she found darker, stranger things lurking beneath consciousness. Things that made the Council feel like a natural expression of the universe. “I just don’t understand it.”