But there had been, as always, shadows lurking. On one evening a mother had turned Ramyi away from a young boy’s joining ceremony, and on another, a group of girls who knew only Orsas, either ignorant of flatspeak or repulsed by it, had giggled enough to make Ramyi cast stones. She’d sent a brown-haired girl home sobbing, her arm swollen and bruised, but the true damage extended deeper than one shabad girl’s flesh.
“They just don’t understand you,” Anna had said, wrapping an arm around Ramyi’s shoulder on the edge of a ramshackle dock. They watched fireflies flitting over the pond, dipping down in mirrored bows and skating over its still black surface. “They don’t understand us. But you don’t understand them, either.”
“What if I don’t want to?” she whispered.
Anna gave a soft, sad smile, raw with the sting of remembering. “Then life will be very hard for you.”
Some evenings Anna had slept alone, but on others Yatrin visited her with the day’s news and baskets of spiced cakes, and it felt natural to rest beside him. He was mindful of her aversion to being held in sleep. Perhaps more importantly, Ramyi trusted him. All of his visits came with an old Nahoran tale, recounting the last stand of isolated keeps or myths of how hayat had bloomed in the world, and the girl often fell asleep while listening by the stacked-stone hearth, only for Yatrin to carry her to her bed and cover her. It was as though she didn’t consider Yatrin to be Nahoran, which was significant in itself.
“She called you kedez today,” Anna told him that evening, drinking mulled wine under burning nebulae. “Not to me, but to the other children.” She looked at him. “Do you feel like her brother?”
Yatrin’s eyes were dark beads, glittering with the neon threads in the western skies. “This fight’s going to hurt her, Anna.”
“It will hurt everyone,” she said. “But show her a reason to heal, and she will.”
He took a long sip. “Any ideas?”
“You’ll find them.” And although she wanted to say more, wanted to whisper that he was her own reason, she didn’t. The bursting golds and garnets overhead spoke for her.
Shem’s arrival was rife with cordoned-off terminal stations and Chayam urban units—outfitted with composite weavesilk helmets, shortened ruji, and dusty camouflage coveralls—who patrolled the valley in packs. The latter, judging by the shouts and a string of near-dawn arrests, managed to stir up more unrest in the shabad communities than an unannounced arrival. Anna, Ramyi, and Yatrin convened at the hilltop garrison with a blend of foreign fighters and Nahorans before proceeding to the meeting point, which appeared to be a bunker set in the foundation of Golyna’s northwestern wall, a short distance from the main gate checkpoint and its enormous, weavesilk-laden cogs. Earthen mounds and other signs of hasty military deployment encircled the entryway. Curiously enough, Mesar was one of the few foreigners absent among them.
The underground space was narrow and stale, its walls clogged with a film of dry spores. Considering the disorientation of the Nahoran troops as they shuffled in and out of the passages, it seemed likely that the morning’s bustle was the bunker’s first use in decades. But there was no risk of getting lost; echoed Orsas and the clanking of distant machinery emanated from the far end of the main tunnel.
“As you might understand,” one of the Nahoran junior officers said to Anna, never pausing his long strides, “Golzag Habalesh may still be recovering his faculties. The sedation was rather powerful.”
It took Anna a moment to recognize Shem by his Nahoran military title: The Exalted Shadow. Even if they regarded him with mistrust, he was still a product of the east, and that commanded a level of respect that Anna might never achieve. “We’ll just be glad to see him.”
“When we made contact, he was in good spirits. Cooperative, by all accounts.”
Anna couldn’t hold back her smirk. “That’s fortunate for your men, Reb’mir.”
After six magnetic locks and an additional corridor of honeycombed setstone, they entered Shem’s holding cell. There was a figure seated in the center of the chamber, fixed in place by the barrels of countless ruji, though Anna couldn’t be sure it was Shem. Its head was trapped within a black, oval-shaped pod, and its body—neck and joints and all—was encased in a suit of fused metallic plating.
Anna scowled at the officer. “What is this?”
“It’s protocol,” he replied nervously. “It doesn’t harm him, I assure you.”
“Is that Shem?” Ramyi whispered. Yatrin was quick to take the girl’s hand and guide her several paces away from Anna.
“Can he hear anything?” Anna asked.
“It’s designed to hinder the world,” he replied. “Hearing, sight, touch—we couldn’t risk any accidents along the way. As soon as Ga’mir Konrad gives the command, it’ll be removed.”
Anna approached the chair. “Remove it now.”
“That’s not my judgment,” the officer said. His eyes danced among his men, flashing white with panic when he glanced sidelong.
“It would be a critical mistake to wait for Konrad’s approval,” Anna said softly, “If he has any ill words to speak on the matter, he can approach me. But he,” she said, gesturing to Shem’s imprisoned form, “is difficult to debate with.”
Bluff or not, there was weight behind her words. Nearly everybody had heard of the carnage left at one of Malijad’s kator terminals, how the sun had darkened and boiled the blood to brown sheets over the earth. Bodies rent open, splayed out in that eerie, ritualistic circle, their flesh covered in thousands of open sores and punctures and—
“Remove it,” the officer huffed.
Without hesitation an auxiliary team surrounded the chair and began to unfasten the armor segments, letting scraps of burned iron and rivets and banding loops clatter to the setstone floor. They moved with practiced efficiency, cautiously lifting the enormous helmet as the final stage of unraveling.
The Huuri restrained in the chair was still young, still thin, still pulsating with the seventeen runes Anna had applied to his flesh over the years. But some vital force had been drained out of him, leaving him closer to a husk than a boy. His eyes, once glimmering and vibrant and shining like pure crystals, were crumpled slits that begged for sleep. He was as ignorant to his own condition as any starving hound.
“Anna,” he croaked. “We’re in Nahora?”
Long ago she’d wept at his sluggishness, at how much his body had degraded since he’d first met her and offered that merciful bowl of broth, but now she studied him with cold acceptance. “That’s right,” she said gently, kicking away crumbs of glowing iron and kneeling beside the chair. “How do you feel, Shem?”
“Good,” he said. “Very good. Many lovely dreams.”
“I’m glad,” Anna said. “Do you remember Ramyi?”
Shem’s stare rolled from one corner of the room to the other, coming to rest on Ramyi as she held fast to Yatrin’s wrist. “I know her. She makes goodness to me.”
“That’s right. She came to see you. We all did.”
The Huuri blinked at the scene, oblivious to the soldiers forming a trembling ring around him. “Yeretu is here?”
“Yatrin,” Anna corrected, still smiling. “Do you feel well enough to walk with me, Shem?”
Even his grin crept out slowly, leaking across his face. “For you, always well enough. Only a little want for sleep.”
She squeezed his hand. “Come, Shem. Let’s go.”
* * * *
On the Old Promenade, basking in the midday sun and savoring the faint breezes that curled off the tides and rolled inland, Anna was reminded of a place that shared everything . . . yet nothing . . . with Golyna. She remembered her first evening in Malchym, still groping blindly at the world’s knowledge and bearing her agony like a bleating animal. It had been the most unexpected place to find compassion, to find mercy, to find Shem and his tenderness. Most
prominent in her memory was how strong he’d made her feel, helping—not dragging—her back to her cot when she couldn’t trust her own legs.
Now Anna was supporting that boy, aiding his labored steps over the walkway’s smooth jigsaw tiles, feeling stronger than ever as a young hand trembled upon her shoulder.
They were walking unattended—to the naked eye, of course. Konrad had made good on his negotiating table promises, allowing Anna’s company free movement within Golyna’s walled districts, provided they kept their distance from areas of worship and relic sanctuaries. Not that there was much for Konrad’s peers to resist anymore. The official Nahoran narrative wove Shem’s eastern birthrights into their leniency, but everybody short of the citizens themselves understood the truth of things: There was no way to restrain him anymore.
For once, the balance of power had tipped considerably on Anna’s side. That, and the old knife she’d found near the boardwalk, gave her a measure of comfort.
“Oh Shem, chodge,” Anna said, using her leg to playfully nudge Shem’s foot and quicken his pace. “You’ve got a rune, haven’t you? Put it to some use.”
They both laughed. It was a day for laughter, after all. Every canal bridge and topiary garden and boardwalk café was ripe for exploration, teeming with pale, clean-shaven southerners and dark northerners alike. Some of the Alakeph brothers had ventured out in their brilliant white robes, drawing crowds and hefty donations in every courtyard they visited. While the city’s commanders had prepared for the worst, assigning countless Chayam units to the rooftops and boulevards of every district Anna had visited, the citizens put their fears aside. Many of the younger residents, draped in fine silks and fitted linen shirts, were eager to approach Anna’s fighters and strike up conversations with their best flatspeak.
A handsome young man had blushed while speaking with Anna. “Would you believe that I begged my university instructors for lessons, just so I could speak with you and your people?” he said. Even those who kept their distance seemed more inquisitive than threatened, occasionally circling the Rzolkan fighters to see what strange paws and fangs and other trinkets were dangling from their belts. Several of Jenis’s men had found their place in the teahouses lining the northern marina, where starry-eyed women were all too willing to refill their kettles at no charge. Adoration was a gradual lure to complacency, but it wasn’t the time nor place to address that, in Anna’s mind. However Mesar chose to keep his men hard, yet humble, was his business.
Even Ramyi, who hadn’t been let out of Yatrin’s sight since they entered the Argent Gate, had succumbed to the torrent of attention and praise that Golyna’s citizens provided. They knew her name, her face, her apprenticeship to Anna—everything except why she hated their breed. When she and Yatrin paused to speak with strangers, her face held little excitement, but she wasn’t skilled enough to hide a roaming, carefree gaze as they moved from one district to the next, taking in a spectacle of white and gold architecture set against mountain spines and endless oceans and lush rows of orchards along the southern strand. If the girl couldn’t call it home, she could call it a refuge, and that was enough for Anna.
“Anna,” Shem said, “we rest?”
She glanced up, inspecting the shops and ribbon-swirling dancers along the main path. Yatrin was guiding Ramyi toward a toy shop near a row of oaks. “We’ll stop in the park.” Turning her attention to Shem’s cotton tunic, she noticed the hayat of his tunnel rune flickering through the threads. According to Jenis’s runner, they’d been forced to shut down four of the other tunnels, maintaining only the passage to the mountains near Karawat and a secondary evacuation route. Even with the lessened load on Shem’s body, the rune’s world-warping rifts were too demanding to allow him anything beyond short walks and consciousness. “You’re sure you don’t want a wagon? I think you’d look regal in it.”
A spark of Shem’s curiosity emerged. “Regal?”
“Like a bogat,” Anna said, quietly adding, “or an orza.”
“Like you!”
At first she balked at the outlandish thought, nearly laughing. She’d been born in a quiet corner of the forests, and she had expected to wither away among its sap and shadows. People there had risen up and been buried like leaf litter, torn between the press of new blood and the decomposing rot of those before them. But this life was chaotic, unprecedented, its trajectory unwritten in the most wild sense. Perhaps it was time to expand her scope of possibilities.
The park at the promenade’s end was perched on a terraced hillside, threaded with polished white steps and gazebos that overlooked a residential district far below. Citizens, Huuri and man-skin alike, were lying on the grass or sitting atop tree branches, and the closer Anna looked, the more idyllic it seemed: bowls of ripe fruit, citole melodies and tolling monastic bells clouding the air, ornate brass shrines nestled among olive trees and shrubs. Like in Malijad, the citizens wore elaborate patterns and decorated their flesh with all manners of metal and pearl, mostly glimmering gold crescents that extended from their nostrils to their ears.
Anna settled Shem against a sycamore and then slumped down beside him in the shade, listening to children laugh and scamper up the bark on the tree’s opposite side. It was calm and cool, and suddenly she was glad for how quickly the novelty of Shem’s arrival had worn off, fading to a festive afterglow over the city and its people.
“I missed the wind, Anna,” Shem said at last. “It makes skin glad.”
She nodded. “It missed you.”
A cluster of Chayam urban fighters strolled past the park, failing to appear uninterested in Anna and Shem. She’d grown adept at spotting them, whether in the valley’s dry gullies or tucked in the shade of a lodge’s third-floor window. They had the same tense demeanor, the same—
One of their watchers was not Nahoran.
Halfway up the slope to Anna’s left, taking rapid but sure-footed strides directly toward them, was a bald, sallow-skinned man with a long khet, narrow leather boots, and a beige neck wrap. Splintered pentagons crept under his skin. A southerner, no doubt, but not from her company. His arms had the dense knots of a man who spent his years taming beasts, or felling logs, or killing other men.
When Anna detected the long, curving ripple jutting into the fabric above his right hip, she knew his trade.
“Shem,” she said, causing the boy to jerk his head up as though torn from sleep, “could you wait here for a moment?” She kept her eyes trained on the killer, staring at him until a jolt of realization burst in his eyes.
He quickly cut left and started up the slope, heading toward a faraway cluster of kiln stacks and jagged temples.
“You go?” Shem asked.
“I just need a word with Yatrin. Is that all right?”
The boy nodded, a thin smile cutting from ear to ear, then tucked his chin back to his chest.
With eyes trained on the Rzolkan, Anna rose and picked her way up the hill, maintaining her distance on a parallel track. She shouldered her way past wine-drunk old men and singing youths, disturbed by the Rzolkan’s resolute path.
At the crest of the slope, which was ringed by a thick stone wall, the southerner hurried through a marble-lined archway and slipped out of Anna’s sight.
She dashed after him, catching a glimpse of the man as he moved through a cobblestone plaza and its arrangement of androgynous humanoid fountains. Trailing at a brisk pace, she watched the man cut through the flow of the crowd and move toward a row of buildings on the far side of the plaza. She caught him approaching a long, mosaic-covered hall adorned with obsidian Orsas plaques and rows of flapping black-and-violet banners—the Nahoran national standard. Again the crowd shifted, and when it dispersed well enough to see the hall’s entrance, nobody remained.
Then the tiling beside the second-floor window warped, distorting as though bent around some gash in reality’s fabric. Sunlight stretched over a patch of bulbou
s nothingness. The window began to rise, seemingly by itself, as though drawn up by one of Malijad’s strange mechanisms. But the cartels had no hand in this—it was hayat’s doing.
Anna bolted across the plaza, ignoring the whistles and outstretched hands and passersby that blocked her path. As she drew closer she noticed a detachment of Chayam guards standing watch at the entrance, scanning the crowds with their ruji held at waist-level, while their leading officer inspected visitors’ documents. She considered calling out to the guards, but there was no time to spare—no way to explain such illusions to the uninformed, more importantly. Anna fished the blade from the inner hem of her coat, then drew her arm back, tensing her wrist.
The window locked in place and—
A dozen paces from the base of the window, Anna snapped her hand forward and loosed the blade. It spun four times, four dark flashes in the shade, before plunging tip-down into an invisible mass suspended in the open window. Bright blood materialized around the metal, only to be snapped back by the climber’s rune. Even so, he let out a wild yelp. The blade wriggled from side to side, caught on a patch of ghostly, red-flickering flesh, until the climber’s crazed flailing knocked him from his perch and sent his intangible form plunging downward.
A blossom of dust shot up on the stones below, indisputably human and thrashing. The blade’s hilt struck the cobblestones like a hammer on a nail, driving the point through the climber’s center, somewhere between his neck and upper back. Immediately his flesh bled back into existence, worming out like a weaver’s yarn in fleshy tones and pores.
As Anna jogged closer, oblivious to the first shouts and screams, she noticed the man was lying on the ground, eyes wrenched open, lips working in sloppy circles. The chipped blade point was protruding through the base of his throat, rattling with every breath. His rune, stripped of its fabric covering during the fall, gleamed proudly despite the trauma.
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