“Give it!” Yet the anger sapped her energy, sending shakes through her body, and the heat became unbearable, boiling the air in her lungs. Her arms slumped to her sides, resigned, and she fell into a walking pursuit.
“I will, once you prove that you have a thinking mind,” Bora said. “Tell me what it is.”
“It’s mine,” she huffed, “and you know it.”
“Try again, child.”
Everything ached and radiated heat within her, and it was only a matter of time until she broke. The words came from her without her consent, but she was far too tired to resist them: “It’s a necklace.” Anna’s father, bearded in black patches, his eyes crinkled from the sun-scorched fields, flashed through her mind for an instant. She watched the sway of the silver links, imagining how many pinches of salt had gone into each curl, how much he’d been paid for Julek. “It’s just a necklace,” she whispered.
Bora stopped, seemingly satisfied. “Yes, it is.” With a careless sweep of the arm she tossed the necklace over the railing.
It was a tumbling blur against a backdrop of beige. It was a metallic glint, revolving in midair, sinking lower and lower until it disappeared below the kator’s walkway. Then it was lost to the expansive sands of Hazan, where a million things just like it had been lost and erased from memory. Where it would die without ceremony.
“Use your thinking mind,” Bora said. Her face was smooth and bronze and untouched by sweat. “It was just a necklace.”
Just a necklace, Anna thought distantly, staring over the railing at the nothingness. Her lips hung open, and she felt the hot winds toss her hair about her face, struggling in vain to pull her back to the moment.
Bora’s soft words burrowed into Anna’s left ear. “Child, your bindings endanger more than just yourself. My dreams are restless.”
Anna grasped for words, still imagining the necklace in Bora’s hand. “I don’t care about your dreams.”
“Look at me.”
A rough hand took hold of Anna’s chin and twisted it to the left, and Anna found herself staring up at the northerner. Somewhere deep inside, there was enough wrath to claw the woman’s eyes from their sockets. On the surface, however, was only confusion. Nobody could be so cruel.
“You are free from your bonds,” Bora said. “Let them go.”
Anna’s eyes crawled over the sands and mountains and ripples of heat, searching for the silver links. Malformed legs appeared in Anna’s mind. “It isn’t that simple,” she whispered.
“It is,” Bora said. A single rivulet of sweat ran along her shaved head, coming to rest at her brow. “Once you learn the way, you can release it.” Sigils stretched and shrank across her cheeks, almost as if they breathed with the northerner’s slow rhythm. “In this moment, you are a wild animal.”
“Let me go,” Anna whispered, unsure if she meant it.
“Your soul carries a thousand packs, all of them filled with sand,” Bora said. “You will be an animal until you learn to cast off your burdens.”
There was no way for the northerner to understand burdens as Anna did, to see decaying boys in swamps and the recurring image of a father hoarding salt bags. In Anna’s mind, there was no division between burden and memory. Releasing burdens meant releasing everything she accepted as real.
It meant releasing herself.
“Show me, then,” Anna said faintly. Only burdens, she told herself, trying to focus on Bora’s amber stare instead of her last image of home, with its misshapen door and wild grass springing up around the fences. I’m not releasing Julek. I won’t.
“Speak with authority,” Bora said. “This is a choice, not a command. You may have gifts, but your mind is spiteful, and it invites destruction. If you take my hand, we will tame your mind. If you run to the safety of your handler’s wings, you will keep your burdens.” The northerner gestured toward the endless stretch of sand and mountains. “If it’s all too much for you, Hazan will not turn you away. Death is a simple choice for the living.”
The survival instinct was a dulled but persistent force in her. Death was no longer the easiest course, nor the simplest. It was not merely a matter of ensuring her place in the Grove-Beyond-Worlds. After all the pain and terror and leagues of travel, she hated death. She hated its greed, its injustice.
Death wanted her yet didn’t deserve her, or Julek, or the nameless millions who lost their battles each day.
“Show me,” Anna repeated. “I want to learn.”
“Very well,” Bora said. No trickery, no chastising. “Come with me, child.”
Bora led Anna to a bulbous red cylinder at the back end of the kator, this one twice as large as those around it. Light spilled through the doorway as Bora slid its door aside, revealing only the edges of a red and gold rug with a beaded fringe. Wisps of smoke curled up and into the light, unraveling in desert winds. Chanting issued forth from the chambers and matched the kator’s thrumming.
Her hands trembling, Anna followed Bora into the darkness.
The air was thick and still. For the first time in days Anna felt sweat beading on her skin in cold dabs. Little by little her eyes adapted to the blackness.
At the far end of the chamber, lit by hanging candles and mounted on a table draped in red fabric, was a corpse. It was a dark, desiccated figure with its arms upright and fixed in crooked angles. Black pits represented a former mouth, nose, and eyes. But more unsettling than the body was the crowd of worshippers sitting cross-legged before the altar. They were so still that they appeared dead themselves. Men paced along the dark lanes of the chamber with ruji in hand, scanning.
Anna followed the northerner further into the chamber, listening to the gathering’s chant as it echoed through the chamber. It was resonant and dull, far beyond comprehension. Their words were ancient and buried things, and by simply listening, she gleaned their secrets.
“Medisyta sha olvef,” Bora said, examining the worshippers with pools of candlelight and shadow across her face. “Meditation upon the end.”
Anna lowered her voice in turn, then pointed to the altar’s corpse. “Who is that?”
“Nobody knows.”
Several worshippers turned their heads toward Anna in a lazy sweep.
“They recognize your tongue,” Bora said. “They fear it.”
Anna was too fixated by the body to dwell upon their stares, however. She wondered where it was from, who’d birthed it, whether or not it had ever loved somebody. A hallowed corpse was nothing new to her. She’d seen pinemen in Bylka, which the priestesses covered in dark sap and dried on tables in the sunlight before stuffing them into hollows of oaks and thorn huts. But pinemen were special, their names known to those who sought their guidance on the trails. This was just a nameless husk, cracked and withering and forgotten. “If they don’t know who it is, then why is it so important?”
Bora folded her arms. “What matters is that it has been swept from life.”
“I already know that,” Anna said. “People die.”
“And so will you. You are arrogant. You live in fear for your own life. But life escapes us all. In time it will outrun the fastest among us.”
“I’m not afraid to die,” Anna countered.
“You are,” Bora said. “The thinking mind will dull that fear, in time. But it is a rare thing to welcome death.”
“So you do fear it.” The notion came with a small sense of victory.
“A rare thing,” Bora said, “but not impossible.” The coldness in her voice said nothing to the contrary.
Those with bowed heads faced the altar once more, but Anna watched them closely, envying their stillness and the way their breathing never manifested in the folds of their robes. Their lungs were halls of stones.
“What about memories?” Anna asked.
Bora glanced down. “What of them?”
“The thinki
ng mind,” Anna said, choosing her words with as much precision as possible. “Does it dull them, too?”
“It dulls the pain,” Bora said, “and it dulls the sweetness.” Her eyes lingered on the corpse. “I suspect that for you, it would be a simple sacrifice.”
As simple as letting go, Anna reasoned. She envisioned a fist unclenching, and from the open palm, handfuls of dried soil scattering in the wind. “How do I do it?”
“There was no trickery when I told you how long men have sought those answers.” She gestured to the carpeted space behind a nearby worshipper, which also happened to be the furthest row from the body. “Each journey is personal and lonesome.”
Everything had seemed so much easier when tasks were concrete, when memories were sweet and simple. Fetching wood and brushing horses and moving buckets were tiring things, but they could be undertaken and completed without much thinking. Carving a path in the mind carried no guarantee of completion. “Tell me how to start, then.”
“Sit,” Bora said. “Sit there, and set your eyes upon death. Think about how much you resemble the still body, and how life vanishes in your breaths. Focus upon this well. If you think of anything else, let it pass you. Turn your mind back to the end.”
Anna stepped onto the carpet, unsure. Then, with a slow sweep, she glanced back at Bora. “How will I know when I’m done?”
The shadows formed dark crevices around Bora’s jaw and eyes. “If you think that you’re finished, then you haven’t taken a single step.”
After a moment to gather herself, lost in Bora’s endless riddles, Anna wandered to the last row and sat beside a thin man with fluttering eyelids. The flesh beneath the lids was a dark yellow. Hazani, she recalled from the tracker’s words. But the man paid her no mind, and Anna crossed her legs, suppressing the radiating pain from her bruised hips and scarred legs.
She fought to concentrate upon the illumined corpse. The body was a shriveled lump at this distance, partially obscured by the shoulders and bowed heads of the closest worshippers. Cardamom and distilled sweat tangled in the air, clouding the chamber like sacred smoke.
“Malin sharame olven,” the worshippers chanted. The man beside Anna let the words dribble from his lips, his eyelids moving feverishly. Their words were harmonized, but nothing indicated that there had been a prompt of any kind.
Anna held her breath and tensed her back, unsure of what to do. Standing up and exiting would’ve been simple, even expected. I have free will, Anna reminded herself, hardening her fists in her lap. She can’t hold me here.
Yet she stayed.
Images of the desiccated corpse rolled through her mind, and gradually, the flesh reconstructed itself, its eyes reforming in bright bulbs. Skin sprouted over its withered shell in spores, then grew into a solid, rose-tinted mass. Limbs straightened out, yet the left leg remained malformed, and the right bent with a slight crook, still usable given the proper technique. Such details felt strangely fitting alongside its charcoal hair and freckles.
The corpse opened its mouth. “Anna,” it whispered. “You left me?”
Anna’s eyes shot open and revealed the altar and the shadows and the thin man. Her scream was a hoarse gasp, drowned out by sudden chanting. Tears ran down her cheeks in warm tracks.
A thousand packs, all of them filled with sand.
Then came silence again, and she stared down at the corpse with cool detachment. It was a collection of tendons and bones and cartilage. Memories of the end in the tomesroom washed over her, and she descended into dark liquid, basking in the crowd’s hymns. She sank deeper, motionless, until the cold became numbing and she no longer desired to surface. Her body tingled and her legs wilted, her body swaying, tossed by the winds of Malchym’s harbor. Like the western breeze that would pull her over the ship’s railing, while the nameless men taught her to cast ropes and spit into the sea. . . .
With that lone gust, her body hurtled downward and into black waters.
In the darkness the world gave way to a monolith.
She gazed upon its flat, harsh sides, trying to understand its true shape as she’d done with light. It was shrouded in fog and shadows, the darkness obscuring its angles. Every so often, segments of the symbol rearranged and fractured. Although the monolith did not speak, it emanated power, taunting her.
Anna wandered forward, desperate to unveil its form. Desperate to hold onto it and understand its mystery. She reached out, and as her fingers brushed the fog—
Bora knelt in front of Anna. Her lips were suspiciously tight, her eyes level with Anna’s, a knot of concern twisting her brows into unfamiliar shapes. If not for the northerner’s reputation, she might’ve appeared worried.
“Lower your head, and don’t move,” Bora said. She placed her hands, hard but smooth, like river pebbles, on either side of Anna’s head. Around her, several worshippers stirred and glanced around nervously. Whispers spread through the gathering. “The first of many have arrived.”
Anna focused on the amber eyes. They were dark and fearless and jagged, drowning out the world beyond Bora. The northerner’s gaze was braced and ready, flickering back at something over Anna’s shoulder.
“We seek only the girl,” a voice croaked from the rear of the chamber. It was thick with the northern tongue, recognizable as river-tongue only by the hard curl of the r in the last word. Boots clanked over the metal panels and carpeted walkways.
“Head down,” Bora whispered. She moved past Anna with an unceremonious brush, striding past rows of worshippers and converging on the source of the footsteps.
Against Bora’s instructions, Anna craned her head around and saw the bright blur of the northerner’s cloak billowing through slats of darkness. Six men stood by the pod’s entrance, their faces shadowed and wrapped with beige cloth. Lean silhouettes of ruji rested in the crux of their arms. Some of the Dogwood men skirted around them to exit the pod, basked in moonlight to expose wide eyes, white lips.
“She’s behind you,” Bora said.
“Eh?”
It was all the leader of the new arrivals had time to utter, a transient bleat of confusion as Bora closed in on him and caressed the sides of his face, almost matronly. Then her hands were torquing and severing his spinal cord, drowning out the room’s final hymns with a muted snap. The body convulsed exactly once before rolling in on itself and sinking in a heap. Worshippers shoved away from one another, scrambling to flee the rush of violence.
A man on the far side of the chamber gave a half-shout and fired his ruj, punching a dozen holes into the metallic hull and peppering the darkness with shafts of pale light. Wind screeched through the punctures in a ghastly moan as Bora lunged at the shooter, forcing him into an unlit corner and slamming his body against the perforated wall once, twice, three times, thrashing until he dropped his weapon and crumpled. Her arm was a crescent sweep as she snatched the fallen ruj and cast it across the chamber, the tube flashing through candlelight and shade and tumbling, end-over-end, before striking a man’s open mouth. Fragments of teeth clattered across the floor. The man’s comrade let off a reactionary shot, but Bora seized the casualty’s arm and spun him closer, intercepting the brunt of the ruj’s payload with a wet whump. Shards of bone and liquefied pulp drummed against the hull as Bora dropped the corpse’s remnants and collided with the shooter, a mass of mica-laden fabric and dark flesh, grunts of terror blending with tangled footsteps and the clatter of ruji, the worshippers in full flight as they crawled from the madness and swiped at freckles of blood across their faces.
A metallic glimmer shot out from the blackness.
Anna ducked and shoved aside the yellow-eyed man, faintly sensing the whisper of broken air over her neck, the blade spinning past, the jagged edge scarring the carpeting between her ankles. The weapon tumbled off in a broken arc, dancing between patches of shade and flickering candlelight.
A pop thundered from the
back of the chamber and washed out the darkness, leaving a white-hot filament of the blast framed in Anna’s vision. Sound was a distant, muddled haze over the whipping winds. Visions of erratic movement materialized from a backdrop of smoke and raw, silvery desert. It wasn’t until the kator turned on its track that Anna realized half of the chamber had been torn away, its edges a fringe of pulsing red and dribbling, molten alloy. Silhouettes flashed past the void with blades dancing and slashing, ruji firing in soundless puffs, bodies being kicked free of the panels underfoot and plunging into the night and its endless sands. Bora was a graceful whirlwind within the violence, a droplet of ink swirling into a stream.
A jumble of dark, sprinting shapes blurred past in the flats outside, drawing closer to the kator’s railings in a cluster of hooves and snapping fabric. Five soglavs, this breed heartier and striped like the plains of their birth, raced over the rocks and kept pace with thrashing claws. Their riders were hunkered down in burlap saddles, ruji strapped across their backs and tattered hoods drawn up against the moonlight. Dust streamed in billowing clouds at their back.
Bora twirled and drove a blade into the final soldier’s ear. Shoving the body free, she rolled to her left, retrieved a fallen soldier’s ruj and leveled it at the approaching riders. Her shoulder shifted with the ignition.
Two riders, both flanking the kator’s railing and preparing to dismount with feet unhooked from makeshift stirrups, absorbed the full blast of iron shavings. Blood darkened the curtain of dust. Tattered bits of cotton flaked into the breeze and coiled away, swallowed by the haze as quickly as the mangled bodies of the riders and dismembered beasts. The three men at the edge of their formation broke away and bore down into their beasts’ necks with barbed gloves, hastening their approach. One rider reached back, grasped his ruj, and cradled it under a crooked arm.
The rose-shaped spark of a firing ruj blossomed in the darkness, and Anna’s survival instincts assumed control.
She dove behind the shelter of the nearest worshippers, hands cupped to the back of her head and legs drawn to her stomach. Hollow whumps rang out as the bodies against her recoiled, slumping over and twisting and twitching. Her stomach convulsed as their cloaks bunched against her, slack.
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