They ate in silence, leaving the pod’s door open to fill the room with cool air and light. Anna sat on her bed and picked absently at the hardtack. Moving the food to her mouth, chewing, and taking occasional sips from her canteen were all perfunctory actions. Her mind was cluttered with fears about Malijad and its immensity, about meditation and symbols, about Shem and how he watched her from across the aisle.
“Shem,” Anna said, hoping to distract him by pointing out the lowered window shutter, “is that fire from heat?”
“No,” Bora said. She was leaning against the doorway with a tract of sweat running down her temple, the tawny landscape reflected in her eyes. “This is an old sign, unique to Malijad alone. To place spark-salts in the canals is a warning to interlopers.”
Anna frowned. “Interlopers?”
With a quickening heart, Anna parsed the tracker’s indifference, why he’d been so cavalier about the smog. He’s trying to spare me panic.
“Welcome to the flatlands,” the tracker growled. “Everything’s mystical.”
Anna was still gazing out at the inferno when Shem reached across the aisle, his arm flowing with gentle sigils, to place a piece of hardtack by her feet. She was reminded of a hound bringing a kill back to its master.
“No,” Anna said. She picked up the hardtack and offered it back. “You should eat it.”
“You’re bones and hair,” the tracker said, pacing near the latrines at the back end of the pod. “Eat it, girl. Or maybe that’s a warning too.”
“The orza will fill her plates beyond need,” Bora replied. “You are not from the flatlands, where a child often lives with only bones.” Her hawkish glare turned on Anna. “The mothers of Hazan know a simpler test. She has breasts, so she will live.”
“Barely,” the tracker said.
Anna pulled the edges of her cloak further around herself, then looked up at Shem. His brows formed a mournful curve, and he swiveled his head from side to side, unsure of what he’d done to upset them.
“That is the root of your concern, then.” Bora nodded. “Her body doesn’t please you.”
The tracker squared his shoulders, pausing mid-step. There was familiarity to the stance, especially in the shadows pooling along the folds of his mask and obscuring his eyes.
“Both of you, stop it,” Anna croaked. She watched the tracker’s hands wander dangerously close to his blade. “I’m not hungry.”
“Perhaps I should feel something for you, child,” Bora said. “I’ll be leaving you in the clutches of an animal.”
Anna stared at Bora, tracking a bead of sweat as it formed on her brow and ran down her cheeks, her graceful neck. There had to be a reason for her barbs, some mechanism behind the provocation. It was as though she could pull levers within the man.
“Pretty face you have,” the tracker said. “No small wonder it hasn’t been carved off yet.”
“Where is yours?” Bora asked.
The tracker grunted, burying the noise deep within his burlap.
“Let it go,” Anna whispered. “Please.”
Shadows crawled over the tracker’s mask and unarmored tunic, occasionally slashed by the light that came through Anna’s shutters. For a long, creeping moment, his hands lingered near his belt.
They fell away.
“Get your pack ready,” he whispered.
All of Anna’s breath left her in a rush, her chest aching. She thought of the blade in her belt, wondering if she could’ve retrieved it in time.
More than anything, she wondered who she would’ve helped.
* * * *
As Anna stood against the railing and looked down the line of waiting passengers, some Hazani with unstrung bows and others Huuri with flowing hoods, it occurred to her that she wasn’t so different from them. Not anymore. Her fair skin and light hair were concealed, and she spoke a faraway tongue. She’d even taken on some of their mannerisms, standing still to avoid overheating and breathing solely through her nose. She wanted to learn their ways, to thrive like the thorny plants that some passengers carried in jars.
And beneath it all, the heat, the blood, the fear, she wanted a life here.
She wanted a life anywhere.
The tracker stood motionless. There was something disturbing about a violent man at peace, about his mail shirt slung over one shoulder and head tilted skyward.
All eyes now rested on the coal-dark cloud above Malijad. It cast shade over the kator, over mud-baked huts and granaries dotting the landscape, over smoldering iron skeletons where canvases had once covered the channels. Ahead the city loomed like a cliffside worked in pastel paint, a blur of ochre and turquoise. Bridges draped in tapestries and trinkets spanned between towers, and as the kator lanced through another veil of smoke, now riding high above the flats on an elevated track, Malijad’s outlying villages, no doubt expansive enough to rival Malchym, slipped under the vessel in a blur.
The world bled together in a mass of beige and black. Entire streets and marketplaces streamed beneath the tracks as vivid smears. Setstone gouges grew into shadowed pits and thin fractures became chasms, snaking over sun-bleached colors and exhaling crystalline dust in the breeze.
She closed her eyes, lost to the winds, the shouting below, the kator’s reverberant humming, eternally ascending setstone, a black sky, smiling Gosuri children.
Everything ceased.
Anna opened her eyes to the crowd, and the platform just beyond the railing, a dull ring overtaking the city’s noises. She rubbed the tips of her fingers together beside her ear canals, listening for the crackling of skin-on-skin to ensure she hadn’t gone deaf as her mother had always done after bouts of thunder.
Broken sunlight bathed the left side of the platform, where a group of Dogwood soldiers waited with ruji, dark glass bottles, and a makeshift desk of wooden crates draped in red sheets. Vertigo struck her as she stared over the railing and watched crowds moving in formless, hazy streams far below them.
“Yelsh,” a Dogwood captain called from the platform. He was older than most, with a lean, sun-darkened face and blue fabric covering his neck and forehead. A red sash covered sand-freckled armor.
A group of men shrouded in flowing white fabric, exposing only their eyes, disembarked alone. They moved like a palisade around a group of brown-robed passengers, most of whom were half their size. Children.
“Bora,” Shem said. He tugged at the hem of the northerner’s cloak and leaned over the railing, grinning. “They remember me? They remember songs?”
“No,” Bora said. “There are many faces within the Alakeph. These men are not guardians of Qersul.”
Anna studied the white-clad men with scrutiny, spotting the outlines of long blades beneath their robes. Alakeph. Rzolka’s Halshaf branches had never needed the protectors, as far as she knew. Their leader spoke to the Dogwood guard seated behind the crates, his gloved hands emoting gracefully, and their exchange was so casual that it could’ve been between blood-kin. The foundlings milled about freely.
But when Anna looked at Shem, she saw his sale as a droba in Tas Hassa and in Qersul, which she’d never seen but feared nonetheless. “You said you were a droba.”
Shem nodded. “I was. They make the buying.”
Anna looked confused. “Galipa fought with them?”
“No,” Shem said, equally bemused.
“He discovered Shem at the foundling hall in Qersul,” Bora explained, her words tainted with frustration. “Galipa donated his salt to prove that he could care for such a child. He is a good man.” Bora cast a hard glance at Shem, and Anna realized that the annoyance hadn’t arisen from Anna’s questions; it was from Shem’s lack of reverence for his father. “These men are perceptive. Through eyes alone, they understand the way of a man’s hands.”
Anna squinted at the warriors, who’d finished conferring with the Dogwood guard a
nd were filing into the building through a covered stairway. There had to be a Halshaf monastery somewhere within the sprawl, she reasoned. “What if they misunderstand someone?”
“They never will,” Bora said. “They’re far too good for Hazan.”
The children followed the Alakeph up the steps, through a hanging curtain, and into darkness. When the last white-clad warrior carried a lame boy inside, the Dogwood guard near the kator raised his hand, called out something in flatspeak, and waved for one of his comrades. A youthful Dogwood guard approached the metal gangway with a cutting gaze, scanning until his attention came to rest on the tracker. After a hushed exchange with the tracker, the guard waved Anna and the others onward. “Right this way, my friends.” In river-tongue, which Anna assumed to be his native language, the guard’s voice was smooth and saccharine. It bore youthful maturity that Anna hadn’t found elsewhere in Hazan, especially since flatspeak sounded as raw and spiteful as its birthplace.
Even so, a flitter of grymjek had leaked out from the tracker’s whispered dealings, and it didn’t fade so easily in Anna’s mind:
Patvor.
The guard led them to the covered staircase, and as Anna glanced back over her shoulder, she noticed the kator’s disembarking passenger queue had ground to a halt, stalled by Dogwood attendants. While Anna ascended the steps hand-in-hand with Shem, she tried to imagine a clean bed and cold water, which now seemed as luxurious as her promised riches.
The young guard paused halfway up the steps. “She wants to see the new faces with haste.” He grinned at Bora. “She had your quarters prepared, morza.”
It was lost on Bora, it seemed. “I’ll remain for now.”
The guard offered a parting grin, revealing some of the whitest teeth Anna had ever seen, then proceeded. He stepped aside at the doorway and draped the fabric curtain over one arm, allowing the tracker clear entry. “Watch your head, pan.” He offered a reverent bow to Bora as she passed. For Shem, he smiled so fully that it put creases under his eyes. “Right ahead, novy pan.”
But when Anna moved to follow Shem into the darkness, the guard’s elbow dipped to bar her way. She peered up at him, reading his brown eyes and the playfulness in his brow, unsure if he’d moved his arm unintentionally. Triangles with soft edges swam beneath his skin. His lips formed a lopsided crescent of a smile.
“My, my.” His smile expanded. “The stars blessed you well, panna.”
He offered a wink so coy that Anna nearly missed it, and she wondered if she’d imagined the moment. “Thank you,” she whispered.
He squinted at the steps behind Anna. “You seem to have dropped something.”
She twisted around to scan the steps, and saw nothing. She patted at her hip for her knife and at her shoulder for the straps of her pack. There was nothing else to drop.
“Here it is,” the guard said, digging down into a leather pouch on his thigh with his free hand. He grunted with mock exertion, and after a moment of rummaging, produced a violet-shaded rose. “This must be it.”
Anna stared at the flower. It was a lovely color, and she’d never seen something like it in Bylka, even at the harvest festivals. The petals were fresh and new, swirling inward to form a black crease at the center. Its stem was a vibrant green, bordering on miraculous in a dying place.
He twirled the flower between his fingers. “Do you like it?”
A smile played on her lips. “It’s beautiful.”
The guard tucked the flower into the neckline of her tunic, making sure to point its thorn away from her skin. “Well, that looks quite nice.” He gave Anna another wink, far more pronounced this time.
“Anna?” Shem called from inside.
She leaned around the guard, holding up a finger to signify wait, then looked back to the guard. “It couldn’t have grown here.”
“Oh, no.” He gestured to the surrounding city and its endless, dust-clouded streets. “But in there, in the kales, the orza grows them like weeds. I found a single bulb many years ago, panna, and it sprouted well in its new home.”
“Oh.” Suddenly it didn’t seem so remarkable.
“Don’t mistake me,” he said with a smile. “Not just anybody can have them. Each day captains pick five of them at the orza’s request. We hand them out as we please to her visitors.”
Anna glanced down at the purple folds, lost in their beauty and deep coloring. “For what reason?”
“Whatever we like, of course.” The guard lifted the curtain higher, offering Anna passage. “Sometimes for a lovely panna.”
She held the guard’s gaze for a moment, envisioning him without armor or sun-darkened skin, wondering if those things were intrinsically part of him or merely acquired traits, and if he was Rzolkan beneath it all. He was alien to her. His kindness was as misplaced as sunlight under a full moon, and—
“Something’s the matter?” the tracker grunted, breaking Anna’s focus. He stood behind Shem, his vacant eyes cycling between her and the guard.
The guard flashed Anna a knowing smile. “Apologies, my friend. She was asking about the kales.”
“Doesn’t need words right now.” The tracker Shem pulled free of the doorway. “We have places to be, things to do.”
“Precisely,” the guard said, lifting the fabric higher and offering Anna a concealed wink.
She glanced down at her boots and stepped into shade, her cheeks unexpectedly warm. She was quick to lock fingers with Shem’s waiting hand, which waited patiently at her hip. After the tracker finished a few muted words with the guard and led them down the corridor, Anna stole a glance over her shoulder.
Only the guard’s dark eyes and smooth lips were visible through a gap in the fabric, but that small sliver of a gaze and a grin was enough to fix Anna’s stare.
Shem guided her around a bend in the corridor, and she saw only dark stone and Bora and the tracker ahead of her. It was a cold, dying place once more. Hazan, she reminded herself. Exhaustion and hunger returned in fierce waves. Thoughts of charming men suddenly seemed childish and hopeless.
Especially when she heard the monsters ahead.
Chapter 13
Muddled shouts echoed down the corridor, joining a wash of footfalls and foreign tongues and cavernous echoes. But the shouting voices stood apart from the din with their familiarity. Although Anna couldn’t tell one speaker from another, nor see the end of the passage, she swore she understood them.
A full sentence in river-tongue, unmistakably male, sliced through the clamor. “See, now? Hush up with it. I told you they’d be here.”
“Teasing runts,” another voice, this one lower yet timid, was quick to reply. “Say something.”
“Fuck’s that flatspeak gibberish?” a third man wondered, almost as though speaking to himself. “No news, bad news? Something like that.”
The tracker hissed a curse. “You can quit your yipping. She’s behind me.” He glanced back, though his inspection seemed to miss the uncertainty clouding Anna’s eyes. “Don’t make any sudden movements, and don’t go prodding at her. Give her some room to stretch her ribs.”
“She’s a hound, then?” the third man asked. He released a slow-burning cackle that was met by the first man’s belly-laugh.
Something about their laughter raked down the back of Anna’s neck, so she gripped Shem’s hand tighter, eased by the sensation of pumping blood in his fingers.
Bora looked back at Anna warily. Her amber eyes were as sharp as ever, crystalline with the light that poured from the tunnel’s exit and threaded over stonework.
“Ah, ah, ah,” said the third man. “I see pretty fingers.”
Rustling fabric and the clapping of tacked boots against tile echoed from the back of the corridor, heralding the approach of the next group of passengers. The tracker, seemingly jarred back to the urgency of the moment, led the group onward.
Before
they emerged from the passage, however, the ceiling slanted up and away with a gilded sheen, glittering with sunlight from an unseen window. Lacquered ivory and jade swirled along the walls.
Anna broke free of Shem’s grip and shouldered her way to the tracker’s side to glimpse the majesty of the chamber. Chamber wasn’t the right word for it. Tiles extended in all directions, flanked by staircases that wove through one another like a spider’s web. Men in bright sashes streamed past carrying parcels and banners, while women carried the folds of glimmering skirts. Children chased one another up stairwells, through lanes of fountains, into gardens nestled within the walls amid pillars and murals of warfare. It smelled of the sweet dust kicked up by horse hooves in summer.
She was distantly aware of the three men before her, but her sight was lured by the sunlight dancing down through the dome’s iris. A palace. She prayed to the celestials and the Grove, begging for a life here.
“Sweet little Bylka girl,” the third man cooed, breaking her focus. His head was bald and sunburned, his nose distinctly porcine. Freckles on his cheeks hemmed in two beady eyes, which were jaundiced and tired, while his smile was a curiously white yet lopsided jumble of teeth. Something resembling a beard covered his face in patches, left to run amok about his chin and neck. A crescent of his gut hung beneath his blue shirt, reaching down to his pants of loose beige twill and red striping. His exposed flesh bore sigils of tangled leaves.
Hearing of home put a chill in Anna’s chest. Looking away from the man was harder than she expected, however. She’d always learned that hounds bit when you turned away. “Who are you?”
“The manners of bogland girls,” a thin man murmured. He stood on the left side of the trio, draped in a purple overcoat with a gold-beaded sash around his waist. His hair was dark and pulled back with a knotted cord, revealing the harsh angles of his face and hooked cheekbones. Around his eyes he had pinched, leathery skin and thick brows. He was clean-shaven, but it only lent a porcelain illusion to his face. His sigils were jagged waves.
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