Scribes

by James Wolanyk

  Just before Har-gunesh lanced through the cloud cover and spilled orange light across her rug, she tied her hair back with twine, tucked it into her hood, and headed for the corridor. Shem’s creaking door stilled her before she could leave.

  The Huuri boy stumbled out of his chambers in a pair of twill pants, letting sunlight flow over and through the sinew of his torso. “Hello, hello,” he said in a sing-song voice.

  Anna worked to put on a smile, unable to look past the fresh blood seeping through his linen. “Good morning, Shem.” Her smile faded. “Those bandages need to be changed.”

  He beamed. “You fix me.”

  “The orza’s herbmen will do it for you.”

  “Cut.” Shem drew a line across his throat with a bandaged finger. “You make me better? I can earn cuts.”

  “You don’t work for me,” she said. “You never had to.” She gestured to the table, desperate to pull the boy’s haunting eyes away. “Eat, Shem. Rest today, and have your hands bandaged. I’ll be back in a few hours.”

  Confusion swam in his empty gaze. “I want work.”

  “Shem.” It was a harsh, unanticipated crack. She immediately regretted it, but forced herself onward, angry at her loss of control. Angry at her anger, she supposed. “Stay here until I get back, and don’t work.” Her voice softened as Shem drew in his shoulders, crestfallen. “I want you to feel better. I know you care.”

  His face brightened as he sat directly where he stood, crossing his legs over the outstretched paws of a bear’s pelt. He hunched over, propped his chin up with both hands, and grinned at Anna. “I don’t work, then. I help in gardens.”

  Anna glanced at his maimed hands, wary. “If it hurts, you have to stop.”

  “Yes, of course!”

  Her smile flickered just enough to imitate happiness, and she slipped out of her quarters without looking back.

  Dogwood guards crowded the corridor, milling about in silence. They were speaking just before Anna’s door opened, judging by the half-mumbled words and collective disengagement that capped off their dialogue. Anna counted fifteen of them in total, eyeing her and offering smiles if their gazes met.

  She pulled her hood higher and quickened her steps.

  * * * *

  The skies were a sill of bluish chrome when she reached the terrace, underlined by familiar orange. She wandered through the grasses and stake-supported vines, searching for Bora amid clumps of men and women walking backward with white robes and mica pendants, muttering chants in flatspeak and bowing with each step. The worshippers’ clenched eyes and crescent-shaped trinkets shed a buried truth: They were retreating from something.

  From Har-gunesh.

  Anna turned away, undeterred by the warmth across her hands. It wasn’t long before she noticed the lone figure seated beside the terrace’s railing, just past a stretch of black grapes and curved red fruits, and approached.

  Bora’s sweat-riveted head turned as Anna drew closer.

  A smirk tugged at Anna’s lips. “You could hear the grass.”

  “Do you think I employ tricks?”

  The joy faded instantly. “I was just trying to figure out how you did it,” Anna explained. “The way you’re so alert, I mean. I thought it was impressive.”

  “Impressing you is not a primary concern.”

  Anna frowned. The northerner’s voice was neutral as always. Even so, Anna imagined that even killers had a tongue for small talk. “Am I interrupting something?” No reply. “Was I late?”

  Bora’s chin dipped. “Sit.”

  Anna did as she was instructed. She folded her hands over her lap as she’d done on the kator, and with some effort straightened her back. From her rear came the low thrum of the winds and the rustling grass. “Bora, what are we doing?”

  Bora’s eyes were fixed ahead. “Sitting.”

  “Wasting time.”

  “Experiencing the truth of the world is far from wasted,” Bora reproached her. “Life is always slipping away, child, but you’ll die an animal if you don’t learn to observe.” Her voice lowered. “To detach yourself from the needs of the feeling mind.”

  It was beyond what Anna understood in any meaningful way, but she trusted Bora with her lessons. She watched the sunrise through the setstone. “Those people,” she said, jerking her head toward the now-absent worshippers, “why were they praying to Har-gunesh?”

  “Not to Har-gunesh,” Bora said. “To Aya-soluk, the Pale Crescents. Shy creatures in need of coaxing to return in the evening.” She too stared at the sunrise. “Eons have passed since they spoke to Har-gunesh, but their priests and priestesses say that bargaining is a wasted effort. Worshipping is madness. It’s a cruel, hateful god.”

  “You don’t believe it, then,” Anna said.

  “I believe it kills,” Bora said as she tilted her face toward the cruel god’s light. “I know it, in fact. But this life is too meager to be spent cowering, child. Bargaining cannot delay death.”

  Anna closed her eyes and let the sunlight filter through in a pale orange wash. She thought back to the forest and the tracker and Julek, seeing the truth of Bora’s words through a pang of discomfort. There was something soothing about inevitable death, knowing that Julek would’ve had to die somewhere, even if he’d survived the trip to Lojka.

  But the living endured the consequences of death. The living dreamt of remains left to rot in marshes. The living felt rage.

  “Do you believe in gods, child?”

  She considered it carefully. Nearly everyone in Bylka believed in the Grove, of course, but that was a place beyond gods entirely. A scattered few—those who endured the mocking and the spitting, that is—believed in the Claw and its thousands of gods, sacrificing to rivers and fallow fields for good fortune. But most of those worshippers were selective, latching onto the gods they could trick or easily satisfy. Her father told her that most of the Claw was gone, and she’d heard from passing travelers that worshippers who lived during the wars were fed to hounds alive, mocking their animal sacrifices. But most who spoke of the Claw had a nostalgic glint in their eyes.

  All Anna knew was that she’d never join their fold. If there were gods, they’d been given enough innocent blood to bless the entire world.

  “No,” she whispered. “Not many of us do.”

  Bora stared ahead, the silhouette of her forehead and nose avian.

  “Have you ever seen one?” Anna asked.

  “I don’t seek them out.”

  Anna picked at the grass around her legs. “So you do believe.”

  “There’s no sense in believing in them.” Bora’s wary eyes turned on Anna’s hands and their tufts of plucked grass. Anna tucked them away. “Either they exist, or they do not. Our perceptions cannot change this world.”

  “But if they exist, you would worship them.”

  “You extract your own words, child.” Bora’s chest rose and fell and rose again. “Some say that gods are beyond our understanding, but there is a simpler truth to worship: It is a contract. And being indebted is a damning thing.”

  It was an odd sentiment, even for Bora. But Anna thought about her words, remembering how she’d seen the Claw’s worshippers bathe themselves in boiling water and drive daggers through their feet. Whether or not they existed, Anna wasn’t sure she’d ever pay such a price. “What about me?”

  Bora raised her brow.

  “Scribes,” Anna said, a chill in her voice. “Some say that we’re descended from gods. You even said it.”

  “I said you would be seen in this light.”

  “Then how did we come into this world, Bora?” It was an age-old question, circulating around Rzolka and the north and the east for hundreds of years, but no answer had ever emerged. “What made me?”

  “Womb and seed.”

  “It doesn’t explain our marks.”
>
  “A veil of self-importance,” Bora replied. “You exist. Anything beyond that is an illusion.”

  An inkling of bitterness rose up in Anna. Her own gifts were difficult to grasp, but there was some prestige to be found in her role, in the things she could do. “You’ve seen what my marks have done.”

  “I’ve seen many marks of the hayajara.”

  “But mine are enduring,” Anna said, borrowing the orza’s description.

  “Yes,” Bora said, “they exist. What of it, child? Do you want to be worshipped? Not all who hold power are gods.”

  “Power?” Anna whispered, taken aback somewhat. “We can stop death, Bora.” The northerner said nothing. “Not even the gods can do that.”

  Bora remained quiet for a long while, betrayed as mortal only by the rivulets of sweat running down her cheekbones and temples. “As I told you,” she said, “being indebted is a damning thing. The wise have already signed a contract with this life, and they don’t venture to break it.”

  We’re all indebted to death, Anna thought. No matter how many others she saved—or indebted, as Bora would have it—she could never save herself. She’d never be saved by another. After all she’d done and seen, knowing the consequences of thwarting death with her marks, perhaps it was childish to wish for similar immunity. Still, she couldn’t repress her feelings of jealousy, or the sense that Bora wasted her ordinary nature by refusing runes. “Bora,” Anna said, snuffing out her thoughts, “what do I do?”

  “Breathe.”

  She bristled, but obeyed. Concentrating on her toes, her calves, her stomach, her arms, rolling relaxation through every muscle, Anna slipped into a calm and shut her eyes against the sunrise.

  Shards of tarnished memories glinted beneath consciousness, but she didn’t reach for them. Her hands were already raw and streaked with oozing gashes. Instead she saw the dark pond of her mind, where fog peeled away in long sweeps and reeds sprouted from the muck. Her thoughts were gnats, circling and thrumming against her skin with their telltale whispers of cool air, flitting past in endless circles.

  Abandon your burdens.

  She raised her hands to bat away the pests, but it was futile. The swarm grew denser, louder, congealing into a hum that swallowed all but the most wayward words.

  Abandon Rzolka.

  Her arms moved in wild streaks, cutting through the black cloud only to find it reform with greater thickness. She screamed into its collective mass and heard her voice reflected back at her, feeble and childish, unable to overcome the mangled cords in her throat.

  Abandon Julek.

  Anna drew in a breath, but the gnats poured into her windpipe and her lungs, filling her with visions of drowning and Malijad’s ruins and dead gods.

  And as the black cloud settled in her, she closed her eyes and ceded control.

  Anna opened her eyes to the monolith hovering over the pond, burning away the low carpet of fog and consuming any glimpse of the horizon or nearby oak trees. Although familiar, it was too perfect to have been engineered by men, too ethereal to exist in woodlands. She’d seen it on the kator, but it was more tangible now, having cemented its form and leaving only a wreath of fog before her. Its name was a great and terrible thing, she sensed, too horrifying for a mind so fragile. All the same, she envied it. She craved it.

  With shivering hands, she reached closer, edging.

  She stopped herself. It was foolish to chase things without knowing them. Her thoughts crackled at the edge of awareness, threatening to drown her once more.

  Anna turned her attention to the water and its unbroken, reflective surface. She thought of rain falling somewhere in Hazan, wasted on the sand and its gluttonous thirst. She thought of the rivers in Rzolka, the thunderstorms that swayed the oak trees, the tears that Galipa cried as he released Shem.

  The symbol that screamed water formed from the blackness of the pond’s surface, pulling itself into swirling loops and crescent bands, and she glimpsed it fully, knowing it in a single glance.

  There was a howling, a whistling, a—

  “Child,” Bora said. It pulled her back to the world.

  She was acutely aware of the sweat pooling beneath her cloak and cotton tunic, the hot breeze of Malijad at midday, the pure blue sheen of the skies. More than anything else, she observed an arrowhead’s point staring at her just a hand away, its toxin-infused tip glinting with freckles of dull purple.

  Bora’s hand held the arrow in place, shaking, and her gaze trailed a group of shadows scurrying away on a surrounding rooftop. “Practice will be done indoors.”

  Chapter 18

  Ten eyes, flawless, slick, raw beads of ink, reflected the tremors in Anna’s hands. Mandibles twitched and crackled with each rub, their dark hairs as thick as the bristles of a horseman’s brush. The creature loomed over her with the same measured patience as its kin in Rzolka, who were known to spin webs in windowsills and leave behind desiccated fly corpses. The azibahl was a sleek, sand-shaded tangle of legs and chitin, impossibly large, smelling only of weak vinegar and copper, its ribbed throat clicking in dead tongues.

  She looked back down at her parchment, frowned, and scribbled an angular break between two Kojadi characters. Her first mistake in weeks.

  “The correction is marked,” the lecturer croaked in flatspeak, its voice so alien that it could hardly be termed an accent. The sounds were guttural, stitched together in the least organic way possible, but coherent. “Which verb form is utilized?”

  Anna gave her way to deep thought, rummaging through the four cycles of lessons she’d accumulated since arriving in the kales, through the thirty tenses of Kojadi and its winding, sharp strokes. “Preterite past, with the inflection of awakening,” she replied in flatspeak’s ninth-tier dialect, which seemed to require twice as many words as the most formal river-tongue she knew. She wondered how her own syntax had mutated since that distant arrival.

  “The correction is spoken.”

  Relieved, Anna set down her quill and flexed her fingers. It brought her some measure of pride, but not enough for her to smile. Especially not with a dozen other students watching so intently from the amphitheater’s front rows.

  They were mostly the children of merchants and artisans, tall and olive-skinned and clad in multicolored robes with sashes. Their faces seemed too elegant for Hazan, as though engineered with the north’s most handsome traits: bold, black brows, sharp cheekbones, rich hazel or gold irises. Unlike the children in the south, their skin was free of blemishes and pockmarks, giving them an unsettling porcelain sheen. Separation from their circle had seemed cold in earlier lessons, but after four cycles of leering stares, she was grateful for some distance.

  Lecturer Gir crept back along the wall in silence, his spindly hind legs slinking over limestone while his forelimbs adjusted a five-pointed cap. The northern students, muddied by fading sunlight and an amber-tinted dome of glass, gave a few parting mutters before turning toward the stone dais.

  It was no secret that they hated her. She’d gleaned several phrases from study hours in the tomesrooms and eavesdropping on Dogwood conversations, allowing her to pick up whispers such as parchment-skin or field-whore. But more damning than her oddness was her standing, reflected in the constant throng of armed escorts and tea invitations from the orza.

  Still, it was a rare thing to feel accomplished in the kales. She had every sweet and trinket and fabric she wanted, all without payment, and learning—either in lectures or through Bora’s guided meditation, where she’d gleaned new yet untested symbols like howling and decay—was her only chance to be productive. Her flowing Kojadi script was tangible proof that she was teachable, even if it was in a dead language. Flawless missives written in six of flatspeak’s twelve dialects sat in the brass tube beside Anna, and the lessons were only growing easier as she approached the servant and laborer dialect of ruinspeak: single words tha
t relied upon inflection rather than written meaning. It had to do with the cost of a word, the orza had once explained in her study. “There is a price associated with being articulate,” she’d said between sips of mint tea. “How much water can a man afford to bleed from his mouth?”

  Her second missive tube, which she’d never shown to Gir or any of the other lecturers, contained the results of a hundred hours spent in the tomesroom’s depths. The names and reputed family trees of Rzolka’s bogaty, the maps of holdings she’d never known to exist, the condensed Nahoran histories of five wars and coups in the south.

  “Kuzashur.” Lecturer Gir’s voice dribbled through the amphitheater like a door on failing hinges. Anna’s attention rose to the dais, where the azibahl stood upon immaculately stacked mountains of ink vials, tomes, and spare parchment as a jumble of burnished legs. Lamplight formed glimmering motes in his eyes. “You are requested by an adherent of the orza.”

  Anna, taking her cue from her classmates below, glanced at the auxiliary entrance to the left of the amphitheater.

  A figure stood in the threshold once sealed by a sliding wicker screen, burning a long shadow across the desks and haunted faces of the students. Bora lingered, her posture impeccable, before backing out of sight.

  Silence hung over the chamber as Anna gathered her belongings under her arm, hurried down the steps, and moved into the marble corridor, making sure to seal the wicker screen and its surge of murmuring before she heard too much from the others.

  “It couldn’t wait?” Anna asked in river-tongue. She joined Bora at the railing that overlooked a shaded statue garden and its pack of roaming bear cubs. The cloisters were deserted that afternoon, their hanging pots either extinguished or bleeding their final wisps of burnt marjoram.

  The northerner looked up from the cubs and studied Anna sidelong. “It was a qaufen.”

  Anna cycled through her Kojadi, wondering if her vocabulary was being tested, but recalled nothing with a similar sound. “What?”