Scribes

by James Wolanyk

  It was difficult to imagine pressing onward without Bora, but judging by the northerner’s appearance in the dead of night, she wouldn’t be without guidance forever. She nodded with respect. “I will,” she said. “Where were you today?”

  “Watching things you cannot notice,” Bora replied. “If truths should be exposed, then know that my dreams are decaying once more. There are dark whispers in their eyes, child. Horrible things.”

  An enlightened mind echoing Anna’s thoughts was damning. “I can’t just leave again, Bora. I won’t go so easily this time.”

  “It’s a simple thing to be resolute, but simpler to be blinded by it. Don’t lose sight of this world.”

  Anna stared through the open double-doors and watched the smoke curling up from between the setsone spires, a greasy black stain against the lighter darkness of midnight skies. She took in the soft roars and clapping of combat, so distant yet so close to her and her gifts. “Do you think I should stay?”

  “No.”

  It was the answer she’d expected, but the truth she hated to hear. “You brought me here,” Anna whispered, leaning closer. “You helped him to deliver me. How can you say that now, after everything?”

  “All things are impermanent, child. Even loyalty.”

  “Would Dalma want me to stay?”

  As much as Anna craved a false answer, a sense that the woman loved her and wanted her to remain in her protection until the stars burned away, there was no sense in believing such things.

  “Whether or not she desires it, she would use you.” Bora blinked. “Never rely on another for your existence, child. Not even when you fail yourself.”

  Anna thought to ask what it meant, to prod at the growing weakness in Bora’s eyes, but she could only nod. “I need to see the foundlings again.”

  “To what end?”

  “My own,” Anna answered truthfully.

  “Speak your truth, child. Would you abandon your precious homeland for one hall?”

  “No. It’s not about choosing. This will be worth it in the end. I know it will. But when I was with them, I felt peaceful. Something like that, anyway. Things felt peaceful for the first time in a long while.” She picked at her quilts, slipping into silence and letting the sounds of another distant strike filter through the balcony glass. “I can still hear their laughter, you know. When it’s all quiet, I hear it. And it’s been so long since I felt anything like that, Bora. Even longer since I did something.”

  “You’ve done plenty.”

  Anna bit back a retort. “This is different. You were right about them, you know. The Alakeph.”

  “Your visit was no coincidence, then.”

  “No,” she admitted. “I had to see it for myself. You said that they were pure, that they’d give their lives for children they didn’t even know. They made me feel like they’d do the same for me. And there’s so much I want to learn from them.” As soon as the words passed her lips she imagined Bora’s chiding. There were a thousand fallacies in those words alone, but she lacked the energy to stop herself. “There’s so much to learn in that hall.”

  Bora’s voice was gentle. “I understand.”

  Anna looked up in surprise, searching for compassion in Bora’s face without success. “Maybe we could speak to them. We could ask them to accompany me.” The northerner’s silence bore through her. “Anything. I just need to return.”

  “They will not listen.”

  “Then I’ll find a way,” Anna said. She pointed at the balcony and the heights of Malijad beyond it. “How did you get here? In this room, I mean.”

  Bora’s visage was like a statue in the light of the small flame. “I came with intentions of showing you. Though perhaps for a different end.”

  Anna narrowed her eyes. “What?”

  “There are some revelations worthy of being witnessed rather than explained, child. I would show you them. This path may take you to your desired end, but there are truths to be observed along the way.”

  “What sort of truths?”

  “Miserable truths. Truths that you weave.”

  Anna studied the light as it flickered over Bora’s eyes, and a cold pit deepened in her stomach. “I’ve never tried to weave anything.”

  Bora stood, walked toward the balcony, and waited. Her silhouette was a stark, silvery burn upon the horizon. “You may forget reality,” she said, “but it does not forget you. My sources know where they’re holding the marked man.”

  Memories of ever-burning eyes trickled through Anna’s mind. She unclenched her fists, wondering about the man’s current state. Whether he’d been tortured or healed, as the orza had promised. Her own predictions sickened her. “Bring me to him.”

  * * * *

  Eastern flurries broke the monotony of lukewarm desert air as they crossed setstone ledges and quilts of baked clay roofing. She followed Bora’s shadow with her cloak wrapped tightly around her, staring out at Malijad and the puffs of smoke within skyscrapers. She couldn’t bear to look down, fraught by dune-borne gusts and darkness and memories of the gut-twisting drop at Malchym’s cliffs.

  They moved quickly yet carefully over cracked shingles and rotted panels and crumbling walkways that had been abandoned mid-brick, all living remnants of the kales’ twelve rotating architects. The tomes had all described the Emirahni rooftops as being ornate, gleaming like molten alloy above the city, but that had been long before vaults ran dry and materials grew scarce.

  “Here,” Bora said at the end of a long, windswept corridor flanked by crumbling arcade pillars. The skies were black, the streets below a dusting of lamplight and fires. In the gloom, Bora stepped onto an adjoining walkway over the void. “Mind your steps, child. The world falls away if you wander too far.”

  A crooked staircase wormed down and away from the corridor, snaking into neighboring districts with the support of a ruptured arch. Bearing Bora’s weight seemed a miracle, given its lack of integrity, but the northerner’s ease suggested that she’d made use of the steps on countless nights.

  “This reaches the foundling hall?” Anna whispered, teasing a step onto a shattered outcropping. Flakes of setstone skittered into the breeze.

  “It reaches many places,” Bora said, wandering past, “but on this night, trail my heels. Hold your words till they’re needed.”

  Eventually they reached a distant tower estate beyond the Dogwood’s district boundaries, its red marble chambers melted and fused by unimaginable heat. Glossy stalactites stabbed down from the ceiling, sometimes encasing statues or porcelain tubs with a crimson varnish. Wind moaned through the surreal gallery as Bora led Anna into an entombed dining room, through a doorway, and down a lightless stairwell.

  They emerged into a courtyard in eerie silence. Collapsed buildings rose up in barbed tangles around the square, looming and black. Mounds of gray ash collected along the foundations and licked over walkways on the breeze. Bodies rested beneath the powder, shriveled and blackened and curled in on themselves in a final act of preservation. In the silvery press of moonlight it was a dream from Anna’s youth, the buildings a mass of snow-capped firs on the far edge of a field. But the odor was sulfurous and stifling, and Anna pulled her tunic over her nostrils to block out wisps of charred twill.

  “They’re keeping him here?” Anna wheezed.

  Bora wandered forward, leaving a set of dark, delicate footprints in her wake. “Not only him.”

  Far in the distance a pair of lanterns bobbed down an alleyway and cast a pale sheen across the setstone and ash. The lantern bearers approached a low doorway set into the masonry and rapped on its surface twice. When the metal slab creaked open, a wash of candlelight spilled out over the alley to expose a mass of ash-laden corpses along the packed earth. The two men entered, shut the door, and bolted the latches.

  Bora approached the alleyway, granting Anna a moment of c
hilling indecision before she followed. The grisly shapes at her feet offered no thoughts of refuge in the contents of the building, and Anna’s marks revolved in her mind, screeching: eyes gushing light, men chained to walls, blades carving flesh with torturous streaks.

  This is my consequence.

  Soft voices bubbled out of the silence as they drew closer to the alleyway. Distinct words were muffled by cracked mud walls and metal fixtures, but grunts and winces emerged through a wash of conversation. The bodies around the doorway were innumerable; in their piles they coalesced as shapeless, dusty hills and valleys, staring up at Anna with hollow eye sockets and withered flesh. Stiffened fingers rose up from the ash like talons.

  While Anna was still picking her way over the corpses, shuddering each time her cloak snagged on bones or cracked skulls, Bora knocked on the metal door twice. The tinny sound rang down both corridors.

  “So?” a voice growled from within.

  “The orza has requested an inspection,” Bora replied.

  Keys jangled beyond the riveted door. The latch mechanism clicked and thudded aside, followed by the grating sound of a crossbar being lifted from its brackets. Before the latch unhooked, a smattering of annoyed river-tongue leaking into the night air, Bora threw her weight against the door and forced it in. Something solid collided with the metal, rattling the hinges. A man screamed from within, but Bora wrenched the door open and drove it back into place with a bracing shoulder, stifling the noise with a snap.

  Anna shrank back, glimpsing the motionless boot of a guardsman through the doorway as Bora stepped inside. Violence was nothing new, but Anna stared at the southerner’s body in confusion, edging closer to glimpse a bearded, split-flesh face in the candlelight. One of the Dogwood, Anna surmised from his black uniform. She watched as Bora moved over the corpse and through a fabric hanging, hearing the faintest mutters of alarm in the wake of the northerner’s entry.

  Yet as Anna stepped inside, skirting around the expanding blood pool beneath the doorman’s hair, the dull ripping of a butcher’s cuts filtered through the curtains. A man’s gurgling fell to nothing after a fall of soft footsteps and the sputters of a carved airway, far too familiar to Anna’s ears.

  “Come, child,” Bora called from beyond the fabric.

  Anna turned and gently closed the door, making sure to avoid the dead man’s leg. Standing in the midst of violence always made her feel exposed, especially when the light of the guttering candles made the body so luminous. She picked her way over the body, smearing her boots with blood, and entered the adjoining chamber.

  The stench of bile and decaying flesh was so overwhelming that Anna hardly noticed the bodies sprawled at her feet. Blood coated the floor in black smears and still-wet puddles, and spattered across the pitted setstone walls were dark blotches whispering horrible tales. Chains hung in tarnished loops and broken-link stalactites.

  Along the wall just beyond Bora was a row of bodies, their arms suspended above their heads by rope bindings and faces shrouded with black fabric. Nothing covered their torsos aside from a latticework of infected scars. The skin was dark, swollen with rot and stretched over jutting ribs, and their heads darted from side to side upon hearing new voices. They were blind, maggot-like creatures, responding only to stimuli and hallucinations. One body, tucked away from the others in the chamber’s corner, was free of injury. A pair of bright orbs glowed through his blindfold.

  Anna’s breath caught in her throat. “Who are the others?”

  Bora stepped aside. “Ask them.” She gestured for Anna to approach the nearest captive. Despite trembling jaws and whimpers, the men retained their muteness. “Speak slowly. Your tongue is not familiar.”

  Glancing away from the still-bubbling slit of an open Dogwood throat, Anna approached the nearest suspended man. She noted the pus ringing his cuts, the mottled blossoms of pipe-burns across his chest, the clustered freckles of a sadist’s needlework. She managed a guarded whisper. “Who are you?”

  “Tasir.” The reply was swift and panicked.

  “Why did they bring you here?”

  “To ask.” The edges of his lips shriveled, threatening to break. “Please help.”

  Anna looked to Bora, but the northerner’s attention rested on the Dogwood corpses, examining the puddles and broken bones she’d created. “What do they ask you?”

  “Names. They wish to know where my brethren are.”

  “What did they do? Your brethren.”

  “They handled salt for men of the south.” The captive rattled his rope bindings, his forearms tensing with bands of striated muscle. “You must release us. Please.”

  The other captives murmured in flatspeak and ventured to try the river-tongue, mostly managing broken phrases about freedom. The marked man, plain in the darkness due to his burning stare, remained still.

  “Do you know where you are?” Anna asked.

  Tasir’s head fell lower, tucked into the curve of his collarbones like a hound anticipating the next kick. “Our home,” he whispered, his voice fraught with high cracks. “They are all deshaf.”

  “Ash,” Bora translated, kneeling beside the Dogwood bodies as she rifled through their packs. “The Dogwood Collective raided this district on the former lune.”

  Anna trailed his scars and slick incisions. “They couldn’t all have been guilty, Bora.”

  Bora halted. “They weren’t.”

  “So why did they come?” Anna whispered among tortured groans. She stared at the shadows pooling in the folds of Bora’s neck scarf.

  “There are hunters among the Gosuri who pour boiling water into holes in the rock. They seek to drive elusive prey above ground.” She met Anna’s eyes with a pointed glare. “Yet there are always unseen beasts that suffer in turn. The heat is not selective.”

  For once the story’s meaning was apparent to Anna: Whatever names resided on the tracker’s list were sure to create a hundred more casualties. And as Anna gazed around the room, lost in the blood and rot and blighted skin, she realized the absurdity of it all. These men were pawns in a game far larger than themselves, guilty only of handling salt for their masters.

  Their sigils trickled beneath the flesh, calling to her, begging for reconstruction.

  “Don’t, child,” Bora warned.

  Anna glanced down at her own hands, mere hairs away from the tang of her hunting knife. Witnessing their agony was unbearable, but to acknowledge her own role was crippling. She lowered her hands. “What about him?” she asked, nodding toward the man she’d marked so long ago.

  His burning eyes seemed to rise and swivel in Anna’s direction, but the motion was lost to the candlelight and tricks played by dancing shadows.

  “He knows your tongue,” Bora said, rising from her search of the corpses and moving to Anna’s side. Something smooth and curved glinted in her hands, but she kept it angled out of full view. “Speak to him, child.”

  Anna edged forward slowly, certain that the man glimpsed her from behind his veil. When she drew close enough to feel the warmth rising from his skin, a slow, simmering wave behind the heat of lit wicks, her lips fell open. “Who are you?”

  “Kill me.”

  No, she told herself, even as her heartbeats drummed up her throat, I won’t do it. She couldn’t do it. The hayat preserved itself. “We can help you.”

  “Kill me.” It was more urgent now, passed through gritted teeth. With every repetition the surrounding captives grew louder, their murmurs bleeding through the chamber and out into the night.

  “Bora,” Anna said, whirling on her heels. She spotted the northerner near the doorway with a familiar cylinder in hand, hefting the device up and down. “We need to get them out.”

  “They are beyond aid,” Bora said. She was a blur among the darkness, but the surrounding drones of pain gave her a wraithlike aura. “Use your blade, child. Slit their thro
ats.”

  Anna’s jaw trembled as she looked over the row of captives, screaming and groaning behind strained rope. Everything about the chamber told her it wasn’t another test from the northerner; she was expected to bloody her hands and end them, as mercilessly as the men who’d brought them here.

  “Kill me,” hissed the man with glowing eyes, remaining still in his bindings despite the thrashing of those around him. “Kill me.”

  The noises grew too inhuman for Anna’s ears. She staggered back, watching their bodies writhe in candlelight like a cluster of maggots, slick with perspiration and red smears and discharge. “Do it,” Bora ordered.

  Chants of Kill me swelled with rage. Burning eyes flared through the black veil, flooding the chamber’s corner in ethereal light, while rivulets of sweat ran down skeletal calves and drained onto the floor.

  “The price of completion, child.” Bora’s footsteps hardly registered. Her hand clamped around Anna’s arm, and jerked backward. “They’ll be here soon enough.”

  Anna plunged backward through the fabric and into the cool antechamber. Their screeches were overwhelming, but she turned and followed in a mindless fog as the northerner dragged her over the bodies, toward the doorway, into the darkness of the night. Echoes of desperate men mingled with her shallow breaths.

  Bora moved to the lighted doorway and tossed a heap of violet fabric across the corpses, covering their wounds with a graceful shroud. It seemed mocking, given the horrors rolling forth from the chamber, but there was no time to parse the fabric’s significance. She tossed the cylinder through the threshold and moved aside, guiding Anna with an open palm upon her shoulder.

  Anna wandered forth, her body numb, her vision lost in the dark. She stumbled over ash-capped remains and the crumbling husks of peddlers’ carts, following Bora’s silhouette, each step taken blindly. An explosion thumped through the earth, pulsing up Anna’s legs.

  She spun to find dust spewing from the open doorway, its particles frothing in candlelight and the flames of burst lanterns. No longer did she hear the screams of doomed men. She envisioned their bodies, mangled and dismembered, hanging from ropes like carved portions in a butcher’s stall.