Scribes

by James Wolanyk

  “I read that.”

  His stare was sluggish, crawling over the desk as though ignorant of who’d written the crumpled missives and ledgers. “Strong made enemies. Things have a slow way in the north.” He reached down, produced a twine-wrapped bottle of arak, and poured out a jigger’s worth of the liquid. His hands quivered and spilled clear droplets over faded papers. Dark blots spread beneath his palms. “My family’s seven fathers owned great sheds, where they made the drying of spark-salts. In time their vault pits fell empty, and they sold their sheds. But our ledgers still breathed. They had a good hand for words of untruth.” Jalwar drank the jigger slowly, his face unaffected, before setting down the glass. “I saw this art in the way of your fingers, too.”

  To Anna, memories of falsified ledgers seemed so distant now, so absorbed by more severe crimes that they barely existed.

  “It’s a wasted tale, my friend,” Jalwar said at last.

  “Tell it.” Cycles past, she wouldn’t have believed her own demands. But now, after all she’d seen, she feared her wrath, her potential to do harm.

  “What is there to tell? The Emirahni had storehouses and salt, and we needed such things. In ink, it was miracle of salt for the Emirahni. Twelve bloodlines had been woven into their name, eight beautiful women and four handsome men, and I was the last of the joining, my bloodline and all of the spark-salts we never held.”

  Anna weighed the northerner’s guilt, already welling up in the flare of his nostrils and the second jigger he poured for himself. Her stomach tightened.

  “Every bloodline stole revenge on that day. My blood was not the only ledger of mistruth. Each joining had been another lie. All of the Emirahni salt and lumber and ores, taken, used, carted away. Yes, Anna, yes, we stole it all away. They had only the husk of their kales, and Dalma’s father, so dishonored and wrathful.”

  Anna failed to stem her scowl. Before those words, Jalwar had seemed more honest than anybody she’d encountered in Hazan. His purity drained away with the second jigger’s swish, tipped back and thudding on the podium in a single sweep. “You ruined her.”

  “I didn’t have the knowing,” he shot back. “I was the only innocent of thirteen hearts, Anna. Dalma’s father failed to breathe before the ending of the season, and she was left with nothing. Not even enough of salt to make the hiring of Katil Anfel and avenge their plight.” He gripped the neck of the arak bottle and rolled its base across the desk in lazy circles, watching the liquid tumble and bead against amber glass. “Malijad law let the others leave. Ruin of bloodline’s wealth is reason for dissolving, you see?” He sighed. “I stayed, Anna. I stayed because I knew the pain of being utilized.”

  “So you brought these men here,” Anna said. “You used her even more.”

  “It was not me.” His knuckles burned white on the glass. He locked eyes with Anna, beads of sweat tracking down his stubbled cheeks. “I speak only to Halshaf. I placed my heart in this hall, Anna. Not once have I cursed such a path.”

  Anna’s couldn’t soften her eyes, nor unclench her jaw. How much of the northerner’s truth had been warped by time, reworked and mellowed as the mind did to all guilty memories? “They didn’t just find this place.”

  “Loose winds carried the orza’s tragedy to the plains,” Jalwar said faintly. “One day, they appear at the gate with wagons and cold eyes. Foundlings hide from them and cry. They make the offering of salt and blades to broken bloodline. To woman with nothing but shame. Salt for shelter. Shelter for riches when they make Malijad pay for words of untruth.”

  Make Malijad pay. It seemed too ironic. Anna wondered if the orza had received what she desired so long ago, gleaning completion from the violence and chaos and rage, or if she’d only become aware of a new trap around her ankles. Perhaps, worst of all, she hadn’t noticed a trap at all.

  “Then their dealings are over,” Anna said.

  “Yes,” Jalwar agreed, his mouth ajar, eyes roaming. “Over.”

  Silence dusted the chamber, leaving the word circling in Anna’s head until she could no longer bear it. Over. “They’re not going to let her live, are they?”

  “Would you?” She wondered if anybody, anybody who’d truly cared for another, could ever lose that stare.

  “If I could,” Anna whispered, their shared knowledge of a rune’s impossibility sinking in with a dull ache. She fixed her gaze on the gloom around Jalwar’s desk, only returning to his eyes when the quiet carried on for too long. “We can’t save everybody.”

  But Jalwar’s eyes were too distant to accept hard truths, lost in the arak’s clear depths. “Do such things matter now?”

  Anna breathed in, but her chest refused to grow. She let the dampened sounds of sisters lecturing fill the stillness, trying to make sense of the plan that had fallen apart just minutes ago. “You need to leave,” she said. “With the foundlings, I mean. I thought there was another way, but it’s all coming down now. Maybe you can still get them out.”

  Jalwar’s eyes drifted to his papers as his thick hands nestled on his lap, leaving the quill abandoned in a blot of ink.

  “I’ve written missives to most of the halls in Hazan and the plains,” Anna said, hoping to earn even an ember of Jalwar’s warmth. “They’ve started to stockpile their supplies for new arrivals, and they’ll take you in. No matter where you take them, they’ll be cared for.”

  Jalwar pressed a finger into the still-slick ink of a nearby page. “This is our life, Anna.”

  “Life changes,” Anna said. “You know that most of all.”

  “For how long did you plan these things?” Jalwar asked, his voice strained. “You have known for days?”

  “How long did you know about their crooked deal?”

  “I never deceived her, Anna,” Jalwar said. “Your ink bears mistruths.”

  “You have to go, Jalwar. Take them and leave, however much it costs. This place isn’t safe.”

  “Without blood, without my heart—”

  “Just like the foundlings,” Anna cut in. Something surged in her chest as the man spoke, and she remembered how much she’d burned when she walked away, when she accepted that her blood and roots were perception. It was rage, and she had no pity to spare.

  “Perhaps I could send them away,” Jalwar said with a defeated hum, scratching absently at his beard, “but I cannot leave this place. The spirit nests itself.”

  Nests, in Anna’s mind, were built to be burnt. She glared at the northerner, but his attention was elsewhere. “You’d send them off alone?”

  “With the Alakeph, Anna. These are strong, brave men, of course. They give all breaths for one young heart.”

  “They’re warriors. Not like you.”

  “Look outside,” Jalwar said. He filled a third jigger with increasingly steady hands. “They need warriors.”

  “Go with them,” Anna pressed. “They need you to guide them.”

  “And how you say this?” Jalwar asked. “Before your approach, Anna, the hall was of peace. And now—”

  “It’s not my fault,” Anna snapped. She rose from the stool and towered over Jalwar, her teeth grinding. She didn’t know if she believed herself. “I don’t have time to argue with you, and the foundlings don’t have much time at all. Especially not for somebody being stubborn. Bad things will happen if you remain here.”

  He raised the jigger to his lips. “Certainty. So much certainty.”

  “Because they’ll want to punish me,” Anna said. “They’ll take away anything I care about.”

  Jalwar drained his arak, tossed the jigger into a heap of cloth in the office’s corner, and began to sift through layers of stained paper. “Ah. Then they have victory.”

  “They don’t. They win if you remain, and they can get to you.”

  “We live in fear for all of our breaths,” Jalwar said softly, “so that you may be defiant. And ye
t you speak of bringing such men to Dalma, of ruining her—”

  “Don’t do this to me.” Beneath the venom, there was a note of pleading. “I’m only trying to help you out of this mess.”

  “You have brought more than aid upon our hall.” He sighed. “Prophecy is for wary fools and hopeful fools alike, but always fools.”

  Anna turned away. “Make plans now. When Dalma holds her performance, you can leave with less attention.” She made her way to the door hanging, drowning her thoughts in the latticework of amber threading.

  “Anna,” Jalwar managed as Anna reached the hanging, his lips scrunched against bitter words, “these men brought a dreadful thing when they came to us.” Their eyes met, cracking whatever veneer the northerner had managed to construct. He angled his face away from the glow of lamplight, away from Anna’s terrible realization, away from everything but humid blackness and liquor fumes. Sweat trailed down his temple, glimmering. He laced bloodless fingers together and forced out a breath. “Go to the infirmary, Anna. The boy’s life may depart with har-gunesh.”

  Chapter 27

  In the hall’s western chamber, sealed behind a wicker door and soothed by Halshaf sisters with rosewater-swollen sponges, those afflicted with pulp-lung came to die.

  Anna wandered down its rows of frail bodies and fever sweat and woven herb shawls, a slave to the rotting sunlight filtering through its shutters. To Bora’s slender form standing watch over tattered quilts, her stare as pensive as ever.

  Sills of soft light fell across the coverings and dark wood of Shem’s cot, but the boy’s flesh held none of its prior glimmer. Blossoms of fluid, cobalt and crimson, swelled beneath his face. His youth was now a tapestry of angry fists, of swollen club strikes, of crushing boot heels, of chipped bones and milk-white cartilage clusters.

  Not even his eyes shone beneath bruised lids.

  Tears muddied her vision and ran in thin, hot lines down her cheeks, and she realized that she couldn’t help him, couldn’t put him back together, couldn’t take back the words she’d spoken in anger.

  I did this to you.

  “Take what you can store in a pack,” Bora said. Amber eyes flicked up at her. “There’s only the end for you here.”

  “And out there?” Anna thrust a finger at the shutters.

  The words passed over Bora like a gentle wind. “Such things are not certain. But here, the end is certain, as is suffering. Look past your heart and be intelligent. Use the mind I’ve granted you.”

  “I did,” she whispered. “But you left me.”

  Bora cocked her head to one side. “I watched over you and heard their whispers. You must leave.”

  Anna glared at the northerner. It was impossible to restrain the thoughts that clamored for attention, that had swelled ever since Bora began her war on emotions. “Leave?” she whispered. “Your faith puts others above the self, Bora. You never cared for anybody but yourself.”

  Somehow, Anna expected to break Bora’s mask. It was a draining thing, and she waited for the words to shatter the woman’s illusion of calmness and reveal a semblance of humanity beneath, complete with its fear and pettiness.

  Bora only blinked. “I could flee without you, child. I could slip into shadows so deep that the light never reaches them.” She surveyed Anna. “I choose to save you, and those who you may save. Ready yourself, child.”

  Anna saw herself assembling tunics and flasks and linen-wrapped loafs of dark breads, traversing the rooftops with her destination unwritten, the entirety of the world open and unbound by prophecy. She saw Shem lying in his bed until a merciful Dogwood soldier brought an ax down upon his skull, snuffing out his inner light. She saw Jalwar’s orphans being flayed, scalped, bled, and the gentle old man’s corpse abandoned amid Malijad’s burning ruins. She saw the orza’s mutilated body hanging from rafters.

  Anna tightened her lips. “I can’t go.”

  “Think of your marks,” Bora replied. “Think of how they may be used. Pain alters belief, child.”

  Anna imagined the scourges and needles and rusted blades flow upon her flesh, certain that she would feel pain. She would endure it. “My beliefs won’t.” Anna stared down at Shem. “Can you take him with you?”

  “No.”

  “You have to!”

  “His injuries are severe. Too severe to cross the heights, or to run. If you wish, I’ll make his end quick. Huuri are constructed well, but I have no trouble locating the life vessels.”

  “No,” Anna snapped. “Not yet. I’ll do it myself, when the time comes.” Tears bit at her eyes, but she found focus in Bora’s amber stare. “When the performance begins tonight, Jalwar’s going to leave with the foundlings. Make him.”

  “He’s a stubborn man,” Bora said. “And there are forces that work beyond your sight, child. Some secrets are beyond the reach of your master, and beyond the orza herself. They’re wolves that haunt my dreams.”

  Anna drew a shaky breath. “The Nahorans.”

  “You’ve seen them,” Bora said with narrowed eyes.

  “It was real.” Anna stared at the quilts covering Shem. “They offered me safety. Could they have given it to me, Bora? All of those things they promised?”

  “Yes.”

  Anna let out a shaking breath, unable to meet the northerner’s eyes. She envisioned everything that could’ve been, all of the blood unspilled.

  “Those without gifts will always pay your price,” Bora continued. “Here, you may be destroyed by their rage. There, you would be cherished.” Her eyes fell to Shem. “Those born to normalcy would see no difference.”

  “But you chose sides,” Anna reminded her. “You left their fabric on the bodies.”

  “Plans must be fluid,” Bora replied.

  Anna thought back to how the Nahorans had oscillated between killing and capturing her, to how they’d exhausted every possible method of reaching her. To the bird’s last words in her chambers, haunted by the inevitable. Destroy.

  A hideous plan emerged from Anna’s memories, obliterating every other thought. “Bora, were you working with them?”

  The northerner drew a slow breath. “Not me,” she said. “Konrad.”

  By now, there were hardly any lines drawn between enemies and allies, traitors or friends, foreigners or natives. Even so, it was Nahora, the nation for which Rzolka could never muster sympathy. It was a land of conquest, and meddling, and—

  And beautiful Orsas, which had lulled Anna out of her terror.

  “You didn’t tell me?” Anna whispered.

  “He cares for you,” Bora said. “He gave you a necklace, didn’t he?”

  Anna raised her hand to the small lump above her chest, where the jewelry rested under layers of fabric. “Why?”

  “It’s a tracking stone, child. His own key will change hues as you move further from him. Such devices are among their simplest tricks.”

  The pieces converged with an inevitable crash, and Anna remembered the way Konrad had looked upon her, making her feel wanted like nobody else and making her dream of his stare, of sharing a life that she’d never have with him. She realized he’d manipulated his reports, ignoring her trips to the foundling hall until it created rage. She thought of the flowers he’d given her and long walks taken through the streets, where he’d smiled at her and taken away her fears of wicked men in the world. He was a lovely, charming man, and there was nothing in his heart for Anna.

  Just as she slept with visions of Rzolka, he slept with dreams of Nahora.

  Liar.

  “I need to get ready for the performance,” she said finally. She thought to tear the necklace away, but its weight was too welcome. “I’d like to be alone for some time.”

  With that, the northerner turned and made her way toward the balcony, her white robes trailing her in a flurry.

  “Child.”

 
Anna glanced sidelong to see Bora standing in the full light of the glass panes, radiant and statuesque. “The end may come for one of us before our steps cross again,” Bora said. “If you meet your end, my memories of these days will pass with fondness. They were most illuminating.” She looked toward the hall, strangely unsure. “And if I meet my end, then forget my name. Never look back to the jaws that claimed me.” Something delicate came over her, a smile, on anybody else’s lips. “Carry only the mind you cultivated.”

  Anna watched as the northerner strode away, her shadow shrinking and disappearing among the endless cots. And when Anna was alone, her mind a wash of celestial patterns and forsaken gods, she knelt beside Shem’s bed and prayed and cried.

  Near dusk, an Alakeph captain tapped his heels in the doorway. “A bath has been arranged.”

  Purging herself of the broken boy’s image, if only to stay sane, Anna dried her swollen eyes and followed the Alakeph captain to the bathing chamber: a space wrought from black, reflective rock that reminded Anna of quenched steel.

  Her actions were perfunctory, limbs moving as though contorted by a puppet tinkerer, coarse hands dragging soap and tepid water and rose petals over herself.

  He’s dying.

  She focused on the Dogwood-issued garments folded on the nearby table, the tainted Nahoran necklace bundled between her cloak and shirt. It was too much. She gazed into churning bathwater, where ripples met the marble basin’s edges and—

  A pink-red strand swirled under the surface.

  She’d always known it would happen, but some things seemed too monumental—too intrusive, perhaps—to occur in the foreseeable future. Childish as it was, she longed for her mother. She longed for the festival that should’ve accompanied the blood.

  They’ll call you panna, her mother whispered.

  Knots crawled up and down Anna’s throat. She rested both hands on the marble basin, wondering if she could fade from existence if she was quiet enough. If Bora would materialize from the shadows, sensing that her refusal wasn’t absolute, and show her the lone thread that unraveled a tapestry of fear.