Anna dried herself with bleached cloth, blotting between her legs with a linen towel, and pulled on her new clothes: a flowing beige tunic with opal beads along the sleeves, a dark satin skirt, and long white stockings.
When full darkness fell and she returned to the chamber, lighting Shem’s lamp to see his frailty in orange hues, Anna drew her blade and held it over the boy’s tender neck.
There was no feeling in the act.
When it was done, Anna stared at the bloody mess on Shem’s pillows. She tried to make sense of the splotches and small scraps of flesh, no longer aware of what lay in the bed beside her.
“Anna?” The Huuri opened his eyes, their light shining like lanterns in the deep forest. He smiled and slapped his hands against his chest, where the bones were crooked but forged with fresh angles, their cracks and fragments and splinters pressed into unbreakable threads. His rune pulsed above and below the bruising, its own star in a nebula of murky, blooming scar tissue. “You save me. You have given the gift to me.”
Anna dropped the blade.
Whatever he was, he could never be a boy again.
Chapter 28
She wandered among the living with a corpse at her side. Every so often she gazed at the Huuri and lost herself to the radiance of his eyes or his toothy, crooked smile. Her hands still bore the weight of the short blade, and her fingers brushed and dragged against one another, tacky with blood that she’d already scourged with soap. Alakeph and foundlings had crowded the doorway, murmuring with awe, but Anna hardly discerned their voices; she’d only heard echoes of Shem’s laughter and worship:
Blessed Anna, my life is yours.
She recalled Shem dressing himself with strong, healed arms, flexing his fingers, grinning as he stared into every mirror and prodded at his face and rune. She recalled him wrapping a neck scarf once, twice, three times around the mark, trying to block out any remnants of its light despite his obsession. She tried to imagine what Bora would say to her selfishness, to the ecstasy and beauty of dying beside somebody who cared for her. Somebody who didn’t deserve her fate.
They left the hall and approached the spires of the kales in silence, the courtyard lit by braziers and deserted aside from innumerable sentries along the walls. Only Konrad had been left waiting at the door, an escort that offered no safety and even less comfort.
The escorting captain’s surprise at Shem’s appearance was enough to absolve him of guilt for the attack, but little else. Even his compliments on Anna’s white dress and silk hair wrap felt empty.
Even from the higher towers, Anna heard the low rumble of the masses, the staccato drumming and low tones of the instrument sections. The night carried the ceremonial trappings of an execution. When they drew closer to the theater, Shem’s hands, scarred and warm, wrapped around her own. Anna met the boy’s bright eyes sidelong, but couldn’t smile.
Attendees hurried past in silk-adorned clumps, crowding ribbon-strewn corridors to form a crowd before the double doors and their Dogwood guards. One by one, each patron was identified, patted down for blades, and ushered into the theater chamber, all to the shrieking of the orchestra’s opening movement.
Each time the doors opened to allow entry, harp strings resonated in Anna’s chest, and drumming pounded into her bones.
“Oz’asin,” a captain called.
Konrad skirted to one side of the gathering, sweeping his arm to clear a narrow path for Anna and Shem. When his eyes met Anna’s, they were so genuine that it hurt.
Anna moved through the gap slowly, aware of the gazes falling upon her. Her grip tightened on Shem’s hand, and the sensation dragged her back to dead forests, dead dawns, places she feared even more than here. At the end of the crowd, Anna emerged into lamplight.
The Dogwood stared at her like a sow that had survived its bleeding.
A shriveled-skin captain in their unit stepped forward and smiled at Anna. His rune took the shame out of his yellowed teeth and the broken-bone twist of his nose. “Enjoy the performance, dearest panna.” His voice was too gruff to be softened by a Lojka accent. “They’ve worked so hard to keep the tale authentic.”
The tale? Then the Dogwood attendants pulled the twin doors open and drowned the corridor in noise.
Konrad stepped past Anna and rested a hand on her back, guiding her forward despite the tension in her legs. Every step was unsure, fighting to break away from the orchestra and its horn blasts, its low strings that resembled mourning in a dead tongue. She wandered into shadow and haunting melodies, the faces of the endless crowd barely visible in candlelight against the glow of countless sigils. All along the walkways, braziers burned in deep pits and basins. She craned her neck to see the farthest rows of balconies and seating circles, but it was impossible, for the rows of patrons and their sigils receded into darkness on all sides. Below her, growing closer and more ominous as they descended a walkway, was the curved stage.
Lamplight painted the dais in warm yellow light. Performers with flowing, hooded robes plucked their instruments on the shadowed terraces behind the main stage. Frail voices rose occasionally above the music, always peaking with a broken crescendo.
This place was worse than death.
Konrad led them nearer to the stage, and as Shem squeezed Anna’s hand she sensed her pulse running rampant along her wrists. She became cognizant of the dryness in her mouth, the shifting vision that made everything more threatening. Focusing on the present would be Bora’s only advice, but she wanted to be anywhere else.
There is nowhere else, she thought. Nowhere is safe.
And so she walked, tucking her gaze to the walkway until they reached a deserted front row, waiting before her like the teeth of a bear-trap.
“Are these reserved for us?” Anna whispered.
“As a matter of fact, the orza chose them,” said Konrad, his voice mellow.
Anna wondered if somebody so kind and wise could hold cruelty in his heart. Anybody could, she suspected. As Anna slipped past Konrad and sank down into one of the oak seats, she became certain of it: Anybody could be reached. Everybody was wicked in their own way.
Shem sat beside Anna and poked at her shoulder. Light flickered through his face and fed the spark in his eyes, granting warmth to his smile. “All is fine.”
Anna smiled back. Just as Bora had always pressed, she lived in the moment, in the flash of comfort from his presence. “I know.” She looked at the Nahoran agent to her right, who offered the same grin he’d worn for days with pretense.
In their own way.
Anna stared at the glowing stage.
The music faded, and curtains blocked out the lamplight.
Darkness consumed the theater.
Trickles of footsteps and blurred shadows moved across the stage, followed by the hissing of something being pushed across stone. Feet tapped in ever-diminishing rhythms, the shadows slinking away and blending back into nothingness. Silence. Then dark orange lamplight flooded down from the upper tiers and sides of the stage, revealing a scene lifted from storytellers’ archives.
Desiccated trees cluttered the stage, their branches long and gnarled and cracked. Smoke curled from urns placed behind prop trees and formed a carpet of swirling fog. The orange light sifted through the fog and carved notches of shadow into the forest, bathing the scene in an eerie glow. Behind the main stage was a painted mural of gray woods at sunrise. In typical Hazani style, the sky was cloudless and streaked with stars.
Yet something was familiar.
Whether at a bonfire, within a festival hall, or in one of Malchym’s alleyways, Anna had seen it all before.
She could always sense the characters, the tragedy, the end of theatrical tales.
String music and gentle drumming rose from the quietness. As the lanterns panned back and forth, guided by the hands of black-robed performers along the stage, shadows appeared in Anna
’s periphery.
She gazed at a raised booth to her left, nearly level to her and more secluded than any other section in the theater. Even at her distance, through the slight haze of pipe smoke that dribbled over their railing, she knew the occupants. She recognized them in the baggy, lopsided corners of the tracker’s mask; the wide brim of Teodor’s hat; the chewing jowls of Josip; the ornate, pin-fastened peaks of the orza’s hair; the scars of the bitter scribe, which emerged as Teodor’s pipe flared with harsh light.
Anna averted her eyes to the stage, trying desperately to fight the urge to vomit. Her throat constricted as the harps grew louder and sharper.
They’re watching. To them, the performance was her terror. It was the trembling in her fingers and her mockery of elegance. They fed on it with hidden smiles and shadowed eyes.
Anna straightened her back and focused on the stage, losing herself in the curls of the smoke and echoes of the drums. She set her heart to a slow rhythm as her thoughts fell away, sinking to the riverbed.
A pair of running figures burst onto the stage, their hands linked and bodies wreathed in fog. The lead actor was pulling their partner, who nearly fell as they crossed the stage and approached the audience. Mere steps from the stage’s edge, their worn tunics and outlandish faces became clearer. Overstated eyes and mouths were painted onto wooden masks, the features distorted and horribly warped to convey a singular reaction: fear.
One of the actors, the smaller of the two, had a feminine face with sapphire paint to form tears around her eyes. Knots of straw-colored burlap formed an impression of light hair. The other, a wide man with bent legs, had a rosy-colored and boyish face lined with dark freckles.
Disbelief set in so quickly that Anna, however foolishly, waited to awake from her dream.
Her mind lost its focus in the masks and their eternal shock.
In their lantern-washed panic.
In her reflection.
Singers joined in with the strings, their wailing an imitation of dark birds that haunted Rzolka’s forests. Then came the flutes, piping and thunderous, to match the exaggerated breaths of the actors.
“He approaches!” cried Anna’s actor, the Hazani-accented river-tongue only deepening the madness.
Anna’s mind rushed to purge any trace of—
A third actor crept out from behind the trees. A fresh burlap mask covered his features, and in his hands he held a rope that snaked down into the fog, twisting.
The soglav lumbered past him, brushing the stone floor with knuckles and chipped claws. This beast was trained, its movements assured, the collar studded with rounded iron nubs and its muzzle absent. Dark, groomed fur hid its body, and it gazed upon the actors as little more than the scraps of meat it had been fed during its training cycles. And as it moved toward them, lithe and strong and far too tame to frighten anyone besides Anna, the strings shrieked.
The tracker raised his arms and called out, his Hazani tongue thickening the words: “At last, the traitor is found.” He took a step forward. “The traitor, and the innocent wretch who shares her blood. How might she be made pure?”
“I’ll not stand beside you,” Anna’s actor said. “I wish ruin upon your people.”
“Then you must be destroyed,” the hooded actor said, leveling a finger toward them.
“No!” the woman cried. “I cling to my life, and I fear my wicked end. Take this pitiful life in my place, and I will serve your cause!” She shoved Julek’s actor to the ground, her hands bent into claws and back bent with a primal arch.
Anna’s heart pounded faster, faster, her throat swelling.
“A bloody deal,” the hooded actor said, “but one born of your vile nature.”
He released the soglav’s rope, and the beast sprang to action. It thundered past a pair of prop trees, all four limbs and snout raking the stage, before hovering over the fallen actor’s body. Over the man who was not Julek, who struggled to stand and back away from the creature, who made no sounds but scrambled so fiercely that his panic couldn’t have been born from stagecraft.
Before the man staggered two paces away, the soglav dove forward and slashed wildly at him. Cloth tore open and flapped in the lamplight. Bloody streaks opened beneath the soglav’s blurs of motion, ripping and shredding and flailing, its claws and forearms staining darker as it pressed on. And still the audience was silent, the music growing louder, the horns and strings blaring, the smoke boiling up in waves and bleeding over the stage’s edge, the actor dying in silence as his arms fell away and flaps of skin dangled.
The soglav’s head jerked forward, its jaws snapping open and sealing around the mask before the man could defend himself. A crack, then a crunch, and the mask fell to the stage in splinters. The actor’s remaining eye, surrounded by puncture marks, swept over the front row.
Through his daze Jalwar managed to glance at Anna.
Intricate black stitches sealed his mouth, the lips and surrounding flesh bulging through the sutures in purple lumps. Yet the sutures didn’t stir as blood drained from his wounds and he fell backward, his eye losing focus and arms going slack and sigils vanishing, the music roaring on behind him.
My consequence.
Konrad’s voice was a muffled drone in her ear; his hands were numb upon her shoulders. Shem looked to her, lost in confusion that neither Anna nor the world could remedy.
He should have left.
Everything rushed over Anna like gale winds. She heard only her heartbeat and the strings, high and grating and bloodcurdling in the madness. Then she heard them. She heard Teodor’s rumbling laughter, Josip’s vicious giggling, Nacek’s fits of chuckles. Turning in her seat and brushing away Konrad’s arm, she saw them puffing on pipes and thrusting fingers out at her, laughing and laughing.
Reality’s levee broke.
Anna stood and wandered toward their booth, lamplight blinding her with its orange glare. At first her feet dragged along the floor, unwilling to function, but soon they were pushing her forth, sprinting away from Konrad’s muted pleas and into darkness, letting her thoughts congeal into a single impulse, forcing her body toward rage, toward a drumming heartbeat and tense shoulders and aching fists, toward violence she’d only glimpsed in dreams and forgotten forests.
And then she was upon them, scrambling up and over the low barrier that separated their silhouettes from hatred.
One last puff of Teodor’s pipe lit his bulging eyes and brows twisted in confusion. It etched out Nacek’s hanging jaw. It revealed Josip’s cheek-cutting smile, his head cocked to one side like a listening hound.
Shadows hung over the others, irrelevant to Anna.
She vaulted toward the fading glow at the tip of Nacek’s pipe, where flakes of black and gray nerkoya leaves broke away and fluttered into darkness. Where the man’s hat brim was flopping backward, a word of the grymjek escaping his lips in a bitter roar, his—
Anna’s knees crashed into the man’s chest. She curled the fingers of an open hand down toward the palm, angling the ridge at the base of her hand outward as she’d learned in the archive tomes. In the darkness and rage, she remembered the Gosuri fighting technique and imagined it within her hand, how she’d seen the diagrams drawn in dark brown ink. The palm’s ridge had to be driven into the narrow band between the nostrils and the upper lip.
Her hand made contact. It crashed into the target region and sent vibrations up her arm, rattling her to the elbow. The flesh split beneath her strike, and she felt the front teeth twisting and cracking at their roots, the lower cartilage of his nose shattering. She savored the present and the dragging sensation of skin and bone and spittle against her palm.
Teodor’s pipe spun end over end toward the floor, the still-lit wad of nerkoya flaring.
Anna swung again with her left fist. Bone gave way beneath her punch, the impact rolling her hand upward and into the soft orb of Teodor’s eye.
Without regard for the pain she bent her fingers at the midpoint and dug her knucklebones into the socket.
He screamed, and the eyeball pressed back until it surrendered and broke beneath Anna’s touch. Warm fluid gushed over Anna’s hand.
“Korpa!” Teodor screeched. His voice devolved as he screamed and kicked, those precious seconds woven into an eternity by the torment.
For Anna, the eternity was one of vengeance.
A hand seized her hair and jerked her to the side. Her scalp burned and she cried out, tumbling off Teodor and colliding with a set of knees, her arms wildly thrashing and striking at the flesh above her, no longer thinking but desperate to inflict—
“Skin her!” a man screamed in flatspeak, the expression cutting through the pain and the darkness.
Through the aching pulses in her head and feet kicking at her, catching her in the wrists and shins and ribs with deadened sensations of impact, she heard the crowd calling out and clamoring. She sensed panic in the vibrations of the floor, in the way the herds shifted and stampeded down the aisles, in—
A piercing whistle rang out among the madness.
For an instant the feet ceased to kick, and Anna pulled herself along the floor on elbows and knees, the hand upon her hair still tethering her to the booth’s crawlspace. She rolled onto her back, pried her eyes open to a cluster of silhouettes, and drove her heel into the closest shape.
Nacek roared, tearing his hands away from her hair to clutch at his face. He stumbled back and nearly collapsed into Teodor’s seat, but was stopped by another shadow behind him; the swift, looming shape descended upon him, one hand wrapping across his face and hooking beneath his jaw, the other clutching the base of his neck, jerking upward with enough force to slacken the body. Nacek slumped to the floor in a heap.
There was no time to identify her savior.
Anna whipped her head back, granting her an upside-down glimpse of the orza and the scribe bolting out of their seats and fleeing the aisle. She pushed herself up in turn, the pain and breathlessness striking her before she regained her footing, and pulled herself over the railing.
Scribes Page 30
