LITMIR.BIZ

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considered the breaker’s words, the gnawing possibility that she was the unreasonable echo in their chambers. But there was no mechanism of the thinking mind to divorce suffering from a need for vengeance. “What would it take to break their code?”

      “Venom may only be remedied with the serpent itself,” he replied. “If your heart still bears the words you spoke to our Council, then there’s little to be done.”

      Whether or not he told the truth was irrelevant. She’d stopped seeking constant honesty from the breaker long ago—that sort of thing was antithetical to a trade built upon lies and deceit. And all hearts, in some form or another, were susceptible to twisting reality to meet their own ends. Her council’s end was Nahora.

      The looming serpent.

      “Perhaps it’s beyond my charge,” the breaker continued, “but with so much sand in one’s grasp, one could stand to shed a few granules.”

      “Clear away your riddles.”

      “The girl, Ramyi,” he said. “Her tuition has suffered as this affair drags on it, has it not?”

      “The sisters are good to her.”

      “Yet you’ve acted as her immutable presence. A guardian of sorts. In Nahora, no child goes without a consistent shepherd.”

      “I’ve done my best with her,” Anna said. “Her lessons aren’t a priority.”

      “Can she even name the sixteen regions encompassing her birthplace?” the breaker asked. “I understand your burden, Kuzalem, but expand your aperture.” He smiled. “Let me act as her watcher. I’ve guided countless children from cribs to columns.”

      She tightened her jaw and glanced away. She’d done her best for the girl, but her best wasn’t good enough.

      “Uz’kafilim!” a voice croaked from the lower pits. Chitin shimmered and flashed in pools of lantern light, giving form to a rush of spastic movement. A dozen Azibahli legs clambered up the walls and raced over grooved channels in the floor. The command radiated outward in waves, passed through clicking mandibles and hoarse northern tongues and fluted pipes amid the rafters, circling until an Azibahl breaker with mangled forelimbs bolted along the railing and towered over Gideon.

      “Venerable Gideon Mosharan,” the Azibahl droned, equally as impassive as his brethren. “The safe house north of Sadh Nur Amah is in peril.”

      Anna’s attention danced between the old breaker and the Azibahl, who rested on its haunches like a hound waiting for a thrown stick. Strikes on soft targets like monasteries weren’t shocking anymore. In fact, they were so commonplace that the only response was to designate an evacuation period. But there was urgency in the den’s scrambling. “Mesar’s leading a recovery force tomorrow at nightfall.”

      Gideon regarded her with a raised brow, but spoke to the breaker. “By which hesh?”

      “The latest missive demands haste,” the Azibahl explained. “Ruin will be brought by midday.”

      “That’s in three hours,” Anna whispered. “We don’t have a tunnel.”

      “It’s never too late to form an arrangement,” Gideon said.

      The term arrangement brought its own thorns. Sadh Nur Amah was well within striking range of Nahora’s garrisons, but granting their troops dominion over a Halshaf cell was unthinkable. Most of the cell would surely choose death before subjugation.

      She always had.

      “Send runners to Mesar and Jenis,” Anna said to the Azibahl. “Tell them to take twenty men each and assemble in the warrens.” She stared at the creature’s nebula of beady eyes, waiting, but it seemed that the old breaker’s approval superseded her own. “Go!”

      The Azibahl sank onto its forelimbs and raced up a nearby column, vanishing into blackness near the ceiling’s array of linking passages. Its departure did little to soothe the panic of the den below.

      “Which scribe will cut their teeth out there?” Gideon asked, more placid than ever.

      “We won’t need one,” Anna hissed.

      “Good practice for your little cub, maybe.”

      “Send two of your breakers for the ridges,” Anna replied. “Make sure they’re skilled with mirrors.” She strode away, quickening her pace to the clap of breakers’ boots.

      Gideon’s laugh stilled her before she reached the iron staircase. “All this effort to wade through the current,” he called. “Why do you forsake the bridge, Kuzalem?”

      Better a bridge than their lives.

      * * * *

      Nobody in the warrens dared to breathe as Anna whispered in Shem’s ear. Her words were sweet and soft, coaxing hayat from the depths of the child’s translucent flesh, delivered in the shelter of cupped hands and candlelight. “Remember how the sand felt under your toes, Shem. Do you remember it?”

      His lids fluttered, and the fractal edges of his tunnel rune pulsed as though they were ashes being raked in a dying fire. His fingertips remained still on the stone slab. Beneath the skin his heart rippled in drawn-out, creeping beats, pumping no more than three times in the span of a minute. Slower was better. Slower meant more accurate, in matters of memory.

      “There was a gully to the north,” she whispered, examining the distorted mirror of another tunnel as it formed on the far wall. There were currently fifteen others, all vivid and flawless in their clarity, offering glimpses of jagged wadis and burned-out Kojadi fortresses and storm-battered passes in the floodlands. A living gallery of Shem’s memories. “This was where you cut down a Gosuri regiment, wasn’t it? You did it for me.”

      Grains of ocher sand sharpened in the nascent portal.

      She glanced at the silent ranks of scribes surrounding the dais and its slab; they had been reduced to bowed heads and bead-wrapped palms in the darkness, lit only by lanterns floating upon the warren’s pools. Their collective meditation seemed to embolden Shem’s abilities, or, at the very least, sustain them with some vital fuel. Focus upon me well. When I die, this will be your charge. Or so she hoped. There was no telling whether Shem would ever respond to the suggestions of another, or if he could understand her mortality. Ignorance was the poison of obsession, after all.

      At her back, murmuring among themselves and shifting with ceramic clacks, were the fighters assigned to Ramyi’s deployment. Drowning out their noise was simple, unlike doubt. Doubt that the girl was ready, that the fighters knew her pettiness well enough to command her, that they would return at all.

      Perhaps ignorance was the poison of desperation, rather.

      “It’s beautiful,” Anna said, returning her focus to the tunnel. It was widening, no longer rippling but settling into a varnished pane, inseparable from a spyglass’s lens in its sharpness. “Remember it with every breath, Shem.”

      The tunnel’s edges glistened with crystalline fractals, then fell still.

      Anna kissed the boy’s forehead, stood, and faced Ramyi’s detachment. “Shara,” she ordered, sweeping her arm toward the tunnel.

      The fighters jogged ahead of the girl in tight ranks, faces streaked with scorchsap and shoulders saddled with bulbous rucksacks. One by one they slipped through the boundary and staggered forward, jarred by the shearing and stretching of flesh, then assumed firing positions around the entry point. Withering sunlight painted the fighters’ beige cloaks, making them as inconspicuous as the distant gorges and their mounds of stone.

      Ramyi’s steps slowed as she approached the entrance, forcing her team to glance back and ensure she hadn’t been mutilated by the crossing. But the tunnel’s gift of vision was skewed, and revealed only desert where there had once been worship and shadows. The girl wandered closer, trembling, then looked back to meet Anna’s stare. Before the tunnel’s glimmering mouth she was

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