LITMIR.BIZ

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5

      By the time their convoy of shrub-blanketed temrusi had reached the western expanse, Har-gunesh stared down from his highest perch. Every slat and vent along Anna’s transport had been cranked open, bleeding near-boiling air into the sprawl of crumbling stone walls, bushy pines, and scorched soil. It was flat here—threateningly flat. One could gaze over the fields and into the flux of scrambled, faraway mirages, picking out the dark smudges of settlements and peddler caravans alike.

      Not that it made any difference now. It had been six hours of crunching over sand and earth and bleached bones, occasionally stopping at dust-shrouded wells to refill the coolant tanks and allow the brothers to retch into dry riverbeds.

      Anna’s shirt was soaked with sweat, as thick and tacky as a trapper’s furs upon her skin. She’d taken a cue from the Alakeph and northern fighters in removing her ceramic vest, bandolier, and rucksack, tossing them into an enormous mound in the rear of their temrus, but even that was a token gesture. Her throat was clogged with fumes, stinging from the arid heat that seemed to leak into her lungs and shrivel her from the inside. Every jolt and bump that rattled through the undercarriage bit into her bones and chafed her flesh, conjuring images of leather stretched over its rack.

      Yet as she surveyed the others, noting the creeping dullness in their eyes and the habitual picking at their lips, she understood that she was suffering least of all. A sharpened mind would always outlast a hardened body.

      Nuhra sat across from Anna, her face a reflection of dreaming tranquility. Her posture was flawless, as rigid and composed as the guardian statues that had lined the outskirts of Leejadal, seemingly immune to the decay of heat and drowsiness. Sweat trickled down her cheeks in smooth, glimmering bands. Even the northern scribes seated near the front of the temrus, who’d worked under her guidance to apply markings to the better part of the qora fighters, now regarded her as a pariah.

      But not everyone was so unsettled.

      That morning, Lukas had hardly detected a change in the woman. Even if he had, he’d remained mum on his insights. His only sign of knowing had been a drawn-out stare in the compound’s lot, carefully weighing Nuhra’s silence, her dispassionate lips, her mechanical gait.

      “Weird way about her,” he’d muttered to Anna as he wandered toward the third temrus, fishing through his pouch for a fresh wad of khat. “Northerners.”

      But the trailcarver’s mission had not been burned away with the rest of her old self. Her every action—indeed, her every step and breath—had become perfunctory rituals, living cogs stripped of all pleasure and craving in service of a grand machine. There was no longer an observer within her mind; there was only a task.

      A singular, hallowed task.

      Anna was still examining the woman when the temrus bucked, slamming them both into the harnesses. Gaslights sparked to life along the central aisle, casting a pallid glow over rusting wall panels, twisting brass tubes, opposing rows of fighters. Anna clawed at her buckles in disarrayed panic as the others silently snapped to attention, locking the bolts of their ruji and filing toward the stockpiled equipment with unnerving expediency.

      No sooner had she wrenched the buckles open than blinding white light flooded the temrus. The transport’s rear panel unspooled to the furthest extent of its fraying winch lines, screeching and pounding down upon the soil in an instant.

      Sweet, coppery dust wafted up and consumed the first wave of fighters to storm down the ramp. Their brethren trailed them, soon reduced to white cloaks whipping and stirring in the haze.

      This is it. This is what we’ve come to.

      She stood and wandered toward her gear, dimly aware of Nuhra striding out onto the field with her men.

      Anna blinked at the mound.

      A ruj. A ruj for killing. Yes, that had to be hers. She picked it up, looking upon her hands as a puppet’s limbs, and slung the leather strap over her shoulder.

      A vest to keep her innards off the sand. She’d need that, too. Her hands tingled as she lifted it over her head, pausing in its deafening blackness, then let its weight slap down across her shoulders. She tightened the straps until she could hardly breathe.

      Then a rucksack, full of things that would keep her alive. But most men she’d known to wear them did not survive long enough to open the flap. She hefted it onto her back, cinched the buckles, and stumbled toward sunlight.

      She was halfway down the ramp when she realized she’d forgotten how to kill. Turning the ruj over in her hands, she noticed—for what seemed like the first time—how alien and brutal and unwieldy it was. Point, pull, kill. That was it.

      Or had she missed something?

      Was it even loaded?

      “Kuzalem, conceal your form.” Andriv’s voice, hard, yet restrained, burst into her awareness. “Their horrors may soon assail our ranks.”

      Anna turned toward the stream of fighters, who were scrambling off the raised path and into a shadowed underbrush thick with gnarled shrubs and wadis. Tracking their course further into the distance, she noticed a series of beige lumps hemmed in by pines and crooked walls and drooping nets. Sunlight gave the mottled mud structures the distinct appearance of flaking limestone. Some of the Alakeph brothers appeared to her as white glimmers, threading in and out of sight as they traversed the network of canals. She squinted at the meandering company; each emergent head and ruj barrel provided Anna with a more precise calculation of distance, no matter how the heat managed to distort their forms. The compound was a half-league away at most, which put their fighters squarely within firing range.

      But such measurements held true for both sides.

      Sinking down to a kneeling stance, Anna nodded at Andriv and crept to the edge of a broken wall. Konrad and the tracker were scurrying into a wadi farther down the road, trailed by a detachment of northerners in reed-sprouting camouflage smocks. Their attempt at silence was wasted; even if the safe house was deaf to their approach, slumbering during Har-gunesh’s daylight pass, the groaning and chugging temrusi had surely revealed their presence.

      “Do they know their orders?” Anna whispered to Andriv.

      The brother was nervously scanning the path, passing cryptic hand signals to mirrormen and captains scattered along the column of temrusi. “The Starsent will not be ended.”

      “We may not have that luxury,” she hissed.

      “The brothers are well-trained, Kuzalem.”

      “So is she.” Anna peered around the wall’s chipped edge, straining to detect any movement within the compound. “Your men will know their course when the time arrives.”

      Andriv settled back against the wall, his eyes roaming the dirt with the telltale glaze of a commander’s imagination. A moment later he reached out, patting Anna’s shoulder to urge her to remain in position. “We will not fail you.”

      “I’m accompanying you,” Anna said. “It’s not under discussion.”

      “We should wait until—”

      “Nothing lurks in the shadows.” Nuhra’s voice was a faint razor, possessed by the certainty of knowledge beyond her mortal senses. She sat in the center of the road, her legs crossed and fingers twisted into a strange knot upon her lap, gazing raptly at a void beyond the sands. “They dwell in restless dreams.”

      “Untangle your tongue,” Andriv snapped. “Are their watchmen asleep?”

      Nuhra closed her eyes. “No.”

      Flickers of encroaching violence filled Anna’s chest with hot, painful throbbing, and her heart knocked against the ceramic vest like war drums. Such dread was familiar to the helpless, to the feeble, and it screamed through Anna’s mind as silence spread and cemented around her.

      Slinging her ruj around and over her rucksack, Anna scrambled down the embankment and into the underbrush in a shroud of dust. Ahead, the fighters advanced

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