LITMIR.BIZ

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      Anna met the tracker’s rigid gaze. “I’m no girl.”

      “The Southern Death’s more fitting, eh?”

      She looked away.

      “Titles, titles,” the tracker cackled. “Such a sickness in the world for titles. The runts in Malchym would slit their mothers’ throats for a fitting one.”

      “You share the disease of pride,” Anna said.

      The tracker clicked through his teeth and jingled his iron links, needling Anna’s mind with barbs of panic, of latent violence. Narrowed eyes seemed to drink in her fear. “Keep looking for river flowers, girl. This entire world is sickness.”

      At midday, the nerash wheeled over the outskirts of Kowak with a sickening lurch. It sliced through stormy billows, offering vignettes of a black, turbulent sea and a sprawling city that gathered like froth at its shores. Twenty of the order’s scribes had deployed there over the past year, but their runes—those that sprouted trees, cleansed wells, reamed in brush fires—hadn’t changed the face of the land much at all.

      Anna held onto rattling straps near her head as they dove into the downpour. Her stomach knotted like it had in the capsules of the kales, but the sensation soon receded in a backdrop of bewilderment, of screeching wing flaps and crackling eardrums and oscillating iron panels. She wrinkled her nose at the sudden burst of sparksalt fumes; they seemed to bleed from dying turbines, wafting into the cabin and stinging her throat in seconds.

      Beneath her the forests swelled, rising up in a stark, threatening mass through screens of mist and smoke. A vast mesa—formed from compacted soil and timber, it seemed—drifted into view in the adjacent clearing. It grew nearer and nearer, fringed by towering pine masts that sharpened to gust-raked canopies, then to quilts of silvery needles, then to ravens perched on gnarled branches and—

      The nerash’s skids struck the mesa with a teeth-jolting thump.

      Anna’s head jerked forward, bobbing with every hop and crunch over the ragged landing platform. She shut her eyes as the nerashif cranked back on his lever, digging the skid’s talons into the damp earth and its evergreen skeleton.

      They twisted and skittered over the soil, filling the cabin with horrible crunching each time the talons caught a buried log and tore across its bark. Finally there was a clap, a groan from deep within the beast, a hiss as the nerash’s cylinders stretched and dampened their halt. The craft rocked back on its haunches, calming the blackness behind Anna’s lids, and grew still.

      Its turbines slowed with a pup’s whine.

      “Not dead yet,” the tracker said, equally surprised and amused. “Could hardly tell it was an easterner at the helm.”

      Anna opened her eyes and worked to undo her harness.

      “Never been to Kowak, have you?”

      She shook her head. “Let’s go.”

      “Swore I’d only visit this pit again when we’d drowned it in ashes,” he said. “Then again, you’d know more about that than I would.”

      “Be silent and hear me well,” Anna snapped, snuffing out the tracker’s rising giggle. “If you truly desire an escape from your marking, then you’ll come to heel. From this moment onward, you’ll resist your animal instincts. Not a foul word, not an errant gesture. I have no qualms with casting you back into this world. You are nothing.”

      She undid the final buckle in their newfound quiet.

      * * * *

      Between chest-stirring cracks of thunder, silence found its deepest notch. That murderous silence, so thick that it leeched the breaths from one’s lungs, hung palpably over the inner districts of Kowak. As palpably as the odors of kerosene and rotting bodies, which now lay in heaps at the bottoms of flooded mass graves. It had been impossible to ignore them; they flanked the last stretch of the kator’s tracks like pale, bloated flowerbeds.

      “There was a riot last night,” a ruddy-cheeked militia boy had explained while leading Anna through the moot hall’s smoky corridors. “We told them to go home. But that sow’s been milked now, hasn’t it?”

      Anna could not bring herself to look at the tracker’s cloaked face. To behold his glee, to know whatever vindicated thoughts he might exclaim with wild eyes.

      Waiting in the Chamber of Antlers, she found herself surveying the clusters of empty brown bottles strewn across the table. Their stench, biting and tinged with the same rot that had clung to the drifters who staggered through Bylka, assailed her with every swell of the hearth’s dry heat. Amber liquid had pooled into thick, glossy splotches upon the sacred wood of the eastern groves. Decrees and writs and missives were plastered together in stained piles. And high up on timber walls, illumined by grimy lamps that had gathered mounds of shriveled gray gnats, were the dust-covered and club-cracked skulls of the city’s earliest pinemen and seers.

      This was the seat of Rzolka’s eastern power. This was where infallible men had decided the lives and deaths of those with soil beneath their nails.

      Anna studied the bitterness creeping through her chest.

      The doors creaked open to reveal a mass of grim-faced, heavyset men shambling toward them. They offered little more than nods or grumbles of clan-speak to the flesh-branded young women stationed in the threshold. Jenis was among them, muttering to his captains in a sour, guarded tone, but it was difficult to distinguish the remaining southerners. They all wore the strange pastiche of traditional vestments and northern luxuries that had flooded the region in the past year or so: quilted doublets, the bristly skins of bears and wolves, dozens of layered amulets and trinkets that gleamed with emeralds, amber, Hazani rose gold. Some even had their faces stitched and studded with the turquoise droplets from Nahora’s coast, which had been one of Kowak’s most demanded tributes for bringing aid to their shores.

      Upon noticing the tracker, however, their jangling and murmuring fell away. Konrad’s old habit of omission was hard to break, it seemed.

      “Well,” the tracker said, lifting his muddied feet onto the table, “I’m glad you lot haven’t been too busy to tuck into your suppers.” His laugh was barely stifled. Then his eyes fell upon Jenis and there was an absence of mirth, of base composure. He gazed at the commander with the hatred of a wronged man.

      “What is this?” a gray-bearded man spat. “Brought the korpa here to string him up, have we?”

      A bald, scowling captain stepped forward. “Honor would be all mine.”

      “Not yet,” Anna said. “Sit. There are matters to discuss.”

      “Konrad said we had a new trail,” Jenis said, shouldering his way to the head of the gathering. His scars were dark and mottled in the lamplight, flashing bright pink as a serving girl moved past them with a dribbling candle and a bushel of bread.

      The tracker smoothed out his shirt. “In the flesh.”

      “Best tell me you’re toying with us,” Jenis growled at Anna. “This city’s already stomped on enough slugs. One more’s nothing to us.”

      “I’ll explain,” Anna said.

      “Explain what?” Jenis asked. “Break his marking. We’ll cut him slow and proper.”

      Anna rose from her chair and swept her gaze across the Rzolkan ranks, making no attempt to uncoil the knot in her brow. “Sit down.”

      The men shared glances and curled lips, shifting anxiously until they found the courage to wander to their armchairs. Several of them, including Jenis, instinctively lifted corked bottles from beneath the table and passed them around the crescent. There was a long stretch of squeaking, fizzling, chugging, all underscored by the hum of sleeping violence with which Anna had grown intimately familiar.

      She could almost feel their liquor burning through ulcerous guts, dulling their minds further with every sip and gulp…. “I don’t

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