LITMIR.BIZ

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hold none of these words in my heart,” Andriv explained. “But he claims to know where she nests.”

      Anna gestured to a faded map of the flatlands. “Show me.”

      “Her notch upon the sands is not what troubles me,” Andriv replied. “Her place is said to lie in the den of Volna’s engineers. By what divination he knows this, I dare not presume. Nor do I lend him the faith that I reserve for the order, you see. But such a notion pains my mind.”

      Memories of the girl’s essence pierced her awareness. Frigid, searing visions of a world lost to hatred, of words that festered in the recesses of buried dreams. Flashes of the blade she’d put to a sister’s throat, of a youthful stare that had traced the lapis lazuli and jade of ceiling mosaics, of blindfolds she’d slipped over a girl’s eyes to shroud the skeletons of her kin.

      Your violence has come home to you.

      “Kuzalem?” Andriv whispered. He was leaning over the table with crinkled brows. “Have I troubled you?”

      “It’s not you,” she said. “Is that all he said? Did he say anything of her purpose in their company?”

      “You believe it to be true?”

      She shook her head. “Knowing takes precedence over belief, brother. Tell me what he claims to know.”

      Closing his eyes for a moment, the brother’s face grew decidedly somber. His lids flickered with repressed pain, a sense of something hideous and inescapable, as though he’d begun to dissolve from the inside.

      Anna knew the sensation all too well.

      “She imbues their forces with hellish scars,” Andriv said finally. “Those who know of the defiled flesh have given her refuge in their knowledge. Yet there are others, too. Legions of the damned and the savage lend their blades to her cause.”

      Her fingertips prickled with numbness and the pit of her stomach fell away in a slow, burning ache. Was he truly describing Ramyi? It felt like yet another apparition in meditation, unreal; yet as vivid as waking life, jarring her out of time, out of space.

      “It wasn’t my fault,” she whispered, so softly that it was stifled by the nerash’s oscillating plates.

      Andriv frowned. “Forgive me, Kuzalem, but I heard not what—”

      “Nothing,” she cut in. “It was nothing.” Then came a span of true nothingness, of shared terror in the understanding of what had passed and what was yet to come. “Brother Andriv, I should lead the others in their practice before we put out the lights. I ask you to confer with Brother Konrad and the tracker once more, if only to know her location more precisely. We’ll need a staging area.”

      “Yes, of course,” he replied, raking in his charts in a nervous rush. “We have several chapters in mind, though we’ll need to pass over Nahora before we enter the flatlands. There are still batteries to the north.”

      “The chapters won’t do,” Anna explained. “We’ll need to make our presence scarce.”

      Andriv blinked at her, seemingly in awe of whatever counsel she might offer—nonsense or otherwise.

      “A hunter’s terror is the surest path to driving a fox into its hollow,” she continued, gazing out at the black, misty skies once again. “I won’t risk any lives on an assault until we’re certain of her position.”

      Andriv nodded, bowed, and rose from his cushion, sparing a final glance at the table and its scattered documents before he entered the aisle. But his steps were slow, sporadic, nearly dragging between the bunks. Abruptly he turned to face Anna once more, shadows etched across his face in dark splotches. “Kuzalem, do you believe it’s actually the Starsent? Will we look upon her?”

      “Do not believe,” Anna said coldly. “Know.”

      * * * *

      It was a safe house nestled among apple orchards and wide, reed-clogged wadis. Patrols made their rounds six times per day. Two mountains, the transfigured lovers Tuchalla and Qirpek, presided over the compound with the boons of creeping shadows, slope-borne whirls of sand, and treacherous passes. None of the traders or caravans from Nur Sabah had cause to venture there, and even the lowest nerashi runs—whether dispatched by the Nahorans or their neighboring qora—would detect anything worth probing.

      That which did not exist could not be killed.

      Anna studied the tracker’s map of the region, concentrating intently on his dried inkblot. It was plausible enough, and several of the northern-born Alakeph brothers had lent credence to his words.

      “Those are foul lands,” one had said, examining the countless latches and cylinders of his disassembled ruj with a falcon’s absorption. “Death itself could dwell there and he would only find his own.”

      She’d awoken to the hard, biting gaze of Har-gunesh, unsure if she’d managed to sleep at all. Her mind had been ablaze with the tracker’s eyes, with his constant stench, which had seemed to effortlessly penetrate the walls of his holding cell. Gazing out at the land beneath them during the night hadn’t been bearable, either: No matter how much time had passed, the trampled, shell-scarred remains of Nahora still snuffed out whatever spark she’d nursed in her heart.

      Yet now she rested by the window once more, her cheek pressed to warming glass, wondering how many leagues lay between Leejadal and their target. Setting the map aside, Anna turned her attention to a barren sky, to the silvery strands that broke over the nerash’s wings and held them aloft. Her instructors in the academy at Malijad had called the substance danha, the dissolving matter of the world. They’d said it could not be touched, nor felt, nor truly glimpsed by the living. But it was not the same world her instructor had known, and Anna no longer accepted the truth of others on faith alone.

      The danha over Hazan was smooth and still, as stagnant as the parched heat that pooled over its flats and gorges. Hours ago, the endless sand seas had been dotted with the half-devoured corpses of Volna’s machines, often encircled by the tent towns of tinkerers and bargaining caravans. Now the land was cracked and naked. Far on the horizon, Leejadal glimmered with its amethyst-tiled skyline, its vast domes that resembled the growing chambers in the kales, its kator lines that spooled out like diamond thread in every direction. Fumes billowed from chasms and pits drilled into cracked plains. At the heart of the sprawling tumor, thrusting up into the danha and beyond its impossible boundaries, seemingly able to pierce the nebulae themselves, was a rod of iron and black stone. The vision was wholly alien, an aberration that her mind could not have fathomed nor accepted in younger years, even after the heights of Malijad.

      She watched the flanking nerashi broaden their wings and fan out their leather tails, drifting lower for the approach on the mesas. Sparksalt vapors bloomed in rippling sills beneath the machines.

      Andriv came to her side with a patchwork brown cloak draped over his arm. “Merciful stars, Kuzalem,” he said. “The quartermaster issued us a spare.”

      Years ago, leagues away, she’d donned a covering of the same sort. She could still feel the dirt stinging her cheeks.

      “Does it suit you?” Andriv asked.

      “My thanks,” Anna said, taking the cloak and laying it out across her lap. “Though I have my reservations about this place.”

      “They’ll be none the wiser about our arrival.” Andriv peered through Anna’s window, fixed on the mirror glints of a captain within the neighboring nerash. “It seems that this tracker has comrades in the most unexpected of burrows.”

      Anna followed the man’s gaze, though she found her attention lured by the swelling expanse of setstone and pilfered abundance. Its wealth was little more than an artifice for the ignorant. Such cities had inherited a lineage of mindless indulgence, a haze of decadence, a gluttonous frenzy where goodness could be bought and sold. “It’s not so unexpected, Brother Andriv.”

      * * * *

      Nuhra of the Fifth

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