LITMIR.BIZ

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woman who was disturbed, even repulsed, by the mere sight of blood. The sort who was decent and virtuous. The trailcarver had highborn flatland features, a lithe form that spoke of restraint in all things, a well-tailored silk and cashmere garment unsullied by mud or drink. She smelled of fragrant oils. Atop her head was a narrow ribbon that bound smooth, glossy hair into a black mass, free of knots or splintered ends.

      But Anna could not bow to her, nor could she clasp her hand on the mesa’s walkway.

      Not after the tracker’s words.

      “Always said there was no sense in stuffing their mouths,” he’d explained as the turbines wound down. “Liked to hear ’em sing.”

      There was no question of moving in a single unit. The crowds were bustling, swarming at every intersection and junction of shops, flowing overhead on rusting gangways and below in shaded tunnels. Cardamom swirled alongside the odors of scorched stone and flesh. Anna’s eyes could hardly track specific faces as they streamed past her: sun-beaten Hazani children, blindfolded Huuri, whip-marked flagellants, henna-streaked women, flesh crowded with beads, piercings, pustules, amulets—it was a vast mélange of rippling fabric and teeth, just as jarring as it had been to her youthful mind.

      But it was worse now.

      Years of monastic stillness had left her defenseless against every new jolt and sharp cry, every flash of vibrant thread, every sweltering breeze that bled the moisture she’d ceased to cherish. She was skinless, raw, apt to be drowned by every eruption of her senses. And she was trembling. Numbness trickled down to her legs. Spasms burst through her chest.

      You are not here. she whispered to the thinking mind. You are the sacred watcher.

      Her next breath brought stillness.

      And with stillness came clarity, a sour realization of what the war had done to Hazan. River-tongue was plastered over most of the signs and banners. Southerners moved in velvet-cloaked packs, encircled by throngs of hired blades and dancing girls. A presence that had once been fortified by terror was now sustained by salt, by metal, by prestige. In a land with nothing, those with something could have anything they wanted. The noble qora, with or without their old masters, had made sure of that. Shop after shop was overflowing with Rzolkan fabrics and gems and weapons, far too lavish to be uprooted or overlooked.

      “Can’t say they never did anything good for us,” the tracker whispered in Anna’s ear.

      She pretended not to hear him.

      At the edge of a spice-peddling row, standing beneath a web of ochre awnings and flapping wings, the city opened into a cluster of earthen paths and shell-pocked setstone. Bodies lay scattered upon the roadways, some crushed and others wilted in on themselves like blistering leather, all picked bare of whatever trinkets or salt pouches had once rested upon their hips. Dry blood was thickening to a burgundy paste in the grooves left by wagon wheels.

      Nuhra glanced back at Anna and Konrad, sparing a particularly indulgent grin for the tracker. “Fear not.” Her voice was silk and honey. “The holy are spared in this place.”

      “Comforting,” Anna said. She avoided Konrad’s warning stare. When dealing with the vicious and the cruel, she’d come to learn, there was no refuge in caution. Intuition had spared more lives than sense ever could.

      “Indeed it is,” Nuhra replied. “There’s little to be gained from the blood of the saltless.”

      The tracker laughed. “Makes you swoon, doesn’t she?”

      Scanning both directions of the nearest path, the trailcarver reached into her tunic and produced a thin wooden talisman. She lifted it high above her head, waiting for the bare-legged running boy across the road to acknowledge her and bolt into a nearby alley.

      Anna glanced over her shoulder to ensure that the first cohort of Alakeph hadn’t been lost in the press. By the time she’d spotted their drab coverings, which did little to obscure the procession of pale flesh and broad frames, a barrage of violent thumps forced her attention back to the path.

      A hulking machine trundled through the churned-up earth, towering above Nuhra as it came to rest in a wreath of steam. Along its base were oil-smeared, flaking cogs bound by black treads, worked by a set of struts that bore the marks of constant snapping and welding. Squares of overlapping ceramic and dark leather covered its flat sides, forming a pattern Anna could only liken to the shell of a tortoise. Everything about the beast—from its twisting copper vents to its ruj-inflicted gouges—exuded a sense of sheer brutality.

      “Oh, Nuhra,” the tracker said. “How you spoil us.”

      The trailcarver blinked at Anna, evidently catching her vague aversion. “A temrus is the most dependable refuge in the Martyr’s Ward.” A coy, knowing smile cut across her painted black lips. “Unless they learn of the hayajara within.”

      * * * *

      Threading the slender roads and underpasses of Leejadal carried a sense of incurable panic. The world beyond the temrus could only be glimpsed through hair-thin slits in the walls’ armor, giving Anna the sense of gazing through a hellish keyhole. Konrad had initially leaned inward to share her vantage point, but his curiosity waned in a matter of moments. It was a blur of cinders and split skin and fur, at once exotic and repugnant. And as the machine rumbled onward, filled with the distant chatter of two old friends and their murderous, half-heard tales, Anna realized she was plunging into an abyss.

      An abyss below the densest soil, below the Grove-Beyond-Worlds.

      But out of that chaos, which had unraveled over the span of two hours in the temrus’s sweltering confines, gratitude had emerged. Their journey concluded at a walled compound on the western edge of the city, steeped in the shade of the impossible spire. Bloated flies swarmed the air and danced over the central lot’s kerosene pools. Men clad in rawhide masks, tattered hoods, and veils paced around stacks of crates and twisted scrap, barking to one another in flatspeak variants that Anna had never heard. One by one, the ensuing temrusi chugged through a blackened, iron-patched gate, lining up in ragged succession like behemoths seeking arid land to graze, still bleeding their fumes as Alakeph brothers filed out and paced around the lot.

      A crooked, battered structure stood at the center of the compound, rising nearly as high as the bricolage watchtowers in the adjacent ward. Sand-worn paint freckled its walls, standing out amid cracked bricks in patches of indigo and ruby. Every window had been blown out or carved out, replaced by sandbags, firing holes, nail-strewn barricades. Most apparent were the gaping clefts in the upper levels and eastern wings, which left the building’s perimeter girded by piles of crushed setstone.

      Anna shifted her pack higher onto her shoulders and wandered toward the ruins. Devastation, somehow, brought more security than the city beyond the gates. After all, devastation was stagnant. Devastation had nothing to defend, nothing to lose.

      Nuhra appeared at Anna’s side and placed a hand on the small of her back, urging her toward the doorway’s partition of shredded linen and beads. “Our tea will grow cold, sister.”

      Despite her best efforts, her spine tensed against the woman’s touch. It was not the sensation, exactly, but the suggestion of what her hands had done. “I’ll be in soon enough.” “I suspect so,” Nuhra giggled.

      Anna narrowed her eyes at the trailcarver.

      Nuhra gently lifted a hand, turning her ink-laced palm to the sky, and smiled. A granule of sand fluttered on the wind, skittered over her wrist, and came to rest between the smooth skin’s creases. Then came another and another, tossed about by a nascent breeze. “The Howling Wall approaches.”

      Chapter 4

      Beyond the shutters was a black, screaming lament. It had materialized as a silent wave, draping itself over the city’s wards in beige folds. But the northerners had known better than to watch its approach; they had huddled with tawdry fetishes and carved constellations into their forearms, whispering fervent prayers into the still-gushing wounds. Its thin haze smoldered from cream to mud, then

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