Scions
The
Scribe Cycle #3
by
James Wolanyk
Genre:
Dark Fantasy
Pub
Date: 4/9/19
Three
years have passed since the devastation of Golyna. Anna, once the
maker of immortals, continues to fight the evil she unwillingly
created through her rune-carving magic. Secreted away in an isolated
mountain monastery, she works as a teacher to young scribes, guiding
them toward runes that foster peace rather than endless war. So when
the tracker who murdered her brother comes to Anna’s redoubt,
begging for his eternal runes to be undone, Anna agrees to grant his
wish on one condition—that he aid her in rooting out the remnants
of Volna, a genocidal regime bent on destruction.
In
this brave new world where old foes can become allies, so too can
former friends sour into deadly enemies. With the tracker’s help,
Anna is propelled into a confrontation with Ramyi, her former
apprentice. Grown bitter and disillusioned, Ramyi now wants to lay
waste to the world—but not before she completes an apocalyptic
ritual that could have dire consequences for all of existence. To
stop Ramyi from unleashing chaos, and restore peace to a broken
world, Anna must be willing to make the ultimate sacrifice.
Chapter 1
Anna heard the old steward long before his lantern’s chalky orange bloom appeared. She’d first sensed his presence from the whine of an oak door farther down the slope, its staccato creaks cutting through the hush of the predawn drizzle, the twisting wail of mountain winds. She waited in stillness by the open shutters, watching the fog shift and creep over blue-black rock, studying the ethereal glow as it grew sharper and nearer. Her legs were still awash in the prickling numbness that accompanied rising from her cushion.
Four hours since the midnight bell, seven since she’d snuffed out her chamber’s lone candle and sat to follow her breath.
The razor-mind did not stir, did not blink, did not wander as the steward came to her door and rapped on the bronze face. Instead, it curiously trailed the seed of a thought blossoming in absolute stillness: Why?
“Knowing One,” the steward croaked in river-tongue, “have you risen from slumber?”
Anna lifted the latch and opened the door. Her steward’s wide-brimmed hat dripped incessantly, flopping about with the breeze, but could not mask his concern. Every wrinkle and weathered fold on his face bled a horrid truth. “What’s happened?”
“Nothing so severe, I imagine,” he replied, wringing his hands within twill sleeves. “Brother Konrad has sent for you.”
“At this hour?”
“Yes,” the steward said. “Precisely now. Yet the reason for this summoning will not pass his lips, Knowing One. Forgive me for my vague words.”
Nothing so severe. She met the steward’s blue-gray eyes, full of haunting curiosity, then gazed down at the monastery’s craggy silhouette. Few truly understood the austerity of Anna’s practice, the importance of cloistering herself for weeks on end. Even fewer knew better than to summon her during the rituals of purification. She counted Konrad among those few.
As she followed the narrow, stone-lined path that carved across the slope, she took in the foggy sprawl of the lowlands and the black clouds blotting eastern skies. It was dead now, free of the ravens and hawks that often wheeled over the ridges, utterly silent aside from their boots crunching over gravel and earth. The monastery was a dark mass, not yet roused for its morning rites. Not even the northern bell tower, a black stripe looming against muddy slate above her, showed any sign of the watchman and his lantern.
Yet something had come.
Jutting out over the lowlands was the monastery’s setstone perch, which hadn’t seen a supply delivery in close to three cycles. Only it was not empty, nor was it occupied by the violet nerashi that Golyna or Kowak often sent. Anna glimpsed a sleek, battered nerash resting behind a sheen of mist, seated directly above the iron struts that bolted the perch to an adjacent outcropping.
“What is that?” Anna asked the steward, clenching her hood against a howling gust.
“I know not.” His words were thick with unease.
In the main hall, a group of Halshaf sisters worked to light the candles lining the meditative circle. Each new spark and flicker drove away another patch of blackness, revealing glimmering mosaics upon the walls, banners emblazoned with Kojadi script, the reflective bronze bowls that hummed their celestial song each morning. The sudden flurry of footsteps upon crimson carpeting did not interrupt their soft, tireless chant in a dead tongue:
With this breath, I arise. With this breath, I pass away.
Schisms
The
Scribe Cycle #2
Three
long years have passed since Anna, First of Tomas, survived the purge
in Malijad after being forced to use her scribe sigils to create an
army of immortals. Safely ensconced in the shelter of the Nest, a
sanctuary woven by one of her young allies, Anna spends her days
tutoring the gifted yet traumatized scribe, Ramyi—and coming to
terms with her growing attachment to an expatriate soldier in her
company.
Away
from her refuge, war drums continue to beat. Thwarted in her efforts
to locate the elusive tracker and bring him to justice, Anna turns to
the state of Nahora and its network of spies for help. But Nahoran
assistance comes with a price: Anna must agree to weaponize her magic
for the all-out military confrontation to come.
Dispatched
to the front lines with Ramyi in tow, Anna will find her new
alliances put to the test, her old tormentors lying in wait, and the
fate of a city placed in her hands. To protect the innocent, she must
be willing to make the ultimate sacrifice. For even in this season of
retribution, the gift of healing may be the most powerful weapon of
all.
The lodge’s main hall was quiet and hazy with a pall of pipe smoke. Most of those lying on the earthen floor were Hazani, their tunics and wraps hanging from the rafters to dry the day’s sweat. A pair of Huuri, gleaming translucently in candlelight, lay huddled together near the door with their packs clutched to their chests. But the stillness was deeper than an absence of guests; the lodge’s ornate silk carpets and silver kettle sets were gone, likely converted to a few stalks or iron bars by a crafty peddler.
Déjà vu crept over Anna, thick and threatening.
Yatrin and Baqir headed for the latrine dugout behind a partition, while Khara slumped down beside the door. The woman fished a cylinder of aspen and a blade from her pack, whittling with rhythmic scrapes, eyeing Ramyi as she wandered aimlessly between cushions and hookahs. When Anna was certain of everybody’s routines, she jogged up the spiral stairwell in darkness.
The muffled cries of babes leaked through locked doors on the second and third levels, but the fourth was silent. Anna wondered if that was conspicuous, or if it might lure unwanted attention from those who searched for that kind of thing, but she trusted in Tensic’s judgment: Many of the veterans in Anna’s company, living or dead, had arranged things through him. Sharp minds and tight lips were rare things in the north.
Anna crossed the corridor and its patches of moonlight, halting at the sixth door. She gave a soft tap with her knuckles and waited.
Silence.
She recalled her infiltrator’s instructions, the exact exchange of one knock for one cough. If she hadn’t been so headstrong, she might’ve fetched Yatrin. But she was. With heartbeats trickling through her core, Anna reached into the folds of her shawl, unlatched a shortened ruj from the clasp on a ceramic-plated vest, and cradled it against her hip. It was the length of her forearm, strangely cumbersome despite her having trained with it nearly as long as it had existed as a prototype among Hazani cartels. Two stubby barrels housed in a cedar frame, a fully-wound cog on its side, payload sacs of iron shavings waiting beside spring plungers. Most of her fighters had taken to calling it by northern
name: yuzel, thorn. Crude, inaccurate, unpredictable—but that had become the nature of this war.
Anna pressed her back to the wall and took hold of the door handle.
Cycles of training coalesced in her stilled lungs, in the hare-twitch muscles of her wrists, inviting peace in the face of unease. Clarity gave form to violence, after all. In a single breath she shoved the door inward, dropped to one knee, swept her yuzel’s dual barrels across the room.
The mirrorman’s body was sprawled out in a wash of candlelight and ceramic fragments, flesh glimmering with slick red. Stale air and sweat wafted out to meet her.
“Shes’tir.” Her curse was a whisper, a surge of hot blood.
Anna stood, keeping the yuzel aimed at the shadows around the corpse. Piece by piece, the room revealed the scope of their work, starting with blood-spattered mud-and-straw walls. A dented copper kettle, an overturned table, a tapestry shredded by errant blade slashes. Then she saw it, gleaming
like a spiderweb or silk strand: a trip wire was suspended across the doorway, just above ankle-level, set with enough precision to rival some of Malijad’s best killers.
But subtlety had never been the way of southerners.
After edging to the left and right, examining the chamber’s hidden corners for assailants she suspected were long gone, Anna stepped over the trip wire and approached the body carefully.
His face was distorted, bulging out and cracked inward with oozing welts, both eyes swollen shut. A garrote’s deep purple traces ringed his neck. With some difficulty, Anna discerned that he’d also been a southerner, not a local conscript or hired hand from Hazan; he’d had naturally pale skin, now darkened by years beneath a withering sun. A mercenary. But his role—passing information through a mirror’s glints—had made him their best chance for information on the tracker’s whereabouts.
Their only chance, after three years of frayed leads and compromised operations.
Anna bent down and turned the man’s head from side to side, noting its coldness, its turgid and leathery texture as a result of beatings. His lips were dark, and—
Ink.
A dark, narrow stripe of ink ended at the crest of his lower lip, originating somewhere far deeper in his mouth. The application had been hasty, forceful even. Using her middle finger, Anna peeled the mirrorman’s lip forward. A triangular pattern had been needled into the soft tissue, still inflamed
with networks of red capillaries but recognizable all the same: It was an old Nahoran system, more a product of surveyors than soldiers, aiming to meld coordinates with time.
Here, now, her only chance.
Anna reattached her yuzel to its hook, slipped her pack off, fished out a brass scroll tube and charcoal stick. With a moment of silence to listen, to observe the empty doorway and the night market’s routine din, she copied the symbol onto the blank scroll. She then furled the parchment
and slipped it back into its tube.
Its weight was eerie in her pack, crushing with importance she understood both intensely yet not at all.
She hurried out of the chamber and toward the stairwell, but before she’d cleared the corridor she glanced outside, where she noticed a dark yellow cloth waving atop a post near the paddock. It hadn’t been there when they arrived. Her breath seized in the back of her mouth and—
A door squealed on its hinges.
Anna pivoted around, yuzel unclasped and drawn in both hands, eyes focused to the slender ruj barrel emerging from the seventh doorway. A dark hand followed, swathed in leather strips far too thick for northern fighters. She slid to the left and squeezed the trigger.
It was a hollow whisper in the corridor, perhaps a handful of sand pelting mud, a rattle down her wrists. Iron shavings collided as the magnetic coils accelerated them, sparking in brilliant whites and blues and oranges. The wall behind the shooter exploded in a burst of dust and dried grass, sending
metal shards ricocheting and skittering across the floor. A scream ceased in a single gust, as bone and cloth and flesh scattered just as quickly.
The shooter staggered forward in the haze, howling as he stared at the stump of his wrist.
Anna fired again.
When the dark cloud vanished, the shooter’s upper half was strewn down the corridor and dripping from the ceiling.
She spun away, sensing the tremors in her hands and the hard knot in her throat, and started down the stairwell. Three years of violence hadn’t made killing any more pleasurable, nor even easier, but decidedly more common. In fact, time had only made her more aware of how warriors were shaped: The nausea and terror remained, but everything was so perfunctory, done as habitually as breathing or chewing. Not that she had the luxury of being revolted by that fact. As she descended she unscrewed the weapon’s empty shaving pouches and replaced them with fresh bulbs.
Scribes
The
Scribe Cycle #1
Pawns
in an endless war, scribes are feared and worshipped, valued and
exploited, prized and hunted. But there is only one whose powers can
determine the fate of the world . . .
Born
into the ruins of Rzolka’s brutal civil unrest, Anna has never
known peace. Here, in her remote village—a wasteland smoldering in
the shadows of outlying foreign armies—being imbued with the magic
of the scribes has made her future all the more uncertain.
Through
intricate carvings of the flesh, scribes can grant temporary
invulnerability against enemies to those seeking protection. In an
embattled world where child scribes are sold and traded to corrupt
leaders, Anna is invaluable. Her scars never fade. The immunity she
grants lasts forever.
Taken
to a desert metropolis, Anna is promised a life of reverence, wealth,
and fame—in exchange for her gifts. She believes she is helping to
restore her homeland, creating gods and kings for an immortal
army—until she witnesses the hordes slaughtering without reproach,
sacking cities, and threatening everything she holds dear. Now, with
the help of an enigmatic assassin, Anna must reclaim the power of her
scars—before she becomes the unwitting architect of an apocalyptic
war.
Their baying rose from the southern bogs, low and tortured, warning fieldmen to gather roaming sows and bleary eyed mothers to bolt their shutters. Then came the screeching that told caravan drivers to seek refuge behind earthworks and palisades.
But the targets of their hunt had no time to think of shelter. Anna, First of Tomas, was too busy thinking of death. She wondered if it would be sudden and painless, numbing her exhaustion like bathing in winter streams. Perhaps death was agonizing, which explained the sobs of feverish men who—
Just two leagues, she reminded herself, even as her steps faltered among the oaks and saplings and lichen-choked stone, all looming monstrously in the fog. Even as her pulse drummed in her temples. The lake is two leagues away. But the air was humid and foul, too thick to breathe. Everything smelled of carcasses reclaimed by the mud.
Her predictions had placed the trackers at five leagues by dawn, yet beyond the latticework of branches, the skies were still a murky wash. Darkness hadn’t yet been flushed from the horizon. No, it was impossible
for them to make up this much ground before sunrise. They’d come earlier every year, ever since the village started to learn their tactics, but this was calculated.
Somebody told.
“What is it?” Julek winced. “You’re hurting me.”
Anna glanced down. She’d absently clamped onto her brother’s wrist, turning his fingers a pallid blue. Her grip eased as she focused on the predawn stillness. Mother often told her that she had their kin’s sharpest ears, but now she hated the honor. She heard the rustling of shrubs, the startled flight of a thousand birds, the slap of paws on damp reeds as
huntsmen cut across the floodplains.
“Nothing,” she said, hoping the boy was too young to understand. She was hardly an elder, but old enough to tell convincing lies. Old enough to make an eight-year-old feel that he wasn’t being hunted, and that they’d spend their morning with toes dipped in crisp water, staring out at the dark pines across the lake. Weaving her fingers into the links of her silver necklace, Anna pulled Julek toward the ferns. “If we don’t hurry, we’ll spend all day out here.”
“It isn’t even sunup yet,” Julek said. He frowned at the beasts’ cries.
“Anna, what’s that?”
“Elk,” she whispered.
Ahead lay the gloom of deeper woods, and behind them, a sprawl of waterlogged fields. She’d been forced to carry Julek through the bogs, and all the while she’d made him laugh by pretending she was his warhorse. Her new boots were ruined, and her linen leggings were soaked to the knee, but it hardly mattered. She wouldn’t be returning.
“Come on, little bear,” she said, waving a gnat away from her face.
“Here, come on. I’ve got you.”
He scrunched his brow, clenched his tongue between crooked teeth, and swung his right boot out. Pitching forward, he caught Anna’s arm for balance. His left leg was more deformed, but the momentum pulled him into an awkward gait. “Anna, it isn’t making me fast. Whatever you rubbed on my arm.”
Anna stole a sniff of her free wrist, breathing deep for the twistroot’s sap-like odor. In its place, she smelled only sweat and ancient wool, and realized the beasts hadn’t latched onto a false scent. She’d mixed the salves incorrectly, perhaps forgetting the tallow to waterproof it on their skin. It was too late now, of course. They were closing in.
“Anna, please,” Julek whined. “I need to sit down. That’s all.”
“When we reach the lake, we can sit down. Is that fair?”
“No,” Julek said. “The lake is an hour away.”
“Less than that, if we hurry. Isn’t that right?”
“I can’t hurry.”
There was pain in his voice, and worse yet, sincerity. Back home, he could barely pace around the field or crawl onto his cot by himself, and he’d been excited by the idea of a secret trip to the lake without his riding pony. For once, he’d been trusted to keep pace on his own two feet. Now it was an exercise in cruelty.
“Anna!”
“I know,” she said softly. She blinked away prickling tears, wondering if they came from desperation or pity. When she saw another cluster of crows scatter from the treetops, she realized it was both. “Julek, we can’t disturb these men. I need you to be quiet.”
“Why?” he whimpered. “You’re hurting me.”
Anna bit into her lower lip, threatening to draw blood. She tried to soften her grip on him, but couldn’t. Letting go meant death.
The boy jerked his arm back, twisting free of Anna’s hold.
She rounded on him with clenched fists. “Julek!”
But he was already crumpled among ferns and overhanging thistle, his breathing hard and broken between whimpers. Thorns fixed his tunic in place, leaving his legs sprawled limply behind him.
“Julek, please,” Anna whispered. She knelt beside him and reached out, but he recoiled, pinning his arm to his chest. His tunic sleeve ended above the elbow, exposing the lashes from the briar patches. Beneath the blood, mirrored across his face and neck and fragile ankles, his rounded sigil shifted in luminous white. The symbol was cryptic yet familiar in Anna’s mind: the boy’s essence, unique to him alone. To glimpse such a thing was a gift and burden known only to scribes. “I’m sorry.”
Julek glanced away, wiping his nose with the back of his hand. “Just take me home, Anna. I don’t like this. I want to go back.”
“Fine,” she said. Again she heard the trackers crashing through the underbrush. Panic put a burning flush in her cheeks. “Come on, Julek, we can go.”
The boy looked up at her, tears streaking his freckles and trailing down his dusty cheeks. “You’re lying to me.”
Branches snapped, perhaps in the grove a pence-league away.
“Never,” Anna said. She offered a hand to coax her brother’s arm out of hiding.
He shook his head. “Something’s wrong.”
“No,” she said in a broken whisper.
“You’re crying,” he said. “Anna, who are they? What’s wrong?”
Out of sight, the beasts growled.
Anna snapped her focus to the expanse of dead brush behind them, scanning for any sign of disturbance among the thorns. But the morning was still a filthy gray, staining the forest in monochrome, and she couldn’t discern anything beyond the dark slashes of trees and creeping fog. The scene only grew blurrier as her eyes watered.
She glanced back at Julek. “We’re fine. I just cut myself.” Anna held up her right hand and fought to ease the shaking. There was a smear of blood beneath her ring finger. “See? Just a small cut. I’ll bandage it at home.”
“You never cry.” His next teardrop rolled until Anna wicked it away with a trembling thumb. “Are you scared?”
No, little bear, she wanted to say, even as the teardrop stung her skin, everything is all right. She opened her mouth, but the words vanished.
Cracking twigs burned away her breaths.
It all seemed so foolish now. Even if she reached the raft, she didn’t know where to go. The tanner’s son never specified which direction she had to travel to reach Lojka, nor how far. And what good were her salt clusters if she conflated pinches and grabs, and had never asked how much to pay for anything? Some of the local boys even said that the northern cities didn’t take salt as payment. Was she even going north? How far could they go without food?
The longer she stared into Julek’s eyes, the less such things mattered.
“Give me your arm,” she commanded. Julek obeyed with hesitation, and Anna took hold of his wrist with one hand and seized a wad of his tunic with the other, dragging the thin boy to his feet and bracing his body against hers. “Just like the fields, okay?” She dropped into a narrow squat and allowed him to lean forward, bearing his full weight across her back and meshing his hands beneath her chin. “I’ll keep you safe, little bear.”
On any other day, Julek would’ve been considered light. Most of his muscles were atrophied from years of housework and bed rest, and unlike the other boys—indeed, unlike Anna—his daily meal was a mug of boiled kasha. Their father could still lift him with a single arm. But today it was all wrong.
Anna had been too nervous to eat for days. She’d traveled a league in total darkness, and another two in marshlands. Her feet were waterlogged and bleeding, her legs threatening to buckle with every step.
Lukewarm sweat beaded along her brow and stung her eyes. When she stopped listening to the wet pulse of her own heartbeats, she heard boots stomping through the brush behind her, quickening as they drew closer. With every exhale, her ribcage constricted. Stagnant air burned in her lungs as she emerged from withered grass and into the mire, hemmed in by drowning trees.
Her boots sank into the muck, squelching as she fought to move on. Flickers of memory, rusted trapper’s teeth and bloody bear flesh and desperate animal thoughts, exploded into her awareness. Escape. But every step pulled her deeper, swallowed her boots to the ankle. Julek’s weight damned them. Anna worked to free her boot, her legs cramping with the effort, but it remained trapped. “Julek,” she said, still pulling, “if I let you down now, could you walk?”
He made no response.
She repeated the question, tugging at the boy’s trouser leg. “It’s very important.” The calm of her voice died with the crunching of nearby branches. She knew they were within sight, but she couldn’t afford to look, especially with Julek clutching her. The boy’s muffled prayers fed the dread in her gut. “Julek,” she whispered to the shuffle of unbearably
close steps. “I want you to stay beside me, no matter what. I know you can do that.” Anna bent at the left knee, struggling to remain upright as Julek swung himself around and dangled freely. She reached down to pull his limp legs from the water, but the boy clutched her tighter. “Don’t worry. Just hold onto me.”
Her knees gave way, and she toppled to the left. But before she could feel the lukewarm water she collided with moss and termite-ravaged wood. Her pale arm slid into the notch between branches and exposed her own cuts, much deeper and brighter, running down leaf-littered skin from elbow to palm. But her flesh was bare, devoid of the sigils she saw
on everybody else. A scribe carried no essence, they said. No protection against the bloodshed from which they spared others.
“It’s okay,” Anna whispered. Boots thumped nearby.
Julek stared up at her with wide, swollen eyes, his grip tightening around her neck. He was trying not to cry, trying to be like her. “Home, Anna. We need to go home.”
Behind her the screeching that once seemed so distant was now deafening. It was a guttural moaning, no doubt muffled in some way, communicating starvation that only trackers could put into their beasts.
Flesh wasn’t enough to satisfy it now. It needed violence.
In spite of the blood, Anna’s mouth went dry. She stared at Julek as her vision blurred, and the tips of her ears turned cold. Before long the crackle of leaves overtook her ragged breaths.
“You’re quick,” said a passionless voice, no more than ten paces away.
“You must be exhausted. Set him down, rest against the tree. There’s no need to hurry.”
In Anna’s mind it was a simple thing to retrieve the hunting blade tucked into her belt. But it seemed impossible to move her hands. When the beast growled behind her, close enough to rustle her trouser leggings with its hot breath, she lost her nerve.
James
Wolanyk is the author of the Scribe Cycle and a teacher from Boston.
He holds a B.A. in Creative Writing from the University of
Massachusetts, where his writing has appeared in its quarterly
publication and The Electric Pulp. After studying fiction, he pursued
educational work in the Czech Republic, Taiwan, and Latvia. Outside
of writing, he enjoys history, philosophy, and boxing. His
post-apocalyptic novel, Grid, was released in 2015. He currently
resides in Riga, Latvia as an English teacher.
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