The rug beneath Anna’s legs was slithering, hissing, hushing her as the Howling Wall spilled into the chamber and grazed her skin. Her mind was aware of its eternal terror, its primordial sludge that had been nursed and sustained over eons of annihilation.
Breathe out.
Nuhra struck a match, purging the darkness around her chin and bony fingers, then guided the flame to an orb-like lantern atop a serving table. The chamber bloomed with waxy light. Faint flurries of sand and mica seemed to seize in midair, glittering in a sea of momentary frost, then sift down into the shadows.
“Their words align with truth, it seems,” Nuhra said. Her stare was wide and eager, her head canted impishly to one side. “You bear the traces of the old ways.”
“Whose words?” Anna asked.
“Many speak of you,” Nuhra replied, “yet few recognize the marrow that lurks within your bones, Kuzalem. My vision knows it by its true name.”
Anna met the woman’s eyes, sensing a fanatical storm that lurked behind decorum. She was right about the rarity of true perception—Bora, and perhaps Yatrin, had been the only ones to decipher her spirit. Not even she herself could claim that feat. Not yet.
“You were initiated into their folds, weren’t you?”
“I’ve learned not to be vague with my speech,” Anna replied.
Nuhra smiled at that. “Abandon your pretense of separation, sister. Does the light of sacred wisdom not shine through our hearts and minds?”
“We are not the same,” Anna said. “Hear me when I tell you that we are not sisters. We are not kin. We are not friends or comrades. We are bound by a task and when that task is complete, we’ll return to our worlds and never speak of this.”
Nuhra drank her tea, taking in Anna’s words with subtle delight, then reached across the table to refill Anna’s cup. “Which mind compels you to say such things, I wonder? Which mind holds to the illusion of distinct worlds? Do we not breathe the same air and die with the same agony?”
The trailcarver’s attainments were obvious: She’d endured the same experiences as Anna, whether through tomes or meditation, and her actions carried a similar aura of efficiency and diligence. Even her eyes reflected the vast stillness of the nebulae. But not all who saw emptiness came away with the same insights, and not all who sought reality were willing to embrace it.
Anna felt her breath trickling across her upper lip, grounding her in Nuhra’s words. Every being had a lesson to offer, if one sufficiently expanded their perception. “What do you see in me?”
“Something ancient.” Nuhra’s voice had grown softer, though no less zealous. “Do you sense it within?”
Yes. It crept toward her lips, but Anna resisted the urge. “Senses can rarely be trusted.”
“As wise as it is true.”
“The work of a scribe is to know what lurks within every being,” Anna explained. “So I caution you against speaking of certainty regarding my nature. I am what I am.”
The chamber’s door opened with a weak squeal, cutting through the storm’s moans and bellows. Konrad stood in the threshold, radiant as lamplight shone upon his white garments, weighing the exchange with pursed lips.
“Is everything all right?” he asked.
Anna glanced at Nuhra, taking particular interest in the woman’s budding smile. “Yes,” she said at last. “We’re discussing the approach.”
Despite his hunched shoulders, Konrad nodded and bowed his head. “Right. Well, the other breakers have given their support to the strike. Andriv will speak with you when you’re ready.”
“Thank you.”
He lingered in the doorway, probing Anna for some sign of distress that she’d sealed in her gaze or joined hands, then dragged the door shut. The iron latch clicked into place.
“How dutiful he’s become,” Nuhra said.
“You know little of him,” Anna replied.
“Surely you jest. I knew of him when he was a mere boy in the Dogwood and I, a lowly aspirant of my sect.”
“Your name never reached his lips.”
“We were not permitted to speak with them,” she explained, fixing her stare on Anna’s scarred throat. “Men of the blade were looked upon as beasts.”
“Do you still believe that?”
Nuhra shrugged. “Some may be.”
“I’ve known beasts,” Anna said softly, “but not all of them carried blades. And some with blades were crueler than any beast I’ve known.”
“Is that so?”
“Beasts lack a mind capable of understanding wrath, but men—men choose to ignore their thinking mind. There isn’t a beast in this world that roams the land, eternally seeking out things to burn or bleed or rape. Men look upon those pursuits as games. Worse yet, they look upon them with honor.”
“Ah,” Nuhra said, widening her grin. “That’s why you hold your heart from me, is it? Do you think that of me?”
“You know yourself well enough.”
“We’ve all done beastly things,” she whispered, “but only lambs and sows can survive through goodness alone. Your Alakeph ensure that, with their claws and teeth.”
Anna tensed her jaw. It had been a mercifully long time since she’d considered the mind she possessed during war, during slaughter. But it would return soon. It had to.
Nuhra broke the silence with a sweet, delicate laugh. “Your shepherd, Bora, was certainly no lamb.”
“Watch your tongue.”
“My tongue? I speak of her with the utmost reverence.” A surprising mask of hurt, of stinging reproach, suddenly came over the woman. “For a time, she shared my quarters in the sanctuary.”
“She was an adherent of Saloram.”
“By birth, yes,” Nuhra said. “But she was sent out into this world to seek truth in all forms. I knew her when she was barely a woman.”
Anna suspended the words in her mind and spun them like wind chimes, struggling to reconcile what Bora had been with the barbarism of what Nuhra was. There was a harsher, more savage element within the adherent. “Now I understand the thread that binds you all together.”
“You speak of your tracker, don’t you?”
“You know him by a different name.”
Nuhra’s smile was dim, fleeting. “Does it trouble your heart to know that he was born as a babe like you or I, Kuzalem? That his mother anointed him with the name Lukas?”
Anna’s breaths ground to a halt. Lukas. She rolled the name through her awareness over and over again. After all this time, it seemed impossible that he could have a name at all. That a woman could force him into the world, smeared in the blood of a living womb. That somebody could love him and hold him, and know him as anything other than a killer.
“He used to be so handsome,” Nuhra said sadly, her eyes wandering through memories and longing alike. “You never asked him to bare his face, did you?”
Her throat worked to produce words, but they were slow, disjointed. “I have no need for it.”
“Lukas, Sixth of Dariyesz.” She smiled. “How long has it been since I’ve spoken those words?”
“I’m certain he’s lingered on your mind, by whatever name you choose.”
“Certain?”
Anna drew in a hard breath.