This was her burden. It had to be.
She probed her awareness for the red lashes of Ramyi’s presence, which had once been as tangible as sunlight or scars or the bodies left in the girl’s wake. Those days had passed, their memories as disjointed and unreal as a fleeting dream, but she grasped at their power nevertheless. Behind closed lids she honed in on labored breathing, glossy orange biting through blackness, a—
Emptiness washed over her.
There was no sense of stillness, for there was nothing to move, nothing to agitate. No sense of time, nor its imagined passing. Not even blackness persisted in that hollow space.
Torchlight and sullied limestone burst into being. Then came the warm, dazzling flickers of flame and cinders, glowing brands steaming against open flesh, spittle glistening on sharpened teeth. Black pigments, made from the bones that her tribe had burned and crushed during the last harvest, coated the floor and ceiling in the form of glimmering murals, glyphs, inscriptions. Beads of blood and sweat sparkled around her.
Lifting her hands into the light, she found dark flesh banded with pink scarring. The cuts were fresh, still dribbling waxy crimson onto pitted stone. But her fingers were thicker than she recalled, more weighty and callused, capable of clamping around a Gosuri’s matted throat and choking it to stillness. Capable of slicing through the thin, pale belly of a southerner. Capable of endless savagery that played through her mind as a tapestry of faces, wounds, howls, an immense wilderness of memories that stitched the divide between the self and the other.
The other.
It was a needle driven into her awareness, a surge of animal fear that destroyed the will to move, to speak, to breathe. This is not me. The fear swelled to horror. Spasms tightened her hands to fists, but they were not her hands, and that sense of volition immediately felt wasted, illusory, a pathetic attempt of the mind to grasp at flesh beyond its control.
There was nobody to rescue.
There was simply nothing.
Yet every step forward was a desperate scream within, an affirmation of the truth that she was not there, that an abysmal emptiness pervaded all things, that the world flowed around an intangible captive.
The elders threw their heads back, mouths wide and gushing black torrents. Fluted fox bones, protruding from their windpipes in ashen stubs, rattled as the men began their hideous calls. It was a monstrous, baleful harmony, growing ever-lower until it coalesced into a chest-thrumming wave.
Primordial words, stripped of all language and logic, intelligible only to the innermost kernel of awareness, consumed her.
We are.
Anna opened her eyes to dust, to blinding sunlight fighting through the canopy overhead. She was standing at the edge of the narrow wadi, gazing out at the compound’s cracked walls and ramshackle wooden gate. Her breaths pooled in her lungs, burning air beyond conscious will, almost as though that vital rhythm had been forgotten, somehow overlooked.
Overlooked as easily as awareness itself, as entire moments of existence:
Crossing over crumbling soil, hunting prey she could not hate, bearing a tool designed to maim and murder.
Anna dropped her ruj and studied its fall, its clouded impact upon the soil. Her hands wandered to her sides, quaking, throbbing, bleeding precious sweat into the earth. She opened her mouth, but did not know the words to scream. Thoughts and senses flickered in and out of complete dissociation. Was it her sight, her terror, her—
“Fuck are you doing?” the tracker snarled, seizing Anna’s shoulder—the pain assured her that it was her shoulder—and forcing her down to a wobbling crouch. His gaze darted between rows of apple trees and waves of Alakeph brothers, who were beginning to edge along the compound’s inner wall with ruji tucked to their shoulders.
“What is it now?” Konrad hurried to them, clutching his ruj by its barrel using a gloved hand. His face was flush, shining with broad ribbons of sweat, as frustrated as it was bemused. “Anna, what’s wrong?”
She struggled for gulps of dense, throat-prickling air, staring blankly at both men as she struggled to ground herself. “I don’t—” she began. A pause, a shallow gasp. “I don’t know.”
“Cracked your mind?” the tracker asked.
“No,” she said, glaring at him. “There’s something wrong with this place.”
“You hurt?” Konrad frowned at her vest, her legs, her neck and its ancient scars. “Take it gently. What do you mean by wrong?”
A sharp clap issued from behind the mud walls. Their entry was a storm of drumming boots, a smattering of shouts in river-tongue and Hazani, a surge of white shapes flowing into the compound’s inner ring. Then it fell away. There was no gargled screaming, no shattering glass, no ruj payloads thudding into mud or flesh with muffled shushes.
Wasps hummed around Anna.
“Think it’s over?” Konrad asked.
“I don’t feel her,” Anna whispered. “Konrad, we shouldn’t be here.”
Shrill whistling filled the air, accompanied by several Alakeph brothers appearing in the compound’s doorway and waving their comrades closer. Most of the men had their ruji slung across their backs or gripped like walking sticks.
But Anna found no relief in their demeanor.
Lukas stood, his knees popping like snapped kindling, and gave a bitter laugh. “Nothing left to raise those hackles, Anna. Just a matter of digging your panna a pit or leaving her for the tribes.”
* * * *
A brittle stillness hung over the compound’s inner courtyard. Many of the Alakeph were gathered into clumps along a fissure-riddled wall, basking in slivers of shade, overcome by a silence that extended beyond the terse ways of their lineage. Others squatted deep in Halshaf prayer, mumbling ancient words to themselves as Anna strode past. Even the northern fighters, adorned with crudely stitched flesh masks, seemed reticent to stand beside the mud-and-timber house.
The stench reached Anna halfway to the door. It was pus and sun-swollen guts, vinegar and stale piss, bile and fermenting sweat. Death. During past campaigns it had become a constant miasma, as tangible and ominous as smoke stirring on the horizon.
It was not the mark of recent death, of course. Fresh blood alone was not so putrid; it was metallic, consistent, woven into Anna’s memories of thrashing lambs and errant shells that had left bodies strewn down entire streets.
Anna’s stomach clenched.
If Ramyi was inside, the fighters’ work had already been carried out.
“Kuzalem!” Andriv burst through the gates with his ruj in both hands, panting like the wild, sunken-ribbed hounds that trotted alongside kator tracks. His eyes were just as fierce. “I feared the worst.”
“Trust in my ways,” she replied, immediately returning her focus to the mud structure. Somewhere in her periphery, her companions were padding across the dust and clumps of silvery weeds, speaking to the first waves of fighters in low tones. It registered as clearly as the pitter-patter dripping that leaked through the doorway, through narrow windows housing blackness. The normalcy of it all was the most chilling aspect: straight, unmarked walls, a copper spigot protruding through the soil, and a set of nearby furrows lined with still-sprouting herbs, basking in the shade of a red tarp. Had it not been for that fetid pall, it would’ve been any other home amid the flatlands.
“I’m not certain you should enter,” Andriv whispered, almost as though tucking his words into Anna’s ears alone. “The brothers assure me that this is a sinister domain.”
“I’m