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.
After hours of meditation, the monastery always felt like another plane, another realm described in the ancient texts. It was a consequence of the formless absorption Anna invariably fell into, stripping her world of boundaries between things, of objects and observers, of concepts that lent meaning to the tapestry of colors and sensations around her. But the strange urgency in the air divided the world into definite components once more.
In some sense she hoped that Konrad had summoned her to bring news of his progress. Even his occasional plunge into panic, spurred by transient insights into a world birthed from emptiness, shed light on how profound his development had been.
“Do not shy away from existence,” she’d always whispered to him, holding the sides of his head as she’d done years ago in Golyna, brushing away the man’s tears as they rolled down in golden streaks. “Soon this dawn will clear away the darkness.”
He was not the only one who’d changed since the war. His Alakeph brothers had grown still and sharp in the isolation of Rzolka’s mountains, perhaps closer to their Kojadi roots than they’d been in a thousand years. At the very least, they were at their most populous, stationed in monasteries and settlements that extended far beyond Anna’s awareness. The same held true for the Halshaf. And it had all stemmed from her guidance, they said—without her, the orders would have crumbled.
Yet she could not shake the sense that their central pillar was decaying.
Sleep brought dreams of Shem’s flesh breaking apart, dissolving into the nothingness she could only experience in slivers. Flashes of ruins and bodies plagued her breathing during extended sits. Months ago, all comforts had come with a sense of imminent loss, and all pains had arisen with the dread of permanent existence. She felt herself resting on the precipice of something tremendous, something overwhelming, yet inexorable. Something that would shatter her mind if she was not ready.
But for the sake of the orders—for the sake of those who looked upon her as their pillar—she buried those thoughts. She turned her mind toward the mandala-adorned doors that led to Konrad’s chamber.
“Shall I bring parchment?” the steward asked. “Perhaps we should preserve your words once again.”
Anna grew still with her hand on the door’s latch. She turned to examine the old steward, whose eyes now gleamed with expectant hopefulness. “Forgive me, but I would prefer to see Brother Konrad alone.”
“Of course.” He looked down at her broken hand and crinkled his brow. “Brother Konrad could transcribe your wisdom.”
“Another time.”
“Very well,” the steward said softly. “As the Knowing One desires.”
His footsteps whispered off over the carpeting, fading into morning chants from the adjoining hall. Soon there was a storm of footsteps shuffling behind thin walls, moving to wardrobes and chests, padding toward the main hall.
Anna opened the door.
Konrad sat on the far side of the chamber, leaning heavily upon the armrest of his oak chair. A pair of candles burned in shallow dishes near his feet, throwing patches of dim, shifting shadows over his nascent beard and haggard eyes. The return to aging—to true living, perhaps—had been a painful transition. But the worry on his face was deeper than the days when he’d toyed with his mortality. He looked up at Anna with sluggish focus.
“What’s wrong?” Anna asked.
Konrad beckoned her to approach. “Close the door, Anna.”
Something about his manner disarmed her. It was a consequence of days and faces and terrors that had been stained into her memory, infusing anything cordial with the expectation of pain. She wavered for a moment, her gaze wandering around the chamber’s sparse furnishings and shelves of Kojadi tomes, then entered and sealed the door behind her. The air was stale and pungent with sweat.
“Are you leaving us?” she asked.
Konrad squinted, then shook his head. “You saw the nerash, didn’t you?”
“Whose is it?”
“Somebody arrived during the night,” Konrad whispered. His gaze crept along the floor, edging toward the cotton partition that concealed his sleeping mat. Every swallow was a hard lump upon his throat.
Anna grimaced. “Come out.”
“Very well, Anna.” A voice nestled in dark dreams. Crude, low, familiar in the most inhuman sense. The song of a bird from autumn woods.
No.
He emerged from behind the covering like a specter assuming its mortal form, letting candlelight wash over his tattered burlap folds, his bloodshot eyes, his twitching fingers. Three years of evading the vindictive masses, fleeing from whatever claws Anna could rake through the Spines and the lowlands, yet now he stood with some twisted semblance of pride.
Of comfort, even.
Anna could not speak. She longed for something—anything—to