Schisms by James Wolanyk Book Tour and Giveaway :)
Schisms
The Scribe Cycle #2
by James Wolanyk
Pub
Date: 7/10/2018
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.
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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