Notes from the Burning Age

by Claire North

  “To be honest, at this stage all I really want is to go home and have a nervous breakdown. It’s not very meritorious, but it’ll probably help in the long run.”

  He scowled, a sudden flare of anger bursting from behind his smile. “Don’t you know there’s a fucking war on?” he snapped, and I recoiled a little, curling up tighter on my rock, but then the smile was back again in a moment, bright and merry as if we were discussing butterflies or the first buds of spring. “Anyway. All this is academic until Jia’s deposed. We’ll take Isdanbul then negotiate a settlement with whoever’s left standing. Give everyone a chance to calm down a bit, reconsider their positions. In time, the remaining Provinces will see the power of our argument; the strength of it. I do believe in something, you see.”

  He talked light and easy, but his eyes were to the west, to the rumbling of his army as it growled across Martyza Eztok. Too far now. Too late – all of it, far, far too late.

  “All this would be an even more stupid waste of life if you didn’t believe.” I raised my voice a little, to cut through the barrage of his thoughts. “But I imagine the wrathful kakuy currently poisoning the land in your wake might be a bit distracting – not to mention Farii’s rebellion.” Not a flicker in his smile, not a flinch, but neither did he reply. “You are worried. About the archives in the coal mines, yes?”

  “It’s my job to be worried. While it is always… nice to see you, the thought that Yue lied to me about the level of defence Jia would dedicate to this region is naturally perturbing. It suggests, in the worst case, a trap.”

  “What do you think is down there?” I asked, following his gaze. “Nuclear? Biowarfare? Cluster munitions? What are you hoping for?”

  He shrugged. “I will take what I can get. We can extrapolate a lot from a little. Look at the advances we’ve made already.”

  “Perhaps you hope there’s a way to kill the kakuy. The great ones, I mean. The ones that come in thunder.”

  “As I said – I make do with whatever I find.”

  I sighed, checked my watch, clicked my tongue in the roof of my mouth. Georg stopped pacing, half-turned, looked at me and seemed for a moment to see me, myself. I smiled, put the lid back on the flask of tea, sealed it up tight, creaked side to side, felt the little muscles down my back ache.

  “It is a trap, of course,” I said, and finally he turned to face me full-on, one eyebrow raised. “Oh, there’s an archive down there, full of frightening, terrible things. Even without Yue’s invitation, you should have left it alone. You talk about ingenuity, but your mindset is so stuck in the past you can’t see the extraordinary advances of the present. You are incapable of appreciating the wonders around you, incapable of ever just being… all right. Satisfied. Under other circumstances, you could have been an astonishing human being. You could have achieved wonders. But you are not. Instead you are remarkably easy to manipulate.”

  I checked my watch again, watched the second hand ticking down.

  “I wish you’d got here on time,” I sighed. “We could have done this differently.” He didn’t speak, didn’t blink. I couldn’t remember the last time he’d listened to me so intently. “I am here to commit a terrible heresy. When it is done – if there is anything left – your army will be destroyed and you will lose Bukarest, probably Budapesht too. It’s going to be hideous for everyone. But you have a choice. You came here for Yue. That was good of you. That suggests consideration for the life of an agent. I’m here to return the courtesy. Krima vaMiyani would love to talk to you; she is as close to thrilled at the prospect as I think she can physiologically be. Defect now, and you’ll have a perfectly comfortable war in a nice hearth somewhere by the sea. Or don’t, and watch everything you’ve built tumble down, and eventually be arrested as a war criminal, perhaps by our side, most likely by your own. Kun Mi strikes me as fond of a scapegoat.”

  He turned, took a step away, stopped, turned again, rubbed his leg – an unconscious movement, a little leaning – seemed to realise what he was doing, straightened, stiff as a tree. “All right,” he murmured. “You’ve surprised me. Thoroughly and actually surprised me. I’m impressed. You’ve given me a great deal to think about. Thank you for that.”

  “I fear that in moments we’ll both have a great deal more.”

  “Even if you did have some sort of trap to spring, I’ve seen your troops, Jia’s little armies. You could bring every soldier she has from every corner of the Provinces here and all you’d do is speed your demise.”

  “Yes. She knows that. She’s old, Georg, but there’s a reason she’s in charge. Winning was never the plan.”

  He looked directly at me, his chest square, shoulders back, stick rammed into the dirt between his feet like a flagpole. “Fascinating. I can still see you – some of you – some of Kadri. But only pieces of you; of him, rather. Little parts you used to be Kadri – or perhaps little parts of Kadri that you have used now that you are trying to be Ven. I have always prided myself on being better than people – at knowing them better than they know themselves. You force me to rethink this position. Thank you.”

  I sighed, stood, stretched, checked my watch one last time. “Too late,” I said. “But for what it’s worth, you’re welcome.”

  “You know that this can never be a—”

  I raised one hand to silence him, and he stiffened, astonished, utterly unprepared for the gesture. “To be clear. There is an archive under Martyza. It was buried in the mines. All the way under the valley, stretching on beneath the earth all around. Tunnels which your army are currently running – in the case of the tanks, driving – directly above.”

  Here it is.

  Here is the moment that Georg’s world falls apart.

  I thought I would enjoy it.

  I thought it would make everything all right. That I would punch the air, laugh, cackle, say something pithy. I thought I would watch him collapse into an old, broken man, and I would feel somehow young again, feel that I had clawed back some piece of myself that had vanished so far into Kadri, into Pityr, into the air and the earth and the forest and into him.

  Instead, he took in a single breath, and let it out slow, because even he had to breathe again.

  I felt tired.

  I wanted to take his hand, tell him it would be okay.

  I wanted to apologise – maybe not to him, but to anyone who’d listen.

  I opened my mouth to try and find words, and there was nothing.

  We stood, frozen in that place, and there would be a part of us always frozen in that place, a shadow of ourselves left behind that we could never find again.

  I wanted to say: Georg. Please defect.

  Please.

  It will just be…

  … it’s the sensible…

  … maybe even the right…

  … we can work something out, it’ll be…

  Sorry.

  Sorry.

  It wasn’t ever a game, but in the end that was the story we told to make it…

  Sorry.

  You weren’t ever really human in my eyes either. You were always just… something else.

  Sorry.

  Instead, I stared at my boots, and then up at him, and wondered what words he’d find, if it would be kindest to speak, or if he needed a little space. When I was Kadri, I had always known these things, but that was another man, another time.

  I thought he’d say the obvious – you wouldn’t dare, you never would, the inquisition would never allow it! But Georg was not one for obvious falsehoods. He nodded, tilted his head to one side. Nodded again. Didn’t meet my eyes. Then he straightened up and, looking a little past my head, said: “So, are you armed?”

  I went for my knife, which is why his stick whipped just above my head as he swung it with both hands, before he turned and, stepping to the side, brought it down across my shoulders. I crumpled beneath it, rolled onto the earth and away from his kick, tangled now in robes – stupid bloody robes for a stupid bloody priest – tried t
o crawl away from another swipe, couldn’t quite make the distance and deflected the weight of his stick across my arm. The pain of it cracked down into my spine, salivated in my mouth, more than just bruising, but the adrenaline kept me moving away as I tried to grab at the weapon, over-swung on its arc, and hold on with one hand while fumbling for my blade with the other. My fingers slipped on the waxed wood, and Georg stepped sideways again, using the weight of his body to pull the cane from my grasp, landed a kick, a little awkward, across my ribs, stumbling back off balance from his own efforts as I rolled away from it, gasping for air. In the moment it took him to steady himself on his feet I scurried onto mine, hands up, and as he swung again I barrelled towards him, fingers aiming for his face, trying to close the distance before the full force of the strike could reach me. The heavy handle of the cane flew past my head, but the tip of it bounced into my skull behind my ear. By then my momentum was too great to slow; I slammed into him, fingers clawing at his face, his eyes, trying to get purchase on something soft and squelchy. Georg dropped the stick to flail at my hands, strength against strength, before some more intelligent instinct kicked in and, reaching through my arms, he tried to ram his thumb into the ridged length of my windpipe, pushing me back as I curled away from the choking pain of it.

  I let go of his face, dropped myself to his left, went to grab his stick as I rolled away, got one hand round one end, but he had caught the other and for a moment we were tugging on it with all the grace of two muddy, yapping pups fighting over a chewed twig. He pulled a little too hard and I let go, fast, his own strength knocking him onto his backside as the energy between us was released. As he fell, I fumbled for my knife again, felt the warmth of the handle against my calf and looked up to see him swinging for my right eye.

  It was somewhere around then that the mines blew.

  It wasn’t one coherent blast. First one chamber beneath the earth, then another, then another, like a string of beads falling from a necklace and clattering to the floor. The roar – the coherent, concerted roar – was a thing that grew over a few seconds as the separate pops joined together, as the clouds of black coal dust and yellow dust broiled and rolled together and upwards, feeding each other, seemingly propelled by the noise of their own explosion. From the church I could see it rise, and an instant later could see nothing at all as a sideways wall of dust choked in off the flatlands. I squeezed my eyes shut and curled up into a ball, covering my ears, trying to breathe only through my robes, the heat and the scratching, suffocating blackness of it a spider’s jaw; nothing but this devouring, this coming apart. The ground bounced and buckled like it was a liquid thing, back on the sea again, drowning again, don’t let go, don’t let go, I had not realised until this moment that the earth was nothing but broken dirt hemmed in by water and air, we would sink, we would be swallowed whole. I couldn’t see Georg, couldn’t open my eyes for more than a moment to try and peer through the blackness, had never tasted coal before – is this what coal tastes like? The taste of the past, of a dryness that prickles your tongue, of red tissue burning raw and breath with stones in it. Medj should taste coal, before their ordinations; they should swim through the flooded caves of Martyza and learn the songs of the old gods too, the ones who made people special.

  After the first roaring, a falling rain. The earth as it falls sounds like hail on metal. It has notes to it, discordant percussions and strange chords. It bounces on your back, runs fingers through your hair. The dust moves like a living thing as you blink and try to rise, shielding your face from the fog of black and grey, blood thick, greased with yellow, melting the soft whites of your eyes. I coughed and spluttered and choked, staggered a few paces, ears singing; tried to shake the singing out, tilting my head side to side, but the note didn’t change. I stumbled to the broken door of the church, half-fell, black lumps of broken world falling all around me, slow, fluttering down like feathers or slamming hard in wet splotches of heavy clay. I coughed, spat the colour of slate from my lungs, staggered a few more paces over the buckled earth, distorted like dunes at the beach, saw only blackness rising from Martyza, heard no guns firing, could not see the hollow, empty place we had ripped through the earth beneath what was left of Georg’s army. Could not see the bodies they would find there in the months to come, even their eyes turned black by the dust that caked them when the world had caved in.

  I thought I heard something behind me, but it was hard to tell through the ringing of my ears, looked up, up through the dust and the black, to where the cloud of coal blown into the sky was still billowing overhead.

  I saw something ripple in it, and it was just the wind.

  I saw something spark within it, red like fire, and it was just the light.

  Then Georg, face turned to soot, caught my shoulder and tried to hit me, but his weight was off, his ears as bloody as mine, and he missed the punch, and I caught him as he half-fell, sinking with him onto the crackling earth. I grabbed his arm before he could swing again, his stick nowhere in sight, and pointed to the cloud, didn’t think I could speak, didn’t think he could hear me.

  He blinked, not understanding, tracks of thinner grey around the corners of his eyes where moisture was trying to form. He followed my finger, pointing to the heavens, saw the dust, saw the coal.

  Saw it catch on fire.

  The flame started at its root, where the black cloud still clung to the earth, and spread up like a blooming flower. It leapt through the dust and through the fog, a rippling wall of crimson, spilling in all directions across the battlefield, curling in and rolling out like the all-consuming wave of the tsunami. The earth boiled beneath it, fused to stone; the clouds parted overhead as if frightened by a predatory beast, and still the inferno rushed outwards, tumbled down, tumbled towards us.

  And for a moment, in the light that was too bright to look at, the fire igniting in every mote of dancing coal spinning on the air, I saw a creature drenched in blood, and its eyes were the hollow voids of an endless death, and its jaw was a waterfall of dripping oil, set alight. It had no wings, no talons or claws of prey, but it beat vengeance across the sky in crimson and black, dimming the sun as it roared across the field. It consumed the ancient chimneys, boiled the water in the abandoned lake. It melted the tanks of Kun Mi, charred the lungs of Antoni Witt and all who followed him. It ignited the grass in tiny spears of spitting yellow, turned the few standing walls of ancient metal into pools of burnt-silver slag. It roared, and roared again, and its voice was the fire, the storm and the earth. The kakuy of Martyza Eztok was as old as the first iron rod driven into the earth, with a heart of coal and a skin of oil. It knew only how to burn.

  I crawled to my feet, called: Georg, Georg!

  Georg, come with me!

  Stumbled towards the hollow open dark that plunged down to the crypt, broken stairs and broken stones.

  Georg!

  He didn’t move.

  Kneeling in the peeling ground, staring up at the firestorm.

  And I wondered if he saw it too, the great kakuy of the mines, vengeance set aflame. I wondered if he saw it reach out as if it would set the whole world ablaze, as if it could tear down the stars, boil the moon.

  Perhaps not. Perhaps, even then, all he saw was the fire.

  I tumbled into the darkness of the crypt, as the world burned.

  Chapter 68

  After a great fire, rain.

  The rain was not the rain of the falling forest. It was the winter rain, sucked in by the air being burned away, a tumult of clouds spinning into the eye of the storm. It was cold, melted ice that sizzled and steamed when it hit the ebony earth. It fell for nearly a day, which is why it finally roused me, the thin stream of slime-ochre water at the bottom of the crypt rising to tickle my nose where I’d fallen. Choking woke me. Then I thought perhaps I slept again, and was awake again, back pressed up against a broken sarcophagus, and wondered if this was me awake at all.

  I moved my fingers, and the skin was leather.

  I l
istened to the world, and all I could hear was ringing in my ears.

  I looked up, and there was night above me, which seemed a lot like being entombed for ever. But if I was entombed, how was the rain getting in, drizzling sideways into my face? My clothes were sodden, black, singed at the hem.

  I unwound myself from some of them, tried to tear off a strip, couldn’t get enough grip on the tough, wet fabric, wound myself back up again.

  It hurt to breathe.

  My tongue tasted of ash.

  I sat a while.

  Someone would come and rescue me, I decided.

  Then I decided that the world was dead.

  The sky had caught on fire and the world was going to start again from the ashes. The deep-sea creatures would have their time at last, those that barely needed a sip of oxygen to endure. The cave sprouts of impossible green, the crimson algae that lived beneath frozen lakes – they would come into their own and start gorging on the burnt ashes of this new world, exhaling oxygen as they slithered across the earth. Cockroaches would be fine, they always were, and probably form the basis of new life. I wondered what monuments they would make, and what they would make of the ruins of ours.

  I sat a little longer, and no one came.

  I started to feel cold.

  The sensation was astonishing. I had not imagined I could feel cold ever again.

  I coughed, and the pain was like bones puncturing flesh. Our lungs are terribly soft, squishy things.

  I tried not coughing, and the cold, which had been my friend, became a dull ache, a restless, heavy thing.

  It occurred to me that it wouldn’t be so hard to die here.

  I didn’t have much of an emotional relationship with this outcome, but, resting with it for a little while, I felt a growing conviction that to die in this place would be insufferably dumb. It would have been easier to drown, or freeze in the forest, or get shot in the head, or burn alive. All of these would have been quicker and almost entirely someone else’s fault. Still, there were plenty of little insects down here – shiny-carapaced millipedes and green-bellied beetles that got tangled in my hair. They’d probably make something worthwhile from my corpse.