Strange Fire

by Tommy Wallach

  “Miracle of miracles,” Denver said. “The old man wants to see you.”

  The path meandered between tulip trees, their buds just about ready to burst. Above their branches, Clover caught sight of the Library, and in the rush of relief that followed, he realized that he’d doubted he would ever see the place again.

  The Library was a messy building, all in all, profuse and unpredictable as moneywort, abloom with balconies and balustrades, bridges and spires and parapets—as if its architects had been allergic to the very notion of symmetry. In a way, the edifice functioned as a metaphor for knowledge itself: contradictory, idiosyncratic, inexhaustible. And for Clover, it was also a kind of second home—only figuratively for now, but senior members of the institution were required to live here full-time, abandoning the outside world completely. Once upon a time, that thought had terrified Clover; these days, it was almost comforting. Last night, following his brother into their house for the first time in more than six months, entering the swirl of must and dust, he’d been assaulted by the phantoms of past happiness. His mother and father haunted every room, every piece of furniture, every floorboard. Though Clive had done his best to return some warmth to the place—setting a fire in the hearth, sweeping the grit out of the halls with their mother’s old birch broom, mixing the dough and setting a loaf of bread baking in the oven—Clover doubted it would ever feel safe or homely again. The house was a husk now, empty as a grave. Could living in the Library really be worse than that?

  The soldiers outside the guardhouse waved him through, and once inside the building, he was escorted by an apprentice through the subject sections for botany and horticulture. The hallway forked, and the apprentice took the left path, which led up a set of stairs.

  “C and F is down that way,” Clover said, pointing to the right.

  “Grand Attendant Bernstein works in divinity now,” the apprentice replied.

  Clover stifled a laugh; working in divinity was considered a great honor, but it was an honor Bernstein was almost certainly miserable to have received. He’d always claimed to find the Scriptures “as dull and painful as a headache.” Now he spent his days surrounded by annotated Gospels and Filial exegeses. Poor man.

  Up the stairs and down another long hallway, Clover was finally led into Bernstein’s office. The grand attendant sat at a massive maple U of a desk, which surrounded him on three sides. Books were piled up everywhere, along with loose-leaf paper, material for binding, a little bowl of gold leaf, and the various other paints and pens the monks used to illuminate manuscripts.

  “Your guest,” the apprentice said.

  Bernstein didn’t look up. “Leave us alone.”

  The apprentice retreated without another word. Clover took a random book down from a shelf and began to read; Bernstein would continue working until he reached what he considered a reasonable stopping point—which could easily be an hour from now.

  Clover owed his relationship with Bernstein to his fourth-form teacher, Mrs. Rogel, who’d recognized not only her pupil’s intellectual gifts, but also his isolation; she’d brought him to the Library as much for his emotional well-being as his edification. At the time, Bernstein had been working in C and F—construction and fabrication. After a brief but wide-ranging conversation with his prospective pupil, he’d agreed to become the boy’s mentor. That was five years ago now.

  Twenty minutes passed before Bernstein finally set his pen aside and leaned back in his chair. “Can you believe this nonsense?” he said, gesturing around the room.

  “At least they moved you to a higher floor. That’s not how promotions work in the Church.”

  “I demanded it. It’s ridiculous to have monks working by oil lamps in the middle of the day. The Descendant faith overturns millennia of precedent in this regard.”

  “So you’ve told me,” Clover said.

  Bernstein sighed loudly. “Look at this.” He gestured toward the page he had in front of him, on which a few verses from the Book of Armelle had been artfully elaborated with various colored inks. “Lord only knows why it has to come gilded and gussied up like a street-corner whore.”

  Clover smiled. He’d missed Bernstein.

  “I’m wasted here, Clover. Just as I was leaving C and F, we discovered a critical improvement to our process for making lime—ten percent increased efficiency in an instant!”

  “That was more than two years ago,” Clover said.

  “Was it? No . . .”

  Clover watched as Bernstein’s gaze turned inward, riffling the musty pages of his own history. The attendant was at least sixty-five, and though his analytical mind was as sharp as ever, he’d begun to forget things. After a moment, he waved the error away. “It doesn’t matter. I’m in divinity until the bitter end now. For my sins.”

  “I’m sure you’ll find something useful to do.”

  “Perhaps.” Silence. Bernstein took a deep breath. “I suppose I’m meant to say something now, about your . . . misfortune.”

  “You already heard?”

  “Bad news travels fast. People love a good tragedy.”

  It stung to know the death of his parents had already become fodder for gossip. “Well, I didn’t come to you for sympathy.”

  “Good. I’ve never been much for handing it out.”

  “I came to show you this.”

  Clover unclasped the flap of his satchel and pulled out the weapon. He slid it across the desk toward Bernstein.

  The attendant pushed back his chair so suddenly he nearly fell over. His eyes were as big as dinner plates.

  “It can’t hurt you just by being close to you,” Clover said. “That’s not how it works.”

  “You know how it works?”

  “More or less, except for the chemistry.”

  “Where did you get it?”

  “I . . .” Clover once again saw the paltry resistance of skin and sinew as Gemma’s knife plunged into the stranger’s neck. The gurgle and sigh as he fell. The blood spouting, pooling, crying out from the earth.

  “Take your time.” Bernstein’s voice was gentle now. “Daughter knows I’ve got plenty of it.”

  Clover took a moment to calm himself, and then he began to tell the story, or a version of the story, at any rate, one in which he glossed over all the parts he wanted to forget—not just the stabbing, but also breaking his promise to Clive, and the brief burst of black vapor around Michael’s head when he was shot, and the light leaving his mother’s eyes as she fell from her horse. When he was finished, Bernstein was quiet for a long time.

  “The sergeant didn’t want the weapon for himself?” he finally asked. Clover was grateful for the simple pragmatism of the question; the attendant really had no interest in discussing emotions.

  “I told him I lost it. He was furious.”

  “Of course he was. He knew Grand Marshal Chang would’ve used it to gin up support for narrowing the parameters defining anathema. Imagine a public demonstration of this thing. The people would insist we start developing our own.”

  “But what is it? Have you seen one before?”

  “I’ve never seen one, no.”

  “But you know what it is.”

  The attendant pursed his lips. “We’re in dangerous waters here, Clover. You aren’t even an official apprentice yet. You shouldn’t know about things like this.”

  “But I do, don’t I? I think I’ve earned the right to at least know what it’s called.”

  “I suppose that’s true.” Bernstein leaned down, examining the weapon more closely. “Technically, it’s called a gun, but its true name is far more sinister.”

  Clover furrowed his brow. “It has a second name?”

  “In a sense.” Bernstein gingerly picked the weapon up between his thumb and index finger, as if it were a snake that might just be playing dead. “It’s called history repeating itself.”

  4. Paz

  “HAVE I TOLD YOU ABOUT the time I was chased up a tree by a sheep?”

  Mitch
ell Poplin was standing between Paz and the bread bin, threatening to subject her to yet another of his interminable stories. At this point, she was starting to believe he was just making them up; in the two days she’d been staying in the Poplins’ guest room, she must’ve heard a hundred of the damned things. Better to go hungry.

  She smiled contritely. “You know, I should probably get moving.”

  His face fell. “You sure? Roosters aren’t even crowing yet—”

  “Sorry. I have somewhere I need to be.”

  Which wasn’t technically true. She only wanted to get out of the house before Gemma and Flora woke up, so she could have a bit of time to herself; the girls had scarcely let her out of their sight since she’d arrived. But even though she’d crept downstairs a good hour before sunrise, she’d still ended up waylaid by the stupid old man, who apparently didn’t sleep at all.

  “At least take this,” he said, reaching into the deep front pocket of his overalls and excavating a few copper shekels. “Growing girl needs to eat.”

  “Thanks,” she said, and slipped out the front door before he could parlay her gratitude into a grudging audience for another soporific soliloquy.

  Though her family had left for Sophia when she was only six, Paz had been born less than a full day’s ride from the Anchor. It was strange to be visiting it for the first time only now, more than a decade later. She’d only managed to see the bits right around the Poplin house so far; today, she hoped to really explore.

  She’d expected the streets to be empty, but it turned out the Anchor rose early. Paz visited a fruit vendor who’d already set up shop in an otherwise sleepy square. She lifted plums to her nose, sniffing deeply—funny how the best ones were those just on the brink of rotting—then took her plunder to a wooden bench nearby. Skin split beneath her teeth; juice gushed. The taste—tart, sweet, earthy—was transporting. She felt a sudden ache of nostalgia for Sophia, for her father, for Terry and Frankie and Carlos and long-lost Anton, from whom she’d received her first lesson in grief.

  The guilt rose up inside her, heavy as stone. She’d abandoned her brothers, her responsibilities. Her father would’ve been so disappointed in her.

  “But I’m doing this for them!” she said, needing to hear the words aloud, though a couple of people passing by looked at her as if she might be mad.

  How had she ended up here, alone in the throbbing black heart of everything she hated most in the world, living a lie? It never should have come to this. It should have ended that night on the mining road.

  What remained of the Sophian town guard had been waiting for her in Wilmington, just as she’d planned, and she led them straight to the crippled wagon. But she’d underestimated Burns, who’d taken the Ferrell twins out of commission single-handedly, and then it turned out that Clover had gotten hold of her father’s gun. In a matter of moments, what should have been an unlosable battle was lost. Paz had chased after the survivors, of course, but when she’d caught up, and they were all looking up at her from their tearful little huddle, she’d frozen. Was it the practical realization that even a crack shot like her wouldn’t be able to take out all four of them on her own? Or was it something far more dangerous: the unexpected trust in their eyes triggering a sudden swell of compassion?

  No—anything but that. Besides, Sergeant Burns had survived the battle as well, so even if Paz had managed to kill the others, the location of the pumphouse still would’ve gotten back to the Anchor. So she’d done the next best thing to slaughter. She’d maintained her mask. She’d retained their confidence. Clive was preparing for a life in the Church, after all. Who knew what opportunities that might afford him, and Paz by extension, if she stayed close to him? Perhaps she’d missed her chance to pay her father’s murderer back in kind, but that had always been a petty sort of vengeance. Better to keep her eye on the true prize: the war to come, and her place in it. She would return to Director Zeno with enough information to ensure herself a spot at the academy, or else die trying.

  She sucked the last bit of flesh from the second plum, then rolled the pits across the dirt like a pair of dice: snake eyes.

  A few minutes later she reached the Purple Road, a wide boulevard lined with grand stone buildings. They weren’t all that tall—Church doctrine limited any new construction to three stories—but most were bedizened with stone sculptures, glistering windows, and fanciful iron scrollwork. Beneath these elaborate facades, the citizens of the Anchor strode about in a rainbow display of rich fabrics and furs. In a wide-open plaza with a fountain in the center, Paz’s attention was drawn to a pair of men sitting at a table, absorbed by a set of tiny figurines that they moved around a board of checkered squares as if the fate of the world depended on it. She watched them for a while, then followed a group of screaming children until they were swallowed up inside a veritable castle of brick and mortar. Through the window, she saw them come to sit before a great black slate on which a severe-looking woman began to write out a few simple arithmetic equations.

  Paz felt sorry for them; they lived and died in a darkness that masqueraded as light. The young people of Sophia were educated by a rotating group of scholars from the academy, where nothing was considered anathema. The very best students were eventually invited to continue their studies at the academy itself, while those who weren’t selected remained in town, helping to provide the labor and raw materials the scholars needed to continue their research. The results of this collaboration—electric lights, medicine, farming equipment—benefited everyone.

  She followed the Purple Road southeast all the way to the cathedral, Notre Fille—great granite jewel at the center of the Descendant diadem. However she may have felt about the teachings of the Church, there was no denying the magnificence of their houses of worship. Paz tiptoed through the narthex and past the donation box, past the guardsman tasked with protecting the place from vandals and thieves, past the elaborate frescoes that told the story of the Daughter’s coming—a flame-haired girl rising up from the bowels of the Earth and disappearing into the stars, then crashing back down and setting the world ablaze—past the mostly empty pews, and all the way up to the kneeler. A massive silver annulus, as big around as the trunk of an old oak, was mounted on the apse. It glittered in the light from a dozen chandeliers, their candles smoking with the sweet scent of bayberry.

  She felt a strange urge to jump up on the altar and tear the thing down.

  “Irene?”

  A momentary sense of dislocation—who’s Irene? She turned. At the end of the kneeler, Clover was watching her with his steady, searching gaze. She tried to look relaxed.

  “Hello, stranger,” she said.

  “What are you doing here?”

  She sidled down the row, so they could speak quietly. “What do you think? Praying, of course.”

  “I’ve never seen you pray before.”

  Oh, but he was an observant one, wasn’t he? “I don’t make a performance out of it,” she said, a note of chastisement in her voice. Sometimes, the only way to defend yourself was to attack.

  Clover seemed to accept her answer. He looked up at the annulus. “I don’t believe in it, you know.”

  Paz was momentarily stunned. Was the son of an Honor admitting to heresy while kneeling in the very front row of Notre Fille?

  “I mean praying,” he explained. “Bernstein says the Daughter isn’t likely to have time to answer every single person who asks something of her. But I suppose you never know if you’ll be the one she listens to that day.”

  “Bernstein?”

  “He’s the man I work for at the Library.”

  Paz hadn’t given much thought to Clive’s brother before, but as soon as she heard the word “Library,” something began simmering in the back of her mind.

  “What do you do there again?” she asked.

  “This and that. Tinker around in the chemistry lab. Build things in the workshop. Read whatever books I can.”

  “They allow a boy your age to do al
l that? You must be very advanced.”

  She thought it would be easy to play on the boy’s vanity, but his eyes immediately narrowed. “It’s not that interesting,” he said. “Anyway, how have you been doing? You didn’t come downstairs when Clive and I visited Gemma yesterday.”

  “I was sleeping,” Paz lied. In truth, she’d watched Clive out of the guest-room window as he approached, and felt an odd fizz of excitement in her belly. It was the same fizz she’d felt that day along the canyon road, when she’d been thrown from her horse and nearly gone over the edge. When Clive had loomed over her with a perfect combination of concern and desire in his eyes, and she’d allowed herself to be kissed. Part of it was the game, of course—she enjoyed how thoroughly she’d fooled him, how he’d just saved the life of someone who was trying to take his. But there was no getting around the fact that he was a handsome boy, and for a moment there, maybe she’d forgotten what was fake and what was real. Anyway, it didn’t matter now. A new plan was coalescing—one that would eliminate the temptation of messing about with Clive entirely.

  All the secrets of the Descendancy were hidden inside the Library—everything they knew and everything they didn’t know. And this damaged, self-conscious little boy just happened to be a favorite there.

  “You know, I still haven’t seen the Library,” she said. “When you’re done here, maybe you could show it to me?”

  She rearranged her skirt beneath her, and in so doing, brought the outside edge of her leg to lie against Clover’s.

  “Okay,” he said. “Just give me a few minutes to finish praying.”

  Paz smiled. “Take all the time you need.”

  5. Clive

  CLIVE SAT ALONE IN NOTRE Fille’s spacious sacristy—“backstage,” as his brother used to call it—just a few minutes before the memorial service was to begin. He looked at himself in the glass and spoke the first line of his eulogy.

  “I loved my father more than I loved God.”