Strange Fire

by Tommy Wallach

  “It’s fine,” he said.

  “Yeah? I hear everybody hates your guts.”

  Clive laughed. He would’ve been insulted if it hadn’t been the truth. “You didn’t ever meet my father, did you?”

  Garrick shook his head.

  “He had a way with people. Everybody liked him, or respected him at least. Guess the talent didn’t rub off on me.”

  “Eh, don’t be so hard on yourself. It’s not your fault they’re all jealous.”

  “Jealous? Of what?”

  “Word around the barracks is you’ve got friends in high places. With your background, that means you’re a shoe-in to make officer before long.”

  Garrick was talking about Burns, of course. Since their return to the Anchor, the sergeant had been promoted to marshal; rumor was he’d be in charge of the mission back east, if the plebiscite went the Protectorate’s way.

  “They hate me because I know a marshal?”

  “And because your da was an Honor. And because of the way you talk to them. And because you grew up in the Anchor. And because apparently you can’t keep hold of your sword.”

  “I dropped it one time!”

  “Once is enough, Hamill. No second chances at first impressions.”

  Clive smiled grimly. “You really tell it like it is, don’t you?”

  “I like to think so. Dare you to ask me how long my willy is.”

  “I’ll pass, thanks.”

  Clive’s attention was suddenly arrested by a mane of black hair moving through the crowded square: Irene. He’d scarcely seen her over the past month; his training took up all his time. Besides, there was no easy way to visit her without running into Gemma.

  “Oh my,” Garrick said, following the direction of Clive’s gaze. “She’s something special, isn’t she?”

  “I know her.”

  “Well, aren’t you lucky? Though not half as lucky as that kid.”

  Through an opening in the milling throng, Clive saw Irene’s companion: Clover. They were standing close together, shoulder to shoulder, hand in hand, and now she was turning her laughing face toward him, and he was smiling back at her, and they were both leaning in . . .

  The very nature of the world shifted. Clive’s stomach felt hollow, and he had to swallow down the sip of bile that had risen to the top of his throat.

  “You all right?” Garrick asked.

  “Yeah. It’s just . . . that’s my brother.”

  In a way, he was saying it to himself, as a reminder. It wasn’t right to be covetous. That was Clover—his own flesh and blood. And didn’t Clover have every right to love? Hadn’t he spent the last couple of years making himself miserable over Gemma? Shouldn’t Clive just be happy for him?

  Only that was impossible. Irene and Clive had a history. Could she really have forgotten what had transpired between them, that day on the mining road? And now she was cozying up to his brother? It didn’t make a lick of sense. Clover was the clever one, the peculiar one—not the one the girls wanted. Irene had to be after something; she had to be playing some kind of angle.

  Or maybe that was unfair. Maybe Clover had changed over the past few months—matured in a way Irene could see but Clive couldn’t. Watching the two of them kissing out in the middle of the square, looking for all the world like any other infatuated young couple, Clive wondered if he knew his brother at all anymore.

  “I hate to distract you,” Garrick said, “but I think we may need to do our jobs.”

  “What?”

  “Over there.”

  Clive wrenched his gaze away from the horror of Clover and Irene together. Near the front of one of the voting lines, a thickset man in dirty overalls had begun shouting at the registrar. Clive and Garrick drew closer.

  “But I live here,” the man was saying.

  “I’m sorry, sir,” the registrar said. “You’re not on my list.”

  “So add me. I only moved two weeks ago.”

  “It’s too late to register for this plebiscite. But if you come to the Office of the People tomorrow, we can get you on the rolls for next—”

  The man pounded on the table. “Do you know why I moved my family to the Anchor, missy?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Because I was tired of the fear. You know what I’m talking about?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Have you ever spent more than a day or two outside this city?” He didn’t even give her time to answer. “Of course you haven’t. Well, let me tell you what it’s like. When it’s not bandits, it’s the Wesah. When it’s not the Wesah, it’s dying of the flu because there’s no doctor worth a damn within fifty miles. And now we’ve got this new nonsense out east? I say enough is enough.”

  “I’m actually in agreement with you, sir. And if you’ll just wait for the next—”

  The man swept the registrar’s logbook off the table. “I’ll be damned if you’re gonna silence me—”

  “Sir,” Clive said, stepping forward, “let’s not make a scene.”

  The troublemaker turned to face him and smiled patronizingly at what he saw. “Shut your mouth, boy. A man is speaking.”

  It was the first time Clive had ever punched someone, so he was surprised at how naturally it came to him. Time seemed to slow. He could feel the man’s stubbly cheek under his knuckles, the give of flesh and the intransigence of bone. In his mind’s eye, he saw Clover and Irene kissing again—long and lingering. The man was on the ground now, and Clive delivered a sharp kick to his stomach—and another, and another. He would’ve kept going too, only someone had grabbed hold of him around the armpits and was dragging him away.

  “What the hell were you thinking, Hamill?” Garrick said.

  “That man disrespected me.”

  “So what? Welcome to the fucking Protectorate.”

  Garrick didn’t let Clive go until they were back out at the edge of the square.

  The anger had receded, and guilt was flooding in to fill the empty space. What if that man had really gotten hurt? And what if Irene and Clover had been watching?

  “Daughter’s love,” Clive said quietly. “I don’t know what came over me.”

  “Don’t beat yourself up, Hamill. In fact, maybe don’t beat anyone up.”

  Clive grimaced. “Should I go back, to make sure he’s okay?”

  “He’ll be fine. Let’s you and me take a little walk, yeah? You can tell me all about your brother’s girl.”

  “There’s nothing to tell,” Clive said.

  Garrick threw a chummy arm over his shoulder. “Somehow, I doubt that.”

  9. Clover

  “A VOTE FOR THE PROTECTORATE IS a vote against God! It is a vote against the Daughter herself! So it is written: he who unsheathes the sword has already struck the first blow. Repent before it is too late!”

  The lay preacher stood on an overturned crate, screaming his lungs out. He’d been at it all day.

  “I can’t believe he’s got any voice left,” Irene said.

  “He’d tell you it’s the power of the Lord working through him,” Gemma replied. “And who’s to say it isn’t?”

  Clover wasn’t yet old enough to vote in the plebiscite, but Bernstein had given him the day off anyway, so he’d brought Irene to Annunciation Square to watch the proceedings. He figured she’d enjoy seeing how the vote was carried out, given how curious she always seemed to be about every little aspect of life in the Anchor. He’d forgotten just how cramped Annunciation Square could get—teeming with humanity, the air a pungent fog of perfume, tobacco, body odor, and spiced meat smoking over hot coals. Though there was always something to watch, be it a heated argument between citizens or a puppeteer’s dumb show, he would’ve rather been curled up at home with a good book. Thankfully, the day was finally drawing to a close. They’d made plans to meet up with the Poplin sisters for dinner, and now they all sat together at a small stone table in a corner of the square, watching the last straggling citizens perform that most fundamental civic duty.


  “Hey, Clover,” Flora said, “how would you have voted, if you were allowed to?”

  “For the Church, of course.”

  “Really? Gemma says she would’ve voted for the Protectorate.”

  “Flora!” Gemma said, blushing with embarrassment. “That was a secret.”

  “It’s fine,” Clover said. “Your sister is smart, Flora. She just wants to be on the winning side.”

  Flora frowned. “The Church is going to lose?”

  “It looks that way.”

  Irene raised her hand, as if they were all in school. “You’ll have to excuse a poor backward country girl, but I don’t even understand who’s up against who. Isn’t the Protectorate just another part of the Church?”

  “Sort of,” Clover said. “The Church established the Protectorate as a peacekeeping force. They’re only supposed to act defensively, but it’s getting less and less clear what qualifies as defense. If Grand Marshal Chang had his way, we’d incorporate towns by force and slaughter every Wesah warrior on the continent.”

  “And that would be bad?”

  “Well, the Filia says violence only begets more violence.”

  “Then why’d you kill that man out at the pumphouse?”

  Clover was taken aback by the sharpness in Irene’s voice, the challenge in her eyes. He looked to Gemma, who met his gaze only for a moment. Everyone still believed he was the one who’d stabbed the stranger that night, and he was glad for that. He’d wanted to, after all; he just hadn’t had the courage.

  “I didn’t have a choice,” he said quietly.

  “You did.”

  “It was them or us!”

  “And you chose yourself!”

  Before Clover could argue any further, he was interrupted by a faint, uneasy voice. “C-C-Clover Hamill?”

  Clover turned around in his chair. Bishop Allen’s innocent, Francis, was standing just behind him. “What is it?”

  “You’ve b-been summoned.”

  “Awwww!” Flora said. “Now he’s gonna miss hearing the results!”

  But in truth, Clover was grateful for the excuse to leave. Irene had been getting oddly worked up, and he didn’t have the slightest idea why. Funny, in spite of all the time they’d spent together, sometimes he felt as if he hardly knew her at all. Maybe every romantic relationship was like that—two people trying to clasp hands across an unbridgeable divide. Or maybe romance had nothing to do with it. Maybe all human relationships were like that.

  When he leaned down to kiss her good-bye, she turned her face to receive it on the cheek.

  “I’ll be back as soon as I can,” he said.

  Clover followed Innocent Francis through the streets around Annunciation Square, still raucous with anxious debate and premature celebration. Near Notre Fille, he saw a man lying in the gutter, his face bruised and bloodied; he’d likely been beaten for having the wrong opinion at the wrong time. Francis passed the cathedral and kept walking.

  “Aren’t we going inside?” Clover asked.

  “N-no. The L-library.”

  “That’s where Bishop Allen is?”

  Francis didn’t answer, but Clover supposed it was logical enough; tonight the Church and the Library were as one, a singular bulwark against the Protectorate’s power grab. It took them another twenty minutes to walk the length of the Black Road to the Library, where they were ushered through the gate and past the guardhouse without question. Then they were inside, threading their way across the ground floor, to a door Clover had never seen before. Francis unlocked it with a large key he wore on a chain around his neck. On the other side, a set of stairs led steeply upward.

  Clover began to climb.

  “I’ll w-w-wait for you here,” Francis said, then quickly shut the door and engaged the dead bolt.

  There was nowhere to go but up—floor after floor without a single door or window. Clover was at first surprised, then flummoxed, then simply exhausted. His calves were on fire by the time the stairway leveled off, dead-ending at a set of regal red doors. They looked too prestigious to be left unlocked, yet they opened at Clover’s touch.

  He found himself in a very large room, at least thirty feet long by thirty wide. Two walls were made up of little else but windows, providing a stunning view out over the fertile farmland to the north of the Anchor. The other two were devoted to bookshelves that stretched all the way up to the room’s second floor, which was accessed by a sharply spiraling staircase.

  It was simultaneously the chamber of a scholar and a king—and only one citizen in the Anchor fit that description.

  “Ah, good. You’re finally here.”

  He was sitting at a large desk just in front of the windows, pen poised over a notebook. His mane of silver hair reached down past his shoulders, and he had a few days’ growth of salt and pepper stubble. The eyes behind the thin-rimmed spectacles were maniacally bright; when he blinked, it seemed a conscious action, as if he were watching the world so intently that he hated to lose even that millisecond of vision.

  The Epistem, Hal Turin, in the flesh.

  “Good evening, Clover,” he said, offering his hand. Clover noticed the man’s knuckles were crosshatched with tiny scratches.

  “Good evening.”

  They shook hands.

  “I’m—”

  “I know who you are,” Clover said, then winced. “Sorry, sir. I didn’t mean to interrupt you.”

  The Epistem smiled. “It’s quite all right.” He motioned for his guest to take the seat across from him, a big leather chair that made Clover feel even smaller than usual. “I have something of yours,” he said, and, reaching into one of the drawers of his desk, produced the gun. Clover hadn’t seen it since he’d given it to Bernstein. It had been polished in the meantime, and sparkled now like a shard of obsidian.

  “It’s a stunning design,” the Epistem said. “I thought when this day finally came, our enemies might have developed muskets. And here we find they’ve progressed to the six-shooter. Or the twelve-shooter, as it turns out.” He set it down on the desk. “You understand how it works?”

  Clover hesitated. Men had been put to death for misuse of the anathema. But he’d already told Bernstein he knew how to use the gun, so there was no point in lying. “Yes, sir.”

  “Explain it to me.”

  “Oh. Okay.” He picked up the weapon. “It’s pretty simple, actually. You just have to squeeze this bit at the bottom—”

  “The trigger,” the Epistem said.

  Trigger: logical enough. “Right. So you squeeze the trigger, and that causes the hammer up here to collide with, well, some sort of reacting agent. The resulting force expels the metal pellet out the end of the tube.”

  “The pellet is called a bullet. And the tube is called a barrel.”

  “After that, you just pull the hammer back, which causes this cylinder here to rotate, and that brings the next bullet into line, so it can be discharged again. And . . . that’s it.”

  Clover replaced the gun on the desk, to the sound of Turin’s surprisingly energetic applause. “Oh, that’s very good, Clover. Bernstein wasn’t wrong about you.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “But our examination isn’t quite done yet. Do you have any idea who that is?” He pointed to an oil painting mounted in the middle of the bookshelves on the east-facing wall. The subject was a middle-aged man, captured in the standard pose of a Library monk: seated at a desk, holding a book with PRINCIPIA written in gold letters on the spine. The light from a candle glimmered on the skin of an apple resting on a corner of the desk; the fruit was puckered with rot.

  “No, sir.”

  “His name was Duncan Leibowitz. He became Epistem about ninety years ago, long before you or I were even born. But his administration of the Library was one of the shortest ever recorded.”

  “He died?”

  “Eventually. But no, that wasn’t why he left. He fled, you see, along with a few hundred volumes from the anathema stacks.
”

  “Why?”

  “Because Leibowitz, not unlike our current Grand Marshal, believed that the laws of our Church were too onerous. But where Chang wants more freedom in deploying our soldiers, Leibowitz wanted more freedom in his research.”

  “Where did he go?”

  “For the longest time, no one knew. Then, about twenty-five years ago, we began to hear rumors of an academy dedicated to scientific inquiry, one that cared nothing for God’s laws. He’d named it Sophia.”

  “Why didn’t someone stop him?”

  “How? By slaughtering his people like sheep? By bringing them back to the Anchor in chains? We had no choice but to wait, to hope they would fall apart on their own. Unfortunately, they don’t appear to have done so. Nor will they. Not without help.”

  The Epistem went silent. When he finally spoke again, he seemed almost nervous, rasping his fingers back and forth across his stubble. “Clover, I’d like you to go somewhere for me. It’s a place only the most senior members of the Church have ever seen.”

  “Why?”

  “I apologize for what may seem a needless obscurity, but I can only tell you that after you’ve returned.”

  On this last word, the Epistem glanced pointedly toward the back corner of the room, where a small wooden door was half-hidden in the wainscoting. An elaborate rendering of Aleph and Eva beneath the Great Tree had been carved into its surface.