Strange Fire

by Tommy Wallach

  “Clive!” Garrick said.

  He shook the memory away. “What?”

  “You think we should do something?”

  They’d made it about halfway across the city—obeying their directive to return to the Bastion after the plebiscite results came in—but it was slow going. The Anchor had been entirely transformed in the space of the last hour. Clive had never known the citizens of the Capitol were capable of such wanton destructiveness. Fights were breaking out left and right. Looters could be seen skulking away from shops with whatever they could carry. The sparkle of shattering glass was a constant accompaniment to the bellows of the vindicated and the wails of the disappointed.

  But now they’d come upon something much worse than a little fistfight. People had been building bonfires in the streets, and just off the Silver Road, the fire had gotten out of control, spreading to a nearby house whose roof was just beginning to catch.

  “You think there are people inside?” Clive said.

  “Maybe.”

  “Shouldn’t we help?”

  “How?”

  The whole bottom floor was already a raging inferno; there was no hope for those left inside. Still, the two of them stood there for a while longer, watching it burn.

  Eventually they moved on, into the darkness beyond the fire’s reach. The Silver Road was usually lit with lanterns, but rioters had taken most of them out already, smashing the protective panes of glass and allowing the pelting rain to extinguish the flames inside.

  “Hey, Clive,” Garrick said. “I wanted to ask you something, before we get to the Bastion.”

  “What is it?”

  “I was wondering if you’d put in a word for me, with Marshal Burns.”

  “What kind of word?”

  “Well, you and him are close, right? And everybody knows he’s gonna get the nod to lead the mission east. So just tell him I should go too.”

  Clive was nonplussed. “But . . . why?”

  “Because I want to.”

  “I get that. But why?”

  “Because my other options are falling asleep doing guard duty in the city for the rest of my life, or else chasing Wesah around until one of them catches me with an arrow in the gut. This here is the first opportunity a Protectorate soldier has ever had to do something really valuable.”

  “Who’s to say it’s valuable?”

  “Well, aren’t you going?”

  “I’ve got my own reasons.”

  “So do I! And I’m not asking for much. Just tell Marshal Burns I’m the finest soldier you’ve ever seen and you can’t survive without me. Which is obviously true, by the way. Already today I saved you from a court martial and got you a moment alone with that honeypot you’re trying to steal off your brother.”

  “It’s not like that,” Clive said.

  Garrick smirked. “Sure it’s not, Dropsy. Just think about what I said, okay?”

  “I’ll think about thinking about it.”

  A few minutes later they reached the plaza outside the Bastion. Unfortunately, there were about a thousand people standing between them and the compound—a pullulating mass of protesters, screaming Filial verses and throwing whatever they could find at the soldiers posted on either side of the gate.

  Clive suddenly felt terribly exposed in his uniform. Doing his very best not to draw attention to himself, he slipped into the crowd and began moving as quickly as possible toward the Bastion. He lost sight of Garrick almost immediately. After about a hundred feet, the first gob of spit hit him in the cheek, followed by a stream of obscene invective. He sped up a bit, which only made him more conspicuous. Someone grabbed him by the shoulder, and he lashed out with his fist on instinct, realizing too late that it was an old woman. She held a hand to her nose as red streams of blood streaked the front of her white dress.

  He broke into a run, cries of “heathen” and “devil” going up all around him, an outstretched foot that almost sent him sprawling, hands grabbing at his clothes and his hair, and then something whistling through the air, a bright burst of pain, and everything went dark.

  A nightmare. He was being chased through the alleyways of the Anchor by some sort of monster—when he looked over his shoulder, all he could see was the moonlight reflecting off the glossy black fur. Shapeless. Nameless. It lunged for him. . . .

  He woke into quiet, calm—a shadowy sanctuary of white beds and black windows, lit by a single oil lamp hanging over the door like a charm. There was a dull pounding in his head. The racket of a city in crisis could still be heard, but it was blessedly muted.

  Someone sat in a chair just next to the bed, smoking a cigarillo.

  “Where am I?” Clive asked.

  “The Bastion infirmary. You took a bad hit. I thought you might be out for the night.”

  That distinctive voice, like the sound you got scraping the black off a piece of charred toast: Burns. Clive had seen him only a handful of times since he’d joined the Protectorate, and always from afar. Strange to think, but he’d actually missed the man.

  “How’s the celebration going?”

  Burns grunted. “Chang’s insufferable even on the days he isn’t gloating.”

  “I thought you’d be happy. We won.”

  “We didn’t win shit. Winning is when you’re still standing up and somebody else is on the ground. Or in it.” He took another long drag off the cigarillo, expelling the smoke in a narrow beam of white that swirled up toward the ceiling. “I was born in a town called Emmetsville. Tiny as a freckle. Way up north. Our family worked a little seam of coal my granddaddy found, way back when. It was hard work, but good business. Too good, in fact. Some of my da’s customers didn’t like the terms he gave. So one day, while we were down in the mine, someone started a fire up around the mouth. Sucks the air right out of your lungs. My father died, along with a lot of my kin. I only got out ’cause I was on my way up at the time, and I had to run two hundred feet of pure fire to make it. Wouldn’t have survived, only we had this Anchor-trained doctor who’d just moved to town. He said I looked like a piece of chewed up gristle when I showed up. Still do, really.”

  Burns laughed, though Clive couldn’t see what was funny about it.

  “See, the problem up in Emmetsville was there wasn’t no order to things. Every man was out for himself and his kin and to hell with everyone else. And that’s no way to live. We all knew about the Descendancy, of course. My daddy said it was a bunch of crazies who sat around praying about God’s kid. But I’d also heard it was civilized, or at least trying to be, and that was more important to me than the nutty religious stuff.” He stopped for a moment, as if to underline whatever he said next. “I believe in order, Clive. I believe in civilization. And if you’re gonna fight, that has to be what you’re fighting for—not something as petty as revenge. And that’s why I can’t let you come east.”

  It was, by a significant margin, the most Clive had ever heard Burns say in a single go. And yet all he could focus on were those last six words: I can’t let you come east.

  “That’s bullshit,” Clive said.

  Burns stubbed the cigarillo out on the arm of his chair. “It’s not. You just started your training. And I feel”—the words clearly didn’t come easy for him—“a responsibility toward you. Toward your parents.”

  “My parents are dead. That’s the whole point.” Clive threw off the blanket and climbed out of bed—wavering a bit when the ache in his head intensified to a pounding. “I’m going whether you want me to or not.”

  Burns stood up too. “It ain’t your decision, kid.”

  Clive felt his fists ball up of their own volition. How dare Burns treat him like a child? Why did he think Clive had even joined the Protectorate, if not to be part of the mission to avenge his parents? If he ended up stuck here in the Anchor, he’d done it all for nothing—thrown away his future with Gemma, renounced his life in the Church, abdicated his responsibility toward his brother.

  He would die before he’d be left be
hind.

  Burns saw the sucker punch coming a moment too late; it caught him full-on in the kidney.

  “Fuck,” he gasped, bent double and wheezing.

  The pounding in Clive’s head receded; the lingering haze of the alcohol cleared. When Burns snapped upright, Clive was ready, dodging an uppercut and landing his own glancing shot to Burns’s temple in the process. He weaved successfully around a flurry of jabs before a quick kick to his left knee buckled the leg, and Burns followed up with a whirling haymaker that sent him sprawling.

  He allowed himself one deep breath before rising to his feet again. Burns was smiling now, bouncing on his toes. Clive charged, narrowly avoiding a straight fist to the nose when a broken floor tile threw him slightly off balance, and found himself staring at an open cheek. His momentum was off, so he couldn’t put much strength into it, but it was still a clean blow, and it knocked Burns back a step.

  He shook the pain out of his knuckles, which was all the time Burns needed to recover. The marshal feinted once, then again—a playful sort of taunt, but with a wariness to it now, a respect. Clive did the same, and Burns actually flinched. It was his enjoyment of that moment that ruined him; in the half second of satisfaction he allowed himself, Burns’s left hand came hurtling like a stone from a slingshot, faster than the eye could even make out, and with the full weight of genuine outrage behind it. Clive didn’t even remember falling—only a hideous flash of white. Then he was on his back, staring up at the ceiling.

  He could hear Burns’s breathing, slowing now, measured.

  “It matters that much to you?”

  “It’s all that matters,” Clive said.

  A long pause. “I’ll see what I can do.”

  Clive turned his head to spit, leaving a pink froth on the white tile floor. The world spun, slowed, centered. Burns was gone—had been gone for a long time now. Through one of the infirmary windows, Clive could see the sky: a gory spatter of stars. They all winked out at once, as if the end of the universe had come, when he closed his eyes.

  12. Clover

  CLOVER FOUND HIMSELF ON A covered parapet, buffeted by a chill breeze that made his skin break out in goose pimples. He walked quickly to keep the blood flowing to his extremities. Through the narrow embrasures to his left, he could see the Tiber sparkling blackly beneath a lowering sky. A couple of torches shone far off in the darkness—travelers coming to or going from the city’s northern gate. The parapet continued to trace the outline of the Library where it extended slightly beyond the plane of the Anchor wall; then the walkway began to angle downward.

  A sweet smell seeped up from somewhere close by, pleasant at first, but growing into an overwhelming miasma as he continued to descend. The moonlight that came through the battlements far above him was scarcely enough to see by, so it wasn’t until he felt the first sharp pain in his foot that he stopped and allowed his eyes time to adjust.

  As the scene ahead of him clarified, his awe gave way to a grim comprehension: now he understood Turin’s order to strip, and the tiny scratches he’d noticed all over the man’s hands. Stretching out before him was a single unbroken thicket of blackberries, its flowers dead and drooping, its berries overripe, rotting on the ground like corpse flesh. The plants had been cultivated to grow somewhere beneath the walkway, then trained through holes in the floor and walls to form an impenetrable snarl of vines.

  Clover took a step forward. He was so cold that the first cuts only reached him as a sort of dull pinching. But then the body went to work: pain triggered the heart to pump harder, and the blood brought warmth along with it, so that every step he took brought more pain, which only accelerated the cycle. Another step, then another. His only choice was to use one hand to cup the sensitive region between his legs while he waved the other in front of his face to protect his eyes. Unfortunately, this left the rest of his body exposed, and the sheer density of the branches meant every inch of forward motion brought three or four inch-long scratches somewhere or other.

  He tried to distract himself from the pain. What did he know about blackberries? If he remembered correctly, they weren’t berries at all, but an aggregation of tiny stone fruits—like miniature peaches all bunched together. Also, they were the victim of a common misconception made in the classification of spinescent plants: namely, that all sharp protrusions were thorns. In fact, blackberry bushes, like rosebushes, had prickles, which were like the plant equivalent of hairs. Hairs that sank deep into the flesh of your foot when you stepped on them, that drew blood the same color as the juice of the fruit itself.

  Clover realized he had begun to moan. The pain was amplifying, ramifying, not unlike the tumescent beads of the blackberry fruit, joining together to form something so much greater than the sum of its parts. He picked up the pace, though it only made the agony worse. A prickle at his forehead seared a line of fire back across his scalp. Blood and berry juice dripped off his chin and spattered on the ground. Everything burned. His moan grew into a prolonged shout, one that he rejuvenated every few seconds with another deep gasping breath.

  It couldn’t go on forever, could it?

  Of course not. But it could go on longer than he could stand. He’d never been so aware of his fragility. Not just physically—though it was humbling to see the damage one seemingly innocuous plant was capable of inflicting, how easily it punctured the thin membrane that was all that kept his insides inside—but mentally, too. In his childhood games with Clive, he’d often played at being captured and “tortured” for information. In those scenarios, he’d always managed to hold his tongue, and he’d honestly believed he could do the same in real life. Now he knew better. Pain rendered all promises null and void.

  The end came without warning or fanfare. Clover simply brushed past one last vine and suddenly his vision cleared. The world was so much brighter here, but before he could investigate exactly why, his eyes alighted on a pool of clear water just to his left; it seemed only natural to jump in. He’d expected it to be ice cold (and he still would’ve been grateful for it), but the water was unaccountably warm, soothing as a cup of tea in winter. He opened his eyes underwater and watched the stains leach out of his skin in little crimson clouds. A great sense of peace came over him, and he allowed himself to simply hang there, suspended, not kicking or flapping, until finally the pressure in his lungs forced him to surface.

  At least twenty feet overhead, a band of sky—blanketed by dark clouds that looked to be on the brink of storming—could be seen through a peaked glass window. And bordering that skylight was something entirely impossible: a series of large glass bulbs, each one shining with a keen, unwavering light, like a bottled stare.

  Only how could a room this large be hidden outside the Library proper if it wasn’t underground?

  The answer was far-fetched but inescapable: he was inside the Anchor wall. Whatever secrets this chamber held hadn’t been squirreled away deep beneath the earth, but girdled the city like some kind of protective charm.

  He tore his gaze away from the lamps to look at the rest of the room. It was only about fifteen feet wide, but so long that he couldn’t see the end of it from this vantage point. A single tall bookcase ran down the center like a long wooden spine. The sight of it confirmed Clover’s suspicions, and his heart began to hammer in his chest.

  Whenever an attendant wanted to consult a volume containing information pertaining to the anathema, he had to file a formal request. If that request was approved, the volume would be delivered in a couple of days. Clover had always wondered where those deliveries originated, and now he knew. Here was the real library within the Library: the infamous anathema stacks.

  Clover glanced back at the thicket, the infinite vines twisting around one another like a nest of snakes. Before the night was over, he’d have to travel that path again. But for now, there was respite. Just next to the pool, a dozen white robes hung from a simple wooden rack. He got out of the water and used one to dry himself, then donned another. Passing his arms t
hrough the sleeves, he saw that the inside of the garment was stained a permanent pink: blackberries and blood.

  A few shallow steps took him down to the level of the bookcase. It was a few inches taller than he was, and divided up at irregular, esoteric intervals. Clover took down a book at random: The Special Theory of Relativity, by Albert Einstein. It began with a couple of recognizable principles—parabolas and planes—but quickly devolved into gibberish—electrodynamical phenomena and the Lorentz transformation, heuristic values and four-dimensional space.

  He kept walking, scanning the titles of the books in order to get a general sense of how the room was organized. The natural sciences—biology, chemistry, and physics—gave way to pure mathematics, then philosophy. And just beyond that . . .

  “Blasphemy,” Clover whispered.

  A large brass annulus had been built directly into the shelf; the books contained within appeared to pertain to pre-Descendant history.

  Clover reached for a volume bound in cracked black leather, half expecting to be struck by lightning as soon as he touched it. Hopefully the Lord couldn’t see what went on way down here, amidst the anathema. Or maybe he couldn’t bear to watch.

  Cataclysm, by Sydney Glickman, the title page read.

  In the following text, I seek to consider the most likely outcome of our impending disaster, based on historical corollaries (insofar as they exist) and the most up-to-date understanding of the damage the Earth is likely to sustain. As should be obvious, I side with the more hopeful wing of the scientific establishment, taking as a first principle that the impact winter will be mild enough to allow for the survival of limited pockets of humanity large enough to eventually reestablish some semblance of civilized society. My conclusions must therefore be considered speculative, penned in the spirit of Isaac Asimov’s Hari Seldon, who sought to treat history as if it were an equation that could be, to some extent, solved.

  To those who would ask why I should bother writing anything in light of what’s to come, I offer the following quote by Schopenhauer: “We can regard our life as a uselessly disturbing episode in the blissful repose of nothingness.”