Strange Fire

by Tommy Wallach

  He started at Gemma’s hand on his elbow.

  “You okay?” she asked.

  “I’m fine,” he said, more brusquely than he’d meant to. Without furniture, the room was smaller than he remembered, claustrophobic. He had to get out. He excused himself and hurried back across the threshold. Irene was crouched a dozen yards off, tenderly touching the dirt with the tented fingers of her right hand. There was a strange hardness in her eyes, almost like anger, and it disappeared with a disconcerting suddenness when she glanced up and noticed him watching her.

  A moment later, Burns came out of the pumphouse and addressed the contingent. “This is the farthest east I’ve ever been,” he said. “It’s all unknowns from here on out.”

  “Not entirely,” Clover said. “We know that Sophia can’t be more than sixty miles from here.”

  Burns raised an eyebrow. “How do you reckon?”

  “Da told me you got here round noon last time, and the horsemen showed up just after dark. That time of year, at this latitude, sunset would come about eight thirty. If Sophia got word right when you showed up at the pumphouse, and the horsemen rode hard, we’d be talking about fifty miles, give or take.”

  “That would also explain why they couldn’t keep up when we ran,” Gemma added. “Their horses wouldn’t have had the chase in them.”

  “Makes sense,” Burns said. He raised his voice so everyone could hear him. “We’re stopping early tonight, boys!” A cheer went up, but Burns spoke over it. “Don’t think that means you’re getting off easy. Before we eat, I want every stone turned over for a mile in every direction. We might learn something about where we’re headed next. So get to work!”

  There was some grumbling after that, but wandering around looking for clues was still a whole lot easier than marching. Clive went to set up his tent, but he’d barely had time to lay out the canvas and stakes before Burns cantered by.

  “Saddle up, Clivey,” he said. “I got something I want to show you.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He finished putting up his tent, then hiked back up the road to where they’d tied up the animals, untethered a dun-gray mustang called Bear, and rode out to meet Burns. The marshal was waiting a little ways west along the escarpment, and they immediately set off in that same direction.

  “How far we going?” Clive asked.

  “Top of this ridge, if we can find a path. Should be a pretty good view.”

  “We hunting something in particular?”

  Burns looked at him askance. “No, I was just desperate for some time alone with you.”

  They rode for a while in silence. Through the gaps in the trees to their left, Clive could see out over the fields down below old farmland long since gone to seed and subsequently overgrown with blackberries and wild grasses. The day’s brief but drenching rains had left the wide lea so cratered with puddles it resembled a swamp. They reflected the harsh silver light of the clouds overhead, reminding Clive of what he’d seen in Irene’s eyes a few moments ago—a secret animus, momentarily revealed.

  “Burns, can I ask you something?”

  “Why not? I already got more quiet out of you than I was expecting.”

  “It’s about Irene.”

  “What about her?”

  “I don’t trust her.”

  “Good. Any man who trusts a woman deserves whatever he gets, and you can bet a bucket of shekels he’ll get something, sooner or later.”

  “This is more than that.”

  “Sure it is. This is you bein’ sore your brother got a girl just when you lost yours.”

  Clive’s anger overwhelmed his good sense. “Open your fucking ears, man! I’m trying to tell you something important!”

  Burns leaned over in the saddle and grabbed hold of Clive by the collar of his uniform jacket, nearly pulling him off his horse. “I know we got history, Clive, but I’m still your superior officer. You’re lucky there ain’t nobody else around to hear you.”

  Clive was in too deep to apologize now. “Well, there’s not. It’s just you and me. And this isn’t jealousy, or some family squabble. I’m telling you, something is off about that girl. She’s got a darkness inside her.” For a moment, he considered telling Burns about what he’d done for Irene the night of the plebiscite, but he knew it wouldn’t reflect well on him, either. “She’s after something. I feel it in my bones.”

  “Maybe she is. Maybe she isn’t. Ain’t really your business either way, far as I can see. Now come on.”

  Burns rode on ahead, and Clive grudgingly followed. They’d found something like a trail, which cut through the escarpment and then on up the hill. After another fifteen minutes or so, they reached a plateau. From this vantage, they could see for miles back to the southwest, out across the silver-studded fields.

  “There it is,” Burns said, jumping down from his horse. “Looks like they’ve stopped for the night.”

  “Who have?”

  Burns pointed out west, directly at the red disc of the setting sun. There was a slight haziness around a copse of pine trees, smoke rising up in almost invisible puffs. “The Wesah. They’ve been following us ever since the day you killed one of ’em.”

  “And you didn’t say anything?”

  Burns bent down to pluck a piece of golden grass from the dirt, then stuck it between his teeth. “Didn’t see much point. If they’d been planning a clean slaughter, they would’ve made a move long before now.”

  “So what do they want?”

  “I honestly don’t know.”

  Clive remembered the child-chieftain Athène, and the way she’d pressed her forehead up against the barrel of Clover’s gun. If every Wesah warrior were that fearless, the contingent wouldn’t stand a chance.

  “Why’d you show me this?”

  Burns didn’t answer for a moment, and when he did, his voice was subdued, almost bashful. “It’s been weighing on me. I guess I needed to tell someone.”

  Clive waited for more, but as was so often the case with Burns, there wasn’t more to be had. In the silence that followed, he saw his opening.

  “I’ve got a weight on me too, sir.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Her name’s Irene.” Burns started to protest, but Clive plowed on. “You’re right I was taken with her. And you’re right I was mad that she picked Clover over me. But I’m telling you right now this isn’t about any of that. You have to believe me.”

  Burns mulled this over for a while, then gave one of his signature grunts. “You got suspicions, Clive, but you need proof.”

  “So how do I get it? Should I talk to Clover?”

  “Nah. Girl’s got him by the balls. On that much we agree.”

  “So what do I do?”

  “I couldn’t say. But I will tell you this: that girl’s sharp as a sickle. If she is up to something, catching her at it’s gonna mean being a whole hell of a lot smarter than I’ve ever known you to be.”

  “Thanks for the vote of confidence.”

  “You’re welcome. And you can return the favor by keeping all of this”—he gestured out toward the Wesah encampment—“to yourself. Wouldn’t do any good getting everyone worked up when there’s nothing we can do about it anyway.”

  “Fair enough.”

  It was dark by the time they made it back to camp. They tied the horses up and made for the beckoning beacon of the fire. In their last few moments alone, Clive remembered a question he’d been wanting to ask the marshal for days now.

  “Sir, when we met with the Wesah, you said something. It was about dreams, I think.”

  “ ‘May all your dreams be nightmares.’ ”

  “That’s right. What’s it mean?”

  “It’s a saying they got. I guess the idea is that if you’re living right, any dream is a nightmare, because it makes you live a life that isn’t yours.”

  Clive supposed that made a strange sort of sense. “How’d you learn to speak their language, anyway?”

  “My mining d
ays, before I came to the Anchor. In my old hometown, we had an arrangement with a local naasyoon. One of their missives worked in the quarry for a while, and he taught me the language.”

  Clive shook his head wonderingly. “You’ve sure had some strange friends in your time.”

  “And some stranger enemies.” Burns nodded toward the campfire, where Irene sat with her head resting on Clover’s shoulder, whispering her silver words into his ear. “You best be careful with yours.”

  “I will, sir. Good night.”

  “Good night, soldier.”

  7. Clover

  THE NEXT MORNING CLOVER WOKE to three inches of snow on the ground and more coming down every minute: fat, furry flakes that homed in with a perverse sort of accuracy on the back of your neck, then ran down your spine and soaked your undershirt. The physical discomfort alone would’ve been bad enough, but the snow couldn’t have come at a less opportune time for their mission: late the previous day, Burns had noticed the hole in the earthen roof of the pumphouse from which the telegraph cable used to run. The cable was gone, of course, but the Sophians hadn’t bothered to remove the brackets from the trees where it used to be attached. Those brackets would lead the contingent straight to Sophia.

  Unfortunately, the slim bands of iron would have been hard to spot even without the double layer of obscuration: the snow that already blanketed the branches and the snow still coming down. There were times when the soldiers had to clear off twenty or thirty trees before they located the next bracket; this task could easily take an hour.

  They made it about two miles the first day, and a little less on the second. Small as he was, Clover couldn’t help with the trees, and the snow made it impossible for him to pursue his fake assignment as botanical researcher. He spent most of his free time with Irene, but she’d grown increasingly preoccupied since the night he’d proposed to her. Yesterday, for the first time since they’d left the Anchor, she went to sleep right after dinner, without even saying good night.

  So when they found the first foreboding message, four days after leaving the pumphouse, he was secretly pleased: at least it made for a change of pace. The words were written on the side of an empty woodshed in bright red paint: Turn back, Protectorate soldiers. Burns ran his finger over the letters, but anyone could see the paint was long since dry.

  “Guess that means they know we’re coming,” he said.

  The good news was that they could stop looking for brackets; just past the woodshed, the vegetation parted unnaturally, signaling the existence of a man-made path somewhere beneath the snow. A mile on, they saw the next message, painted around the entire circumference of an old grain silo: You are trespassing on Sophian territory.

  The following day the snow stopped falling, and sometime in the early afternoon, they found what would be their final warning. It came in the form of a corrugated tin hut, about twenty feet by twenty feet. The metal reflected the harsh winter light so brightly that from some angles it appeared just as white as the surrounding snow. The soldiers stood back a ways as Burns pulled the door open, and then they began to move inside. The hut was windowless but for a wide skylight overhead, and the only furniture was a square table situated directly below that skylight, drawing a theatrical sort of focus to the strange device mounted on its surface.

  Clover pushed his way past the soldiers to see it more closely: a circular base, perhaps six inches in diameter, from which sprouted a trumpet-shaped corona, like the outgrowth at the center of a daffodil, growing from a narrow tube at the bottom to a gaping maw at the top. The trumpet was made of brass, a material that tarnished quickly if left on its own. Either the device had been placed here within the last week, or else someone was coming out regularly to polish it.

  “It’s a weapon,” someone said, causing a bit of a pileup at the door as some of the soldiers tried to leave while others were still coming in.

  “It’s not a weapon!” Burns shouted. As everyone quieted back down, he glanced at Clover and whispered, “It’s not a weapon, is it?”

  Clover could only shrug; he had no idea what it was.

  “Maybe it says there,” Irene said, pointing to a small scrap of paper that had been placed beneath a corner of the device.

  Burns picked it up and read aloud. “ ‘Please remove the cylinder from the box and position it in the phonograph. Place the needle in the groove. Turn the crank slowly and regularly.’ ” He looked back at Clover. “What the hell’s a phonograph?”

  Phono: sound. Graph: write. Sound writer? “Something to do with music, maybe? It looks a little like an instrument.”

  “Why the fuck would they put a musical instrument in an empty building in the middle of nowhere?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Marshal, I think I found something.” A soldier was standing over a small trapdoor built into the floor and marked off by a square of red paint.

  Burns reached inside and pulled out a small mahogany box, inside of which was a pale yellow cylinder. He offered it to Clover. “Ring any bells?”

  The cylinder was rough to the touch, as if it were a spool of very fine thread. It was made out of wax, which perhaps explained why it had been placed underground: such a material would be particularly sensitive to changes in temperature.

  Clover carried the cylinder over to the phonograph and looked for a place where it might be mounted. There was a spindle near the base of the trumpet, and with a little fiddling, he was able to swing it outward. The cylinder slid on neatly and clicked back into place. He located the needle next, positioning a narrow spit of iron into the groove on the cylinder (starting from the left, as if it were a book waiting to be read). The crank on the side of the device had a wooden handle that fit nicely in the palm. As soon as Clover began to turn it, an odd mist of sound emerged from the trumpet, eerie enough that the hut immediately filled with the disconcerted cries of the soldiers.

  “Get away from it!”

  “It’s got the devil inside!”

  Clover stopped turning the crank and looked to Burns.

  “You know what’s making that sound?” the marshal asked.

  Clover nodded. “It’s the needle scraping the bottom of the groove. The trumpet just amplifies it.”

  “So no demons?”

  “No demons.”

  “Go on then.”

  Clover returned to the crank, conjuring up that spectral sound again. It almost would’ve been soothing, but for the occasional crackle that ran through it like a bolt of lightning in a distant storm cloud. And then, from the ether, a voice emerged.

  “Greetings, soldiers of the Descendancy. My name is Zeno. As you’ve probably guessed, I am from Sophia.” It was a woman speaking. Her voice was confident, almost arrogant, but rendered ethereal by the medium. “Sophia—from the Greek word for knowledge, is the name of both my academy and the town that surrounds and sustains that academy. And it is true that we were responsible for the killing of some of your people this past summer.” The soldiers started clamoring again, and Clover missed the next bit of the recording as Burns struggled to get them calmed down. “. . . in the hope of re-creating the great technological achievements of the past. As evidence of this, I present to you this phonograph machine. The phonograph was invented by the first generation of men, more specifically by a famous native of this country named Thomas Edison. As you can see, it allows for the recording, storage, and retrieval of sonic information.” Clover realized he’d started turning the crank faster, which had the effect of both accelerating the woman’s voice and raising its pitch. “Unfortunately, these cylinders have a rather limited recording time, so I must get to my point. I know why you’ve come here, and I’ve left this message as a final exhortation for you to reconsider. Your position is hopeless, in both the short term and the long. Sophia offers the world light, while your Church offers only darkness. A war between us would be a tragic waste of our limited resources, and the ending would be the same. The Descendancy will fall.”

&nb
sp; The Protectorate soldiers were shouting now, angry and fearful, lashing out against what they didn’t understand. Clover put his ear closer to the trumpet, so he wouldn’t miss anything. “In light of your entrenched fanaticism,” Zeno went on to say, “I doubt you will take my counsel to heart, but know that any further movement toward Sophia will be interpreted as a hostile action. We cannot promise that a single one of you—”

  The crank was ripped from Clover’s hand as Burns lifted the phonograph up off the table.

  “Wait!” Clover shouted, but too late. The device must’ve weighed more than the marshal had expected; he only got it up to chest height before it tumbled out of his hands and onto the floor, where it shattered into a dozen pieces.

  “That’ll shut the bitch up,” he said.

  A cheer went up from the soldiers, as if destroying the phonograph were analogous to destroying the voice behind it. But all Clover felt was a burning in the pit of his stomach: the fury of the thwarted scientist. Burns couldn’t possibly understand how much work must have gone into the construction of that machine. To break it before making even the slightest effort to understand how it functioned was nothing short of sacrilege.

  “That should have gone back to the Library,” he said quietly.

  Burns smiled grimly. “My condolences to the Epistem.” He shouldered his way back through the crowd of soldiers. “We camp early tonight, boys. Obviously these Sophians are scared shitless of us, and that’s worth celebrating.”

  Another cheer erupted as the contingent followed the marshal out of the hut. Clover stood for a moment longer over the broken remnants of the phonograph. He felt as if he ought to say some sort of eulogy.

  “I’ll help you with the pieces, if you want,” Irene said. Lord, but she knew him so well.

  “Thanks.”

  He bent down and picked up the cylinder. It had cracked in half when it landed, but he could still trace the delicate etching from which the needle had drawn the voice. Funny how the very existence of the phonograph sent a clearer message than anything in Zeno’s incendiary speech. The scholars of Sophia had built this from scratch, as well as the telegraph machine, and the gun. Maybe Zeno was right. Maybe the Descendancy was doomed.