Dissension

by Stacey Berg

  “Excuse me.” She stopped politely but inescapably in the path of a man whose clothes were notably intact and whose cart was weighted with a large sack of grain. He frowned, seeing nothing but a ragged woman and her child. Interesting that he seemed more annoyed than frightened; order must prevail in this part of the city. Or perhaps he was just stupid.

  “Yes?”

  “I found this baby unattended. I wondered if you could tell me where I might take it that its matri would check for it?”

  “I wouldn’t know.” He yanked his cart around her and went on. She suppressed a brief surge of irritation and made no effort to stop him. A little further on she found someone more helpful, a man who eyed her uneasily, stepping back to what he incorrectly estimated was a safe distance before suggesting that perhaps she could obtain more information at a certain trade not far away, and also some milk for the child, which by now had begun to wail again in earnest.

  His directions sent her south, towards where the city had reached its greatest heights just before the Fall. The shells of the buildings still reached for the sky, thirty or forty levels stacked one above the other, though the tops had long ago sagged and crumbled in on themselves. Hunter knew from her own experience that it was possible to climb at least partway up inside some of the buildings using old stairwells and the shafts of mechanical lifts that could be climbed like vertical tunnels. It was hard to imagine the number of ­people who must have lived here before the Fall, to fill all that space; millions, the priests said. And once there had been city upon city like this, now silent, as far as the ears in the desert could hear. The cityens who were left were like the scavengers in the desert, crawling among the ruins with no thought of what had been lost and no goal greater than the day’s necessities. Only the Church remembered, and dreamed to make men more than what they were.

  The empty sockets of the buildings frowned down at such dreams. She turned back to the road. Fittingly, the trade she sought occupied the front corner of one structure that had not been very tall to begin with, and had therefore been easier to restore. From the street, it looked like most of the ground level was still filled in by debris, but the heavy door was marked with a sheaf of grain, the symbol for supplies, and light seeped out under the sill. She tried the door gently; it was locked. That couldn’t stop her long, of course, but forcing her way in might lead to confrontation, and that would not serve her purpose just yet. Instead she knocked, at first politely, then pounding hard with her fist, the way a desperate woman with a hungry child might do late at night with no other hope.

  “All right, that’s enough! I hear you.” The door opened a crack, just enough to let the occupant blind her with a bright light aimed at her eyes. Her pupils damped it down immediately, but she blinked hard anyway, giving an impression of helplessness that apparently satisfied the torch holder, for she heard a clank of chain and the door swung wider to admit her.

  The room she entered was smaller than she would have thought, and crowded with shelving on which were stacked all manner of goods, some in bundles, others in bins, still more just laid out in the open. It looked innocuous enough—­foodstuffs, cloth, a few mechanical tools, all perfectly legitimate to trade. Someone had known enough to rig a proper power drop into the room; the light was steady and clean, not the flicker of candles or lamps. The beam in her face was handheld, a Church device that had somehow found its way here.

  She blinked in earnest when the trader switched it off. “What do you want?” he asked, keeping the heavy stick he held in his other hand ready for a quick swing. His frown took in her unkempt hair, dirty clothes, and finally, the exhausted baby. Good; she wanted him to mistake her for no more than a distraught cityen. He might not be used to such ­people, by his appearance: like the man with the cart, his clothes looked newly sewn, scarcely a stitch undone. And if she wasn’t mistaken, the reinforcing patches at elbow and knee were the same woven polymer thread the Church used in the hunters’ clothing. The last time she had been in the city she had not seen that; she would have to tell the Patri.

  Then with a lurch in her gut she remembered that she would not be reporting to the Patri.

  “I need milk for this baby,” she grated, shifting the wailing boy in the crook of her arm. “Human, if you have any.”

  The trader continued to study her closely, stick still raised. Maybe he could see better than she thought. “Nothing else?”

  Laughter almost caught her by surprise. Nothing he had could possibly be sufficient for her needs. She choked back a dangerous despair along with the laugh. “Yes,” she said recklessly. “Information.”

  The tip of his stick tapped a thoughtful rhythm against the flooring. The sound echoed hollowly. There must be space under the floor for goods he didn’t want to display. Interesting. “I assume you have chits, or something else to trade?”

  She smiled briefly and set the object she was holding on the table, watching with satisfaction as his eyes widened. “This should be enough for some milk. And some information.”

  He reached eagerly for the device. Her free hand clamped over his wrist. He thought about swinging the stick, but stopped when she smiled at him again. She nodded and let go. “Milk first.”

  He was back in less than a minute, and the milk smelled sweet. The baby lipped impatiently at the cloth nipple, its cries quickly replaced by enthusiastic sucking noises. “Nice baby,” the trader said, all friendly now.

  “It’s not mine. No, I didn’t steal it,” she added as she saw him computing how a woman would end up with a baby that new that wasn’t hers. “I’d give it back to its matri, if I could find her.”

  “I haven’t heard of any missing babies,” he said. His eyes were locked on the object sitting on the counter between them. It was simple, mechanical, but very old. She might have come by it any number of ways.

  “Where do you get human milk?” she asked casually.

  He shrugged. ­“People bring it in, not my problem where they get it. Baby dies, milk keeps coming, who knows.”

  “I’ve heard sometimes ­people leave babies outside the forcewall. If they did that they’d have extra milk.”

  He looked up sharply, genuine distress crossing his fleshy face. “I wouldn’t trade with the kind did that.”

  “Hmmm. With a place like this you must have ­people come to trade from all over the city. Maybe some of them would talk about that kind.”

  ­“People talk, that’s not my interest. I just trade. Goods or chits or grain, whatever you want, makes no difference to me.”

  “Well.” She reached for the wayfinder she had set out to entice him. “This is too much to trade just for milk. If you don’t have any information—­”

  “Wait,” he interjected swiftly. “What do you want? Ask, maybe I’ll know.”

  For just a moment she debated simply asking about the Warder. If he existed, the trader was exactly the kind of man who would know about him, and she was sure he would talk; he wanted that device. But he’d also be eager to trade back to the Warder the story that a stranger had come in asking for him personally. That would be too suspicious to explain away if her plan worked. A less direct approach would be better. And the trader’s reaction had given her a clue. “Where can I take this baby that someone would take care of it if I can’t find its matri?”

  Relief crossed the trader’s face; he’d been worried that he wouldn’t earn the wayfinder. “Easy enough. Keep going south, through Riverbend, to the old clave by the stads where they grow the grain. Follow the numbers down, you’ll find what you’re looking for.”

  She didn’t have to feign surprise. “Riverbend? I know that place. Nothing but crazies and gangs, even the hunters never got it cleaned up. You’re sending me into a trap.” She made to pocket the device.

  “No, no, it’s not like it used to be.” He shook his head earnestly. “Still rough around the edges, sure, but plenty of ­people li
ve there now, regular cityens. Anyway, you’re just passing through, no one will touch you. You’ll see. The baby will protect you.”

  “The Church protects the ­people,” she said automatically. The tone caught his attention. Questions started in his eyes, where she came from, why she knew so little of the city. Hastily she slackened her features, let her hair fall forward. “At least that’s what those hunters say.”

  The trader grunted. “Hunters? Don’t see them around here very much, do we? Leave us to sort out our own troubles, except when they come to take the tithe.”

  She looked at the suckling in her arms. “Maybe they’d have taken this baby to the Church, if its matri took it to them instead of leaving it outside.” But they wouldn’t have, and she knew it. If the fierce girl had heard her she would have spat her disgust right on the trader’s clean floor. The thought hurt, a sharp pain under her ribs.

  The trader shrugged, uninterested in conjecture. “Maybe.”

  She paused, as if considering whether to trust him. “You know, maybe it’s not so bad the hunters don’t come around. I’ve heard ­people saying we don’t need the Church like we used to. We’d do fine on our own.”

  He’d heard that too, and still thought it dangerous, by the way his face closed up. “Like I said. ­People talk, it doesn’t mean I listen.” He set another container of milk on the table. “Here’s my part. That, and you take the baby to the Ward. You go there, ask for help. It will find you.”

  She fingered the wayfinder in her hand. She felt a curious reluctance to leave it. In truth, it had little value; there were plenty more in the priests’ store. No harm would be done by letting the cityens have it. But she had carried this one for a long time, and it had always led her back to the Church, no matter how far the Patri’s orders had sent her. You don’t need a wayfinder to get back from the city, she told herself sternly, and stood up, settling the baby’s solid weight against her chest.

  She tossed him the wayfinder. “Fair enough. Here’s mine.”

  CHAPTER 12

  The city took a long time to cross on foot, and night made it seem longer. Between the claves where the cityens clustered against the dark, the wind probed deserted alleys, and every footfall echoed with a deathly emptiness that Hunter never felt in the clean distances of the desert. Even the lightstrings hung as a guide to the safest route from North to Riverbend only made the surrounding darkness more impenetrable. The way she followed was as desolate as if no one had survived the Fall. As if even the Saint couldn’t hold back the dark. She smelled stone cooling, flinty-­sharp, but no other animals except herself and the baby, and the only sound was the distant hum of the transmission lines, almost below even her hearing. All you do is wasted, a serpentine voice hissed in her thoughts. The Church is nothing against the end of the world.

  She closed her mind to it and kept going.

  She might have been walking an endless dusty loop, passing the same ruined buildings over and over, the same burned-­out lamp sputtering dead warnings into the night. It was illusion, she told herself, born of night and distance and fatigue; she knew her steps carried her steadily south. She paused for a moment to wipe a smudge from her vision, then shook her head and resumed her dogged trudge, ignoring the temptation to tear off a bit of cloth to mark her passage, in case she circled this way again. As her path curved near the river, the breeze picked up an oily tang that burned in the back of her throat. She wondered if cityens could taste it. Fortunately the baby, having guzzled most of the trader’s milk as she carried it along, slept soundly. Despite the trader’s reassurance, anyone about in the Riverbend now would not be someone whose attention she wanted to attract. She kept to the edge of the clave as best she could, working her way past it towards the Ward.

  Finally the air began to clear and light leaked back into the streets. At last she crossed the no man’s land between the claves and arrived at the edge of the Ward. Like the Church, this part of the city had been ancient before the Fall, and when the population had shriveled to its tiniest remnant, it had holed up here, where the city had begun as a fortress an eon ago. The small scale of this clave was comforting for a walker, especially compared with the vast empty paths striping the desert. The buildings stood close together, blunted towers that had never overreached like the blind giants farther north, the stone alleyways they’d grown up around so narrow and twisting that aircars couldn’t follow them. Even the ground vehicles cityens had used before the Fall would have had a hard time navigating this area, and there was no evidence that they had tried. In other parts of the city and along the desert roads hunters ran across rubber wheels and other preserved parts that showed where vehicles had died, but if any had been left here, they had long since been salvaged for scrap or dissolved into rust.

  The buildings themselves were in decent repair here, many of them built of the same stolid brick and stone as the Church. It would have been a simple matter to clear rubble, shore up walls and roofs, and wire the lightstrings that ran every which way off the clave’s main transmission hub. Though the street she walked was narrow, it was well maintained, and showed the marks of many recent passersby. At some of the intersections the buildings bore painted numbers, counting down towards a center of some kind. In this early part of morning the streets were still empty, but it was the emptiness of sleep, not death. Though it was still quiet, Hunter could hear the sounds of a day slowly wakening, a wheel or two rumbling over stone, the creak of hinges arguing not to open. Someone would notice her soon.

  When she came to an open square where four streets met, she paused, pretending to study her choices uneasily. She walked a few paces to the left, then turned back in the other direction, scanning the upper floors of the nearest buildings for anything lurking there, occasionally glancing back over her shoulder. A few hundred paces past the square and a turn, followed by another, and another, and she ended up back where she had started, as someone truly lost might do. By now a sullen dawn was beginning to stain the cobble. She let her steps flag, paced a bit more, then flopped down on a bit of curb, head hanging. The baby, which had been sleeping contentedly in the crook of her arm all the while, chose this opportune time to let out a shriek of protest.

  “Do you need some help?”

  She looked up through a curtain of dirty hair. A young man stood near, but not too near, as anyone with sense would faced with someone as wild as she no doubt looked. Though he appeared more than adequately fed, he balanced lightly enough on his feet, ready to respond if she made a sudden move. She doubted that he was some innocent who just happened to be passing by. Worth trying, then. “I’m looking for the Warder.”

  A little laugh, not especially unkind. “Really? Why?”

  She had worked out her story in the long night’s walk. She would give them one mystery to solve; pleased with their own cleverness, they would not probe her deeper secrets. “I have something to tell him.”

  “You look hungry. Whyn’t you tell me whatever it is? I’ll take you somewhere you can get something to eat, and then I’ll go tell’m.”

  At the mention of food, her stomach rumbled helpfully. “No. Only him. You won’t believe me, so he won’t believe you.”

  “Whyn’t you let him decide?”

  She pushed herself to her feet, shoulders setting stubbornly. “No. The children are too important. If you won’t help me I’ll find someone else.” She started away across the square.

  “Wait, wait.” The man hurried up beside her. “What about children? I see you have th’ one. You want help with it, I’ll get you some. Just tell me what you need. I’ll speak with’m myself, I promise.”

  “Take me to the Warder. Then you can hear.”

  He spoke to her gently, reasonably, the way one did with someone who might react unpredictably. “Something special about your baby? More’n just having it, I mean?”

  She let a hint of defiance trickle into her voice. “Yes. Very
special.”

  He hesitated a moment longer. “All right, then. Come with me, I’ll take you to’m. He’s busy, but he won’t mind.” She studied him as they walked. He wore the kind of baggy outer shirt cityens made from salvaged polymer they melted and spun into fiber, then wove into decent cloth, neither as new as the trader’s nor as worn as her disguise. A blue stripe ran down one side, brightening the otherwise drab color. He had a round, pleasant face framed by a tangle of curly brown hair that made him look like a little boy, though the breadth of his shoulders belonged more to a man.

  The street was beginning to stir, cityens emerging to face their daily struggles, and though she drew an occasional puzzled glance, he seemed familiar to many of those they passed. ­People liked him, she thought; they waved and nodded, and he smiled back, a warm, open grin that made her think of how rarely hunters smiled. As they walked he whistled, not the imitation of animal sounds that hunters practiced, but a pretty tune, the way a happy man might as he ambled on his way. After a while it brought someone else.

  “Hallo, Justan,” the newcomer said. He was younger than his friend, and considerably leaner, with the wiry build of a youth just coming into full manhood. His overshirt was nearly identical to the first man’s, fitted closer to his frame but still loose enough to conceal a weapon, if he carried one. Some kind of uniform? Hunter wondered. The stripe was the same on both. It didn’t indicate a rank: the new man clearly thought he was in charge. “What’d you find there?”

  “I was checking th’ edge and met this woman wandering down from th’ Bend. Says she wants to see th’ Warder.”

  “Really?” The man looked Hunter up and down, wrinkling his nose. “You think he wants to see her?”

  “I do. She won’t explain, but she seems to know something about some special children.” He turned to Hunter. “Go on,” he encouraged her. “Tell Loro.” She shook her head dully, as if she were too worn out to try to explain. Justan shrugged at Loro. “He’d want t’ know.”