Scorched Earth

by Tommy Wallach

  The soldier stopped just outside what used to be Epistem Turin’s office. “Go on,” he said.

  “Alone?”

  “You afraid, traitor?”

  “I’m not a—” Clover let the words die in his throat. What was the point? People would believe what they wanted to believe. He opened the door and stepped through.

  His first thought was that he’d mistaken the geography of the building somehow. Though he’d traveled along the same halls and climbed the same stairs as before, somehow he’d ended up in a completely different place. Here was Turin’s office, except everything that had marked it as his was gone. The bookshelves that stretched all the way up to the second floor had been completely emptied of books; in their place were hundreds of useless, ugly knickknacks—taxidermied birds and rodents, small clay pots fired with sneeze-shaped patches of metallic glaze, framed drawings of horses and military parades, various pieces of Protectorate regalia and surplus pageantry, a few geodes (quartz, pyrite, limonite)—anything and everything except words on paper, except knowledge. Apparently, it wasn’t enough to murder the man; Chang also had to murder his memory.

  “Hello?” Clover called out.

  But he could already sense there was no one there. The hint of a breeze caressed his arm. He traced it to the hidden door in the wainscoting, which had been left cracked.

  Clover could remember the first time he’d stepped through that portal—naked, terrified, innocent. It felt as if centuries separated him from that day, and from that version of himself. Then, the walkway atop the Anchor wall had seemed no less than the entrance to a new dimension. Now, it was just another parapet; if and when Kittyhawk flew over the Anchor, the pilot would be able to see this pathway laid out beneath him as clearly as a river. Strange how perspective could alter things so completely. The passage began to slope downward. Clover pulled his arms into his sleeves, but he knew there was nothing he could really do to protect himself from what was coming. And though he wasn’t looking forward to the pain, he couldn’t help but be excited at the prospect of seeing the anathema stacks again. The light turned crepuscular, faded away. Clover stretched out his sleeved hands, wincing in expectation of the first prick of the blackberry bushes. Step after step, deeper into the dark, but still he felt nothing. He must’ve misremembered the distance; time had been extremely malleable the last time he’d walked this path. Yet now the gloom had begun to take on a distinctly rosy tint. The corridor jogged to the left and the tint became a flame; someone had screwed a sconce into the wall and fitted a torch into the bracket. In the sphere of illumination, Clover could make out where the brambles had been cut away, their bleeding stumps peeping out of the holes in the stone floor. The vegetal detritus had been swept into piles at the edges of the passageway, creating a clear sight line for hundreds of feet. The starkness of it, the violence implied by all those severed vines, affected Clover viscerally. He might’ve lost his religion somewhere along the way, but his respect for and devotion to the Library itself remained intact. For the path to the anathema stacks to be laid bare like this seemed the most terrible of heresies, and the implication…

  He began running, as fast as he could manage along the uneven stone bricks, until he nearly fell into the pool that used to offer succor to those who’d survived the brambles. From that raised platform, he gazed out over the great chamber hidden within the Anchor wall.

  “Daughter’s love,” he whispered.

  Those materials once deemed too explosive for anyone but the Epistem and Archbishop had practically become public property. Dozens of men, some Library monks and some wearing the red and gold of the Protectorate, were freely exploring the anathema stacks—idly leafing through ancient texts, tossing them aside like rubbish or else making copies at the desks that now lined the walls to either side of the fatally pitted central bookshelf. So absorbed were they in these desecrations that Clover’s appearance was hardly remarked.

  “Is Grand Attendant Bernstein here?” he asked the nearest monk.

  “In hell, probably,” the man answered.

  The words themselves implied aspersion, but nothing in the monk’s demeanor read as hostile. “Hell?” Clover said.

  The monk pointed toward the other end of the chamber. “That way.”

  Memory had gilded the lily of his last visit to the stacks; where Clover remembered the chamber being enormous, practically a mile from end to end, he now traversed the whole thing at a brisk walk in less than a minute. Guards stood on either side of a doorway that gaped out of the sheer stone.

  “I’m here to—” Clover began to say.

  “Go on,” one of the guards interrupted. “He’s waiting for you.”

  Clover passed through the portal and down a corridor lined with lanterns radiating a suspiciously perfect yellow light. He leaned close to the frosted glass of one and could clearly make out the bulb and its searing filament. Electricity, here in the basement of the Library itself—Chang truly had swept away the old order at a blow.

  The corridor opened up onto a chamber about the same size as that which housed the anathema stacks: a workshop, not so different from the one at the academy in Sophia. At least a hundred men and women were hard at work, scurrying between the engines and forges, the generators and the anvils, through air heavy with the smoke that wasn’t captured by the fans built to carry it up and out through the roof. Most of them were making guns—some small, some as big as the one Chang was said to have deployed at the Black Wagon Massacre. Clover watched as a monk dipped a tray of bullet castings into a steam bath. He was a strange-looking man, freakish even; though his skin was dark, it seemed somehow etiolated, as if he’d never spent a moment in the sun.

  “It’s rude to stare,” a voice said.

  It took Clover a moment to put a name to the face: the illustrious Ruzo Chang, Grand Marshal of the Protectorate, de facto leader of the Descendancy. Here was the man who’d killed Archbishop Carmassi and Epistem Turin, who’d ordered thousands of Wesah slaughtered at the tooroon. Clover suppressed the urge to spit in his face.

  “Clover Hamill,” Chang said. “I’m sorry we haven’t been able to meet before now.”

  “I’m not.”

  Chang chuckled. “You and your brother are two of a kind, aren’t you?” Clover didn’t answer; he wouldn’t be baited. “Let’s go for a little walk, shall we? There’s something I want to show you.” He gestured toward the eastern wall of the chamber, where another two Protectorate soldiers were standing at attention. At a signal from Chang, they reached into their shirts and produced elaborate brass keys on necklaces. After fitting these keys into nearly invisible chinks in the stonework, the soldiers began to turn them, around and around, as if winding a clock. A loud grinding sound came from the wall—rusty gears activating other rusty gears.

  “I learned this trick from one of Turin’s notebooks,” Chang said.

  At first glance, it seemed as if the stonework at their feet had become a kind of whirlpool, a perfect circle of bricks spinning and sinking at once, like a screw slotting into place. It stopped about four feet below the level of the floor, revealing a wrought iron staircase spiraling even farther downward, lit with yet more electric lights.

  “Close it up after us,” Chang said to the soldiers. “I won’t be back today.”

  They began to descend. After a few dozen steps, Clover heard the grinding of the floor rising back into place above them. Stone dust plinked atop the steps and feathered his hair.

  “Where are we going?” he asked.

  Chang stopped and looked over his shoulder. “To see some old friends.” He smiled, as if in expectation of something sweet to come. “And to make a deal.”

  3. Paz

  THE TWO OF THEM ROLLED down the hill in a clinch, flipping over and over, hands scrabbling for any kind of advantage. Paz felt as if she were trying to get the better of an animal, rather than a person. The slope steepened vertiginously, absurdly, until they were falling through clear air, whirling as they went,
still biting and scratching and screaming with the fever of battle. They fell for minutes, for hours maybe, nothing but black sky all around them, stars sprayed like spittle in every direction. The ground arrived as a thunderclap. Paz found her arms pinned beneath the Wesah warrior’s knees. The tribeswoman began to intone something with a liturgical gravity, which gave Paz time to wriggle one arm free and draw her knife. She lashed out, but without any leverage, the attack was naturally deflected by her opponent’s vest.

  The warrior brushed the blade aside like a bothersome fly, but Paz no longer cared. Her attention had been captured by the woman’s armor; the cuirass had been hardened in a shape that left room for a bosom. Descendancy women never wore armor, and the Wesah weren’t technologically advanced enough to produce this sort of cured leather. That meant this piece had been made specially for this woman. And there next to the seam, Paz could just make out the brand of its maker: RP, circled twice.

  The tribeswoman raised her blade and brought it down with all her strength, piercing Paz’s heart and evicting her from the dream.

  * * *

  She woke shivering beneath the thin blanket. The horizon had just donned its first pale corona, inflaming the thin scudding clouds that scarcely seemed to move across the sky. Her belly rumbled; other than a few handfuls of berries and a couple of mealy apples picked off the ground, she hadn’t had anything to eat in days.

  Her first thought was to wonder where Clive was; then she remembered everything that had happened. Blinking back tears, annoyed at the way they found their way out anyway, she rose and carefully peeled the dressing from her side, so she could wash the wound out in the nearby stream. Athène’s arrow had only grazed her, but the last thing she needed now was an infection. Luckily, the horse she’d stolen had been fitted with a saddlebag, inside of which she’d found a few arrowheads, some rope, and the blanket, the edges of which she’d cut away to make bandages.

  Had she been wrong to run? Of course she’d wanted to hold her ground, to plead her case before that improvisatory tribunal, but there’d seemed precious little hope of exoneration. Neither Flora nor Athène had any reason to give her the benefit of the doubt, which meant everything would’ve rested on Clive, who knew her capacity for duplicity all too well. She didn’t think he had it in him to hurt her, but if he’d handed her back over to the Protectorate, she’d never have seen the light of day again. She simply hadn’t been brave enough to bet her life on the depth of his love.

  So was it he who hadn’t trusted her, or she who hadn’t trusted him?

  After the adrenaline wore off and Paz found herself alone, riding a stranger’s horse toward no particular destination, she realized there was only one way to clear her name: find the woman who’d actually murdered Gemma. The killer had a head start, but probably assumed no one would be pursuing her; only Paz knew what had really happened in the pasture, and would she really seek a second round with the woman who’d clearly only spared her life on a whim?

  Paz found an abandoned campsite the very next morning, the embers of the fire pit gray and wet with dew, but in the days since, there’d been nothing. The trail had gone cold… until now.

  The dream tried to slither out of her grasp, but she grabbed hold of it by the tail and dragged it wriggling back into her consciousness: RP, circled twice. It wasn’t much to go on; the Wesah woman might very well have acquired the cuirass from someone other than the person who’d made it. But if she’d bought it specifically in preparation for the tooroon, there was every chance it came from somewhere close by. Towns were few and far between this deep in the outerlands, and not many would have an armorer of that caliber. RP, whoever he or she was, would be known for many miles around.

  Paz had happened upon a road early the previous morning, but for safety’s sake had camped a little ways off. She returned to it now and followed it to where it met another, larger road, which wound through the hills to the northwest. Once, she had to hide in a ditch while a large delegation of Protectorate soldiers passed by. They were uncharacteristically quiet, almost solemn. Paz wondered if they’d known what was going to happen at the tooroon, or if Chang had suprised them, too. Not that it mattered; they were complicit anyway.

  It was another three days before Paz spotted a town, the first she’d seen since leaving the coast. There wasn’t much to it aside from a general store—already closed for the night—and a pub called the Alehouse, from whose open windows wafted the homely scents of fresh-baked bread and roasting meat. Paz pulled open the door but froze on the threshold. The place was packed—far busier than a small-town tavern had any right to be. Even in the weak light of the lanterns on every other table, she could see why: Protectorate soldiers took up half the stools in the place. It had to be the same unit that had passed her on the road. The disciplinary tattoos on her face would make her instantly recognizable to anyone who’d seen them before, but there was nothing to be done about that now; a couple of the soldiers had already glanced her way, and it would only make them that much more suspicious if she left without ordering anything. She went to the bar, trying her best to look natural, and took a seat next to a man and woman in their sixties. They were already deep in their cups, and from the easy manner of their arguing, probably married.

  “It’s on the way,” the woman said confidently. “Felt it last night just as the moon was coming out. An early turn.”

  The man sniffed. “No such thing. Turn’s a holiday.”

  “Turn’s a state of mind. When it’s cold, it’s turned. That’s why they call it the cold turn.”

  “Load of bull. September thirty. Two months off.”

  “Tell that to the fields o’ dead sweet corn when the first frost comes.”

  “It’s fucking July!”

  “Excuse me,” Paz said. “I’m trying to find someone, a tanner probably, but one who makes armor. He’d have the initials RP.”

  The man screwed up his shine-shattered features. “RP, eh? RP…”

  “Roberto!” shouted the woman. “There’s your R!”

  “Roberto’s family name’s Lombardo.”

  “So?”

  “And he’s a farmer.”

  “People can do two things. Anyway, he’s not much of a farmer. You see how he takes care of that land?”

  The couple went on arguing, having seemingly forgotten the initial question, or that Paz was even there.

  A fist knocked plangently on the wood of the bar. “You drinking?” asked the tender. He was a young man of twenty or twenty-one, whose striking good looks had yet to be tarnished by the sunless, sleepless life of a barkeep.

  “Sure. Whatever’s on the tap there.”

  “Nothing’s on the tap. Not for years, anyway. All we got is shine, and it’s not good shine either.”

  “Then you better change your name.”

  “Juan?”

  “Not your name, Juan. The Alehouse.”

  A wisp of a smile below the wisp of mustache. “My da came up with that. He was the brewer in the family. I don’t seem to have the knack.”

  She smiled back at him. “I doubt that. You look like you’ve got all sorts of knacks.”

  Juan was momentarily nonplussed—oh, the dependable innocence of country boys. Maybe he’d have the information she needed, but what mattered more right now was that she find a graceful way out of the pub. A couple of the Protectorate soldiers had begun to pay her a little more attention than she liked.

  “Nice to meet you, Juan. I’m Irene. You feel like gettin’ some air?”

  * * *

  Agate, a barmaid with the complexion of a rotting apple, offered to take over for a bit so Juan and “Irene” could take a turn around the town, which Paz had learned was called Oleanna. She delayed asking after the mysterious RP, allowing herself a moment to enjoy the fantasy that she had no ulterior motive, no mission, no past at all.

  “So, Irene, I’m guessing you’re not from around here.”

  “What gave me away?”

  “Ba
sically everything about you.”

  “I’m from the Anchor. Third Quarter, if that means anything to you.”

  “A city girl. Makes sense. That where you got those tattoos?”

  She felt herself blush. “I’ve had some hard times. I’d rather not talk about them.”

  “Sure. Sorry. Tending bar, you get used to asking people about their troubles.”

  They walked in silence for a while. Paz could feel herself relaxing for the first time since she’d come upon Gemma in that clearing.

  “So what brings you to Oleanna?” Juan said.

  “Long story. Call it an adventure.”

  “A girl like you shouldn’t be adventuring. It’s not safe.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “And you aren’t married or nothing?”

  Paz held up her naked ring finger, and remembered the time Clive had wrapped his pinky around it, like a promise. “Nothing doing.”

  “Good.”

  He clasped her hand and pulled her to him—gently, but with a winning sort of chivalrous ardor, as if he’d just slain a dragon for her. His breath smelled of shine, and his cheek was rough with stubble, but she didn’t imagine it would be so bad to kiss him a little, just to pass the time, just to remember that somebody could want her. And yet…

  “I’m sorry,” she said quietly.

  To Juan’s credit, he let her go immediately, his playful passion turning to mortification. “No, it’s my… I just thought you…”

  “It’s fine. You’re very sweet. But I can’t. There’s someone else.”

  “And he lets you wander the countryside alone? No offense, but he sounds like a damned fool.”

  “He can be. He has been. But so have I.”

  They walked on, but things were different now; there was a certain sort of magic that could exist between strangers only until the question of romance was resolved. “You know, I should probably get back to the bar,” Juan eventually said. “With all these soldiers in town, we’ve been pretty swamped.”