Scorched Earth

by Tommy Wallach

  “Something’s happening,” Clover said.

  “You know it’s nothing to be ashamed of if you wanna leave,” Kita said. “It’s not as if you can do anything to help them now.”

  “I know. But I have to be here.”

  The crowd cracked open like a coconut, clearing a path through the square. Clover grabbed Kita’s hand and led her into the crush of gawkers, weaving his way up to the foot of the gallows. The first person to climb the steps was the hangman, dressed all in black. Bishop Allen came next, wearing robes of red and gold to signal the Church’s absorption into the Protectorate. He looked right at Clover but didn’t appear to recognize him.

  The crowd’s enthusiasm reached a fever pitch as the prisoners were escorted up to the gallows by Chang and his honor guard. And there they were, looking the same as ever but for the ragged prison garb and unshaven cheeks: Clive and Daniel Hamill, reunited at last. Clover felt a strange, shameful surge of jealousy that he wasn’t up there with them.

  Kita squeezed his hand. “You okay?”

  Clover didn’t answer. Chang was approaching the edge of the gallows platform, as if it were a stage. He motioned for the crowd to quiet.

  Of course. The bastard never did pass up an opportunity to give a speech, did he?

  11. Paz

  THE PERFORMANCE HAD DRAGGED ON for nearly an hour now and showed no signs of stopping. It was an old story, brimming with false identities, cross-dressers, ironic misunderstandings, and an unceasing torrent of melodrama. But while the production itself might not have been anything special, the circumstances surrounding it certainly were. Village pantomimes such as this one averaged an audience of a couple hundred people at most; yet today there were thousands watching the earnest town players strut and fret about the stage—or trying to watch, at any rate; the town square wasn’t nearly big enough to contain the entirety of the Wesah nation, even in its diminished state.

  Paz had assumed the tribeswomen and their missives would quickly grow bored of the show, given that the vast majority of them couldn’t understand a word of the dialogue. But as the pratfalls and pretenses piled up, their laughter only grew more uproarious. According to Athène, the closest thing the Wesah had to theater was the otsapah’s recitations of the tales of Wolf and Fox. They’d never seen two people embrace onstage, or duel with wooden swords, or be transformed into donkeys by a vindictive fairy queen. Paz couldn’t tell what they were enjoying more: the story itself, or the fact that men and women were willing to do such ridiculous things in front of an audience.

  “We should go,” Athène whispered.

  “All right,” Paz said. She leaned over to Flora. “Can you look after yourself for a bit?”

  The girl nodded. After saving Paz’s life with a word, she seemed perfectly content never to speak again.

  Paz followed Athène back through the crowd and out of the square. Once again she was struck by the improbability of her new position as right-hand woman to the new leader of the Wesah. Though she liked to think it was because of her intellectual capabilities, or at least the fact that she spoke English better than any of Athène’s other advisers, she suspected she owed her station more to the vagaries of sentiment—guilt and grief, nostalgia and longing. Paz had known Gemma, had loved someone who had loved Gemma: a tenuous link, perhaps, but in the weeks since they’d left the Villenaître, it had already begun to blossom into something not unlike friendship.

  Paz had always fantasized about life as a Wesah tribeswoman, traveling the byways of the world surrounded by sisters you knew would give their lives for you. She was pleased to discover the reality wasn’t so far removed from what she’d imagined, if slightly more violent.

  “You really think she came?” Paz said.

  “I do.”

  After Athène assumed the mantle of Andromède, she’d immediately dispatched a rider to the closest town known to be a part of what the Sophians called their “telegraph network.” There her emissary was to extend Zeno an invitation to a parley in an outerlands town known to have recently switched its allegiance from the Descendancy to Sophia. The tribe departed the Villenaître the next day, and reached their destination in under two weeks. The mayor himself had arranged this pantomime to celebrate their arrival—impressive, really, given that he’d been informed of it only a couple of days ago—and now it was time to see if they’d get anything more for their troubles than a mediocre drama. Athène’s invitation had specified just this hour on just this date at just this specific inn. But the question remained—would Zeno actually show up?

  They identified the place by the rank smell that wafted out of it—alesweat, Paz’s father used to call it—as there was no sign or marker to distinguish it from the houses around it. But as they climbed the wide steps up to the porch, gunshots rang out from inside; stuttering light briefly painted all the fogged ground-floor windows blue-white. A moment later, half a dozen men in various states of inebriation came running out the front door and dispersed into the night. The heavy silence following the fusillade was abruptly broken by the bathetic bounce of a piano, somehow jaunty and foreboding at once. Paz looked to Athène, who could only shrug: your guess is as good as mine. They drew their daggers, though such weapons would be useless against a skilled gunman, and went through the open door.

  The inn was homey and full of clutter—pots and pans and wicker brooms all hung from the walls as decoration. A large elk head gazed out from over the hearth, its severed neck black from years of smoke damage. A dozen or so tables were patterned with the legacy of who knew how many thousands of mugs of ale, like a drunkard’s homage to the annulus. The bar was on their left when they came in, and just beyond it stood a ramshackle old spinet. The figure at the bench sat hunched above the board, her red hair dangling over her hands as they danced across the keys. A huge silver gun with two barrels and two cylinders rested on the top of the piano, leaking twin plumes of smoke. At the bottom of a stairway that climbed the rear wall of the inn, a large bald man with red suspenders lay in a pool of his own blood.

  “Don’t mind him,” Zeno said without looking up from the piano.

  Athène sheathed her dagger and motioned for Paz to do the same. “He attacked you?”

  “Not exactly. I just happened to meet one of the girls he employs upstairs. She told me she was fourteen, and not very convincingly. I asked the gentleman behind the bar if he would consider allowing her to leave, and he said she still owed him money for room and board. We had a frank exchange of ideas on the subject of unpaid labor and, well, you can see how it turned out.”

  “Good riddance,” Paz said.

  Zeno abruptly stopped playing. “I know that voice.” She turned toward them as she closed the lid of the piano. Something like a smile made a fleeting appearance on her lips. “Paz Dedios.”

  “Evening, Director.”

  “Still alive after all this time. You never cease to surprise.”

  “I’m just as surprised as you, believe me.”

  Zeno stood up and walked behind the bar, perusing the bottles on the shelves as if they were books. Occasionally she’d stop to uncork one and sniff before replacing it with a grimace. “I was glad to hear from you, Athène. Or is it Andromède now?”

  “Andromède.”

  “And so young, too. But there are advantages to that. Age calcifies thought. You notice that X and Y always seem to go together, and soon, whenever you see X, you think Y X and Y become inextricable. So you forget about Z. And it’s always Z that’s going to kill you.” Somehow Paz doubted it was a coincidence that Zeno’s name happened to begin with Z. At last the director located a bottle whose smell didn’t disgust her. “Looks something like wine, anyway,” she said, before pouring them each a glass. She raised hers in a toast. “To collaboration.” Her hazel eyes took on a red and sinister tint in the light from the candles on the bar. They all clinked glasses and drank. “An interesting word, collaboration,” Zeno continued. “It means both to work together with an ally and to se
cretly cooperate with an enemy. Tell me, which one are you interested in?”

  Paz was impressed at how quickly Athène replied. “The Descendancy slaughtered my people. But I cannot punish them alone.”

  “So you seek a partner in vengeance?”

  “More than vengeance. If the Anchor wins the war, they will come for the rest of my people.”

  “Do you think they’ll win?”

  Athène looked to Paz. “She does.”

  Zeno raised an eyebrow. “Really?”

  “I don’t know who’ll win,” Paz said. “I used to think the Descendancy didn’t have a chance in hell. But now I’m not so sure. Chang is ruthless. The Protectorate is well-trained and outfitted. The Anchor was built to withstand a siege. Before the Church lifted the ban on anathema, you would’ve had a clear advantage, but now, who can say?”

  Athène frowned. “Anathema? What is this?”

  “Guns,” Paz explained. “They have guns now.”

  “Ah. Yes. Big guns.”

  “We don’t know what the future holds for Sophia and the Wesah,” Paz said to Zeno, “but we know it’s better than the alternative. Join with us, fight by our side, and we will win you this war.”

  Zeno swirled her wine in its glass. “And what will you do, once you’ve won me this war?”

  “We will survive,” Athène said, a boast and a veiled threat at the same time. “That is all we want.”

  “Is it, now? What a refreshingly humble aim.” She offered her glass, but only to Athène this time. “Fine. An alliance.”

  “An alliance,” Athène said, meeting the toast. They drank.

  “So when do we strike?” Paz asked.

  “Are you in a hurry?” Zeno replied.

  “Every day we wait, the Anchor will be getting stronger.”

  “Which is why I began the assault many weeks ago.” Zeno refilled all their glasses, emptying the bottle. “The first blow should arrive any day now.”

  “Our scouts say your army is still weeks away from the Anchor,” Athène said.

  “That’s true. But I sent a little surprise on ahead. And it’s my hope that you and your sisters will help me deliver another one, to Edgewise this time.”

  There was a creak at the back of the room. In a flash, Zeno drew a second gun from somewhere on her person—this one smaller and more elegant, plated in what looked to be either copper or rose gold. A girl stood halfway up the staircase, staring over the railing. She wore a tattered white nightgown, and her legs were thin as birch saplings. This had to be the one Zeno had mentioned; she didn’t look a day over eleven.

  “He dead?” she said, pointing at the body.

  “He ought to be,” Zeno replied, holstering the gun. “But you never can tell for sure until you’ve checked the pulse.”

  The girl came the rest of the way down the steps and approached the corpse. Unafraid, she pressed her fingers into the man’s thick neck. Paz could hear whispers coming from the shadowy enclave at the top of the stairwell—some unknown number of other women conferring.

  “Goddamn it!” the girl said, advancing on them as if she was thinking about throwing a punch. “What the hell are me and my sisters supposed to do now? Cusick took care of us!”

  “He took advantage of you,” Paz said.

  “And so will whoever comes along next! It’s not as if we’re gonna get to run this place just ’cause he’s gone. This is Amestown, all right? People here ain’t civilized unless it serves them to be.”

  Athène reached out and touched the girl’s arm. “What is your name?” she said.

  “My name’s go to hell.”

  “Nice to meet you, go to hell. I am Andromède, the leader of the Wesah nation.”

  “So what?”

  Athène smiled. “So tell your friends to come downstairs. I have an offer for you.”

  * * *

  The tribe traveled west for most of the month of September, moving swiftly across a landscape exhibiting its last hurrah of beauty—golden grasses, sunbaked earth, a canopy of reds and oranges threatening to become a carpet at any moment—before the cold turn dragged it unremittingly toward bleak winter. The sweet scent of decay floated on the air, and the weather became unpredictable. They rode through sun and storm, across fields still high with corn and cotton and those where the wheat and barley had been harvested weeks ago. The tribe kept to the Southern Tail, a sort of vanguard for the Sophian force behind them. Though their numbers would’ve been enough to dissuade any kind of organized opposition, they soon learned that the Anchor had put out a call for all able-bodied men in the Descendancy to come to the defense of the capital, so there was no sign of resistance—not even when they forced their way into homes to empty the larder and raid the coops and pens.

  Paz found the power intoxicating. She’d spent her whole life dreaming about bringing down the Descendancy, but even in the most improbable iterations of that dream, she’d never imagined she would find herself traversing the outerlands with the Wesah, aggressively dominating town after town in a relentless drive toward the Anchor. At the same time, Athène was developing a ruthlessness that made Paz nervous; the chieftain still refused to kill a woman—no matter how belligerent or insulting—but any man who stood in her way for more than a moment was unlikely to live to regret it.

  Only one town presented the tribe with anything more than the most cursory kind of opposition, a hamlet called Trinity, just east of the mountain range known as the Teeth. Paz had visited the place twice before, once as a spy and again as a prisoner. When the Wesah first arrived, they thought the town was abandoned. But once they reached the plaza in front of the hyperbolically ornate church, at least a hundred men burst out of the houses all around them, brandishing a pathetic collection of makeshift weapons—pitchforks and hatchets, kitchen knives and a couple of rudimentary bows. They’d been dispatched with only a handful of casualties on the Wesah side, but Athène’s anger was as great as if she’d lost a thousand. Standing at the center of a veritable pile of corpses, she’d turned her eye to the august silhouette of the church.

  “Come with me,” she said to Paz, leaving the rest of the tribe to begin ransacking the town for supplies.

  The doors were unlocked but heavy as stone, closing behind them with the finality of the grave. The marble floor drew echoing slaps from their moccasins.

  “What are we doing?” Paz said, but Athène didn’t answer. The chieftain had that hunter’s glint in her eye. Past the ambo, a door opened into a tiny office, where an old man in Honor’s robes sat at a desk, scribbling in the margins of a Filia.

  “Martin, I told you—” He broke off when he saw them, hand going instinctively to the elaborate golden annulus he wore on a chain around his neck. Athène drew her dagger.

  “There’s no need for that,” Paz said, though she knew it would make no difference. She could still remember this kind of rage; she’d felt it for years after Anton died, blaming the Descendancy for everything that had ever gone wrong in her life, but it burned only dully now. Athène was still new to her pain, drunk on it.

  The Honor backed up against the whitewashed wall of his office and drew his Filia to his chest, as if it might protect him somehow. Athène stabbed just below it and ripped the blade outward, disemboweling the man where he stood. He collapsed, curling inward like a pill bug around his precious book. Athène reached down and unclasped his necklace. It was actually made up of a series of annuli arranged around a central pin, like the orbital path of planets around the sun. She held it up and tapped one side; the rings all spun at different rates, in a mesmerizing, interweaving dance.

  “Pretty,” she said. “Would you like it?”

  Paz shook her head. “You shouldn’t have done that. He was no danger.”

  Athène’s face clouded; her eyes narrowed. For the first time in weeks, Paz remembered that she was only alive because the girl who had become Andromède saw fit to keep her alive. She backed up a step, instinctually, but Athène closed the distance b
etween them in a heartbeat. Now it was Paz up against the whitewashed wall, just beside a thick streak of vivid red blood.

  “That is true,” Athène said. “He was no danger. I am the danger.”

  There was an odd playfulness in the chieftain’s manner, but it was only at the last moment that Paz realized why. Her fear gave way to curiosity just in time, as Athène stepped into her and their lips met. After some hesitation, Paz let her hands find the curve of Athène’s bare stomach, which had an unexpected tightness to it.

  The kiss didn’t go on for very long. Athène pulled back with a sigh. “So beautiful, but no passion.”

  “Sorry,” Paz said. “I guess I only like kissing men.”

  Athène laughed. “Maybe one man in particular, yes?”

  Paz thought about kissing Clive in the dirt along the old mining road, and on the docks in Settle, and another few thousand times—wherever and whenever they could get a moment alone. It hurt to remember, yet she wouldn’t have given up those memories for anything. “I try not to think about him too much. Otherwise, I—hey, you okay?”

  Athène’s expression had turned sour; she looked as if she might be sick. “Yes,” she said, putting a hand to her mouth. “It is nothing. I am only hungry.”

  But suddenly a dozen little signs and suggestions coalesced into an explanation: Athène had been nauseated the last few mornings, and she’d claimed a couple of meals smelled rotten, even though everyone else agreed they were fine.

  “Athène, are you pregnant?”

  The chieftain swallowed hard. She looked disappointed in herself, for giving away the game. “You can tell no one. The tribe is still not trusting me. They must see me as strong.”

  “How long have you known?”

  “Only the last week am I sure.”

  “How did it happen?”

  “Just before the tooroon, Gemma and I bring a missive into our bed. Rugaru was his name. Dead now. Like her.” Athène put her hands on her stomach, as if communing with the child inside. “We would have raised her together. A strong girl. A warrior.”