by Andrew Post
“What do we do?” Kylie-Nae whispered as Anoushka swiveled the periscope and triggered a lens to watch the soldiers in the near distance reach a large canvas tent. They ducked inside, likely to have a word with their commander. There’d be no chitchat this time, no niceties, no please and thank you. They’d be dragged from Joan, clapped in chains, and sent in a barred wagon to the nearest high-ranked Committeeman who’d lay a sentence on them so grand it’d take a week to list every one of its elaborate cruelties. The Law of Neutrality was a serious thing.
“Get us cranked,” Anoushka said when the tent flap flung wide and the two gate watchers came charging with guns raised, leading their commander and no fewer than ten other blackcoats, who struggled to get their boots and helmets on. A shot rang out. Peter’s horse reared. Teetee barked.
Another shot snuck in through the narrowing view slot on Anoushka’s side. For a heart-stopping second, the bullet bounced around within Joan, sparking off the cannon breach, the floor, the ceiling before tumbling dead to the floor, having hit none of them. Anoushka brought the holler tube close.
“Peter, go!”
Peter charged, taking his mare up and over the gate. Teetee scrambled through the gaps in the fence, leaving tufts of hair snagged on the barbed wire. Once Joan was cranked up and crawling, Anoushka pushed them through the gate, crushing it under her treads.
Behind, Ruprecht ducked on his caravan’s high seat, snapping the reins and yelling, “Go! Go!”
When they’d gotten about a mile down the sandy track, Anoushka heard Ruprecht yelling something—muted, over the tank’s noise and crunching earth. She clicked to rear view. Over Ruprecht’s caravan, on the hill behind, she could see silhouettes slide up and over the horizon. Dozens of blackcoats.
The overcast sky painted everything stark and hid the dark-uniformed soldiers. Their dust cloud grew quickly, swelling and nearing. Another shot came, pinging against Joan’s rear end. She couldn’t hear Ruprecht’s screams but could see his red face howling. He was still ducking in the caravan’s bench, fighting with the reins even as his terrified horses threatened to pull him off the road.
“Full speed,” Anoushka shouted and threw the brake off completely. Ahead, Peter moved aside, the tank and the protagonist raced neck and neck. Ruprecht was dragging behind. His horses kept trying to pull in different directions, away from the shot-at caravan, and one wheel was dipping off the road. He would’ve flipped if not for some quick tugging on the reins to slam the two lifted wheels back onto the road.
“Kylie,” Anoushka said, shoving her periscope up, “take the rope and hitch Ruprecht to us.”
Kylie-Nae eyed the neat coil of rope on the floor where Anoushka had pointed but still screwed up her face. “Do what?”
“We’re gonna lose him.”
Kylie-Nae clearly wanted to argue further—perhaps even point out that losing the bard might not be such a bad thing—but hooked the rope onto her shoulder, climbed the ladder, and banged open the topside hatch. In the periscope, Anoushka watched her cannon master tie one hoop, hook it onto Joan’s cannon barrel, walk the remaining coil, and add a second quick-tied hoop to the rear.
“Cut loose,” she shouted to Ruprecht behind.
Through the dust-fogged periscope mirrors, Anoushka watched Ruprecht rifle through his riding cloak’s pockets. “I don’t have a knife,” he cried.
Without hesitation, Kylie-Nae drew. Feet splayed, fighting for steadiness on a rollicking tank, she aimed and cracked off one shot between the horses. There was a snap of metal giving, and the harnesses split. The horses did as they’d been trying to do—bolted in two different directions—and immediately the caravan’s velocity fell away.
The distance between the tank and the caravan was growing by the second.
The blackcoats drew in, firing freely. Orange streaks cut past Kylie-Nae on either side, inches from her head. She craned back, screamed out from the effort, and launched the lasso through the air. It caught the caravan’s hitch. The rope twanged tight. There was a momentary lull in Joan’s speed as the caravan’s weight was taken on. Ruprecht was nearly flung over the back of his caravan as it was yanked along.
Anoushka released the brake. With a lot of slack in the rope, the caravan bounced around. She sighted a bend ahead and slowed to ensure Ruprecht wouldn’t be swung off the side.
Peter reined back long enough to take the rope in one hand, riding between the caravan and tank, to keep it steady. He downed one of the blackcoat’s horses with his scattergun, the man disappearing in a bloom of dust as the beast upended, legs flailing. Zuther and Russell pedaled, both sounding like broken squeeze-boxes from the effort. Anoushka cheered them on, said they were doing great and to keep at it; they’d nearly lost them. She kept Joan’s brake free, tweaking the yoke with each little curve in the path. The clangs of bullets hitting them slowed, until only occasional gunfire behind was heard but nothing striking its mark. The Scorch neared, the clouds growing dark overhead. They slid under them, into the gloom and the chill doubling within another mile. The soldiers had retreated. Even if the squad was wanted for breaking the Law of Neutrality, going into the Scorch would be punishment enough.
* * *
“Well, here we go,” Anoushka said.
Birdsong ended. Thunder took its place. For the next 200 miles, it’d be nothing but this dead gray waste. Anoushka tried not to think about it like that. Just another stretch. Keep that distant beacon well tended and bright.
Shadows moved on delay. Lift something and there it was, in silhouette, for a moment too long. Replace it, and it took a moment for it to fade in, your arm’s dark double moving behind a second late.
On the first night, when the log in the fire popped, everyone around it flinched and laughed at their own jumpiness. By the fifth night, though everyone still jumped, no one laughed.
The place felt unfinished. Like a miserable god’s incomplete project, shoved away in shame to rot.
Their compasses endlessly spun, useless here. All they could do to remain on course was keep the Burned Mountain on their left and the gulf on their right.
A week later, they rumbled into the heart.
More contorted trees. Except these were ablaze with a soundless fire; flames like something from the grayscale world of the moving pictures. Curling gray and black, guttering in the frigid breeze to stretch before returning high while the gale moved on to stir more grit and black snow.
A craggy hunk of rock the size of a cow floated a foot off the ground. Anoushka made Joan give it a wide berth.
Ruprecht, in his towed-along caravan, rode in the passenger box, shutters drawn and locked.
Ahead, Teetee, clinging steadfast to Peter’s side, was nearly getting stepped on by his master’s horse.
By the eighth day, Burned Mountain was directly to their left. Its summit pierced the dark clouds. Its entirety couldn’t be taken in straight on. Burning Mountain was more accurate; small fires were still alive here and there on its chest, embers flaring and winking bright. It would never cool, never heal. It was still suffering as if the Error had happened only minutes ago. It had been burning like that the last time Anoushka had passed through here, though she’d seen it from safely behind the windowpane of a locomotive. They’d loaded Joan up and passed through fast. The conductors often kept a cask of camphor for occasions like this, to throw onto the coal and really speed up the journey.
* * *
Anoushka slammed on the brakes to make Ruprecht run into the back of them. Immediately afterward, quickly reversing, she crushed him where he still sat on his caravan. He screamed, briefly. Shrill, like a woman. And as Peter, ahead, was turning around in shock at what she’d done, she loosed the cannon. Burned gristle—Peter, Teetee, his horse—rained down on Joan.
Waking, Anoushka didn’t sit up with a gasp but with a laugh that’d accompanied her up out of the nightmare.
In the gloom, a line of figures stood abreast, shoulder to shoulder, only indistinct smudges in the da
rk. She didn’t need to count them to know it was fifty-three orcs and the seventeen newer kills—the gobs from Breakshale. Her tally. One moved, shuffling the ashy grit to scramble near.
“I heard Markus. Anoushka, I heard Markus.” The dying fire lit Ruprecht’s face. He had tears in his eyes. “He’s out here.”
Anoushka watched her tally, behind him, fade to nothing. “Go back to bed, Ruprecht,” she said and rolled over. She pulled her blankets over her head, as she had as a child when she was afraid. The dark didn’t move, then.
“Godsdammit, listen to me.” Ruprecht fumbled to find her under the covers. She pushed him back. “Please get up, everyone,” he said, stumbling back. “Get up. We have to go help him.”
When he put his hands on Kylie-Nae, she roughly shoved him away. “It’s not real.” She was quick to retrieve her water-colored photo of Molly and put it back on her pillow, where she had been keeping it lately while she slept.
Russell woke with a start, shooting up in his bedroll. “I’m sorry, Tara,” he shouted, his voice returning to him, echoing in this place despite there being only open gray wasteland around them and nothing to, logically, bounce his voice back to him.
“Only a dream,” Anoushka told Ruprecht and Russell. “Any other time, on the train, I’d drink so much coffee to stay awake for the three days it’d take to pass through. But we’re just gonna have to deal with it, okay? Remember, it’s not real.”
Ruprecht dropped to his knees near the fire. “We should’ve gone back in there to get him. Gods know what the gobs did to his body.” He wrung his hat in his hands. “He was . . . good. He was a good boy.”
Sounding out of the dark, among the silently forever-burning trees, a thwack, followed by another. Everyone kicked off blankets and readied their weapons. Anoushka led, squinting into the shifting shadows. Her own, below her, on delay—followed her.
They found Peter in a nearby copse of the twisted black trees. He was naked. His shortened, torn member was shiny with scar tissue. The muscles across his back and shoulders corded and bunched with the stripes of further scars as he crashed his ax down, over and over, on the pile of splintered wood.
Whimpering, Teetee stood watching, helpless.
“She was my wife,” Peter said, pulping the tree’s limbs one by one. After reducing it to the trunk, he tossed the ax aside, scraped yellow sap onto his hands, and spread it across his face.
“Peter?” Kylie-Nae said.
He swung about, and scrambled to find his scattergun among his discarded pieces of armor.
“It’s not real. It’s okay.”
He clicked back the scattergun’s hammer, the flint cartridge ready to spark the pan. He held the barrel under his chin, his thumb on the trigger near his waist. He looked at them all, Kylie-Nae nearest, reaching out, begging him to put the gun down.
“I won’t go back there,” he said.
“We’re not asking you to,” Kylie-Nae said. “Please, just listen to us.” She turned back to Anoushka, Russell, Ruprecht, and Zuther. “Let me handle it, okay?”
Taking Ruprecht by the arm—because it appeared he was considering trying his own hand at talking sense into Peter—Anoushka walked the bard back to his caravan and saw him in.
Back at the fire, Russell had rolled back over, covering his head with his blankets. Zuther remained sitting up, gun in his lap, looking out toward the sound of Kylie-Nae talking to Peter.
“Leave it,” Anoushka said.
“Leave what?” said Zuther.
“Just let her.” Once Zuther had put his gun away and lain back, Anoushka said to both Zuther and Russell, knowing the dwarf wasn’t asleep by how he was breathing under his thick blankets, “Day and night, from here. We don’t stop until we’re out of this shit.”
The next morning, Peter had started down the road before they had even gotten Joan wound.
By late afternoon, they caught up to him where he’d planned the midday stop. He was sitting on a rock, resting his face in raw, skinned palms. “How much farther?” was all he said, behind sap-sticky fingers.
* * *
A warm afternoon, uncharacteristic of the Scorch. With some snow melting away, the ash-colored plains resurfaced. As the suns set, what had melted froze, creating a shining expanse like a shadowpane around them. Dueling skies, both dark.
At the yoke, Anoushka thought about Erik. But her imagination drifted into a waking nightmare, quickly, beyond her control—like punishment for daring to think of nice things. She saw herself straddling him, with him inside her. His face was blue, eyes rolled back—she had her hands around his neck. But she continued to grind, even so. As his blue face went slack and she felt his heart give, as if this was what she sought, her back went straight and she screamed with red ecstasy.
On the tenth day’s midday break, Anoushka took Lodi’s shadowpane out again. Tugging off its supple leather sleeve, she kept her face turned halfway away while first gazing into it, peering sidelong from the corner of her eye. After confirming no horrific creature was leering out, she gazed full-on, allowing her eyes to latch with the black glass. Almost involuntarily. Trying not to blink, figuring that’s how it worked having seen Lodi use it, Anoushka hoped some part of her would suddenly activate as it had back at the church. Maybe it would allow her to see where Lyle Eichelberger was hiding. And if so, she pleaded it wasn’t New Kambleburg.
Her reflection wasn’t on a delay as it had been before. And it was remarkably clearer, as if since she’d seen it last, the scuffs and scratches in its surface had mended. Anoushka tried again to remember what Lodi had said about the Gods’ Error, its creation. There it was. Far off, lit milky by the moon and stars. On a map, you could see how the Scorch splashed directly out from it easterly, as if the little collection of twisted stone summits had collectively gotten ill—aiming for Silt, but had only poisoned everything between, the Mountain breaking its crushing wave to let the toxic darkness pitifully settle at its feet. No answers materialized in the glass. Only her desperate, wan reflection staring back.
* * *
The next day, they finally crossed back into the unfucked world. Oh, to see the suns again! They faced two days of freezing rain coming down in fits, but any conditions other than that of the Scorch were welcome.
They took a two-day break and slept through most of it. They finished off the last jars of stewed tomatoes and corn. Their appetites had returned. Conversation started back up in drips and drabs. Zuther and Russell played Usurp with their well-thumbed deck. Kylie-Nae found a hot spring, and they took turns bathing. They all still felt raw—Peter, in particular, was still keeping his distance—but nothing had truly been lost. Nothing tangible, anyway. No one spoke on it, but Anoushka could see each of them still felt the Scorch’s lingering touch.
* * *
The squad pulled on coats and jackets and hoods and doubled their gloves. Anoushka remained in her shirtsleeves, offering her Queen Cannonball jacket to Kylie-Nae. To Anoushka, it was only a bit nippy; one tick in the pro column for being north-born, at least.
Ahead, a weak column of smoke reached to meet the gray sky. They braked, readied guns.
Cranking up the side armor, Anoushka saw the smoldering base of a watchtower, reduced from twenty stories high to ten feet of cinder, one of the seaside bastions making up Matchstick Row. Whoever thought painting pine towers to look like stone from a distance may’ve saved themselves some coin, but the bluff, evidently, had been called.
“They’ve come inland,” Anoushka said. No bodies of the guards were around. Probably taken by the orcs, but not as prisoners since they don’t do that. “Stay on guard. We’ll camp here and hit it early tomorrow.”
Towing the caravan behind them, they moved Joan inside what remained of the watchtower’s base to camouflage her from the road. This way, they might—might—get the jump on the orcs should they come by on patrol during the night.
Without comment, Ruprecht accepted her decision of where to stop for the night. He got down o
ff his caravan bench and closed himself inside the passenger box. A moment later, a trickle of smoke came from the small stove chimney.
After tying his horse’s reins to the caravan, Peter thudded out into the woods, either for a piss or to sit by his own fire and sleep as he had been lately—in a temporary shelter from fallen limbs and dead leaves. He’d always been a quiet man but was quieter since the Scorch. Kylie-Nae never said what they shared out there in the gnarled copse that night. Anoushka felt it wasn’t her place to ask.
The snow that’d settled earlier in the day made it difficult to start a fire. It was nearly midnight before they’d finished the stew, using the last of the acquisitioned canned vegetables. After dinner, they sat with the fire crackling between them. No sing-alongs. Heeding Lodi’s cautioning, they left the radio off. Russell volunteered first watch and, in three pairs of trousers and every coat the others could lend, the dwarf waddled to the road, smoking and dancing from foot to foot to keep his blood moving.
“I’d about give my ear for a pinch of moss,” Kylie-Nae said.
“I’d give both my ears for another cask of ale,” Zuther snorted. “Say, remember that swill at the place in Gallingrad? Guy was practically giving it away. We drank the night away on like four julas.”
“Fair trade, I thought,” Anoushka said. “We about shit ourselves inside out the next day.”
The three of them laughed but tried to keep it quiet. New Kambleburg was close, over the hill, and sound carried over snow about as well as it did over water.
“Be right back.” Kylie-Nae stood, drew up her hood, and headed into the woods.
Anoushka and Zuther remained at the fire. She watched him survey the dent of Kylie-Nae’s rear end in the snow between them. Looking over his shoulder, he traced the cannon master’s trail of prints into the dark beyond the firelight’s reach. She was out there. And so was Peter. And Zuther didn’t care for that.
“She can take care of herself, Zee.”
“I know.” He stared into his cup, swirling his coffee. “I wish I could tell her, you know, once and for all,” he said after a long while. “No matter what she says back, I’ll have finally said it, got it out there, in her ears, you know? Not in here,” he said, poking the side of his head, “driving me crazy. Aren’t I a little old to be getting fuckin’ butterflies as if I’m some lovesick little kid? I’m godsdamned thirty-eight.”
