by Stacey Berg
Echo waited.
“I’ve been thinking . . . You know, when I first heard you describe the city . . . I guess I thought it would be like the Preserve, only bigger. But it’s so strange here.” She pulled a branch closer to inspect a dead twig at the end. “Dalto’s told me how the Church used to arrange the most advantageous pairings among the cityens, and he’ll explain more as soon as the splitter’s in place. After that . . .” The twig broke with a snap; the branch sprang back into place. “Maybe it will be time to figure out how I might get home.”
Back to the Preserve. That request would bring its own considerations: whether Khyn could reveal too much now, and what the Church might gain from access to the Preserve, against how much it might cost. What Khyn wanted—what Echo had promised—would count for little, in the end, only what would serve. One way or another, the Patri would have to decide. And Echo remembered the look on the vekteres’ faces, when they had come for her after the Preservers made a similar calculation.
Perhaps the same thought occurred to Khyn. “You’ll help me, won’t you?” she asked, searching Echo’s face.
Echo pictured Stigir, taking off the crown.
“Yes,” she said.
Khyn snapped another twig. “They’re bringing the charge splitter online this afternoon.”
The sun felt too hot all at once; sweat trickled beneath Echo’s shirt. She and Khyn crossed the compound in separate silences.
The priests sat in their orderly rank at the panels, hands busy with switches and dials, Exey standing a little apart, Dalto giving clipped orders while the machines hummed their soft counterpoint. The familiar sounds seemed only to deepen the silence. Against it Khyn’s footsteps tapped a syncopated rhythm. Exey turned their way. “So nice to have someone who gives you warning. Hunters are always sneaking up on people. And the rest of them are just as bad. These priest fellows are happy to let me work in their shop—and what a shop it is!—but they certainly have a knack for not answering a question. Shows you what kind of trader I am, giving away my baubles for free.” He touched a hand to his hair, but it was tied back with a bit of string. “Ah, well, lost that one too. I’ll make another, when I get a chance . . .”
He had always talked too much when he was nervous. The anxiety was contagious. Echo’s belly churned as she left him and Khyn alone. The charge splitter made a gleaming ornament amidst the dull patina of the ancient wiring. New connections ran from it to the boards, and in the other direction back towards the altar. The Saint herself was lost in shadow.
Dalto had stopped giving orders. The pattern on his board pulsed steadily, blue and green and yellow. He watched, face a mask of hunterlike concentration. Echo peered over his shoulder, trying to understand what he saw. It is for the Saint’s good, she told herself; but her heart was pounding. “All is in order,” Dalto said at last. “The circuit is stable in isolation. Now we must see if it is compatible with the Saint. Toler, confirm your boards.”
The priest on the far right nodded. “Ready, Dalto.”
“Radnish?”
“Ready.”
“Stepan?”
The young priest in the middle did not answer immediately. The orange and yellow light from his panel reflected like firelight across his high cheekbones.
“Stepan, confirm your readiness.”
“A moment, Dalto.” His thin fingers made the barest adjustment to a dial, and the panel’s colors cooled. “I confirm my board.”
“Merick?”
“My board is ready, Dalto.”
“Very well.” Dalto took a deep breath. Echo’s chest tightened.
And then, for an instant, she almost had it: the pattern flickering as the priests tuned their panels, the balance, the unspoken language of the Saint’s mind as she lay, not sleeping at all, but casting her awareness all across the city she loved—
Do you see me?
“Switch the circuit over.”
The alarm whooped as power surged.
“Quickly!” Dalto ordered. “Activate the splitter!”
The pattern flew apart. What had been a single note divided, like the wind whistling through wires, sliding up into a grating dissonance that made Echo’s whole body clench. Exey turned wide-eyed to Khyn. “What’s wrong?” he whispered urgently. “It’s not supposed to hurt her!” She put a finger to her lips, shushing him.
Stepan’s board flared into orange, then red. “I have it,” Stepan said, tuning a dial before Dalto could speak. “I have it.” The red faded, and the machine hum softened, the dissonance fading.
Dalto traced a pattern on his own panel. “Your board is steady,” he confirmed. “Radnish, decrease your input. Merick, turn yours up two clicks.”
“Yes, Dalto,” the priests chorused.
Then it was quiet for a long time while the priests worked, Dalto occasionally calling instructions, but softly, and the fluctuations in the panels no worse than the usual flickers. Echo’s breathing slowed in tandem with the pattern, though something in her gut still tensed. Finally Dalto’s shoulders lifted and fell, and he pushed his chair back from his panel. Damp patches darkened his robes under his arms. “It is working,” he said. “Thank the Saint. Her output is stable, and we can divide it among the circuits as needed.” He shook his head to himself, his pale face creasing in a half-disbelieving smile at the board he watched. Khyn stood tugging her braid, lips quirked to one side in an odd expression of relief touched by sadness.
Exey glanced towards the altar, biting his lip.
Echo drew him that way. The Saint lay still in the shadows; the machines droned steadily. Echo imagined something heavy about the quiet, a muffled quality that had not been there before the splitter. That is as it should be, she told herself, but a weight seemed to sit on her heart too. “Look, Exey, she is at peace.”
The fabricator stood, head bowed, pinching the bridge of his nose. Echo hesitated, then moved back a respectful distance from his grief. She tried not to look, but her eyes kept stealing to the Saint. It was foolish, she knew, as if she watched someone who had been ill fall into a restful sleep, and kept checking needlessly to see if she still breathed. But the Saint’s face was so distant, empty . . . And then Exey gave a stifled cry, and fled from the sanctuary. “Let him go,” Dalto said. “He has given us what we need. We can control the Saint.”
Echo told herself that she was glad.
The next morning the Patri came to see the splitter. The look in Jozef’s eye reminded Echo of the time she had watched him in his laboratory, deftly maneuvering tiny instruments to harvest the eggs that would become the next batches of hunters. The old Patri had made him let her look through his magnifier. The small nubbin of flesh beneath the lenses became the whole world when she stared through the eyepiece. Perhaps Jozef saw everything that way. Now, as he studied the Saint, his fingers twitched, as if they manipulated instruments still.
It was the only part of her that mattered, Echo had said to herself, watching them dissect Ela’s ovaries.
She had not believed it even then.
Chapter 17
The splitter’s installation came not a moment too soon. The city trembled above the precipice. First a shop in the Ward burned, which might have been an accident, or revenge. Then another body appeared on the fringes between the claves; it belonged to a man from North known to have unsavory associations in other claves. The projectile wound in his chest could not have been an accident. And the hunters were no closer to eliminating the threat. They checked every smithy, but found no sign of weapons being forged. “You might wouldn’t,” Tren told them when they stopped in North. “Know you’re coming, a smith could as hide anything he wanted. But look around my shop, all as you think fit.”
“We have no reason to suspect you,” Nyree said.
“Look anyway, esteemed hunter. I won’t have the other claves say as North got special treatment.” They found nothing, of course.
Now it was a market day, when all the cityens would rub up against each othe
r. That might spark any manner of trouble. The hunters planned to patrol in enough force to discourage trouble, yet not so much that their presence itself provoked it. The juveniles would be there too, to give the appearance of an exercise and not a threat.
But Fury was missing. No one had seen her, Indine reported, since last evening’s meal, when her penance for killing the cityen had ended. “If she’s run off, all the better for her.”
Echo, fighting a surge of panic, thought of all the accidents that could happen, even inside the Church compound; of the time she had seen a young hunter kill another, near this very spot, in a training exercise gone wrong. And Fury had made no friends among the juveniles . . . “She wouldn’t just run.”
“Why not?” Indine asked sensibly.
“Because—” All at once Echo knew where to look. She ran for the priests’ domicile without explanation. There, in an empty room near the laboratories, she found the boy sounding out the letters from a print, Fury curled up at his side, listening with her eyes aglow. “Then the base pairs match up in two comple—comple—”
“Complementary,” Echo said from the doorway. Both children jumped; a juvenile hunter would have heard her. “Come Fury. Your batch is assembling to help patrol the market. You are late.”
“I want t’hear about the denas,” the girl objected.
“Another time. You must fulfill your duty.”
“Go on,” the boy said. “Don’t want no more trouble with them. Send you away for good.”
“Who told you that?” Indine, it must have been. She was only looking for an excuse.
He only shrugged. Fury hugged him, so hard he squeaked, then punched him lightly on the arm. “More later,” she ordered, and scurried past Echo up the steps.
The boy’s face crooked into a worried grin as he watched her go, but it turned hard again when he looked at Echo. “What d’you want?” he asked when she did not follow Fury away.
“Nothing,” she almost answered, as she had in the desert when she had first found the children, but it was no more true now than it had been then. “What do they call you here?” she asked instead.
“Andrik.”
“That’s a cityen’s name. Who gave it to you, the priests?” Her heart sank at the thought that he fit in no better than Fury.
“My patr’. Fore he died.”
All the time in the desert, she had never asked. It was the one thing Lia had been truly angry with her about. “I’m sorry,” she said, to the boy, to the memory.
“Won’t matter when you go ’way again.”
Now she understood. Twice she had abandoned them, once in the desert, then again here. “I’m sorry,” she said again. “Andrik. If I could have—” But she could have, and they both knew it. That she had chosen duty made it no less a choice.
He flipped the print open again, eyes fixing on the page. The stony silence followed her up the stairs and out into the yard. For once she did not seek comfort from the Saint.
The sky over the market square shone metallic gray. The priests predicted worsening wind, but this morning there was nothing more than a steady breeze, welcome in the heat. Echo crouched in concealment on a high fragment of cemented stone, all that remained of a building that had fallen to ruin long ago. The market was neutral territory, sacrosanct among the three claves, but tension stretched the city tight.
Despite the violence, no one appeared to have stayed home. The square was packed. Vendors called out, enticing cityens to try their wares; buyers haggled with sellers, enjoying the sport as much as the exchange of chits and merchandise. Carts were loaded with small sacks of grain; whatever shortages Kennit and the councilors feared, it wasn’t stopping ordinary cityens from trading their portions for goods they wanted more right now. Echo wondered if they’d regret those trades in the hungry days of winter, before the vernal rains brought the next flush of green to the fields. Likely not: the long view had always been the Church’s domain.
A twist of smoke, carrying the delicious smell of roasted bovine, rose from a group of wheeled metal boxes set apart from the more flammable parts of market. The customers clustered there were fewer, and better dressed. Bovine meat remained a delicacy; most of the animals that grazed in the fields by the stads were kept for milk and the hard cheese that made Khyn wrinkle her nose. Across the square, long wires were strung with a variety of the skirts and trousers and shirts that cityens wore. The vendors who dealt in polymer had set their stalls just beyond, providing rolls of combed-fiber cloth, various thicknesses of thread, and other goods that those who made their own clothing would need. At the very end of that row a woman had set out a small tray of cutting tools, the reclaimed metal gleaming in the sun.
Tools meant a smithy. Or a shop. Echo searched among the Benders’ stalls for Exey’s cart. From this height she should be able to recognize the sun-charging panels he had mounted on top. But either he wasn’t here, or he no longer had the panels; in any event, she saw no sign of him, nor had she since he’d fled the sanctuary after the splitter was installed. The priests were asking about him; apparently his estimation of his skills was not entirely exaggerated. She stifled a flash of anger. His pain was a poor excuse to deprive the Saint of a resource. She would find him again.
The morning wore on without incident. She was just starting to think the hunters’ precautions were wasted when she saw it: an eddy in the crowd around the food stalls, where the steady flow of cityens was becoming turbulent in one corner. An argument, perhaps haggling gone too far; as she watched, a hand shading her eyes, the turbulence spread.
She leapt down from her perch, angling towards the trouble. She didn’t run; a panic in the market could turn into a deadly stampede. But already the voice of the crowd was changing. The cheerful babble developed an anxious overtone, and cityens left off their purchases to look around in puzzlement as more and more of their fellows pushed their way down the narrow aisles, away from whatever was going on. They weren’t running either, and they hadn’t yet decided to abandon the baskets and heavy bags that were impeding their progress; but the sense of flight from danger grew more acute. Echo slipped upstream against the flow, until she met a wall of cityens, mostly young men, many of them stinking of ferm. They were not fleeing but pushing and shoving each other to get a better view. Most likely they had nothing to do with whatever was happening up ahead, but they were already beginning to glower at each other and curse. She had to put an end to this quickly.
“I told you as to get away from here!” A burly man had a club out from behind his cart and was waving it in a practiced arc back and forth across his body. A few pommes had spilled from his cart; Echo smelled the fruity sweetness where one had split open on the stone. Memory stabbed at her, another market, a pomme shared with Lia—she took a quick breath to dispel it and focused on the men in front of her. “I’m not selling to any the likes of you,” the vendor told someone. “I don’t care how many chits as you offer. It’ll never be enough.” Beside him, a few of his fellow traders, similarly armed, nodded agreement.
“Market’s neutral ground,” the object of his ire said. That man had a larger group of friends, but they were empty-handed. “You got no right to refuse my custom.”
“Is there a problem, cityens?” Echo stepped forward with a suddenness that made them all take notice. She stood feet spread and shoulders square, hand resting lightly on the projtrodes at her belt. She hoped these men hadn’t yet got into their ferm. If she had to use her weapon, she could trigger the panic she sought to prevent.
The crowd eased back a bit, but the trader only pointed with his club. “Wardmen thieves as want to buy my grain? I’m thinking not. They’ve already taken as more’n their share.”
“That’s right, Rolt,” one of his comrades said. “Remember the grain count.”
“There was a misunderstanding,” Echo said, trying to keep her voice light. “The Church sorted it out.”
“And thanks for that,” the Norther said. “But I’m still not sell
ing to them.”
“He’s got no right,” the Wardman complained. “Look.” Something flashed in his palm. Echo had the projtrodes out even faster, pointed at his chest. Gasps and exclamations sounded all around. The man’s hands flew up in panic; gold and copper scattered at his feet. “It’s only chits!” he cried.
Taking a deep breath, she lowered the trodes. “Here is what I want,” she said, loud enough for everyone to hear. “You cityens”—she turned a hard hunter stare on the restive observers, in case they thought they’d escaped her attention—“clear this area. You Wardmen can find another place to make your purchase. The rest of you pack up your stalls. This part of market is closed.”
“How’s that as fair?” the vendor asked, outraged. “We aren’t the ones as started the trouble.”
“Then do not be the ones to make it worse.”
“See?” the Wardman said, sneering. He stooped to gather his chits back into his pouch, snatching up one of the fallen pommes as well. “Should’ve just sold me my grain like I asked.”
“Pay him for the pomme, cityen,” Echo said.
“It was going to waste,” the Wardman complained, but he tossed a bit of copper to the vendor, who caught it with a practiced hand. Then he held it up between thumb and forefingers so everyone could see.
“Ward’s chit? I wouldn’t take that rebel trash no matter as who was paying.” He spat on it and flipped the disc, spittle and all, right into the Wardman’s face.
The Wardman leapt forward. Echo caught him with a foot behind the ankle and a quick tug on his sleeve that tumbled him to the ground. The Norther was already scrambling over his cart, club raised; she stripped it from him as she knocked him back with a flat hand to the chest. He clutched himself, eyes wide with surprise, then stumbled into his cart, falling heavily. The crowd, which had been trickling away down the main aisle, paused with renewed interest.