Regeneration

by Stacey Berg

  “To assess the threat.”

  “To see the place she made sound so beautiful.”

  There was a little silence. Echo fixed her gaze on the cityens milling about below. Then Marin smiled. “Khyn makes the Preserve sound that way as well. I hope for a chance to evaluate her accuracy one day myself. Now, though, I should return you to your quarters. You are not accustomed to our heat, and it would not further relations among us if you fell from the wall.”

  Taavi’s laugh was less forced this time, and it held something of relief. She disappeared down the ladder with Marin. Indine said, “The Preservers are not hunters, but neither are they fools.”

  “I was aware of that from the beginning,” Echo said.

  “Perhaps you did not cover your trail as well as you thought.” Indine only appeared to be focused on the crowd.

  “I did not lead them here.” But now Echo wondered. Perhaps somehow, unbeknownst to herself, she had wished it even then. A small mistake, an unconscious clue . . . “No,” she said aloud.

  “Yet they managed to find us.”

  Echo shifted to take the weight off her weak ankle, more habit than necessity by now. “The priests failed to turn off the beacon until after I arrived. Perhaps—”

  “The beacon was not strong enough to travel so far. You yourself told us that.”

  “Then I don’t know.” The sun, glinting off the turning dish atop the mast, sparked in her eye. The after-image left a dark spot in her vision. She rubbed her lid, then stopped, looking up again.

  The dish. The huge surge, that day in the sanctuary, and Dalto’s voice: One last bleed-off through the dish. Saints, she is strong.

  Echo’s whole body went cold despite the heat. She stared, unseeing, at the faceless cityens below. She barely noticed the crowd parting, or the cityens who marched right up to the wall. She remembered herself pleading, and the Patri’s denial, and then the Saint flaring, beyond control.

  Sending the signal to the Preservers.

  For a dizzy moment the shock nearly sent Echo tumbling off the platform. She clutched the rail to catch her balance. The Saint had brought the Preservers, because Echo wished for it. She had refused the Patri’s order, yet answered Echo’s plea.

  Saints. Saints.

  “What is she up to?” Echo drew a breath, but Indine was pointing down at the crowd.

  A cityen had clambered up on some high point and was shouting and gesticulating at the crowd. She succeeded in capturing the attention of those nearby; they quieted enough for her words to rise over the other voices and up to the hunters on the wall. “Strangers as ought not be here,” she shouted, and the quiet spread, more of the cityens turning to listen. “Who knows as what they want?”

  “We don’t want them!” someone called back, and then another shouted, “No.” Cityens nearby gathered around the woman in an irregular circle that grew as others, attracted by the shouting, pushed closer to see what they were missing. One tried to climb up beside the woman. Echo saw now what she stood on: a piece of plank balanced precariously across two piles of stone. The woman wobbled as a man leapt onto the plank. “Send them back!” he yelled, and others took it up until it grew into an unsynchronized chant. “Send them back. Send them back.”

  Echo’s belly knotted. “We must disperse them.”

  Indine scowled down at the crowd as if they were unruly juveniles. “Let them shout themselves hoarse. They will tire soon enough.”

  “Indine—”

  “It is only words,” Brit said, but her voice held a trace of unease.

  Echo had seen what words could do. And she had another fear as well. “The Preservers will hear.”

  “So? They already know they are not equally welcomed by all.” Indine was not referring only to cityens. “It is just as well. It will give them incentive to keep their end of the bargain.”

  “How will hostility encourage Stigir to work with the Saint?”

  “I was speaking of their departure after.”

  By now the crowd had packed closer, trying to hear what all the yelling was about. Some were shouting themselves, others trying to quiet them. Within the concentric circles around the woman, little knots developed as smaller groups took up the argument.

  Another bunch shoved their way towards the center. They were yelling too, words barely intelligible from here. “Don’t speak for us,” Echo made out, then there was something indistinct, then “Northers.” Now the groups were coalescing into sides, and the shouting took on an ominous tone.

  One of the newcomers approached the pair already on the plank. As he tried to climb up himself, someone grabbed him and pulled him back, with a shout of, “Get the scum off of there!” The man fell, disappearing from view amidst those standing all around. His friends tried to pull him up, and the chanting broke apart into angry argument as the cityens nearest pushed and shoved each other. Someone bumped against the makeshift platform, and the woman leading the protest fell too.

  A man bent to help her, and someone pushed him away. He staggered, then turned back, arm swinging wildly. In another moment it would be a brawl.

  Echo flung herself down the ladder, palms burning on the rails. Indine, cursing, followed after, and Brit behind her. They were out the gate and wading through the crowd before the cityens saw them coming. It was not the organized force of the rebellion; the cityens nearest pulled back, dragging their comrades with them, giving way in a panicked retreat that separated the factions as the hunters made for the fight at the crowd’s core.

  “Get back,” Echo ordered, wrestling two men apart. Brit sent another man to the ground and Indine pinned a fourth, and then it was over, the punches subsiding to pushes and shoves, and then to angry glares and muttering as Echo hopped up onto the platform. “Go home, all of you,” she ordered, pitching her voice to carry to the fringes of the crowd. “Make no more foolish trouble.”

  “Wardmen scum as started it,” one more foolish than the others called, but his friends cuffed him to sensible silence.

  “Go,” Echo said again. By now more hunters had come through the gate, arraying themselves along the wall in a show of force that did not need to engage the cityens to discourage any further thought of violence. The fringes of the crowd peeled back, cityens starting away down the road, and the center began to unwind.

  But then another voice, cooler, rose in a question. “What about the strangers, then?” And some who had been departing paused, waiting to hear the answer.

  “They are the Patri’s welcome guests,” Echo said, pulse spiking anew. “And you have disgraced him in their eyes. Now go, all of you, and thank the Saint that no worse harm has come of this.” The cityens looked at one another, and the hunters, and decided not to take their chances.

  But Echo was wrong, as it turned out. For as the cityens withdrew, a murmur started up again near where she stood, and cityens were staring at something on the ground. It was the woman who had started the chanting, lying still where she had fallen, trampled by the crowd.

  Hunters brought the councilors to the windowless room at the end of the hall. The Patri looked calm enough, leaning back in his chair; but his thumbs tapped a rapid rhythm. The councilors were nearly as disorderly as the cityens had been. “How could such a thing happen?” Kennit cried. He was still sweating from the long walk from North, and the hard faces of the hunters weren’t helping. His shirt was damp at the neck, and the white was yellowing beneath the arms. Despite all that, he managed to look the Patri in the eye. “I have word from the Northers who were there. Sira didn’t do anything as to deserve it. She was just talking, and not even against the Church, not as I hear.”

  “She was speaking against the Preservers,” Echo said out of turn. The Patri flicked a glance at her, but she continued, “They are the Patri’s guests. She was wrong to stir the crowd against them.”

  Kennit swung on her. “Always you as in the middle when something happens to my people. Trampled, that’s as they say. Where were you when the crowd was
getting out of hand? And then it’s as no one would have panicked if hunters hadn’t attacked.”

  “It was cityens who started the trouble,” the Patri said, voice hard. “And I want no more of it. Is there anyone here who does not understand?”

  “That woman didn’t speak for us,” Tralene said. “If these strangers offer help—” She looked down for a moment, then lifted her face again with a determined look. “I heard the one told Luida they had more grain than they know what to do with, and there’s never a hungry child as in the winter. If that’s so, there’s no cityen should be complaining.”

  “I don’t see as they brought us any gifts,” Kennit said. “And even if they did—it’s just as this, Patri. Everything that’s happened . . . the people are nervous enough. It’s not so long since the rebellion, and so many things as different now to how they used to be. One stranger, that we could as much as see, but so many, and all of them here . . . and some of them were like as hunters, I saw that on the road.”

  “They are not hunters,” Echo said.

  Teller, looked at her, lip curling in disdain. “We heard it was you that brought them. That’s extra reason to send them on their way. There’s nothing you do ends up to have a right reason.”

  “You see?” Kennit said. “The next thing will happen is some fool Wardman gets it in his head as he knows better than the Church, and it all starts again. North is loyal, Patri, you know that; but there’s those in the city as don’t know to listen, to you or me or anyone. What they might do, as they get frightened, or too much ferm . . . Send the strangers away, Patri, I beg you.”

  His argument held sense. Echo saw it suddenly from the cityens’ point of view: the memory fresh of a time they had turned against each other, and some of them against the Church; the terror of the old Saint’s death, that might have taken them all over the edge with it; a new Saint, and a new Patri, who reasoned with them even when they wished to be commanded. They must be feeling the ground shift as they walked.

  And now, in the shape of one aircar with half a dozen passengers, the dawning sense that they might have many more things to fear than they had known.

  Echo watched the Patri, scarcely breathing. Jozef said nothing, his hands for once still. Don’t listen, she thought. Please. The Saint needs the Preservers. Through the thick walls she heard the wind; the lights dimmed fractionally, then held.

  The Patri stood abruptly. “I will not debate you. Go back to your claves, all of you, and tell your cityens this: trust the Church as you should have done from the beginning. Your understanding is not required, in this matter, only your obedience. Do not forget the lesson of the mill.” His hard gaze traveled from councilor to councilor, and one by one they dropped their eyes, even, at last, Teller.

  That should have been the end of it. But as the hunters were escorting the councilors to the gate, Khyn and Stigir emerged from the sanctuary not twenty paces away. Kennit stepped towards them. “You are not welcome here,” he called, loud enough for all to hear. “Go back to your own city, where you’re as wanted.”

  Echo jerked him back, nearly off his feet. He clutched his arm, lips compressed in pain; but the fear in his eyes was not for her, who deserved it, but the Preservers, who could do him no harm at all. She dragged him to the gate and shoved him stumbling out.

  When she turned back, Stigir was watching, and by his look his thoughts were dark.

  “I want Taavi and Jole back at the aircar,” Stigir said to the Patri. His crossed arms were the only outward sign of his anger, but Echo had no doubt what he would do if the Patri did not agree.

  Jozef knew too; his pale eyes were cool but he only said, “It is an unnecessary precaution, but if it is a condition for finishing your work . . .”

  “I don’t like leaving you here without us,” Jole objected, looking darkly on the hunters.

  “Make the aircar ready,” Stigir said, clapping him on the shoulder. “I will finish as quickly as I can, and we will all get away from this place. I expect,” he added for Nyree, “that you will maintain a guard around the aircar, in case any of your cityens attempt to confront my people there.”

  “They do not cross the forcewall,” Nyree said, “but if it will make you feel more comfortable, we will be happy to watch over you.” She managed somehow to convey both indifference to Stigir’s concern and contempt for his weakness in the same few words. Stigir nodded curtly and left without saying any more.

  A few cityens returned to the wall that day, but the hunters dispersed them, as they turned away those who came to visit the nuns. So easily erased, the small gains made after the rebellion. Echo wondered what the councilors had told their claves. Kennit’s fear and Teller’s anger made a bad combination, more volatile than a pure strain of either; and she knew from bitter experience that a small spark was all it took when the cityens were already primed for violence. Even Patri Vanyi, farseeing as he had been, had nearly lost the city. If the cityens had any idea how close Jozef allowed the strangers to the heart of the Church . . .

  But it was Echo who had brought them here.

  The sanctuary offered no respite from her worries. Though the priests sat at their panels as always, lights flickering and machines humming softly, there was unaccustomed activity by the altar. A low pallet, like the stewards’ couches in the vault, had been set not far away, and lengths of cable, not yet connected, ran from there back to the priests’ main panels, where Dalto worked. Stigir bent again above the Saint, not touching, but his eyes traced every detail with an intimacy that made the shroud too thin a cover. Gem stood nearby, watching it all, whatever she thought well hidden behind the featureless hunter mask. Tools and extra wire were strewn across the bench where Echo usually sat; she turned away after a minute, back to the panels.

  “How is the work progressing?” Echo asked Dalto.

  The priest started, so engrossed in his work that he hadn’t noticed her approach. Lights chased each other in an intricate pattern across the panel. “Well enough. We will create an effect somewhat like the charge splitter, only permanent.” A strange expression flashed across Dalto’s face, sorrow mixed with satisfaction. It was gone before Echo could be sure she had seen it, but it left her shaken.

  She studied the lights, willing herself to understand the patterns. Hunters knew the basics of a body’s working, enough to treat their own wounds and maintain their usefulness in an emergency; she supposed that the panels were something like that to a priest. The blinking there could be a kind of pulse, and the lines connecting one area to another the blood vessels, or the nerves, the net that carried the Saint’s awareness through the crown, beyond the spire and out across the city . . . She saw the gap Dalto had pointed out to Khyn that first day, the incompleteness where a vital piece was missing. The board blurred, and she closed her eyes; when she opened them, Stigir was tapping a finger on the panel.

  “This discontinuity in the circuit, that’s why you get the surges. If the interface works, I’ll be able to tune the flow just long enough to close it,” Stigir said.

  Dalto nodded. “That will keep the systems in perfect isolation.”

  “Will the interface process be dangerous?” Echo asked, seeing not the small dark space in the pattern but a cliff’s edge, and a hand scrabbling desperately for any grip to stop the fall . . .

  “I’m sure my head will ache for days,” Stigir said with a rueful smile. Echo felt a stab of guilt. She had not spared the slightest thought for his safety, or his courage. “But other than that I don’t think so. This is close enough to what a steward does. With Dalto keeping the power to a minimum, and Khyn ready to extract me from the link if there’s any problem, I should be safe. Reasonably,” he added.

  It was worth any risk, any risk at all. And he would be in the interface with the Saint. Echo’s eyes blurred again. Before she could stop herself she whispered, “Will you be able to hear her thoughts?”

  “It’s only circuitry on our side,” Dalto said. She was glad that in the dimness he
could not see the shame that flooded her face. But Gem was watching too, and there was plenty of light for a hunter to see. The line formed again between Gem’s brows, and she studied Echo for a long moment before she finally turned away.

  Echo dreamed of the cliff again that night, and woke long before dawn. She could not seek comfort in the sanctuary, center of her greatest fears. Instead she found a place in the yard out of the wind, where she could see the spire. She tucked up her knees and leaned her back against the stone as she used to long ago, before she knew anything of panels and circuitry, before the hopes and schemes that brought the Preservers here—before Lia—and watched the pulsing spire turn. If Stigir’s interface worked, there would be no more surges. The Saint would be saved. And she would preserve the Church, and the Church, the city.

  That was all that mattered.

  The gap in the circuit closed. The Saint safe, in perfect isolation.

  But nothing would ever close the gap in Echo’s heart.

  The winds steadily increased, putting everyone on edge. Hunters were dispatched to each clave, carrying the priests’ warning that this storm looked to be a bad one, and helping to oversee the preparations. “Everyone sensible knows to be off the streets when it hits,” they reported on their return. “Some of the fools in the fringes seem to think ferm will protect them, but otherwise it’s the best we can expect.”

  Echo worked with the others around the compound, securing loose objects, covering equipment as best they could to protect against the blowing sand. The Church had withstood many windstorms; the hewn stone buildings and underground warrens were proof against the worst weather. But it wasn’t only structure they had to worry about. A weak connection brought a wire down, the end sparking and snapping in the middle of the yard. It only took a moment for the power to reroute, eliminating the danger. “Thank the Saint,” a priest said; but Echo thought of the strain to keep all the city systems running, and her anxiety grew more acute.