by Stacey Berg
“Now you’re breaking into my brother’s house?”
She moved aside to let him see the woman behind her. “Perhaps”—she searched for the name; Mari, it came to her from long ago. A time with Lia. She shook herself. “Perhaps Mari would like to take the child.”
The baby squalled in protest as Mari drew it away. Exey’s brother poked his head out of the back room at the noise; his eyes met Mari’s and the worried faces turned to her as one. Before they could ask Exey said, “Give us a few minutes, if you don’t mind. It’s old business, nothing to worry about. Just cover your ears if you hear screaming.” His weak smile could not have reassured them, but after a moment they withdrew. The curtain did nothing to mute the baby’s cries.
“I see you made another hairclasp.”
“There’s nothing to them.” Exey’s face contracted. “I took the design from a print Lia gave me.”
Echo remembered the way Lia set prints aside for Exey, mechanical designs or simply pretty things she thought he’d like. She had given one of his ornaments to Echo once, a gold ring for her ear. Echo had lost it during the rebellion, a tiny failure that stung unexpectedly now. “What was the drawing you made in the tower?”
“Who knows? I draw all the time up there, I told you that before. Probably just some random design, something to sell at market. You know me, always fooling with my baubles.”
“You were designing weapons. Why?”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about. Hardly surprising, though, you always think the worst—”
“You know who’s making them. Tell me.” She took a step towards him, looked at the curtain, stopped. “I’ll do anything,” she said.
His face changed, and so did his voice. “Let’s go outside.”
He wasn’t stupid enough to try to run from her, but she stood close to him anyway, backing him against the habitation’s rough wall. The wind plucked a few strands of his hair free of the new clasp. “Tell me,” she demanded.
“You don’t know what you’re asking.” His eyes flickered towards the door.
“Who?”
His voice shook. “I don’t know. I swear, I don’t know. It was only ever messages. I never saw anyone. But they knew where my brother and Mari lived, and they said . . . I only left some prints, and a key I copied from the mill . . .”
“Saints, Exey! Have you learned nothing? Why didn’t you come to the Church? We would have protected you. I would have.”
“Like you protected her?”
She jerked her fist aside at the last second, splintering the doorframe instead of his bones. Someone inside cried out at the noise. “A hunter is dead! If the Church does not find the source of the weapons, what happens to the Ward will make the mill look like nothing.”
“The Ward deserves it!” She stared at him dumbfounded. “Don’t you see? It’s all their fault. If they hadn’t started talking about change, goading the cityens to rebel . . . None of this had to happen! The Church would never have sent you to the Ward. You would never have found Lia. And she would still—she would still be— Saints. Saints.” Exey slid to the ground, back against the wall. His face dropped into his hands. “Lia. I’ve made a terrible mistake.”
Echo squatted by him. “Who is making the weapons?”
“North,” he whispered. “It’s North. They just wanted to make it look like the Ward.”
The mill, that she had destroyed with her own hands. The Saint’s anguish, the order she had refused. And the surge that followed, and the Patri’s threats. Echo clasped her hands together before they could close on Exey’s throat. “You’re passing weapon designs to North?”
“No! Yes, but it’s not what you think. I swear by—”
“Don’t,” she hissed. “Don’t you dare.”
“You have to believe me. What I’ve given them—the weapons wouldn’t work. Not any better than the old kind, anyway. What’s the difference? They have them already. Everyone does . . .” His head rolled slowly back and forth. “Lia will never forgive me.”
She hauled him to his feet. “Stop your nonsense and listen to me. Go to the Church now. Tell them what you just told me.”
“They’ll kill me,” he wept.
He deserved it. That’s what Nyree would say. For Marin alone . . . “Ask for Gem. Gem, no one else. Tell her everything. I swear to you, Exey—if you fail the Saint again, I will kill you myself.”
Swirling dust and debris triggered the glowlights in random bursts that ruined her night vision, more troublesome than if it had merely been dark. At least she did not have to worry about the lights giving warning of her approach. By now everyone would be ignoring them. She saw no one else on the road to North, but that meant little. The same conditions that made it easy for her to cross the city unnoticed would favor others as well.
She arrived at the smithy at last. It was a squat building, sensible stone against the risk of fire, all but the shutters and the wooden door that creaked and rattled in its frame. Unsurprisingly, it was locked. She broke the handle with a hard jerk, the noise scarcely audible above the din of the storm. Inside the big main room it was warm, the fire banked in the forge. A pot sat atop the still-hot metal; absurdly, the sweet smell of slow-cooking grain made her mouth water. Tren slept on a pallet in a side room. Some sense warned him as she looked in; he stirred, reaching for a long metal bar that lay beside him. She evaded its swing easily and left the smith sleeping more soundly.
Then she tore the smithy systematically to pieces. It took an hour, and when she was done she had emptied every drawer, upended every box, checked every square of the floor for a false chamber. She even dumped out the container of grain he kept near the forge for his meals.
She found nothing.
She stood amidst the debris, feeling a gray sinking in her gut. If she accused North without evidence, it only showed that Kennit was right about her. Exey’s word would be nothing to the Church; he had sided with the Ward once, and they would assume that he still did. And whatever he said about North, that he was involved with weapons at all—it was just further proof that the Wardmen must be punished.
And Jozef would make the Saint do it.
She thought quickly. Even with the storm, someone would show up at the smithy eventually. No one must suspect that a hunter had done this damage. Echo scattered the wreckage into a more disorderly pattern, then, after a moment’s consideration, pocketed Tren’s pouch of gold chits, small but heavy. He’d been doing well enough for himself. When she was finished, she peered through the shutters. It must be close to dawn, but the sky was still an opaque black. Tren would be sleeping late, thanks to her. She moved the pot off the forge so his breakfast wouldn’t set the place on fire before he woke. That wasn’t the kind of thing a thief would do, but the smith would be too upset to notice. He would need a good meal, to face the mess she was leaving. And he was obviously a man who enjoyed his grain: a pile of empty sacks lay folded in the corner, waiting to be taken back to the storehouse for refilling.
The storehouse. She stood for a moment, eyeing the sacks. They were the small kind that the grain was portioned into when an individual was allotted grain from storage, or bought extra at the market. A bit of red thread had been sewn into a corner of each, perhaps to mark them for Tren. She rubbed the fabric between her fingers, feeling the roughness of the weave. And something else, small and hard and flat, stuck in the corner. A bit of grain, maybe.
She flipped the bag inside out. The small object fell to the floor, where it landed with a faint clink. Heart pounding, she reached for it, held it close to the forge to see better. The light from the banked coals gave its sharp edges a reddish cast, like fresh blood staining a predator’s teeth.
What she held was a tiny gear.
Echo broke a window out of the back of the storehouse with the first heavy thing that came to her hand. Tren’s pouch of chits, as it happened. The room she climbed into was full of old bones. She pulled herself up a ladder of ribs and came face to face wi
th a giant skull, teeth the size of her fingers bristling in a deadly grin. She slid quickly down the other side. She had little time; when the alarm was raised at the smithy, the Northers might think to check elsewhere, just in case Tren wasn’t the victim of a random thief. If her guess was right, the storehouse would be high on their list.
She ignored the piles of grain sacks the juveniles had worked so hard to count. If the weapons were hidden among those, she had no hope of finding them, not by herself in what remained of the night. The front area, where the individual allocations were made. She had to hope the weapons were hidden there.
Hope won’t make it happen or not happen, she had told Lia once long ago, when Echo still judged her a cityen, soft. Before Lia had become her world. Pain lanced through her. She stopped where she stood, wasting a precious moment to catch her breath. Then she set about her task.
She had to admire the Northers’ foresight. Cityens, nervous about having enough grain to last through the storm, would have been picking up their allotments of grain right up until the weather forced the storehouse to close. Yet fresh bags were stacked in neat piles in the front room, ready to pass out as soon as the wind abated enough. She held her lightstick to the sacks. Plain, mostly, ones for sale; but some were marked as paid already, with a scrap of colored thread sewn through.
She pawed through the piles until she found red. Five sacks, far too much grain for one man’s breakfast, even Tren’s. She hefted them one by one, heart in her throat. If she was wrong about this . . .
The fourth sack was heavier than the others. She ripped the drawstring open, spilling grain across the floor like sand. Her hand dug through the bag, spilling more, and then closed around something hard.
Slowly she drew the weapon out. It fit in her hand with loathsome ease. The twinned cylinders gleamed dully in her lightstick’s glow. She set it down, barrel aimed away from her, and dug out two more just like it. Then she tore open the fifth sack, dumping its contents onto the floor with a ringing clang. Hundreds of small metal balls poured out and chased each other around the floor.
Here was her evidence.
She should feel triumph, North’s deception uncovered, the Ward shown innocent. The Saint, safe from being asked to punish her own people unjustly. Mostly Echo just felt sick. Cityens used these on each other. On hunters, like her.
One of the balls had rolled into the socket of a discarded skull. It stared up at her, a blind metal eye. The world ends over and over, it told her. The Fall happened to us. It will happen to you. The Church could find every weapon, punish everyone who touched one, but no one could make that instinct to use them go away. Men had been like that long before the Fall. Echo had told Lia as much, that long ago day.
But: We don’t have to be like that forever, Lia had answered.
She swept the weapons back into the empty sack.
The lights came on, blinding her.
“Echo Hunter 367,” a familiar voice said out of the glare. “What do you have there?”
Echo lifted the sack. “Slowly!” Nyree ordered. Gem must have told her. Amidst everything else, Echo felt the unexpected pang of something lost, almost before she knew she had it. “Set it down.”
Echo did, with a metallic clank. And as her eyes adjusted to the brightness, she saw Nyree in the doorway, Kennit behind her, flanked by Brit and Cara. And she saw the weapons the hunters held. “Saints, Nyree!”
The woman’s teeth gleamed in the bright light. “There is no sense in wasting a resource. But you haven’t answered my question.”
“The answer is obvious. I have found the cityens’ weapons. The cache we were looking for. Tren is making them in his shop. North planned it all along; they only made it look like the Ward.”
“She’s a liar!” Kennit said.
“It seems likely,” Nyree agreed, but Brit held Kennit’s arm.
“Look for yourself,” Echo said. “You can see what’s happening. Tren makes the weapons, then they hide them in with the grain. You were right: they can move them anywhere in the city that way. But it’s North, not Ward, that’s doing it.” She paused, another realization dawning. “They planted the weapons in the mill. The dead man—they killed him to be sure we would investigate.” And she had fallen for their trick. “We thought exactly what they wanted us to.”
“She’s the one as been planting weapons,” Kennit said. Sweat glistened on his throat; the prominence there worked. “She’s been favoring the Wardmen all this time.”
“Finish the search here,” Echo said. “I must report to the Patri at once.”
Nyree’s weapon did not waver. “I do not take orders from you, Echo Hunter 367.”
“Then listen to me and think, Nyree. We do not know how many of North are armed, or what they plan to do. They have already tricked the Patri into moving against the Ward. It will be a terrible mistake.”
“You not only know better than me, you wish to correct the Patri as well? Your arrogance is breathtaking.”
“Nyree, please. This is not about our differences. There is danger to the city. Maybe even to the Church. We must tell the Patri. Let him decide.”
“He will want to know about the weapons,” Brit said. Then, as Nyree stood stubbornly silent, she added, “Regardless of who planted them.”
Nyree’s face was hard. “I concur.”
Brit, still holding Kennit’s arm, gestured at Echo with her weapon. “No,” Nyree said. “You stay here. Maintain the watch, in case the Wardmen try something under cover of the storm. I will take her myself.”
“What about this man?” Brit asked.
Nyree cast Kennit a withering glance. “The Patri will decide what to do with him. With both of them.”
The sky was the yellowing green of an old bruise, the rising sun’s disk blurred, edges sanded away by the wind-borne grains. They found the Patri in the sanctuary, studying the panels. Gem was there too, holding Exey off to one side. Her grip on his arm looked as likely to be for support as to keep him under control; the fabricator’s face was pale, his eyes wide and frightened. His gaze kept darting to the altar, where Khyn had threaded more cable to the wire circlet while Dalto made adjustments. The three of them barely acknowledged the odd gathering over by the panels, before returning to their work with feverish concentration.
“Is there evidence either way?” the Patri asked when Nyree finished her report.
“No,” Nyree said. “I have been following her all night.” Echo cast a shamed look at Gem, who answered with a wry quirk of her lips. “There were weapons in the storehouse, but Echo could have placed them there another time. The fabricator is known to have sympathized with the Ward. The two of them could be working together to cast the blame on North.”
“You must believe me, Patri,” Echo urged. “The Ward is not at fault. It was always North.”
“We found no weapons the first time we searched the metalsmith’s shop,” Nyree said.
Another piece fell into place. “Tren invited us to search there.”
“Yes. Because he knew he was innocent.”
“No,” Echo said slowly. “Exey told us to look in the smithies. But the other cityens did not know yet that we were looking for newly made weapons. Old ones could have come from anywhere. Tren wanted us to search his shop so we wouldn’t look there again. And the weapons I found last night were new.”
“You still could have planted them,” Nyree said.
Echo shook her head in mute frustration. All the things she was guilty of, and Nyree pursued the one that she was not. “Why would I?” she asked.
No, that was not the question. Why would North? Why would they make weapons at all? The Ward was effectively disarmed, and North were hardly rebels . . . The answer tried to shape itself, a handhold on the truth. She could not grasp it. The work at the altar distracted her; the glinting wire and the occasional clink of metal sounded unnatural in the shadowy silence where the Preservers prepared the changes that would save the Saint.
It’s t
ime for everything to change, Lia had said, here, in this room, on that altar. She had meant the city, and the Church. Even the change that was forced on her, when she ascended as the Saint.
That was the answer. Change.
Echo bit back the sound that came to her lips.
Kennit, hearing, pointed a shaking finger at her. “Patri, I’ve said it all along. She as hates North. She was with the Ward from the beginning.” His eyes darted to Stigir and Khyn at the altar. “And strangers now, here as in the Church itself, ones as she brought . . . It’s as I feared. It’s all as I feared.”
“I don’t have time for this trouble now,” the Patri said. “Take them both away.”
“No,” Echo said. Now she realized Kennit was telling the truth. But not about her.
Nyree’s hand closed hard on her arm. Her voice tightened with anger. “You have disobeyed the Patri for the last time. Even if you are innocent of planting the weapons—and we will find out your part in that—you are guilty of far worse. It is not only your actions that betray the Church. It is your heart. You know nothing of duty. You do not serve the Church. You are no hunter.” Her lip curled in familiar disdain. “Only give your order, Patri, and I will cast her out myself.”
Once the words would have shaken Echo to her very core. Somewhere inside the fear still clawed at her, but distantly. If they cast her out—she had to make them understand. But not for herself. The Saint preserved the city. All of it: Church and Ward and Bend and North. Hunters and priests and cityens. Even this cityen who stood in the sanctuary, his face twisted, fury and terror darkening his eyes. And now Echo knew why he wore that look.
“It is as you feared,” she said to Kennit. There was a softness in her voice she did not recognize. “But your fear is not of me. It is not of the Preservers either. You’ve told us all along, but we failed to hear. Patri, don’t you see? He fears the change.”