Strange Fire

by Tommy Wallach

  “After you,” Burns said.

  “What?” Clive almost laughed. “I’m not going in there!”

  “Oh no? Why not?”

  “Da says places like this are the devil’s laboratory.”

  “Your da’s right. But one can’t do the Lord’s work without spending a little time with the devil.”

  Clive shook his head. “I’m sorry. I’ll just wait for you out here.”

  Without warning, Burns grabbed hold of Clive’s arm just above the elbow, his grip as tight as a manacle. “When you’re a high-and-mighty Honor like your daddy, you can be better than places like this. But you came with me tonight, and that means you’ll damn well do what I tell you to.” With that, he pulled Clive forcibly through the swinging doors of the public house.

  Inside, a man in a straw hat and no shirt was playing something slow and bawdy on a ramshackle spinet. The instrument was so busted up it looked like the wall behind it was the only thing keeping it upright, but Clive recognized the insignia of Anderson’s Music Shop carved into the lid—a gift to Amestown from the Anchor, likely on the occasion of its incorporation. Three or four men sat at the bar, drinking beer and chatting, but it was the woman that caught Clive’s attention. He’d never seen so much skin all at once (at least not outside of a bit of spying he’d done back home, around and about the public baths). Seen from the threshold of the tavern, the woman had a kind of rough beauty to her, but as Clive crossed the room, he began to make out the texture of her face, layered like a wedding cake, rouged and mascaraed toward an uncanny approximation of youth. Her dress arced like a child’s jumping rope down and across her chest. The plunging crevasse outlined there pulled at his eyes like some demonic misappropriation of Gravity.

  He didn’t have to be told what she was. Eighteen years of life was plenty of time to learn to recognize sin and money and the places they overlapped. There were women like this back at the Anchor, in spite of the Church’s best efforts. They walked the streets of the Third Quarter, pretending to be beggars.

  The men at the bar had all gone quiet when they noticed the newcomers, but the pianist was too drunk to notice much of anything, so the cheery off-kilter tonk never stopped.

  “Can I help you with something?” the bartender asked. He was an older man, silver-haired, with blunt brass rings on most of his fingers.

  “A thimble of your strongest,” Burns said.

  “Sure thing.” The bartender unstoppered a bottle and began to pour.

  “Say, I just went to visit my old pal Arthur, but his place was all boarded up.” Burns’s tone was chummy and nonchalant. “I sure hope nothing happened to him. You boys know where he’s at?”

  The men at the bar shared a series of loaded glances. “You know—” one of them began to say.

  “Let me stop you there,” Burns interrupted. “See, this ain’t my first time around the Tails, if you get my meaning, and one thing I’ve learned is that whenever someone doesn’t answer a question straightaway, he’s fixing to lie to you.”

  The man who’d started to speak stood up, knocking his chair over behind him. “You calling me a liar?”

  “Not yet. That’s my whole point.”

  “Well, my whole point is I don’t take shit from ugly Anchorite bruisers.”

  “Diego,” the bartender growled, “you shut your mouth and sit your drunk ass back down.”

  The man called Diego stared hard at Burns for a few seconds more, then grudgingly righted his chair and sat down again. He muttered something in an incomprehensible outerland patois that set the painted woman to cackling.

  “You’ll have to excuse him,” the bartender said. “Diego’s protective of Arthur. We all are.”

  “I understand. I respect blind loyalty.” Burns downed the shot on the bar; the bartender immediately refilled it. “Listen, I ain’t looking to cause trouble. I just need to visit the old man and make sure he’s keeping his promises.”

  “Art’ll have eighty summers behind him come November. Hardly knows where he is half the time.”

  “Then we won’t have a problem. You got my word on that.” Burns put out a hand, and after a moment, the bartender shook it.

  “He moved a few years ago, to a little shack on a hill about a mile south of town. Keeps a few cows and sheep, makes toys for the kiddies. Widow Moses brings his food out to him once a day, in the mornings. Just follow the main road east until it splits, then head uphill. You’ll see it.”

  “Thank you kindly.” Burns reached into his pocket and pulled out a silver shekel. He set it spinning on the bar. “Next round’s on me, gentlemen. And make it two for the lady.” He tipped his hat to her, and she blushed all the way down to the place Clive was still trying his best not to look.

  About half a mile outside of town, they found the spot where the main road sent a narrow envoy up into the hills. Ascending, Clive discerned the golden eyes of an owl glittering between the branches of a tree, just before the creature emitted a loud, eerie hoot and flew off into the night. The trail devolved into a slight browning in the grass underfoot, and before long, the silhouettes of two structures materialized out of the gloom: a small hut that was clearly the old man’s home, and a wooden lean-to for the cows a little farther up the hill. A lone heifer was still out grazing. It lowed genially at their approach.

  Burns gave a few quick pounds on the door. “Arthur Edwards!”

  A clatter from inside. “Who’s there?”

  “Sergeant Burns of the Descendancy Protectorate. Open up!”

  “Unless you wanna see me buck naked, you’ll hold your horses.” A minute later the door opened, revealing a wizened old man in a white nightshirt and cap. His eyebrows were two wild thatches of silver, and his spine arched like a blade of grass bowing in the breeze.

  “Evening, Arthur,” Burns said. “Mind if we come inside and take a quick look around?”

  “It’s the middle of the night. Can’t you come back at a reasonable hour?”

  “Afraid not. We leave town bright and early tomorrow.”

  Arthur let out a raspy sigh. “All right. Come on in.”

  Clive followed Burns into the dingy shack. The only illumination came from the wan moonlight that shone through the cabin’s small thick-paned window and the gleam of the moribund embers in the stove.

  “I can’t see for shit in here,” Burns said.

  “Patience.”

  Clive heard the groan of a drawer sliding open, then caught a whiff of bayberry. Arthur opened up the stove and lit the candle off an ember. He set it in a bronze holder nearby, casting the whole of his humble existence in a weak red glow: blankets askew on the narrow bed in the corner, a washbasin and a sliver of soap, half a loaf of bread laid out on a pinewood table next to an empty jar of honey and a sticky carving knife. On the wall opposite the bed, a collection of wicked metal tools hung from hooks above a work surface littered with springs and clasps and wood scraps.

  “What are you making here?” Burns said.

  “This and that.”

  “Be specific, Arthur.”

  “Toys, mostly. Dolls. The occasional flute. Take a look. I’ve got nothing to hide.” He reached up to a shelf and pulled down an unfinished wooden box. There was a crank on the side. “Go ahead.” Burns took the box and began turning the crank. A bit of halting music played, tinkling like raindrops on a tin roof, and then a little man leaped out of the top. He wore a golden robe, just like the Archbishop, and his face was screwed up into a ridiculous grimace.

  “It’s not as good as what I used to make,” Arthur said. “The fingers don’t listen anymore. I have pains like you wouldn’t believe.”

  Burns put the box down. “And your old pursuits?”

  There was a flash of apprehension in the old man’s rheumy eyes. “I’m done with all that,” he said quietly.

  “Glad to hear it.” A pregnant pause. “Well, I suppose we’ll be going then. Would you mind if I lit my candle off yours, for the journey back?”

 
“Not at all.”

  Burns pulled a fresh beeswax candle out of his jacket pocket and lit it. Strange, Clive thought. The sergeant had been happy enough to walk in the dark on the way here.

  Arthur escorted them back outside.

  “See you on the next tour,” Burns said.

  The old man allowed himself a creaky death rattle of a laugh. “Let the Daughter take me before then, eh?”

  The door closed behind them, and Burns immediately cut across the pasture toward the cowshed. Clive jogged to catch up. Inside the wooden lean-to, two big cows were lying peacefully on the dirt floor. The air was warm, heavy with the smell of hay and slow-moving animals. One of the cows raised her head, but soon decided the guests were of no consequence and put it right back down again. There was a stall for a horse at the back of the room, empty but for a big mound of hay.

  “What are we doing out here?” Clive asked.

  The sergeant pointed at the hay. “Move that pile for me,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “You see any horses in here?”

  “There’s cows.”

  “And there’s a whole field just outside, city boy. Now don’t make me ask again.”

  Clive set to work with a rusty pitchfork he found leaning up against the wall. The cows watched the flying fodder with indifference, but they startled when the pitchfork clanged against metal. Clive knelt down and swept away the last of the hay. A brass ring was set in the middle of a wooden trapdoor.

  He looked up at Burns, unable to hide his admiration. “How did you know?”

  “Because I’m a misanthrope. Open ’er up.”

  Clive pulled at the brass ring. Beneath the door, shallow steps descended into a cleanly hewn square of darkness.

  “A man his age couldn’t dig this,” Clive said. “He must’ve had help.”

  “A fine observation.”

  “So what’s down there?”

  “Only one way to find out.” Burns handed the candle to Clive. “I’ll be right behind you.”

  Clive was far from excited at the prospect of plunging blindly into the abyss, but he didn’t want to look cowardly in front of Burns. Besides, he couldn’t help but be curious about what the old man was hiding.

  He counted steps: twelve altogether. At the bottom, he found himself in a room about twice the size of the cowshed up above, and full of strange objects. Some were recognizable from the smithies and woodshops of the Anchor—the clamp, the lathe, the crucible—but Clive had no names for the rest of it. Tiny strips of metal had been melted onto other pieces of metal in mysterious configurations. Copper had been hammered into thread-like strands, which were spooled up or set running from one enigmatic contraption to another. Glass had been blown into strange shapes, and the resulting vessels held various colored liquids.

  “What is this place?” he asked.

  “Arthur would call it a workshop,” Burns said. “Your father would call it a den of sin. They’d both be right.” Clive frowned, still uncertain. “It’s the anathema, Clivey! In the flesh!”

  Of course. The room literally reeked of things that should not be known. Burns handed Clive one of the mysterious glass globes. It was affixed to a heavy piece of wood striated with thin bands of metal. One of those copper threads spiraled around within the globe, as if tracing the path of a trapped and frantic firefly. “Hold on to this,” he said. “We’ll bring it back to the Anchor with us, as evidence.”

  “What about the rest of it?”

  Burns grinned. “Well, that’s the fun part.” The sergeant got his hands underneath the nearest table, and letting out a sound halfway between and a groan and a roar, he turned the whole thing over. Glass shattered. Metal snapped. There was a hissing sound as one of the infernal liquids was absorbed into the earth, and the sickening smell intensified. The sergeant had an animal joy in his eyes as he reduced the room to fragments and splinters and particles, and Clive had to remind himself that this was a godly, sanctioned destruction. In the space of a minute, Burns had turned the workshop into a ruin.

  “That should do it,” he said, still panting from the effort. “Let’s go.”

  Clive was all too happy to get back to the surface. He took the steps two at a time. “I can’t believe that old man did all of this,” he said. “He seemed so frail.”

  “Plenty of frail men have done plenty worse.”

  “I know. But that doesn’t mean—”

  As Clive reached the top step, he felt a sudden shooting pain in his shoulder. He cried out and swatted at his back. His first thought was that he’d been bitten by a spider, only this hurt so much more than a bite should. . . .

  Arthur backed away into the corner of the cowshed, his expression an unholy mixture of terror and wrath. He held the carving knife in his palsied right hand, its blade dripping black with blood. And now Clive could feel the warm wetness trickling down his spine and into his pants.

  “You monsters,” Arthur snarled.

  “Oh, it’s only you,” Burns said. “I was worried those yokels from the inn had followed us.” He looked at Clive. “Did the old man poke you with his little pecker? We’ll make him pay for that, won’t we?”

  “Look out!” Clive said. Arthur was on the attack again, heading for Burns this time. But the sergeant saw it coming from a mile away, and delivered a hard fist straight to the old man’s nose.

  Arthur went down onto his knees, blood pouring from his nostrils. “Oh, you fools,” he murmured. “You poor, blind fools.”

  “We aren’t the criminals here, Arthur,” Burns said.

  “Your leaders are the criminals!” the old man spat back. “Your religion is the criminal! Your dogma and your cant have frozen humanity at a—”

  Burns kicked Arthur in the stomach, interrupting the tirade. “If we’re so terrible, then why did we show you mercy the first time we discovered your little hobby?”

  “I spit on your mercy,” Arthur said, hawking bloody saliva onto Burns’s shoe.

  Burns placed that same shoe on the old man’s neck. “You gave us your word, Arthur. You lied to your God, and your sovereign protector, and for what? For this?” He grabbed the object Clive had carried up from the workshop. “Do you even know what this is?”

  The old man laughed. “Of course I know. I made it with my own hands.”

  “So what is it?”

  “Nothing so extraordinary. Your precious Epistem could make one himself if he wanted to. But I suppose he enjoys keeping you all in the dark.”

  “You didn’t answer my question.”

  “You wouldn’t understand.”

  Burns put more weight on the old man’s neck. “Try me.”

  “Fine! It’s a conductive filament of copper built into a glass container to aid in the radiation of light.”

  “Wrong,” Burns said. “It’s a weapon.”

  Clive looked away as soon as he realized what was about to happen. There was a sickening crunch as brittle bone cracked and caved, followed by a vast and terrible silence. Clive felt his eyes drawn back to the old man against his conscious will, as if it were his duty to bear witness to the horror.

  A stillness beyond stillness. Eyes open and unblinking. The object was sunk so deeply into the old man’s skull, it seemed to have become a part of him.

  Clive made the sign of the annulus on his chest, drawing the circle from clavicle to navel and back, as he spoke the Trinity Prayer under his breath.

  What had they done?

  5. Clover

  CLOVER WOKE WITH A TERRIBLE pounding in his head, and realized it had to be the famous “shinefog” that adults were always going on about. An interesting physiological phenomenon: undoubtedly the headache was related to dehydration, but how could drinking so much fluid make someone dehydrated? His reasoning failed him after that, obliterated by the pain; he felt as if a fissure had opened up in the middle of his brain, and now the two halves were attempting to separate themselves entirely. He sat up with a groan. Clive was still fast asleep on th
e pallet next to him, which was odd; usually Clover was the later to rise.

  He dressed quietly and left the tent. A warm breeze was blowing, hard enough to loose the seeds from nearby dandelions. He caught one in his hands like a firefly, peeking at it through the gap before setting it free again. Though he wouldn’t dare tell his father, the little balls of fluff always reminded him of the Filia story about Onan, whom God slew for spilling his seed on the ground. Strange that flowers could get away with things men could not.

  The rest of the ministry was already awake, eating breakfast out behind the big wagon. The mornings after gatherings were always a culinary bounty. Parishioners often brought gifts of food to the service, and last night had been no exception: jars of honey and raspberry preserves, plump blueberries and sweet cream, even a small wheel of goat’s milk cheese. Clover jammed a bit of everything into his bowl, spooning only a few dollops of thick porridge over the top.

  They’d begin the trip back west later today, by way of the Southern Tail this time. There were still months of travel ahead of them, but Clover always enjoyed the feeling of cresting the figurative hill and gazing down on the return journey. Finally you could allow yourself to fantasize about the creature comforts of home without it being a sort of torture. Most of the ministry would be looking forward to warm beds and cozy fireplaces and big dinners, but Clover was most excited about returning to the Library. He’d been rereading the same five books since they left the Anchor, and by now he could recite whole passages from memory—a talent that impressed exactly no one.

  “Where’s your brother?” Flora asked, just as Clover sat down next to her on the grass. Her pale cheeks were gory with smeared fruit.

  “Sleeping.”

  “After he went to bed all early last night? What a lazybones.”

  Clover frowned. “He went to bed early?”

  “He disappeared just after you did,” Honor Hamill said. “We figured he’d earned the break, seeing as it was his birthday and all.”

  But Clover could remember waking up sometime during the night—probably another side effect of the shine—and noticing that his brother wasn’t there. It had been dead silent outside the tent, which meant the gathering had ended. So where had Clive been?