Strange Fire

by Tommy Wallach

  “What sort of things do you forage for?” Burns said. His tone was only a couple of shades shy of outright interrogation, but Harry didn’t seem to mind.

  “Oh, there’s all kinds of valuable stuff, if you know what to look for. I scout for this carpenter out in Amestown, name of Timothy Horsefall. Just a few miles from this cabin, there’s a grove of pine you could make a whole town out of. And there are firs farther up north that two grown men couldn’t get their arms around. Then there’s the fruit trees, of course. The apples aren’t good eating, but they make a mean cider. . . .”

  Harry kept nattering on as they tore through the bowl of cherries. At some point, Clive noticed his father trying to catch his eye. Honor Hamill made a subtle gesture with his head, toward the place where the rear wall of the cabin met the thatched roof. The gray tube they’d seen outside ran from the ceiling to somewhere behind the wardrobe.

  “So tell me about yourselves,” Harry eventually said, after having described just about every plant that grew within fifty miles of the cottage. “You’re really from the Anchor?”

  “Born and raised,” Honor Hamill said. “But now I’m in charge of a traveling ministry. We bring the word of the Lord to those who are ready to hear it.”

  Somewhere close by, a wolf howled; Clive shivered.

  “Hey,” Harry said, snapping his fingers. “I just remembered I’ve got a bit of shine up in here somewhere. I was saving it for a rainy day. You boys interested in a drink?”

  “Always,” Burns said.

  Clive watched to see if Harry would go for the wardrobe, but the bottle was in one of the smaller cabinets. “I don’t have any glasses, so we’ll have to do it the old-fashioned way. To the Daughter.” He raised the bottle in a one-man toast before taking a deep draft. “That’s how you Descendancy folks put it, isn’t it?”

  “Sure is,” Eddie said, taking a swig and passing the bottle on. Clive’s father took only a tiny sip (An Honor can drink in the spirit of fellowship, but never to the point of impairment), so Clive did the same. The shine was surprisingly smooth, almost as good as the stuff they made in the Anchor.

  “So, Harry,” Burns said, “what do you do when you’re not out here hunting?”

  Harry grinned. “You sure have a lot of questions, Mr. Burns.”

  Burns grinned right back. “I’ve got a curious personality. And it’s Sergeant Burns.”

  For some reason, Clive found himself listening intently for another wolf call—they seldom sounded all alone like that—and maybe that was why he was the first to hear the clicking. It was a bit like the noise certain insects made, only more mechanical, and a little too loud.

  “Anybody else hear that?” he said.

  “Hear what?” Honor Hamill asked.

  “Something’s clicking.”

  “It’s just the bugs,” Harry said. “I tell ya, this place is nothing but spiders and skeeters—”

  “Quiet!” Burns said. They were all listening now. Sure enough, the sound was coming from the back of the room. Only before any of them could get up to investigate, Harry let out a loud sigh.

  “I suppose I should just show you,” he said. He walked leisurely over to the wardrobe and pulled the doors open, revealing a small device made of metal and wood. A long brass arm rose and fell at irregular intervals, bouncing against a bronze pad mounted in the base: that was where the clicking sound came from.

  “Anathema,” Clive said.

  “Sure is.” Burns crinkled up his nose. “And I recognize the stench in here too. It’s Blood of the Father.”

  The Filia said the Lord had set the Blood running through the branches of the Great Tree, warning Aleph and Eva never to drink of it. But the devil had tempted Eva, and she had succumbed, and so humanity was banished from Eden. After the garden was destroyed, the Blood spread into all the veins of the Earth. A second time the Lord warned humanity not to drink of it, and a second time he was ignored. So he sent his Daughter to cleanse the Earth, and humanity was reborn from the seed of Noach—the only man who’d obeyed God’s admonition.

  “Blood of the Father,” Harry said, and smiled. “I’d forgotten that’s what you all call it.”

  “You extract it here?” Honor Hamill asked.

  “Sure do. Pump’s in the basement. I’m out here to fix it when it breaks down, then collect the juice and take it where it needs to go.”

  Clive suddenly remembered what Clover had overheard at the gathering, and the last pieces of the puzzle came together. Blood of the Father was said to burn with a supernatural intensity; in the Gospel of Jiehae, it was referred to as strange fire. “Your name’s really Riley, isn’t it?” he said.

  Their host acknowledged the truth with a resounding smack of the knee. “Hot damn, kid! How’d you work that out?”

  Clive ignored the question. “You were responsible for some sort of fire near Amestown.”

  “You heard about that?” Riley chuckled. “See, I was carrying a jug over to Arthur, as a personal favor. I got a late start, and he was asleep when I got there. I didn’t want to wake him, so I figured I’d camp out for the night just outside his house. But like a damn fool, I set the jug down too close to the fire. One spark got in it and fwup.” Riley threw his hands in the air. “Nearly singed my eyebrows clean off.”

  “Is that what you’re running out of that tube up there?” Burns asked, pointing to the gray cable.

  Riley shook his head. “That machine in the wardrobe is called a telegraph. It sends messages along that cable, faster than you can imagine. In fact, I used it to send a message to some friends of mine the moment you first knocked on my door.”

  It was worrying just how serene Riley seemed to be. Didn’t he realize he was admitting to blasphemy? The punishment for extracting Blood of the Father was death.

  “So why’d you even open the door?” Clive said. “We were just about to leave when you invited us in.”

  “I know you were. I could hear everything you were saying. But don’t you see? I couldn’t let you go. Not after you’d found this place.” As he was speaking, Riley had gone to stand by the door. Now he reached into his waistband and withdrew something: an L-shaped piece of wood, inlaid with iron. It had to be a weapon of some sort, though it was like nothing Clive had ever seen.

  “Are you threatening us?” Burns said.

  “I’m afraid so.” Riley pointed the hollow end of the weapon at the sergeant’s chest.

  Burns laughed. “Well, I don’t know much about that doohickey you’re holding, but I doubt it’ll take us all out faster than we can get to you. You’re all alone, Riley. Put that thing away and let’s talk civil.”

  “But I’m not alone, Sergeant Burns. Didn’t you hear the wolf howling outside? That’s our signal. There’s half a dozen men waiting on the other side of this door.”

  Clive had maintained his composure up until then, but now he felt his blood running cold. He could hit a wild turkey at a hundred feet with a bow and arrow, and Burns was said to be an absolute demon with a sword, but on Honor Hamill’s insistence, they’d come to Riley’s cabin unarmed. (“The first blow is struck as soon as you unsheathe the sword,” he’d said, quoting the Filia.) That meant they had no way to defend themselves.

  Was this really it? Was this how he was to die, only two days after he’d finally become a man? Would the Lord really allow something so unjust?

  “I’m a Descendant minister,” Honor Hamill said. “What you’re doing here is wrong. You have to let us go.”

  “If it were up to me, Honor, I would. Honestly. But this is bigger than us. I don’t have a choice.”

  “Of course you do.” Honor Hamill took a step forward, his hands up in a gesture of conciliation. “I can see that you’re a good man, Riley. You wouldn’t kill us all in cold blood.”

  “You’re right,” Riley said. “That’s why these men are here.”

  He pushed the door open with his free hand. Shadows moved out in the darkness, and Clive could hear the jangle of m
en dismounting.

  Under his breath, Honor Hamill began to speak. “Father in the ground, whose fist is the Daughter, whose love is Gravity, thank you for your gift. . . .”

  11. Clover

  IT WAS A STROKE OF luck when Gemma tripped and fell as she dodged between the black masses of the horses, because just afterward, the door opened and two unfamiliar men emerged. Clover ducked out of sight, but not before seeing his father and brother through the doorway. They were still alive at least.

  “Hello?” one of the men called out.

  “Careful! Someone else is out here!”

  It was a girl’s voice, coming from somewhere back in the woods; the horsemen must’ve set up some kind of rear guard. Clover mentally berated himself for not thinking of that sooner. If it hadn’t been for the cloud cover blotting out the moonlight, he and Gemma likely would’ve been picked off on the way in.

  The two men at the door of the cottage were talking, but too quietly for Clover to make out the words. Then one of them began moving along the face of the escarpment, while the other came toward the horses. Gemma would be unable to move now without being spotted. Clover pulled out the knife he kept in his boot and crept toward her.

  “Whoever’s there, just come out peaceable,” the man said. “We don’t want trouble.” When he came up close to the horses, they moved aside to make room. Clover heard a little yelp that could only be Gemma; the horse must’ve stepped right on her.

  “Who was that?” the man said.

  Gemma jumped up and began to run out from the scrum of animals, but she only made it a dozen feet or so before the man caught up with her and threw her back to the ground. The light from inside the cottage glinted off a piece of metal in his hand—some kind of weapon.

  “You shouldn’t have come here.”

  “I—I got lost,” Gemma said.

  “Is that right?”

  “Yeah. I was on my way out of Amestown and I—”

  “Quiet, girl. You’re not fooling anyone.”

  As they were speaking, Clover circled around behind the man, the sound of his movements masked by the loud panting of the horses. He changed his grip on the knife, preparing to strike . . . but hesitated. Though he knew that there was no time to lose, that every passing second could be Gemma’s last, his whole upbringing was conspiring to stay his hand. He’d spent a lifetime praying to the Daughter, reciting the proverbs of peace: Whosoever raises his hand against his brother or sister is a pretender to the Godhead, and so shall be rendered bereft.

  “I want you to know I don’t take any pleasure in this,” the man said.

  “Then why do it?” Gemma asked.

  This simple question seemed to give the man pause, and Clover knew this was his last chance. All he had to do was swing the knife.

  But his body refused to move.

  “Stop right there,” he said weakly, because it was all he could manage to do.

  The man turned. “What the hell—” he started to say.

  His eyes widened and bulged outward as Gemma plunged her own knife into his neck. There was a quiet gurgling in the back of his throat, not unlike the sound made by a happy baby, before he went down on his knees and fell face-first into the dirt.

  Gemma still had a death grip on the knife, which she’d followed all the way down to the ground. Now she let go and scooted quickly backward.

  “What have I done?” she whispered. “Oh Lord, what have I done?”

  Clover knelt at her side. “We both did it.”

  “It’s not true.”

  “Then I did it. It was me. That’s what we’ll say.”

  She moaned softly. “No, no, no, no . . .”

  He wanted to comfort her, but there wasn’t time. “Come on,” he said, getting his hands under her armpits and pulling her to her feet. As he tried to lead her toward the cottage, his foot bumped against something hard. He reached down and picked it up—the weapon the man had been holding. It was heavy, built to fit perfectly in the hand. Clover had never seen anything like it before, and yet he understood its nature implicitly, as its purpose was inherent to its design. And the name of that nectar was science. This was the darkest manifestation of the anathema, the very thing the Church had been established to oppose. There was no way to know how precise its aim was, nor at what distance it operated, but one thing was for certain: it had been built to kill.

  A plan was beginning to coalesce in Clover’s mind. It would all come down to the weapon, and whether or not his instincts about it were correct.

  “Gemma, I need you to cut their horses loose and give ’em a good kick. Then make sure ours are ready to ride. If this works, we’ll be moving fast.”

  Gemma nodded her acceptance.

  Clover crept onward toward the cottage and peeked around the edge of the open door. The men of the ministry had their backs up against the wall, facing four of the strangers, three of whom held their own versions of the L-shaped weapon.

  “I’m telling you the truth,” Honor Hamill said. “We’re just a ministry looking to bring new folks into the flock.”

  “Then what’s the soldier doing here?” one of the strangers demanded.

  “He’s here for protection! That’s all! I swear it on the Lord and his Daughter. And if you let us go tonight—”

  But Honor Hamill’s plea was interrupted by a piercing shriek. “He’s dead! They killed him!”

  Clover recognized the voice: it was the rear guard again. She must have discovered the body of the man they’d killed.

  “I knew he was lying,” another of the strangers said. He pulled back a small comma of metal on the top of his weapon and took aim.

  Of course! There was a priming mechanism, like the drawing back of a bowstring. Clover quickly matched the action and then stepped into the doorway. He pointed his weapon at the lantern hanging near the back of the cabin and squeezed his index finger.

  The explosion that resulted was deafening, and the reverberation nearly shook the weapon from Clover’s grasp, but it had worked. The lantern was extinguished, and the cottage was cast into sudden darkness. A chorus of grunts and shouts ensued, but because no one could see where anyone else was, the strangers couldn’t risk firing their weapons. Bodies came rushing out of the cottage, one after another after another.

  Clover could make out Burns’s voice close by. “I knocked ’em around a bit. We should have a few seconds before they can shake it off.”

  “Over here!” Gemma shouted.

  They followed her voice back down the trail, to where she held the leads of all their horses. Clover climbed up onto the closest animal.

  Quick footsteps from behind them were followed by three more explosions in rapid succession. Two of the bolts whizzed past, but the third found flesh.

  “Agh!”

  “Eddie, you all right?” Honor Hamill said.

  “It’s just my leg,” Eddie replied. “Keep moving!”

  And then they were galloping back along the trail, as fast as they dared in the scattered moonlight. Clover was right at the center of the pack, his brother next to him, Gemma out front, and the other men bringing up the rear. By some miracle, all of them had made it out alive. Someone was giving chase, firing blindly into the dark. Clover could hear the bolts as they passed—the sound reminded him of the spectral blur made by a hummingbird’s wings. Minutes passed, protracted and terrible, accompanied only by the patter of hooves on dirt and Eddie’s agonized grunts.

  Clover didn’t consciously register the moment when their pursuer fell away, but the next time he turned to look back, there was nothing to see but the silvery sheen of moonlight on the aspens. A few seconds later, he heard the most awful scream of his life—shrill and unearthly, impossibly long.

  Somehow he knew that scream was directed at him and Gemma, for what they’d done tonight. He wondered if they would ever outrun it.

  12. Clive

  THEY FOUND THE BIG WAGON by the side of the road only a few miles west of Amestown; for once,
Clive was glad that his mother was such a worrywart. As soon as they saw their father, Michael and Flora came hurtling out at him like a couple of puppies, jumping up on him before he could warn them about his leg. Meanwhile, Clive’s mother embraced him with tears in her eyes.

  The reunion didn’t last long; there was too much to be done. Clive helped with the heavy lifting, unloading anything and everything that wasn’t absolutely crucial to the journey ahead. It was a painful business, though not nearly as painful as the thought of all their musical instruments, which were still inside the small wagon they’d abandoned outside Amestown. Eddie was having a lie-down on account of his injury—a ragged hole blown into the flesh just above his knee—so it was almost noon by the time they set out again. Though the Anchor was only about six hundred miles away as the crow flew, the Southern Tail zigged and zagged worse than a drunk stumbling home at the end of the night. They could manage about twenty miles a day if everything went smoothly, but a bad summer storm could slow them down considerably, and trouble with the wagon or the horses could see them stranded indefinitely.

  In other words, they were going to be on the run for a good long while.

  Even if the specter of death hadn’t been circling above them like a vulture, the ride would’ve been uncomfortable. Nine of them were now stuffed into the big wagon—three people up in the driver’s seat, exposed to the sun, and the other six packed in the back with the supplies. Though the Southern Tail was a relatively well-kept road—graded and smoothed every three years by order of the Anchor—it still jostled you hard enough to rattle your brain every minute or two.

  The first couple of days passed in a haze of anxiety and fear. They rode through Grandsville at night and skirted around Framington entirely. Clive would’ve traded every shekel he had for a couple of hours in a real bed, but he understood why they couldn’t risk it. Amestown had seemed wholesome enough, and yet Arthur Edwards had lived there, and that man Dominic, and who knew how many other heretics and traitors. There was no telling how deep the corruption went.