Strange Fire

by Tommy Wallach

  Clive didn’t bother trying to hide his own tears; he’d relinquished his dignity the second he got down on one knee. “So where does that leave us?”

  “I guess we’ve got two choices. Either this is the end right here, or else we try and make it some sort of new beginning.”

  “Beginning of what?”

  “I don’t know. We’ll have to figure that out.”

  She reached out to him—a simple handshake, an offer of friendship—and some petty part of him wanted to push it away, to refuse to accept any sort of compromise. His heart ached to think of all the things they would never be to each other, the chance at happiness they may have missed. But he’d lost so much in the past few months—his intended, his mother and father, his calling, even his brother, in a way—he didn’t imagine he could survive losing anything else.

  He took her hand in his. It wasn’t the same as it had been before, but at least it was something. A comfort. A reminder. A new beginning.

  15. Clover

  AT SOME POINT IN THE night, the clouds overhead burst open and the rain began to drum a dense tattoo upon the roof. If Clover had looked up, he could’ve watched the rivers of rain running down the peaked glass, smearing the starlight. But he didn’t look up. There were simply too many books to read. Books about religion and books about war and books about technology. Books about ways to think, to learn, to live. Books about books and books about books about books, hinting at a past so dense with knowledge that it was a wonder anyone had done anything but read.

  He understood the inscription he’d seen on the door now—and you shall be as Gods. It wasn’t a promise, but a curse. God knew all the dark secrets of the world, and now Clover knew them too. He felt drunk on that knowledge, almost sick with it. If learning was a lightening, as the Filia had it, then by now, Clover was floating up around the clouds.

  Sometime just after sunrise, he realized he was no longer reading the words in front of him, but tracking the line of pink light creeping across the page. His mind was glutted, saturated—like a tea towel soaked in water. He simply couldn’t absorb another word.

  He stood up, bones cracking, and replaced the book on the shelf. Over the course of the night, he’d traversed the full length of the chamber—about a quarter mile from end to end—but only now did he notice the door at the far end of the room. It was no more than a black rectangle cut into the stone beneath a small sculpture of a hawk, with a keyhole bored around hand height. Clover knelt down and stared into the aperture, but he could see only darkness.

  He was turning away when he heard it—just a rustle, really, yet impossible to miss in the sepulchral silence of the anathema stacks. He returned to the door and put his ear up against the stone. The ghostly susurrus that came whenever something was held up to the ear, the thunderous beating of his heart . . . and voices. Unquestionably, what he was hearing were people speaking. He stepped away from the door, as if whoever was on the other side might burst through at any moment.

  But who could it be? Were there prisoners kept down here? And if so, why? How terrible must their crimes have been to merit such isolation?

  No. That didn’t make any sense. He must’ve misunderstood the geometry of the room as it related to the city. This door undoubtedly opened onto some empty back alley behind the Library, hidden here so the Epistem would have a secret means of escape, should he require it. The voices were just ordinary citizens going about their day.

  The mystery solved, Clover finally returned to the entrance, pausing next to the rack where the robes were kept. When he’d first seen them, he’d been relieved—now he’d have something to wear on the way back through the brambles. But that was wrong, wasn’t it? As the Epistem had said, the path was to be walked as the garden was walked.

  He hung up his robe, took a deep breath, and stepped back into the passage.

  There was a towel waiting on a hook inside the door, and his clothes had been folded up just beneath it. Epistem Turin was at his desk, looking for all the world as if he hadn’t moved since Clover had left.

  “I had some tea brought up,” he said, “but it may’ve gone cold. I expected you to return sooner.”

  “Thank you.”

  Clover sat down across from the Epistem and picked up the red clay mug. He sipped: peppermint and pine. It was such an oddly commonplace thing to be doing, after everything he’d just been through.

  “Well?” the Epistem said. “Ask what you need to ask. I’d like to get to sleep at some point.”

  Clover had a million questions, but one was more pressing than the others. “The Filia, is anything in it real?”

  “Everything in it is real.”

  “But . . . but it isn’t. I learned the truth last night. You showed it to me.”

  “Ah yes. The truth.” With a groan, the Epistem rose from his chair and went to stand by the windows. The sky was pink at the horizon, shading to peach up above. He took off his spectacles and rubbed at his eyes. “I have terrible vision, you know. It’s been that way since I was very young. Right now, all I see out there is a field of color. It’s beautiful, but not very practical.” He put the spectacles back on. “When I was your age, I became fascinated by the field of optics. I decided to apprentice as a glazier, but my master kicked me out when he discovered I was spending all my time grinding lenses instead of making glassware. I realized the only place I could pursue my research in peace was here, at the Library, so I began my apprenticeship as soon as I turned sixteen. I was insatiable, just like you. I read everything I could. But like so many precocious learners before and after me, my mind had begun to outpace my soul.”

  “I don’t know what that means.”

  “True learning requires one to question, Clover, and I learned far too much too quickly. I began to doubt everything, so much so that my apprenticeship was in danger of being suspended. As a last resort, I took my questions to the Library Dubium, and by sheer chance, our Honor at the time was a man named Carmassi.”

  “The Archbishop,” Clover said.

  “Eventually. He saved my faith, Clover, and that faith has saved my life more times than I can say. It will do the same for you. Knowledge alone will not sustain you, whatever you may think now. Trust in God. Trust in his Daughter.”

  “But the Daughter was just a stone.”

  The Epistem sighed. “And your mother was just a complex arrangement of proteins resulting from a simple evolutionary process that took place over an untold number of millennia. And the love you felt for her was just the honeyed mead brewed up by the chemicals and electrical impulses in your brain. That is what knowledge tells us is true. But does that feel like the whole truth to you?”

  After a moment, Clover shook his head.

  “Exactly,” the Epistem said. “With everything that’s to come, you’ll have to hold fast to your faith. Otherwise, you’ll be lost.”

  “Everything to come?” Clover’s mind had reached the breaking point; he couldn’t solve any more mysteries tonight. “I don’t understand.”

  “While you were in the wall, we lost the plebiscite. The Protectorate will send a contingent to Sophia, and that act will read as a declaration of war.”

  “But what does that have to do with me?”

  “You will accompany the contingent under the pretense of doing research for the Library. And when you reach your destination, you will surrender yourself to the enemy.”

  Clover would’ve laughed, but there wasn’t a glimmer of humor in the Epistem’s voice. “What?”

  “We’ve learned that Sophia is always on the hunt for promising new students. These recruits must be young and exceptionally intelligent, like you.”

  “What good would I do as a prisoner of Sophia?”

  “Not a prisoner. A student. And you’ll do what any student does: learn. How far has Sophia’s technology developed? How many soldiers can they muster? What is their chain of command? At the moment, we’re completely in the dark.”

  “They’d suspect me ri
ght away.”

  “Of course. But the Archbishop and I believe you can convince them of your sincerity by sharing some of what you’ve learned tonight. That’s why you were allowed to explore the anathema stacks.”

  “You want me to give up the Descendancy’s secrets?”

  “Nothing in our books is a secret to them, I’m afraid. Leibowitz saw to that.”

  “And if it doesn’t work? If they don’t believe me?”

  The Epistem sighed. “I think you know the answer to that.”

  Paths through the future zigged and zagged, a lightning tree of possibilities. Clover saw himself bleeding out from a bullet wound to the head. He saw an arrow protruding from his chest, loosed by the Protectorate soldier who’d caught him in the act of offering himself up to the enemy. He saw himself in some dank basement, facing whatever hideous tortures the scholars of Sophia had devised. And yet . . . to sneak right under the noses of the people who’d killed his parents, to destroy them from the inside, wasn’t that worth the risk?

  And there was something else, too, a thought he would never dare speak aloud. In Sophia, he could do more than read about the anathema; he could touch it. He could learn how the telegraph machine worked. Maybe he could even build his own. For the first time in his life, he would be entirely free.

  “I need to think.”

  “Of course you do. Just remember, no one is to know of this, especially not your friend Marshal Burns.”

  “You’re keeping secrets from the Protectorate?”

  “We’re keeping our options open. That’s all you need to know. I’ll expect your answer within the next couple of days.”

  “Yes, sir.” Clover rose to his feet, feeling weightless and disembodied and dazed.

  “Before you go,” the Epistem said, “would you mind praying with me?”

  “Of course.”

  The Epistem closed his eyes, cleared his throat, and recited the first few words of the Trinity Prayer. And all at once, Clover was transported back to his childhood, sitting around the campfire on some tour around the Tails, surrounded by the loving faces of his mother and his father, of Clive and Gemma and Flora and Eddie and Michael, all speaking the prayer in one voice. What he wouldn’t have given to be with them all again.

  But there could be no going back; there was only the future. Clover already knew he would accept the Epistem’s mission. He would go east with the contingent, carrying this fraught new knowledge inside him, like one of the terrible bombs he’d read about in the anathema stacks. And at the gates of Sophia, he would pretend to betray the Descendancy. No one could know the truth—not Gemma, not Irene, not even Clive, who was too deeply involved with the Protectorate now to be trustworthy.

  Oh, but there were dark days ahead.

  Clover bowed his head and joined in with the prayer.

  Interlude

  AT THE VELVETY, BLUE-BLACK HOUR just before dawn, the boy climbed out of bed and quietly pushed his bedroom window open. The roof was steeply pitched, and the previous night’s storm had left the shingles slippery as eels, but he was adroit at such maneuvers; he sometimes made a few shekels sweeping out his neighbors’ chimneys with a long-handled broom he’d secretly named Sir Sweepy.

  The boy sidestepped to the very edge of the roof, then sat down. From this position, he could tap his boot heel against the window of his younger sister’s room. After a moment, she tapped back, and a minute later she emerged onto the roof. Her wild shock of black hair and long white nightdress were both whipping around in the wind as if they were fixing to fly away.

  “You must be freezing,” he said.

  His sister ignored him. “Is it ready?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Then do it already.”

  The boy stepped up to stand on the crest of the steepled roof, holding the kite in one hand and the spool in the other. This was the moment of truth. He closed his eyes and listened for the ripple of leaves along the pathway below that signaled an upswell of breeze; when he heard it, he cocked his arm and threw the frame out into space. The wind took hold of it immediately, and the boy was so surprised that he nearly lost his grip. The kite fought hard against him, a prisoner being dragged to the gallows, but he held fast to the spool, playing out the line in order to give his captive a bit more room to breathe. The black fabric was more conspicuous than he’d expected, reflecting the moonlight in white waves up and down its skin. It bucked and banked, once dipping down below the line of the roof, then whipping back up toward the sky with a breathtaking swiftness.

  “It’s so beautiful,” his sister said, her voice gone soft with reverence.

  “Isn’t it?”

  The boy understood now why such an activity was banned; this pleasure was far too keen to be holy. He felt himself becoming one with the kite, carried aloft by some impossible force. Unable to help himself, he let out a single loud whoop.

  This joyful noise did not go unheard. Just next door, Emilia Cardacci happened to be awake as well. She was penning a letter to her paramour, a young man with whom she’d become a little too well-acquainted three weeks earlier, and whom she was now attempting to cajole into proposing to her, when some animal part of her brain registered movement beyond the thick glass of her window. She looked up. Something was moving out there, causing the stars to blink. A bat? Impossible. No bat had ever danced like that. Nor would a bat allow itself to be leashed by the foot, as this one had. Emilia had no word for what she was seeing, and yet she eventually worked out the gist of it: someone on the roof of the house next door had built a flying device. And who else could it be but that strange little boy?

  He’s lucky it’s only me seeing this, Emilia thought, glancing over at her sister, Lily, still sound asleep, dreaming of doing chores and obeying rules, most likely. If that little prude had spotted the boy’s misdeed, she would’ve gone screaming for their parents in an instant.

  But no—this moment was reserved for Emilia alone, suddenly connected to something greater than herself by this sparkling black diamond capering through the early-morning darkness. She felt something lighten inside of her. When the boy let out his whoop, it took everything in her power not to whoop along with him. If flight was possible, then everything was possible. She didn’t have to marry some boy she scarcely knew just because of a single unfortunate tryst. She didn’t have to do anything she didn’t want to do. She could be like that . . . that thing up in the sky: free.

  For many weeks afterward, Emilia would wonder if everything that came next really happened as she remembered it. For in her memory, the horror gripped her as a kind of prophecy, even before the wind gusted and the black diamond suddenly puffed up like an angry rooster. She was already on her feet, hands against the window, as the kite pulled the boy down the steepled roof, holding the leash in his hands.

  Let go, she wanted to scream, and at the same time, she understood why he couldn’t. The kite had opened a doorway, a glimpse into another, better world.

  The boy disappeared over the edge, down past the gable and out of Emilia’s sight. And then his little sister appeared at the very spot where he had fallen. She must have been up on the roof too, and had seen it all happen from just a few feet away.

  Emilia had never liked the girl much: pretty as anything, too pretty really, but just as strange. Stared at you like she was seeing into your soul. Never bothered saying good morning or good evening. Even now, she wasn’t screaming or crying, just standing there, gazing downward.

  It took Emilia a moment to remember herself, then she ran downstairs and out into the chill of the morning. The boy lay in the alley between their houses. His eyes were open, as if still hungry for another few seconds of vision through that doorway, and his neck was bent at an obscene angle. The spindle had been crushed beneath his body, and by some miracle, the kite continued to gambol in the air above them, like an oblivious animal.

  Ever so slowly, Emilia reeled it in. When she had the kite safely in hand, she dropped it to the ground and trampled it
underfoot, shattering the thin wooden braces. She reached down and tore out the silk, rubbing it between her fingers: impossibly soft.

  “Give that to me.”

  It was the boy’s sister, who’d slipped into the alley as silent as a shadow. Her tone was flat, her expression impassive. Was she in shock, or simply heartless? For an instant, Emilia entertained the thought of refusing the girl’s demand. She would’ve liked to keep the silk, as a sign or symbol of something. But of course that would be crazy.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, offering up the piece of fabric. The girl tore it out of her fingers and ran back into the house without a word.

  Emilia registered the tears leaking slowly but unceasingly down her face, and she realized she wasn’t crying for that brief moment of absolute freedom she’d felt while watching the kite, or even for the boy lying breathless and broken at her feet. She was crying for that strange little girl, who couldn’t cry for herself.

  Part III

  TRAITORS

  * * *

  And Nadab and Abihu, the sons of Aaron,

  took either of them his censer,

  and put fire therein, and put incense thereon,

  and offered strange fire

  before the Lord, which he commanded them not.

  And there went out fire from the Lord,

  and devoured them,

  and they died before the Lord.

  —Leviticus 10:1–2

  1. Gemma

  GEMMA STOOD IN FRONT OF the glass, turning first one way and then the other, watching her double do the same. Lord, could they have made this getup any less flattering?

  “Momma would be spinning in her grave,” she said under her breath.

  Viola Poplin had had such high hopes for her daughter—that she would leave behind the nomadic ministry life and become a normal Anchor society girl, married to the estimable Honor Clive Hamill, peacefully growing fat in a well-appointed Anchor home with a gaggle of children around her. And here she was in a Protectorate uniform a size too big for her, her engagement broken off, preparing to head out once again into the wilderness.