Oddity

by Eli Brown

  Clover slumped on the cavern floor, and for a moment, everything was as silent as the heart of a mountain should be. Then the vermin, which had gone utterly still as Miniver dissolved, began to twitch and moan, grieving their mistress.

  “Clover,” Nessa said, her voice worried.

  “On Sundays, Father and I ate supper with Widow Henshaw,” Clover said, the memory pouring out of her with the tears. “They were forever discussing how to manage difficult pregnancies.”

  Nessa pulled her up, and Clover continued, “This one night, we’d eaten white-bean soup with salted pork, cornmeal fritters, mustard greens, and mulberry vinegar. I’d crawled under the table, stuffed and ready to fall asleep, and I heard the widow whisper, ‘There could be a cure. If she’s still alive in there somewhere.’ And father said, ‘I have saved what could be saved. I won’t risk what’s left.’ I couldn’t guess which patient they were talking about.” Clover laughed, feeling delirious.

  The vermin began to rustle, darting into the shadows with squawks and chirps.

  “We have to go,” Nessa said.

  “Don’t you see, though?” Clover said. “Father did know that Mother was the Seamstress.”

  “He should have told you.”

  “But the bliss of falling asleep to the crackle of the fire, the smell of the bread oven, the comforting voices around me. I felt safe! Father wasn’t keeping me ignorant. He was keeping the horror out. He built that safety for me, and day after day, he fought for it.”

  Nessa pulled Clover toward the stairway that led to the main tunnel while the vermin began to writhe in the shadows like a gathering storm. The vermin cooed and wailed in the darkness.

  “I understand now. I finally understand what happened to my family.” Through the Walnut, the sounds of war grew louder as Clover dropped to her knees. The relief of finally knowing and the grief of losing her mother so soon after finding her was too much. She felt herself cracking, falling in several directions at once.

  “You got to say goodbye,” Nessa offered, shoving Clover’s bag into her hands. “You set her soul to rest. No one else could have done that. Maybe that’s why she was looking for you. But Clover, we have to go.”

  Clover’s eyes were drawn to the worktable, the masterpiece of madness in disarray. She picked up the Pestle and examined it.

  “My mother invented a process that reverses death.”

  “It makes vermin,” Nessa said.

  “It also made Susanna.”

  “We know what Auburn will do with it,” Nessa said.

  The thought of undead soldiers marching in an endless war got Clover to her feet. With the vermin moaning in the shadows and the rumbles of gunfire echoing above them, Clover and Nessa took the pieces of the laboratory in a hurry. They threw the oddities onto a dried bison pelt and dragged it back into the caverns. The orphaned fiends followed, their confused whispers growing.

  As they passed through the storage chambers, Clover tossed oddities onto the heaps of junk, hoping to hide them among everyday things.

  “Shouldn’t you take some with you?” Nessa asked. “So no one can piece it together and start churning out vermin again?”

  Clover agreed. She weighed each item in her hands, trying to imagine its power, remembering the disaster of the Ice Hook and of the Wineglass.

  “Each one could be a miracle or a curse.” Clover had to stop, her throat clenched around a sadness that seemed much older than she was.

  “Whatever you do, do it quickly,” Nessa said, peering into the darkness where the vermin shuddered. “I don’t know what the vermin will do without her.”

  Clover wept as she threw the Churn and the Rolling Pin among the kitchen things. She wept as she threw the Hammer among the tools and put the Whisk in her bag. She wept as she wadded the Gloves into her pocket.

  “I wish there was someone wise, someone good enough to make these decisions.” But in the dim light there was only Clover and Nessa and the mute weight of the viper coiled around her arm.

  Clover weighed the Pestle in her hand. The blue Powder it produced had saved her life, but it was also a crucial part of making vermin. Suddenly, an explosion rocked the mountain, knocking the oddity to the ground. The vermin rushed forward all at once, and Nessa screamed. But the beasts didn’t attack; they ran right past, headed for the surface. Dust rained down upon them as Clover fell to her knees, searching for the Pestle.

  “We have to go!” Nessa yanked Clover to her feet before she could find it. The two hurried for the entrance, trying to keep their footing in the scrabble of fur. Clover felt things falling from her bag as another explosion shook the earth. Clover’s lungs vibrated as the mine trembled around them. The lantern dropped and broke — plunging them into darkness.

  The vermin screeched and surged, knocking Clover off her feet. She tumbled, cracking her head against the cavern wall. She lost all sense of direction as the beasts trampled her.

  “Where are you?” Nessa shouted over the thunder of the mine’s slow collapse.

  “Here!” Clover shouted desperately, not knowing where that was. “Nessa, here!” The riot of vermin suddenly coalesced under Clover, pressing closer, inflamed by the familiar timbre in her voice. Nessa’s hands found Clover’s just as the vermin lifted her in a crescendo of howls.

  “Leave her alone, you mongrels!”

  But Nessa was lifted too, still clutching Clover’s arm, and both were carried on a tide of matted fur.

  “Nessa, look, we’ve made it!” Clover shouted as they were ferried toward the glare of the sunlight.

  At last they emerged at the bridge, stunned by light and deafening noise. The vermin kept running in a chaotic herd across the bridge, many falling into the void below.

  The momentum carried the girls halfway across before the vermin abandoned them, leaving the girls gripping the planks and fraying ropes.

  Clover, though, didn’t slow down for long. She leaped from board to board toward the far side of the bridge, where the war had begun.

  Rifles cracked, cannons thumped, the screams of dying men echoed through the trees. The fighters had dug in around the abandoned town, darkening the air with gun smoke. Hannibal’s army, entrenched in the ditches on the eastern slope of Abbot’s Highway, traded shots with the platoon of French soldiers who had apparently arrived early enough to occupy the ruins. Bricks burst into orange blooms where the bullets hit. A band of Sehanna fighters had assumed control of the wooded eastern slopes, cutting off any retreat toward Louisiana. Some of the copper smelting pans had been rolled forward as makeshift shields. Three nations had converged on Harper’s Hope. The Seamstress’s hoard had brought them all. The logic of war demanded a fight, here and now.

  When Clover placed her feet on solid ground, she was stopped by the vision before her. This was what she had hoped to prevent: terrified young men, clinging to life, firing, reloading desperately, and firing again. Bodies littered the ground, sacrificed to the urgency of the battle.

  Clover stood exposed and motionless, feeling as helpless as a baby in a crib. Then Nessa tackled Clover and dragged her behind a tree, bullets smacking into the bark around them.

  “Is that as bad as it looks?” Nessa pointed toward the glowing haze of the mining town. There the Heron glided in bright swoops between the ruined buildings.

  “The oddities have already been unleashed!” Clover wailed. Smoke blotted out the distance, but she could hear the screams of the Heron’s prey.

  Clover spotted Hannibal hopping from branch to branch in the nearby tree, shouting orders down to his men. Then Hannibal caught sight of Clover, and for a moment they regarded each other across the disastrous haze.

  “He knows there’s no way to recall the Heron,” Clover moaned. “Oh, Hannibal, what have you done?”

  “What is that?” Nessa pointed at another oddity making its way through the maelstrom: an armored Armadillo waddled in frightened circles near the entrance of the warehouse. When a bursting brick startled it, the Armadillo lea
ped into the air and curled into a tight ball. Immediately guns and bullets, cannonballs, and even belt buckles converged upon it. Anything iron within twenty yards was drawn by its powerful magnet. When it was a bristling ball of armaments, the Armadillo uncurled, shook off the scrap, and continued its terrified dash.

  But the half-dozen men whom the Armadillo had disarmed didn’t stop fighting. They ran at one another and fought fist and tooth.

  “Look there!” Nessa shouted. A commander of Hannibal’s regiment aimed Mr. Agate’s Umbrella like a gun, but instead of bullets, a bolt of lightning arced across the field, splitting a boulder and shaking the mountain with its thunder.

  “Whoever wins this battle,” Clover whispered, “will march across the earth, if there’s anything left of it.”

  “How can we stop them?” Nessa said. “Just us against all of that?”

  Sweetwater’s rattle rang in her ear, and Clover Constantinovna Elkin remembered that she was blood sister to a snake. She remembered that she was Miniver Elkin’s daughter. She loaded the Pistol and closed her eyes. She gave the bullet directions and pulled the trigger.

  With a crack, the bullet raced off, slamming into rifles, cannon flints, and quivers. The weapons it struck burst out of the fighters’ hands as the bullet looped around the battlefield, quickly losing momentum. Clover reloaded and fired again. This time she aimed for the Umbrella and the powder kegs. The explosions knocked the wind out of her, but she did it again and again, forbidding the bullets to hit anything made of flesh. All around the mountainside, rifles exploded and arrows shattered.

  But there were too many. The battalions had come with crates of munitions, knowing that this first battle might be the most important.

  “You’ll run out of bullets long before they do,” Nessa said.

  A Sehanna fighter picked up the bent Umbrella, and the scene was lit with another burst of ragged light. Clover’s efforts only made the men load their rifles faster, frightened by the chaos.

  “Even the poachers are here!” Nessa pointed to Willit’s remaining bandits, some she’d never seen before, perched atop a crest of rock. They traded shots with Aaron Agate, dressed in his beaver-fur hat. A host of old Society members were with him, huddled in one of the ruined buildings, adding the smoke of their antique rifles to the storm.

  The fighters dug in. With every passing second, the fever of war increased. “We’ll make a dash for those boulders over there,” Nessa said, giving Clover’s arm a shake. “Stay close to the crevasse. They won’t see us if —”

  But Clover could only shake her head. She had been raised to heal bodies, to nurse them to health. This senseless violence shook her to the bone. With every explosion, a moan escaped her lips. Her jaws clenched so tightly she felt a tooth crack.

  “Stop!” Clover screamed, but she hardly heard herself over the noise. A huge tree, broken by cannonballs and Heron’s fire, shuddered and fell, tearing lesser trees down as it slammed into the earth.

  “Stop!”

  Clover heard the terrible howl of the Heron, getting hotter and stronger with everything it consumed.

  With trembling hands, Clover lit a Match, and everything froze.

  The mountain was suddenly silent as a winter night. The air was cluttered with debris; bullets, stopped midflight, hung like snowflakes, cannonballs like Christmas ornaments. Even the upturned beak of the Heron, huge in the distance, was still as a painted sunset.

  Clover didn’t know what to do. The quiet was such a relief that she almost wept. She wanted the Match to last forever, but it was already half-gone. She knew that as soon as it went out, the fighting would continue. And she only had four Matches left in the box.

  She left Nessa behind and ran toward the nearest fighters, a row of French soldiers lying behind a bank of fallen brick. One squinted over his rifle sights, another grimaced as he urgently reloaded, yet they were all identical. Frozen as they were, Clover could see clearly the same grizzled face — thick eyebrows and slate gray eyes — repeated on each man. These were the notorious accablant, the relentless army Hannibal feared. Clover imagined a factory somewhere deep in Louisiana where a powerful oddity turned out copies of this soldier faster than a printing press. She tried to kick the rifles out of their hands, but the scene might as well have been carved in marble.

  Clover clambered atop an overturned wagon, desperately searching for a solution. The Match was nearly out.

  Looking away from the battle, scanning for a last-minute advantage, Clover found only trouble: Willit Rummage, still alive, was making a dash across the bridge. The Match had caught him at a precarious angle, leaning toward the mine.

  Clover used the last of her time to dive back behind the tree trunk, close to Nessa. As the flame singed her fingertips, she shook it out, and the battle exploded around her.

  “What did you do?” Nessa hollered.

  But Clover ignored her and yelled into the Walnut instead.

  “Don’t go in there, Willit!” she said, watching the poacher helplessly as he made the last leaps across the gaps in the bridge and pulled himself to safety on the far side of the canyon.

  Willit dashed into the mine. “Only a fool leaves empty-handed, and Willit Rummage is not a fool.”

  Seconds after his figure had disappeared into the gloom of the tunnel, a cannonball slammed into the cliff above. The stones came down over the entrance like a mouth closing, and Willit was swallowed inside.

  The calamity paused for a moment as the fighters saw the mine entrance obliterated. But only seconds later, gunshots shook the air again. The battle would continue, even if the prize was out of reach.

  The Heron moved in and out of the smoldering tree line, bringing a blistering heat. It towered above the soldiers who fled before it, its legs pillars of flame. Those it gobbled up turned to ash before they made it down the Heron’s throat.

  If the collapsing stones hadn’t already crushed him, Willit would starve inside the mine. If anyone deserved to perish, it was Willit. But Clover couldn’t stand to see another person die.

  Sweetwater’s rattle filled her head, drowning out even the roar of the cannon. She rose, hearing herself say, “Enough hiding . . .”

  Nessa grabbed her arm. “What are you doing?”

  “Enough secrets. Enough killing.”

  Clover shook Nessa off and strode forward.

  Nessa hollered behind her, “Come back!”

  Clover, backlit against the infernal gloaming of the wildfire, walked directly into the middle of the battlefield, shouting, “Enough!”

  She was exposed in the eye of the storm, the air around her glinting with shrapnel. Nessa came running after, plum-faced with fear but ready to tackle her crazed friend, when an explosion threw her to the ground.

  A burning tree had fallen between them, spewing eddies of soot and embers. While Nessa coughed and cursed behind the wall of fire, Clover continued to march forward, all of the clamor and grief resolving into a single sound, as if every bullet and cannonball had struck a massive bell, and the bone-rattling knell came out as a single word:

  ENOUGH.

  It was this moment that made Clover Elkin famous, that inspired songs about the doctor’s daughter. Every newspaper would feature an illustration of her silhouetted in the middle of the battlefield. The fighters who survived would recall how they lowered their rifles when they saw the unsettling young woman, fearless in a storm of bullets.

  The shooting stopped entirely when the horror of the Heron loomed up behind her like a demon from the molten core of the earth. Everyone saw it happen. With the last of the bullets melting into pewter mist against its plumage, the Heron snatched Clover up and swallowed her as if she were a tadpole. But the girl didn’t burn. She tumbled down the throat and into the belly. She floated there, a fetal shadow in the white-hot blaze.

  Then she grabbed the Ember Heart, gripping the source of the inferno in her hand. The Heron let out a tortured wail, staggering as its furnace Heart smothered. As the living i
nferno sputtered out, Clover dropped and landed in a crouch. She emerged from a whirlwind of black smoke, still holding the Ember in her fist. It must have been pure torture, but she held on to the Heron’s Heart as if it were a family heirloom. Witnesses would all swear that her arm glowed red-hot. She was furious.

  With rage enough to burn the world spreading into her, the girl stood in the middle of the smoldering battlefield and screamed at the fighters.

  “Murderers! You want power? I am the only oddity that matters now. I am the daughter of trouble, with venom in my veins. The Seamstress is dead and buried. Her methods destroyed. The mine is collapsed. This mountain is a grave now. Leave it in peace. There is nothing for you here but death.”

  This vision haunted everyone who saw it: the unearthly child smoldering in the sudden silence. Even the rattlesnake around her neck shone like molten bronze.

  And then, as she shouted, “Go home while you still can!” the vermin emerged from the trees and howled with her, a sound like a hurricane wind.

  Most fighters would say it was the forest fire or the slavering mob of vermin that forced them to drop their weapons and retreat. But a few honest men would admit that it was Clover who stopped the battle. They saw in her a power greater than any oddity, greater than any treaty or nation, a power that humbled them, that scared them, that gave them hope.

  Clover’s memories of that moment were as murky as a dream. She recalled the Heron’s heat boiling her blood, pain turning to strength. She remembered the ash on the faces of the men running down the mountainside, vermin on their heels.

  She remembered feeling Hannibal watching her from the highest branches of the remaining trees, like an angel scorned.

  The surface of Salamander Lake was buckled and warped.

  No one welcomed her home. Not even crickets or birds. The waterwheel was frozen in place. The silence was an accusation.