And then the City Guns begin to move. The ground shakes as all around they turn and point their massive barrels into the sky.
Vinneas has taken a small watch from his pocket. He glances at the numbers, then up at the clouds. “Here we go,” he says.
“Something else we’ve figured out, Jax,” Imway says. “If Romeo doesn’t get us within twenty minutes of the incursion, he won’t get us at all.”
All across Ninth City, the guns begin to fire, each one burning with a blinding flash, slashing upward with pillars of light that leave wide holes in the clouds where they cut through, enough to see blue sky and shafts of sunlight.
Suddenly, Kizabel winds up and throws her cup into the air over the city. “Come and get us, Romeo, you asshole!” she screams. “What are you waiting for? We’re right here!”
“Imway was right,” Vinneas says to me. “She’s a complete lightweight.”
But Imway is shouting, too. “Yeah, let’s go! What’s wrong, Romeo—you scared?”
And before I know it, I’m shouting with them. “You just try it! I’ll break your stupid face!” I decide if we make it out of this, I’ll need to think of something better to yell next time.
“Show us what you’ve got!”
“Our boy Jax is gonna tear you a new one!”
We keep yelling, and the ground rumbles with each shot of the City Guns, faster and faster, like a gigantic drum, until they’re coming so fast and so loud, we can’t hear our own shouts.
Beside me, Vinneas is still watching the time.
THREE
NAOMI
We reach the crossing just as the clouds that have been trailing our caravan now for a day and a night finally overtake us, scattering the cold air with flakes as small and bright as stars. Whoops and shouts go up all along the line of wagons to greet the first snow of winter. I have heard it is otherwise among the mighty townships and the northern tribes, but for us Walkers, winter has always been the happiest season.
Mama sits beside me in the front of our wagon, quietly smoking her pipe while I keep Chester, our cart horse, to his duties. Baby Adam hides in back, his bravado of the past days having lasted only to the first sight of the high pass, whereupon he near about wet his britches. I have told him to get out and walk awhile so he can see just how wide and strong the ridge is, but he prefers to cover his head with blankets. Leon, our rat terrier, is whimpering to console him. I will admit the path feels much worse than it looks, rocking us this way and that and setting the pots and pans hanging in our wagon to clattering, and I am glad we are fifth in line through the ravine and not first.
“Come up and keep us company, cowboy,” Mama calls. “We’re just about over the ridge.” This enticement is enough to lure my brother into the open, perhaps because Mama has not called him Baby Adam, a title he likes not at all but which has stuck to him well past his baby years. Baby is seven now and too fond of coddling. He still has the fine blond hair he was born wearing, firm evidence in my opinion that he remains in most respects an infant, and I plan on referring to him as such until he shows me wrong. He comes out carrying the fiddle he inherited from Papa, proof his courage is not fully restored. Torturing that poor instrument and the ears of anyone within hearing is a balm for Baby’s soul, it seems, because he plays only when he’s anxious or afraid. Soon, Leon is beside him, singing along, and between the two of them and the pots still banging with each bump of the wagon, they set up a racket wanting only a chorus of devils to complete a full demonic symphony.
It is to this unmelodious anthem that the scouts return. They appear at the edge of the ravine, horses and riders breathing clouds into the freezing air, the rock walls sparkling with crystalline frost, and a moment later, we hear the bugle sounding through the mountains, signaling that they have encountered no danger, that the way ahead is clear. Once again, the caravan sets up a cheer. Even Chester senses the excitement, and it is all I can do to keep him from charging ahead. The snow is still sparse, but I know there is ice lurking beneath the thin white lace laid over the ground.
The scouts are waiting for us as we round the pass. The ridge widens and levels, and with a tumble into the ravine not so likely, Baby and Leon leave off their caterwauling, the last of their wails fading as my sister, Rae, trots up on Envy, her piebald mare.
“I hope you’ve got another song in you, Baby,” Rae says, smiling at him with her warm, suede-brown eyes. “I told the scouts you would play us into New Absalom.”
Baby mutely shakes his head and holds out his arms, asking to be picked up and forgetting all about the fiddle, which nearly bounces from the wagon at the next bump.
“Damn it, Baby!” I shout, grabbing for the fiddle. “You break this thing, and I’ll have your guts for garters!” I have watched my sister unman our coda’s meanest rowdies with the same words and less, but my little brother appears hardly to have heard.
Rae meanwhile has lifted Baby onto the saddle in front of her and placed her hat on his head. Only with Rae does Adam truly earn his title, nor will she quit spoiling him no matter how much I get after her for it.
“Mm sorry,” says Baby Adam, plainly not sorry.
“How about you, Sunshine?” Rae asks. Rae is about the only one who still uses this name for me. I nearly reply that my name is Naomi or hers is Puddinghead, but unlike Baby Adam, I have the sense not to get upset when someone calls me something I don’t like.
“How about me what?” I ask, sharper than I intend. The pair of us have been bickering the better part of a month, and I was prepared for some chiding or rebuke. But my sister is not the sort to come at you sideways. If she means to start a fight, she will lay in right away, and just now she seems as merry as you please.
Rae shakes the snow from her matted braids, hair the brown-gold of burned sugar. Her tanned face is flushed from the cold, her scarf stiff with frozen breath. She is nineteen and beautiful, even by the standards of the townships, where girls are rumored to bathe almost daily and can generally be counted upon to have all their teeth. “How about you play for us? I promised the scouts we’d have a tune. You’re too kind a girl to make your big sister a liar.”
Rae is highly peculiar when it comes to my fiddling. She could easily play for herself, and yet hardly a day goes by in which she does not try to cajole a song out of me, usually on some pretext, as lately I have wearied of acting her personal minstrel. I would offer some mean remark if I thought meanness would discourage her, but it is not possible to hurt Rae’s feelings as far as I have seen, and anyway, it turns out today I do feel like playing, even like the fiddle wants me to play; I could almost swear I hear it humming to me on its own. So I tell Rae sure and hand Mama Chester’s reins and set the old fiddle to my arm.
The tune I have in mind is slow and somewhat mournful but also happy, what Papa called a waltz. It is an old song well-known among our coda, and only a few notes have passed before people begin to sing, first in the wagons closest to us—Jasper Hollis and his family just ahead, and the Silva girls with their husbands and Alicia Silva’s new baby boy—and then others up and down the line, until all fifteen wagons are mooning and crooning along with my fiddle, and it is thus that we come finally to New Absalom and our winter rest.
For the past three seasons, my coda has traveled all up and down the continent trading and foraging and tending our small herds, and never have we remained in one place more than a few nights running. To stop longer would be to hazard attack from the tribes that claim those lands as their territory, most of whom are hostile to anyone not their own and consider caravans like ours fat and tempting plunder. Even on the move, we are often called upon to defend ourselves, but we are as a rule better armed than most tribesmen and unwilling to surrender our wagons without demanding payment up front in blood, and once our assailants realize this, we are generally deemed not worth the trouble. But in the wintertime, most everything north of the bridgelands is covered
in snows so savage that attempting a trek of any distance is to invite death into your own boots, and even the fiercest warriors will not venture far from their lodges. So when the cold comes, we Walkers take the provisions we have spent the year gathering to some snowbound roost and wait out the cold months in safety.
New Absalom is the finest of our winter refuges, though at first sight it looks like little more than an overgrown ruin. The sprawling shrubbery and tall grass is a careful deception, however, planted deliberately to make it seem as if New Absalom’s last inhabitants left long ago and with no intention of returning. Once the brush and dirt are cleared away, we will have a town of grand stone homes seemingly untouched by time.
This place is what my people call a shroomtown, owing to the way everything from buildings to roads to walls to stairways seems to have sprouted like so many mushrooms from the ground. We have encountered other such localities in our wanderings, but never one so intact or so secluded. Nor have we ever succeeded in puzzling out the means by which such structures were raised. Once, Randy Tinker Bose tried digging under the wall of a shroomhouse and discovered it was fused to the living rock beneath. His conclusion was that the builders of New Absalom were somehow able to command Nature herself to grow houses the way she might grow mountains or trees, though presumably a bit more quickly. Everyone agreed this was a damn-fool notion, but to date it remains our only explanation. What we do know is that shroomhouses are sturdy and comfortable, more so even than the houses they have in the townships, which are impressive to look at but still made with nails and planks and other common materials, much the same as our own wagons.
By tomorrow night, we will be fully settled in New Absalom, and there will be a feast and a bonfire to celebrate the start of winter, but tonight we are quiet and somber, settling together in the huge rock fortress we call Everett’s Palace, a fanciful name that stuck as fanciful names often do. Despite its generous proportions, the Palace holds heat well, and a few small fires warm it nicely. I roll up in my blankets, planning to make a show of sleeping, though I expect the real article will be hard to come by.
Tomorrow will be my first ride with the scouts, who are charged with venturing ahead of the caravan to survey the path and flush out danger. Rae put up a fuss when I announced my intention to ride, though she had no right to whatever. Any member of our coda is permitted to become a scout at the onset of her thirteenth winter, and stay as long as the others will have her. But Rae considered her own judgment sufficient to keep me with the wagons and would not hear otherwise. My sister’s temper is never to be trifled with, but this was one of the few times I have seen her in so black a rage. She would have had me forever nannying Baby and laundering everyone’s underthings had Reaper Thom not finally succeeded in talking her down. I have been thin with her ever since. Who she thinks she is to make exceptions to our coda’s laws I cannot say. Rae herself was fully two months younger than I am now when she first joined the scouts, and she is counted among their best. I intend to be every bit as good and have spent many a sleepless night pondering just how I will achieve this lofty aim.
It thus comes as a surprise when I awake and realize half the night has already passed. The upstairs chamber where we have bedded down with some of the Hollises is dark save for a few rambling embers, and I lie there listening to the breathing of sleepers dreaming quiet dreams. And then I hear something else, a kind of metallic winding, and notice Rae’s bed has not been slept in.
I find her seated by a window in the hall, looking out into the clear night. I’m sure she hasn’t seen me, but then she says, “Hey there, Sunshine. What’s the matter? Not sleepy?”
The windows of shroomhouses seem thin and flimsy but are harder than any glass I have ever encountered. Outside, the clouds have cleared, allowing moonlight to fall bright into the hall. “Is the storm over?”
“Not quite. It’s just resting a bit.”
“Are there moon babies out?” I regret speaking as soon as the words leave my mouth. Moon babies are colorful blooms of light found in the vicinity of the Moon on some clear nights, often in the company of angel’s stitches and sparrow fires and other similar displays. They make a grand spectacle, and the number of times I have witnessed them could be counted on one hand. It is said they are more commonly seen from New Absalom, but likely that is just another of the superstitions surrounding this place, and I fear by asking I have shown myself the silly girl I am trying so hard to prove I am not.
“Just the plain old Moon,” Rae says.
“Then what are you doing?”
She turns her face to me, smiling. “Thinking about winter. There’s a book of stories I’ve been meaning to finish. And I think I’ll carve a set of chess for Baby.” She sighs happily. “You go on back to bed. Big day tomorrow. I’ll be along in a minute.”
Rae is in a fine mood, our quarrels of the past days seemingly forgotten. I am not so quick to relinquish a grudge, but like all my sister’s passions, her happiness is catching, and as I crawl beneath my covers, I feel a smile climbing my face.
Not until I am teetering on the edge of sleep do I recall the sound of winding metal that drew me from my bed and picture Rae beside the window, and see the pistol in her hand, and hear the ratcheting as she worked the action over and over and over and over.
FOUR
NAOMI
When next I open my eyes, morning has arrived, and I am surrounded by empty bedrolls and cool ashes and bodies bustling as they ready for the day. Breakfast is well under way in the great hall, everyone seated at long tables loudly devouring hotcakes. Most will spend their day clearing the town, heavy labor and cold but work all are eager to begin. I spot a place next to Baby Adam and have annexed one of his hotcakes before he registers my arrival.
“You give that back!” he shouts, grabbing.
I pretend confusion, my mouth full. “Give what back, Baby?”
“I’m not a baby!” I have chewed enough of his meal now that he no longer wants it returned, and so Baby tries to bite me instead. “And you’re a big old priss, Miss Priss!” We all have names for one another in my family, and this is Baby’s for me.
“Careful there, little man. You don’t have so many sisters you can afford to just go eating them willy-nilly.” Rae has arrived with a tall stack of hotcakes, all dripping goat butter and burned-sugar syrup. She makes remuneration to Baby for his lost cake and plops the rest in front of me. I tuck in with gusto, both because I’m famished and because I am anxious to get going, but when I’m done, Rae makes me drink a big glass of goat milk before I am allowed to leave, insisting I’ll need the energy. I am so full of nerves that I neglect even to remind her that I can feed myself, thank you very much. I finish in one great gulp and run to put on my boots and woolens and leathers and run back to the hall.
Mama is waiting with packs for me and Rae, each with a lunch of hard-boiled eggs and a sandwich made with thick-cut bacon and no little grease, one bottle of milk and one of whiskey, plus blankets in case we are caught outside tonight. She gives Rae her pack and Rae bows to receive a kiss on the forehead. “Come back to me, sweet girl,” Mama says.
“I will, Mama,” Rae replies softly.
Mama removes my hat to kiss me on the crown of my head. She and I are colored alike, freckly with eyes and hair shaded like coffee, though if Mama’s brew would keep you up all night, mine is milkier and not so potent. “Come back to me, sweet girl,” she says.
“I will, Mama.”
This is no idle promise or needless benediction. It is the duty of the scouts to spare our coda peril by facing that peril first. If there is violence waiting beyond the safety of our camp, the scouts will bear the worst of it. We were fortunate this year not to lose a single soul, though at the summer gathering, Timothy Sullivan did convince some poor, misguided girl to marry him and left our coda for hers. But if we ever imagine partings are always so cheerful, we have the tablets to tell us otherwis
e.
The tablets are tall wooden slabs, all carved with the names of friends and family lost to the wilderness, taken by sickness or cold or by our enemies. Among the names are three Rae carved herself: Everett Ochre, which is Papa’s name, and those of our brother and sister, Jesse and Delilah Ochre, all three taken in a raid by Leafcoat warriors eight years ago. The tablets are hinged like cabinets and have shelves holding candles and pictures and toys and other tokens of remembrance. No one leaves the safety of our camp without first touching them for luck. Much of our coda’s history is held in those tablets, and as I follow Rae from the great hall, my hand running across the wooden grain, I feel the warmth of memory beneath my palm.
The other scouts are at the gun racks set just inside the arch of Everett’s Palace, jostling and joking as they shoulder their rifles. I hang back, not wanting to get in the way, suddenly remorseful for stealing Baby’s breakfast. I feel much the baby myself now, unsure how to find my way in. Rae shoves and laughs with the rest, but when she turns away, I see she has my gun beneath her arm.
“Cleaned it this morning,” she says, presenting me with the rifle. “And this is for you.” In her other hand is a pistol, a revolving sixer, new and dimly gleaming, with a textured wooden handle.
“Where did you get it?” I ask, awed. I had expected to be stuck with one of the old rusty things used for practice.
“At that township a few days back.” Rae is plainly pleased with herself, and for good reason. Townspeople are notoriously stingy when it comes to their weapons, and coaxing the tiniest peashooter from them is a lengthy and expensive production.
“But how did you pay for it?”
She flashes me a jaunty smile. “My secret. Go ahead—put it on.” The pistol has its own leather holster, which Rae helps affix to my belt. The gun hangs heavily, frightening and reassuring both. “Good girl,” Rae says, when I’m set. “Now go saddle up Jumbo.”
Ninth City Burning Page 3