Scorched Earth

by Tommy Wallach

  Concerned whispers like rustling papers, a palpable sense of fear. Daniel Hamill looked up to the great stained-glass windows along the eastern wall of the nave. “Sophia is on the march,” he said. “As I speak, her armies travel swiftly through the veins of the Descendancy, and they will not stop until they’ve stilled our very heart, this city we call the Anchor.” He went quiet for a moment, then threw his arms up to the sky. “I welcome them!”

  Chang shot to his feet, barking something to his honor guard. The entire congregation erupted in shouts of dismay—with Clover probably the loudest among them—but his father would not be silenced. “You are welcome here, Sophia! Deliver us from this benighted age! Deliver us from dogma! Deliver us from evil!”

  7. Paz

  THERE WAS AN ADDITION STUCK to the side of the house like a barnacle, its unpainted clapboard walls and rusting steel roof contrasting with the sturdy planks and orderly shingles of its host. It could only be RP’s workshop. Paz decided to begin her infiltration there, farthest from where her quarry was most likely to be sleeping. The doors were secured with a thick iron chain, but the thin wooden walls were rotten near the ground, so Paz was able to pry the boards off with her bare hands. The nails screamed as they were pulled from their berths, bending as if melting. It was scarcely five minutes’ work to make a hole big enough to squeeze through.

  She’d kept her eyes on the couple for most of the afternoon. They’d walked the market for nearly an hour before returning home with a basket full of melons, a bunch of carrots, and a rabbit the breeder had clubbed over the head right there at his stall. Crouched in the bushes, Paz had watched through the windows as the Wesah woman prepared lunch. Afterward, the two of them retired to their bedroom. (Paz hadn’t been able to make out the details of their exploits through the closed curtains, which was probably for the best.) A while later the couple took another few turns around town and stopped in at the local public house for a drink. Paz got the sense RP liked to show the Wesah woman off; scandalized glances followed them wherever they went. Certainly the people of Cody were responding to the novelty of a Wesah tribeswoman living outside her naasyoon—and with a man, no less—but just as shocking was the oddness of this particular coupling. RP was chubby and short, neck-deep in middle age, while the Wesah woman fairly glowed with youthful vigor. Yet these sorts of partnerships were common in civilized society—security and support exchanged for a pretense of devotion and love. It was Paz’s mistake to think the Wesah were above such transactions.

  The couple returned home again a few minutes past sunset, and Paz took up her position outside. She’d watched from the woods until the last candle was blown out, then waited another half an hour, just to be safe. In spite of these precautions, she could still feel her heart beating hard as she rose to stand inside RP’s workshop. Moonlight gleamed through the cracks between the clapboards, making a starscape out of the studs and bolts scattered on the counters. Sickle-shaped tools hanging from the walls enacted a portion of the moon’s phases. Paz stepped gingerly toward what she hoped was an internal door connecting the workshop to the house. Something pulled at her shoulder; the rope she’d purchased at the market earlier that day had looped itself around the bottom of a bucket. She shot out a hand and managed to get her fingers around the handle just in time to keep it from falling over.

  “Daughter’s love,” she whispered—a strange habit she’d picked up from Clive. A hollowness bloomed in her heart: Was he still alive? And if so, was there any chance he still loved her? She shook her head, silently chastising herself: this was no time to be clouding her concentration with thoughts like that.

  She continued on across the workshop, more carefully now. On the way, she picked up a scrap of light that turned out to be some kind of rasp, serrated along one edge—though her plan was to avoid fighting, only a fool would confront a Wesah warrior completely unarmed. She reached the edge of the chamber and two shallow steps that led up to a door. The hinges were mercifully silent: one of the advantages of sneaking into the house of a craftsperson.

  The room beyond had no windows; it was as if someone had applied a fresh coat of black paint to the darkness. She followed the sound of torrential snoring through another doorway, sliding the rope off her shoulder as she went. Though it would’ve been easy enough to kill the warrior in her sleep, Paz couldn’t exactly exonerate herself with a corpse. For this to work, she had to get the tribeswoman out alive.

  RP lay on his back at the center of a large bed, his striped socks pointed straight up at the ceiling. The Wesah woman was curled up next to him, entirely submerged in the patterned quilt. Paz had cut the rope into three shorter strands, and now she set aside the rasp she’d found in the workshop and gently laid those strands across the sleeping couple—one at the level of their chests, another at their waists, and the third at their ankles. She looped the ropes around the bottom of the bed, slid under the mattress, and gathered all six ends together on one side. Starting with the middle strand, she crossed the ends over each other and slowly tightened them against the bed frame. RP’s snoring attenuated; he muttered something. Here was the dicey part; with a great heave, Paz pulled as hard as she could and quickly made a knot.

  “What the hell?” RP said blearily. He sat up but was forced back down when Paz put her weight into the topmost rope and knotted those ends as well. RP’s ankles were still free, and if he’d had the presence of mind, he might’ve slid out. But already his moment was past; Paz cinched down the final rope, pinning him to the mattress in three places.

  She stood up and surveyed her handiwork. RP wriggled beneath his bindings, swearing a blue streak, but the Wesah woman remained a motionless comma beneath the quilt. There was no way she could have slept through all that; this had to be some kind of subterfuge—unless she was simply ashamed to show her face after being caught so easily.

  The creak of a closet door. Understanding dawned on Paz just as something hard and heavy smashed into the side of her head. Her legs turned to water beneath her, and though unconsciousness beckoned like a bathtub full of warm water, she managed to keep it at bay.

  The Wesah woman had never been in bed at all. Maybe she’d noticed Paz way back in the market, or else heard her fumbling around in the workshop only a few minutes ago. Either way, she’d had time to place pillows or blankets under the sheets to approximate her sleeping form and then hide herself away in the closet. Strange that she hadn’t come out sooner, or at least warned RP what was about to happen; Paz easily could’ve killed him by now, if that had been her intention.

  “Noémie, what’s going on out there?” he asked. “I can’t see a damn thing.”

  Noémie: it could have been a false name, only it rang a bell—a story Gemma had told during the tooroon. This girl had been Athène’s lover before Gemma took her place, and then she’d been banished from the tribe for trying and failing to kill her usurper. Suddenly the events of the past few weeks all made sense. Noémie had come to the tooroon with one goal in mind: vengeance. To that end, she’d enslisted the help of this foolish old man, whose armor would ensure that when she faced Gemma, she wouldn’t come up short a second time. And she hadn’t.

  “I no know,” Noémie replied. In a painful turnabout, the Wesah woman quickly and expertly bound Paz’s wrists and ankles with two lengths of twine. A moment later a lantern flared to life. “You,” she said, recognizing Paz at last. “Why you are here, chee.”

  “You killed Gemma,” Paz whispered.

  “Yes.”

  “But everyone thinks I did it.”

  “Think you kill,” Noémie said, exploring the idea, slowly breaking into a smile. “Think you kill.” And now she was actually laughing, so hard she could scarcely breathe.

  “Girl!” RP shouted. “Cut these goddamn ropes already.”

  Noémie was still chuckling as she picked up the rasp Paz had left on the floor, running her fingers lightly along the serrated edge. Paz made sure her face didn’t betray a hint of fear; she wouldn�
�t give the woman the pleasure. “Do it,” she whispered.

  But Noémie decided to see to RP first. She went to the bed and began sawing through the rope around his waist. Paz tried to get to her feet, but she was still too dizzy. Blood trickled down her neck. The sawing grew louder.

  “Careful there,” RP said.

  Err-eee. Err-eee. Err-eee. Faster and faster. If Noémie didn’t stop soon…

  RP screamed as the rasp completed its journey through the rope and continued on into his stomach. Paz put her hands over her ears to drown out the ragged scrape of metal on bone. Of course Noémie felt no loyalty to this man; she’d only been using him—for food and lodging, for his skills as an armorer. Probably she’d only come back after the tooroon to hide out for a while before trying to wheedle her way back into Athène’s good graces, now that Gemma was out of the picture. Paz’s arrival had only triggered the plan a little early. Yet another death to weigh on her conscience. Yet another entry in her deep register of sins.

  RP’s screams died out, gave way to gurgles and grunts, then a final exhalation. Noémie stripped off her nightdress and used it to wipe her hands clean. Then she took a set of traditional Wesah clothes out of the closet—leather skirt and blouse, a fur-lined jacket, moccasins—and quickly dressed.

  “We go now,” she said.

  “We?”

  But Noémie had already left through the front door. Paz was lucid enough to stand up, but the bindings around her wrists and ankles forced her to shuffle like an invalid. She tottered outside, where Noémie was just bringing a horse around.

  “You no run,” the tribeswoman said, then mimed drawing a blade across her throat. She mounted the horse and set a blanket down behind her as a kind of pillion. With her ankles bound, Paz had to ride sidesaddle, which she’d always hated, and hold on to Noémie’s skirt for balance.

  “Where are we going?” she asked.

  “Special place. Place of my people.”

  “Why are you taking me?”

  Noémie cracked her neck, the knobby bone at the base protruding like a creature trying to escape from under the skin. “You my gift,” she said, looking over her shoulder so Paz could see the madness in her eyes, the satisfaction in her smile. “You best gift in world.”

  8. Clive

  THERE’S A STORY GOING AROUND about your papa.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  Clive’s cellmate, a slim and bespectacled twentysomething named Theo, leaned out from the lower bunk. He spoke low, as if there were any need of discretion in a place like this. “They say he led this big service at Notre Fille yesterday, but instead of giving a sermon or reading from the Filia, he pledged his allegiance to Sophia.”

  “Sure he did.”

  “I’m just telling you what I heard.”

  Theo had been arrested for synthesizing gunpowder in his basement without official authorization, and though he wasn’t exactly the sharpest knife in the drawer, he didn’t seem the type for idle gossip. Still, something must’ve gotten mixed up as the story made its way down to the Bastion dungeon. “You heard that my father pledged his allegiance to the people who tortured him for a year? The people who are trying to destroy our entire civilization?”

  “Miguel told me. And why would he lie about it?”

  Miguel was one of the guards. “To hurt me, or confuse me, or just for the fun of it. Who knows?”

  “I imagine a lot of people do, actually.” Theo disappeared back behind the lip of the bunk, no doubt returning to the book he’d been reading ever since Clive got here; every time he finished, he’d just start over again from the beginning.

  Clive leaned back against his pillow and sighed. Life had truly come full circle. Here he was, a prisoner of the Bastion, when less than a year ago, he’d been looking at Paz from the other side of the bars. He spent a lot of his time thinking about those days; in spite of the circumstances, his visits to the dungeon had been a kind of courtship. The whole time he was meant to have been grilling her for information, he’d been falling in love.

  He didn’t feel any less in love now, in spite of what Paz had done. That is, what she might have done. In the weeks since the tooroon, Clive had pictured the scene a thousand times. And though the hard facts hadn’t changed—Paz crouched over Gemma’s body, covered in blood and holding a knife, then fleeing the scene as if her guilt were a foregone conclusion—he simply couldn’t accept that she was the killer. There had to be some other explanation, some larger story he couldn’t see. Otherwise, the world was darker and more terrible than he could fathom—and God knew it was already dark and terrible enough at the moment. Though Paz had described the bleakness of the dungeon in agonizing detail, it was one thing to hear about it, quite another to live it. This was boredom on an epic scale, boredom that bent the very nature of reality, that slowed the river of time to a treacly trickle. You clung to anything that helped mark the passage of the hours: the bowls of cold leftovers from the Bastion mess that Clive knew from experience hadn’t been that good in the first place; the arrival of new prisoners, always greeted with cheers of welcome from those already imprisoned—the seemingly fraternal welcome masking a bitter schadenfreude; the twice-a-day spot checks, during which a guard would turn over the mattresses and look for any cracks or holes in the walls, pinching his nose with his off-hand the whole time. (Clive could no longer smell the revolting bouquet of the dungeon—one small blessing anyway.)

  Things got a little better after his first week, when the prisoners were gifted a distraction in the form of mandatory labor. One morning they were chained together and marched upstairs into a large, light-filled chamber that Clive recognized as one of the Bastion dormitories, only repurposed now as a workshop. Two tables ran the length of the room, both large enough to fit fifty men to a side. The tools the prisoners would need for their work were already laid out like place settings at a dining table.

  An attendant waited until they were all seated to explain how they would henceforth be spending their days. Bullet casings cast in the foundry beneath the Library—publicly acknowledged but still informally referred to as “Hell”—would arrive in two parts, which the prisoners would glue together with resin. When that was done, they would cut grooves into each casing by rotating it against a metal wheel, and finally seal the whole thing with wax. A few prisoners—unapologetic members of the Mindful or else die-hard religious zealots who still clung to the Filial dictum of nonviolence—refused to aid the Descendancy war effort, and they were sent back down to the dungeon with a promise of half rations going forward, but everyone else welcomed the change of pace: the food upstairs was fresher, the days passed more quickly, and you could even get some sunlight on your skin if you got a seat near the windows.

  It was almost enough to make Clive forget that Chang might summon him for a public hanging in Annunciation Square at any moment.

  * * *

  That morning began like any other, with the slow shuffle upstairs and along the wide halls of the Bastion, the uncoupling of the manacles as the prisoners took their seats in the workshop, the leisurely introduction of conversation. But after about an hour, Clive glanced up from his work to find everyone looking toward the workshop doors, where a group of Protectorate soldiers were crowded around something. “What’s going on?” he said.

  Theo, seated just to Clive’s left, tapped his temple knowingly. “Just me being right again. Like always.”

  As Clive watched, the soldiers separated to reveal the impossible: a new prisoner who looked exactly like his father, or a malnourished and haunted version of his father, anyway.

  “That can’t be him,” Clive said, though he knew how uncertain he sounded. “Why would he be here?”

  “I already told you. He’s a Sophian sympathizer. They’ve probably been questioning him ever since that service at Notre Fille.”

  “Da!” Clive called out, but was quickly shushed by one of the guards. There was nothing for it but to wait until lunchtime came around, when the prisoners wer
e given fifteen minutes to fill their bellies and massage the ache from their fingers. As soon as the food arrived—one pockmarked apple, one scoop of peppered potatoes, one disconcerting assemblage of wilted greens—Clive made a beeline for the window, where a pale revenant in the shape of the late Honor Daniel Hamill stood gazing out over the Bastion training fields.

  “Da?” he said. “Is that really you?”

  His father turned to him, smiling weakly. “Yes and no.”

  But there could be no question now that Clive had heard that voice—deep and limpid, somehow more convincing than the average voice. The very sound of it made his heart hurt with a longing for something irrecoverable—a time when their family was whole, and war was just a word you heard in fairy tales and old songs. He wanted so badly to embrace his father, or at least to feel as if his father wanted to embrace him. But neither of them moved.

  “Clover told me you were alive,” Clive said. “But I don’t think I believed him until right now.”

  “I don’t blame you.”

  “You didn’t really turn on the Descendancy, did you?”

  “I’m here because I told the truth.” He gestured with the puckered stub of his left index finger. It had been amputated at the last joint. “This is how the world has always treated prophets. We’re ignored until we can’t be ignored. Then we’re silenced.”

  Clive’s stomach dropped as he realized the full implications of his father’s imprisonment; Chang had no reason to keep either of them alive anymore. He wasn’t sure which was worse: the fact that his death was now practically assured, or that his father had made that grand public disavowal of the Descendancy knowing full well what it would mean for his son.