“I’ll help, if it ever comes to that.” Paz wasn’t sure why she said it, or if it was a promise she could fulfill; they just felt like the right words for the moment.
“Thank you, Paz. But I am preferring someone who likes to kiss me. Now come. We have much to do before we sleep.”
Athène left the office. Paz followed, but not before looking down once more on the old man. He still had the Filia clutched to his chest, the pages stained red with blood. There was a time when the sight of a dead Honor would have filled her with a sense of righteous satisfaction. But that time was long past now. She reached out and slid his eyelids shut, wondering how many more decent men would have to die before this was over.
12. Clive
LADIES AND GENTLEMEN OF THE Descendancy, I welcome you to Annunciation Square,” Chang bellowed. The crowd cheered enthusiastically, a sparkling sea of bottles and steins raised toward the gallows. Most of them had probably had a couple of drinks already; nobody wanted to watch an execution sober. “I know that many of you aren’t native Anchorites, but have heroically answered the call to fight in the holy war that is upon us.”
“Heroic?” Clive heard his father say. “They’re only here for the twenty gold shekels they were promised after the fighting’s done.”
Had Chang really promised that much to every soldier? Twenty gold shekels was a veritable fortune; the Descendancy couldn’t possibly sustain such a large payoff—unless their fearless leader didn’t expect all that many soldiers to be around to collect.
“Sophia’s army will be upon us in a matter of weeks,” Chang continued. “They plan to lay siege to our city, to try and starve us out. But they will fail. We have set aside stores that will last us for over a year. They’ll beat against our walls like waves against the shore, and when the time is right, we will strike like this.”
He snapped his fingers and was rewarded with a deafening roar of approval—as if winning a war could ever be so simple. Clive glanced over to his father, hoping they might share in the tragic absurdity of the moment, but Daniel didn’t seem to be paying attention; his gaze was firmly directed at the sky, as if he were looking for a sign from the God he had forsaken.
“We’re gathered here today to celebrate our city’s strength,” Chang said once the crowd had quieted again, “by executing two of the Descendancy’s most vile enemies. A father and a son. One concealing his malevolence behind a minister’s robes, the other behind a Protectorate uniform.” The crowd booed and hissed, peppering the gallows with rotten fruit and small stones—though the guards and the hangman probably got the worst of it. “Perhaps you’ve heard of this sad, cowardly organization that calls itself the Mindful. There are no more than a few of them left, skulking in the shadows, papering our city with their filthy propaganda. We will tear it all down just as we will tear all of them down. Our victory begins now.”
Chang punched the air—the signal his men had been waiting for. Two members of the honor guard dragged Clive by his bound wrists to stand directly beneath the noose, where the hangman fitted the rope around his neck. He’d been in this same position not so long ago, above the beaches of the tooroon with Burns. But Burns was dead now, as was Gemma and probably Flora, too. So many lost. Clive wished he still believed that he would see them all again on the other side, but all he expected to find there now was darkness. The fear reared up in him like a desperate animal—he didn’t want to die!
“Da?” His father was still staring up at the sky, completely ignoring the hangman drawing the noose tight about his neck. “Da!” Clive shouted.
Chang turned around to look at the condemned. “Any last words?” he said.
“Plenty,” Clive replied.
“Good. Keep them to yourself. I want you to die unsatisfied.”
The crowd cawed and shrieked like a flock of ravenous birds. Clive wondered how many of the people out there knew him personally—folks he’d gone to school with, or performed for back in the ministry days, or trained with on the fields of the Bastion. All of them so eager now to watch him hang. A low-pitched drone sounded beneath the cacophony; in his frantic state, Clive imagined it was a sort of auditory distillation of the people’s bloodlust.
“Clive! Clive!”
He’d avoided looking at anyone in the first few rows so as not to see their hatred and cruelty so close up. But he would’ve known that voice anywhere, even through the drone growing louder every second. Clover had one arm on the lip of the gallows, almost as if he might climb up, and the other around the waist of a stout, bright-eyed girl Clive vaguely recognized. He smiled at this unexpected scrap of grace. To know his brother had found someone to give him some comfort and consolation in these dark times—it was better than any last words could’ve been.
“Da, look,” Clive said to his father. “Clover came!” Chang descended the gallows steps as the hangman took up his position beside the lever that would drop the platform. Through it all, even with Clover calling out his name, Daniel Hamill wouldn’t stop looking up. “Da!” Clive shouted. “Look at Clover! Look at me! Da!”
As last his father turned his attention away from the sky. His eyes were clear, almost joyful. “She’s here,” he said to Clive. Then he raised his voice to its full ministerial volume: “She’s here!”
Clive looked upward, realizing as he did so that the drone he’d been hearing wasn’t coming from the crowd. A shadow appeared behind the clouds, like a fish swimming just beneath the surface of a river. A moment later it dipped into view, a revelation in silver, a demon, a miracle—moving more quickly than should have been possible, as if reality itself had suddenly come unspooled. As Clive watched, it began to shed small gray pellets, almost like bird droppings. The crowd was transfixed; by the time they realized what was happening, it was already too late.
The air filled with screams. Those citizens at the edge of Annunciation Square tried to flee back up the narrow alleyways, as the first bombs began to land, throwing up terrible bouquets of jagged stone and torn flesh. The hangman jumped down from the platform and disappeared into the crowd, while Chang was quickly spirited away by his honor guard. At the same time, a small group of men and women were making their way up to the gallows. They seemed unperturbed by the bombs, efficiently extricating Clive and his father from the ropes around their necks and wrists. The woman helping Clive said something, gesturing toward the eastern edge of the plaza, but her words were drowned out by the cries of the wounded and the drone of the flying fish, which had finished its first salvo and returned to the clouds.
As soon as he was free of his bindings, Clive ran to the edge of the platform and scanned the square for his brother, but the smoke made it difficult to see much of anything. Notre Fille had been hit; the bell tower appeared to have been blown clean off, and the eastern wall had been reduced to rubble. Dozens of bodies were strewn around the cobblestones and at the bottom of the large craters carved out by the bombs.
“Clover!” he cried out. “Clover!”
“Come on,” his father said behind him. “We have to leave before Kittyhawk—”
“You do whatever you want,” Clive interrupted. “I’m gonna find my brother.” He dodged past his father and ran down the steps. There were four bodies underneath the gallows, blown there by one of the explosions. He’d checked only the first two—neither of whom were Clover—when a hand closed around his wrist, holding him in place.
“Daughter’s love, Clive,” his father said. “There isn’t time for this.”
“Isn’t time? He’s your son!”
“I know. But the plane…” He trailed off. The “plane” had just dropped below the clouds again. It was returning for a second assault.
“Run!” his father shouted. Clive obeyed this time, charging alongside his father toward the eastern edge of the square. But so many of the cobblestones had been blasted loose by the bombs, leaving pockmarks and ridges and little fires everywhere; it was impossible to move quickly. Clive glanced over his shoulder and saw the b
ombs exploding along the rooftops. Too late.
He was lifted off his feet, and for a brief fantastical moment, knew what it was to fly. Then the ground was hurtling back toward him again, and the world mercifully disappeared.
* * *
A city on fire. Blood running through the streets. That drone like a drill boring into your skull. Clover’s little body torn to pieces.
Clive sat up screaming, glanced around like a cornered animal. He was lying in a bed in a wide, low-ceilinged room with wooden beams and gray stone walls. If this was hell, it was nicer than he’d expected; if heaven, a little underwhelming. As his eyes adjusted, he realized he knew this place: the vestry at Ratheman Chapel in the Second Quarter. His father had let him give the homily here once, to an audience of exactly eight people.
Nearby, the woman who’d untied him atop the gallows was bandaging the shoulder of some other man. “Daniel,” she shouted, “your kid’s up.”
The door that led between this makeshift infirmary and the chapel proper opened, revealing a few dozen people milling around the nave; they could only be members of the Mindful. Clive pushed himself back against the thin pillow as his father came to stand at the end of the bed. They observed each other.
“You knew,” Clive said, “about that thing in the sky.”
“The pilot cut it a lot closer than I would’ve liked. He was supposed to interrupt Chang’s speech.”
“You knew it was coming and you didn’t warn me. You didn’t warn Clover.” Clive shook his head. It was one thing to align yourself with Sophia; it was another to put that loyalty above the safety of your own flesh and blood. “I used to look up to you,” he whispered.
If the blow landed, Daniel didn’t show it. “I hope you will again.”
Clive swung his legs over the edge of the bed and stood up. He wobbled, abruptly aware of the many scrapes and bruises he’d sustained in the attack, but managed to stay upright. In the nave, the Mindful members were engaged in some sort of impassioned debate—probably about which innocent people they would murder next. Clive didn’t want anything to do with them, or with any part of this war. He was officially done. The large front doors of the chapel were boarded over, but he remembered there was a back entrance behind the ambo. He already had his hand around the doorknob when he was pulled up short by the sound of a gun being cocked.
He turned to find his father holding the weapon. The rest of the Mindful had gone quiet, watching to see what would happen. “Please,” Daniel said. “It isn’t safe out there.”
Clive snorted. “It doesn’t look very safe in here, either.”
“I mean it, Clive. I can’t protect you outside these walls. And you’re a risk to all of us, now that you know we’re here. I can’t just let you leave.”
Maybe that was true. Maybe the once honorable Daniel Hamill really had changed so much that he could shoot his own son in the back. But if that was the world they lived in now, Clive would be more than happy to see the end of it. He turned back around and opened the door.
“Do what you have to do,” he said, and walked out into the night. He left the door open behind him, waiting for the sound of the shot. But it never came.
Interlude
KNIT ONE, PURL ONE. KNIT one, purl one. Francie didn’t need to think about what she was doing, or even look at her hands. They carried out the familiar motions on their own, while her mind wandered from memory to memory like a cow in a field, chewing a bit of grass here, another bit over there. Shitting it out and starting all over again.
In spite of the must and the dust, Francie could still see this place as it had been the day she and her late husband Drew opened it—as Debenham House back then. They’d retained the services of all the best craftsmen in Edgewise to build it: carpenters and blacksmiths, bricklayers and masons, even a down-on-his-luck Anchor-trained artist to paint little Filial scenes in all the rooms. But the murals had all flaked and faded by now, their once-vivid colors turned dull and murky. Francie had painted over most of them with her favorite color—a shade of green she called “sea foam”—but if you looked closely, you could still discern the outlines of the scenes underneath, tenacious remnants of the past lurking beneath the surface of the present.
Why was it that a once-beautiful thing gone to rot left a more bitter flavor than a thing that had never been beautiful to begin with?
Francie had been beautiful once. Boys would stop and stare, happily married men would try to catch her eye when their wives weren’t looking, the sailors and stevedores down at the docks would whistle and hoot when she passed. None of them knew her secret, which was exactly how Francie liked it. Sometimes she would tuck a lock of hair behind her ear, and the memory of making that same gesture thirty years ago would momentarily convince her she was a teenager again, and that any man who gazed upon her would inevitably be struck speechless with desire. But that was just wishful thinking: men’s eyes slid right off her now, like she was scarcely a person at all.
Knit one, purl one. Start a fresh row. Probably for the best; Daughter knew all that attention hadn’t always served her well. They were nights she didn’t like to think about now—flirtations turned aggressive, refusals that were ignored.
Let those memories lie, Francie. Move along to a greener patch of grass.
She’d kept the fire burning since the sun went down, and now the lobby of the boardinghouse—called Francie’s now—felt claustrophobic with heat and smoke. She put down her knitting and went outside for a breath of cool air. Used to be Edgewise would still be bustling this time of night, but the outbreak last month had changed things. Though there hadn’t been any new reported cases of the plague in at least a week, the city was still effectively quarantined. Half the quays sat empty, and the seaside taverns were quiet. Everyone was a little bit poorer, a little bit colder. Business at the boardinghouse was particularly bad; it would’ve been even worse if people knew that a boarder had died of the plague right on the premises. But Francie had handled it, bundled the corpse up in the dead of night and paid an old dockhand to carry it out to the trench where they’d burned all the other bodies. Even so, most of her rooms were unoccupied at the moment; she’d even stooped to taking in a few working girls to make ends meet—something she’d sworn she would never do.
Across the street, Honor Olmstead sat on the bench outside his church, smoking a cheroot. His teeth were so stained from the tobacco it made Francie a little sick to see him smile; so it was a good thing he seldom did. He waved at her, and she waved back. They hated each other.
She was just about to go back inside when she heard a cry from somewhere up the road.
“Did you hear that?” she said to the Honor.
“Sure did,” he replied coolly.
“Sounds like somebody’s hurt.”
“A cat, maybe.”
“That was a person.”
“A whore, then. Those girls like to play it up, act like they’re enjoying themselves.”
Francie knew that sound all too well; she’d endured a few dozen varieties of the ecstatic performance over the past few weeks. The boardinghouse had painfully thin walls. “It ain’t that.”
Olmstead shrugged. “Whatever you say.”
Francie squinted. A match flame appeared at the top of the road leading into town. Then another. And another. “People are coming.”
The Honor was curious enough that he stood up and joined Francie in the middle of the road. He squinted into the darkness. “People come. People go.”
“Not these days.” Dozens of torches now, and more coming down the road every second. Francie jabbered out of nervousness. “Can you believe what they’re saying about that airplane? Flying around like an eagle, dropping things on people. Frightens me to death, I’ll tell you. How can a body fight a war against the sky?” The flames floated higher than they should have, like a hundred ruby will-o’-the-wisps—it was a moment before Francie realized it was because the torches were held by Wesah warriors on horseback. And now the
quiet of the night was shattered by a different sort of cry. A cry of triumph, of ardor, of incitement.
A cry of war.
Francie didn’t personally have a problem with the Wesah. She’d met plenty of tribeswomen over the years, had even lodged a couple, and they’d been about as civil as anybody else. One time a sallow-looking man had shown up with a Wesah girl of maybe fifteen and taken a room upstairs. After thinking on it for a few minutes, Francie had marched up there and told him he’d have to take his custom elsewhere. The look on the girl’s face had haunted her ever since—how someone could beg for help without saying a word—but really, what was Francie supposed to have done? If she’d gone to the sheriff, he might’ve killed the girl just for being Wesah, or else taken her for himself.
Yet it was the shame for not having done more for that girl that kept Francie rooted in place as the Wesah bore down on her, even though she knew there was only one reason they would arrive in such numbers in the middle of the night, particularly after the horror that Grand Marshal Chang had visited on them at that big old get-together of theirs.
“What the hell are they doing here?” Olmstead said.
“Honor, I think you should go inside,” she whispered.
But it was already too late for that. The first Wesah were passing by, and Francie lost sight of Olmstead for a moment. The warrior women whooped and hollered, fearless, exhilarating. Candles and lanterns were lit in windows up and down the street, as if magically switched on by the cries of the Wesah. Francie heard something like a slap, something like a gurgle. When the flow of horses had passed, she saw Honor Olmstead lying on the ground with a neat X cut into his chest. Two tribeswomen stood over him. One was tall and broad-shouldered, with blunt, masculine features. The other had a more feminine physique, though Francie had no doubt she was every bit as ferocious in a fight. The larger warrior peeked around the church door while the other looked across the road. Fancie met her gaze; the warrior’s eyes were inviting and threatening at once, like deep water, and she still had her blade drawn; a drop of blood fell from the tip.
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