Scorched Earth

by Tommy Wallach

  “It relaxes me.”

  “Maybe for the gods, too. Maybe it is relaxing to build worlds. Certainly more so than waging wars.”

  Zeno ran her hand along the smooth curve of the miniature tree’s foliage. She found an imperfection: snip, snip. “I hope you won’t be offended to hear that I didn’t expect to see you alive again.”

  “No. I would be thinking the same.”

  “Good. Then the offense can be mine alone.” Zeno finally deigned to look up from the tree. Her eyes, ringed with sleeplessness, were an accusation. “I sent men to die so you could get into the Anchor. So you could kill Chang. And yet here you are.” Athène didn’t speak; she’d anticipated something like this. “If you’d tried and failed, you would be dead. If you’d succeeded, my spies would know, and you would also be dead. So you didn’t try.”

  “I did.”

  “Then how did you survive?”

  “The Grand Marshal let me go.”

  “Why would he do that?”

  “So I could give you a message.”

  “What message?”

  Athène considered reneging on her promise to Chang, but what good would it do? Surely he’d find some other way to deliver his revelation to Zeno, and the delay would serve no one. The sooner the two armies met on the field of battle, the sooner they would destroy each other. So she delivered Chang’s message, along with a threat of her own. As she spoke, the vicious words unspooling like black ribbon from a spindle, she watched Zeno’s cool superiority melt from her face like tallow. She left the tent in silence, confident that the final battle for the soul of the continent was finally about to begin.

  * * *

  It was scarcely an hour’s walk from Zeno’s encampment to the Wesah’s, but Athène took her time, hoping the brisk breeze might blow her doubts away. She felt sullied by the events of the past few days. Though she’d only agreed to help Chang because doing so helped the Wesah, it still made her sick to think that she’d shared a drink with the man who’d murdered thousands of her sisters in cold blood, to say nothing of having just done his bidding.

  No theoretical nausea after all: Athène doubled over and emptied the contents of her stomach out into the mud. It felt like a judgment, a rejection of all her excuses and equivocations. Though she’d yet to feel her daughter quicken, she could sense the girl’s spirit inside her—like a second conscience, appraising her every decision.

  “What else would you have me do?” she asked, but her child-to-be didn’t respond.

  She reached the outskirts of the Wesah camp. During the raid on Edgewise, the tribe had taken on a dozen new missives—all under the age of fourteen, still malleable enough to adapt to their new circumstances without too much bitterness. They crouched around the fires, tending to the meat in silence; missives weren’t allowed to speak English to each other, and these boys had yet to learn more than a handful of Wesah words. Watching them now, Athène realized that the time would come when this practice would have to be abolished. Though most missives eventually came to think of themselves as members of the tribe, that didn’t change the fact that they began their lives with the Wesah as slaves. How could Athène claim the moral high ground over the Descendancy or Sophia when she was complicit in treating human beings as mere chattel?

  “Andromède,” said a young warrior called Elodie, whose arms were heavy with battle trophies. “You are back.” Her voice betrayed her disappointment.

  “Summon the chieftains to my tent.”

  “Many are out hunting.”

  “So bring me the ones who aren’t. Go.”

  Athène wasn’t surprised at the girl’s dismay; she’d only been Andromède for a month, after all. More than a few of her sisters had probably hoped she wouldn’t return from her mission to the Anchor, so some more worthy warrior could be promoted in her place.

  Seven chieftains had survived the massacre at the tooroon, but only three arrived at Athène’s tent within the following hour, after which she set a guard outside to bar further entrance. Three was an auspicious number, and the tribe was now small enough that it could be effectively administered with this many. Two of the chieftains—Lyra and Delu—had led naasyoon in the southern reaches, and both had the burnished bronze skin and gilded leather armor common to those places. The third was her mother’s ex-lover Nephra—the only one Athène really trusted.

  “Where have you been?” said Lyra. Of the three women, she was the one most obviously skeptical of the new Andromède. Athène appreciated that; true disloyalty always came disguised as flattery and fawning. “We have been sitting here doing nothing for days.”

  “I went to the Anchor and offered Chang a temporary alliance.”

  All three chieftains reacted viscerally; even the usually dispassionate Nephra looked disgusted. “Why would you do this?” she asked.

  “The Grand Marshal is no better and no worse than Director Zeno. We cannot trust either one.”

  “So why ally ourselves with either?”

  “Crow is not an ally of Fox or Wolf, but she has been known to help both when it serves her. We are Crow. We are death itself.”

  Delu seemed confused by this conflation of the mythological and the real. “So we’re going to kill them both?”

  “We are arranging it so that they kill each other. If one side wins too easily, then even afterward, they will still be too strong for us to fight. I helped the Grand Marshal because he seemed to be in the weaker position. Even if I was wrong about that, by delivering his message, I have moved us one step closer to our goal.”

  Two missives appeared carrying a wooden tray laden with seasoned beef, heat-puckered ears of purple corn, and sweet pudding.

  “What message?” Nephra said.

  “After the tooroon, Chang sent a portion of his forces east. They hid in the hills north of Sophia until Zeno’s army rode for the Anchor. Then they struck.”

  Lyra swallowed loudly. “You’re saying Sophia is destroyed?”

  “If the Grand Marshal is to be believed, the town itself is gone. The academy still stands, but the Protectorate soldiers have been instructed to kill one scholar and burn a hundred books every morning from now until the war is over. But that was only one-half of the message I delivered to Zeno.”

  “What was the other half?” asked Delu, like a child demanding the end of a bedtime story.

  “I told her that her siege was a shameful act of cowardice, and that if she didn’t move on the Anchor in the next twenty-four hours, we would attack her armies with everything we have. Zeno has no choice now. To hold the siege is to risk the lives of her precious scholars and invite a battle on two fronts. Force will meet force, with Crow hovering overhead all the while, waiting to descend.”

  “Mafwe,” Nephra said. Lyra was grinning ear to ear, finally appeased.

  “Spread the word through camp,” Athène continued. “Tonight we feast. Spare nothing, as if there is no tomorrow. Once Zeno enters the city, the hunt begins.”

  “But who are we fighting for?” Delu said. “Who are we hunting?”

  The smoke wafting off the meat was intoxicating. Athène’s mouth dripped with saliva, with expectation. “All of them,” she said. “We’re hunting all of them.”

  11. Clover

  CALCULUS: A SHRINKING CIRCLE OF soldiers, its area and circumference determined by the laws of derivatives and integrals, its proneness to chaotic dispersion defined by limits and logarithms. Algebra: unknown variables all converging on one location, their values determinable only through combination and elimination, through the resolution of the equation. Arithmetic: problems multiplying, families divided, element of uncertainty added, lawfulness and sanity subtracted. Wasn’t that the secret dream of every scholar, to render the seemingly irrational actions of man entirely through mathematics? To see the world in some more fundamental spectrum? Maybe genius was just the marriage of intuition and calculation: a subconscious that could compute. Revelation always arrived as a lightning bolt, but undoubtedly weat
her patterns of thought had conspired to create the necessary preconditions for the storm.

  As soon as Clover saw Zeno’s soldiers on the move, he knew that the academy at Sophia was lost. To attack the Anchor now, just as the effects of the siege were being felt, was completely illogical. And what else but personal vendetta could drive the otherwise unflappable Zeno to act illogically?

  “Hello? Clover? What are we gonna do now?”

  He came to his senses standing at the bottom of the elevator. In his mind’s eye, he could still see Roddy and Tara plummeting with that heaviness peculiar to death, just as Sister Lila had done. (Here physics held sway: terminal velocities and parabolic motion, mass and small-g gravity.) Roddy’s men had left, and Clive and Paz were locked in a tight embrace at the other end of the barricaded portion of the Ring Road. Clover could hear Paz’s sobs even over the gunfire and the nascent patter of rain; clearly she’d solved the problem of the unlikely assault as well, and knew what it implied for her brothers back in Sophia.

  He realized Kita was looking at him expectantly.

  “Did you say something?” he hazarded.

  “I said what the hell are we gonna do now?”

  The future was defined by complex crosscurrents of intention and exigency, like the call-and-response of a Descendant gathering. The only comfort was the thought that a powerful enough mind could read them. “I think we should go to the Library,” he said.

  “The Library? Isn’t that the first place Zeno’s going to attack?”

  “Probably. That’s why it’s important we help the attendants defend it.”

  “So now you wanna fight?” Clive said. He’d left Paz over by the barricade to collect herself. “Five minutes ago you were ready to leave town!”

  “But that isn’t possible anymore. And if we’re stuck here, I’m not just going to sit back and watch it all happen. I have to try and save… something.” He glanced over at Paz but looked away as soon as he caught her red-rimmed eyes—her brothers were probably beyond saving now.

  “Then let’s go to Mitchell’s,” Clive said. “Honestly, I couldn’t care less about the Library.”

  “Why would we go to Mitchell’s?”

  “To look after him and Flora! Remember them? Our friends?”

  “They’ll be safe as long as they stay put.”

  “You can’t know that!”

  “I know that the Library matters more than any of us!”

  “It’s just a building, Clover.”

  “It’s not and you know it. You’re just not thinking rationally.”

  “Oh really? Because I’m so stupid and you’re so fucking smart?” Clive strode forward, and it took all of Clover’s willpower to hold his ground. His brother stopped mere inches from his face. A last moment of impending threat, then a sort of miracle: Clive exhaled, and it was as if all his anger dissipated along with the breath. When he spoke again, his voice was quiet, thick with emotion. “You really won’t come with us?”

  “I can’t,” Clover said, though it hurt his heart to do it. “If Sophia’s really gone, the Library is all humanity has left. I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be.” A brief hesitation, then: “Do you… do you need us to come with you?”

  Clover would always be grateful for the offer, whatever happened. “No,” he said. “You’re right about Flora and Mitchell. Someone should check on them.”

  They stood there for a moment, just looking at each other. Clover realized how much the two of them had changed in the past year, and how those changes had somehow brought them closer together, or made them more understandable to each other, anyway. It was the one redeeming part of all this upheaval, all this destruction. The asymmetries that had made things so difficult between them had all resolved—Gemma, their parents, their prospective careers. Now there was nothing standing in the way of respect, or affection, or even…

  “I love you, Clover,” Clive said.

  The words were so unexpected they sounded almost profane. Was one really allowed to speak something so intimate? “I love you, too,” Clover said, tears springing foolishly to his eyes.

  Clive turned away. “Don’t die,” he said gruffly. Then he and Paz clambered over the barricade, as Clover took Kita’s hand and made for the alley. Behind them, the pulley of Roddy’s elevator clanged against the Anchor wall, like a bell tolling in remembrance of the lost.

  * * *

  They moved quickly along the Purple Road toward the Library. Clover no longer worried about being identified by the Protectorate; Zeno’s army would enter the city within the hour, and this knowledge had already percolated through the citizenry by way of information vectors every bit as efficient as the gutters that channeled rainwater along the streets and down into the sewers. Despite the lateness of the hour, it seemed as if half the Anchor was running from one place to another, stocking up on supplies or looking for a safe port in the storm to come, while the soldiers who had been so ubiquitous since the curfew went into effect were conspicuously absent; Chang could no longer spare any men to patrol the streets.

  They arrived at the Library and found the gatehouse empty and the gates wide open.

  “I don’t like it,” Clover said. “It looks like a trap.”

  Kita sighed. “And yet we’re still walking into it.”

  The garden trees were bare, and the rain had already turned the sweeping lawns to puddled swamps. Skeletal leaves dissolved under their feet like wet paper. They reached the large double doors that opened into the Library proper, and still there was no sign of either Library attendant or Protectorate grunt. Clover tried the handle.

  “At least these are locked,” he said. Then, knocking, “Hello! Is anyone in there?”

  “Get away,” said a muffled voice from inside. “There are a thousand soldiers in here. They’ll blow you to pieces.”

  Kita snorted. “Will they now?” she said. “Then they’ll have to get through the eighteen dragons we’ve got out here.”

  The peephole grate slid open and a palsied and veinous hand stuck a knife through, swinging it wildly from side to side. “I said get away!”

  Clover jumped back on instinct, though the knife wasn’t anywhere near him. “We’re not with Sophia,” he said. “I’m a friend of Attendant Bernstein.”

  The knife stopped its impotent air-stabbing. “You mean Grand Attendant Bernstein?”

  “Yes. I’m… we’re here to help.”

  Finally the weapon was withdrawn. A pair of cloudy eyes magnified by pince-nez appeared at the peephole. Kita gave a little wave. “Hello,” she said. The grate slid closed and the door opened.

  “Sorry about that,” said the old man on the other side. The bottom half of his face was a mass of white beard, above which loomed a craggy nose like a mountain peak poking through the clouds. “I’m Attendant Garula.”

  “Clover Hamill. And this is Kita Delancey.”

  “Hello again,” said Kita.

  The grand foyer of the Library, usually bustling with distracted attendants and beleaguered apprentices balancing towers of books in each hand, was empty. Scraps of paper crinkled underfoot, and all but one of the teardrop-shaped gas lamps had been extinguished. Garula led them past the central staircase to what were known as the Innocent Steps—in the Library’s early days, the servants known as innocents were compelled to traverse the building by very specific routes.

  “Where are the soldiers?” Clover said.

  “Who knows?” Garula replied. “Chang cleared almost all of them out yesterday morning.”

  “Why? He must know how important the Library is to Sophia.”

  “I guess we aren’t a priority. Look there.” They were just passing through the third floor along the course of the spiral stairway. A single soldier could be seen pacing the long corridor. “A couple of men on every floor. That’s what we’ve got to defend against an entire army. Honestly, I don’t even know why Chang bothered leaving anyone at all.” He cupped his hands and called out to the soldier. “Yo
u’re doing God’s work, Grady!”

  The soldier turned. “What?” he shouted. But Garula was already climbing the stairs again. Kita followed him, but Clover hesitated for a moment. “What?” the soldier repeated—almost like an admission of something, or an apology.

  “Nothing,” Clover said. He took the stairs two at a time to catch up with Garula and Kita, who’d arrived at the fifth floor and were already halfway down the hall.

  “How much have you got left?” Kita asked the attendant, continuing some conversation that Clover had missed the beginning of.

  “Well, that’s hard to say. The records are less accurate than we expected. I’d say we’ve transcribed about a third of what I’d view as critical information.”

  “What are you talking about?” Clover said.

  “See for yourself,” Garula replied, opening the door to the Rotunda.

  It was the largest single chamber in the Library—three stories tall, with a vaulted ceiling on which were painted various scenes from the Filia relating to books and knowledge, along with a re-creation of the constellations as they would have been arranged on Landfall Day. Clover had been here hundreds of times before, usually chasing down some niggling question of Bernstein’s. He could remember tiptoeing across the marble floor so as not to disturb the attendants silently poring over their texts at the long shared tables. Today, however, the room was anything but silent; what had to be most of the attendants and apprentices left in the city were on hand, all of them furiously scribbling away in twine-bound notebooks. At the center of the room, the circular desk where two or three attendants were typically stationed—there to fetch volumes requested by other scholars—was manned by only one person.

  “Bernstein!” Clover shouted.

  The spark of recognition, a warm smile—immediately giving way to concern. “Clover, what are you doing here?”

  “We came to help.” An attendant arrived at the desk and picked up a big stack of books, which he carried straight back to his table. “Just what is it you’re all doing up here, anyway?”