Scorched Earth

by Tommy Wallach

  “Copying,” Bernstein explained, as he set out another stack of books for the next attendant. “We’ve been doing it in secret for weeks, but after Chang cleared out most of his men, we moved into the Rotunda. The soldiers he left behind don’t seem to care what we do.”

  “What’s the point of having two copies of everything in the same place?” Kita said.

  Bernstein seemed to notice her for the first time. “Who are you?”

  “Kita Delancey. Clover’s sweetheart.”

  That got a gruff laugh out of the old man. “Ah. Well, let’s hope you’re more trustworthy than the last one.”

  “I am.”

  “To your question, the books aren’t in the same place. We’re sealing the copies into barrels and dumping them into the Tiber.”

  Clover remembered Paz mentioning that she’d seen something floating down the river when she and Athène came through the aqueduct; it must have been one of the barrels. “Why not just send the originals, if you’re worried about Zeno taking the Library?” Clover said.

  “I couldn’t care less who ends up with the manuscripts. I just don’t want to see them lost or destroyed. Two copies in two places mitigates the risk.”

  A woman in attendant’s robes snapped for Bernstein’s attention. After a brief whispered conversation, she scurried off across the Rotunda. “Is she an attendant?” Clover asked.

  “We lifted the ban on women working at the Library after the Archbishop died. He was the one who insisted on the rule, probably to justify its corollary in the Church hierarchy. We needed the help.”

  “What did she say?” Kita asked.

  “The Sophian army is inside the city. You two have to leave.”

  “Shouldn’t everybody in here leave?” Clover said. “Zeno will probably come for the Library first.”

  Bernstein shook his head. “We all knew what we were signing up for. We’ll keep working until the last possible moment.”

  “Then so will we,” Kita said.

  Clover turned to her. “Do you even know how to read and write?”

  “No,” she answered, visibly bristling. “But I’ll find a way to make myself useful. I always do.”

  * * *

  Clover was assigned a desk and a treatise to copy: On the Chemical Properties of Different Varieties of Tree Bark. Kita acted as a go-between for the scholars and the central desk, carrying books and papers back and forth as necessary. Though they could hear nothing of the battle raging outside, the Protectorate guards received occasional updates by way of semaphore sent and received from the roof. Apparently, Zeno had abandoned her guns outside the city, perhaps to encourage Protectorate soldiers to desert, and her forces had entered through all four gates at once. Though it seemed inevitable that at least one of these divisions would come for the Library, no reinforcements from the Protectorate were forthcoming. Again, Clover wondered why the Grand Marshal didn’t see fit to better protect the seat of centuries of Descendant erudition and history.

  Hours passed. Clover’s hand cramped into a claw; he shook it out and kept on writing. At some point, food arrived—massive steaming pots of rice decanted into bowls and sprinkled with salt and pepper—but no one stopped to eat. Some time later, Clover set his head down on his arms to rest a moment and passed out. When he woke again, the sun was rising. He could feel hot breath on his ear, someone whispering for him to wake up already.

  “What is it?” he said groggily.

  Kita clearly hadn’t slept; the circles around her eyes were the same green-black hue of an old tattoo. “I followed one of the soldiers upstairs, just to see what he was doing.”

  “You’re lucky he didn’t catch you.”

  “They have Blood of the Father, Clover. Whole barrels of it.”

  “What? Why would they—”

  He’d answered the question before he was finished asking it. Chang had left just enough soldiers behind to carry out a simple directive: if it looked as if Sophia might take the Library, they were to set the whole place ablaze. The Grand Marshal was like a spoiled child with a toy—if he couldn’t have it, no one would. And if both the Library and the academy at Sophia were destroyed, the world would be cast back into a dark age that would take centuries to escape, if not millennia.

  “We have to stop them,” Clover said.

  Kita nodded. “I know.”

  12. Paz

  THEY PASSED A LARGE HOUSE in the second quarter, immaculately kept, with a walled garden out front decorated with hedge sculptures—a bull, a mermaid, an annulus. White sheets hung from each of the eight street-facing windows. They’d gone sopping wet in the rain, sticking to the granite blocks like a shroud, but the message remained clear enough: no one in the house planned to put up resistance to the Sophian incursion. A few blocks on, citizens who lived in the apartments around a market square hefted furniture out of their windows so those waiting on the flagstones below might fashion them into a barricade. There didn’t seem to be any Protectorate soldiers on hand, yet somehow there were plenty of guns—mostly long rifles with knives sticking out from under the flared barrels. On the smaller roads closer to the Poplin house, people ran this way and that, half of them carrying pitchforks and axes toward the sound of battle, the other half carrying stuffed satchels and bulging valises away from it. The pubs and dance halls were all dark; the cafés were populated only by upturned stools and the flashing red eyes of the rats.

  Paz saw all this, but registered none of it. All she could think about was Frankie and Carlos. Which one had the Protectorate gotten first? Had their deaths at least been quick? Would she ever know?

  “Paz,” Clive said.

  She returned to herself. They were only a few blocks from Mitchell’s place, but Clive had stopped walking. Somewhere nearby, the wail of a baby abruptly died out. “What’s wrong?” she asked.

  “Now that the siege is over, there’s nothing keeping us here. We can get Flora and Mitchell and go. Just like we planned.”

  “What about Clover?”

  “Clover can take care of himself. He’s proven that by now. But if you want to stay, so you can look for Terry, I’ll understand.”

  Terry, the oldest of her brothers, the most likely to still be alive—just one more faceless soldier in Zeno’s army. He was almost certainly inside the city walls now, but how could she ever hope to find him? “I can’t protect Terry any more than you can protect Clover. If we can get Flora and Mitchell out of here, we should.”

  Clive nodded. “Okay, then,” he said. “Let’s do it.”

  The windows of the Poplin house were dark, and the front door was open, banging loudly against the frame every few seconds.

  “Could they have gone somewhere?” Paz said.

  “Where would they go that would be safer than their own house?” Clive replied. He pushed the door open with the tip of his shoe and peeked his head around the jamb. “Hello? Mr. Poplin? Flora?”

  They searched the kitchen and living room first, and then Clive went to check the upstairs bedrooms. The house was bone cold. Paz opened the stove and sniffed—no one had cooked anything here for at least a day. The door down to the workshop stuck in the frame. Houses breathe, her father used to say. She’d tried to explain the science to him—how wood expanded in the summer due to increased humidity—but he preferred to live in the metaphor. She shouldered open the door to a sour exhalation, as of food left out to rot, which overpowered the more familiar scents of wood scraps and polish. She thought back on the months she’d spent living here as Irene, the late-night talks with Gemma, the weekend she’d donated to Mitchell, helping him to finish painting a set of chairs for a tiny client in the First Quarter. Something tapped her cheek, buzzed past her ear. Why was there something so foreboding about going down a staircase? The vertiginously tall steps, each footfall landing like a heartbeat, like a countdown. Too dark to see anything—Paz fumbled to her left, to the gas lantern Mitchell always left hanging there on a peg. Clover had designed it to spark its own flame whe
n you turned the dial. The room flickered into color.

  Paz gasped, nearly gagging as she drew the rotten smell deep into her lungs. Splatters across the dirt floor. Dried patches on the tables, tinting the sawdust red. Spots sprinkled around the walls like raindrops on dark clothing. Mitchell sat in a chair before his treadle lathe, still as a painting, head resting on his chest. His tools were scattered around him, all of them covered in gore; he’d been tortured in too many ways and places to take in at once. Had this happened the night she’d fled the house? She’d assumed the soldiers would leave Mitchell and Flora alone if she ran, but that had been foolish. Yet another corpse left in her wake; yet another stain on her conscience.

  One of Mitchell’s hands—furred at the joints, thick-veined and calloused—had been nailed to the lathe along with a note.

  Clive and Clover Hamill: I’ve taken the girl. Please report to the Old Temple for your orders.

  —Your Grand Marshal

  Paz heard the creak of steps as Clive descended, the sharp intake of breath, silence as he read the note.

  “I should’ve known Chang would come for them,” he said quietly. “This is my fault.”

  “No. It’s mine. The night I arrived in the Anchor, they were watching the house. They came here because of me.”

  “It’s both our faults, then. Or neither. I don’t know anymore.”

  A tear ran slowly down her cheek. She’d liked Mitchell. He’d welcomed her when she first came to the city, had treated her as if she were a member of his family. He’d deserved so much better than this. But that wasn’t why she was crying. “We’re never going to run away together, are we?”

  Clive wiped her tear away with his thumb. “Let’s face it,” he said. “We’ve only ever been good at running into trouble anyway.”

  * * *

  “So the Anchor was actually built over a deep network of tunnels, like the one you and Athène used to go through the aqueducts,” Clive explained, as they jogged briskly from overhang to awning, trying to keep out of the downpour. He seemed preternaturally interested in the gutters, which were running heavy and fast as a freshet. “A few hundred years back, there was a big earthquake, and the church at the center of the Anchor ended up collapsing into those tunnels. A bunch of people died, but the city planners decided it was God’s will, so they rebuilt underground. But I guess people hated it, because after a while the Church abandoned the place. They laid a fresh foundation over the top and started building Notre Fille. Anyway, people call that church, the one they left underground, the Old Temple.”

  “So what’s Chang doing down there?”

  “The sewers crisscross the whole city. They’d be a good way to move around without Zeno knowing. That explains why there are so few soldiers out on the streets.” Clive abruptly stopped walking. “Here we go.” He gestured toward a storm drain. Water poured through, splattering against the stones some unknown distance below.

  “Seriously?”

  “I’m sure there are more pleasant ways in, but I couldn’t tell you where.” He sat down on the cobblestones and put his legs through the drain, holding the lantern he’d taken from Mitchell’s workshop under his jacket. “Wish me luck,” he said, before sliding the rest of his body through.

  She didn’t hear him land. “Clive? You all right?”

  “I’m fine!” he called back. “Just wet. Come on down.”

  Paz sighed. At least she was wearing Gemma’s old jeans and not a dress. She went through on her back, swallowing a mouthful of gutter water as she passed under the cascade. Clive caught her before she plunged into the artificial river that ran down the middle of the brick-walled chute. She tried not to look directly at it; even though the sluiceway ran deep with rain, undoubtedly there were things in there she’d rather not see.

  They started walking. Rats scurried out of the lantern’s bolus of light, as if it might burn them. Curious cockroaches waved their antennae from the mossy fissures between the bricks. Every few hundred feet, another drain would empty from above, pouring over iridescent patches of mold and fungal blooms that looked uncannily like human ears. The smell alone was enough to knock you on your back; Paz had to keep her sleeve across her nose for the first few minutes, breathing through the fabric until her eyes stopped watering.

  “You know where this temple is?” she asked.

  “Not exactly. But the sewers all empty into the Tiber eventually, so I figure we should just head upstream.”

  Screams slipped into the tunnel through the drains. A stutter of gunfire left an image momentarily frozen on the iris. They walked beneath a war zone. After about half an hour, they turned a corner to find a string of electric lights running along the wall. Elegant glass bulbs with thick filaments were connected each to each by long stretches of copper wire.

  “Chang must have been planning this for a while,” Paz said.

  “How do you mean?”

  “Well, look at these brackets. They’re rusting. That doesn’t happen overnight.”

  Clive shook his head. “We keep underestimating him, don’t we?”

  “Everybody does. It’s why he’s winning.”

  The passage zigzagged for a few hundred feet, then abruptly opened up. They found themselves standing on what felt like a cliffside, gazing out over a massive chamber illuminated by powerful lights mounted on the walls. Paz was surprised to learn that the Old Temple wasn’t a single structure, but a complex of many buildings, most of them crumbling stone sheds of one or two stories. The largest of them was the church itself, built in the traditional round shape, with a roof of moldering terra-cotta shingle. Thankfully, no one seemed to be guarding the path by which they’d entered the Temple chamber, nor did anyone notice them descend to the level of the complex. A lone soldier sat outside the church, scratching himself and smoking.

  Paz ducked behind a chunk of gray stone that had probably been there since the earthquake that created this place. “Look,” she whispered. Clive knelt next to her and peeked around the stone. One of the single-story sheds had shiny new bars over the windows. “You think they’re holding Flora in there?”

  “It’s worth a look.”

  As quietly as possible, they sprinted from cover to cover until they reached the shed. Clive tried looking through the window, but it was too high up.

  “Give me a boost,” Paz said.

  Clive made a stirrup with his hands and lifted her to the window. “What do you see?”

  She squinted. The only light inside the shed was what little penetrated through the cracks in the roof. A glint—there, and then gone. “Something’s moving. It must be her.”

  Click. Paz would have known that sound anywhere. “Shit,” she said, dropping back to the ground. The soldier held a cocked gun in one hand and a lit cigarette in the other. He had a ridiculous long mustache—probably a struggling artist or merchant who’d enlisted in the hopes of surviving to claim those twenty gold shekels.

  “You came,” he said. “The Grand Marshal was starting to lose hope.”

  “Now you can let Flora go,” Clive said.

  The soldier looked genuinely confused. “Flora?”

  “The girl in there!” Clive pointed to the shed. “She’s done nothing wrong.”

  “When Chang gets back, I’ll be sure to tell him you feel that way. Now if you’ll be so kind…” He gestured with his gun toward the front of the shed.

  Clive started to walk, but Paz hesitated. “That’s a single-shot pistol,” she said.

  “Excuse me?” the soldier said.

  Paz couldn’t help but smile a little as she explained the situation to Clive. “When Chang opened up Hell, he was suddenly looking at a couple centuries of weapons development all at once. Case in point, that gun right there needs to be reloaded after every shot.”

  “So if he shoots one of us, whoever’s left can kill him?” Clive said.

  “That’s right.”

  Clive frowned sagely, as if cogitating on an interesting riddle. “So who sh
ould we let him shoot?”

  “I’m fine either way.”

  “I’ve been shot before. I can take it.”

  “How gentlemanly of you.”

  “Wait, wait, wait!” the soldier said, backing away with his hands up. “Let’s not do anything crazy.” He looked around, then dropped his voice to a whisper. “I don’t even want to be here. I should be at home with a glass of whiskey and a good book.”

  “I couldn’t agree more,” Paz said. “So why don’t you give us the key to that shed and run along home?”

  “You’ll really just let me go?”

  Paz nodded. “Swear to the Daughter.”

  He fumbled at his belt and took off the key. “Listen, there are about a hundred soldiers just on the other side of that wall.” He pointed toward the church. “So whatever you’re gonna do, do it fast.” He handed her the key, then took off running toward the nearest entrance back into the sewers.

  Paz threw Clive an amused glance. “Who said diplomacy was difficult?” she quipped.

  Clive was still chuckling quietly as he unlocked the shed door. It was a mess inside, full of old construction materials and broken furniture. All of it was wet and rotten from the rainwater that filtered first through the streets above the Old Temple and then through the shabby roof.

  “Flora?” Clive said. “Flora, are you there?”

  The voice that answered was weak and raspy, but unmistakably male. “No Floras, I’m afraid,” it said. “Check back next week.” This cryptic statement was followed by a peal of wild laughter.

  Clive scrambled over the rubble. Paz followed him, and through a gap in the shelves, she could finally make out the figure chained to the back wall. He smelled of infection progressed past the point of no return, of rotting flesh, of the beginning of the end. Or maybe the end of the end.

  “Da?” Clive said. “Da, is that you?”

  An eerie white line appeared in the darkness—a grimace and a smile at once. “Who’s asking?” Daniel growled.