What the Thunder Said

by Walter Blaire

  “I don’t think I’ll tell you his name.”

  Pain touched Jephia’s perfect face. She changed her question. “If you were arrested and Shanter was hanged, how did you break free?”

  “Same answer,” Caulie replied. Silence built between them.

  “I guess my project is complete,” Jephia finally said. “I have turned you into the suspicious, guarded person you’ll need to be to survive the world.”

  “I’m sorry. It doesn’t seem wise to tell you.”

  “I’m not sad, Caulie. I just don’t have a project anymore.”

  Someday, someday, Caulie hoped she would be as detached and cavalier as her friend. Or maybe she didn’t—it would be awful to be so guarded. “I almost have this wrapped up. When I’m done, I’ll need Lady Jephesandra Liu Tawarna to help me return to the university. Is she still willing to help me?”

  “Lady Jephesandra will await your call and so shall I.” Jephia gave her a faded smile. “Are you close to an answer?”

  “When I get back, maybe I can tell you all about it.” For the first time, it was Caulie who ended the call.

  She dropped the tablet in her lap, exhausted. She could use a few days of sleep, but she didn’t think the panther, the Gray House, or the wizard on the other side of the trenches would give her even a moment’s peace. At least Shanter was finally quiet. She glanced over and gave a start.

  Shanter was awake.

  He watched her from the bench, unable to turn his head. His eyes were askance, locked on her face, glowing from the light of the coals. She smiled and he answered with a horrible, lopsided grimace.

  He formed words but had no voice to speak them. She leaned close, putting her ear against his warm lips.

  He breathed, “You told her I’m dead.”

  “That was just to get you out of the picture, Shanter. You can’t be a target if they think you’re dead. I was being clever.”

  “So, I’m not dead?”

  “No, of course not!” She pulled away and looked into his eyes. She understood. “I’m sorry, Shanter, but you’re still alive.”

  Chapter 25

  The plan was simple. The next time the wizard used the enemy artillery to convey a message in the thunder, Caulie would answer with a message of her own. Colonel Bessawra’s artillery battalion, the Forty-First Field Artillery, would use coordinated interval fire to express the simple song pattern she constructed, and it would nullify the enemy’s thunder. It was a straightforward plan but only in the broad strokes; the details caused innumerable problems. The timing was as loose as she could make it, but the gun crews were used to racing each other, not collaborating, and they always rushed their counts. During her early trials, the song quickly lost all meaning.

  At first, the Haphan officership of the Forty-First ignored her, even when she failed to depart as promised and instead began organizing their gunners. Their stolid absence from the unit through the first morning taught Caulie more about politics than a year of Jephia’s cocktail parties back in Falling Mountain. They were afraid of overstepping themselves and bringing retribution upon the battalion, nearly as paralyzed as Caulie had been her whole life. Colonel Bessawra and Captain Nance might not know who she was, but she was wrapped in politics beyond their ken.

  Caulie would have preferred more interference for once, because she was hopeless at managing the Tachba. Staring down a jostling, distracted mass of artillerymen who couldn’t keep quiet for two consecutive minutes and who added uncomfortable flattery to every question they raised . . . forget Jephia’s parties, this was Caulie’s social nightmare. At the end of a morning of failed attempts to coordinate the battalion’s fire, Grampharic reported that a deeply annoyed Captain Nance had been finally seen visiting the gun crews, demanding information. Even better, Captain Nance had been heard chastising them. Caulie felt a spark of hope.

  The young officer attended the next gathering at high noon. After less than a minute of Caulie’s polite and intricate instructions, Captain Nance broke in with a voice like a Landing Day rocket: “You damned snappies, why are you torturing her with questions? That will only get you more questions. She has a game to play, but you’re too stupid to see it. Mess call before you starve to death, and then get back here on the double. Be ready to give real service.”

  Relieved, Caulie watched the Tachba evaporate. She didn’t even mind Captain Nance’s condemnatory stare. “You’re ruining my unit, Dr. Alexandrian.”

  “I know, I know. They’re so chatty.”

  “If you speak to them like they’re people, they’ll get ideas.” She raised a hand before Caulie could answer. “They are a unit, not a group. They will not understand until you address them in the singular. It’s the first thing you learn at officer school, but you never went, did you?”

  “Is it that obvious?”

  People rarely noticed Caulie’s humor, but the captain snorted. “I wonder what the mysterious woman wants them to do. Do we need each gun to fire at specific times?”

  Caulie glanced around. They were alone. “Are you offering to help? If you are, why?”

  “At some point, you’ll move on and take all of this with you. Whatever it is. Your politics, that creature at the top of the mountain . . . the colonel ordered me not to hinder you, so I can only try to limit your damage to the battalion.” Captain Nance turned toward the cliff, where far below the trenches a haze of smoke rose and distant crackling gunfire echoed. “Also, I’m not unaware of the problems down there, the inexplicable mass deaths. If the South breaks through, the Forty-First won’t last a minute. You believe you can nullify the enemy’s new weapon, but you have no idea how to run artillery. I hope I’m being clear enough: I don’t wish to seem helpful, but I have to keep these men—I mean the battalion—safe.”

  She’d feel differently if she’d spent all morning trying to teach them something new, Caulie thought. Despite the hours of obstinate misunderstanding, the sudden fights between the men, and the staggeringly trivial problems that stopped all progress—Hirthan losing his belt in the latrine, Whally counting from one and not zero—she couldn’t stay annoyed with people who only wanted to do right. She had smiled more frequently that morning than she did during a month in Falling Mountain. She had even laughed aloud. She didn’t want these obnoxious Tacchies falling victim to the wizard’s next attack.

  “I need the guns to fire according to a pattern,” Caulie explained. “It’s something you could tap out on a drum, but it’s very specific, with gaps between the beats. It turns out the guns can only fire every few minutes though.”

  Captain Nance rolled her eyes. “You haven’t heard of reloading?”

  “You should build your artillery guns more like pistols, with a place for more bullets.”

  The officer laughed aloud in a most un-Haphan manner. “You have effortlessly solved one of our most enduring problems.”

  Caulie grinned too. “Anyway, they will have to stagger their fire to keep the rhythm correct. They have no problem repeating the rhythm”—indeed, one of her problems was how the song turned them functionally deaf when they got it right—“but breaking it across the guns is apparently impossible.”

  “They’ve never had to fire in that style.” Captain Nance turned to view the men, who were already streaming back from the mess hall bearing full buckets, bowls, and even the odd helmet. “We’ll use a timing song. That’s what they’re for.”

  “A . . . what?” None of the Tachba had mentioned a timing song.

  Captain Nance explained. Timing songs were short tunes common up and down the eternal front that the Tachba used to make predictions about the artillery barrages flying over their heads. They claimed they could tell whether the barrage was walking across their position or planning to linger awhile, whether the number of guns firing was growing or shrinking, and whether the barrage itself was increasing or decreasing. Timing songs were as standard as anything Tachba could be, Captain Nance claimed. As the captain described them, Caulie realized she ha
d heard a timing song herself, at the end of that first devastating day in the trench following the explosion of the A-beam. It had been a brief, simplistic chant after the Southie artillery had begun—she hadn’t known what to make of it at the time, and she’d been too exhausted, confused, and despairing to care.

  “For your love of the empire,” Captain Nance concluded, “let me be the one who explains it to them.”

  And so, with Captain Nance’s caustic instructions to the artillerymen, a timing song became the basis for Caulie’s rhythm. The drilling and organization fell to the captain, and since Caulie didn’t want to tip their hand to the enemy, it was all dry firing, with no rounds actually spent. The gun crews thought the exercises were wonderfully eccentric and played along without complaint, singing together and shouting, “boom!”

  “Anything that breaks the tedium,” Grampharic explained as they watched. “Even if it’s brand new tedium. In fact, they’re starting to cheer your name. Not Culleyho, but Caulie-ho.”

  “Oh no!” Caulie was appalled. “You didn’t make that up, did you?”

  The squaddies laughed, and Prodon said, “La, no, miss! We can’t profane the name of our greatest queen—but the Haphans can. Captain Nance let it slip and we thought it was a pot of jam—that’s a good thing. So now you are Caulie-ho and the captain is the Jam-Spreader.”

  * * *

  Shanter had been immobile for the first full day. He’d damaged his neck again by fidgeting and trying to sit up, and Caulie had finally ordered him tied to the bench with gallows rope. Yet movement and the spending of surplus energy were crucial to keeping Tachba males sane. Immobilized, Shanter’s words grew strange. He shouldn’t move, but he couldn’t be still—could he make nothing easy for her?

  In the end, Caulie put away her research, sat beside his bench, and experimented with control songs just for him. First she made him thoughtful, content to stare at the coal embers. This lasted half an hour, and when thoughtfulness lost its allure, she improvised a new song that somehow, accidentally, made him interested in distant places. He listened motionlessly through the night while Caulie described life at Falling Mountain and the university. She may have embroidered her stories slightly to make them sound like she’d participated in that life more than she actually had.

  The next morning, Shanter grew cantankerous again. He noticed her tapping on his bench, and controlling the Pollution became harder when the subject was aware of the attempt. She had to engage his interest the traditional way: by being interesting, and this let him draw her into dangerous topics. How had Ouphao’an managed her kingdom? What was the outcome of her breeding program in the mountains? Was he, Shanter, a product of that breeding? How did logic circles work again, or were they called logic rings? She would speak, and he would lie motionlessly and listen.

  This was a good thing at first. He was a good listener, and Caulie needed to speak her ideas aloud to get them straight in her head. But as he wore her down through the second day, she caught herself slipping. Every secret he gleaned could be another incentive for the Gray House to kill him. Where once the entire concept of proscribed information had seemed silly and obstructive to Caulie, she now felt it viscerally. Every day she was extending the knowledge, awareness, and skills that made her unique, and none of it could be unlearned. To an organization like the secret police, which was committed to keeping information locked in the proper receptacles, Caulie was developing into a dangerous aberration. Like the windows of the archive chamber in her lab, she had to see out, but not let anyone see in. She now believed in dangerous knowledge.

  One night, she stopped pretending she was still that Caulie, the earlier, innocent Caulie. She banked the coals, crushed the leaves of a certain mountain herb under Shanter’s nose, and tapped a song to finally force him to sleep. This was knowledge pulled directly from a sorceress who’d lived a thousand years earlier. Ouphao’an had discovered that the herb’s scent increased suggestibility, and that dark, quiet rooms reduced distraction.

  It was primitive. Caulie hunched like a primeval witch doctor over his body, crooning wordless tunes and drumming a somnolent rhythm over and over on his forehead. At one point, Grampharic stuck his head in to ask a question, blanched, and disappeared again. Whatever the ritual looked like to outside observers, it worked on Shanter. He dropped into the first restful sleep she’d ever seen him take and woke ten hours later showing marked improvement. Caulie put him back to sleep for two more very quiet, very productive days of research on her tablet.

  Four days after being hanged, Shanter sat up and turned his head, albeit with excruciating slowness. Caulie had expected help from the Pollution, but this was astonishing. He enjoyed impressing her with his health and stopped complaining about the sleeping spells. The more he recovered, the more freely he could fidget, and the more he seemed content to simply watch her work.

  On the fifth day, as Caulie worked, Prodon stuck his head through the door. “La, we have it starting.”

  “What is starting?” Shanter whispered, his voice hoarse.

  “Thundering of a Southie barrage. Nothing new there, but this time with shells not-falling from the sky-neh. No amusement for the trenches. Of course, the South could be firing upon someone else, but who else is there? We are their best friends, and how rude to change one’s affections—”

  “For all love, Prodon,” Caulie said, “you sure like to talk.”

  “I should kill him!” Shanter blurted. He sounded surprised, as if he’d just come upon a good idea. In fact, he now said it every time he saw the young squaddie, to Caulie’s continuing puzzlement. “This Prodon scrag is the worst kind of idler. Not only wasting his own time but stealing all of ours.”

  “Oh, how amazing. Shanter is going to kill me.” After several episodes of this, the young squaddie was down to tolerant eye-rolls.

  “There will be no killing,” Caulie said.

  Shanter frowned. “Fine, no killing.”

  “Now that that important issue settled again,” Prodon said, “all we have left is an enemy wizard using thunder-magic to attack our trenches.”

  Caulie pulled on her coat and thrust her tablet and the clipboard in the pockets. On her way out of the bunker, she brushed the hair out of Shanter’s face. His neck was too stiff to permit him to flinch away, and she liked seeing the conflict on his face. This time, she went a step further and stuck earplugs in his ears. Though his mobility was improving hourly, he couldn’t yet raise his hands high enough to remove them.

  Outside, the sky was dim except for the mountain sunset, a growing blood-red tinge on the horizon. Caulie listened to the thunder resounding off the mountain peaks and crags. He had refined his methods. His artillery was sending a complex rhythm that took nearly twenty full seconds to repeat.

  The wizard’s song seemed to contain several ideas at once. Caulie had to admit, it juggled them nicely. The rhythms were flavored with certain logic rings outside her familiarity, though most of them overlapped with the controls she depended upon for her own songs. In essence, it was what might emerge from a savant who wasn’t aware of those underlying bases for the rhythms, someone working without knowledge of software or mechanics. She couldn’t divine the wizard’s intentions yet, but she was braced for something unexpected. If he was truly a he, he was probably Polluted himself and working from inside the affliction, somewhere Caulie could never follow.

  She tried for confidence: ultimately, it didn’t make a difference what the wizard tried. Complex or simple, brutal or sophisticated, it didn’t matter; Caulie’s song was an answer that would finish any argument.

  She followed Prodon to the forward command post, which she could never find by herself even though it now had a tall wooden platform made from the dismantled gallows. On the way, she intersected with Captain Nance coming from the Haphan buildings.

  “I wonder if this is the weapon?” the captain asked. “Do we understand what the ‘thunder’ is telling us?”

  “Some of it,” Caulie sai
d.

  As far as Caulie could gather, the thunder was asking the Tachba to adopt a quiet disposition. It’s the time of day when we should relax, let off steam, and remember that joke we wanted to tell, it seemed to be saying. The Antecessors would have used this specific mood to ratchet down tension and restore discipline after a heavy engagement. At the same time, the thunder also contained echoes of the subversive tones that Caulie had used herself on Grampharic’s squad. Along with that was something new, something she hadn’t considered possible: it was reassigning the roles of the listening Tachba. It was goading the Tachba away from the soldiering side of the spectrum toward something less reactive and more reflective . . .

  “So far,” Caulie continued, “the message is to relax because there is no danger, but also to be the type of person who pays attention to detail. He’s making our Tacchies calm and receptive.”

  Nance’s reply was measured. “I find myself wanting to thank the enemy.”

  “After he has them paying attention, he’ll send over the real stuff.”

  “The real magic!” Prodon exclaimed. “I can’t wait to hear it!”

  When they arrived at the forward command post, a helpie lifted Caulie’s coat from her shoulders. She shivered in the frigid air while he draped her in a flowing, pristine white cloak. He placed a tall staff into her hand and stepped back expectantly.

  She liked this part least: Prodon’s awestruck face, Captain Nance’s cynical frown, her own mountain of imposter syndrome. She tapped her staff against the stony ground and it flared to life. The glowing, battery-powered diadem six inches wide lit the dark plain like a flood lamp.

  “It’s not magic,” she said, as the Tachba gasped. Prodon and the others knew better, but they still smiled with unrepentant glee.

  Caulie stood alone at the top of the signaling platform, just her and the mountains and the blood-red sky, her cloak refracting in the searchlights trained from the ground.