February 13, ‘23 (71 Years Before the Fire).

Merrick Kapel had never in his eight years seen weather like this. This close to the palm-lined fiftieth parallel, nothing worse than cold rain fell, even in the depths of winter. By midmorning, the blizzard that had rolled in overnight had dropped more than a foot of snow, and the drifts were still climbing.

“Don’t go too far!” Mother yelled as Merrick ran after his brother, who had tried to sneak off alone.

Simon looked back. “Why are you following me?”

“You’re going into town, right?” Merrick said. “I’m coming along.”

“You won’t have fun,” Simon said as he opened the dori’s waist-high wooden fence, causing a small heap of powder to fall on the ground.

“You’re going to smoke, aren’t you?”

“No, we’re not going to smoke.” The older brother’s face had turned red from the cold. “They might, I won’t. It doesn’t matter. You should go back home. Mother is sure to need you for something.”

“I’m coming along. You can’t outrun me.”

Simon, who walked with a slight limp due to a childhood illness, hated when anyone else brought it up, and shoved his little brother, causing Merrick to fall rump-first in the snow. Then, regretting how he had behaved, he extended a gloved hand to help him up.

“You can come, Mer. Just don’t act like a kid. Okay? Town people are different from us.”

Merrick, his entire childhood, had heard the other doriyats, most of whom had come as adults, speak of towns as dangerous, seedy places. They explained that you couldn’t just go to the depot for school supplies or lumber, as town people had to buy everything. Land had owners, whatever that meant, and children were sent to work in factories and mines at age six. He didn’t understand how that could be a bad thing—it seemed like it would be fun. Townie kids were rougher and grimier than dori kids, but also seemed more grown-up—they knew more curse words, they started drinking earlier; they knew how the world really worked.

The brothers continued downhill through the woods. A path had been cleared on the flat for a railroad, but the ongoing crisis of severe weather—up north, it had been snowy like this since October—had delayed construction. This spell of cold weather had a name—Alma Winter, this one being the worst in more than two hundred years—but its significance would not be clear to Merrick until much later in life.

Merrick looked back. Fallen snow obscured the dori’s plain houses and vegetable gardens. The fence was barely visible. “How far are we going?”

“Far,” said Simon.

Overhead, a woman opened the shutters of her second-story window and unloaded a chamber pot, forcing the boys to jump back. “Go home, idiots!”

Simon cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted, “Blow off!”

Merrick, though nervous, needed to show resolve, so he added, “Get lost, old bat!”

The woman threw a handful of iron screws at the boys. “If ye’re not gone in ten seconds, the dogs are coming out.”

They could hear the dogs behind the door. Simon, too lame to run, trudged through the snow as fast as he could. Merrick kept up. They continued heading south. The wind picked up and it took noticeable effort to walk against it. They had gone another quarter mile or so before Merrick spoke.

“She really seemed to hate us,” he said.

“We’re Vehu.”

“She’s not?”

“Probably not,” said Simon. “You’ve been on the dori your whole life, but we’re less than two percent of the population.”

“So, people hate us because there are so few of us?”

“That’s part of it. They also think we’re a hundred times richer than we are, and that we don’t share.”

Merrick pointed to a hole at the knee of his jeans, exposing long underwear. “Us, rich?”

“Hate doesn’t have to make sense.”

“I don’t hate anyone,” Merrick said.

“That’s good, Mer.”

They reached the town’s deserted center, where some of the buildings were three stories high. Simon, who had been here before, but never in such weather, stopped as if lost, before pointing and saying, “We go past that bank building, and turn left.”

Merrick followed. Lights of houses were on, but there was no outdoor activity in the snowed-in town, and businesses were closed. The side road had a few sleepy houses on each side and ended at a lot with a massive sycamore. Boards had been nailed into its bark to make a ladder into a tree fort.

Simon laid his hands on the bottom rung. “You’re not scared, are you?”

“Of course not.” Merrick scoffed. The structure was barely eight feet off the ground.

“Good.” Simon climbed up into the fort, and Merrick joined him.

The tree house had been made of old lumber found in one of the heaps by the railroads, so the wood had been reinforced to compensate for the shabby quality of its materials. Three boys, approximately Simon’s age, were inside: one was a dori kid Merrick recognized, and the other two were townies. Their clothes smelled of smoke.

“Why’d you bring a kid?” one asked.

“He’s my little brother.”

“So?”

“So, you’ll let him in.”

Merrick smiled. He and Simon had their disagreements, but Kapels stuck up for each other.

The older kids were sharing a bottle of beer. Simon sipped it, but told Merrick he didn’t have to drink any. Merrick had tried wine once, during the Lifting of the Fast, and decided he couldn’t stand the taste of alcohol. He had decided then, at the age of seven, never to drink; later in life, he would wish he had retained that prejudice. They were sharing jokes he mostly didn’t get, and describing events that meant nothing to the young boy, so he found their conversation boring and, instead, picked up one of those grayscale magazines with hand-drawn pictures of nude bodies.

“You’re wrong, Simon.”

“I’m wrong about what?”

Merrick leafed through the pages. “You said girls don’t have butts. They do. See!”

The boys laughed.

“Dicks, Mer.” His brother put a gloved hand on his shoulder. “Girls don’t have dicks. Everyone has a butt.”

“Oh.” Embarrassed, he tossed the magazine into the corner. “Then how do they pee?”

Laughter continued.

As time passed, the snow turned into rain, pounding on the treehouse’s corrugated metal roof. A damp wind blew, and Merrick was getting cold—and bored. He had no interest in smoking or drinking, and he had already found a dozen places on the dori where he could swear and not be overheard.

He tugged at Simon’s jacket sleeve. “Can we go home?”

Simon blew an air cloud of smoke. “You’re the one who wanted to come.”

“I did, but none of you want to do anything.”

“That’s why it’s called hanging out, idiot.”

“Don’t call me—”

“Hey, Merrick.” One of the town kids picked up a deck of cards. “Do you play ehrgeiz?”

“I don’t know the rules.”

“Good idea,” Simon said. “Anyone mind if I help my brother out?”

“Fine by me,” said the one with the deck of cards.

Simon taught the rules and strategies to Merrick; after two rounds, Merrick understood the game well enough to play on his own.

“I’ve given you a great lead.” Simon pointed to the scoresheet; he had 67 points, and the player in second place had 49. “Don’t screw it up.”

Merrick drew an excellent hand in the fifth round—the king of onions, a king-ace-two shield suit, and a long run of coins up to the deuce. If he played this hand well, he might be able to pull of Shvatz, which they called “Slam” here. He recognized the weak cards—a false-exit five, a bad axle—and passed accordingly.

“Bastard,” said the player receiving his pass. “I mean it as a compliment. Your brother seems to have a natural talent, Simon.”

Merrick smiled.

They never did finish the round.

“Shit,” said one of the boys. “It’s Thrush.”

Mr. Thrush owned half the town. Clean-shaven and about forty, he stopped below the tree fort, with a red face and a black hickory cane in hand.

“You little shits better get off my property right—” He noticed Simon. “Oh, it’s vyrim from the hill, too. Now I really will fucking wring every one of your—”

As a dori kid, Merrick didn’t understand land ownership or its rules, but he had heard all about the Thrushes, and nothing good. The other boys, ignoring the latter, chancing the six foot jump into snow, hurried off, while Merrick jumped from a middle rung. Rain had only melted the top layer of ground cover, so they couldn’t make any speed until they came into the forest, finding paths amidst the conifers where they had some chance of outrunning the grown man still chasing them.

Simon fell back a little, and Merrick stayed with him. Mr. Thrust’s first swing hit the older brother, delivering a blow that might have cracked a rib, were he not dressed for winter. Merrick pulled back a snow-covered pine bough, then let it loose, spreading white powder across the man’s face, then kicked him in the shin as hard as he could.

“This way!” yelled one of the boys. The front runner seemed to know the woods well enough to keep them on a path where the snow was shallow and they could keep speed, but the man with the cane kept coming, and soon they came to a creek, too swift to cross, over which a bridge existed but had collapsed under the weight of snow it had not been designed to hold.

“Shit,” said one of the boys. “We’re cornered.”

One of the kids reached into the snow and produced a smooth stone.

“It shouldn’t come to that,” said Simon. He pointed along the shore; running water had cut a ribbon of ground beside itself where they could keep running. “Let’s go that way.”

They continued. Merrick was struggling to keep his breath and his legs were growing tired. Simon, who had been told by a doctor he should not run at all, was visibly wincing. Their path swung back into coniferous forest, with a detour to avoid a clearing with snow too deep to cross at any speed, and in the general direction of the town’s main road. They had not shaken Mr. Thrush off yet.

“You’re wasting time running, boys! I own this t—”

Merrick heard a raw rimy crack. A palm tree, laden with ice, toppled, landing on the man with the black hickory cane, leaving a red bloom to spread in the snow.

“He’s hurt,” Merrick said. “Maybe we should go and find—”

“He’s dead, Mer,” said Simon. “There’s nothing you can do. Let’s go home.”

#

The roof of the dori’s main dining hall had also collapsed, so most families were following the un-doriyat custom that evening of eating in their apartments.

Father drank his second cup of coffee. “What did you boys do with yourselves today?”

“We went into the woods.” Simon recounted an abridged version of their blizzard escapade.

“We played cards,” Merrick said. “No betting, though.”

“Good for you, boys, that you got outside on a day like this. I’m glad my sons are adventurers.”

Merrick, worried he’d get in trouble if he didn’t mention what he’d seen, said, “Mr. Thrush.”

His older brother kicked him under the table.

“What? We didn’t do anything wrong.”

Mother said, “What happened to Mr. Thrush?”

“An hour after we left,” his brother said. “What I’ve heard is…”

“A tree fell on him,” Merrick blurted out. “He’s dead.”

Father seemed elsewhere for a moment. “You’re saying that like it’s a bad thing.”

“No, Pa,” Merrick insisted. “Real dead.”

Father put his coffee cup down. “I heard you the first time.”

“Mr. Thrush is a bad man,” Mother said.

Father looked at Merrick. “You may be too young to remember, but there was a year when nobody could go into town safely, and there was hardly any food.”

Simon groaned. “It was awful.”

Merrick had only the vaguest recollection of it. The hunger pangs seemed so distant in memory, he could not be sure if he had felt them or simply convinced himself that he had.

Father explained, “We’re Vehu. We plan for bad years. We had enough grain and honey to last for as long as we needed it to, but we couldn’t sell any of it because the townies had been told—Egenbur Thrush, father of the man who just died, owns the presses around here—that we poison everything we sell.”

“Don’t forget hexes on the silverware,” Mother added.

“Rumors like this have hurt our dori’s fortune considerably. You said Mr. Thrush’s death was an accident. If it was anything else, please never tell me.”

“It was an accident,” Merrick said.

Simon nodded to concur. “I saw it.”

“I suppose it shows God does look out for our people after all.”

#

Six years and an opposite season later, fourteen-year-old Merrick was collecting milk from the dairy barn before dawn when heard a shriek and, thinking a coyote had come after their goat, walked out with the dori’s one weapon, a shotgun. The scream had come from a woman—the dori had been set on fire in several different places. Although the doriyats fought the blaze with buckets of lake water, the crops and buildings were all destroyed, and most of the animals killed.

The dori’s people had no choice to move into town, where most landowners would not rent to Vehu and those who did charged exorbitant rates. To survive, Mother had to find work cleaning others’ houses all day, coming home too tired to attend to their two-room apartment. Father took a factory job, but was too old for its pace of work, and died in the middle of a shift. Mother’s death—a month later, just after Merrick’s fifteenth birthday—left him an orphan.

It had not been difficult to identify the arsonist. Karaly Thrush, sixteen-year-old son of the dead landowner, had been seen that morning by several of the doriyats, in addition to bragging about the violence to so many people, even Karaly’s uncle, the town’s judge and mayor, could not overlook the crime. He sentenced the boy to five years of house arrest.

Merrick had gone to the trial. The other doriyats had not been able to do so—town work was not like dori work; instead, grimy duties were used as punishment rather than shared, and one had to start and stop on a fixed schedule. He would remember, long after the day of it, Karaly’s contemptuous smirk as the bailiff walked him off to live in confinement but comfort. The brothers had given up the parents’ modest apartment and were living in a hovel south of town, surviving on twenty-nine-day jobs, when the first anniversary of the attack, a hot night in late August, came.

Two hours after midnight, Simon roused his little brother from sleep.

“You don’t have to come along, but you can. It was your dori, too.”

He knew already what his older brother meant, and accepted the revolver handed to him.

They wore black, all five of them, including wool face masks. Merrick had never used a weapon in his life, and was unsure if he’d be able to do so. The teenage arsonist had likely been a pawn—the Thrushes had bought the dori’s land from its desperate owners, and sold it to a railroad company at a profit—and Merrick wondered, if Karaly begged for his life, would he deem the bastard’s humiliation sufficient, or would he pull the trigger?

The five men dismantled the fence slowly, then crept to a three-story house with a wraparound porch—a mansion, by Russet Bay’s standard. No lights were on, and the house had only one guard, a cousin of the Thrushes, armed but inattentive. One of the boys took him from behind and slashed his throat. Two seconds of pride were followed by the realization—his face was obscured by his mask, but one could see it in his body—the realization that he had caused a human death. It was too dark to tell, but Merrick thought his hands might be shaking.

The tallest put a hand on the boy’s shoulder, “Go for the kidney next time. They go into shock immediately and cannot scream.”

Merrick looked around. He thought he might have made a mistake, but he could not back out now. He watched the back of the one who took apart the front door lock. When they were inside the house, a stale hot air sat uncannily still. They searched by meager light. Merrick, keeping a wall to his back, looked around to make sure no one else was in the house to sneak behind the other four.

“Here’s his bedroom,” whispered one of them. “Fucker’s still asleep.”

Merrick’s first thought was to go inside, to have some impact on the moment; his second of there being no need for him to do so. He heard Karaly beg for his life. He heard a loud bang that disoriented him. The darkness and shocking noise had caused him to nearly lose balance; his hands had stopped him from falling and he was hunched over a desk covered in school papers.

Karaly’s handwriting was similar to his own. They had read some of the same books. Merrick wondered if it had been right to come here, to be part of this, to have this boy—a catspaw who might have been unable to refuse when asked by an uncle to raze a dori—take the bullet for an entire rotten family.

“We have to leave,” said one of the black-clad men.

Another said, “The Sheriff will be here any moment.”

Simon shouted. “Merrick! Come on!”

Unsure why he was doing so, Merrick grabbed a handful of Karaly’s school papers before leaving the house.

After the deed, the five of them gathered at his and Simon’s apartment, which barely fit them. Merrick looked through the sheets he had taken.

“You’ll have to destroy those,” said Simon.

“I will,” Merrick said. “I couldn’t tell you why I took them, but I suppose I just want to know...”

The tallest of the five said, “What?”

“Why.”

He shrugged. “You cannot go back in time and unmake a dead man’s choice. He was a hateful son of a bitch and he destroyed our lives. So, we ended his. That is all we get to know.”

“Of course,” Merrick said before walking outside. “Of course it is.”

“So you’ll destroy those papers?”

“I’m going to do it right now,” Merrick said. It was an hour before dawn. One good thing about living in this part of town was that no one would notice or care if a fire was set. Merrick did not read the school papers, agreeing that they were meaningless, except for one: an envelope made of a fine paper one could not find in these parts. That letter, he opened.

Such opportunities did not come to Vehu, not back then—not the rich ones who lived in Moyenne or Exmore, and certainly not penniless “chouzers” from wrecked doris in Russet Bay. Karaly Thrush had been accepted into a seven-year apprenticeship at the prestigious Institute of Anatomy and Medicine in Exmore. Due to recent events, the teenage arsonist would be unable to attend.

#

Doctor Kapel, like all doctors in Exmore, displayed his medical degree prominently in his office, but the name on his had been burned off. He would say that this had happened in a tragic fire, and this was not entirely a lie. Everything else, he did honestly. He never cheated in school, nor helped anyone cheat. He graduated at the top of his class. He made good money in his trade, while one still could, but had always taken more pride in the lives saved. His leadership in the search-and-rescue operation after Exmore’s Great Quake of ‘49 earned his public recognition. He was invited to lecture at his alma mater, Exmore Medicine—although this wouldn’t last, attitudes toward the Vehu were quite liberal—and won awards for teaching, too. To add to his good fortune, he met the beautiful Vehu heiress, Nadia ti Ravenna, at a garden party and, long story short, convinced her to marry him. They had two sons together. By forty, he had achieved more than he had ever expected.

Thus had gone the charmed first half of his life. The second half? Oh, the second half.

The loss of the money had been tolerable, mostly. He and Nadia still had their house, their garden, and their books. Vehu could no longer practice medicine, by law—a good number of the Global Company’s Z-2s and Z-3s had sons who needed spaces in the professions—but, so long as he kept his services within the District, he knew they would not suppress him and he would not starve. Money was, in any case, a tool of the leaden present day, something a better future would not need, so while the Company’s theft of his and Nadia’s (mostly, Nadia’s) gold and jewels had been a crime, it had been risen to a level that would color the heavens with rage. The deaths of their sons, though.... Unforgivable.

Merrick cherished his communal upbringing, but dori parents—including his—tended to hold offspring at some distance, the ideal being that children would be raised and educated jointly, thus starting the rising generation in conditions of equality and community. He and Nadia, however, did not live in a dori, but in a world of perennial conflict from which children needed some protection. So, they had doted on their boys from infancy to adulthood, ensuring every advantage they could. None of this had prevented the generations from dying in the wrong order.

The first son’s death, in battle up north, had left him crying for days, but also proud. The second produced a reaction he would admit did not deserve admiration. He drank so much in the latter half of the Eighties—a decade already full of depressing centennials—he could barely remember having been there. Nadia ran the business end of his medical practice, and his medical decisions remained sound, but he still struggled to wake before ten o’clock. Finally, on his seventy-fifth birthday, Nadia threw out all his booze and demanded the local bartenders refuse to serve him. This intervention, although humiliating, had probably saved his life.

He thought about his sons every day. They had deserved to have futures; they still deserved to have futures. If alive, though, they would have left Exmore long ago, because the world was darkening for Vehu again, its only light coming from the dori movement’s revival, that more than a thousand miles away. Ettasi Vehu were taking up the Northwest Trail to the Yatek. So far, the taigamen had allowed them safe passage—perhaps those “boreal savages” were not savage at all.

In late April, the Exmore Telegraph announced that a notorious witch had been found dead beneath a waterfall, eight miles from the epicenter of a forest fire it alleged that she started, but Dr. Kapel knew how to spot truths between Company lies. She was probably alive, the fire’s cause was anyone’s guess, and the Globbos had not found her yet. This brought a crack of God’s hope into the leak world. With luck, he would find the mage before anyone else did.

#

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

The red alcohol in Merrick’s thermometer had sat halfway between the markings for 6.0 and 6.1, so he wrote this down in a tiny notebook.

“How’s Farisa?” Nadia asked from the second-floor landing.

“Temperature’s coming down.”

“How much have you told her?”

“Nothing.” Merrick walked down the stairs and washed the pans in the kitchen. It still embarrassed him, given his dori upbringing on which relationships of property had no place, to see servants do the grungy work. “She isn’t ready.”

Nadia went into her reading room and adjusted one of the old bronze busts. Merrick could never remember which was which, because while he had also read the Vehu greats—the poets, the philosophers, the men of science—it had never occurred to him to wonder what any of these authors had looked like.

His wife asked, “Is the machine working?”

“It’s missing a couple pieces. I’ll have to go into town.”

“Be careful, Merrick. We aren’t young anymore.”

“Careful, I’ll be.”

“I’ve seen your list. Is there any reason you need to be the one to get these things? Couldn’t I send—”

“Springs.” Merrick put on his jacket. “There are so many different kinds of them—different materials and sizes, torsion springs and tension springs, that sort of thing. Besides, I would like a midday walk.”

“I suppose you’ve earned one.” She shrugged. “Put on a hat, though. It’s bright out there, and your bald spot burns quick.”

“Yes, m’lady.” Merrick chose a gray felt hat with a wide brim, too informal for the temple but passable on the street. “If Farisa wakes up while I’m gone…”

“She’ll be taken care of.”

Merrick started down the stairs.

“Not so fast,” Nadia said.

She had made it a rule, fifty-two years ago, that neither could leave the house without a kiss. You never knew if you’d see each other again.

“I’ll be back before you know,” he said as he closed the door.

#

Nadia finished her cup of tea. She had given up on convincing Merrick out of his daily walk, which had been a constant in his life since middle age. When his medical practice was active, he would spend so much time in transit to see his patients, it became natural to him to promenade, even on days off, to the point that he complained of leg pain if he did not cover two miles every day. When Café 317 still stood, she would sometimes find him up there having been pulled (or having put himself) into a card game with the locals. That was Merrick; he had retained the child’s sense that no one was unworthy of his curiosity, could hold malice for no longer than a breath, and could stretch a five-mile walk into as many hours, even in cold weather, due to his tendency to stop and talk to the neighbors.

Nadia summoned Wegen, the chief guard of the household. “Look after the girl upstairs. I have to get something.”

“I can certainly go and—”

“No. This time, it has to be me.”

She donned a beige bonnet and the most colorless dress she owned, because today’s mission would be best achieved in the guise of a sad old lady, the kind the world did not merely underestimate, but fully ignored.

She passed through the District’s eastern barricade, thanking the men posted there for their service, and found herself out in the rest of the city, a place that felt—but had not always felt—like a desolate wild. The streets had no trees and the lack of shade made it hot. The absolute stillness of this windless day did not help. Starlings had taken residence in dilapidated warehouses, and she had to watch her footing, because most of the road’s pavement had been stripped away years ago, leaving potholes and dust dunes sizable enough to twist an ankle, and this was not a place where it would be safe to become lame.

People still lived in some of the apartment buildings here, but there was an absence of activity, a static buzz of suspension, that caused her arms to prickle. Exmore’s famous glass factories, shut down years ago, had lost their windows, and who knows who or what had taken residence in them? The state buildings, devoid of purpose since the Company had outlawed public government, were now opium dens. The Valmont Cannery—the one that had killed three hundred people in the Seventies—was still open, but only because its owner was Stefen Harrow. In any case, Nadia saw no signs of human movement within or around it; the work behind the barbed-wire fences had been mechanized.

Willow Street led to Old Lake, a low-lying eastern neighborhood that had lived, at one time, on a real lake. Fish bones could probably still be found in the muddy landfill, if one cared to dig, but it smelled so bad that even tent people avoided the area. Still, the fastest route to her destination cut alongside it. Road signs had been taken down years ago, so Nadia relied on her old memories to navigate.

The concrete walls of houses had once been green with ivy, but were clear now. The foliage had either been torn off to make more space for vandalism—unlicensed street art, clever and otherwise, could be spotted everywhere—or, more likely, eaten.

On a long white head-high barrier, graffiti was mostly textual; it was unclear whether it could be called dialogue, or if the voices were mostly separate.

Kento snaffed a goat for 2 viles of doap.

Beatrice will arrive 27-Ak.

Pfarliq xayx: Qant your mozzer, Veerum. We don't want yar madjick or your meydje.

Bearliq? Kento’x xixter could xept zzat buzhtik.

Barixa hax already croxxed over owr bridje.

The names changed often—Nadia doubted that anyone made notorious by these walls, such as the current era’s ubiquitous Beatrixa, lived very long. It did not surprise her that themes in “the chaff” had not changed over the years, though the tone of abjection was new. Even the most crushed people could insult each other.

White pebbles crunched under Nadia’s leather boots. There had been a place here, a fixture of her childhood, where one could buy a bowl of fresh-cut watermelon and mountain berries for four cents. Seven bought a scoop of ice cream. As a little girl who lived on an allowance of ten cents per week—her parents did not explain to her that they were rich until she was nineteen—she used to come here all the time. Nadia remembered the crickets and the fireflies on those long summer evenings. Today, there were few insects; the vegetation was sparse and mostly colorless.

The last time Nadia had been in Old Lake, Marla was alive. They both had living children. It was an ordinary, every-week affair to come down here the day before sebbana—they’d meet by the playground at eleven, visit the bank if they had any business there, buy the blue stamps for advance-rate postage even though neither needed to save the money, and then shop for groceries in the local farmer’s market. They would discuss their children’s sports and education and taste in friends. They would debate how to raise children properly Vehu in a modern world—which traditions really mattered, which could stand to be amended. They would laugh about how difficult it was to be good parents, and how it would be so much easier, later on, to be grandparents with the benefit of hard-won wisdom.... God be red, if Michalo were still alive, he'd be forty-one, married to a nice girl named Lia or Shana, with three children: Pavi, Larika, and (not to constrain the gender of the third) Ariel. The loss still hurt; after all this time, it still fucking hurt.

Can it up, Nadia. This place is too dangerous to wallow in sadness.

She knew better than to go inside the bank building before looking inside from various vantage points—the place was in ruins, but the layout had not changed. This place had fallen in the summer of ‘74. It had never been unusual for pessimou to rob banks, but this time they made their invasion permanent. A pensioner, unaware of what had happened, was robbed and beaten senseless upon going there to deposit a check. The Telegraph declared that Old Lake had become a “red zone” due to all the pessimou moving in, accelerating its decline, and rumors of police and press complicity in the bank building’s takeover, though they had seemed too far-fetched and conspiratorial to be true, proved correct.

Nadia had cracked enough safes in her Reverie days to know that her family’s gold and gems were long gone. Even the strongest contrivances fell to a welding torch within hours. Smallboxes, on the other hand, could not be broken into unless destroyed, which would invariably damage the contents. Pessimou were greedy, crafty, and irascible, but they were not stupid, and surely they had figured out that more money could be made by ransoming these boxes to their owners than by blasting them open.

She walked into the ruins, hoping for rationality. A civilized transaction was possible, as she had brought more than enough gold to buy back what was hers. However, if the pessimou could not accept their payment, she had an alternative means of negotiation: a three-shot derringer, packed in her purse between small oranges.

She drew a breath to calm herself, and she walked in.

#

“Stop!” A male voice had come from a back corridor.

Nadia watched a mangy dog amble past her. A crow’s shadow disturbed the sun spill through a high window that had somehow remained intact over the past twenty years. Constellations had once been visible on this building’s vaulted ceiling, but years’ worth of smoke had occluded most of the stars.

A young girl, a pessima no older than fifteen, stood up behind the counter. In her hand was a piece of street meat—this time of year, probably a rat or baby groundhog she had trapped.

“It seems we ‘ave a customer.”

“We’ve nothing today,” said the male voice. “Supplier’s asking forty grot a slark.”

“Didja ’ear that?” The girl’s tongue pulled the last scrap of undercooked meat off a thighbone. “Come back tomorrow, old hag.”

“I’m not here for drugs.” Nadia’s hand moved about in her purse. “I don’t even know what a slark is.”

“Then what are ya ’ere for? Ya comes to a drugs place, I’m ’ssuming ya wants drugs.”

“Do you still have the smallboxes?” It struck Nadia that this girl had been born after the building’s invasion. She wondered if the pessima had been born here. “I would like to pick mine up.”

The girl smiled at Nadia before calling back. “Someone’s ‘ere to buy a smallbox!”

A male voice said, “A smallbox?”

“I have money,” Nadia said. “What’s your price?”

“What d’you think?”

Nadia dropped a gold half-crown on the wooden counter. “Fifty to bite. A hundred grot more when I have the box.”

The pessima sucked her teeth. “You just say ‘fifty to bite,’ old lady? I’m not putting that anywhere near my mouth. Counter’s as dirty as the floor. What, ya think we’re animals ’ere?”

“I meant no insult.” Nadia sighed. “It’s an old expression. One who didn’t trust a source of gold would—never mind. You don’t have to—”

“Bitch, it’s dirty now. Give me a clean coin.”

“Very well.” Nadia replaced the rejected coin with a shinier one. “The box number is—”

As a shirtless boy walked up, the girl said, “’Ere. Bite it. Make sure it’s real.”

The boy seemed offended. “I just heard you say—”

“I know what I said.” The girl, sitting down on a metal stool, reached under the desk for another piece of street meat, this one fried. “I said I am not going to bite it.”

The boy looked around as if he were being set up for a prank and then put the coin in his mouth. “Real gold, it seems.”

“Are you sure?” The girl asked.

“Unless you want to test it, I am.”

The girl rolled her eyes. “Which box, ma’am?”

“Eight twenty-seven,” Nadia said.

Once the boy was gone, the girl said, “Just ’old on for a squip. You said you’d pay fifty and a ’undred grot.”

“That’s right. A hundred fifty. And I will.”

“What’ve ya got in box eight two seven’s worth a ’undred fifty?”

“Sentimental value,” Nadia said. “That’s all.”

“We ’aven’t seen anyone come for a box in years.”

The boy returned with the metal box, lusterless but intact. The engraved numbers were correct. “The key?”

Nadia laughed. “That’s now how this is going to work.”

“Yer telling me ’ow this works?” The boy slid his hand under his armpit and scratched his shoulder blade. “This is our ’ouse. We get ’alf of whatever’s in the box.”

“Even all of it would be worth a lot less than a hundred fifty.”

“Not to you, we think. Whatever it is, we get ’alf of it.”

“It’s an indivisible item. It can’t be split, is what that means. Do whatever you have to do with the coins—bite them, weigh them—because they are real, but you’re going to give me that box. Now.”

“This a joke to you?” The boy put the box on a stool behind him and spat on his hand. “Get the fuck out of ’ere, old cunt.”

As he reached for something, Nadia drew her derringer. “Five!” She fired, pinging a defunct cash register behind him, square on the 5 button, which flew off.

The boy shook.

“You’re welcome to check my marksmanship,” Nadia said. “Let’s not play a game you’ll lose.”

The raven-haired pessima stood up. Nadia felt sorry for her; aside from her crooked teeth, which could be fixed, she was quite beautiful, and her quick eyes suggested intelligence. She deserved a better life than what she would have here.

“Please stay seated,” Nadia insisted. “I came here for the box, and the price I offered is more than fair. You’d not get ten grot on the street for what is in it. Besides, I don’t want to hurt anyone.”

The girl whistled. Two grown men, both carrying pistols, walked into the lobby.

“Half’s ours, whatever’s in the box,” said one of the gunmen. “If it can’t be split, all’s ours. ’Im’s rules.”

“’Im’s rules,” said the other.

Nadia’s hand tightened around her gun. There were four people watching her now, and she had two shots left.

“Could kill you,” said the girl. “It’d be nothing to us. We know you have the key.”

Nadia pointed her own gun at her. “I’d get one of you first, and it’d be for nothing.”

“If it’s nothing in there, why do you want it?” The girl looked at the two gunmen and, with a hand gesture, requested they lower their weapons. “This place irn’t been open for s’alive, and ye’re a ’undred years old, and ye’re telling me you came this way for nothing? No.”

“I’d like to think I look good for a hundred. What’s in there is a very old thing a very old woman wants, and nothing more. No one else would know what to do with it. I have offered to pay a price several times what is fair—no one would believe you if you tried to sell it—so let’s be smart here.”

The boys raised their guns, but Nadia could tell by the way they were holding their weapons that they had probably never used them. She moved her own gunsight from the girl, who had seemed so unbothered by the pointing of a gun at her she had not stopped eating, to the one she thought would crack first. She realized she was far too old for this sort of thing. In her prime, she could have gotten out of this mess by force—an option one never wanted to use, but that it helped to have—via one shot per gunman, a bluff charge toward one dropped weapon before taking the other, and escape on her own terms—with the small box. As a woman in her early seventies, though, her nerves and reflexes were slower and she had no chance of pulling that off.

“Weapons down,” said a voice from above.

The girl slurped the last reddish flesh from what appeared to be a raccoon’s rib.

“Them first,” Nadia said.

“All of you,” said the voice. “There is no need.”

The two men lowered their weapons, and Nadia put her gun hand back in the purse.

“I said drop.”

The two men put their guns down and looked up. Nadia put her weapon in the purse, then withdrew a visible open palm. The man who had yelled came into view on the balcony, then dropped a rope ladder and descended into the lobby. He seemed to be the group’s leader, even though he himself could be no older than his late teens. In her mind, Nadia named him “General Peachfuzz.”

“Why you dumb spaffs taking guns to that’s just business?” Peachfuzz smacked one of the gunmen in the back of the head. “Lady, can’t you just tell us what’s in the box?”

“A hundred and fifty grot for you if you hand it over. Nothing if you don’t.”

“If it’s nothing to ya, then ye’ll tell me what it is.”

“You wouldn’t believe me, and no one will, so the resale value is zero.” She paused. “It’s a bottle.”

“A bottle? Orc’s blood?”

“Hell no.” Nadia turned to face General Peachfuzz. “How old are you?”

“Twenty-six.”

“No, you’re not. You look sixteen.”

“Seventeen,” Peachfuzz admitted. He picked up the smallbox. “Eighteen in a month.”

Nadia reached into her purse and touched one of the clementines she had brought. “Old enough to drink, then?”

The gunmen laughed. Peachfuzz spat on the floor. “Bitch, I been old enough to drink s’I’s five.”

“What’s in the bottle is booze. Nothing less, nothing more.”

Peachfuzz squeezed his chin between his forefinger and thumb. “Ye’re offering a ’undred fifty for booze, in an amount irt fits in a smallbox?”

“It’s potent stuff. Old booze. Old-like-me booze. It tastes and smells awful. You’d be sicker than death if you drank it. That’s how powerful it is.”

“Is that a challenge?” Peachfuzz looked around.

“It’s not. I’d rather you not have any. My offer of a hundred fifty is open.”

“Listen, lady. I drink nothing but straight. I drink moonwater. You could set fire to the shit I drink.”

“I’ll make you a deal, then,” said Nadia. “If you can tolerate three drops of the stuff, meaning you keep it down for five minutes, you can have the whole bottle—and the hundred fifty I offered.” She laid two more half-crowns on the desk. “Make it two fifty.” Her eyes met everyone else’s in order. “Otherwise, it’s all mine.”

“Three drops? You think I can’t stand three drops of old jank?”

“I do. Five minutes and one rule—You puke, you lose. Sound fair?”

“I’ll do it.” Peachfuzz drew a circle in the air with two fingers. The shirtless boy brought him a shot glass.

“Only you?” Nadia said. “There’s enough for everyone.”

“Just me,” Peachfuzz said.

“Why don’t I pour it?” Nadia said.

“Nice try.”

The pessima, with a freshly lit cigarette in her mouth, bounced on her heels. “Wait a minute. What if it’s poison? Old lady oughta drink too.”

Peachfuzz waved her away with a hand.

“No, I’d be happy to.” Nadia made sure to count the clementines in her purse: one, two, three, four. “I just don’t know that you’d want me wasting it if your goal is to win it.”

“It's fine.” Peachfuzz clacked his shot glass against the counter. “Who pours?”

“I’ll do it,” said the boy. “Your key, old lady.”

She handed it to him.

Lieutenant No-Shirt opened the box and held the vial up to the sunlight. “Not much of it.”

Nadia said, “As I said, it’s potent.”

Peachfuzz nodded. The boy let a few drops fall down the shot glass’s smudged wall. Peachfuzz looked at the small amount of tonic with suspicion.

Nadia chuckled. “Are you going to drink it, or do you need me to show you how it’s done?”

The boy drank.

“It takes a few seconds before you feel anything.” Nadia kept talking, gesticulating with one hand to keep the others’ attention off the other one.

“I feel fine,” said Peachfuzz.

“That’s good.” Nadia counted seconds, visibly, on her fingers; the other hand, moving very slowly so as not to jar anyone’s peripheral vision, took the glass vial, corked it, and put it in her purse. She now had what she had come for; she only needed to get out alive.

“How much longer do I have?”

“It’s been about twenty seconds,” Nadia said.

Peachfuzz belched, then touched the side of his head as if holding back pressure. His cheeks turned sallow and puffy. He groaned and doubled over. Vomit poured from his mouth.

The pessima charged at Nadia, her voice cracking like a scared child’s. “You old witch! What the fuck did you do to him?”

“Nothing,” Nadia said, pushing the girl back by her arms. “I said he wouldn’t be able to handle it, did I not?”

“You poisoned him!”

“He poisoned himself. I never wanted him to drink it. I wanted to take it all home with me.”

“I should kill you!”

“Oh, stop.” Nadia shrugged. “At that dose, it’s no worse than seasickness. Get him water and oranges, and he’ll be fine.”

“Does it look like we have oranges ’ere?”

Nadia drew the two clementines—she had brought four, in case she had been expected to drink the concoction, from her purse. She threw one to Peachfuzz, and one to the pessima. She backed toward the door. “They’ll help,” she yelled. She looked around, then tossed the other two fruits, holding the gun with the other hand, backing up a little bit more, sure to not let anyone see the back of her head...

One of the gunmen lifted his weapon. “At your word.”

Peachfuzz, still green in the face, called him off. “Let ’er go. She won, fair as pickles.”

#

When Nadia returned home, she put the glass vial in a hollowed-out book on a fourth-floor shelf. Merrick hadn’t come back yet, so she read in the living room until dinner.

They called Farisa’s name several times during the meal, but she did not stir.

“Should I go up there?” Nadia asked.

“Let her rest,” Merrick said. “She’ll eat when she’s ready.”

“I don’t understand why—”

“For someone who survived madhouse fever, she is on the mend quickly. I was able to give her water and broth. Most patients can’t even take that until three days after.”

“Most patients die of it. She has a talent of making herself an exception to many rules.”

“That is true,” Merrick said.

It was only seven thirty, so they resumed packing their possessions. Servants did most of the work, but there was so much involved that even the residues of the moving process consumed the old couple’s spare hours. Merrick had begun to drink a little bit, which Nadia did not favor, but this sort of process required them both to be a bit buzzed, so she hid her objections.

She balled up an old newspaper to protect a piece of ceramic cookware before setting it in a wooden crate. “There’s something I need to ask you. About Farisa.”

“Oh?”

Nadia didn't like that she was questioning another’s motives, but she had grown up in a rich family, rather than on a dori. She knew how covetous people were, and how morally pliable they became when egregious benefit or severe losses were possible for them. Her brothers and her father had been cheated in business, and then there was the whole matter of her sons.

She said, “Do you believe her account?”

Merrick, ever the professional, took a moment to formulate a response. “Obviously, I do not believe there was a forty-eyed monster in Cait Forest. I also do not think she’s a liar.”

“So what is she, then?”

“There are a number of possibilities. A six-point-five fever can cause confabulations—hallucinations, but of the past. False memories. It is rare, but it does occur.”

Nadia raised an eyebrow. “And where did she get that fever?”

“Your grandmother lived to be ninety-two, and died as sharp as most twenty-year-olds, and her whole life she believed in ghosts. The spirits of dead people, she sincerely thought, gave her advice, and yet—”

“She was not mad.”

“That is my point, Nadia. She was not. I have a patient now who believes his cat is the reincarnation of his mother. He has no other disturbances; I see him for something unrelated. He was a successful lawyer, and still would be, if there were laws. People can believe strange things and not be dangerous to anyone.”

“You’re right.” Nadia walked into another room, directly beneath the bedroom where Farisa was sleeping like a leopard. “Of course you’re right. I guess just never thought we’d still be...”

“Still be... what?”

“Involved, Merrick. Involved with such danger, at this age. We’re going to the Yatek to avoid conflict, not relive old ones. We know her name, but not what she has done. You barely know her, and I know even less. Don’t you think it’s possible that she really did start the fire?”

“If so, I never would have brought her into our house.”

“So, what did?”

“Any of a number of things. Lightning?”

“We’re due east of Cait Forest. A storm that night would have come over us, and none did.”

Merrick raised his voice. “All kinds of things start forest fires. When it’s that dry, the spark of a falling rock can start a—”

“Quiet. You’ll wake her.”

Merrick shook his head.

“You’re missing one possibility, which is that Farisa is, in fact, mad. She is a mage, and her first signs appeared at the age of, what, two? Such talent comes with....” She shook her head. “We could be wrong about everything.”

Merrick did not smile as he said, “I’d sooner believe that forty-eyed forest monsters exist.”

#

She was a green-throated, blue-headed bird of paradise with fire under her wings. A vernal quilt of flowering trees and shrubs whipped beneath her as she flew. A distant southern hill seemed to polarize the light around it; as she grew closer, a tower appeared at its summit. She had never thought anyone could live this far south, but she found life here, and she found magic here, and she was safe. She could be what she had been born to be, and it did not endanger her. She would fly higher, go faster, and explore this new world until it ran out of sights, which it never would...

The bed shook. Farisa, covered in sweat, sat up.

The quake had been minor. It had ended before she could be scared, but she felt a sense of disorientation. She barely remembered laying down in this bed. She could tell, by a look through her window, that she was on the upper floor of a house, but she didn’t remember climbing stairs, either.

The noise of children playing outside suggested it was morning.

Nadia—she did remember the old woman’s name—came to the door and opened it.

Farisa propped herself up on an elbow. “Have I really been asleep for—?”

“Twenty hours, my dear.”

“I suppose I should get out of bed, then.” Farisa sat up and put her feet in cotton slippers. She held the bedpost for balance. The tiniest movements made her muscles sore, but having been in bed for so long caused a need to stir.

“Merrick says your fever’s almost gone.”

“That’s good.” Farisa sniffled. “I feel better.”

“Drink this.” Nadia presented the same bitter medicine she’d given yesterday.

Farisa groaned.

“I know it tastes very… one might say, chemical.”

“To be literal, all matter is chemical.”

Nadia laughed. “I suppose that is true.”

She drank the resin-scented broth. Her nostrils were one day less numb from the madhouse’s stench, so her palate had returned a bit to the world of the living, a fact that made the medicine taste more bitter.

Nadia grabbed a pair of eyeglasses that had been sitting on a writing desk and put them on. “It isn’t easy, is it?”

“No.” Farisa took another swig of Nadia’s medicine. Her vision stopped drifting and squared up. “It’s not easy at all.”

“Can you walk about, say, forty feet?”

“I think so.”

Nadia took her hand. “Come with me, then. There's something I’d like to show you.” They went down a narrow hallway. At the end of it, Nadia opened the door to bright eastern light. “Don’t worry. No one will see us.”

Morning sun fell on the spacious balcony. Three stone tables and twelve wrought-iron chairs were here; this place would have been a perfect setting for a professors’ salon. The top-floor outdoor terrace had a waist-high brick wall; atop that, purple-gray glass rose to three feet above eye level.

Nadia added, “The glass is polarized. We can see the city but, except around sunset when the light hits us directly, they can’t see us.” She knocked on the glass wall as if waking Exmore from sleep. “Who is Raqel?”

“Raqel? I know that name.” Farisa felt a diffuse frustration in knowing she should have an answer, but with no precision regarding what had been lost.

“It’s a common Vehu name. You said it a couple of times while you were sleeping. I assume she must be someone important to you.”

“I’m sorry. My memory’s a bit... it’s a bit vurkt.”

Nadia chuckled. “That’s also our word.”

“I suppose....” Farisa looked around herself like a confused animal. “I suppose it is. Raqel, Raqel. I know the name, but I just can’t....” She groaned. “Is this normal with ma—that fever I had?”

“Merrick would be the one to ask, but I don’t think so.”

Farisa looked at her hands. What had she forgotten? She remembered that it was late spring; a glance at Exmore confirmed it. She knew she was about twenty. Paths through her past, though intact in her mind, no longer made a concurrent braid so much as a heap of disjoint threads, cut apart and reassembled.

Nadia added, “The name intrigued me, but that’s all.”

One of the servants came by with a pitcher of ice water and poured it into two glasses, then handed each woman a wide-brimmed white hat.

“You'll want to cover your face, Farisa. The sun gets high this time of year.”

Farisa, after putting the hat on, drank. She realized, to her embarrassment, that she had gulped a whole glass in less than a minute. “I feel like...”

Nadia said, “Go on.”

“Raqel. The name must have been important to me, because it is so familiar. There are parts of me that... that I have lost since the fire. I want them back.”

“It would be better for both of us if your memory were clearer.”

“Aye.” Farisa bent the brim of her hat down.

“I do have something that might help.”

“Medicine?”

“Kind of. It’s just inside. Let me go get it.”

“Shouldn’t we speak to your husband?”

“This stuff is harmless.” Nadia went back into the house and returned a minute later with a glass pipette and a vial of clear liquid. “Harmless, but potent, so use the smallest amount you can. Two drops at the most, one if you can.”

“How do I…?” Farisa squeezed the pipette’s rubber bulb to draw fluid from the vial. “Like this?”

“That’s too much.” Nadia put most of the liquid back in the bottle. “Like I said, just a drop.”

“Okay.” Farisa tilted her head back and squeezed the bulb. She barely felt wetness on her tongue, as if the drop had evaporated on the way down. “I don’t think that was enough. I’m not feeling anything.”

Nadia opened an orange with a knife. “Nice weather, isn’t it?”

Farisa asked, “Did someone spill vinegar?”

Nadia pointed to a rack of wine bottles, red and white in alternation, up against the wall.

The air smelled of honey and saritah blossoms, as it often did in spring, but even though the wind was gentle, the sweetness of airborne pollen was starting to make Farisa’s eyes water. She sneezed so hard, she nearly blacked out. “What the—?”

Nadia said, “It takes a moment.”

Sweat began to form on Farisa’s sunlit arms, and she smelled salt. A dog on the street below stank like a wet corpse; the poor cur had coal rot and would be dead soon. The florid odor of horse manure, from neighborhoods where streets were never cleaned, followed. Cooking odors—Farisa had always found Ettasi food bland, but the spiceless fattiness of local cuisine had now developed its own unwholesome stench—came from all directions to a radius of half a mile. She retched.

This old woman has... no, she wouldn’t have... her husband saved me... he did, but maybe she’s the one calling the shots....

She felt a trapped sneeze, as if she had been punched in the nose. She pictured a bowl of old coins as the odor of iron sickened her.

My own blood, through my skin.

Then city soot, fleck by fleck, rang her sinuses like a percussion drill. So did discarded hops mash behind taverns, odors of regret from the brothels, and the sickened fish of the polluted Bubo River. The odors to follow were less disagreeable—a peach orchard, mushrooms in outlying forests, the electricity of a rain cloud over the northern horizon—but those odors were followed by one that put her into absolute panic: a smell of pure fire, a belch of poison and spoiled meat.

“This is awful, Nadia. Can you make it stop?”

The old woman shook her head. “I can’t.”

Farisa sat on the bare concrete of Nadia’s patio crying. The stench doubled in intensity every second. Cait Forest was ablaze, because of her; the Marquessa, flying behind, whipped up curtains of yellow fury, and the only salvation was that death itself did not want the disgraced witch. A million terrible scents were in the sky. Smoke. Burning flesh. Urine, shit, and tears. Blood, so much blood, a thousand miles of arteries on fire. Char and ash, white and black. Tephra, rolling rocks and falling boulders. Glowing red lakes, yellow spurts of lava. Shaking. Death. The sky’s supports buckled and the corpses that had been piled atop of it started falling down upon the world like hailstones.

The girl lay shaking. Her lungs had been scorched by molten sand and gaseous fire. She had been destroyed from the inside out. With her breathless last, she glared at the old woman.

“Nadia. Why?”