Wren Wallis - [BCS227 S01] Read online

  After Burning

  By Wren Wallis

  It’s impossible to keep a secret from the Sons, of course, and so Almas is wearily unsurprised when the black huntsmen arrive on the second day.

  Sonam comes running up to fetch her, and Almas straightens from the pallet of the girl she’s tending and goes tight-lipped down the stairs and out onto the porch, wiping her hands on her sarafan.

  There are three of them waiting on horseback in the street in their black surcoats and blackened mail, their hard blank faces. There’s a dead man as well, standing slope-shouldered and patient among the horses, his vague gaze fixed on the sky.

  One of the huntsmen is the Vigilant himself, Father Vasli, a square-built, square-jawed young man whose eyes have always seemed to Almas a little too small. Everything about him is stiff right angles. Even his frown has corners.

  “Sister,” he says, and lays his hand over his heart in greeting. His courtesy is a thin skin of ice over a dark depth. “With your leave, we’ve come to search this place.”

  Almas folds her arms across her chest. “Well, you can’t have my leave, Father,” she says, her courtesy equally brittle.

  He hadn’t expected that and rears his head back to reassess her. She knows how she must look: uncovered hair a frowzy nest, shapeless clothes stained, eyes sunk with exhaustion. She stares him down. Though he looks older—the Sons all look older than their true ages—she knows that the Vigilant of Kharsh is only twenty-eight. Young for his post, the youngest in the oblast.

  Lidat comes out quietly onto the porch to stand beside her, shoulder-to-shoulder; Sonam must have gone for her as well. Almas doesn’t glance toward her wife but feels bolstered by her presence, the two of them together forming some stern impasse. She raises her chin and keeps her gaze on the Vigilant.

  A season past, neighbors might have come warily out onto their own porches to witness the commotion. There are hardly any neighbors left now, and this hardly counts as commotion any longer.

  How different three months make the world.

  “Sister, we’re at war,” Father Vasli tells her, as though Almas doesn’t know that, as though it doesn’t pass bloodily through her door every day. “It’s come to our attention that you harbor enemies of Maret’s Ordinary here.”

  “It’s a clinic, Father,” Lidat answers, politer and more patient than Almas is ready to be. “We harbor the injured.”

  It isn’t properly a clinic. Their old clinic, the true one, was burned to posts weeks ago with the rest of their neighborhood, so they’ve shifted their practice to an abandoned house within the safety of the inner ring-wall, in the shadow of the Watchtower: Kharsh’s last circle of refuge against both daytime raiders and nighttime horrors.

  One of the horses sidles in the pitted street. From beyond the wall in the rubble of the old city comes a sudden clatter of foreign weapons and rough shouting, a wafting stink of smoke and blackpowder.

  It ends as abruptly as it began. None of the three huntsmen has reacted to it. The dead man continues to gaze absently at the sky.

  They are all, Almas thinks, as tired as she is.

  She can’t hate these men—these boys—here; can’t sustain the flame of anger for them. They’re all so young, behind their weathered faces, not one of them older than their baby Vigilant, and all of them doomed. Death might come for them soonest in the mask of this ugly little border war, but even the ones who don’t fall in this season and this place will be dead in a handful of years. The Sons of Maret are raised for martyrdom.

  She can’t hate them, but the sheer waste of it never ceases to gall her, to chafe her every physician’s instinct.

  “Are they kin of the Ordinary?” the Vigilant asks. He already knows the answer, else he wouldn’t be here.

  “They’re children, is what they are,” Almas says.

  “Even so, sister. Even the wastelanders’ children can be a danger.”

  “Yes,” she snaps, “dangerous children like yourselves.”

  Lidat intervenes. “We’re physicians, Father. It makes no matter to us who a person is. We help the hurt, regardless.”

  “Even to aid the enemies of your own people?”

  Almas scrubs at her brow. “Do you think we bear love for the men who’ve destroyed our homes and lives? Of course not. But tell me why we shouldn’t number you and yours among them.”

  “Almas,” Lidat warns.

  Almas knows the tone and knows Lidat is correct. Little as she likes it, she isn’t going to argue with her wife in front of these boys, and arguing with the boys themselves will do her no more good. She turns on her heel and stalks back into the house. Her temper wants to bang the door; her concern for her patients’ rest won’t allow it.

  She’s kneeling at the pallet of one of the burned boys, swabbing his scarlet-blistered skin with cold tea and the last of the honey, when Lidat returns. Almas has been stiff with queasy dread, expecting the heavy tread of men’s boots, but she only hears her wife come alone into the room behind her to move among mostly-empty cupboards.

  “Out of honey,” Almas says, when Lidat says nothing. “And no more fat for liniment.”

  “Irinat says the stored rice is going to weevils. Not sure what we’ll be feeding them, soon enough.” Lidat comes to set a roll of rough linen beside Almas on the floor. “He’s been replaced, Father Vasli has. No doubt he only wanted to strut while he still could.”

  “Replaced?” Almas’s hands still at her work.

  “Yes.” Lidat settles beside her. “The new one should be safely within the wall before sundown. Vasli warned me that we’ll have him to contend with in less than a day, and commends us to his good graces.” She hugs her knees.

  “And that was all?” Almas knits her brow.

  Lidat presses her lips together. “It was a threat, I think. The new one they’ve sent is the Wolf.”

  Almas fumbles, tipping the bowl of tea. She catches it upright again but not in time, and a dark pool spreads. Almas curses the waste as Lidat rises wordlessly to her feet and returns with a rag to mop it up.

  When all is dry and tidy again and Almas has finished plastering strips of linen across the boy’s burns, she and Lidat go down together to the kitchen. Lidat opens her arms and Almas steps into them, and they hold each other tightly. Almas puts her face in her wife’s hair and breathes in: bergamot and coriander, a smell like sunshine, the smell of home.

  Before home became someplace foreign to both of them; before home was the rust-rich stink of blood and the singed sulfurous scent of the steppe raiders’ blackpowder weapons.

  A stone of grief lodges in her throat, and she squeezes Lidat tighter. When she lifts her face, her wife’s hair clings like cobweb to her wet cheeks.

  “What do they mean by sending that one, do you think?” she asks.

  Lidat nestles her head on Almas’s shoulder. “To put a hard end to it, I’d guess. You’d think they’d have done it sooner, honestly.”

  The new patients they’ve been tending these last days, the injured wastelanders, had been a caravan of refugees. Mostly children—near two dozen of them—and only three adult women, and no men; all of their men and most of their women were dead, trampled into the burned scar of land where the steppe nomads’ Choyi trade-camp had been.

  They’d come straggling downriver away from blood-blackened earth and singed air that had once smelled of home, aiming for the shelter of another of the grassland camps. And it was their bitter, unblessed fortune that they’d limped right into the ugly storm that had once been the Ordinary border-settlement of Kharsh.

  It was one of their own people’s devices that caught them: a buried blackpowder trap. The raiders had no doubt laid it for a scouting pa
rty of the Sons, but its effect was indiscriminate. Almas and Lidat were only able to collect seven little broken bodies from what remained, and one of those died whimpering the first night.

  Almas’s heart has been breaking slowly for months: a numbing crush rather than a clean shatter. It has been ground so fine by now that sometimes she thinks she’ll suffocate under the weight of sand in her chest where her heart used to be.

  And now the Sons will come to finish the deaths that the wastelanders started. It’s the whole tale of this war. How wretchedly fitting that it should be the Wolf, the man who razed Choyi and drove these children from their home, who will come to drag them from Almas’s.

  “Do you think?” Lidat asks, and for a moment Almas isn’t sure whether she’s given voice to her own thoughts, whether Lidat is answering her. But no, Lidat only wants Almas to confirm what she herself had said.

  “That he’s meant to put an end to it? I’d assume so.”

  “Do you think he will?”

  Almas wants to reassure, to offer words of wine and honey. But she can’t lie to Lidat, and she’s too tired to lie to herself. “I don’t think it matters. What does an end to it look like, at this point?”

  “Almas,” Lidat says. “Almashka.” She draws back to take Almas’s face in her hands and kiss her, salt and sweet, defiant, and the grief that grips Almas’s heart seems to slacken for a moment at the softness.

  Sonam doesn’t have to fetch her the following morning. Almas sits back on her heels from changing the dressings on one of the burned boys, and when she lifts her tired gaze from the small, raw body, there is a man there.

  He stands just within the doorway, and he must have had to duck his head to get through it; he is the tallest person Almas has ever seen. He wears the black mail and surcoat of the Sons, but he wears them without ornament or emblem save for the three iron rings in his ear that mark his rank. His high black boots are scuffed to dullness. One hand rests on the pommel of the curved sword thrust into his black sash; the graceful dark wing of a lacquered bow rises above his shoulder. His hair is threaded with white, once-black faded to an iron-grey like Almas’s own, and he wears it drawn back in a heavy braid, longer than a woman’s.

  Almas has never seen the Wolf before, but she knows him.

  He watches her without expression, and his eyes are the most terrible: they too seem faded, the pale nothing-color of a winter afternoon, bizarre in the hard brown face. It’s like being stared at by a ghost.

  “You weren’t invited in,” Almas tells him, despite the taste of ash on her tongue. Did Lidat let him in? Where is Lidat?

  “The whole of the Ordinary is Maret’s, sister, and I am her Son. I don’t require invitation.” He offers it like explanation, not rebuke.

  Almas pushes herself stiffly to her feet and puts her hands on her hips. “Well, the house is mine.”

  He doesn’t answer this but continues to watch her with that uncanny translucent gaze.

  “What do you want?” she demands.

  “I understand that you’re the physician,” he says. “And you’ve stayed. Our kin owe you much. I’ve come to see your clinic and your work.”

  “And my patients? To render all my work for naught?”

  Again he doesn’t answer; only waits.

  “Where is my wife?” Almas asks him, and her voice cracks only a little on the last word.

  “In your kitchen with your girl, making tea for my brothers. She wanted to fetch you herself, but I told her I could manage.”

  When he smiles, Almas can see that one of his front teeth is broken crookedly, leaving a triangular gap. It lends the expression an absurd, childish quality. She doesn’t know whether he means to soothe her or to mock her.

  “So. These are your latest patients?” he asks, and comes two steps farther into the room.

  Almas steps swiftly to intercept him, planting herself between him and the boys on their pallets. She puts one hand into the pocket of her sarafan, touches the reassuring cold edge of the little blade she keeps there. “You can’t have them.”

  He cants his head at her, an earnest line between his brows. “And I would want them for why?”

  Does he not know who they are? Did Father Vasli not mention? No, he must know it; even if Vasli hadn’t said, one of the dead would have whispered it in his ear. Still, she balks at giving them away herself, so all she says is, “The other one threatened them, yesterday.”

  There’s a flicker behind the pale eyes like a change in the weather, and then it’s gone; only a passing cloud. He’s quiet longer than Almas likes, but at last he says, “I was sent here to end a fight, not to find more of them. Brother Vasli saw his duty differently, perhaps.” It is the same indifferent, mild courtesy, but Almas catches the insult in it: Brother Vasli, not Father. She wonders how cold a cut that is within their order.

  She doesn’t let go of the knife in her pocket. “Swear to me that you won’t harm them.”

  He assesses her in silence. Again it goes on so long that Almas nearly loses her nerve and speaks again just to fill it, but then the Wolf says, “I do not swear, save to God and my brothers, sister. But I have no quarrel with you, nor with these children.”

  The gentle way he says children loosens Almas’s grip on her secret knife, but she doesn’t let it go. “No? And what was your quarrel with Choyi?”

  Nothing in his stance or manner changes. “The quarrel with Choyi wasn’t mine either. I was only charged with ending it.”

  “Is that your picture of peace, then? What you did there? Is that what Kharsh should dream of?”

  “I don’t make the peace,” he tells her. “I only end the fight. The mending, God entrusts to others. I am no physician, sister.” He shows her a ghost of that gap-toothed smile, and Almas thinks the shadow that dims it now is something close to sadness.

  “We could see the smoke for two days,” she tells him.

  “As could the clans, I pray.” Neither hard nor boastful; tired, Almas thinks. He sounds tired too.

  She lets go of the knife and takes her hand from her pocket, wipes her palm on her sarafan. “What a cruel hope, when people die to write your messages.”

  “As God wills,” is his reply. Only when Almas has turned her back on him does he add, dryly, “It would have been a shame, anyway, to chip your little knife against my mail, ai?”

  She stiffens and feels herself flush to the roots of her hair, but the man only moves quietly around her, to the pallet of the boy she was tending, and crouches down as if beside a skittish animal.

  “Nasty work,” he says at last. “Blackpowder?”

  “Yes. A trap.” She hesitates, then folds her arms and goes to stand at his shoulder. “They drove a caravan straight across it. The ones that survived were lucky to be near the back of the thing. Even so, I’ve got one with half a leg gone.”

  He reaches out to touch the boy’s sheened brow. Almas draws breath to snap at him, but his hand lies lightly and the child doesn’t stir beneath it. “A new tactic of Tsomo’s qazaqi. One of my brothers lost six of his host to one, outside of Akhor.” His voice has a blade’s edge.

  Almas wants to say that it’s barbaric, but then so is the whole of it; it would be like observing that a cupful dipped from the sea is salt. And this man has been the author of barbarisms as well, so how should it matter to him? So all she says is, “I’m sorry.” That much is true.

  He rises to his feet again and Almas steps back. “You will make a list, sister,” he tells her, and for a moment her gut clenches like a fist, but he goes on: “What supplies you require for your practice, what more you can use. We’ll see you furnished from the Watch’s stores as best we can for now, and when the fighting’s broken and the roads open you’ll get the rest.”

  Almas feels a weight of words trapped beneath the sand in her chest. She’s always thought it a strange expression of gratitude to say I don’t know what to say, but now she doesn’t. She isn’t even entirely sure it’s gratitude. “I—”

/>   The Wolf nods once at her expression. “Come. Let’s go down to your wife and my brothers, ai? It was a long road; a moment for tea will be pleasant.”

  He is as good as his word: the first load arrives in the late afternoon, borne from the Watchtower’s long shadow by a surly red mule. The young brother who led the animal carries the crates one at a time up to the porch in silence.

  When he’s finished unloading the mule, he makes a somber salute to Almas. “Our Father sends his respect, and says to keep well clear of the wall after dark, grandmother. He advises there may be noise.”

  It has been a season of noise; Almas doesn’t point this out. Nor does she ask why she should keep clear of the wall. The boy wouldn’t tell her—if he even knows it himself—and anyway it likely means another deployment of the Watch’s dead. Almas has no desire to watch the tame dead feed. And then belatedly she hears the words after dark and they freeze her, crackling beneath her skin. She stares, uneasy.

  No one living goes abroad at night, not even when the world’s at peace. Night is the reason for walls and Watchtowers, the reason the Sons of Maret are made and raised as they are, the reason the dead are tamed. Night is when the devils come.

  And they’ve come to Kharsh in numbers; the monsters feed well in the stinking charnel ground. At night the wastelanders withdraw to the safety of their camps and bright ward-lines, the Sons within their walls, and the devils claim the field. Lately they prowl so close to the wall that Almas hears the snarls and gibbering of the damned in her snatched and restless dreams.

  The tame dead are the Watch’s surest weapon against devils and raiders both, but there can’t be more than a handful of them left. And when they’re spent, what then?

  When the youth and his mule have gone back up the street, Almas drags the crates into the hall of the house and pries them open. Packed in the sweetly musty rice straw within, she finds honey and beeswax and wool fat, willow bark and vinegar and strong clear liquor, peony root and licorice and salvia. There are also, unasked-for, a sack of clean, carded lambswool, another of millet, a sticky, paper-wrapped brick of dried apricots, and a little jar of poppy tears.