Strange Fire

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  For the doubtful

  Let us rather choose

  Arm’d with Hell flames and fury all at once

  O’re Heav’ns high Towrs to force resistless way,

  Turning our Tortures into horrid Arms

  Against the Torturer; when to meet the noise

  Of his Almighty Engin he shall hear

  Infernal Thunder, and for Lightning see

  Black fire and horror shot with equal rage

  Among his Angels; and his Throne it self

  Mixt with Tartarean Sulphur, and strange fire,

  His own invented Torments.

  —Milton, Paradise Lost, Book 2

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thank you to Krista Vitola and Christian Trimmer, editors in arms. Thank you to Lucy Ruth Cummins, Ryan Thompson, Jenica Nasworthy, Alison Velea, Valerie Shea, and the whole design and production team at Simon & Schuster. Thank you to my sensitivity reader. Thanks to the MacDowell Colony, where this book was started almost three years ago. And finally, thanks to Mom and Ellen, for everything else.

  Prologue

  FLORIAN PARKS WAS SITTING IN the Gantry watchtower, whittling a wooden doll for his little sister, when he first spotted the travelers over the pointed tips of the palisade. He was so surprised that he cut the figurine’s nose clean off. An hour later they appeared again, marching along the river. They were close enough to make out individually this time: about twenty people altogether, men and women both, each one bedraggled and gaunt as a beggar. They had no pack animals or wagons, just a single handcart they kept near the center of their procession. It was clear they’d been traveling for a long time.

  They crossed the bridge and stopped a dozen feet from the town gate. One of them stepped forward. He had lank silver hair and a thick beard, and he walked with a pronounced limp.

  “Hail and good evening,” he said. His voice was surprisingly powerful, reeking of a practiced, if rusty, authority.

  “Same to you,” Florian responded.

  “We are a band of travelers in search of a place to lay our heads for the night. We were hoping to find such a thing behind your walls.”

  Florian hesitated. His sense of charity warred against that pessimism born of having known a few too many bad men. “There sure are an awful lot of you.”

  “We have shekels, if that’s your concern,” said another of the strangers.

  Florian frowned; the word was distantly familiar. “Shekels?”

  “Currency,” the man explained. “Bronze and silver.”

  Florian spat a gob of chew into the corner of the tower, which was long since stained rust red with the stuff. He doubted the strangers actually had anything of value on them, but he also didn’t see how they could be much of a threat. Utter exhaustion was written all over their faces, and they didn’t have a single sword or bow between them.

  “Gimme a tick,” he said, and quickly clambered down from the watchtower. The gate was braced on the Gantry side with a large iron rod. Florian lifted it off the brackets and set it to lean against the palisade.

  “Just give it a push,” he shouted, and stood back as the gate swung open.

  “Welcome to Gantry,” he said. “I’m Florian Parks.”

  They each gave their names as they passed, but Florian managed to remember only that of their leader, Seftika Onoma. When they’d all passed through the gate, a couple of them helped him to replace the buttress rod.

  “Mr. Onoma,” Florian said, “I should bring you straight to the mayor. The rest of you can sit a spell at the Hare. Grant—that is, the proprietor—won’t have space for all of you to sleep, but you can at least get warm by the fire until we sort things out.”

  After introducing the strangers at the Hare (and confirming that they did indeed have a fair bit of silver on them), Florian went up the hill with Seftika. They moved slowly, on account of the old man’s limp.

  “Your town is rather well situated, isn’t it?” Seftika said.

  “You’ve got a good eye. That’s why the Wesah don’t bother us. Water all the way around, and cliffs, too. That bridge is pretty much the only way in. Here we are.”

  The mayor’s house was twice the size of any other in town, built of red brick and mortar instead of the usual wood. Florian could tell that Seftika was impressed by it.

  “Constantine built that thing with his own two hands. He’s got all kinds of workshops in the back, too. Says he likes to tinker.”

  Florian knocked. After a moment, the door was answered by the mayor’s daughter, Denise. She was a pretty thing, hair always braided elaborately, neck smooth as planed rosewood. He always got a little tongue-tied around her.

  “Evening, Denise. We’ve got a guest here. That is, we have a whole lot of guests. About twenty, all told. This here is their leader, Seftika Onoma, of . . .” Florian realized he’d yet to ask where the strangers had come from.

  “The Anchor,” Seftika said.

  “The Anchor?” Denise said. “What’s that?”

  “It’s a city.”

  “Huh. Never heard of it. But I imagine there’s plenty of things out there I never heard of, eh? Just let me tell Papa you’re here.”

  She returned a moment later and ushered them into the house, down a hallway, and out onto the back patio. Constantine was sitting in a rocking chair, smoking a pipe.

  “Evening, Florian,” he said. “And a pleasure to meet you, Mr. Onoma.”

  “Thank you, sir,” Seftika replied.

  “So my daughter tells me you’re from the Anchor.”

  “That’s right.”

  “And you’ve brought a few friends with you.”

  “Yes.”

  The mayor took a leisurely suck on his pipe, exhaling the fragrant smoke in a narrow stream. “Interesting. I’m bettin’ there’s a story there, eh?”

  “There is.”

  “I’ll warn you even before you start, I got an ear for liars. Comes from having three daughters. They’re always trying to pull something over on me.” He winked at Denise, who blushed prettily. Florian couldn’t help but wonder exactly what her father might be referring to.

  “I have no interest in lying to you, sir,” Seftika said.

  “Good.” The mayor leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. “Then start talking.”

  Seftika sat down cross-legged on the deck and took a deep breath. “Duncan Leibowitz, Epistem of the Anchor Library, was terribly ill . . .”

  He tossed and turned. He sweated and swore. He cried out for water, then threw up whatever he drank. He prayed to God and in the same breath cursed a creator who would inflict such suffering on his creations. He was tormented by visions of the Conflagration, of the Daughter turning her face away from him in shame, of demons descending from the skies to torment those he loved. He sensed the dark angel of death perched just at the edge of his vision, patient as a vulture, brutal as a hawk.

  And yet, through it all, the scientist in him remained awake and aware.

  Decades earlier, just after taking his holy orders as a monk, Leibowitz had been assigned to the Library’s chemistry department. He accomplished little of note in that position, choosing to focus his efforts on the sort of politicking that allowed one to rise through the ranks of the institution, rather than on synthesizing a more
efficient fertilizer or a less toxic solvent. It took him nearly a quarter of a century to achieve his goal: just shy of his fiftieth year, he was named Epistem, the most senior position in the Library, answerable only to the Archbishop and God. His business now was exclusively bureaucratic in nature: meetings with Church officials and the Anchor city council, delegating his attendants in response to specific calls for consultation, appearing at parties and functions.

  He couldn’t have said when he began to grow nostalgic for his days as a lowly attendant, toiling alone in a dank chamber over a flask and a crucible, the hours passing by unheeded. It stole over him slowly—this sense that life was passing him by, that he would die having produced nothing of lasting value. Then the plague came, carried up the coast by traders from Sudamir and left at Edgewise docks with the rest of their cargo. And as it began to spread across the Descendancy, as town after town saw its population decimated, the funeral pyres wafting pestilential smoke across the countryside, Leibowitz finally understood what God wanted of him.

  Unbeknownst to even his closest associates, he built a small laboratory in his private offices and began poring over every volume in the anathema stacks, page by page, line by line. It took him months to find what he was looking for: a reference to a medicine invented by the first generation of men, a sort of panacea, cultivated from the same mold that grew on bread left out to rot. The procedure for synthesizing this elixir was terribly complex, and more than two years passed before Leibowitz even managed to assemble all the necessary ingredients. Another year later, he finally produced a viable dose.

  At that point, Leibowitz faced a critical question: Who would he test his invention on? He had to tread carefully; his experiments had never been formally approved by a writ from the Church, which meant he was already guilty of blasphemy. If his potion wasn’t a rousing success, he would almost certainly end up excommunicated.

  There was only one plausible solution.

  That Sunday, Leibowitz traveled to St. Ivan’s Hospital and spent the morning walking among the sick and the dying. He held their cold, clammy hands to his lips. He leaned down to kiss their foreheads.

  By the time he went to bed that night, he could already feel the fever taking hold.

  He waited as long as he could before taking the medicine; the plague needed time to incubate, to reach its full strength. Only after three days, when he felt any further delay might prove fatal, did he fetch the vial and syringe.

  He injected the solution, then lay back on his bed and fell into a dreamless sleep.

  When he woke again, it was to a bright, clear morning and a bright, clear head. He felt as if he’d spent the past few days slowly drowning, trapped beneath a thick layer of ice, desperate for air. And at the last possible moment, he’d managed to break back through to the surface. He laughed like a madman. He wept with joy. God had granted him a miracle. Producing the antidote on a large scale would be difficult—perhaps impossible. But so many lives would be saved as a result—they really had no choice but to try.

  Those were the exact words he used when he presented his discovery to the Archbishop—we really have no choice but to try.

  But it turned out the Archbishop saw things rather differently, and the two men spent the entire night arguing. The Epistem asked how the Church could so cavalierly consign thousands of men, women, and children to death. The Archbishop countered that the Lord and his Daughter determined the appropriate time for every mortal being’s passing. The Epistem then asked why the Archbishop bothered to eat or drink, if he was unafraid of death. The Archbishop said that eating and drinking were natural acts, while the work Leibowitz had done was not. The Epistem asked what the purpose of the Library was, if not to improve the lives of the people. The Archbishop answered that it was Scripture, not science, that determined the definition of “improvement.” Back and forth the debate went, in an ever-widening gyre, until it encompassed the very nature of faith, of knowledge, of divinity, of mercy, of providence, and of the Descendancy itself.

  But when all was said and done, the Library was subordinate to the Church. The Archbishop’s word was final, and that word was no.

  Over the next few weeks, Leibowitz found it more and more difficult to sleep. He spurned the company of others, and when forced to socialize, would be either cold and taciturn or needlessly quarrelsome. The despair he’d subjugated to his scientific work reasserted itself. And one night, as he lay awake into the wee hours, he began to compose an essay in his mind. It would come to be known as A Treatise on Knowledge, and within a week, every monk in the Library would’ve read it. The Treatise told the story of the Epistem’s past five years—how he’d labored to discover the cure, how he’d made the difficult decision to test it on himself, how he’d brought his triumph to the Archbishop, and how he’d been rebuffed.

  He’d hoped to sway opinion within the Library against the Archbishop. He didn’t realize that his letter amounted to a declaration of war.

  The Archbishop quickly called together the Gloria—his council of bishops—and they agreed to formally name the Epistem a heretic. Within a few days, Leibowitz had been taken from the Library in chains, and a new Epistem had been installed in his place. The official word given to the people was that he’d succumbed to the plague.

  Leibowitz’s story would’ve ended there, if not for the fact that a few dozen attendants had read the Treatise and been moved by it. Before the former Epistem’s execution could be carried out, these intrepid few staged a daring escape, successfully spiriting him out of the city.

  They were alive, but they no longer had a home. Not only because the Archbishop would be looking for them, but because they’d lost their faith. They decided to travel east until they reached territory where they were no longer criminals on the run, where they were no longer anyone at all. And in that place, they would find a way to start again.

  The silence stretched out for a long time after that. Constantine’s eyes were closed, and if not for the smoke periodically leaking out from around his pipe, Florian would’ve thought he was asleep.

  “I’ve put most of it together,” he eventually said, “but I do have one last question.”

  “Please,” said Seftika.

  “Can you teach us some of the things you know?”

  Florian didn’t have the slightest idea what the mayor was talking about, but the stranger seemed to understand.

  “Give us fifty years, maybe a hundred, and we will improve your lives in ways you can’t begin to imagine. We will flood your streets with light even in the dead of night. We will show you how to soar above the clouds. We will make your farms more productive, your sicknesses less deadly, your horses stronger.”

  “What about our booze?”

  Seftika smiled. “We can make a shine so strong it’ll melt a snail down to slime.”

  “You willing to shake on that?”

  “Indeed I am.”

  The two men stood up and shook hands. And Florian realized that Seftika wasn’t nearly as decrepit as he’d at first appeared. In fact, it almost seemed as if his shabbiness were a sort of disguise, one he could slough away like a snakeskin. With a good wash and a fresh set of clothes, a trimmed beard and a haircut, he would look completely different—formidable, commanding even.

  Florian chuckled. He’d never been the fastest calf to the teat, but he always got there eventually. “Seftika Onoma?” he said. “Where’d you come up with that one?”

  “It means ‘false name’ in an ancient tongue,” the stranger replied, looking almost sheepish. “But now that we’re to be neighbors, I hope you’ll call me Duncan.”

  Part I

  BROTHERS

  * * *

  What hath God wrought?

  —Samuel Morse, 1844

  (the first official message sent over the Washington-Baltimore telegraph line,

  quoting from the Book of Numbers)

  1. Clover

  CLOVER HAMILL ATTEMPTED TO CALCULATE his share of the modest birt
hday pie his mother had just brought out from the wagon. Three hundred and sixty degrees of pie divided by nine people was forty degrees each, but that would only be if the slices were cut evenly, which they seldom were. Clive, being the man of the hour, would be in charge of dividing the pie up, and that didn’t bode well for his younger brother. It wasn’t that Clive would apportion himself the largest piece—though no one could have blamed him for doing so on his own birthday—but that he would undoubtedly give outsize pieces to their mother for making the pie in the first place, and to their father and Eddie and Burns because the men needed to keep their strength up, and to Michael because he’d throw a tantrum otherwise, and to Gemma and Flora just because they were girls. Clover figured he would be lucky to end up with a twenty-degree slice. Given that the height of the pie was about four inches and the radius about five, his share would amount to . . . roughly seventeen cubic inches of pie. Attendant Bernstein could have taken the math even further—reckoning the caloric content of the pie based on its constituent ingredients, for example—but Clover hadn’t yet received the education to carry out such a calculation.

  His mother put the pie down on the trestle table. A lone beeswax candle was sunk into the middle of the doughy lattice, but the breeze had already put out the flame. Everything would have been so much better back at their house in the Anchor. The pie would have been a cake at least twice the size of this one, and the room would have been pitch dark but for the candle flames spitting shadows over the walls, and everyone would have been warm and comfortable and clean.

  But they weren’t at home. They were on the road. And on the road, you took what you could get.

  Clover realized he’d missed the first couple of lines of the “Birthday Hymn.” He joined in just in time to wish his brother long life and happiness—in the name of the Father and the Daughter and Holy Gravity. Clive closed his eyes, looking prayerful and solemn even though he was probably only wishing for an extra-special present from Gemma tonight, and then he made a show of trying to blow out the candle. Everybody laughed.