Thunderhead

  “I often come here to visit the remains of the Arch at the start of a new year,” Scythe Curie said as they strolled through the winter-bare but well-tended paths of the riverside park. “It humbles me. It reminds me of the things we’ve lost—but also of how much better our world is now than in mortal days. It reminds me why I glean, and gives me the fortitude to stand tall in conclave.”

  “It must have been beautiful,” Citra said, looking at the rusted ruin of the north pylon.

  “There are pictures of the Arch in the backbrain,” Marie told her, “if you ever feel like mourning what was lost.”

  “Do you?” Citra asked her. “Do you ever mourn what was lost?”

  “On some days, yes, on others, no,” Scythe Curie said. “Today I am determined to rejoice in what we’ve gained, rather than what was lost. Both in the world, and personally.” Then she turned to Citra and smiled. “You and I remain alive and unharmed, in spite of two attempts to end us. That is worth celebrating.”

  Citra returned Marie’s smile, then gazed once more at the rusting pylons, and the park in which they sat. It reminded Citra of the Mortality Memorial in the park where she had secretly met Rowan. The thought of Rowan made her heart sink. Word had reached her of the fiery end of Scythe Renoir. Although she wouldn’t admit it out loud, and barely could admit it to herself, she longed for news of more dead scythes—because another gleaning by Scythe Lucifer would mean that Rowan had not been caught.

  Renoir had been ended nearly a month ago. She couldn’t guess where Rowan was now, or who he was planning to end next. He wasn’t limiting himself to MidMerican scythes, which meant he could be anywhere. Anywhere but here.

  “Your mind wanders,” Scythe Curie observed. “This place can do that to you.”

  Citra tried not to linger on those wanderings. “Are you ready for conclave next week?” she asked.

  Marie shrugged. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

  “They’ll all be talking about us,” Citra said. “I mean, after the attempts on our lives.”

  “I’ve been the center of attention at conclave before,” Marie said dismissively. “And so have you, dear. It’s neither negative nor positive in itself—it’s what you do with the attention that matters.”

  From the other side of the north pylon came a group of people. They were Tonists. Twelve of them. When they weren’t traveling alone, Tonists always traveled in groups of either seven or twelve, representing the seven notes of the diatonic scale and the twelve notes of the chromatic scale. They were ridiculously slavish to the mathematics of music. Tonists could often be found sniffing around architectural ruins, searching for the so-called Great Fork, which was supposed to be hidden within some mortal-age bit of engineering.

  While other people slipped away when they saw scythes in the park, the Tonists stood their ground. Some even glared. Citra began to walk toward them.

  “Anastasia, what are you doing?” asked Marie. “Just let them be.”

  But Scythe Anastasia wouldn’t stop a thing once she had committed herself to it. Neither, for that matter, would Citra Terranova.

  “What order are you?” she asked the one who looked like he might be their leader.

  “We are Dorian Tonists,” he said. “But I can’t see why that’s any of your business.”

  “If I wanted you to get a message to someone in a Locrian monastery, would you be able to?”

  He stiffened. “We Dorians do not associate with Locrians,” he said. “They are far too lax in their interpretation of doctrine.”

  Citra sighed. She didn’t know what message she’d want to pass on to Greyson. Perhaps just gratitude for saving her life. She had been so upset that he hadn’t been Rowan, that she had treated him poorly, and had never even thanked him for what he had done. Well, it didn’t matter now, because clearly no message would be getting to him.

  “You should go,” the lead Tonist said to her, his face cold and judgmental. “Your stench offends us.”

  Citra actually laughed at him, and her laughter made him redden. She’d come across Tonists who were kind and accepting, others who were all about selling their particular brand of crazy. She made a mental note that Dorian Tonists were assholes.

  Scythe Curie came up beside her then. “Don’t waste your time, Anastasia,” she said. “They have nothing to offer you but hostility and harangues.”

  “I know who you are,” said their leader with a caustic enmity even greater than that he’d shown to Citra. “Your early deeds have not been forgotten or forgiven. Someday, your score will be settled.”

  Marie reddened with fury. “Are you threatening me?”

  “No,” he said. “We leave justice to the universe. And what rings out always echoes back.” Which Citra figured was the Tonist version of  “What goes around comes around.”

  “Come, Anastasia,” Marie said. “These zealots aren’t worth another second of our time.”

  Citra could have just walked away, but the man’s attitude begged for her to play with them a little. So she held out her ring.

  “Kiss it,” she said to him.

  Scythe Curie turned to her, shocked. “Anastasia, why on earth would you—”

  But she cut Marie off. “I said kiss it!” She knew he wouldn’t, but she also suspected that some of the others in the group might be tempted. “I’ll grant a year of immunity to any of you who steps forward to kiss my ring.”

  Their leader paled, terrified that this turquoise harbinger of unnatural death might steal his entire flock away.

  “Intone!” he shouted to them. “Drive them away!”

  And they all began a bizarre open-mouthed humming—each of them droning a different note, until they sounded like a swarm of bees.

  Citra lowered her ring and held the leader’s gaze for a moment more. Yes, he had triumphed over her temptation, but only barely, and he knew it. She turned her back on them and left with Scythe Curie. Even though the scythes were gone, they continued to drone, and probably wouldn’t stop until their leader told them to.

  “What was the use of that?” Marie chided. “Haven’t you ever heard the expression, ‘Leave a cult to its cacophony?’ ”

  Marie seemed unsettled as they left the park, probably because of the memory of her brother.

  “I’m sorry,” Citra said. “I shouldn’t have kicked a hornet’s nest.”

  “No, you shouldn’t have.” Then after a moment, she said, “As infuriating as Tonists are, he was right about one thing.  Your deeds will always come back to haunt you. It’s been almost a hundred and fifty years since I routed the rotting vestiges of government to clear the path for a better world. I never paid a price for those crimes. But someday, the echo will return.”

  Scythe Curie spoke no more of it, but her words lingered just as powerfully as the Tonists’ droning, which Citra could swear she still heard in her head for the rest of the day.

  * * *

  There are many moments in my existence where I have been confounded by “circumstances beyond my control.”

  What most come to mind are the disasters in space.

  On the moon, there was a catastrophic leak that exposed the entire supply of liquid oxygen to the vacuum of space, leaving nearly a thousand people to suffocate—and all attempts to retrieve their bodies for revival met with failure.

  On Mars, a fledgling colony lasted for almost a year before a fire consumed the entire complex and everyone within it.

  And the NewHope orbital station—a prototype that I had hoped would eventually form a habitable ring around the Earth, was destroyed when the engines of an approaching shuttle misfired, and pierced the station like an arrow through its heart.

  After the NewHope disaster, I terminated the colonization program—and although I still employ millions in research and development of technologies that could potentially be used in the future, those employees and those facilities often succumb to bad luck.

  However, I do not believe in bad luck. Nor, in this circumstance,
do I believe in accidents or coincidence.

  Trust me when I say that I have a keen understanding of what things—and people—are “beyond my control.”

  —The Thunderhead

  * * *

  32

  Humble in Our Arrogance

  The morning was icy but windless on the day of  Winter Conclave, January 7th, Year of the Raptor. It was a natural chill—the Thunderhead did not finesse weather systems for scythes. There were times that scythes would complain about inconvenient weather and insist it was the Thunderhead’s spite, which was ridiculous—but some people could not help but ascribe human failings to it.

  The BladeGuard had a much larger presence than usual at Winter Conclave. Its primary purpose had always been to police the crowds and make sure the scythes had a clear path up the stone steps to the statehouse. This time, however, the stairs were flanked by a full gauntlet of guards, shoulder to shoulder, behind which the disappointed crowd could barely glimpse the scythes as they passed.

  Some people forced their way through to take a picture or dare to touch a scythe’s robe. In the past, these overenthusiastic citizens were pulled back and returned to the crowd with a glare or a reprimand. Today, the guards were instructed to dispatch them by bullet. It took only a few deadish people being rushed to revival centers for the rest to get the message. Thus, order was maintained.

  As with everything else, the scythes had polarized feelings about the added security measures. “I don’t like it,” grumbled Scythe Salk. “Shouldn’t these good people have, at the very least, the opportunity to see us in our glory and not just holding the blade that gleans them?”

  Scythe Brahms offered a counterpoint to the sentiment. “I applaud our High Blade’s wisdom in providing better security,” he proclaimed. “Our safety is paramount.”

  Scythe O’Keefe commented that they should just build a tunnel and bring the scythes in underground—and although she meant it to be bitterly facetious, Scythe Carnegie noted it was the first good idea O’Keefe had had in years.

  Dissent fomented and hackles were raised even before the scythes entered the building.

  “Once Scythe Lucifer is taken down, all this will settle and things will return to the way they’ve always been,” more than one of the scythes said—as if taking down the black-robed vigilante was a cure-all.

  The scythe in turquoise tried to stand as proud as Scythe Curie as she climbed the steps, doing her best to dismiss Citra Terranova from the day, allowing herself to be Scythe Anastasia both inside and out. She heard the grumbles about Scythe Lucifer as they climbed the stairs, but was heartened rather than troubled by them. Not only was Rowan still out there, but they were actually calling him Scythe Lucifer—accepting him as one of their own, even if it was unintentional.

  “Do they actually believe that stopping Rowan will solve everything that’s wrong with the scythedom?” she asked Scythe Curie.

  “Some choose not to see anything wrong,” Marie responded.

  Anastasia found that hard to believe . . . but on the other hand, finding easy scapegoats for complicated problems had been a human pastime since the first mob of cavemen struck someone down with a rock.

  The uneasy truth was that the division in the scythedom was as deep as a gleaning wound. There was the new order, with platitudes to justify its sadistic appetites, and the old guard, which blustered about how things were supposed to be but was unable to take action to do anything about it. The two factions were locked in a death grip now, but neither could die.

  As always, there was a lavish spread of donated breakfast foods in the rotunda, where the scythes gathered informally before conclave began. Today’s morning feast was a seafood buffet, designed with staggering artistic skill. Slabs of smoked salmon and kippered herring; bushels of shrimp and oysters on ice; artisan breads and countless varieties of cheese.

  Anastasia thought she had no appetite, but seeing such a spread could entice the dead to rise for one last meal. Still, she hesitated at first to partake, because it felt like defacing a sculpture. But the rest of the scythes, the good and the bad, attacked it like piranha, so Anastasia gave in and did the same.

  “It is an unofficial rite that dates back to the old days,” Scythe Curie once told her, “when the most austere and reserved of scythes would, just thrice a year, give in to gluttony without regret.”

  Marie drew Anastasia’s attention to the groups of scythes and how they huddled in social cliques. Nowhere was the division clearer than here in the rotunda. The new-order Scythes gave forth a vibe that was palpable—filled with a brazen egotism that was markedly different from the more subdued self-importance of the rest of the scythedom.

  “We’re all arrogant,” Marie had once told her. “After all, we are chosen because we are the brightest and the wisest. The best we can hope for is to be humble in our arrogance.”

  As Anastasia took in the crowd, it chilled her to see how many scythes had altered their robes to include embedded jewels—which, thanks to Goddard, their martyr, had become a symbol of the new order. When Citra first came to conclave as an apprentice, there were far more independent scythes who did not align themselves with either faction—but it seemed there were fewer and fewer, as the line in the sand became a fissure that threatened to swallow those who did not choose a side. She was horrified to find that Honorable Scythe Nehru had added amethyst gems to his pewter-gray robe.

  “Volta had been my apprentice,” Nehru explained. “When he sided with the new order, I took it as a personal insult . . . but then when he died in the fire at that Tonist monastery, I felt I owed him an open mind. I now find joy in gleaning, and surprisingly, it’s not a terrible thing.”

  Anastasia respected the venerable scythe too much to put forward her opinion, but Marie was not one to hold her tongue.

  “I know you cared for Volta,” Scythe Curie said, “but grief is not an excuse for depravity.”

  It left Nehru speechless, as it was intended to.

  They stood eating among like-minded scythes, all of whom lamented the trajectory of the scythedom.

  “We should never have allowed them to brand themselves the ‘new order,’ ” Scythe Mandela said. “There’s nothing new about what they do. And casting those of us who hold onto the integrity of the founders as ‘old guard’ diminishes us. We are far more forward thinking than those who serve their primal appetites.”

  “You can’t say that while eating a pound of shrimp, Nelson,” quipped Scythe Twain. Which made some of the others chuckle, but Mandela was not amused.

  “The conclave meals were intended to make up for a life of self-denial,” Mandela said. “But they mean nothing when there are scythes who deny themselves nothing.”

  “Change is fine as long as it serves the greater good,” Scythe Curie said, “but the new-order scythes don’t even serve a lesser good.”

  “We must continue to fight the good fight, Marie,” said Scythe Meir. “We must maintain and exalt the virtues of the scythedom; stick to the highest ethical ground. We must always glean with wisdom and compassion, for it is at the core of what we are—and we must never take the ending of life for granted. It is a burden, not a delight. It is a privilege, not a pastime.”

  “Well said!” agreed Scythe Twain. “I must believe virtue will triumph over the selfishness of the new order.” But then he smirked at Scythe Meir. “Of course, Golda, it does sound as if you are campaigning for High Blade.”

  She laughed heartily at that. “A job I wouldn’t want.”

  “But you have heard the rumblings, haven’t you?” Twain asked.

  She shrugged. “Rumblings are just that. I leave gossip to scythes who have not yet turned a corner. Me, I’m too old to waste my time with petty speculation.”

  Anastasia turned to Scythe Curie. “What rumblings?” she asked.

  But Scythe Curie was blasé about it. “Every couple of years there are rumors that Xenocrates will step down as High Blade, but he never does. I think he starts
those rumors himself to make sure he’s the center of everyone’s conversation.”

  And, as she eavesdropped on several other discussions, Anastasia could see that he had succeeded. What discussions weren’t about Scythe Lucifer featured all sorts of rumors about Xenocrates. That he had already self-gleaned; that he had fathered a child; that he had a tragic accident while setting his age back that left him with the body of a three-year-old. Speculation was rampant, and nobody seemed to care that some of the rumors were ridiculous. That was part of the fun.

  Anastasia, in her own scythely arrogance, had thought there’d be much more conversation about the attempts on her and Marie’s lives, but it was barely on most scythe’s radars.

  “Didn’t I hear something about you both going into hiding?” Scythe Sequoyah asked. “Was it about this Scythe Lucifer business?”

  “Absolutely not,” Anastasia said, far more adamantly than she had intended to. Marie intervened to stop her from digging a deeper hole.

  “It was just a group of unsavories. It behooved us to be nomadic until they were ferreted out.”

  “Well, I’m glad it’s all resolved,” said Scythe Sequoyah, and he went back to the buffet for seconds.

  “Resolved?” said Anastasia, incredulous. “We still have no idea who’s behind it.”

  “Yes,” said Marie, calmly, “and whoever it is could be right here in the rotunda. Best to feign nonchalance.”

  Constantine had informed them of his suspicion that a scythe might be behind the attacks, and now he was working that angle. Anastasia looked around the crowded rotunda for him. He was not difficult to spot, as his crimson robe stood out—although, mercifully, it had no jewels upon it. Constantine was still holding his position of neutrality, for whatever it was worth.

  “I’m glad you have your eyes back,” Anastasia told him as she approached.

  “They’re still a bit sensitive to light,” he said. “I suppose they must be worked in.”