Free Walk to the End of the World by Suzy McKee Charnas

Moonwitch had not been destroyed by the missiles the Ancients had hurled; she had fought back through her minions, the fems. With her magic the fems had inspired the natural inferiors of the Ancients to join in a coalition to overthrow the rule of order and manly reason. There was some question as to the exact apportionment of blame for the rebellion of the Wasting among the various kinds of lesser beings (collectively known as the unmen). Each kind had a proper place, after all, under the authority of men: the beasts of all elements furnished men with raw materials; labor could be forced from the lazy, savage Dirties; even the fems had certain minor skills to offer their masters in addition to giving them sons.
    To the logical mind, however, the answer was obvious: there had been beast-fems, and fems among the Dirties, and the sons of men had turned Freak under the tutelage of their dams. The common denominator of corruption and rebellion among all the unmen had been fems.
    Even at the time, there had been names for fems indicating some understanding of the danger they represented. One Ancient book used in the Boyhouse mentioned fems as ‘bra-burners.’ Since ‘bra’ was a word in an old language meaning ‘weapon,’ clearly ‘bra-burner’ meant a fem who stole and destroyed the weapons of her masters.
    The weapon of the fems was witchery, and that could only be destroyed by burning the witches themselves. The Ancients had begun by burning other kinds of rebellious unmen, out of a reluctance to recognize the power that the fems had accumulated. By the time the fems’ primary responsibility for the wars of the Wasting had been openly acknowledged by the Ancients, the world had already begun to slip from the grasp of men.
    Yet it never fell into the hands of their enemies. The fems’ witchery was by nature irrational, utilizing epidemics, uprisings of crazed Dirties, destructive storms (to which the Ancients properly gave fem-type names), and poisons released into air, earth and water. These weapons were so virulent and undiscriminating that
they also killed the unmen themselves. That anyone survived at all was due to the foresight and tough-mindedness of a handful of ruling men.
    Shelters had been prepared earlier against the aggressiveness of the most powerful of the Dirties: Reds and Chings across the ocean and Blacks at home. Seeing at last that the light of manly reason was doomed to be overwhelmed by the forces of chaos, the wisest leaders of men withdrew to these shelters, taking a handful of fems with them for breeding purposes.
    Outside of this Refuge, as the area of the shelters was called, men and unmen fell to the plagues and disasters that wasted the world. In helpless horror the men in the Refuge watched (by means of wonderful distance-instruments) the ruin of the civilization they had once commanded but were powerless to save. Some of the refugees went mad, but the strongest among them (many were military men) organized an interim life of discipline and sturdy optimism. They had faith that someday the surface of the earth would be habitable again. Meanwhile, at least the vermin responsible for earth’s ruin were dying along with their victims.
    The descendants of the refugees (and the properly tamed fems) emerged eventually to reclaim and make usable the territory now known as the Holdfast. It was the first step in the Reconquest of the whole world in the name of light, reason, and order. The descendants of the surviving fems, however, would never again be allowed to become an active danger to the hegemony of their masters. The only type of unmen to have been saved from the Wasting, fems were now closely controlled; modern men were taught never to forget that these beings were by their nature the hereditary and implacable enemies of everything manly, bright and clean.
    Servan was disappointed to find no signs of witch-power here in the recesses of Bayo. On occasion he had sensed something secret about