Session Six — Stand Aside

It was eleven at night in the junkyard, a sliver of moon over the hulls, and Miyake was on deck drinking tea.

Her expression said everything she wasn't saying. The crew had found her a local complication that had nothing to do with what she was paying them for, and her contempt for it was real but good-natured. Bemusement, mostly. Something close to entertainment. She watched the coal hounds circle and drop among the wrecks, looking for somewhere to sleep, and gave no sign of wanting to involve herself, least of all to help.

Tauon read her anyway, and for once she was easy to read. There are lines of patience in her face that go back decades. Whatever she is cooking, she has been cooking for a long time. In the moonlight he could see the gold inlay on the handle of her sword and the fact that she was not looking at the junkyard. She never looks at what is in front of her. She looks at what it means further down the road. Tauon could not tell what she is after. He came away certain of one thing: this isn't business. Wherever she is going ends in something personal, tied to who she is.

She finished her tea. The cup was gone from her hand.

“Well, if you need me, just call my name and I'll hear.”

She went below.

The drumming started a little after that, low and far off.

They were not marching drums. Two of them knew it immediately. A marching drum keeps a steady repeat. This one built and cut, built and cut, a call to action. Scout fixed the direction: south, across the river. Arkady, listening longer than anyone, was the first to understand that it was coming closer. Very slowly. But closer.

While it came, they argued about the dead.

Yazan had grown up in one of the most volatile places in the world and knew better than anyone aboard how belief takes hold of a thing and will not let go. “If we convince them that the fight is over, that they did their jobs, they will just vanish. It is the belief that they have a mission that is tethering them to this world.”

Scout would not have it. “If you get rid of this presence, Savannah will be consumed by the war. You're dooming this small community to that war. And you're not even asking them if that's okay.”

Tauon saw a market. A city where both armies already have to come in peace is a port of call, a refuge, a place to hold talks. There ought to be a way to make that pay for the people who live there. Arkady floated a reserve force, and then something larger: give the dead new orders and point them at Concepcion and Petrolina, and let the war be fought on the capitals while the rest of Dixie recovers.

Yazan put a stop to that one. Everything he knew from Arabia said that a manifestation like this is bound to its ground. Nobody has ever seen a shard storm leave Arabia. There would be a catalyst somewhere, a source.

Tauon said that if there was a source, it was shardisite, and shardisite is valuable. Arkady offered him the Compass of Need and reminded him that it does not point at what you want.

Chet had his spyglass out at the south rail. The river had a skin of fog on it and the air was fifty-five degrees, which in this part of the world it has no business being. He searched the far bank for a long time without saying anything.

“It sounds like it should be right there.”

He was pointing at marsh. Clumped grass, reeds, and once they actually looked at it, craters. Old artillery craters gone soft and green. The far bank had been a battlefield.

Then Chet called out again, and this time there was something to see. A long line of ghost soldiers coming through the marsh, straight for the city.

The coal hounds were up and alert, but not afraid. Behind them, under the drumming, came the small sounds of a city closing itself: doors, windows, shutters latched one after another.

“Guys. They're at the water.”

They walked out onto the river, and the fog parted around their legs as they came.

Most of the crew went below. Tauon stayed on deck to watch. Scout kept working on the ship.

Yazan climbed down, crossed the yard, put his hands up, and walked out the gate onto the empty wharf to try to parley.

The line ran as far as he could see in both directions. Not one line, several. Regiments. Hundreds became more than that as they kept coming. They marched almost perfectly in time with the drums, rifles raised, and as they reached the wharf they climbed up onto it, right up to him, and went past without a glance. Not one of them so much as looked his way. Every one of them was looking at the same point somewhere inside the city.

“Gentlemen, what are your orders? Where are you going?”

Nothing. So he fell in and walked with them.

They funneled through the streets in squad formation. Nobody broke step, and nothing distracted them. He passed out of any range that would get him back to the ship and kept going. He believes there were at least a thousand of them. All along the way, faces appeared in windows and vanished. Shutters closed. Candles went out.

They stopped at a house near the center of town. Southern, pillared, a wraparound porch, one of the well-kept ones. Thousands of dead men filled every street around it and stood in silence, leaving a clear ring of about forty feet around the house. For a couple of minutes they did nothing but stare at it.

Yazan called out into the quiet. “Keep the peace!”

The sound that came back to him from the ranks was that of the butts of their rifles slamming into the ground in unison. Whether Yazan instigated that or it was eerie timing was harder to tell.

An officer climbed the porch steps and knocked on the door. His hand did not pass through it. It was an ordinary knock, not violent, not even alarming, and given everything around it, that was the worst part. The door opened onto darkness. The officer stepped inside and the door shut behind him.

Yazan walked across the clearing. Nobody stopped him. This close he could see what they were: half decayed, grizzled, beards yellow with tobacco, pieces of some of them missing, and all of them faintly translucent. He went up the steps and raised his hand to knock, and before his knuckles touched the wood, the door opened.

The officer was standing in the doorway with his fist knotted in the back of a man's nightshirt, bringing him out of his own house.

The man was not fighting. He did not want to go and he was not going willingly, but he was not resisting either. Yazan saw terror in him, and resignation.

From somewhere inside, a woman was sobbing.

For the first time, the officer looked straight at Yazan.

“Stand aside.”

Yazan stepped back and asked him to help him understand what was happening.

“I've got orders.”

“To keep the peace?”

The officer ignored the question. He moved past Yazan and carried the man down the steps, the bulk of his weight held up by a dead hand, a step taken now and then with his own feet. The ranks opened to let them through and closed again behind them.

The house smelled of a good supper, pipe tobacco, and something more exotic. It was a home, plainly loved. On the wall hung a lithograph of a family: a wife, three young children, and behind them, standing proud, the man who had just been dragged out the door.

The woman was on her knees at the top of the stairs, trying very hard not to wake the children almost certainly sleeping in their beds with her lament.

“Tell me what he did. Tell me everything. How can I save him?”

“He took something from the new boat. And they came and got him.”

“Where is it?”

“They took it.”

“What was it?”

“It had to have been some military something. I don't know. I didn't see it.”

Yazan cast haste on himself and went after them.

The dead were already heading back the way they had come, and they filled every street in every direction. He had to wade through them. They were not solid, but they were physical enough to push aside, and not one of them moved to make room for him. He crossed and recrossed the town looking for the one living man in a crowd of a thousand dead, and it took him all the way to the wharf at the southern edge of town.

From there he saw the officer step off the wharf onto the water, holding the man, and start walking across the river holding his head under.

“Wait! He'll give back what he took! And I know Admiral Marchetti!”

At Marchetti's name the officer's head cocked. He looked back. Yazan watched him size him up and decide he was not worth stopping for.

The river is a hundred and eighty feet wide, a sheer wharf with no shallows. The man was ninety feet out and well beyond any spell Yazan had. He tried again anyway, shouting that the man would make it right, that there was no need to execute him. The officer did not look back again.

Nothing else on the water moved. A thousand dead men crossed that river without leaving a ripple. The one disturbance on its whole surface was a man in his nightshirt, thrashing, choking, coming up for air when he could.

The rest of the crew reached the wharf about then. Arkady had changed into the scrap dealer and come running at the sound of Yazan's feet in the street. They stood there and weighed it. Arkady offered to call out that he was the courier. Yazan said do it. Tauon was more cautious: they knew these dead were here to keep the peace, and he was wary of interfering in any serious way. Justice can be harsh.

“He's got kids.”

While they were still deciding, the thrashing stopped.

The officer dragged the body the rest of the way across, carried it five feet up the far bank, and dropped it. Then he went on with the regiment and left it lying there.

Tauon flew across. The man lay face down in his pajamas with no pulse and no breath. When Tauon turned him over, he knew him. He had worked at Abner's yard. He was one of the men who had been repairing the boats.

His fist was clenched shut. In the moonlight Tauon caught a glint of gold, and when he pried the fingers open he found a Cordoban captain's pin.

There was nothing to dig with, but the bank there is pocked with old craters. Tauon laid him in one, covered him with sticks and branches as best he could, and prayed over him: the profit of death, that justice is sometimes harsh, and that you do not strike a deal you cannot make good on.

Something heard him. It always does. This time the answer reached him as if through a veil, filtered through something he did not know and that felt dirty.

Arkady went back to the ship to start writing new orders. Yazan and Tauon went to the house to tell the woman.

She was on a bench on the porch, rocking. Beside her, one leg crossed over the other, was Kernel Nichols in a white smoking jacket, white slacks and loafers. He was not holding her and was not trying to. He was simply there with her. When he saw them coming, his face was full of a deep sadness and showed no surprise at all. He had done this before.

“I tried to save him, but I was too late.”

“He was gone the moment that he took that trinket.”

Tauon asked whether it was the theft or the thing itself.

“It was the affiliation of the item.”

Then Nichols told them what he knows, which he admits is not much.

“My understanding, which is limited at best, as I've only been here for the last twenty five years. At some point in the war there was a truce. That truce was to be ratified. But the messenger never returned. Those boys rotted out in those swamps waiting for that message to come.”

There is an old farmhouse about five miles south of town. The legend says that is where the deal was struck. Nobody from Savannah goes out there. It is deep in their territory.

“They come whenever you choose a side. And they react harshly to what they call belligerence. Whatever orders they were given before they died have been twisted and misshapen into something beyond reasonable. There is no reasoning with these things.”

Tauon asked whether war would come to Savannah if the dead were dismissed.

“Almost certainly.”

Whether that would be better than this.

“That is the million gold question. One to which I have not found an answer.”

Tauon gave him the trade port idea: a safe haven, open to anyone willing to keep the peace.

“Is it safe? Because there's a whole bay of shot down ships that would argue otherwise.” And then: “What about those who don't even know? What about the veterans who wear their colors just out of pride? Those who just happen to have a piece of cargo with Amazonian insignia on it?”

He knew they had struck their colors before they came in, and he allowed that it might mean something. That the party might be something special.

Tauon said Savannah could be the place where both sides finally come to strike a ceasefire. Yazan said Savannah could go down in history as the place where the war ended.

“Wouldn't that be something.”

Through all of this the woman was coming apart beside them, and they had been talking over her.

Yazan told her he was sorry he had not gotten there in time. She looked up, tried to say something, and broke down. Nichols told him there was nothing he could have done. The man sealed his fate the moment he took that pin.

“I don't know if that's true. I think maybe I just didn't try hard enough.”

Yazan asked her whether she had what she needed to take care of her family. She clearly had not even thought of it yet, and the question broke her further. Nichols saw it land.

“Joanna, honey. Let's go inside and fix you a cup of tea. And let's try not to wake the kids.”

At the door he turned back to them. “It would be hard for her, if that's what you're asking.”

His name was Joseph and he had been the breadwinner. The children are Miles, seven, Amy, eleven, and Daniel, fifteen. They were much younger than that in the lithograph Yazan had seen on the wall.

“The most likely ending to this one is they'll be just like all the rest. These children will become my wards, and Joanna will go to work.”

The crew gave him a hundred gold for her. He pocketed it and promised she would get everything she needed, and said their generosity would be repaid however he could manage it. Then he looked at his watch. It was about one in the morning. He told them he had a long night ahead of him, and that the morning would be a better time to discuss alternatives.

When they got back, they agreed it was the item and not the theft. And since they were the ones who brought that ship to Savannah, maybe they should burn it.

Scout worked through the night and had the Boats N Hoes structurally whole by morning. She looks like she was fixed in a junkyard but she flies. The laboratory has been cleared of what was destroyed and now functions after a fashion, with questionable results.

At nine in the morning Yazan and Tauon took the sloop south. Arkady stayed aboard to work on a white and gold courier's uniform and the orders to go with it. Scout stayed to mount the hardpoint with Benny. Chet stayed with the ship. “Ghost farmhouses don't really appeal to me very much at all.”

Before they left they went over the sloop once more for anything with a nation on it. In several places someone had already pried the insignia off. Joseph, the day before.

The fog was cold and wet, with visibility to about five hundred feet. They flew low, and every so often the marsh below showed them a ghost platoon gathered around a spectral fire, eating breakfast.

They had no idea which farmhouse to look for, so they set down beside a field that was still being worked. Tauon flew down in his boots to a boy of about twelve, shirtless in a straw hat, who had stopped working the moment the sloop dropped out of the fog.

“Gee golly, mister, what can I help you with?”

Tauon told him they were looking for the house where the truce was struck. The boy said that was just a fairy tale. Everybody knows about the ghosts, and you are supposed to leave them be and mind your own. He could not stop looking at Tauon's flying boots.

“That's some fancy boots, sir. How's a kid gonna get a pair of boots like that?”

“First you gotta leave this plantation and go adventure the world.”

“Well, daddy says I'm probably gonna die here.”

Tauon flew back up to the sloop and went through the dead Cordobans' stripped uniforms for the shiniest pair of boots aboard. He brought down a pair of polished black military boots. The boy was wearing straw sandals.

“These keep the mud off your feet, boy.”

“Think I can fly?”

“Not these. But one day.”

“Hot damn. Thank you, sir.” Then, quietly: “You dint here it from me but my daddy says never to go past the O'Neill farm. Three miles down the road. You'll know it cause every place out there is abandoned except the O'Neill's.”

Smirking, “I don't know how I'm gonna explain where I got these boots from. But damn if I ain't gonna keep them.”

They followed the road past the O'Neill farm. The tilled ground ran on another five hundred yards past the farmhouse and stopped abruptly. Then a strip of forest. Then a battlefield.

It was not like the others. This one was not overgrown. The dirt was turned and looked fresh. The air smelled of sulfur and black powder, and they felt in the backs of their throats that metallic tinge that comes with a great deal of shardisite magic in one place. Everything had a faint pearlescent sheen, as if they were looking at a picture of the thing rather than the thing. All the way out they had seen deer, a shard shrew, crows. Out here, nothing alive at all.

The house in the middle of it was weathered with time, but untouched by war.

Two stories. Some windows broken. Abandoned, but nothing falling down. Nothing came out to meet them and nothing reacted when they landed.

Tauon knocked, and the sound ran through the entire house. They could feel the dust they had disturbed settle. It is not exactly sacred ground. It has been undisturbed for a very long time, and they could feel their own presence cutting through it. The door was not locked.

The fog let in only a dim, even light. The light they brought in seemed to physically push the dark back.

A white oak fills the middle of the entry hall. It was once a houseplant; its broken pot lies around the base. It has grown up through the room since then, swollen and twisted, with tumorous growths where no tree should have them. It has shed all its bark. Carved into the bare wood are thousands of characters. Most are initials. Some are full names. Many are only marks, the kind Tauon has seen a thousand times on contracts, made by men who could not write. Thousands of names. Each carving weeps from the low end of its line.

To the left is a library, its books mostly rotted past reading. Almanacs, homesteading manuals, and one set of the Encyclopedia Britannica that might hold together if opened carefully. Several writing desks. Brass-nibbed quills, ink long since dried away, and stacks of very old parchment. When Yazan drew a quill across a sheet he could feel impressions in the paper beneath.

They rubbed soot from the wicks of old candles across the parchment and words came up.

That hostilities between the forces under our commands cease from this hour.

That the City of Savannah and the marsh country within its earthworks be held neutral, belonging to neither Nation, and open to the passage of all persons not under arms.

That the Grey Companies and the Blue Marines shall together bar the entrance of any army, of whatever Nation, and keep the peace within, until this Instrument be answered.

That this Instrument be carried by neutral hand to Admiral Marchetti, commanding His Majesty's forces in the southern theater, and to the Chancellor-General of the Republic, for their ratification.

That the Garrison hold the line until the courier returns.

Signed by a brigadier-general and a commodore. Witnessed by an ensign of a neutral packet service. W. Halloway.

This was not the instrument itself, only its impression in the sheets beneath it. But the dead in the swamp are doing exactly what it says.

The dining room is mostly taken over by the oak's branches. The table is laid for a dozen, with no trace of food. This was never a military building. It was a working farm, comfortable but not rich, and a family lived here.

Upstairs are four bedrooms. In them they found abandoned soldiers' gear rotting where it was left: a pack, a pair of boots. On the bed in the master bedroom lay a captain's uniform, about a hundred and sixty years old. Before it rotted, someone had torn off every mark of rank and every insignia. They folded it carefully and took it.

The storm cellar is on the east side of the house. When they opened the door, pent-up energy rushed out past them, a whoosh rather than a blast, and the rotted hinge gave way. Metal on the tongue. Their own magic felt like it was slipping out of phase with them.

Seven steps down to brick and earth. The oak's roots come down through the ceiling and have broken into the foundations. Beneath the tree, behind a curtain of roots, something green was pulsing slowly.

Tauon reached in to move the roots aside. They wrapped around his arm and drove thorns into it, and they were deliberate about it. Then they began, slowly, to lift him off the floor. The rest of the cellar came alive, thrashing and grabbing at anything within reach, and wherever the roots found the brick pillars they ground into them.

Yazan lit the flametongue and cut him down with a single stroke.

Tauon tried lesser restoration on the tree. He knew he had cast it. He could not tell whether it had done anything, and it did nothing at all.

So Yazan cut a path. Wide sweeping arcs with the burning blade, not aimed at anything in particular, while Tauon threw sacred flame at whatever reached for them. When it was over, a clear path four or five feet wide ran between the writhing stumps to a chest of rotted wood and brass. Its lid was intact. Green light came through every gap, and something was seeping out of the bottom of it. The roots had grown into that seepage, not into the thing itself.

The lid was locked. When they forced it, the whole chest fell apart.

Inside was a globe of brass and glass about the size of a child's ball, heavy and corroded and leaking, and glowing green.

Tauon lifted it in his bare hands, careful not to touch the fluid.

Yazan watched him lock up. His eyes rolled back in his head and his jaw fell slack, and he stayed like that for thirty seconds.

What Tauon saw: the cellar running backward. Roots drawing up into the ceiling, earth and brick falling back into place, until it was a working root cellar again, with baskets and jars of preserves. Yazan was gone. And down the steps came a captain of the Amazonian Navy carrying the brass globe. He shut the cellar door behind him, sealed the globe in the chest, and walked straight through Tauon on his way out. Then everything ran forward again.

To Tauon it had felt like five or ten minutes. In the cellar it had been half a minute. He was holding the globe and it was dripping.

They carried it out into the light, and Tauon cast mending on the corroded brass.

The thing threw the spell back at him with the same intent he had put into it, and he was a child again.

He knew the memory well. He was living on the street and had been entrusted with a crate of apples to deliver. It was his first big job, enough money to keep him fed for a long time. The crate gave way in the street. He had been practicing mending for months under the eye of the bard who taught him and had never once made it work. That day, for the first time, it worked. The crate came back together almost perfectly. That was the memory.

This time the apples rolled into the street and people trod on them. He reached for one and someone kicked it away. He cast mending on the crate, and a few slivers drew together, and then the whole thing fell apart again. He was a little boy, crying, looking up for someone to help him gather his apples, and everyone around him was pointing and laughing.

Then he was back, and the spell had worked. The corrosion ate itself down to pocked metal, the brass reshaped itself to close the gaps, and the leaking stopped. A tear ran down his face. The old memory was already slipping away from him, and the new one was settling in where it had been.

Yazan identified it. It took him ten minutes. When the spell touched the globe, the globe looked back. Every cell of him felt weighed and measured.

It took him back to Bethel, to his testing for the cleansings and for guiding people through the storms. He had failed that test. He had not kept his intent under control, and instead of cleansing the thing he was sent to cleanse, he made it worse and multiplied it, and that failure is where his mirror image comes from. His instructor stepped in. He walked away whole. That was what his memory recalled in that moment.

In this new twisted recollection, he lost track of one of the mirrors of what he was fighting, and it cut him across the face.

Tauon watched the scar form on his friend's face in real time. Not a wound. A scar, already healed. Yazan raised his hand and felt the ridge of it. The pain came back as vividly as if it had happened yesterday, and the memory of walking away unhurt was gone.

The spell had worked though. The globe is a shard dynamo, a containment vessel for shardisite whose purpose is locomotion. It turns raw intention of a pilot into direct movement of whatever it is harnessed to, airships, sea vessels and land vehicles. It has been out of use for nearly a century because it is unstable and has effects nobody intended. Originally designed to be an assembly line produced magical component to warships, it was produced by one of the richer nations to profit off the Foreverwar. The real price of its scaled production being its unstable containment. As it is it almost certainly would not work, but there is a real stone of shardisite inside it. The leaking fluid was the crude buffer that contained and channeled its power.

Even as Yazan held onto what he had just learned, his original memory of his cleansing trial faded, like a dream right after waking, soon to be lost forever. And when Tauon set the dynamo down in the sloop's hold, they both felt the last vestiges of their original memories reduce to oblivion.

Savannah was the only place for miles with any sun on it. Until they flew back into it they had not noticed how dark everything else had been.

Scout's hardpoint did not go well at first. On the first attempt he cut the hole too big and spent three hours undoing the damage before he could begin again. On the second, an earlier repair gave way under the work. In between he went around the other yards looking at old military hulls with extra hardpoints added, and learned that the proper way is to build them into the ship in the first place. On the third attempt it held. It is a little ugly, the failed attempts show, and it is entirely serviceable. The small cannon goes on it.

Benny was ecstatic. The whole yard was in a good mood. After the morning they had had, it was hard to take.

Afterward Scout had Benny take him around to the other yards to find a buyer for the Cordoban sloop. Six people looked her over. One told him to get that hell out of there. Two said they were interested and would follow up.

Tauon asked Benny's father, Abner Rusk, for a lockbox. Abner didn't have one, but he had a thin metal crate, and considering everything the crew had done, he told them to take it free of charge. They packed the dynamo in it with cloth and carried it aboard the Boats N Hoes.

Scout knew what it was the moment he saw it. His maker had worked with devices like it. He felt it the way a child recognizes something in his father's workshop. He told the party that shard dynamos are crude, cheap, and simple to build. Unskilled hands can make them, though not keep them running. The fluid is a sort of oil full of a semi-magical particulate, made to dampen shardisite and channel it, but that it does the job about as well as a hammer drives a screw. The globe is meant to sit in a particular coupling and come out only for maintenance and repair. Two nations built them: Atlantis and Cascadia, the two that have supplied the Foreverwar for centuries. Neither has made one in over a hundred years. The thing is a relic.

What sits inside is a stone of shardisite. Big enough to fit in the palm of your hand. Enough to drive a galleon. In a world where most of the shardisite has been dug out long ago, it is worth anywhere from five to twenty-five thousand gold, and could be far more if the dynamo could be made to run again. There is no safe way to get the stone out without specialized tools and talent, and certainly no one in Savannah has access to either.

Arkady met them in the laboratory wearing a half-finished uniform in white and gold. He has spent the day rehearsing his part with an intensity that impressed even himself, muttering it to himself over and over. Chet spent most of the day muttering that these employers are crazy, though he had been listening to Arkady the whole time and some of what he was practicing actually seemed like it had merit.

Yazan showed Arkady the rubbing of The Hermitage Accord taken from the farmhouse.

Arkady's forgery had been close. It had also been wrong in ways that now mattered. The crest he had drawn was an Amazonian admiral's anchor, and the dead are not waiting for an Amazonian admiral. They are waiting for a neutral courier, under the seal of a Quebecois packet service, coming back with the document ratified by both sides. The Republic's seal is a lion and the Kingdom's is an anaconda. Nobody in the room knows who the Chancellor-General was. Nobody knows what year the dead believe it is.

Arkady walked to the western edge of town having incorporated all of this new information into his plan. He found a dark alcove where nobody was watching, and changed into the white and gold uniform of a peacekeeping force he knows doesn't yet exist.