Chapter 83: The Rest of the Battle

The medic had the man on his side with a wet cloth over his mouth, and Wren, on her knees beside Rook with the relay set down, got his coat back over his shoulders one-handed, scorched hem and all, and left it there.

"He'll get to your hands when he's done with the one who has lungs," she said. "Both of them, and your neck under the hook. Don't touch anything."

Then the guns outside changed.

He had listened to those guns and knew their manners: short bursts, laid and lifted together, one decision in forty rifles. Now a gun on the road fired a burst that went on too long and stopped mid-belt. Another fired at the dark. A voice outside the east door called a word in the Dominion tongue, and called it again, and was not answered.

At the south door the platoon lieutenant said, "Colonel," in a different register from the one he'd used all night.

"I hear it." Marrow had turned back from the south door. He stopped where Rook knelt, and looked at the man on the floor, and then at the mask. "He's out. They've lost him." He said it as a finding.

Wren had the set in her lap again. The needle that had rested every night of this front below the lowest mark had come up off the pin and stood in the marked bands like any relay's needle, wandering, and the glass ring around it was lit the ordinary dull glow of every set in the camp.

"It's just a relay, sir," she said. "It's a relay again."

* * *

Rook took up the thread to the man on the floor and found the thread and nothing at the end of it — the mind that had answered on it every time not answering, as a room does not answer when the person in it is asleep. He let it lie.

He could feel the rest. He had felt it from a corporal's stool, lying across the valley like a rope across a floor. It lay there now with no hand on it. Forty threads, fifty, each running from a man outside these walls to a mind on this floor that was not taking them up tonight. Every one of those men was standing behind a wall or in a doorway alone in his own eyes for the first time since he had said yes.

Marrow was watching the mask.

"You told me a rope isn't a voice. I've accepted that. He doesn't speak through it; he sees, and forty men moved by what he saw, and they're out there now with nobody seeing." He looked down at the man on the floor. "You've a channel to him. You've had your hand on that rope once already, on a bench, uninvited; it's on Osei's page. Take it up. Look through it — every man behind those walls, where he stands, which way his rifle points, whether he's decided to run. I'd have the valley on one sheet, and a quarter of the dead I'll take otherwise, theirs and mine. That's the condition tonight. Use what he built, while he isn't."

Osei's pen had stopped.

Rook held out his left hand for the slate, and she gave it to him.

No, he wrote, and turned it up, and then wrote under it in the leaning letters.

I wouldn't be one more hand on that rope. It isn't a thing lying on a floor for whoever wants it. It's forty men who each said yes once — to him. I'd be doing to every one of them what I did to a medic at a tailgate, forty times, on purpose, with a colonel watching and calling it a sheet.

Marrow read it through.

"Then it's rifles." He turned toward the doors. "Lieutenants. Both platoons out, in fours, as you came in. South platoon the buildings west of the road; east platoon the road and the east side. Nobody goes north of this hall. The annex end is fire, and the party on it can burn with it or run. Prisoners if they put a rifle down, not lowered. Move. Osei, the north end's yours." He looked back once at the man on the floor. "Cade. That man doesn't stand up. If he wakes and turns his hands over, you tell me before he's finished turning them."

"Sir," Cade said, and went to stand over the cot the medic had dragged the man against, with his rifle in the crook of his arm, and did not look at the mask.

* * *

The platoons went out as they had come in, in fours, at a run, into a road where the guns were still firing and had stopped meaning anything. Rook went out behind the last four with the rifle slung on his back, and stood in the door's shadow, and let the Sight go where his attention went.

It went to the men in the road.

They had been one thing on a slope, at a hut, at a gate, because the man who saw through them saw the whole road at once and each of them saw only his part and trusted the rest. Now the road was full of men who saw only their part. One knelt behind a truck's wheel with a rifle up and no target, turning his head from side to side. Two had backed into a doorway and stood shoulder to shoulder firing at the hall's east door in bursts that did not lift together. One was walking up the middle of the road toward the far gate, with his rifle hanging from one hand by its sling.

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And off every face it touched, the Sight gave him what it had given him off a man against a truck wheel: a fear that was not of Rook, and not of the company's guns.

The east platoon was firing along the road at the doorway with the two men in it, and one of the two was hit and went down against the frame, and the other kept firing, alone, at a hall.

Rook walked out into the road.

He unslung the rifle and set it against the hall's wall, and walked out from the door's shadow into the light of the ward line and the burning annex, in a pale mask with a single hook, with his left hand open at his side and his right held against his chest, into the lane between the hall and the doorway where a man stood firing.

"Hold — hold your fire, east — that's the asset in the lane, hold —" The lieutenant's voice went up the road and the platoon's rifles stopped, because the colonel had told them before they came through a gate which thing in this valley they did not fire past.

The road went quiet, but for the fire.

The man in the doorway had a rifle on him. The Sight gave Rook a man who had been told since the wall that this was the thing on the ground he did not shoot, and who had never until tonight had to hold that instruction alone in his own head.

He kept walking.

He walked at the pace the leg allowed, which was slow, and every rifle on the road that had been pointed at a hall was pointed at a mask, and behind him a company's rifles were pointed past him and silent. He had stood as bait on a picket three times and every time somebody else had decided that he would. He was standing in it now because he had walked into it.

The man in the doorway lowered the rifle an inch, and raised it, and Rook watched him decide.

He fired.

The round went past Rook's shoulder close enough that he felt the shape of it, and from the hall's south door a rifle spoke once. Ilsen's; he knew the man's rhythm from a crest. The man in the doorway sat down on the step and put a hand to his side and looked at it.

Nobody else fired.

The man behind the truck's wheel looked at the mask for a long moment over his sights, and Rook watched him find, alone, the thing forty men had held between them since the wall, and then he put his rifle flat on the ground in front of him, both hands off it, and put his hands on his head. The one walking north stopped, and let the rifle hang further, and it slid off his shoulder into the dust. In the doorways along the road's east side, one after another, in no order, because there was no order any more to be in, men who had held a valley on a rope put down the rifles they had never been meant to use on him and stood there with their hands empty.

Some ran north, toward the far gate, four or five, their boots on the stone and then off it. The lieutenant let them; he had fours moving into doorways and men coming out of them with hands on their heads, and no rifles to spare for the ones who had chosen the dark.

Rook stood in the middle of the road, and the leg answered late, and he let it.

* * *

The man who had been against the truck wheel was against the hall's west wall, at its north corner.

Rook found him there when the road had gone to prisoners and counting: back to the stone a few yards from the annex's burning corner, a squat grey cell in his lap with his hands around it, the pale glow of it lying up across his face. The rest of the party had gone north into the dark. This one had sat down.

He looked up at the mask when Rook stopped in front of him. He had a Meridian word for what he wanted to say, and used it.

"Quiet."

Rook let the Sight sit on him.

"It's gone quiet." The careful Meridian the courier had used, the same vowels. "Every morning since I came inside the wall he'd take us up, and you don't hear it, you aren't alone in it. Then the annex, and I'm walking with a cell in my hands toward a fire, and I can feel him go." He looked at the cell. "I said yes to him the first week. I didn't know what I was saying yes to."

Nobody does, Rook thought, and did not write it.

A private took the cell out of the man's lap, carefully, and the man let him, and put his hands on his head without being told.

* * *

The hall, when he came back into it, had a lamp lit at the west row's end and the medic sitting back on his heels.

The man on the floor was awake. He lay on his side against the cot frame with a wet cloth across his mouth and his eyes open, streaming still, and his hands on the floor in front of him, turned down. Cade stood over him. Osei stood at the cot's foot with her book open, and Hollis sat against the next frame with his coat gone and his forearms wrapped, taking each breath as if he had decided on it in advance.

Rook stood at the man's feet.

The hands on the floor turned over slowly, the fingers loose, and Cade's rifle came out of the crook of his arm, and Osei said, "Cade," once, level, and Cade stopped with the rifle half raised and watched the hands.

They lay there, open.

«I haven't taken it up.» The quiet voice came down the thread with the smoke gone out of it and something new in its place. «I can feel where it lies. I've left it.»

«I know. It's quiet out there. One of them told me.»

«Yes.» A pause, and it was the first the man had given him that was not a measured beat. «You asked me to walk.»

«You walked.»

«I've been trying to remember the last thing anyone asked me before you. A lieutenant asked my name. Before that I can't find one. It was all this is what happens.» The streaming eyes came up off the floor and found the mask, and stayed. «I'm going to lie here with my hands like this until somebody tells me what happens. Write that down for the lieutenant, in your words, since she can't hear me.»

Rook held out the burned hand for the slate, and Osei put it in the hand, and he wrote, and turned it to her.

He's awake. He has not taken the band up, and says so, and I can feel that he hasn't. He wants it written that he's lying with his hands open until somebody tells him what happens. He says it's the first thing he's ever asked for.

Osei read it, and wrote under it for longer than his three lines took, and when she had finished she said to the man on the floor, without looking up from the page, "It's written. What happens is a colonel decides. I'll be standing here when he does."

Marrow came in through the south door with the east lieutenant and the first of the prisoners' count, and stopped inside it, and looked down the length of the hall at the lamp, and the rifle in Cade's hands, and the two hands open on the floor.