Chapter 89: The Foundry's Leash

The convoy moved at first light, and Osei counted it out of the gate.

She stood on the road inside the wall with her book shut and her rifle across her back, and as each truck went through the gap where twenty stanchions had once gone dark she said its number aloud. The two aid trucks. The council's truck, with its riflemen on the tailgate and the man from the cot sitting between them in a plain coat with his hands on his knees, and the liaison beside him with a form sheet on hers. Renner's three from the yard, roped and sheeted. Bram's section had the gate, and Bram stood at its post with the heavy rifle at his side and his hand on the timber, holding it back.

Rook stood at the road's edge with the kit on his shoulder and the rifle slung. He had sat the night on the wall with the section, with the kit on the gatehouse bench below him, and had shouldered it at first light without being told to.

Third Squad was staying. Marrow held the valley with the company until Corps sent what Corps sent, and Third Squad were his witnesses, and Ferro's, and would go back to the Ninth Front when Corps had read every page. Osei had told them at the tent row at dawn in the voice she used for orders. Then she had looked at the mask, and at the kit on its shoulder, and had said nothing about either.

The last of Renner's trucks went through.

"Six," Osei said, to the road. Then she opened the book, and wrote, and turned it so he could read it before she closed it.

One of six out of the valley on his feet. Six stands. I've written why, and I'll sign it, and Corps can read it.

"That's the count," she said. "I'm not changing the number because one of it is walking."

* * *

Hollis came along the road from the hall with his forearms wrapped to the elbow and his rifle slung on the shoulder that could take it, and stopped in front of the mask, and held out his hand. Palm up, open, the wrapping ending at the wrist.

"I can't feel much in it," he said. "Write it anyway."

Rook reversed the stylus and wrote into the palm, slowly, with the burned hand: R. O. O. K.

Hollis's fingers closed. "Four letters. I felt three." He did not open the hand. "I said at a farewell once I'd settle for the bird staying carried. Is it."

Kit pocket, he wrote. With a page and a letter.

"Then that's settled." He shouldered past, and stopped, and said to the road, "Sten would've walked. He'd have said the boots fit," and went on to the wall.

Wren had the relay on her knee at the gatehouse step, one-armed, and she did not get up. "A quarter of it's mine," she said. "I didn't consent and I'm keeping it anyway. Watch everything. Miss little. That's the instruction."

Ilsen stood at the gate's timber with his whetstone in his hand and nothing to sharpen. "The square," he said. "The children with the painted faces. If you're going past it, tell whoever's there that a man's still saving a remark, and he'll be along to make it when the war's finished with him." He looked at the mask. "It's a fair remark. It'll keep."

Cade said no word. He put a hand on the strap, the shoulder under it, and this time it stayed a moment longer, and then it was gone, and so was Cade, back along the road toward the hall where a cot stood with its strap cut off and nobody on it.

* * *

Bram had the gate.

He stood at the post with his hand on the timber and did not swing it wider, and looked at the mask squarely.

"The major came down to the gate in the night," he said. "Stood in the gatehouse door a minute with your kit on the bench and you on the wall, and went back up. I've seen nothing twice now." He shifted the rifle. "I've stood at three doors of yours. One I had a rifle up at. One I held the top of. This one I'm holding open." He set it down as a report. "It's still a debt."

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It's still a debt. Rook wrote it and turned it. Keep it. It's the only thing of mine anybody's kept honestly.

Bram read that. His jaw did the thing it did.

"Voss said the truck's still running," he said. "I said I wouldn't tell you. Consider that I haven't, again." He took his hand off the timber. "Go on. The section's got the gate."

Rook went out through it.

The road ran south from the gate past the picket's two sandbagged positions, empty now, the fire lane between them cut with more optimism than saw, and on down the corridor's bend to where the camp's berms showed a mile off with the convoy's dust already settling over them. He walked it at the pace the leg allowed. Behind him the gate stayed open. The valley was Meridian's now, and a Meridian gate on a Meridian road stood open in daylight, and nobody closed it after him.

* * *

The camp had the convoy in its motor pool with the Corps Intelligence escort mounting up along it, and the command tent had its flap tied back and one person in it.

Renner stood at the map table with the valley's survey pinned flat under its four stones and a pencil in her hand, and she was looking at the map when he came in, and she kept looking at it.

He set the kit on the bench.

The tracking chit came out of the kit's inner pocket, where it had ridden since a Director's desk — Core-keyed, no bigger than a coin, reporting to an office two provinces south at intervals he had never been told. He set it on the survey's edge, under the nearest stone.

Then he unclipped the charge.

It came off the strap by his own hand, as it had gone on in this tent on the first day with a colonel watching. Matte grey, the size of a spent shell casing, the single recessed contact on one face. Keyed to a man in a valley, under a countersignature by relay, under a clause a duty officer had withdrawn in one line. It had fired once and taken hold of nothing. He set it beside the chit under the stone, contact upward, so that whoever lifted the stone would see which face it was.

Renner's pencil moved on the map. She did not look up.

He unbuckled the kit's outer pocket to put the stylus away, and his burned fingers went in past the bird and the page and the letter and Nell's pencils and found a thing that had not been there when he set the kit down on a gatehouse bench: a lanyard, worn soft, and on the end of it a brass compass with a scratched glass.

He took it out and held it in his palm.

It read two degrees west of true. Its owner had known that, and had said so at a rest halt on a night march, and had walked into a ford somebody else had chosen and stopped there. It had ridden in a breast pocket since, through a board and a corridor and a valley, and had lain on a rail once where a Class II asset could see it, and had been put back in the pocket without a word.

Renner's pencil stopped. It did not lift.

"There's a mile-post at the corridor's first bend south of here," she said, to the map. "Dominion post, the insignia chiselled off, a Meridian number painted over the scar. The survey has it wrong by forty yards. I've been meaning to correct it." The pencil moved again. "That's the last thing on this table I'm going to say to anyone today."

He clipped the lanyard to the strap where the charge had been, over the sternum, and put the compass inside his coat, and shouldered the kit.

She was looking at the map when he went out under the tied-back flap.

* * *

The gate corporal was the one who had read the seal on the first day, and the two names under it.

There was no seal now. Rook unclipped the slate and wrote on it, and held it out, and the corporal read it, and his attention came up to the mask for a moment as it had the first time.

Rook.

"That's not on my list," the corporal said.

No, he wrote.

The corporal looked at the slate, and at the mask, and at the kit with the bird's shape showing in its pocket and no grey thing on the strap, and at the road south, which was empty, and Rook watched him decide against remarking on any of it.

"Then it isn't," the corporal said, and stepped back from the gate.

He walked out through it.

* * *

The corridor ran south as it had run north the day a gate corporal read two names off a seal: a graded strip of packed stone with mile-posts at intervals, some new, some Dominion posts with the insignia chiselled off and a Meridian number painted over the scar, and the country either side of it planted in rows by people who had meant to farm here and then had stopped. The convoy's dust had gone on ahead of him and settled, and the road was his.

He walked, and found after the first quarter-mile that the pace was a pace, and that nobody had set it.

The first bend came up where the survey said it would, near enough. The mile-post stood at it: a Dominion post, the scar where the insignia had been, a Meridian number painted over the scar in a clerk's careful hand. He stopped beside it and took the compass out and held it flat in his burned palm with the lanyard over his wrist, and let the needle settle.

Two degrees west of true. He knew its error, which was more than he could say for the road.

He put the compass away, inside the coat, over the place where the cold sat with a room in it, and walked on past the post.