Ember Legion

By day nobody worked the wall. They worked its root instead.

The rod man and four helpers turned over every hand of the waterline along the pier’s back face. The rod went along the stone seams one by one; wherever a seam would take a bug, they marked it, and a helper followed with sandbags and wire—bagged, then wired across. The wiring had rules to it: wire bites where the stone is wet; ten wraps on dry stone and one soak loosens them all. By late afternoon the pier’s back waterline was down to one opening—half a body wide, running straight in, sandbag stacks chest-high on both sides, bags laid mouth-in, staggered three courses. It looked like the same dark run the bugs had always used. It wasn’t.

The Ember Guard’s twelve split into hides. The hides weren’t on the pier—they were in the grass: the wild tufts along both faces of the pier and the stone piles at the grating’s two ends. Four spots, three men to a spot. A hide was wherever a man pressed in and pulled the grass back over himself—a slit left in the roots for the muzzle, and from the path by day, one more patch of wild grass.

Xiao Mao had come out with the cart hauling matting and left a hand punch behind: one mark on the stone at every hide, same work as the punch marks on the gun. Shifts changed, the marks didn’t—who squatted where, you found by touch in the dark.

Lei Changgeng came to see it. He crouched at the mouth of the dark run a long time, stood, and raised one condition: ”Nobody touches the sandbags on the pier.”

”Your sandbags,” Chen Jin said. ”My grass.”

Lei Changgeng crouched again, looked down the half-body-wide road. ”They’ll really use it?”

”The one last time used it.” Chen Jin slapped the sandbag stack inside the run. ”Good memory. A road it remembers, it walks again.”

”And you want it dead on that road?”

”I want it walking to the end.” Chen Jin said. ”In the mines we drove badgers—never chased them. Block the back mouth, leave the front open, and it walks itself forward. What’s ahead of it, it doesn’t know.”

Lei Changgeng watched him a while, said nothing. Took two steps, turned back: ”The rifle line?”

”The line stays as is. They ride the surface at your grating, you shoot them same as ever.” Chen Jin said. ”Shoot hard. Last time it sent three to draw your fire, and the draw worked. A trick that worked once gets tried again.”

Lei Changgeng nodded, then: ”And if one turns back halfway and digs at the stacks?”

”Let it dig. The stacks are thick—it can dig a while.” Chen Jin said. ”Digging carries sound. When the hides hear it, they’ll know—one’s in.”

Full dark, the men went down into the hides. One rifle and one rod each, muzzles down, no lamps—that was the rule. On the pier the torches burned as always, laying the mouth of the dark run out bright.

A hide is not a wall post. On a wall you can shift your feet, lean on the parapet, doze in turns; in a hide you are nailed into the dirt—legs going numb, and all you can do is move your weight, not make a sound. Past midnight the dew came down, sliding off the grass blades into collars. When a cough built up, a man buried his face in the crook of his arm and sweated it out. A finger’s width off the trigger—Lei Changgeng set that before they went in: at night everything looks like a bug, and a soft finger puts a round into your own man.

Chen Jin’s own hide sat at the end of the run—a pocket walled in by sandbag stacks, and squatting in it put the stack rim overhead. If the bugs came, the first nose down that road met his knife.

Past midnight, the surface moved.

Three again, riding it toward the grating. Lei Changgeng’s rifle line was waiting—no holding back this time, six rifles in one volley, and not one of the three got a foreclaw onto the grating’s crown; all of them went back into the water. The gunfire ran as thick as the night on the road, firelight over the pier and the water both. Overhead, Lei Changgeng was bawling for a reload—that shout was aimed down the dark run too.

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At the mouth of the run, below the waterline, three more came up quiet.

They went around the torchlight, up the pier’s back face over the stones, and into the half-body-wide opening—then down the road fast, shell scraping sandbag, a dry rasp on both sides, the smell of wet earth and acid coming low along the ground. The first one reached the end of the road, found no way forward, and slowed—and when it slowed, the rasp stopped, and the run went quiet.

In that one breath of slowing, the back mouth shut.

Two helpers shoved the ready sandbag stack across the entrance, and the road in was sealed. Three bugs in the dark run: no retreat, black ahead, sandbags on both sides.

Only then did the man at the end of the run move. Chen Jin met the first head-on—the knife went in along the seam, came out, and he stepped aside. The second panicked and went up the stack; two foreclaws had just hooked the rim when Chen Jin’s knife came down from on top of it—it had walked itself onto the blade. The third swung to hunt for a gap and slid along the ground past Da Liu’s hide—Da Liu’s rod went sideways into its forelimb joint, one pry, over it went. It kicked all four; Da Liu held the rod two-handed and waited for the kicks to spend themselves, then put it in along the joint seam. Done.

Not one shot, start to finish. On the pier the rifle line faced the water the whole time, and nobody on it knew the hides had taken three.

On the high slope, the thing stood up. This time it stood long—torches couldn’t reach it; just a shape blacker than the night, fixed on the east sluice. In the hides nobody stirred; men skipped even the shift of weight—everybody listening its way. It stood the better part of a meal, then went down. No howl.

The count came before first light. Surface riders: three, three husks floating back, waterlogged, two men to carry one. Dark run: three, all accounted for, none gone. Garrison untouched. Ember Guard untouched.

Lei Changgeng called the roll. He finished one pass, closed the roster, waited two breaths, opened it and ran the names again from the top. The second pass went fast and never stopped—no new names to take. Only when it was done did the roster go back inside his coat.

[Night tally: Hound-class x2]

[Embers: 1335]

One thousand three hundred thirty-five—seven hundred sixty-five short of the rifle. Six bugs dead tonight; the panel took two, both Chen Jin’s own kills. Da Liu’s didn’t count. Chen Jin closed the panel. This was the crookedness he’d finally put a hand on: his kills went on his line; other men’s kills went nowhere. And even his two—one had come to him only because somebody else’s hide had held it first. The ledger was looking less like a ledger and more like the scale at the mine mouth: the baskets kept getting heavier, and the reading still belonged to the same few men.

He put the thought away and crouched down with Lei Changgeng to go over the drill.

”Should’ve been done this way from the start,” he said. The words were out before he heard them—done this way, bought with that boy’s life. ”Should’ve” meant the boy had died for nothing.

Lei Changgeng didn’t answer. He walked two steps to the run, crouched, turned one of the husks over and checked the seams, then squared off a course of the sandbag stack.

The second night, no bugs. The surface lay quiet.

The third night, still nothing. The dark run sat empty, the dew on the sandbag stacks drying down and falling fresh. Talk started on the pier—everything under the sky: the bugs had learned and gone around; the thing on the slope was holding something big back. Over at the garrison, men had begun asking what the dark run actually was—the ones who’d laughed at the Ember Guard for squatting in grass now drifted past and asked, easy, how it worked.

Chen Jin didn’t join the talk. In the mines, a badger blocked once wouldn’t touch the old road for three nights—not gone, just testing new ground outside. No howl meant it was keeping notes.

At dusk Lei Changgeng came over with a note. Not his squad’s—the hand sloppier than his, one corner gone gray with water. It had come from the west wall: out of the council one hand, into the east sluice another, two squads of passing before it got here.

”West wall. Night before last, they lost two.” Lei Changgeng read it out and folded it. ”They’re still running the old way. Rifle line square on the front, bugs feeling along the back of the breach—spend one night, learn one stretch.”

Chen Jin read the note twice. East sluice: two nights, no losses. West wall: one night, two men. One city, two ways of fighting, two ledgers. Not that the west wall’s men couldn’t fight—nobody had turned their wall’s root over for them.

”This way,” he said, handing the note back, ”can’t squat at one gate only. The bugs learn a road, not a flag. What they feel along tonight is the west wall’s breach; tomorrow night they can turn and feel along our waterline. This ledger has to balance at both ends.”

Lei Changgeng took the note and stowed it. ”Can it even be taught? Not everybody can hold a hide. A whole night without moving wears worse than standing a wall.”

”Teach it,” Chen Jin said. ”Start with the squad leaders, section by section.”