Ember Legion

Lei Changgeng spread the roster out on a sandbag and pinned the page with a stone.

”The two you asked for. I picked them,” he said. ”While they’re still breathing, come look at my books first.”

Chen Jin crouched down. On the open page, three lines stood blank on the right—not blacked out, but ruled off against a straightedge, one thin line after another. Straight, and cut deep; the strokes showed through the back of the paper. On the left, two new names. Ink still fresh, the hand crooked, every stroke that could be spared was spared. The writing was Lei Changgeng’s own.

”This squad started with fifteen old bones,” he said. ”Two gone on the north road. One at the east sluice. Two pulled out to the port works. Three laid up in the wounded shed. Men who can still stand a night watch: seven, as of today. Fifteen minus eight.”

He closed the roster and stowed it inside his coat.

”The other sections aren’t much better. Across this city, the old garrison is six or seven parts gone out of ten. The replacements can’t work a bolt clean—at night everything looks like a bug to them. Last night a new man on the west wall took wind in the sheet iron for movement and put a round into his own wall. Woke half a section.”

”Nobody chewed him out?”

”Chew him out for what?” Lei Changgeng said. ”At that age, every man’s first round goes the same way.”

The new man didn’t go up on the wall today. Lei Changgeng let him sleep till noon, then had him go pick up yesterday’s casing, polish it bright, and set it on the gun rack. A wrong shot written under your own name beats one written in other men’s mouths.

The two new soldiers checked their rifles where the pier broke the wind. The older one had been militia—he loaded by knocking each round square against the stock first. The tall thin one was slow. Every step of the check he glanced over at Lei Changgeng, and only when Lei nodded did he take the next one. Hands-on teaching, over and over, nobody hurrying anybody.

Lei Changgeng’s whole lesson was one line: pull once, listen. Chamber loaded or empty, your hand hears the difference—your eyes can’t be trusted. At night, with no lamps, that one pull is all you have. The militia man was pulling with his eyes shut by the third try; the tall one still had his open. Lei didn’t push. He laid the man’s hand flat on the bolt and walked him through two more.

By noon, four squad leaders had come in from four sections.

Not by any order. Lei Changgeng had traded shifts on the duty roster and gone section by section to ask. Of the five who came, one wasn’t a squad leader—the west wall’s had died at a wall root days back, and the deputy standing in for him had never yet had his name written into any roster. He’d taken over the men, taken over the post; the line above his was still blank. Men had started calling him the stand-in.

More sections had wanted to send somebody. But squad leaders—there were just these. The rest couldn’t spare one man who could leave his post. The method existed. The men to teach it were running out. Four of them and the stand-in crouched outside the mouth of the dark run, not one of them sure what they were there to see.

One leader, forty-odd, an old burn scar up his arm, asked the moment he was through the door: ”Captain Chen. The fleet—is it actually coming? The men sent me to ask.”

Lei Changgeng’s eyes cut over. The man swallowed the rest.

”That one I don’t answer,” Chen Jin said. ”Answering buys nothing. Today I’m teaching one thing only: how to hold a wall until the day it comes—or the day it doesn’t.”

In the mines you didn’t break in a new man by talking. Rules you talk about never get into the hands; rules in the hands never wear out. He took the five out to the grass tufts and pointed into the hides. ”In. One stick of incense. Muzzles down. No sound, no moving.”

One man to a hide. They pressed down, and the grass closed over them.

The sun moved from overhead to the west. The wind crossed twice, pressing the grass flat and letting it back up. Once, a sentry walking the pier side went by, boots solid on the stone—nobody in the hides moved a hair. Chen Jin squatted in his own hide at the end of the run, not hurrying, not even looking—just listening. Grass that rustled fast meant a leg gone numb, shifting weight. A long quiet meant the man had fallen asleep. Sleeping wasn’t a mistake. First-day men down the shaft had all slept like that too.

When the stick burned out he knocked twice on the stone. Five men came up out of the grass, knees cracking in a chorus. Three came up gray-faced, hands shaking as they climbed out. The burn-scarred leader rose slowest—made it halfway and went back down, and stayed down a slow cup of tea before he stood straight.

This book was originally published on NovelPhoenix. Check it out there for the real experience.

”That wall root back home,” he said. ”I’m turning it over the day I get back.”

Chen Jin waited until he was standing steady. Then he talked. Three rules, that was all.

”First. Hold the root, not the face. A wall isn’t held from the wall-top. It’s held from the wall-root. Bugs don’t come at the face—they come at the root: the waterline, the breach, the grating posts, every place eyes can’t reach. Turn the root over once, and that’s worth ten more men standing on top.”

”Second. Tap the ribs, ask the roof. Mine saying. A heading has two ribs and a roof, and down the shaft you tap before anything else, and you listen. Solid ring, good stone. Hollow ring, there’s nothing behind it—set supports.” He took the rod and rapped twice along the wall root at the waterline—a dull knock, solid stone. Half a step over, another tap, and the ring went thin. Nothing behind it. He scored an X over the spot with the rod tip. ”Mark it. Tomorrow, bring men and tap it again. Still hollow, report it to me. The solid ones you leave alone—they’ll hold. Once a day. That’s the whole job.”

”Third, and this one matters most. When something happens—tap the roof before you pull a man.” He said it flat. ”A heading caves, and a man crawls in without tapping, usually you bury one more. Walls are the same. Somewhere goes loud, first you find out how many, and where they got in. Then you move. Going in on pure heat isn’t rescue. It’s adding to the ledger.”

None of the leaders answered. The burn-scarred one ran the three rules through his mouth once, then: ”Every day? The tapping?”

”Every day,” Chen Jin said. ”Half of holding is the tapping.”

”And the other half?”

”The other half is holding still,” Chen Jin said. ”A wall that can hold still is a wall that holds.”

The words just came out. Only after they were out did he hear what the second half was carrying. The mine had spent ten years beating these rules into men. The east sluice didn’t have ten years. The boy the east sluice lost had died standing the post he never got the chance to teach.

Men could be replaced. Rules couldn’t. Right math, in the mine. Here, it didn’t balance.

He shut the thought down. What you taught out and never taught back was still a debt.

That night the four leaders each brought two veterans from their sections and squatted the hides with the Ember Guard. The stand-in and Lei Changgeng’s new men took the grating posts as one hide. No lamps, no orders passed in the dark; you found your hide by touch, feeling for the punch mark on the stone. The man who’d taught them walked the whole line of hides once, and at each one, the man inside raised his muzzle an inch. Counted present.

The panel sat in his pocket. Chen Jin didn’t open it. Open a panel in the dark and the light leaks—one slit of light, one life. A man holding a hide doesn’t get to look at his own accounts.

Past midnight, the surface moved. One thin line of it.

A fine ripple riding flat along the water, all the way to the mouth of the dark run. And it stopped. In the hides inside and outside the run, not one man moved. The burn-scarred leader closed his fist around the rod handle until the knuckles went white, and didn’t shift. The line of sound sat on the surface the better part of a meal. Sitting was worse than moving—nobody knew whether the next breath meant in or back. It went back. Downstream, the way it took. On the high slope the thing stood up once too, farther north than the nights before. Stood a moment, went down again. No howl. Not this time either.

It came to look. It didn’t come in.

They broke the hides at first light. The four leaders left without a word among them, out the sluice and off to their own sections, every one of them walking faster than he’d come.

The stand-in didn’t go. He crouched at the grating posts and felt down the night’s hides one by one, marking a line in his palm for every one he touched. When he’d finished, he came and stood in front of Chen Jin and asked whether they’d squat again tonight. They’d squat, Chen Jin said—until every section squats on its own. The man nodded and left. Got a few steps, turned back, and put down the question he hadn’t dared ask during the day’s lesson: ”Our section’s waterline—when you get a chance, will you come look at it?”

”You don’t wait for a chance,” Chen Jin said. ”Today.”

Lei Changgeng took the new soldiers’ rifles back and checked them one at a time. On the tall one’s, he worked the bolt three times, then handed it back. ”Good. From tonight, you hold the grating posts.”

The tall one took the rifle without a word and hugged it against his chest.

Chen Jin and Lei Changgeng crouched on the pier. East of them the sky was going gray, and the water lay flat without a single seam on it.

”The fleet question—the men asking it isn’t a bad thing,” Lei Changgeng said. ”Holding it in is what’s bad.”

So Chen Jin gave him the books. Grain: thirty days, eating it meanest. Copper: thirty-nine. The fleet: thirty-one. The one spare day in the middle was on paper.

Lei Changgeng took that in, and watched the water a while. He didn’t ask about the fleet. He asked something else. ”Thirty days. Somebody’s eyes on that waterline every single night. Seven old men of mine, two shifts a day—bones wear through.”

”That’s why we teach,” Chen Jin said. ”Teaching is how you save bones.”

Lei Changgeng said nothing. After a while: ”Then we hold it one day at a time. The day on paper—we’ll deal with it when it gets here.”

By day Chen Jin walked all four sections, one after another. The rod ran along the wall roots section by section—the solid ones passed, the hollow ones marked. Seventeen Xs across four sections: nine on the waterlines, eight at breach roots. Some of the seams were old; under some, the stone had already started shedding grit. He set men to shoring them with sandbags for now. One at a time, later.

At dusk the hammer-song started up from the repair station. One stroke, another, carrying across half the city—no hurry in it, and no stopping. Everyone on the pier heard it. Nobody asked what it was.

The two new soldiers looked at each other and pulled their rifles in a little tighter.

The second gun was being forged.