~ DAVID ~

Plateau Watch was well concealed. The dusty track that led there was marked on the maps as the Northern Road, and it was easy enough to find it, but once out of the valley it seemed to take the least passable course. The road wove through forests full of trees in a variety of shapes and sizes, uneven hillocks. The topology of Essegena was in the fort’s favour. The bluff it had been built on seemed to rise out of the earth without warning. Approaching from the valley, the fort itself was hidden well behind a taller promontory. And the road wasn’t even well-marked. It would be easy to take a wrong turn, go too far, and wander aimlessly into the who-knows-where.

David was glad he wasn’t going alone. General Bradshaw was leading the inspection, and he’d brought a dozen soldiers along with him. Not that Bradshaw was paying them any mind. He spent the entire journey silently following Sergeant Malleston, who’d made the long trip once already this morning to come and meet them. No doubt Malleston, who’d arrived in the valley sweat-drenched on the back of a piebald horse, would have preferred to take a few minutes to rest before starting back. Bradshaw didn’t give him that option.

It was left to David to martial the soldiers Bradshaw had ignored. They were a motley selection of spotty-faced newbies and lazy slackers, the sort who would ignore the gift of an easy assignment to complain about the length of the walk. Their junior officer was Sergeant Coburn, a bulky woman with a thick mop of titian hair that was only barely contained beneath her hat. Unlike the rest of them, she was diligent. Her uniform was immaculate—even her fingernails were tripped and shaped in accordance with regulations so obscure not even generals enforced them. Her front teeth caught on her bottom lip whenever she closed her mouth, leaving it open a shade and making her look permanently as though she was about to say something. In actual fact she was very quiet.

“What was it brought you all the way to Essegena?” David asked her, a short way into their journey. It would be rude not to try to make conversation.

But try as he might, Sergeant Coburn seemed uninterested in continuing it. “Same as everyone else,” she grunted. “It’s something to do.” That was the last time she spoke until Plateau Watch came into view on the crest of a hill.

Immediately in front of the fort, the ground was a narrow sward of grass, flecked with wildflowers and declining into a gentle slope after some yards. A stake had been driven into the ground here. Attached to it, a crudely painted sign bore the fort’s name, in shaky hand. “I’ll have to send a man with some stencils,” Bradshaw quipped, as he passed it. “Nobody benefits from an unreadable sign.”

At the edge of the grassland, the woods were thin. Many tree stumps dotted the landscape, outnumbering the standing trees in places. Lieutenant Bennett’s men were fighting a war to claim the land from the Gods. These were the corpses left behind by their battles. Trickles of red sap had run along these trunks, staining like blood as they dried.

There was no mystery as to the whereabouts of those trees’ trunks. Soldiers in cotton vests carried them two to a trunk, glistening with sweat, and laid them in stacked pyramids in a shady yard beside the fort. David did a quick count by eye. There must have been hundreds of logs, if not thousands. Most had been stripped of their bark, sawn into quarters, dried by the sun. Lieutenant Bennett stood in the centre of the yard. Even in such an oppressive heat as this, she’d not eschewed even a single piece of her uniform. Where others, the ones doing the heavy lifting, looked close to boiling point in only vests, Bennett had everything, right down to the heavy serge surcoat and the stifling kepi. She stood barefoot despite this. Apparently her feet were not beholden to the same uniform requirements as the rest of her.

“Lieutenant,” called Sergeant Malleston, stepping into the yard. “General Bradshaw’s here.”

She turned, startled. “General. Welcome to Plateau Watch.” She held her arms out wide in a sweeping gesture, reaching her fingertips to the edge of the yard. “The pride of Essegena.”

General Bradshaw suppressed a laugh. Poorly. “Captain Clifford did warn me that you had the ego for command.”

“But no boots,” David observed. “Don’t tell me: you needed all the leather to build your pride?”

Lieutenant Bennett flushed. “I don’t deal well with heat. Fresh air on my feet helps me to keep cool.”

So would taking off one of your layers, David thought, but he suspected he wouldn’t be the first to suggest that Lieutenant Bennett take off her overcoat at the least. It was truly a spectacular heat today. Sergeant Coburn had made them stop halfway to the Watch, so the men could refill their empty flasks from the big lake up atop the bluff. Half of those flasks were already empty now, David’s included. He was desperately thirsty.

General Bradshaw seemed to be of a similar mindset. “My men have had a long walk, Lieutenant, and the day is stifling. I hope your hospitality is as grand as your walls.”

Lieutenant Bennett nodded. “Let me take you to the dining room,” she said. “I had Mam Howarth lay on a spread for your arrival. There’s plenty to drink, and plenty to discuss. This way.”

They followed Lieutenant Bennett back out of the yard, into the full sun again. David hadn’t realised what a gift the shade of the trees surrounding the lumber yard had been until the burning blaze was once again searing his skin. Bennett led them past a low, long hut of white adobe, to the wooden front of the fort itself. Here, two soldiers leaned against the timber, talking away. Neither seemed to notice Lieutenant Bennett and her procession approaching.

“Cutler. Rice. Focus. This is a fort, not a holiday.” Both soldiers stood with straightened backs when Lieutenant Bennett scolded them, with faces that were passing contrite. As soon as she’d walked past them, both scowled at her. It was fortunate for them General Bradshaw didn’t notice. His temper alone wouldn’t have allowed him to suffer mockery of the officer class.

The dining room was at the southernmost point of the fort, a right turn and a long walk down a dimly lit corridor from the front gate. It had an odd splendour to it. One wall, a long hemisphere protruding outwards to the valley, had tall boards of polished pine between its dark timber beams, each board verged with ornate decal. “Our honour board,” said Lieutenant Bennett proudly. “Whenever a Plateau Watch soldier distinguishes themselves, their name will be etched in the wood forever.”

“Very good,” said General Bradshaw. “Now all you need is some names to go on there.”

Bennett soured. “It will take time, General,” she said. “Essegena has all its history still to be written. Plenty of time to get names on the board.”

“And in the meantime your soldiers get to eat three meals a day sat before a reminder of their collective failure,” said Bradshaw.

Bennett didn’t seem to hold any interest in talking about the honour board any longer. She gestured to a long table running down the middle of the dining room, already laid on with huge crystal jugs filled with water. “Sit,” she said. “And I’ll see where Mam Howarth’s got to.”

She disappeared through a small wooden door. David turned to Sergeant Malleston as he sat. “Is she usually this nervous?”

Sergeant Malleston’s lip twitched. “I was always told to say nothing if I had nothing good to say.”

“Then I’ll treat this in complete confidence,” said David, leaning closer to Malleston and quietening his voice to a whisper. “But remember I’m Lieutenant Bennett’s superior—and yours, too. So I can definitely force you to answer, if I so choose.”

Malleston hemmed and hawed and eventually sat down next to David. “She’s all about appearances, truth be told,” he said. “Not that she’s particularly dropping the ball, but image is everything. You’d see a different picture if you’d come unheralded.”

David frowned. “How so?”

“The lumber yard. Most days there’s only a handful on lumber duty, half a dozen tops, and normally she delegates to Corporal Leymore. Honestly, I’ve not seen her in the yard before today. And the only reason she’s brought everyone straight to the dining room is because it’s finished. The north wing’s just a frame with a roof stuck on top, not even painted yet. Not that the Lieutenant will mention that.”

“Nobody’s expecting the place to be finished,” said David. “I think the General was expecting to find a couple of sodhouses, so she’s already exceeded his expectations massively.” It pained him to admit it. Part of him had hoped Lieutenant Bennett would fail hard. He wasn’t sure exactly what she’d done to draw his hatred, apart from being annoying in her persistence. Sometimes that was all it took.

Sergeant Malleston smiled. “Thank-you, sir.”

Ah. So this was Sergeant Malleston’s triumph, at least in part. Still, it hadn’t fallen down. It hadn’t caught fire with the loss of four-score lives. Nobody had been murdered and interred in the walls—or at least there was no evidence to suggest it. Even if Plateau Watch was in exactly the same state of completion as when Lieutenant Bennett had arrived a few weeks earlier to claim her command, she was far from being the worst Lieutenant in the Unity’s history. On David’s first command as a Lieutenant, he’d been out in the sticks, on a Malindei outpost far from any significant settlement. It was a two-week journey to Huilteir and back if anything needed repairing. Eager to make an impression, and far from eager to subject his new squad to cold showers for a fortnight, he’d undertaken the repair of a faulty water pipeline by himself. The outpost had flooded. The water damage was measured in six figures, and David had nearly been demoted on the spot.

Lieutenant Bennett emerged looking chipper. “I promised food, and it’ll come soon. There was a slight hiccup involving dropped glassware.” She’d put a pair of boots on, David noticed, and she was walking with a bit of a hobble. “We’re well on our way to being self-sufficient. All our water is drawn from three wells in the ground around the fort, and we’ve begun to sow the land south-east.” She pointed as if to indicate the crops she’d had planted, seemingly forgetting that they were inside and thus there was a wall in the way. “If we can get a good yield, a third of our food needs will be met by our own farmsteads by the first harvest.”

“What about the other two thirds?” asked General Bradshaw. “The route here’s not a kind one for wheeled carts. Are you planning on carrying large quantities of food all the way here from the valley by hand?”

“With respect, General, the connections between Plateau Watch and the valley aren’t my remit.” Bennett had a point there. On paper, the area of her command extended very slightly beyond the walls of the fort. In practice the reach was a little larger—there was nobody within two hours of here by foot, so she was the local authority—but there were plenty of self-important men who’d feel very aggrieved if she started paving a road from the valley.

“Have you had any luck locating your missing soldiers?” asked David.

Bennett shook her head. “No more than you have, Captain.”

Sergeant Coburn spoke up. “Lieutenant, I wonder if it might be possible to see your stables?”

Bennett grunted. “Speak to Speke.”

“That’s her response whenever somebody mentions the stables,” Sergeant Malleston explained, for only the ears of David and Sergeant Coburn either side of him. “I can’t work out if it’s because she doesn’t care a jot for the horses or if she just thinks the pun’s funny.”

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“Puns are never funny,” Sergeant Coburn muttered, standing. “Where will I find this Speke?”

“He’s usually in the stables,” said Sergeant Malleston. “There or his cottage. Here, I’ll take you.” Malleston rose and led Coburn out of the dining room. Bennett watched them go with piggy eyes.

They’d returned before the food Bennett had talked about. She was talking in great detail about the methods she’d used to build the wall surrounding the fort’s rear yard—methods, no doubt, that somebody else had suggested and implemented—when they came in.

“Sergeant Malleston says you’ve got a ghost,” said Coburn. “I think a ghost story could do us all good.”

“You’d better not be about to tell me this place is haunted,” said General Bradshaw, his eyes darting around the room.

Bennett shot Malleston a pleading look, then smiled at Bradshaw. “I wouldn’t say that, no,” she said. “What Sergeant Malleston means is that some of the soldiers are a bit on the superstitious side. They make up stories, over their nightly ale, and then pass them around as fact.”

Bradshaw nodded. “Soldiers do make up stories, that’s true.”

“What stories?” asked David.

“Nothing especially imaginative,” said Lieutenant Bennett. “There’s some say they’ve heard screams, from the hills over to the east. Some swear blind that they’ve seen odd lights dancing in the woods. I’ve had to double up the night watches because too many wouldn’t sit up in the tower alone.”

Bradshaw looked at David. “Normally scary stories extend as far as the odd quip. If it’s got to the point that your soldiers are refusing to carry out their duties… well, that’s unusual, to say the least. Are you sure there’s no truth to what they’re saying?”

“How can there be?” Bennett laughed. “Lights in the dark, bodiless screams—it’s an adolescent fantasy of a nightmare, not the sort of thing that has any basis in reality. It’ll be witch-shades and shadow people next.”

“But are you sure?” said Bradshaw, pressing.

Bennett folded her arms. “I’m a rational woman, with a head full of science. You’re the same, I’m sure.”

“I’m not a rational woman, no,” said Bradshaw, “though I do take your meaning. That doesn’t mean being so confident in what you know. Essegena isn’t the world back home, Lieutenant, you should remember that. Similar, maybe. We don’t know yet exactly how things work here. Just because something’s a baseless fantasy elsewhere doesn’t mean it’s not very real here. And we need to know what we’re dealing with.”

Bennett rolled her eyes, which served only to harden Bradshaw’s face. “I’ve sent a few squads up onto the hills to look around. They’ve never seen a thing. They come back after an hour or so saying they’re too scared to stay there any longer, because they can’t stand the idea of doing real work. It’s tall tales, General. Tall tales and laziness.”

They were interrupted then by the arrival, at last, of the food Lieutenant Bennett had promised, laid on in wooden platters carried by cooks in white aprons. Despite the Lieutenant’s words it was a humble spread. Four loaves of bread to be shared between all of them, along with a single stick of butter and a heaped plate of assorted vegetables. The platters were verged with slices of salted beef, straight out of a rations tin. They hadn’t even been heated up. A couple of slices of gold-brown honeycake promised a rare treat—but these turned out to be stale.

Still, David was in no mood to complain. Hungry people seldom are, when food is laid out before them. He ate with great gusto, and helped himself to more than his fair share.

By the time General Bradshaw was finished with Lieutenant Bennett, the day had acquired a cooler hue. David had long since grown bored of their conversation. Ghost stories had given way to specific methods of constructing buildings, and he took Lieutenant Bennett’s enthusiastic recommendation of a particular type of joist as his cue to check out of that conversation.

There was only so much twiddling his thumbs that he could do, though, and for as long as he was sat directly across the table he was expected to contribute some to the conversation. He got by on platitudes and empty responses that didn’t address the topic at hand—or anything else, for that matter. His mind wandered to home, his comfortable bed alone in his chambers, where neither Lieutenant Bennett nor anybody else could come between him and his books. Reading was no substitute for the lived experience of human contact, true—but the people who resided in those books spoke at David’s pace. They were silent on command.

“Captain Clifford?” Sergeant Coburn was leaning across to talk to him. “Captain, would you like to explore the fort with me?”

It was the kind of proposition he’d turn down, but Sergeant Coburn’s eyes betrayed a glimmer of... fear?

He rose.

“Don’t wander too far, Captain,” said General Bradshaw. “Else you might get lost.” It was one time, once in years of service, when he’d heard an instruction wrong and ended up twelve miles away from his intended rendezvous, at the edge of a large cenote. One time, and he still couldn’t move past it.

But then, if it had been General Bradshaw who’d gone to the wrong place, David knew he’d have mentioned it at every opportunity. So who was he to complain?

Sergeant Coburn led David wordlessly through a drab scullery, where great brass pans hung dripping, and out into a courtyard that would have been large enough to accommodate a regiment in formation, were it not for the furrows of soil that took up a good third of it. Green shoots peered out of this soil, seeking the sunlight which had now begun its descent behind the hills. The entirety of this courtyard was surrounded by a drystone wall, waist high, save for the fort itself. Beyond, David could see the stables, oaken with a slate roof above their gables. A girl with dark hair falling down her back stood on the hayloft balcony, scrubbing away at the bannister. And beyond even this, on the far side of a long declension, was Lieutenant Bennett’s haunted woods. There was nothing sinister or spooky about them, on the surface. The way the hill rose sharply, after a gentle slope down from Plateau Watch, was a shade imposing perhaps. But the trees in their legions that carpeted the hill looked so beautifully peaceful. A bird flew over those trees. From the courtyard it was but a speck of black on the aquamarine canvas of the sky.

“This place is beautiful, don’t you think? Everything about Essegena amazes me.” Sergeant Coburn spoke breathlessly.

David couldn’t help but agree. The valley had a certain beauty to it, and the Mettywood. Nothing he’d seen yet was hideous or boring. What had imbued Essegena with such wonder? The worlds of the Unity could be breathtaking at their best. Galleon’s Wake was a revelatory sight. The Six Sisters of Tol Manase were ancient titans rising high above their jungle home. And it was said that no man could cross over the Edge of the World and not return a changed man. But those were the highlights, and the everyday beauty was scarce. Foul metropolises blighted the landscapes of every major region, huge and polluted and full of far too many people, and surrounding them was the desolation they left behind. Essegena, by contrast, seemed to be made up of nothing but these beauties. The world was still virgin. There could be some incredible spectacle here that would put Galleon’s Wake to shame, and it was just waiting to be discovered.

Had every world been like this, once upon a time, before mankind wrought its influence? It wasn’t hard to imagine. The fields of Borrowood were an oasis in a desert of beauty, the island of Ivyne still untouched by modernity, but neighboured on all sides by dry expanses quarried of all their valuables, and faceless cities that had become boundless slums. Yet once, long ago, the land where those dead quarries were had been as pure as this that David saw before him.

Four thousand years of human progress were bound to take their toll.

“You wanted a word, Sergeant?” David cut to the chase. He wasn’t blind. She might well have said that she just wanted to look around, but she could well have done so on her own.

Sergeant Coburn squeaked, and looked around to make sure they weren’t being followed. “Mathilde,” she said. “For the Daughter.”

“Okay, Mathilde. What’s troubling you?”

Mathilde Coburn took a few seconds to steady herself, then launched into a rapidfire babbling that David was hard-pressed to understand. “The General’s impressed by this place. He’s going to greenlight more outposts, in other places. Captain Clifford, please send me to one of them. Strip me of my rank if you don’t want to give me command, but you have to let me go. Send me out of the valley. I need to get away from him, before he finds out.”

“Whoa, hold up. Slow down.” David held a hand up. “First things first, let’s have some details. Who is it you want to get away from?”

Mathilde said nothing. Her eyes, he noticed, shifted vaguely behind them, towards the dining room.

“Is it General Bradshaw?”

She shuffled her feet, looked down at the floor, pulled at her hair, but didn’t answer. She didn’t need to. That silence answered his question as well as any words could have.

“I want to help you,” said David, “but you need to give me something to work with. A Sergeant in command of a garrison—it’s not unheard of, but it’s definitely unusual. There’ll be six or seven people wanting to know why you got a command and they didn’t. Now, I can defend the decision, but I need to know why I’m defending it.”

Mathilde sighed. “I have a son,” she said. “He’s four years old.”

“That’s not an issue,” David assured her. “Lots of people have children here. Lieutenant Bathart, Corporal Watchorn, even General Bradshaw’s got daughters, though they’re adults so it’s slightly different.”

She shook her head. “He’s not on my declaration. There’s a woman—Meridel. She’s listed as a washerwoman, in the registry, though she doesn’t work. I send her a stipend out of my pay, and she looks after my son. The files say she is his mother.”

“Why would you do that?” Every prospective colonist had signed a declaration before leaving for Essegena, no matter their rank or their status. Family status, next of kin, that sort of thing. The Unity took such documents seriously. The best she could hope for, if they ever found out she’d lied, was a one-way trip back home at the first opportunity. She’d be looking at long-term imprisonment, maybe a life in bondage.

“The Council can see my records,” she said. “I was never married. I was an idiot, and I didn’t take the right precautions, and the next thing I knew I was pregnant. Well, how could I not see it through? I could have ended the pregnancy, sure, but that would have been the easy way out.”

“So what that you never married. It’s not an obligation.”

Mathilde Coburn shuddered bodily. “His father’s on the Council. If he learned about my boy... I dare not visit Meridel while I’m in the valley, in case I’m seen. I have a sister—she knows me, knows the boy is mine. She’d give me away. Let me go elsewhere. So I can see my boy, and be his mother.”

It wasn’t the response he’d been expecting. For a good many seconds after she’d finished speaking, the only sound was Mathilde’s breathing, heavy and fast. David watched her for a second, looked at her closely. She couldn’t have been much more than a teenager when her son was born. It would be an embarrassment to Bradshaw to learn about his bastard boy, and he’d be exactly the sort to put out a hit. Oh, he wouldn’t go himself. He’d never dare to get his hands dirty. But he’d say the right word to the right ally, and Mathilde Coburn’s son would not wake up one morning.

“I’ll do what I can,” said David. “You have my word on that.”

“Thank-you, Captain Clifford.” Mathilde kissed his cheek, leaving it wet and grimy. He tried to figure out how to wipe it dry without offending her.

“Call me David in future,” he told her. “It’s only fair. I have your name, so you should have mine.”

A few short minutes later, they were interrupted by the arrival of Sergeant Malleston. “Pardon me, sir,” he said, “but General Bradshaw is looking for you. He wants to start back. The day is getting on, after all, and it’s a good few hours back down to the valley.”

Sergeant Malleston wasn’t wrong. By the time they’d made it back as far as the big lake, they were in the throes of the evening. A wicked sunset streaked across the lake’s waters, painting them in toasty shades of orange and red. Far from toasty, on the other hand, was the weather. Once the sun had beaten its final retreat, a frigid wind had moved in. It was only gentle, more a breeze than a gale, but it was icy.

David reached into the pocket of his jacket, which he was suddenly glad he’d brought with him. It had been too hot to wear earlier, so he’d tied it around his waist. Now, when it was cold, everybody else had come to regret going without. Mathilde started shivering before the lake came into view. General Bradshaw had started waving his arms back and forth, making strange noises with his tongue, in an attempt to disguise his cold with bravado and machismo. David didn’t need to pretend to be doing exercises. He had a coat. It was warm and woollen and had a pair of thick gloves in the pockets that would keep his hands from going numb.

But instead of soft gloves, he touched something cold and firm. Glass. Rounded. There was no weight to it as he removed it from his pocket, and holding it to the light he saw it was the bottle Chris had given him. He must have pocketed it in order to move it from place to place, and then forgotten about it. It wasn’t very exciting. The only mystery was the bottle’s contents, and judging from how light it felt it was probably empty. That was the sort of joke Chris would make. He was probably waiting for David to turn up at his office door, red-faced and raging, having opened the bottle to find there was nothing inside.

Well, Chris would never get that satisfaction. If he wanted to make a joke, he could take a joke as well.

They walked between trees here, woodlands that while sparse were dark enough in the daylight. In the evening they were positively black. The glowing lake smiled at him through gaps in the trees, and a dense brush of green ferns tickled at his legs to remind him that they were still there. All David could see were the shadows of the others. He had to keep close enough, or he might lose them. If he lost them, he mightn’t find them again. It would be a fine way for him to end his days, wandering aimlessly in thin woods no more than a mile or two from his bed.

He dared to take his eyes off the man in front for only a second. That was all he needed. He drew his arm back, glanced into the thickest part of the woods, and released. The bottle flew through the air and then it was gone, swallowed by the night. He wouldn’t have been able to follow its flight even if he’d wanted to. But he’d kept walking, not even looking, and he’d already forgotten the spot he’d thrown from.

“What was that?” said Mathilde, behind him.

“What was what?”

“You threw something. I saw it.”

David fixed his eyes forward. “Don’t worry about it. It was nothing.”