The first attempt to hold a meeting of the new Emergency Council was a shit show. Gertrude was still unconscious. We’d just discovered that Amris was the most senior Librarian currently on the Citadel so he’d been co-opted. The Chief Priest of the Source refused to attend on the grounds that he was too busy helping people settle into the Safehold. Administrator Augustus Leitner from the hospital was so distracted that, while he was physically in the room, he could barely be said to be present.

There were half a dozen other people that I didn’t know but the Mayor never got the chance to do the introductions. Every time he opened his mouth there was another interruption. Some came from inside the room but most were from people trying to join the meeting.

Every few minutes there was someone new at the door claiming that we couldn’t possibly hold a Council Meeting without them. A couple of them were legitimately members of the existing City Council who had been overlooked. They were welcomed into the Council room. The rest were just various important and “important” people who thought they should have been invited. The Mayor asked each one of them what skills or knowledge they were bringing to the table. They mostly cited wealth, connections or property. The Mayor told them that, should we discover any use for wealth or connections then we would be in touch. None of them were citing property on the Citadel. The Mayor told them that the Council would be in touch the moment the Citadel was reunited with the land they owned.

In the end the only thing on the agenda was the ratification of the current Rationing plan and the reading of the Ostian declaration of war.

I explained the Rationing rationale while everyone nodded and tried to look interested. The plan was passed unanimously, even though I seriously doubted that anyone other than Amris could have described the plan even five minutes after leaving the meeting.

Then the Mayor read the declaration of war to us. It was the most cold-blooded thing that I ever heard. All it said was that unless and until we surrendered the Fever Hospital and everyone inside it, including both staff and patients, to representatives of the Ostian Government then the Ostian Empire would be at war with the city of Moonstone and its citizens. They expected everyone not tied to the hospital to vacate the Citadel and hand it over to the Ostian forces.

There was no further explanation or justification. The Council was disinclined to agree to those terms. I was suspicious that this couldn’t possibly be the first communication from the Ostians on this subject.

The Mayor insisted that there had been no sabre rattling. “All we’ve heard from them is repeated, formal, requests for information on how many patients and staff were at the Fever hospital. We sent them the publicly available information. They kept asking for more information but we couldn’t tell them more without the express permission of our patients’ next of kin.”

Someone prodded Administrator Leitner and asked if the Ostians had contacted the hospital directly.

“Oh yes. Letters, C-mail, even delegations coming in person. Nothing that we could tell them was enough. I’m not sure if it was a translation problem but they seemed to expect a different kind of answer to anything we could tell them. At one point they asked us where we were putting the bodies.”

###

Gertrude didn’t come round until the next morning. I made her coffee in the tiny kitchen of the Outlander apartment while Amris, who’d known her a lot longer than I, broke the news.

Gertrude took it surprisingly well. I guessed that might have been because she was still suffering the aftermath of completely draining herself. I thought that she was probably too exhausted to get properly emotional.

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

I found out I was wrong when I brought her the coffee. She was clutching a small pebble in both hands while taking deep, shuddering breaths.

“It’s a touchstone,” she said, between sips of coffee.

“I don’t know what that is,” I said. “At least I don’t know what that means here.”

“A lot of couples use them,” said Amris, as Gertrude continued to drink the coffee, “It’s a pair of magically entangled stones enchanted by two people who love each other. When you touch one stone the other stone warms up. It’s a way of telling your loved one that you’re thinking of them.”

“Geraldine is alive,” said Gertrude, still gripping the pebble with one hand as she sipped coffee with the other, “and I will see her again.”

###

There was another Emergency Council meeting that day. This one included Gertrude and I finally got to meet The Temple of the Source’s Chief Priest, Osred Kaye.

In every other respect it resembled the meeting from the day before. One particularly strident landowner wouldn’t leave, even when Amris said she had a “fine Landlord’s head” upon her shoulders and asked if she wanted to keep it there. It was only when Osred Kaye asked if her newfound passion for service to the city meant she was ready to give up her private prayer room for a toddler creche that she decided that she had better things to do with her time.

There’s not really any point in going into further details about the Council meetings. We didn’t get a sense of what the Ostians really wanted until much later and the day-to-day administration of the Citadel was boring enough when we were doing it. I see no reason to go over something that’s available elsewhere in the form of the detailed minutes we kept.

However there was one thing that we discussed in almost every Emergency Council meeting and would become a huge and ongoing issue. Should we stay in the relative safety of the Citadel or not? In the Citadel we had food, water and shelter but we were a massive target. The Citadel might be moving but it wasn’t moving fast enough to get away from dedicated pursuers and it’s not like we could hide it. If we left the Citadel then the civilians could disperse but we’d be refugees at the mercy of the rest of the continent.

I was firmly on team Citadel. Even though I didn’t think of myself as a permanent resident of Moonstone, I thought it was madness to leave. I couldn’t help thinking of the crew of the SS Idyllic refusing to hand over the children and fleeing from Ostia.

In that meeting everyone was team Citadel. I wasn’t sure if the novelty of the situation was pushing people to cling to the familiar, or if it was just that none of these city folks knew how to survive outside the city. The unanimity didn’t last.

The longer the siege went on the louder the calls to leave the Citadel became. Every member of the council had people asking them when we would give the order to abandon the Citadel.

The Citadel drifted south towards Talia. Many of the wealthier families in the Safehold had summer estates on the Talian coast. When we reached the Talian highlands, dotted with hilltop villages that were almost as high as the pavement level of the Citadel, some of those families chose to leave.

On one hand it was good to have fewer people to feed and care for. On the other hand it was terrible for morale. Every time we got close to a mountain or hill, or even a really tall tower, people clamoured to leave. The official position of the Emergency Council was always the same. “We’re not stopping you from leaving but you can’t take any supplies or the emergency gondolas. If you can figure out a way to get down then best of luck to you.”

Those with money or connections seemed to have no difficulty in finding someone to help them down to the ground as long as it wasn’t too far. I found out later that most of the University faculty were making bank on the side doing flight and levitation spells. One of the lecturers in Arcane studies told me that he’d been paid enough to retire to the countryside just from casting MASS FLIGHT twice.

I was surprised that he hadn’t left. He had the skills to get out and he had money to spend once he did. When I asked him about it he just laughed and said “I don’t know why anyone thinks that leaving the Citadel will save them from the Ostians. The Empire is in the grip of madness and until it passes none of us will be safe.”