The first part of our plan, to evacuate people out of the city and into the caves and cellars hidden beneath it, wasn’t too difficult. It was kind of pointless without the second part, though. The getting people safely onto the ground and away from the Ostians part.

We had one, apparently insurmountable, problem. We had no reliable way of communicating with people outside of the city. The Ostians had used some bullshit ritual to cut off every form of communication more complex than touchstones. The crystal mail network was completely unreachable. Telepathy spells worked inside the city but failed the moment either person left.

We knew all this because we had Geraldine. Well, we had her once the Ostians let her out. They picked her up on the first night. They had intelligence that she was married to Gertrude, that Gertrude was on the citadel, and that the two of them were inseparable. And no, we don’t know where they got their information from.

The Ostians kept Geraldine for questioning for over a week. They probably only let her out because they were running out of space in the finishing school to detain people. It’s probably hard to explain to your bosses that you’ve got no space to detain the teens who keep vandalising the “Submit to Ostian Authority” posters because you’re questioning a semi-retired knitting pattern designer about her wife, the glorified librarian.

We didn’t even have to tell the kids to vandalise anything. One of the first things the Ostians did was to attempt to detain all the sick children. They couldn’t, because all the actually sick kids were in the Fever Hospital on the Citadel. All that was left was the babies too young to catch the fever and the teenagers who were either too old or had caught a mild dose and were already over it.

But the Ostians didn’t find that out until after they’d detained everyone they could find under the age of seventeen. There’s no power of irritation in the world like a bunch of teenagers who’ve spent the weekend imprisoned along with a few screaming babies and stressed out new mothers.

Once they got out we had a hard time getting them to stop doing things specifically to upset the Ostian Secret Police. In the end we gave them a schedule. That way their misbehaviour would draw attention away from our activities and we could be sure they were detained with cast iron alibis whenever we did anything that the Ostians were bound to find out about.

Anyway, Geraldine had tried everything to communicate with Gertrude but the only thing that worked was their touchstones. The Scholars wasted a lot of effort theorising about why the Ostians’ ritual worked on everything else but not on the touchstones. I’m half convinced it’s because they didn’t want it to work on touchstones. I think they wanted people outside the city to return to their loved ones and they’re only going to do that if they’re sure they’re still alive.

Once Geraldine was sure that she couldn’t get through to Gertrude she started obsessing over ways to send messages using only touchstones. Eventually she worked out that, while you can’t send much of a message with one touchstone, you can send a detailed one with two sets of five touchsones. If you assign one group to be the columns and one to be the rows then by touching one from each group you’re selecting one of twenty five squares on the table. Apparently it’s very similar to the way some weaving patterns are coded.

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Now all we needed were two lovebirds, twenty pebbles, and a plan.

###

The two lovebirds we found didn’t want to be separated but they also didn’t want to stick around in Moonstone under the Ostians. He was with the guild of Navigators. She was a scholar of the Arcane. Anywhere else on the continent they never would have met but he drove the gondola route that connected all the University buildings and she liked to ride the empty gondola in the early morning because it helped her to think.

They were perfect for the job. They were in love enough to make for strong touchstones, they were both smart with excellent memories and he was already in the Guild of Navigators.

Geraldine came up with the plan. Every third night at the same time they would check the stones. One hot stone meant everything is fine but no-one is leaving. A hot stone from a row and one from a column was one of the pre arranged pick up locations. Every location had a back-up location in case of trouble. Two hot row stone and two hot column stones were distress signals but I’m not privy to what the response was supposed to be.

As soon as the engineers built the first ramshackle secret gondola our boy was dropped off on the road to Uln in the middle of the night. He had 10 days to get to Uln, make contact with the Guild of Navigators, and be ready to start receiving people. We had 10 days to make more gondolas, secure our secret camp and work out who was leaving and in what order.

###

I thought I’d be one of the last out but actually I was in the third gondola of the evacuation proper, along with Geraldine. We were both going to Uln. She was going to oversee the ground planning and I was on my way here, instructed to find Agnes and request space for refugees.

I knew Agnes would welcome them, can’t help but take in strays that one, I didn’t expect how eager she’d be. By the time I got there the Ostians had thoroughly worn out any welcome they might have expected in the Black Woods. The Camp was already filling up with people who’d run from every town and village to get away from them.

And then the day after I arrived here we got the first message from the Citadel. Gertrude managed to reach Agnes through the Crystal Ball Network, even though they’d never met. She had to route it through Geraldine and Mistress Magdalene from Uln.

Of course by the time we got that message from Gertrude the Citadel was in the Labyrinth beneath the Talian Mountains and most of the people were on some long travelling device that Petra was calling a Train.

That news was enough to put a bee in Agnes’s bonnet. A whole hive of bees, really. She insisted that this Train thing would be coming to the Black Woods. She said that it was inevitable, that she saw it in the crystal ball. I've never known her to do much looking for the future and she’s certainly not usually given to making firm predictions but she was so sure about this that Gertrude is bringing the Citadel here.

Gertrude has a plan to end this stupid war. Agnes has a plan to make sure the Ostians don’t stop her. The Council of Uln agrees. The guilds have all signed off on it. The Citadel will be here late today, or maybe tomorrow. If Agnes is right, that's when we’ll finally have to stand and fight.