It took nearly a month for Wasolan to retaliate after the raid on Rhatal. To no one’s surprise, they did what they were supposed to do. From the old Independent Cities, Ivterran, Borirnna and Catabron, five battalions mustered near the steadily refilling Rhatal. From there, they marched directly North toward Altok.

Tengu and Ora, and therefore Ato and Emen, were not involved in assisting Altok. Ato had attached herself to Ora, in a very similar way to Ora being attached to Tengu. Despite her youth and desire for violence, Ato’s safety wasn’t a consideration for Ora and Tengu sitting out the battle at Altok.

Emen appreciated it either way.

The diplomatic trip to Altok and Kzara had taken much longer than Tengu, Ora, or Beln had hoped it would. After an additional two months of planning the raid against Rhatal, Beln and Ora weren’t the only ones starting to worry.

With the additional two hundred people who had arrived in Outpost and Haven from the raid on Rhatal, almost as many people had arrived in Haven and its surrounds since the patrol had visited Lookout as had been there before. Not quite, but it was a problem.

Not everyone had forgotten about the two year deadline from the Lord’s House over the fourteen months since the proselytiser had visited. There were certainly people accusing each other of ibildicide who didn’t know why the joke had been invented.

Lookout was in much the same condition it had been in fourteen months ago: three buildings, a nice little garden, a turbine and a well. The only difference was that a couple of people basically lived there most of the time. The rest of the crew still rotated every month or two.

Hobbs and Mu both said they enjoyed the quiet in Lookout. Both of them also quite enjoyed operating the telegraph and keeping an increasingly dense log of activity in the surrounding area.

Some people had expressed concerns over the mental wellbeing of Hobbs and Mu. Tengu had told those people to mind their own business.

Not only were Mu and Hobbs having a great time slowly inventing a typewriter for sending telegraphs faster, being away from all the excitement, and drawing up their spreadsheets, they were absolutely thrilled to be able to roll out a proposed redesign of Lookout for when it inevitably needed to be come a fortress the same way Outpost had.

Beln was so relieved that someone else had been thinking about the problem that he immediately gave them both a big hug, which they didn’t object to. As much as he hadn’t forgotten, no one had thought to suggest that Lookout be worked on while the diplomatic party was away.

The first order of business was to drastically expand the garden into a reasonably sized farm. Outpost had yet to reach food self-sufficiency, though in Jules’ defence, it did seem to basically double in size every couple of months.

Mu and Hobbs were possibly being overprepared, but that wasn’t exactly a problem. Excess food could be dried or fermented to compensate for bad harvests or sold to Altok and Yarkot.

Lookout didn’t grow at the same pace that Outpost had. Quite a lot of the people freed from the Lord’s House were happy to make the trek to work on it, but despite the shrinking deadline, the project didn’t have the same feeling of urgency.

Up to this point, Haven hadn’t really had any mines or quarries. The steel looted from bandits, raiders, slavers, soldiers from Wasolan, and expeditions to old ruins stretched a great deal further than the clothes did. A sword could be turned into a couple dozen arrowheads or a few spearheads, after all. Concrete was quicker and easier than quarrying stone.

Mu and Hobbs had done some calculations, and they were of the opinion that quarried stone would be better for building walls around Lookout than the concrete blocks that had been used for most of the watchtower.

It was surprising to Ora, who certainly had no plans to join in, just how many of her fellows liberated from Outer Light were more than happy to set up a new quarry at a granite outcropping about half a day from Lookout.

The quarry also solved two other problems faced by Haven’s construction industry: it was getting harder to find enough aggregate for the concrete; it was best to have a base of gravel or crushed stone under a concrete foundation.

Tengu’s method of spreading cement over concrete foundations was a passable way to ensure that they were level and flat, but the floor in her house in Haven was starting to crack.

Given that most buildings in Haven had timber floors, it didn’t seem like much of a problem. But enough people knew that you were supposed to put gravel under a foundation that the lack of it was considered an issue.

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Tengu was not present for the discussion and analysis of her building techniques, nor was she informed of it later. Ora, Tengu, Ato, Emen, Heft and Pest were all out in the Lord’s House for some extended reconnaissance.

It had been abundantly clear that they could leave the construction of Lookout to Hobbs, Mu, and Beln. So they’d decided it would be more useful to know what they were actually dealing with around what the people of Haven were starting to think of as their border with the Lord’s House.

The first piece of useful information was both encouraging and vaguely upsetting. More than a month of exploring, occasionally hiding from patrols, and doing their best to keep a map, into the reconnaissance, made it clear that Outer Light was distinctly the furthest south settlement of the Lord’s House.

The bad news was that Outer Light was operational again. It shouldn’t have been a surprise, but it was. What wasn’t a surprise, given that Outer Light was operational again, was more and bigger watchtowers, sturdy walls, and a good deal more soldiers.

It was impossible to get close enough to have a look in the pit to get a sense of whether there were more slaves than before Haven had emptied it out last time. But over a couple of days of watching, the six of them saw two caravans head north and a patrol head east.

They decided to follow the patrol, since Mu and Hobbs would definitely want more information about the route. And it would be easy to follow caravans laden down with stone and ore.

It wasn’t a wasted nine days, but Ora and Ato felt like it was. The patrol passed through a small farming town and then two small forts that Tengu was fairly sure marked the border with Oszrath.

From there, the patrol followed the rough border of the wastes. Everyone in the group except for Tengu tried to wave to Lookout as they followed a good distance behind the patrol.

‘She’s tall enough she doesn’t have to wave,’ Ato pointed out, sagely.

The recon team already knew there was nothing along the border of the wastes, and so even Tengu had to admit it was a bit of a waste of time to trail the patrol the whole way.

Tree weeks was a long time for Emen and Ato to travel in one stretch. Neither of them had ever really travelled for more than a day at a time. They were both missing the sense of stability they’d had during their brief stays in Outpost, Haven, or even Lookout.

Ato wasn’t going to give up.

It wasn’t a complete waste of three weeks, of course. The patrol stopped in a fairly large city that was certainly on the border with Ovek. Conveniently for six people who had not dressed to try to infiltrate a Lord’s House city, the name was written on a big sign. It was part of the same sign that announced the border with Ovek was only two kilometres west.

The city of Deep Illumination, a name that Ato laughed at for several minutes, was probably the same size as Haven. Haven was still only about two thirds occupied, and only that much because of all the space taken up by the gardens. Deep Illumination was full, it was multi-story, and it was surrounded by a much more impressive wall than Haven.

As with Outer Light, it was impossible to gauge how many people were in the city. But a couple days of observation were enough to confirm it was where at least some of the caravans from Outer Light ended up. And it was where patrols going the opposite direction originated.

Ora, Ato, Tengu, Emen, Pest and Heft were in the Lord’s House for just shy of a month. By the time they got back to Lookout, it felt like a distinctly different place to the one they’d left.

Mu and Hobbs had put a lot of thought into how Lookout should be laid out. A five-metre stone block wall was set about fifty metres from the old Lookout. A scattering of sheds and small houses spread out to either side of the watchtower, behind that were a couple of apartment buildings, some bigger storage warehouses, and quite a number of foundations and only-just-begun buildings.

Ballistae, stationary crossbows, and trebuchets rose steadily along with the growing number of apartments and the extending wall.

As the war with Wasolan seemed to largely die down, the garrison at Outpost started to spread out. After the sound defeat of the army sent against Altok, Wasolan appeared to have lost interest in the fight to its east, focusing instead on the war with Kzara.

Just over a hundred of the soldiers freed from Wasolan left the wastes entirely, headed to Kzara to join the fighting there. It was a shame, but no one made any effort to stop them or convince them to stay.

The old Sand Crawlers base returned to about thirty people, keeping an eye out for the odd slave catcher or escaped slave from Ovek or the Lord’s House. Jules and about a hundred people stayed in Outpost, continuing their forays into the land around Journey and into the outskirts of Wasolan.

Nearly eighty people, mostly people freed from Outer Light, had moved into Lookout permanently. They were joined by about eighty more from Outpost. The rest headed to Haven to finally get the chance to retire from fighting. Or at least to have a break.

And so, when a raiding party arrived at Lookout two months early, Lookout was currently home to about a hundred and eighty people and almost as many siege engines as buildings. The tower had also grown two more storeys.

Rather than go out to meet them, Asmon Varalagos shouted at them from the top of the wall.

‘I’ve been reading this book you gave me,’ Beln shouted. ‘This Mistress of Night gets a bad deal, I reckon. All she did for you and you try to cast her as a villain. Despicable.’ Beln easily managed to duck behind the crenulations in time to avoid being shot.

The raiding party left swiftly when a huge, clay globe shattered nearby.

The siege engineers of Lookout decided to let the raiding party get away. There was a little bit of hope that the Lord’s House would decide it wasn’t worth it. Everyone who knew anything pointed out that the Lord’s House was not known for good decisions.