The last glimmer of sun had vanished in the east by the time Rann made it back to the others. There were patches of near-blackness scattered around the encampment, areas where the floodlights did not reach, and he had to walk through a few of those to reach their tent. The light of Ilath and Thain wasn’t quite bright enough to navigate by. Bombs were still falling in the distance, their red and orange flashes casting surreal shadows on the dark hillsides. To the north, the moody glow of forest fires washed out the twinkling stars on the horizon and outlined the slopes of the mountain at the valley’s end.

He found the four of them sitting cross-legged together, smoking on the muddy ground a few yards from the tent. A small battery-powered lantern had been hung from the apex of the tent frame, attracting a blind constellation of insects. The curfew had already been called, but it was loosely enforced; other squads sat around similar lanterns dotted throughout the tent city. The motor pool nearby echoed with metallic clangs and the shouts of mechanics repairing trucks and armour.

“Any good news, sergeant?” Lidaro asked, as Rann sat down beside him. “Or is it all need-to-know?”

Rann had never believed in hiding the truth from his squad. He credited them with enough intelligence to know when he was lying. He told them, in brief, what Dauman had said. He was silently proud to see them take the news with little more than a shrug.

“They laid on a whole briefing just to tell you that?” Wace snorted. “We know what the Salv are like. I figured they must be trying to pull one last trick.”

“Honestly, I was waiting for the mushroom cloud all the way up that beach,” Iva said, chewing a wad of gum. She was the only one of the squad who didn’t smoke. “Though if their atomics couldn’t stop us at Indeleon, they sure as shit couldn’t here, with all these mountains around to deflect the blast.”

“Wouldn’t have stopped us. Would’ve killed a good few of us,” Geddan grunted. “You don’t meet a lot of fellows from Indeleon any more.”

“There won’t be any more Indeleons,” Rann said firmly. “We’re putting an end to the Salv, and their atomics.”

Lidaro crushed his expired cigarette into the mud under his boot heel. “So, plan is, we burrow into that mountain, find Nilen’s atomic eggheads, and bring back their scalps for Dauman’s mantelpiece?”

Iva waved the lingering smoke away from her face. “You make it sound so easy.”

“No. If it was easy, we wouldn’t be here,” the boy said tersely. “But I’m glad we are.”

“You’re a mad bugger, then.” Geddan struck a sulphur match off a crumpled scrap of sandpaper to relight his failing cigarette. “You’ve never been under a mountain. Wouldn’t be so damned keen if you had.”

“You were a miner, weren’t you, Gedd?” Rann asked him. He was surprised Lidaro hadn’t fired some taunting remark at Geddan. Some cheap shot about cowardice, or how the Forester was too big to fit through the tunnels.

“A foreman. Spent fifteen years in the coalpits. Underground doesn’t bother me. Underground with buggers shooting at you, in corridors tight as a snake’s arsehole, now that I don’t like. At least in the pits, if the whole place exploded, most times it was an accident.”

“Did that ever happen to you?” Lidaro asked. There was a thoughtful look in his blue eyes.

“Not to me. Couple fellows I knew died that way, though. Electric spark set off firedamp in a deep seam.” He blew a coil of smoke up at the night. “Would have been quick.”

“You’d hope,” Iva said glumly.

Lidaro said nothing for a while. Then he spoke, quietly, without looking at any of them. “The Salv captured my brother at Ryvalan, in the first year of the war. The wireless said they put a lot of prisoners to work in the mines south of there. Mother was so happy when she heard that. She said the tunnels would keep him safe from our bombs, when we pushed the Salv back.”

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This, Rann hadn’t heard before. Lidaro had never mentioned having a brother. He waited for the boy to go on.

“I don’t know if they really sent Yasalei there. Maybe they shot him right after the battle, or shipped him off to their slave camps out east,” Lidaro said, his voice betraying no hint of emotion. “But Mother wanted him to be in the mines, so Father and I, we agreed that’s where he was. All through the war, we told her to wait for his letter. When I joined up, I said I’d bring him home with me.”

“We took Ryvalan back without much of a fight,” Rann said, hoping in some vague way to sound reassuring. “It was in the newsreels.”

“Yeah. Too late for the miners, though. The Salv herded them all down there, and collapsed the tunnels with blasting charges.”

Amid the noise and bustle of the encampment, the five of them shared a brief silence. After a moment, Wace spoke. “I’m sorry, Lidaro.”

“Don’t be,” Lidaro replied. He got up and turned towards the mountain, a looming black absence in the starry night, limned by the fires beyond it. “Them, though. They will be.”

He paced off towards the tent. As he passed by, Geddan wordlessly offered him the end of his cigarette. The boy took a long drag that burned it down to a glowing stub, and flicked it out of sight. “Thanks, Gedd,” he murmured.

“Welcome,” the Forester said simply.

Over the next few minutes, they all followed Lidaro, one by one. Rann was the last to retire. He untied his boots and left them by the tent’s opening, then crawled inside awkwardly, finding himself a space on the roughspun floor mat between Iva and Geddan. He could tell by the quietness of their breathing that they were all still awake. The air was dreadfully close and humid, freighted with the cloying odours of mud and unwashed bodies.

But Rann had slept in worse places than this. His drowsiness crept up on him with merciful quickness, and soon the others succumbed as well. For once, he hardly noticed when Geddan began to snore.

On the edge of sleep, sounds from outside filtered into Rann’s consciousness – a commotion of engines and the impatient blare of motor horns. A mechanised convoy was moving out into the night. Probably a unit of sappers, driving off to lay the groundwork for the assault on the mountain. A thankless task if ever there was one.

The noise and the muggy heat brought back memories of a warm spring evening, years before the war. Hazy, half-forgotten images steadily attained clarity in his mind’s eye. He and his then girlfriend, Teina, had gone to a music hall in the Crown City. For a country boy like Rann, the sheer scale of the place had been overwhelming – the soaring canyons of high-rises, the sea of neon signs and spotlit banners by night, the endlessly jostling motorcars. Riding the elevated monorail between districts had felt like a journey through a dreamworld. Passenger dirigibles, the aeronautical state of the art back then, had drifted over the skyscrapers and eclipsed the sun like elongated moons. He’d seen more people on a single intersection than lived in his entire hometown.

A Forester had tried to get into a saloon where they were getting a pre-show drink. Two burly doormen had muscled the tall copper-skinned youth back into the street, and when he protested, they’d thrown him onto the pavement and delivered swift precise kicks to his ribs, until he hollered in pain. Rann and Teina had watched, along with the other patrons, as the Forester limped away with his slacks torn and his head bowed. It was only when they left for the concert that Rann had noticed the poster tacked up in the window. Stark black block-letter print on a plain white background: “No Darkskins. No Foresters. Honour The Sacraments. Bless The People’s Salvation.”

That wasn’t the first he’d seen of the Salvators, but it was the first time he really paid them mind. Back then, they had just been a religious movement, calling for stricter segregation and a return to the traditional form of the Sacramental Faith. Smiling men and women in pious grey stood at street corners and in train stations across the kingdom, handing out flyers and paper rosettes. Their marches and rallies drew heaving crowds in the drought-haunted provinces. On the wireless, one could often hear impassioned broadcasts from their founder; a preacher from the eastern coast, a diminutive man by the name of Nilen. There had been rumours he planned to stand as the King’s Marshal. Rann had set little store by those rumours, at first.

Teina always giggled at Nilen’s scratchy voice, those long breathless sermons. “He keeps saying heretic. Does he know what that word means?” she’d say.

“I think it means whatever he needs it to mean,” Rann would reply.

Teina had been a sweet woman. Cheery, unassuming, energetic without being restless. She would kiss him awake in the mornings. Even after they parted ways, they’d stayed friendly and kept loosely in touch by letter and telegram. The last he’d heard from her, shortly before the newly-elected Marshal Nilen declared the king apostate, she was living in the river valleys north of the Crown City. She’d found work as a typist in some quiet market town where Salvator banners hung from every lamppost.

Those valleys had been burned to ashes in the final months of the war, first by the king’s bombers and then by the retreating Salv in their last spiteful campaign of scorched earth. Rann had read of fleeing civilians being marched into the woods to be shot as traitors. In some places, rumour had it the vengeful royal troops had been every bit as merciless as the Salv.

He hoped her end had been quick, when it came.