Caspar’s men were waiting for him at Gallow’s Croak, one of the inner bastions directly overlooking the Breach. Most of the seventeen-pounders on its polygonal breastworks were arranged to cover the approaches with enfilading fire in the event that the enemy broke through the outer defenses, but some were trained in the opposite direction, their sights fixed on the densely packed hovels crowding in from all sides.
The denizens of Chancer’s Run were as much of a threat to Lufthaven as the horrors beyond the curtain wall, Caspar knew. A most wretched breed of villains and scum. He kept a ready hand on the hilt of his saber as he walked, conscious of the sidelong glances his uniform drew from passersby.
Caspar started off with a commanding stroll, head set high and shoulders straight. It simply would not do for a commissioned officer to show weakness before the rabble. But the cobbles were uneven and slick with mud, the filth from the gutters overflowing in reeking rivulets. By the end of it he was walking on tippy toes to avoid dirtying his fresh pair of boots, holding his pants at the knees like a lady in skirts just to keep the hems from dragging.
None of it helped. He arrived before the gate as an absolute fashion disaster, the once spotless tunic plastered to his back with sweat and slowly turning a mysterious shade of yellow that stank somehow of onions. The sentry on duty received him with a sharp salute.
“Good day, Deputy-commissar. Are you lost?”
“I should hope not. Is this Gallows Croak?”
“Yessir. And the fleshpots are back that way,” the sentry said, giving Caspar a greasy smile. He pointed to a block of low houses where a scowling woman leaned against an alley wall, her see-through nightgown revealing muscles worthy of a prizefighter. Caspar caught her eye for a moment and flinched at the smoldering hatred he saw in them.
“Are you trying to be funny?” Caspar lashed out, turning back to the sentry.
“I weren’t making no jibes, sir,” the soldier blinked in honest confusion, “This here’s a forward post. It’s no place for a gentleman like yourself, if you take my meaning.”
“Evidently Stahlka disagrees,” Caspar said, and showed the man his orders. At the sight of the four-point seal the man’s smile evaporated like the morning dew.
“Company, ten-shun!” he bellowed, “Officer at the gate!”
Caspar entered a courtyard flanked on each quarter by low stone barracks. A platoon of militiamen was practicing pike drills at the base of a flagpole, the banner of the tear-and-sun wilting in the heat and dust. An officer stood overseeing their efforts, a dried-up string bean of a man with a shock of white hair, dressed in a striped green hosen and tunic. Upon seeing an officer of the Commissariat he straightened up and brushed his forehead with his fingertips in laziest salute that Caspar had ever seen. The men paused their drill to stare at Caspar until the officer roared:
“What are you worms goggling at? The killing stops for no one! Advance!”
“Killem! Killem! Killem!” the men howled, stepping towards a line of mannequins and stabbing the ever-loving stuffing out of them. Caspar watched as tufts of hay spilled to the ground and felt a knot of queasiness constrict in his gut. Though luminessor around his neck wasn’t tuned for use he could still sense the waves of fear and fatigue coming off the men like an animal stench. This was nothing like academy swordsmanship with its theories on poise and footwork. There was no art to this. Only the simple practice of murder.
“You are Captain Sedgic Courser, commander of this garrison?” Caspar held out his written orders towards the officer.
“None other,” Sedgic replied. He eyed the rolled-up papers as if they were something that had crawled out of an open sewer before turning to scream at one of his men:
“Narrow your stance, Rieback! Lunge in with your gut sticking out and some croaker’s bound to carve it off you for a sweetmeat. Am I right?”
“Right as rain, sir,” panted the militiaman.
Sedgic waved him on, still ignoring the papers. Caspar fought the urge to grind his molars into splinters and managed to say:
“Captain, you are to supply me with a company of your finest men to accompany me on a mission of extended reconnaissance into the Wasting.”
“Reconnaissance?” Sedgic harrumphed, “Out of the question.”
“This comes direct from the Stahlka,” Caspar shoved his orders right under Sedgic’s nose, “The chain of command—”
“Remains intact,” Sedgic interrupted, “You are a Deputy-commissar. By the Junta Statutes, your special advisory powers take effect only during times of war. Therefore, I am the ranking officer here, and I refuse to sign away the lives of three hundred men.”
“The war has never ended,” Caspar said, posturing up to him, “Not officially, anyway.”
“Yes. Isn’t that just bloody convenient?” said the captain. Caspar was pleased to see a vein throbbing in the center of Sedgic’s forehead. Evidently it didn’t take much to get under his skin.
“Will you comply?”
“I cannot.”
“You may hang just for saying that.”
“If it comes to swinging,” Sedgic shrugged, “Swing all, sez I. Stahlka would gain nothing by it—you’ll find there’s a shortage of honest men serving on the Breach.”
“Oh, is that what you are? An honest man?”
Caspar knew when to stop pushing the envelope. Sedgic was wearing the carefully blank expression of a man on the cusp of violence. Suddenly the captain barked:
“I have a proposition, deputy-commissar. Let’s you and I go for a walk right this minute.”
“If you wish,” replied Caspar, his mouth going dry and puckering up like a raisin. That had sounded a great deal like an invitation to a duel. Unconsciously his feet began inching into the classic line of attack. A shadow of a smile flickered across Sedgic’s face and Caspar Blaised himself for the worst. But to his surprise the captain spun on his heels and strode away.
“Aren’t you coming?” Sedgic called back over his shoulder, “As for the rest of you, drill to exhaustion, then report to the mess for victuals.”
Caspar followed the captain out the western gate of the keep and into the main thoroughfare. Wherever Sedgic went the sight of his ridiculous green pantaloons parted the crowds like seafoam before the prow. Caspar noted that even the grimiest urchins and gimlet-eyed vagrants doffed their caps and kept their eyes glued to the pavement until the captain had passed. Caspar filed the observation away for future inquiries.
They came to the end of the lanes where the hovels grew sparse and were replaced by lean-tos jutting up among the foundations of the old curtain wall, their roofs mere squares of cloth or goatskins propped up by sticks and sections of blast-pitted stonework. From beneath a dripping clothesline a woman with sunken eyes watched Caspar as behind her a gaggle of naked children played hook-a-rat in a circle scrawled in the dirt. Their version differed somewhat from the games of Caspar’s youth in that the prize was an actual, living rat, hissing and spitting with rage. They’d managed to bind it in a thin wire cage such that its paws could still scuttle across the ground, but since the cage was tied to a peg in the ground, all the rat could manage was to run in frantic circles as the players vied for its possession, their hookstaves clattering fiercely as the attackers sought to carry off the prize while those within the circle made a stout defense of it.
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“Charming community,” Caspar observed.
“Just wait till you meet the neighbors,” Sedgic replied.
Wooden palisades plugged up the largest gaps in the Breach, their frames reinforced with packed dirt and stones. Sentries kept watch from their loopholes, nursing their arquebuses in the crook of their arms as they yawned and rubbed at their own bleary faces. A bugle sang out when Caspar and Sedgic came within sight and the men staggered to attention, but not before the captain jumped bodily down their throats.
“Embarrass me in front of Commissariat quill-nibblers, will you?” Sedgic bellowed up at them.
Quill-nibbler? Caspar had never before encountered such brazen disrespect. Unsure of how to respond, he let the matter slide.
“Postlewait, you’d better have a good excuse for this,” Sedgic demanded, “Because at the moment I’ve a mind to set you digging latrines for week, barehanded!”
“No excuses, captain,” whinged a soldier in a plumed helmet, “No excuses. But the 4th’s been stoking the corpse-fires starting on last Tallowday, and not a man of us has caught a wink of shuteye since. Soon as dawn shows his sunny backside, we’re on patrol and a-quieting the corpses, gory as you like, and from noon to sixth bell we haul em back to be kindling. Either that or we’re filling in tunnels what will be dug up again come tomorrow. It’s a dog’s life, captain, if you don’t mind my say-so. When are we going to be relieved?”
“Stahlka will rotate the 4th Labor Battalion to the rear when it becomes necessary,” Sedgic replied with surprising mildness, “Until then, you’ll hold the line like a true son of Lufthaven. Open the gate—the deputy-commissar here wishes to make an inspection.”
Caspar smelled the pits even before the portcullis swung up with a rattle of heavy chains. The living stench wormed up his nose and made foul leavings in his mind, so that for weeks after every place he visited was touched by this sense of ague, the mildew of a dying century going the way of all things and back to the mud.
Mile upon mile of flooded trenches stretched from the city bulwarks to the hills beyond the horizon, the scorched and tortured earth divided by rivers of stagnant water. Beneath the looming shadow of the wall, gangs of workers slung bundles to bottom of a ditch where tongues of flame licked at a heap of ashes. Each man wore a nosebag across his face and a layer of soot on their skin so thick that they appeared to be pig-snouted devils groping through the bowels of hell.
“Impressive, isn’t it?” Sedgic remarked.
“I’d heard that some of the Enemy’s siegeworks remained intact, but this…” Caspar shook his head in disbelief, “Why, with all this in place they could storm the Breach tomorrow if they chose,” Caspar gave a strained laugh, “They’d be knocking on the citadel walls in time for tea and cakes.”
“Those are the last words I would’ve expected out of a commissar,” Sedgic replied, arching an eyebrow at him in surprise, “Aren’t you supposed to be assuring us of our inevitable victory?”
“Our conviction doesn’t blind us to reality,” Caspar riposted, “This situation is unacceptable. You’ve had years to demolish these trenchworks.”
“Son, do you have any idea just how many souls perished in the last great siege?”
“Two and a half millions. And don’t call me son,” said Caspar at once. It was one of many numbers he’d learned by rote in the academy, together with the average annual grousewheat yield of the agricultural districts (nine million bushels) and how long the city could survive on its stockpiles before it became necessary to draw lots to determine who would have the honor of offering up their bodies for the glory of Lufthaven (roughly twenty-eight days).
“Correct. And what is the combined strength of the Labor Battalions?”
“Between ten and twenty thousand,” Caspar replied, “Double that number in reserves.”
“Right again. I knew you’d be good at figures—quill-nibblers usually are.”
“Did you drag me out here to quiz me on useless trivia?” Caspar said, bristling at the insult, “Or did you have a point to make?”
“I just made one. For every mine or trench my men fill in with their shovels, the dead simply dig three more. They’re inert during the day, but from dusk to dawn they work without pause. They never tire or go hungry. Some believe that the dwarves created this force as a final act of vengeance. There are said to be great pipelines beneath the mountains of Metrogrom, pumping the miasma up into the earth from some deep-running well of evil. All this while Stahlka sits idle in the Principia, thumbs up their arses. What can mere men do against such monumental indifference?”
“You want more involvement from those above us,” Caspar pointed out, “And yet you also insist that the war is over.”
“Hah!” Sedgic scoffed, “You’re too young to remember what a real war between the Powers looks like. When the next one comes, as it surely will, we’ll need every pair of hands we can get. Which is why I refuse to sacrifice three hundred men for the sake of your vanity.”
“Vanity? How dare you cast such aspersions!”
Yet even as he said it, Caspar found he could not look Sedgic in the eye. Dropping his gaze, he noticed limbs sticking out from the bundles in the ditch, dry and desiccated, the skin wrinkling like parchment as the flames consumed them. There couldn’t have been more than thirty bodies in the pile by his count, but even that number felt staggering. To say nothing of two and a half millions…
He had seen death before, of course, when he’d been assigned to help quell the food riots at the central plaza. Who could’ve imagined that the price of bread could upset so many people? In the end the Civil Militia had been forced to disperse the mob with cannon fire. But Caspar had never seen destruction handled with such lazy, workmanlike efficiency. He watched as a pair of workers slung a corpse over the edge like a sack of potatoes. The bundle went bouncing down the slope in a tumble of clods and soil, falling just short of the pyre. As its toes brushed the flames, a spasm went through its body, fiendish life returning in a series of horrible convulsions. Rotted ligaments crackled and snapped as it began writhing up the slope on its belly.
“Roast me, will you?” it snarled, “Roast me till I’m good and juicy? Not this little chestnut!”
The ghoul’s head was carved nearly in half by a fearsome wound, milky-white eyes bulging out of their sockets like runny eggs, but that didn’t seem to bother it. It reached the rim with frightening agility and flung itself at the young commissar, snapping wildly at his ankles. Caspar uttered a high-pitched squeal and kicked out his legs in a series of desperate goosesteps, managing to stay mere inches away from the snapping fangs. He twisted an ankle on a loose stone and sat down hard. Cold fingers closed around his throat and began to squeeze, and squeeze, and squeeze till the vision began to fade from Caspar’s eyes.
“We got a live one,” said a militiaman.
“Short iron, please,” Sedgic drawled.
A laborer tossed him a spade. Sedgic snatched it out of the air and swung at the ghoul’s neck with the edge, shearing its head clean off its torso so that it described a perfect parabola through the air. It spat curses as it tumbled across the earth before rolling behind a grassy knoll and out of sight.
“Fore!” Sedgic called out. There was polite and scattered applause from the onlookers.
“Excellent form, sir,” said one militiaman.
“Too much power in the downswing,” critiqued another, holding up a piece of slate and chalk, “A little more finesse and he might’ve chipped it into that crater.”
“Everyone’s a critic,” Sedgic complained. Caspar pried the corpse off and stood up, breathing hard.
“Your assistance was unnecessary, captain,” he gasped, fighting back the urge to shudder, “But I thank you for the gesture.”
“Go home, boy,” Sedgic told him, “There’s no place for you here.”
“Yet here I am. Duty-bound.”
Sedgic let out a bark of laughter.
“You wouldn’t know duty if it bent you over and spanked you silly. All you want is a tinpot medal pinned to your chest.”
“I’m not the one refusing a sealed order here.”
“And what will that order accomplish, exactly? Do you even know what Stahlka’s after?”
Caspar leaned in and said in a low voice only the captain could hear:
“Vylem Redmaine.”
Now it was the captain’s turn to breathe in sharply. Caspar pressed ahead, knowing this was his only chance to sway him.
There was always the option of crushing Sedgic beneath the full weight of the Commissariat. But judging from the manner in which people behaved when in the captain’s presence, Sedgic was widely respected. It was clear that he was the glue holding together the pathetic, faltering efforts of the 4th Labor Battalion. Making an example of him would only create resentment in the ranks, resentment which out in the field would fester into outright mutiny. Caspar had heard many a story of commissars vanishing into the Wasting that way.
Besides, he didn’t want to ruin the man with bureaucratic backstabbing. Sedgic was undoubtedly an enemy, but he at least deserved to be destroyed through more honorable methods.
“Give me your cooperation,” Caspar said, “And I’ll personally guarantee that 4th Labor Battalion will be rotated to the rear upon the successful completion of the task.”
“What guarantee? Stahlka has sent you out here to vanish like the rest of us, and dead men cannot keep their promises.”
“Then it appears we both have a vested interest in keeping me healthy and whole,” Caspar said in triumph, “If Redmaine is brought to justice and I am still alive to savor our success, then your men will be relieved. Think it over, captain. How many more are you willing to lose out here?”
Sedgic looked at the tired faces all around him, and for an instant the hard lines on his smoothed over. Caspar knew he had him then. The captain nodded and said simply:
“You’ll have your three hundred. Three hundred and one.”
“I don’t follow,” Caspar said, frowning.
“Congratulations, Deputy-commissar. I’ve just volunteered to lead your little expedition. Of course, you’re still welcome to tag along.”
“That wasn’t part of our discussion!”
“As my dear mother always used to say: if you’re going to do something, at the very least, do it right,” Sedgic said. Then the captain strode back to the palisades, leaving Caspar fuming.