The Wounds Spread
For six days after Atlas Nine fell, nobody crossed the boundary, and Tovan Rheel, who counted everything, counted those too. The machines stayed where they had been left, the walkers standing silent in their gantries like cattle told to wait. The workers did not.
Every evening they gathered along the perimeter in the cooling light, supper bowls in their hands and the generators thrumming at their backs, and stared west across the strip of strange green grass. At first they joked about it. Somebody would call out to ask whether the forest wanted its river back, and somebody else would answer for the forest in a high, wavering voice. By the fourth night the jokes had stopped.
Something had begun walking around the camp after midnight. No one saw it. They only heard branches snapping in the dark beyond the last lamps — one, and then another, and then another — in a slow, patient circuit of the perimeter. The guards doubled their patrols. The sound continued anyway, and the guards came back from their rounds pale and talkative, carrying their lanterns rather higher than regulations required.
Tovan spent most of those six days inside Atlas Nine. He told everyone he was studying the damage, and that was true. It simply was not the whole truth.
The machine’s severed leg had been crushed inward with enough force to deform reinforced alloy. Tovan calculated the pressure required. Then he calculated it again, from first principles, in case he had trusted a table he should not have trusted, and then a third time on a fresh sheet, in very small, very neat figures. The numbers did not make him feel any better.
Sela found him beneath the walker just before dawn, with grey light coming up behind the gantry and his boots sticking out of an open maintenance hatch. He heard the crunch of her steps on the cinders, a pause, and then a long and eloquent silence directed at his feet.
“You’re still in there?”
“Yes.”
“You ate?”
Tovan did not answer. A cable creaked somewhere above his head.
“Tovan.”
“I had something.”
“When?”
“Yesterday,” he told the underside of the chassis.
He heard her sigh, and the clink of a mug set down on a strut, and then her face appeared at the edge of the hatch as she crouched to look beneath the chassis. He was lying among the cables and the grease with his diagnostic slate pressed against his chest, looking up at the bend. He could have drawn it with his eyes shut.
“There is no hidden engineering answer,” Sela said.
“I didn’t say there was.”
“You’ve been measuring the same bend for three days.”
“It failed wrong.”
“It got crushed by a root,” said Sela patiently.
“Yes.”
“That is the answer.”
Tovan slid himself out on the creeper board a foot at a time and sat up, blinking in the light. His face was filthy, streaked with black from brow to jaw, and his hands were worse. Sela handed him the mug of tea, which had gone lukewarm on the walk over, and he took it without looking at it. “It shouldn’t be possible.”
Sela stood and dusted off her knees. “Neither should north be underground. We’ve moved on.” She drew a folded sheet out of her coat and held it out to him between two oily fingers.
It was a requisition sheet. Tovan opened it on his knee, and halfway down the page he forgot the tea entirely. Four additional excavation walkers. Twelve boring engines. Three mobile foundries. Hundreds of replacement and expansion workers. And then, set a little apart from the rest at the bottom of the page, in the same neat clerk’s hand — security contracts.
Tovan looked up. “This wasn’t approved through engineering.”
“No.”
“Who signed it?”
Sela tapped the bottom of the sheet with one finger. She need not have bothered; Tovan already knew. The signature sat at the foot of the page, small and straight and perfectly legible. Marcellin Auric.
The second convoy arrived three days later, and Tovan heard it long before he saw it. It came up the eastern road in the afternoon heat beneath a column of dust, and the noise of it rolled ahead across the plateau like weather. The first convoy had looked like progress. This one sounded like preparation for war.
Heavy engines tore ruts into the road. Crates of blasting cylinders, stencilled with warnings, travelled beside stacked bridge components, and armoured supply wagons rolled between the towering construction machines. Tovan stood at the edge of the generator yard with his slate and counted them as they came in, and lost count, and started again.
And alongside them came the Bronze Mantle Company. Veterans, mercenaries, former soldiers: people who had spent too many years learning how quickly a peaceful assignment could become something else. It showed in the way they rode, loose in the saddle, eyes always moving, hands never far from their weapons.
Their captain was Jarek Voss. He was human and broad-shouldered, with grey beginning at the edges of his beard and a face that looked as if it had been left out in a good many winters. He wore plain armour scarred by old repairs, the patches riveted on neatly and never polished to match. There was no crest on it and no ceremonial sash. It was the armour of a man who expected to be hit in it.
His company was as mixed as any Synapse crew: dwarven riflemen with long guns slung across their backs, human veterans with faces as weathered as their captain’s, a minotaur shieldbearer whose shield was nearly the size of a door. Two goblin crossbowmen rode double on one patient mule and argued the whole way in. A lizardfolk tracker with a missing finger walked at the front, tasting the dusty air.
They looked a good deal less impressive than the machines. Tovan trusted them a good deal less.
Jarek dismounted near the generator yard, let go of his reins as though certain somebody would catch them — somebody did — and walked straight over to Tovan, pulling off his gloves as he came.
“Rheel?”
“Yes.”
“Voss.”
Tovan nodded. The captain did not offer his hand, and Tovan, who disliked having his hand taken by strangers, was grateful to him for it. Jarek’s eyes had already gone past him to the forest, and they stayed there.
“How many dead?”
“None.”
Jarek looked back at him. “None?”
“Not from attacks.”
“Machines lost?”
“Several.”
Jarek grunted, and Tovan watched him file the word away, as though he would want a proper number later and knew better than to ask for one now. “People taken?”
“Survey teams,” Tovan said. He did not elaborate.
“And?”
“They came back.”
Jarek scratched at his jaw, slowly, through the grey of his beard. “Fine,” he said. He looked west again, at the dark wall of the trees and the strip of strange grass, and at the long brown scar where the stump of Althuun still stood. “What am I supposed to shoot?”
Tovan frowned. “Preferably nothing.”
Jarek grunted again and began to pull his gloves back on, one finger at a time. “That’ll make the contract interesting.”
Marcellin Auric gathered the senior staff in the command pavilion that afternoon. The canvas walls glowed amber in the low sun, and the air smelled of hot dust and lamp oil. The four great beams overhead stood perfectly straight, and Tovan noticed that nobody had chosen to stand directly beneath them.
The revised construction map hung on a frame behind Marcellin, and Tovan saw the problem at once. The original corridor — one road, one straight green line — had been replaced with three major routes, and from those three sprang seven secondary branches, splitting like cracks through glass. Extraction zones had appeared deep inside the Sanctuary, hatched in red.
New stations. New bridge sites. New drilling areas, each marked with a tidy little symbol that Tovan had designed himself, years ago, for a quarry. He stepped closer. “This is triple the original clearance.”
“Approximately,” said Marcellin. He sat at the table with a folder open before him, turning its pages.
“We haven’t even finished mapping the first route.”
“Then map faster.”
“That isn’t how terrain works.”
Marcellin went on turning pages. “We cannot allow the project to fail because one route is vulnerable.”
Sela had settled on an upturned crate beside the tent pole, cracking roasted nuts between her thumb and forefinger and dropping the shells into her other palm. She studied the map for a long moment, head on one side. “You mean because the forest keeps breaking it.”
Marcellin did not look up, and he did not answer. He let the silence go on just long enough to make its point, and then he turned another page, and Sela put a nut in her mouth and crunched it with great deliberation.
It was Jarek who spoke next. He had been leaning against the canvas near the back with his arms folded and two of his sergeants beside him, and he did not raise his voice. “What are the rules?”
Marcellin looked up. “Rules?”
“If they attack the crews.”
“Protect the crews.”
“How?” Jarek’s arms stayed folded.
“With whatever force is necessary.”
Jarek shook his head, slowly, the way a man shakes his head at a horse he has decided not to buy. “No.”
Marcellin’s expression tightened at the corners of the mouth, very slightly. Tovan had seen grown men go white at less. “No?”
“I want it stated properly.” Jarek unfolded his arms and glanced around the pavilion — at the foremen, at the clerks with their pens, at Tovan and Sela — as though he were counting witnesses and wanted everyone to see him do it. “If somebody dies, I don’t want three clerks deciding afterward that I misunderstood you.”
A few of the workers glanced at one another. One of the clerks, Tovan noticed, had stopped writing altogether.
Marcellin stared at the captain for a long moment. Then he drew the papers in front of him together and squared their edges against the table, one side and then the next, until not one sheet stood out from the rest. “Defensive force only.”
Jarek nodded once. “Fine.” He let a beat pass. “Who decides what defensive means?”
Marcellin’s patience thinned; Tovan could see it in the way he set the stack down, a fraction harder than he needed to. “You do. That is why you are here.”
Jarek said nothing more. But he did not look reassured, and when the meeting broke up Tovan glanced back from the flap and saw him still standing before the map, studying the seven branches like the tracks of something he would one day have to follow.
Deep inside the Sanctuary, where Vaelor Thane kept his watch, the news travelled without messengers. Roots carried tremors from one valley into the next. Birds changed their migrations. Water altered in taste, and creatures abandoned places they had occupied for generations.
He stood among the ferns at the edge of a pool whose surface had turned black. It was not poisoned; the water was cold and clean and smelled of nothing but stone. It simply no longer reflected the sky. Looking into it was like looking into a hole in the world.
Eryndra stood at the water’s edge with her back to him, and he waited behind her, because that was what one did with Eryndra, and he was not good at it. He was Warden of the Thornwake. One side of his face was still elven, and felt the cool air coming off the pool. The other had long since become bark and knotted wood, and felt it only slowly, as a tree feels it.
In a hollow of his shoulder lived silver insects, and when he grew angry they came out. Today they covered half his arm, crawling in glittering lines down to the wrist. Anyone who knew him could have read his temper off his forearm like a page.
“Three columns,” Vaelor said.
“Yes.”
“More machines.”
“Yes.”
“Armed outsiders.”
“Yes.”
He struck his staff against the earth. The blow went down into the soil and came up again through the water, and the black surface of the pool shuddered from edge to edge. “Then it is done.”
Eryndra did not move. She had gone entirely still, the way a deer goes still, listening to something beneath the ground, and the leaves at her temples hung motionless with her. “What is?”
“We wake the Thornwake.”
“No.”
Vaelor stared at the back of her head. He had expected argument. He had come ready for it, had walked half the night with it turning over and over in his mind, and the flatness of the answer angered him more than any argument could have done. The insects poured down over his knuckles.
“They cut Althuun.”
“I know.”
“They return with soldiers.”
“I know.”
“Then stop saying that.”
Eryndra turned round at last. Vaelor flung out his arm and pointed east through the trees, toward the far-off camps that neither of them could see and both of them could feel, like a splinter working its way in under the skin. “We bury their machines. We break their roads. We drive every living thing wearing their colours out of the Sanctuary.”
“We do that already.”
“Not enough.”
“No.”
He took a step toward her, crushing the ferns beneath his feet. “No?”
“No,” said Eryndra. “It is not enough.”
That silenced him. Of all the things he had expected her to say, agreement had not been among them, and he stood there with his arm still half raised and found that he did not know what to do with it.
Eryndra looked past him toward the eastern horizon, where the morning was coming up grey through the canopy. “They are counting on that.”
Vaelor’s brow tightened, and he heard the bark creak faintly on the wooden side of his face. “On what?”
“On us losing patience.”
His insects crawled over his wrist and back again, restless as a swarm before rain. Eryndra went on in the same level voice. “If we destroy their camps tonight, what happens tomorrow?”
“They leave.”
“No.” Her voice sharpened, and he heard it sharpen. “Marcellin sends the bodies east.”
Vaelor said nothing, because he had nothing to say to that, and he did not like having nothing to say.
“He tells the court that the Sylvan slaughtered workers. He tells merchants their people are unsafe. He tells the Justicars the western roads are under attack.”
Vaelor’s jaw hardened until he felt the wood of it grind. “They are invading us.”
“Yes.”
“Then let them call it what it is.”
“They will not.” Eryndra came toward him across the moss, barefoot and soundless, and on the branches above them the seven black birds shifted their feet. “They will call it a Sylvan uprising.”
Vaelor looked away from her, down at the black water. It did not help. Eryndra lifted one hand and pointed at the pool. “Right now they are the ones crossing into our Sanctuary.” She turned and pointed east. “They are the ones cutting. They are the ones building. They are the ones violating the boundary.” Her voice lowered. “If we drown three camps and leave hundreds dead, that story changes.”
Vaelor looked back at her. “You fear their story?”
“I fear what follows it.”
He waited. Somewhere above them a bird shook out its feathers and was still again.
Eryndra answered him quietly. “Justicar banners.”
The insects on Vaelor’s arm stopped moving.
“Gilded coin buying more soldiers. Court orders. Other guilds deciding we have become a threat to the realm.” She looked around them as she said it, at the ferns and the old trunks and the pool that reflected nothing, as if she could already see them gone. “And then we are no longer defending against one expansion.”
Vaelor understood now. He hated that he understood. It sat in him like a swallowed stone, and no amount of anger was going to shift it. “We defend against Ashkar.”
“Yes.”
Neither of them spoke for a time. Far away, something enormous moved between the trees; they both felt it come up through their feet, a long, slow shifting of weight, and then stillness again. Vaelor lowered his staff until its foot rested on the moss. “So we bleed carefully.”
Eryndra’s expression hardened. “No.”
“We do.”
“No.” She stepped closer, close enough that he could see the fine grain of the bark along her neck. “We hit them. We break the machines. We take their crews. We close every road they open.” Her voice was colder now, and quieter, which was worse. “But we do not give Marcellin a field of bodies he can carry to the Supreme Ruler.”
Vaelor stared at her. The insects had begun, very slowly, to move again along his arm. “And if the Supreme Ruler does nothing?”
Eryndra did not answer at once. She looked down into the black pool, and the leaves at her temples stirred, though there was no wind under the trees at all.
“Then I stop caring what story Marcellin tells,” she said, and above them, one by one, the seven black birds turned their heads toward the east.
Jarek Voss had ridden into a good many forests in his life, and had never liked any of them, and he liked this one least of all. The first expanded construction column entered the Sanctuary at dawn under a sky the colour of wet slate, and within a hundred yards the trees had closed overhead and the light came down green and dim through the mist.
He rode on the flank, where a captain could see the whole column, and counted it. Two excavation walkers, stepping high over the roots. Four armoured haulers. Portable pylons, and a bridge-laying engine folded up like a beetle. Forty Synapse workers, and thirty of his own Bronze Mantle guards spread along the line where he had placed them.
Tovan Rheel rode in the lead carriage with his slate on its strap, and the horned engineer, Venn, stood behind him with one hand on the rail. For the first mile, nobody spoke much; the forest seemed to swallow even the noise of the engines. By the second, the tension had begun to loosen, because people cannot stay afraid of nothing for long. Somebody on a hauler began to sing. Another worker shouted at him to stop, and Jarek, who agreed with the second man, kept his face straight.
Then the convoy halted.
Hundreds of deer stood between the trees, among the trunks and the bracken and the mist, perfectly still and perfectly silent, watching the column. They were not ordinary deer. Some carried flowering vines through their antlers, white and pale gold. Others bore pale markings along their sides that looked almost like writing. At the centre stood a great stag, taller than Jarek’s horse, with antlers spread like the bare crown of a winter tree.
In the lead carriage Tovan raised a hand, and the machines groaned to a stop. Jarek nudged his horse forward until he drew level. The horse did not want to go, and he did not blame it.
“Road blocked?”
Tovan nodded without taking his eyes off the herd.
Jarek looked off to one side, where the ground fell away into reeds and standing water. “East?”
“Swamp.”
“West?”
“Ravine.”
Jarek looked at the deer for a while. Some hundreds of animals spread out across the forest floor, and not one of them had so much as flicked an ear. “Then we wait.”
Venn was watching the stag, and had been since the column stopped. “They know,” she said.
Jarek glanced up at her. “They’re animals.”
“That one’s looking straight at you.”
It was, as it happened. Jarek had noticed that some time ago, and had decided not to mention it. “It’s still a deer.”
The stag lowered its great head, slowly, as if acknowledging something — what, Jarek could not have said. Then it turned. The entire herd turned with it, all at once and without a sound, and within moments they had melted away into the green dark between the trunks, and the forest was only a forest again.
Tovan went on staring at the place where they had been. Venn noticed it before Jarek did, and leaned over the rail. “What?”
“They weren’t stopping us.”
“No?”
Tovan shook his head. “They were leaving.”
Jarek looked ahead, up the line of the road that did not yet exist, into the mist. His horse shifted under him and blew out a long breath through its nose. “Leaving what?”
Tovan did not answer. After a moment Jarek gathered his reins and rode back down the column to tell his people to keep their eyes open, which, he saw as he passed them, they already were.
Three hours later the drilling crews reached a ridge, and Tovan climbed down from the carriage to look at it. It ran across their path like a wall of grey stone furred with lichen, a few stunted pines clinging along the crest. The road required a cut through solid rock.
No major root systems appeared on the scans. No nesting grounds. No visible reason not to proceed. Tovan checked the readings, and checked them again, and a third time, standing in the wind while the riggers fidgeted with their charges. Then he lowered the slate and gave the order.
“Fire.”
The detonation shook the valley. Stone burst outward in a grey fountain, and dust rolled back over the construction line, tasting of flint and powder. A few of the workers cheered, and Tovan felt the small, familiar loosening in his chest that came when a job went as planned.
Then the mountain screamed.
The sound came from inside the rock: low, grinding, alive. Tovan felt it in his teeth. Cracks raced across the exposed ridge, branching as he watched, and the pebbles began to dance about his boots.
Somewhere to his left, Jarek was shouting. “Back!”
The stone opened. A colossal shape pulled itself from the mountain the way a man drags himself out of a pit, with plates of rock covering its back and roots tearing loose around its limbs. It had no eyes that Tovan could see, only a hollow mouth ringed with jagged stone, and out of it came that grinding scream.
One worker froze where he stood. Jarek reached him in four strides and dragged him backward by the collar. The creature swung an arm, and the blasting platform vanished beneath it. Metal folded. A Synapse rigger flew across the clearing, and another worker disappeared beneath the falling debris.
The minotaur shieldbearer of the Bronze Mantle charged, bellowing, to put himself between the giant and two engineers trapped beneath a toppled gantry. The giant struck him. His shield cracked down the middle, and he dropped to one knee under the blow and stayed there, braced.
“Move!” he roared.
The trapped engineers crawled free. Tovan was already running for the nearest excavator, hauling himself into the cab before his mind caught up with his body. Sela came up the ladder behind him.
“This thing isn’t built for this.”
“I know.”
“That was not reassurance!”
Tovan forced the excavation arm down between the workers and the creature like a bar dropped across a door. The stone giant struck it. The machine twisted under them with a shriek of metal, and steam erupted from broken lines.
“Tovan!”
“I’m trying!”
The giant raised its arm again, high above the cab. Tovan looked up through the cracked glass at a fist of stone the size of a cart and knew, with perfect clarity, that the excavator arm would not hold a second time.
Then the giant stopped.
Eryndra stood on its shoulder. Tovan never saw her arrive; she was simply there, barefoot on the plates of rock, with the seven black birds wheeling above. She laid one hand flat against the stone, and the creature trembled. He could see her lips move, whispering, though he heard nothing over the steam.
Slowly, the raised arm came down. Then the giant retreated, step by grinding step, back into the ridge, and the stone closed around it like water over a dropped weight.
Eryndra jumped down. Jarek had his weapon up before her feet touched the dust, and Tovan was down the ladder without remembering how. He caught the captain’s wrist. “Don’t.”
Jarek pulled free — not roughly, but he did not lower the gun until he had looked hard at Tovan’s face. “One of your workers is dead.”
Eryndra looked toward the collapsed platform. Her face changed, and Tovan, watching her, thought at first that what he saw was guilt. It was not guilt. It was grief. But it was not grief for the same reason as theirs, and he did not yet understand what the reason was.
She walked to the foot of the ridge and put one hand flat against the broken stone, where it was still settling and ticking as it cooled. “They broke open his sleeping chamber.”
Jarek stared at her. “He killed a man.”
Eryndra turned. “And they woke him with explosives.”
Jarek’s jaw tightened under the grey of his beard. “So that makes it fine?”
“No.” Eryndra looked toward the body lying in the dust beyond the ruined platform. “It makes it ours to remember.”
Then she walked away into the trees, and the birds went after her. Jarek watched her go, with the gun hanging forgotten at his side.
“I don’t understand these people,” he said.
Tovan looked at the ruined ridge: the raw grey wound in the stone, the dust still drifting down out of the air, and the place where something had been sleeping until he woke it.
“I’m starting to,” he said.
The dead worker’s name was Orin Pell, and Tovan read it off the crew list that evening and then read it again, as if the second reading might say something different. Twenty-three years old. Apprentice structural engineer. Eleven months in the Neon Synapse.
The workers held a funeral beside the unfinished road in the last of the light, with the walkers standing dark behind them and the smell of broken stone still in the air. There were no speeches. Someone placed Orin’s tool belt beside the body, the grips worn smooth where his hands had been.
His roommate came forward last and left half a bottle of cheap spirits, and stood there as though he had meant to say something, and went back to his place without saying it.
Sela stood beside Tovan, close enough that their sleeves touched. Neither of them moved away.
Marcellin arrived late, in a clean coat, with an aide at his elbow. He spoke first to the foremen, quietly. Then to the quartermaster. Then he spoke to Jarek, and Tovan, who was standing near enough to hear, heard him ask which of the machines could still operate.
Tovan stared at him. Something in him had gone very hot and very still at the same time, and he felt Sela turn her head to look at him.
“Don’t,” she said.
“He’s asking about equipment.”
“I know.”
“Orin is right there.”
“I know.”
Tovan started walking. Sela grabbed his sleeve, and he stopped — not because she had pulled hard, but because he realised, three steps across the grass with Marcellin’s well-cut back in front of him, that he had no idea what he intended to say. Behind him, the bottle beside Orin caught the last of the light, and went dark.
That night Tovan entered Marcellin’s pavilion without permission. The camp had gone quiet but for the generators, and a brazier burned low against the chill. Marcellin sat beneath a hanging lamp, reading loss reports, with the remains of a supper at his elbow; he had eaten while he read.
“You knew,” said Tovan.
Marcellin did not look up. “About?”
“The ridge.”
“I knew there were irregular readings.”
“You had the survey.”
“Yes.”
“It flagged movement underground.”
Marcellin looked at him now, and set his pen down beside the report. “What are you asking?”
“Why did you approve blasting?”
“Because the road passes through the ridge.”
“Orin is dead.”
“Yes.”
The answer was immediate. There was no pause before it at all, and it stopped Tovan where he stood as surely as a hand laid against his chest. He had come in with an argument ready, and he understood now that the whole of it had depended on Marcellin flinching.
Marcellin put down the report. “I know his name. I know which crew he belonged to. I know where the compensation goes.”
Tovan felt sick. “You make it sound like paperwork.”
“It is paperwork now.”
“He was twenty-three.”
Marcellin rubbed his forehead with two fingers, slowly. “Yes.”
Tovan waited for more. Nothing came, and the brazier ticked in its corner, and at last he said it. “You don’t care.”
Marcellin’s expression changed. It was not anger, at first. It was fatigue — a long, grey, bone-deep weariness that Tovan had never once seen on him, and that was gone almost before he had seen it. Then came irritation, which was more familiar.
“That sentence is childish.”
Tovan stiffened. Marcellin rose from his chair. “You think caring is the same as stopping?”
“No.”
“Yes, you do.” He pointed at the reports, the whole squared stack of them. “I have injured workers. Damaged equipment. Delayed shipments. Frightened investors. A dead apprentice whose family must be paid.” His voice rose slightly. In anyone else it would have been nothing; in Marcellin, who did not raise his voice, it was very nearly a shout. “I care because all of those things now require action.”
Tovan stared at him. “And what action do you take?”
Marcellin sat down again and drew the reports toward him, and squared their edges against the table, one side and then the next. “Continue.”
Tovan’s face went blank. He felt it go, like a door swinging shut in a draught.
Marcellin opened another ledger and picked up his pen. “When you have a viable reroute, bring it to me.” The pen began to move across the page, and Tovan stood before the table for some time, and it did not stop.
In the weeks that followed the construction spread, and that was the horror of it. Not because the Sanctuary stopped fighting, but because the Neon Synapse adapted. Every act of resistance became an engineering problem, and in the workshop sheds on the plateau the lamps burned all night.
Roots destroyed the roads, so the Synapse raised the roads above the soil on steel trestles. Vines strangled machinery, and heated plating was added, so that the vines shrivelled black where they touched it. Spores drifted down from the canopy in golden clouds and left whole crews senseless; respirators were issued.
Rivers changed course, and portable bridge systems followed them. Fog confused navigation, so guidance cables were stretched between towers, and the convoys felt their way along them like blind men along a rope. Each solution made the next incursion easier.
The forest began losing ground. A silver-barked grove disappeared beneath a mobile foundry. A nesting basin became an extraction pit. A luminous marsh was drained, and its light went out in a single evening. A mountain pass was blasted wide enough for heavy machinery, and the echoes rolled round the peaks for an hour.
The workers did not wake each morning intending to destroy the Sanctuary. They woke because shifts began at dawn, and because wages were due, and there were families in the east waiting on them. Somebody had to repair the engines. Somebody had to move the stone. Somebody had to maintain the generators, and not one of them, taken alone, was doing anything worse than a day’s work.
Destruction acquired schedules.
Jarek Voss read the patrol reports by lantern-light in his tent, with rain drumming on the canvas and his boots steaming beside the brazier, and every night there were more of them. Eryndra was answering differently now, and every one of her answers came to him on paper. Whatever rules the forest was fighting by, the first of them had plainly not changed: no massacres. Everything beneath that had changed entirely.
Convoys vanished into fog and returned without their engines, as though the machinery had simply been lifted out of them. Machines were dragged into rivers and found in the morning with the water running through their cabs. Supply caches disappeared overnight, leaving a rectangle of flattened grass. Bridges were grown shut beneath masses of roots so thick that the axes bounced off them.
His own patrols fared no better, and that was the part Jarek took personally. Bronze Mantle squads found themselves surrounded by beasts, far too many and far too patient, and were forced to abandon their weapons on the ground before they were released. They came back ashamed and furious, and he could not blame them, and he could not give them back their weapons either.
Workers were taken from remote sites. They returned days later, barefoot, unarmed and terrified, and most carried the same message: leave the Sanctuary. One foreman came back with his uniform covered in living moss. A young engineer returned clutching a seed so tightly that it had cut his palm. A mercenary — one of Jarek’s own — came back without his sword, and refused to explain what had taken it.
No one died. Not by accident. Not yet. Jarek touched the small leather book in the breast of his coat, where he kept the names of his dead. There were no names from this contract in it, and he meant to keep it that way.
He gathered up the reports and walked through the rain to the engineering shed, where the lamps were still burning, because they always were. Tovan Rheel sat over a schematic with a cold supper untouched at his elbow. Jarek slammed the reports down on top of the schematic.
“They’re doing this on purpose.”
Tovan looked up at him. “Yes.”
“They know where our patrols are.”
“Yes.”
Jarek slapped a hand down on the top sheet. “They know the routes.”
“Yes.”
Jarek leaned across the table and pointed a finger at him. “Stop agreeing with me.”
Tovan blinked. Rain dripped from the edge of Jarek’s hood onto the schematic, and the engineer moved the corner of it carefully out of the way before he spoke. “What do you want?”
“I want authority to strike them before they strike us.”
“They haven’t killed anyone.”
Jarek laughed. There was no humour in it at all. “You keep saying that.”
“Because it matters.”
“To you.”
“To everyone.”
Jarek leaned forward, both hands flat on the reports, until the lamp lit his face from below and made it older than it was. “No, Chief. It matters to the people who aren’t dead yet.”
He straightened and pulled his hood up again, and looked out through the open door of the shed toward the dark line of the trees, where the rain was falling and something was waiting, every bit as patient as he was.
“Sooner or later,” he said, “one of them decides to stop being careful.”
At Ilyr’s Rest that moment nearly came, and Eryndra was there to see it.
The basin lay in a wide fold of the hills, with low grey grass and pale stony soil. To the Gilded surveyors it had looked empty: dry, dormant, unproductive. They did not understand that every eighty years enormous white flowers emerged from that soil, and that creatures travelled across the Sanctuary to reach them. Some of those migrations lasted months.
The next bloom was still years away, and so the machines moved in. Eryndra watched from a ridge with Vaelor beside her, in a cold wind that smelled of hot oil. Below them a construction walker crushed a dormant root bed beneath one metal foot, and she felt it break through the soles of her bare feet like a cracked tooth.
Vaelor made a sound in his throat. “Enough.”
Eryndra said nothing. Down in the basin another machine began to drill, its bit spinning up to speed with a high and rising whine.
Vaelor turned to look at her. The insects would be out along his arm again; she did not need to look to know it. “Enough.”
She still did not answer. He stepped closer, and she heard the creak of the bark on his face. “Eryndra.”
“I heard you.”
“Then call them.”
She knew what he meant. The old things: storm spirits, buried beasts, river forces not awakened in generations. One command from her could tear apart the entire construction column, and leave nothing in Ilyr’s Rest but wreckage for the white flowers to grow through in their time.
Eryndra looked down at the basin. “What happens after?”
Vaelor’s face twisted, the elven half and the wooden half together. “I am done with after.”
“I’m not.”
“They are killing now.”
“Yes.”
“So kill them now.”
Eryndra turned to him at last. “No.”
Vaelor struck his staff into the ground, hard enough that a crack ran out from it through the stony soil. “You said if the ruler failed us—”
“He has not even heard us yet.”
“And whose fault is that?”
That landed. She felt it go in, quite deep, and she said nothing, because there was nothing honest she could say.
Vaelor stepped closer still. “We wait for reports to travel while roots die under iron.” His voice cracked — not elegantly, not dramatically, but simply with rage, the way a branch cracks when too much weight is put on it. “My people are asking why I stop them from fighting.”
Eryndra looked back toward the machines. “So are mine.”
“Then answer them.”
She could not. Below them the drill bit entered the earth, and the sound of it seemed to travel through the whole ridge, up through the rock and into her bones, so that the leaves at her temples shivered as if in a gale. Eryndra closed her eyes.
“Not yet,” she said.
When she opened them again Vaelor was staring at her, and what was in his face was disgust. She made herself meet it.
“Then tell Ilyr that,” he said, and walked away. Eryndra stood alone on the ridge with the wind in her face and the drill singing in the stone beneath her, and did not move.
Tovan Rheel reached the gorge a little after noon, and the first Sylvan killed by the expansion was lying at the bottom of it. She was not a warrior. Her name was Lethari, a young scout, and she had been carrying three hatchlings across a root bridge when a Synapse boring engine severed the network beneath it. The bridge collapsed. Two hatchlings survived. Lethari did not.
The gorge was narrow and green and loud with water, and the broken ends of the bridge hung down from either side, pale roots snapped short and dripping sap. The boring engine stood silent on the far bank. Lethari lay among the ferns, small and slight, and the two surviving hatchlings crouched against her side, making a thin, piping sound.
Tovan stood several paces away with his helmet in his hands. He had taken it off without thinking when he saw her, and now he did not know what to do with it.
Eryndra arrived before the body had been moved. She came down the side of the gorge without seeming to climb it, and the black birds came down after her and settled in the broken roots overhead.
“I’m sorry,” Tovan said.
Eryndra ignored him. She knelt beside Lethari in the wet ferns and touched her face, very gently, with the backs of her fingers. Then she picked up one of the surviving hatchlings and held it against her chest, and it stopped its piping and was still.
Tovan shifted his feet. The silence was unbearable, and he had never been any good at bearing things he could not fix. “The survey didn’t show the bridge.”
She gave him nothing. The water ran on over the stones.
“We didn’t know anyone was above it.”
Nothing again. The hatchling breathed against her chest.
“I can shut this section down.”
Eryndra looked at him, and Tovan stopped. Her expression frightened him — not because it was furious, though he had come braced for fury, but because it was empty. There was nothing in it at all. It was like looking at a house after everyone who lived in it had gone.
“We can reroute,” he said quietly.
Eryndra looked back down at Lethari. “There is always another route for you.”
Tovan lowered his eyes. He stood there a long time, turning the helmet over and over in his hands, while the water ran and the birds watched him from the broken roots. After a while he said, “I don’t know what you want me to say.”
Eryndra stood. “I want you to leave.”
“I can’t.”
She stared at him. He was ashamed of the answer; he felt the shame go through him, hot and thorough, from his scalp to his boots. But he did not change it, because it was true.
Eryndra nodded once. “Then stop asking me to understand you.”
With the hatchling still held against her, she gathered up the other, and lifted Lethari in her arms, and carried her away up the side of the gorge. The birds rose and went with her. Tovan stood alone among the ferns with his helmet in his hands and the broken bridge dripping above him.
That night the Thornwake gathered, and Vaelor Thane stood at the centre of it beside the dead.
They did not meet in a hall. They met beneath a vast arch of living roots, high as a cliff, and the night air beneath it smelled of moss and cold water and crushed leaves. Pale fungus glowed in the crevices of the root walls, and by its light Vaelor watched them come in from the dark.
Elven wardens with their bows unstrung. Humans bound to the Sanctuary. Bark-skinned guardians who stood among the others like trees. A moss-covered troll who had protected the same river for centuries, hunched beneath the arch with his great hands hanging. And creatures whose names had never crossed into eastern languages, standing at the edges of the light with their eyes shining.
Lethari lay at the centre, wrapped in leaves. Vaelor stood beside her with his staff in his hand and the silver insects crawling thick along his arm, and he did not try to call them back. When he spoke, he did not raise his voice. He did not need to.
“No more.”
The words moved through the gathering like wind through reeds. Someone called out from the dark beneath the roots: “Wake the river.” Another voice: “Call the cliff storms.” Then a third, louder than the others, a shout that rang off the vault overhead: “Bury their camps.”
Eryndra stepped forward into the light, and Vaelor looked at her. He did not tell her to stop. Another night he might have shouted her down. But this time he wanted to hear what she would say.
Eryndra looked across the gathered Sylvan, slowly, from face to face. “We strike everything they build.”
A murmur ran round the arch.
“We break every machine we can reach.”
The murmur grew louder, and she raised her voice over it. “We take every worker we can take without killing them.”
There was anger in the crowd at that, and Vaelor felt it, a hot and restless shifting like a beast turning in its den. Then Eryndra’s voice hardened. “If they raise weapons against us, defend yourselves.”
Vaelor watched her carefully. That was new. She had never said it before, not in so many words, and he could see that the gathering knew it too.
Someone shouted from the back: “Why spare them?”
Eryndra turned toward the voice. “Because I will not give Marcellin the war he wants.”
The gathering quieted. She pointed east, out through the roots toward the distant camps. “He wants bodies.” Her voice was cold now, as cold as the water in the black pool. “He wants frightened merchants. Dead workers. Stories of Sylvan beasts tearing apart camps.” She looked down at Lethari in her wrapping of leaves. “He wants the Supreme Ruler to hear about our violence before he hears about theirs.”
Vaelor kept his face hard. He would not give her that much, not yet.
“So we do not give it to him,” said Eryndra.
Someone shouted, high and cracked: “How many of ours die for that?”
Eryndra stopped. The question hung there beneath the roots. Vaelor watched her look down at Lethari, and then up at the faces around her — broken faces, many of them, faces that had lost something already — and he saw her take the question in and not turn away from it.
“Too many already,” she said.
No one spoke. Eryndra swallowed, and Vaelor, who had known her a long time, could not remember ever having seen her do it.
“For that, I am responsible.”
He looked at her sharply. She did not avoid his gaze. She met it and held it, in front of all of them.
“I believed we could hold them without forcing the throne to choose.” Her voice had become quieter. “I was wrong.”
The crowd shifted, and on Vaelor’s arm the insects went still, as they had gone still beside the black pool.
“I go east,” said Eryndra.
Vaelor frowned. “To the ruler?”
“Yes.”
“What if he refuses?”
Eryndra looked up at the dark roof of roots overhead, where the fungus-light did not reach. “Then the Sanctuary stops asking permission.”
That changed the room. Vaelor felt it change, the way the air changes before a storm breaks, and he stared at her for a long time. Then he lowered his staff until its foot rested on the earth beside Lethari’s head.
It was not agreement. It was not forgiveness. But it was enough.
Before Eryndra could leave, blood came first, and Tovan heard about it the way the camp heard about everything that mattered: in pieces, at second hand, and too late.
A Bronze Mantle patrol had discovered Sylvan saboteurs dismantling a drilling platform in the night. The Sylvan fled, and the mercenaries pursued them into the trees. Nobody, afterwards, could agree who fired first. The official account claimed that the Sylvan turned and attacked. Several workers who had been on the platform insisted, to anyone who would listen, that they did not.
Three Sylvan died: a human woman, a bark-skinned guardian, and an antlered creature barely older than Lethari. One Bronze Mantle soldier suffered a wound to the shoulder.
By dawn the Gilded report had already been written. It was waiting on Tovan’s workbench when he came in, squared neatly against the edge, in the grey light from the shed window with the lamp guttering out beside it. His own name was lettered at the foot, above an empty line.
ARMED SYLVAN ASSAULT REPELLED BY PROJECT SECURITY.
Tovan read it. Then he read it again, from the heading to the last line, while the lamp went out and the light outside grew. Sela came in with the morning tea, set it down at his elbow, looked over his shoulder, and took the page out of his hands to read it for herself.
“Wasn’t what happened,” she said.
“No.”
She gave it back to him. “You signing?”
Tovan stared at the line that bore his name. He picked up the pen and held it over the paper, and hesitated, and a single bead of ink fell from the nib into the margin. Then he drew the pen across the report from corner to corner, hard enough to score the paper, and underneath, in his neat engineer’s capitals, he wrote:
INCIDENT ACCOUNT DISPUTED.
Sela leaned over his shoulder, a roasted nut halfway to her mouth and forgotten there. “Put the witnesses.”
Tovan added a second line beneath the first.
WORKER TESTIMONY CONTRADICTS SECURITY SUMMARY.
He put down the pen and sat back. Sela looked at him for a long moment, and for once she was not smiling at all.
“That’s going to hurt,” she said.
Tovan rubbed his face with both hands, smearing ink across one cheek without noticing. “I know.”
Marcellin summoned him before noon. The command pavilion was hot by then, the sun beating on the canvas and the flaps tied back for air, so that the noise of the camp came in with the glare. Tovan’s report lay on the desk in front of Marcellin, and the long diagonal line across it could be seen from the doorway. Marcellin tapped it once with one finger.
“What is this?”
“My objection.”
“I can see that.”
Tovan waited. Marcellin’s jaw tightened. “This report goes to insurers. Court offices. Investors. Contract representatives.”
“The report is false.”
“Were you there?”
“No.”
“Then you do not know that.”
“I spoke to workers who were.”
“And security spoke to theirs.”
“Jarek didn’t write this.”
Marcellin paused. It was the smallest of pauses, no longer than a breath, and in anyone else Tovan would not have noticed it at all. But it told him enough.
“You approved it.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
Marcellin sat back in his chair. For the first time, the exhaustion showed clearly — in the hollows beneath his pale eyes, in the set of his shoulders under the beautiful coat — and he did not trouble to hide it. “Because I need the project under control.”
“It isn’t.”
“No.”
The answer surprised Tovan so much that he did not know what to say next. Marcellin did not wait for him. “I have dead Sylvan. A dead engineer. Nervous financiers. A security company beginning to complain about unclear authority. A court asking why the western project appears to be collapsing.” He pointed at the report, at the scored line and the capitals beneath it. “I cannot send them uncertainty.”
Tovan stared at him. “So you send them a lie.”
“I send them something they can act on.”
Tovan did not trouble to hide what he felt either. It must have been plain in his face, because Marcellin’s patience, which Tovan had once believed had no bottom to it, simply vanished. “Do not look at me like that.”
Tovan said nothing. Marcellin stood. “You think truth runs governments?”
Tovan shifted uncomfortably. He had never been good at arguments that were not about numbers, and this one was not. “I think it should matter.”
“It matters when someone can use it.”
Tovan looked away from him, toward the great map on its frame, with its three routes and its seven branches and its tidy red hatchings. Somewhere in all that painted green there was a gorge with a broken bridge. “And who gets to use Lethari?”
Marcellin frowned. “Who?”
Tovan looked back at him for a long moment, and saw that the name meant nothing to him at all.
“That’s what I thought,” he said, and left.
By the end of the second month, the first permanent Gilded structure stood inside the Sanctuary, and Eryndra climbed to a distant ridge to look at it. Stone, steel, gold-braced windows, and a tower overlooking a cleared valley. Marcellin called it Auric Station. The workers called it the Nail, and from a distance that was exactly what it looked like: something hammered into living earth.
The Gilded Coven had raised its banner above the roof. The gold cloth unfurled over the trees, bright as a coin, the only thing for miles that did not belong there. Vaelor stood beside her, leaning on his staff.
Below them, machine-light burned across bare ground where enormous red ferns had once grown. Farther west, another column moved into a new valley. Then another. Eryndra laid her palm flat against the trunk of the old pine beside her, and felt it shiver.
Vaelor spoke first. “When do you leave?”
“Tonight,” said Eryndra, without looking away from the banner.
He nodded. There was no argument.
Behind them, the animals were already moving deeper into the Sanctuary. She could hear them and feel them through the earth: great herds, winged predators, burrowing beasts, creatures leaving places they had occupied for generations. It was not migration. It was retreat.
Vaelor looked back toward them, and then at her. “If he refuses you…”
“I know.”
“No.” He turned to face her, and the silver insects stirred along his arm. “I need to hear it.”
Eryndra looked at him. “If the Supreme Ruler refuses to stop them, I return.”
Vaelor waited. “And?”
Eryndra looked down at Auric Station. The golden banner snapped in the wind. “And we remove them ourselves.”
Vaelor nodded. That was enough, for now, and he turned and went down from the ridge into the trees, and left her alone with it.
Eryndra looked east, toward the heart of Ashkar, where the maps did not end in green. She had spent months trying to keep the Sanctuary from becoming the aggressor in someone else’s story. Now her own people were beginning to ask whether that restraint had protected anything at all.
Below her, another ancient tree fell. The sound rolled out across the valley, slow and splitting, and she felt it in the soles of her feet. Then another. Then another.
The Gilded Coven believed persistence would break resistance. The Neon Synapse believed every obstacle could be solved. The Sylvan had believed restraint would preserve their right to defend themselves. Only one of those beliefs remained intact. And Eryndra was no longer certain it was hers.