Those Left Behind
The first machines left the Sanctuary under watch. They went east along the roads they had cut for themselves, through a thin cold drizzle that beaded on the armour plating and ran in brown streams from every joint, and on either side of each column, along the ridges and between the trees, the Sylvan wardens kept pace with them. They kept far enough back that they were rarely seen clearly: a shape against the skyline, a pale face among the ferns, a figure standing beside a trunk one moment and gone the next.
No one in the columns mistook their presence for protection. The wardens were there to make certain that every road led east, and that nothing stayed behind unless the Sanctuary chose to keep it.
For the workers of the Neon Synapse, the journey out bore little resemblance to the one that had brought them west. Months earlier they had come in disciplined columns beneath cheering crowds, with children on the roofs and old men holding up their grandchildren to see.
Their walkers had been polished until they shone, their crews had been proud, and their engineers had been quite certain that they were taking part in the largest construction undertaking Ashkar had seen in generations.
Now many of those machines limped. Some walkers had lost entire limbs and lurched along on what remained, so unevenly that the crews riding them had to hold on with both hands. Cargo engines dragged damaged axles through the mud with a grinding that set the teeth on edge.
Survey systems had been stripped for parts, because there was no room to carry them whole, and equipment that could not be moved at all had been dismantled where it stood — often by the same people who had spent months keeping it alive, working through the night with their mouths set and saying very little.
Workers carried what they could on their backs, in sacks and crates and blanket rolls tied with wire. Those without transport walked, and there were a great many of them, strung out for miles along the road in the rain with their heads down.
Behind them, the Sanctuary had already begun pressing back against the abandoned roads. Roots came nosing up through the fractured paving stones. Moss crept over foundation blocks that had been poured only weeks before, and vines climbed the signal pylons that no longer carried power, winding round and round the dead cables as if to make quite sure of them.
From a distance it might have looked as though the wilderness was healing quickly.
The Sylvan knew better. Grass could cover a scar long before the wound beneath it had closed.
Eryndra came home before the last convoys had reached the eastern boundary, and the first thing she knew of Ilyr’s Rest was the smell of it. Lime and stone dust and old engine oil hung over the basin, sour in the damp air, where once there had been nothing but earth and growing things.
She stood at the rim with her staff of living wood in her hand and looked down at what remained, and for a long moment she did not move at all.
The basin had never looked like much to eastern eyes — low grey grass and pale stony soil that flowered once in eighty years — but beneath it the white-root beds had lain thick and living, waiting for their season. Now much of the ground was bare and packed hard, scarred by machine tracks and broken concrete footings, and a dismantled Synapse pylon lay on its side near the edge of the old flowering ground like the bones of some creature that had crawled there to die. Vaelor was waiting for her near it.
She went down and stopped beside the pylon, and Vaelor stood several paces away and watched her come. They did not embrace. That had never been their way, and she thought that neither of them would have known what to do with it if it had been.
“You came back,” he said.
“Yes.”
He looked past her, toward the far end of the valley, where a thin line of workers was crawling east along the road like ants along a crack in a wall. “They are going.”
“Yes.”
For a while, that was enough. Water dripped from the struts of the fallen pylon. The black birds that had followed her home came down one at a time and settled along its length, and shook the rain from their feathers, and were still.
Then Eryndra asked, “How much?”
He knew what she meant. She saw him know it; she saw his shoulders set, the way a man’s shoulders set beneath a load he has carried a long way and does not mean to put down. “Oruun Hollow is gone. The morrahn have settled farther north, but the move cost them. Two calves died after the second migration.”
Eryndra lowered her eyes. There was no wind in the basin, but the leaves at her temples stirred.
“Eshara?”
“Still too warm in the lower reaches. Some fish have returned upstream.”
“The Blue Breathing?”
Vaelor glanced toward the western ridges, where for four days the smoke had stood violet against the sky. “There is growth on the southern wall. Small patches.”
“Alive?”
“For now.”
Eryndra nodded. She had known most of it already, from the birds and from the roots, but knowing a thing and hearing it said aloud by someone who had stood and watched were not the same, and she let each name settle in her before she asked the next.
They began to walk through the ruined basin together. The earth beneath their feet had been pressed down so heavily by machinery that roots struggled to get into it at all; she could feel that through her bare soles, a hard, numb deadness like a held breath.
Near the middle of the basin she crouched beside a single thin strand pushing up through the soil and rested two fingers against it. A faint answer came up through her hand, weak, but present.
Vaelor stood over her and watched. “You stopped them.”
Eryndra shook her head without rising. “The ruler stopped them.”
“You went.”
“That does not return what we lost.”
“No.”
They walked on. She studied him sidelong as they went, because he had changed since she left, and she wanted to understand how. Some of the fury remained; it would always remain in Vaelor, as much a part of him as the bark.
But exhaustion had settled around it now, the way moss settles around a stone, and the silver insects that lived in the hollow of his shoulder had not come out once since she arrived. She did not think it meant he was at peace. She thought it meant he was tired.
After a long silence he said, “I hated you for leaving.”
“I know.”
“I thought you were asking us to suffer so strangers would think well of us.”
Eryndra looked at him. Vaelor rubbed at a ridge of bark along his wrist, as he did when he had something to say and disliked having to say it, and kept his eyes on the ground. “I understand now what you were trying to prevent.”
She waited.
“If we had buried their camps in the first weeks, the next people through those trees might have carried Justicar banners.”
“Yes.”
Vaelor looked away across the basin, at the tracks and the footings and the long raw scars. “I still think we waited too long.”
Eryndra turned back toward the exposed earth. “So do I.”
That surprised him. She watched it surprise him: the quick turn of his head, his face caught open for an instant before he could close it again.
In all the months of the expansion he had shouted at her, and pleaded with her, and struck his staff against the earth until the ground rang with it, and none of it had moved her an inch. She did not think he had ever expected to hear her say it.
She bent and took up a handful of soil and let it run slowly between her fingers. It came away grey and fine, more like ash than earth. “I believed restraint would give the realm time to see what was happening before we were forced into war,” she said. “Instead, it gave Marcellin time to build.”
Vaelor watched the dirt fall. “It saved some things.”
“Yes.”
He looked around Ilyr’s Rest, at all of it. “Not this.”
Eryndra closed her hand around the last of the soil. “No.”
There was no final argument between them. She had expected one, all the long road west, and had half prepared herself for it, and now it did not come. Both of them had been right about something, and both had been wrong about something else.
The Sanctuary had survived without becoming the enemy Marcellin needed it to be, but survival had demanded a price that neither of them would ever consider acceptable, and there was nothing to be gained by arguing over which of them had paid it.
They stood together in the ruined basin while the light went grey and then dim, and the birds sat in a row along the fallen pylon, and none of them made a sound.
Deep in the old forests, where the earth stayed cool all summer and smelled of leaf mould and rain, the Sylvan did not emerge from the expansion with any carefully reasoned hostility toward machinery. Memory was rarely so precise. It lived in the body first, and in the reasoning a long way after.
Children who had hidden in the root shelters while the excavation walkers passed overhead, pressed together in the dark with soil sifting down onto their hair each time a metal foot struck the ground, grew older remembering that sound more clearly than anything that was ever said about it.
Wardens who had spent months watching rivers diverted and nesting grounds dismantled began to refuse mechanical equipment near sacred sites, and did not much care whether anyone in the east thought the refusal reasonable.
Beasts that had learned to flee the vibration of drilling engines went on fleeing it long after the engines were gone, starting up from their beds at any sound that was even distantly like it.
At Thalenor Root, the surviving memory network itself appeared to recoil from large mechanisms. When carts carrying powered equipment approached, the faint lights within the wood drew back into it, and the voices that remained grew faint and difficult to hear, like people who have stopped talking because someone they do not trust has come into the room. The Sylvan noticed.
At first, large machines were forbidden only near Thalenor. Then the restriction spread to other ancient sites, one grove and one valley at a time, and over generations what had begun as caution hardened quietly into custom, until few could remember a time when it had been otherwise.
The distinction between the Gilded Coven that had ordered the expansion and the Neon Synapse that had built it grew less important in popular memory, as such distinctions do. The machines had been the things people saw. They had cut Althuun. They had crossed Ilyr’s Rest. They had bored into Oruun Hollow.
To many Sylvan, machinery would forever carry the memory of intrusion, and that resentment would survive long after the names of the individual engineers who had built and driven and argued over those machines were forgotten.
At the eastern boundary, the workers of the Neon Synapse discovered a different kind of aftermath, and Tovan Rheel, who had spent his life on problems that could be measured, found that this one came in a thousand small pieces, every one of which could be measured and none of which would stay solved.
The moment they left the Sanctuary, the problem ceased to be survival and became administration. The demobilisation camps had been thrown up on open pasture just beyond the boundary, row upon row of canvas on a field already trodden to mud, and they smelled of wet wool and latrines and woodsmoke that never quite caught.
Thousands of people crowded into them while Gilded accountants sat at trestle tables processing withdrawal claims one form at a time. There were too few shelters, too few transport wagons, and not enough food arriving on schedule. The project had been designed to move people and machines westward in stages. Nobody had planned to evacuate the entire operation at once.
Workers slept beneath canvas when they could find it and beside dismantled equipment when they could not, curled in the lee of a cargo engine’s flank for whatever warmth was left in the metal.
Some sold their tools to buy meals. Others bartered spare machine parts for passage east. Several crews simply shouldered their packs and began walking toward Veyra, having decided that the road was more reliable than waiting for official transport, and Tovan could not honestly tell them they were wrong.
He spent his days moving from one practical problem to the next. It was a long way from engines, and he did not like it, but it kept him from thinking, and he was grateful to it for that. He forgot to eat most days. Sela, when she was near enough to notice, did not let him forget twice.
“How many carts?” he asked the quartermaster, a stout, harried man with a pencil behind each ear and a third in his hand.
“Twenty-eight available by tonight.”
“We need fifty.”
“You have twenty-eight.” The quartermaster said it without heat, as another man might have remarked on the rain.
“What about the medical convoy?”
“Six are reserved.”
Tovan did the arithmetic in his head, and then, because it was the kind of arithmetic that mattered, did it again. “Then twenty-two.”
The quartermaster nodded and made a note.
Tovan looked past him toward the machinery waiting at the edge of the camp. It stood in long rows under tarpaulins that bellied and cracked in the wind: prototype drilling assemblies, survey engines, portable power cores, equipment that represented years of Synapse development and more of his own nights than he cared to count. He knew most of it by its serial numbers. Some of it he had designed.
“How much can twenty-two carts move if we leave the heavy gear?”
The quartermaster stared at him, the pencil stopped halfway to the page. “The consortium will want the drilling systems recovered.”
“The consortium isn’t sleeping out here.”
“That equipment is worth a fortune.”
Tovan looked toward the camp, where several thousand exhausted workers waited in the mud for transport, and the queue for the nearest water barrel ran back further than he could see. “Leave it.”
The quartermaster hesitated. “All of it?”
“Anything that keeps a person here another day.”
That was the order, and it went out across the camp before nightfall. Months earlier, Tovan would have spent hours calculating which machines could be salvaged, going down the rows with his slate and arguing for each one as though it were a patient. Now he walked past the tarpaulins and barely looked at them, and if it cost him anything, nobody saw it, himself included.
Sela spent most of her time at the payroll tents, and that proved worse.
There were three of them at the far end of the camp, long marquees with their side walls rolled up and the queues running out of them across the mud like spilled thread, and every morning began with another dispute before the clerks had finished setting out their inkwells.
A mechanic from Veyra discovered that half his final wages had been withheld. A goblin rigger was told that his hazard supplement was under review because his crew had abandoned a worksite during a Sylvan attack, and he stood at the desk turning his cap round and round in his hands, as though he might wring a different answer out of it.
Sela had bought a twist of roasted nuts from a hawker at the camp gate on the first morning. She had not yet managed to eat one.
A woman named Rana Kel, who had lost two fingers when a bridge mechanism collapsed, stood at the payroll desk that afternoon while a clerk explained that her injury compensation required further verification. Sela was beside her. She had walked over with Rana from the medical lines because Rana had asked her to, and because Sela had a reputation, by then, for not leaving.
“Verification of what?” Sela asked.
The clerk looked exhausted. He was a young man with ink on his cuffs and the grey, puffy face of someone who had been shouted at since dawn, and Sela might have felt sorry for him if she had had any sorrow to spare. “The circumstances of the injury.”
Rana lifted her bandaged hand. “The machine crushed them.”
“Yes, but liability —”
Sela leaned closer over the desk. “She arrived with five fingers.”
Rana sighed. “Sela.”
“She is leaving with three.”
The clerk rubbed his temples. “I understand what happened.”
“Then why are we still here?”
“Because I cannot authorise the payment.”
“Who can?”
“Gilded liability office.”
“Where?”
“The capital.”
Sela stared at him. The capital was a very long way east of a muddy field at the edge of the Sanctuary, and all three of them knew it, and the clerk at least had the grace to look down at his papers.
Rana touched her arm. “Leave it.”
“No.”
“Sela, I want to go home.”
The anger went out of Sela’s face all at once, like water out of a split bucket. She looked at Rana, and then past her at the queue: hundreds more people standing in the mud, holding papers much like Rana’s, waiting their turn to be told the same thing.
She realised that she had crushed the paper twist of nuts in her fist. She put it in her pocket, picked the claim documents up off the desk, folded them carefully along their creases and handed them back.
“We’ll find another way.”
Rana gave her a tired smile. “With what money?”
Sela had nothing useful to say to that. She stood at the desk while Rana tucked the claims inside her coat and went out into the grey afternoon, holding her bandaged hand against her chest in the way people do when they have stopped noticing that they are doing it.
Tovan confronted Marcellin three days later, and he noticed the furniture before he noticed anything else.
Auric Station had been emptied by then — the Nail, the crews had called it, and nobody was sorry to see it go — and Marcellin had relocated to a temporary Gilded administrative pavilion just beyond the recognised Sylvan boundary, on a rise of dry ground a little apart from the camps.
It was warm inside. There were carpets over the duckboards and a stove ticking in one corner, cushioned chairs, a sideboard with decanters on it, and lamps that did not smoke. Tovan understood, looking at them, that the furniture had arrived before many of the workers had. He glanced at Sela, and saw that she had understood it too.
Marcellin sat behind a portable desk surrounded by ledgers and withdrawal assessments, with a plate of bread and cold meat at his elbow that he was eating from as he read. He did not look up from the page.
“Chief Rheel.”
“Tovan.”
Marcellin looked up. In all the months of the expansion Tovan had never once corrected him, and he watched the man register it, the pale grey eyes resting on him for a long moment as though he were a line in a ledger that had come out unexpectedly. Then Marcellin nodded. “Tovan.” He looked toward Sela. “Engineer Venn.”
“Sela.”
Marcellin’s expression tightened, very slightly, the way a knot tightens when someone pulls on the other end of the rope. “What do you want?”
Tovan placed a stack of disputed payment claims on the desk. He had carried them under his arm all the way across the camp, and the top sheets were spotted with rain. Marcellin glanced at them without touching them. “I am familiar with the matter.”
“You’re familiar with the total.”
Marcellin looked up.
Tovan took the first claim from the stack. He had not meant to read them out. He had meant to make an argument, a precise one, and had rehearsed it on the walk over; but the argument had gone somewhere between the door and the desk, and the papers were all that was left. “Rana Kel. Two fingers lost. Compensation suspended.” He laid it down and took another. “Berek Oss. Six weeks of hazard pay outstanding.” Another. “Tal Vennor. Died at Seren Deep. His family has received nothing.”
Marcellin leaned back in his chair. “All of these claims are being reviewed.”
“Why?”
“Because the circumstances of project termination affect contractual liability.”
“The Supreme Ruler ended it.”
“Yes.”
“We didn’t.”
“I am aware.”
“Then pay them.”
Marcellin’s patience began to thin. Tovan could see it happen, not in his face, which did not change, but in his hands, which drew the nearest ledgers toward him and began to square their edges, tapping each one into line with the next. “It is not that simple.”
Sela laughed. There was nothing amused in it; it was a short, hard sound, like a bolt shearing under load. Marcellin looked toward her. “What?”
“Nothing was complicated when you needed something built.”
His eyes narrowed. Sela stepped closer to the desk. She had an oily rag in one hand, Tovan saw, from the engine lines, and she did not seem to know it was there. “You wanted roads? Simple. You wanted another shift? Simple. You wanted a drill moved farther west even after people started dying? Very simple.”
Tovan glanced at her, but did not interrupt.
“Now people want the money they were promised, and suddenly nobody can understand a contract without three lawyers.”
Marcellin’s expression cooled. He did not raise his voice; in all those months Tovan had never once heard him raise it. “This conversation is finished.”
“No,” Tovan said.
Marcellin turned toward him. Tovan’s hands were trembling slightly, though whether from anger or from nerves he could not have said, and he pushed them into the pockets of his work coat to make them stop, which did not work.
“Some of these workers are stranded.”
“We are arranging transport.”
“Some can’t afford food while they wait.”
“That is being addressed.”
“Some haven’t received full wages for weeks.”
“That is being reviewed.”
Tovan’s voice rose. He heard it rise, and could do nothing about it. “Everything is being reviewed except what you asked us to do.”
Marcellin stood. He did it without haste, and for a moment he looked down at the desk as if consulting it. “The Gilded Coven has lost enormous sums.”
Tovan stared at him.
Marcellin continued in the same level voice, as though reading from a report he had already written and found satisfactory. “Facilities are being abandoned. Infrastructure is worthless. Investors are demanding compensation. Contracts throughout the east are collapsing because the ruler terminated this project without allowing proper demobilisation.” He believed it, Tovan realised. He believed every word of it. That was very nearly the worst part.
“That has nothing to do with Rana Kel.”
“It has everything to do with every claim on that table.”
“She did the work.”
“Yes.”
“You hired her.”
“The Neon Synapse consortium hired her.”
“You hired the consortium.”
“Yes.”
“And you sent us in.”
Marcellin’s jaw tightened. “You accepted the contract.”
The tent became very quiet. The stove ticked. Outside, a wagon went creaking past, and somebody further off was calling a name over and over and getting no answer. Tovan looked at him.
Marcellin did not soften the point. He was not a man who softened points; he only placed them, one after another, where they would do the most work. “You were not forced into the Sanctuary. Your guild bid for this work. Your engineers accepted the compensation. Your crews continued operating after the risks were known.”
Sela’s expression darkened. “Careful.”
Marcellin ignored her.
Tovan spoke quietly. “We stayed because you kept promising payment.”
“Yes.”
“Until you didn’t.”
Marcellin did not answer. He let the silence sit between them on the desk, among the claims and the ledgers and the plate of cold meat, and Tovan understood that the silence was the answer, and the only one he would be given, and that there was nothing more to accomplish inside this tent. He gathered the claims together.
Marcellin stopped him. “Leave those.”
Tovan looked down at the papers in his hands. Then back at him. “No.”
He took them with him. It was, he thought afterwards, the first thing he had ever taken from Marcellin Auric, and they had never been Marcellin’s to begin with.
Sela remained behind for a moment after the tent flap had fallen shut behind Tovan. She could not have said why. It was not a decision, exactly; her feet simply did not go.
Marcellin had already sat down again and begun reorganising the documents on his desk, tapping each ledger square against the next until the stack stood as neat as a wall, as though Tovan and the claims and the last quarter of an hour had been a draught that wanted only to be shut out. She watched him do it.
“You know what the crews call you?”
“I have no interest.”
“Golden leech.”
His hands paused on the stack. Only briefly — hardly longer than a breath — and then they continued, squaring the corners exactly as before. But Sela had spent her whole working life listening to engines for the half-second hitch that meant a bearing was about to go, and she knew one when she heard it.
“That one reached you.”
Marcellin looked up. “Get out.”
She did. Outside, the wind off the Sanctuary had turned colder, and the queue at the payroll tents had not grown any shorter. She stood and looked at it for a while with the rag still in her hand, and then she stuffed the rag in her pocket and went to join it.
The workers did not immediately riot, though there were cold nights at the boundary when Tovan thought it a nearer thing than anyone in the Gilded pavilion supposed. Instead they did what Neon Synapse people usually did when confronted with a system that did not work. They took it apart.
Engineers compared contracts over the cookfires. Mechanics brought their payroll slips, creased and stained and soft with handling. Clerks who sympathised with the workers copied internal payment schedules and passed them across after dark, and crews sat up late with lamps matching the hazard rates they had been promised against what had actually been paid.
The faults came out of the paperwork the way faults come out of an engine once someone knows where to look: duplicated deductions, unexplained penalties, whole sites classified as voluntarily abandoned when the workers on them had fled active Sylvan attacks.
Sela began collecting everything. Three notebooks became six, and six became boxes, and the boxes began to take up a good deal of room.
Tovan found her one evening sitting inside a supply tent with a lamp hissing on the centre pole, surrounded by mechanics, riggers and operators of every size and shape the Synapse employed. Documents covered the tables, the crates, the cots and a fair part of the floor.
A dwarf with spectacles on the end of his nose was reading contract clauses aloud in a slow, outraged voice, and two orcish operators were sorting payroll slips into piles by month. Tovan stopped at the entrance.
“What are you doing?”
“Accounting,” said Sela, without looking up.
“You hate accounting.”
“I’ve changed.”
A goblin technician handed her another contract. Sela scanned the page, ran a finger down it, and stopped halfway. “Same clause as North Basin.” She marked it with a stub of pencil and passed it to the worker on her left, who added it to a pile that was already leaning.
Tovan picked his way across the tent and sat down beside her, moving a box of payroll slips to do it. Somebody pushed a cup of tea into his hand, and he held it and forgot about it. “What happens when you finish?”
She looked around at the growing archive, at the boxes and the piles and the dozen people bent over them in the lamplight. “We know exactly what they owe.”
“And then?”
“Then we stop letting them tell us we imagined it.”
Tovan looked at the documents. He understood that answer better than most of the people in the tent could have guessed. He had kept his own record since the reports had begun to change, and he knew precisely what it was to be told you had imagined a thing you had stood and watched happen. He set down the cold tea, drew the nearest box toward him, and began to read.
Not everyone could wait for a legal fight, and Jarek Voss, riding the boundary roads with his company in the last days before they pulled out, saw the proof of it everywhere he looked.
People needed to get home. Families expected wages, and rent went on piling up in towns far to the east whether anyone was there to pay it or not. Food cost money. Transport cost money.
So the workers began selling things: their personal tools first, then the spare parts. A crew from the northern corridor sold a damaged survey drone to a merchant for a fraction of its value because six of them needed passage east. Another crew dismantled a mobile generator and sold the aetheric core. Some crews stripped abandoned Gilded infrastructure before they left, down to the hinges.
The Coven called it theft. Most workers no longer cared, and Jarek, who had been a soldier for hire long enough to know exactly what a contract was worth once the money stopped coming, found that he did not care much either.
He witnessed one such dispute beside an abandoned storage depot on a raw grey morning, with his horse blowing steam and the depot doors hanging open on their rails.
Three Synapse mechanics were carrying copper coils out toward a wagon, each coil heavy enough that they had to hug it to their chests, when a Gilded clerk stepped in front of them with a ledger held up before him like a shield.
“Those belong to the Coven.”
One mechanic kept walking. The clerk followed him, hurrying a little to keep up. “Put them back.”
The mechanic stopped. He was a big man, grey with depot dust, and he turned round slowly with the coil still in his arms. “You owe me eighty-seven crowns.”
“That does not make this yours.”
The mechanic lifted the coil slightly, so that the weak light ran along the copper. “How much is it worth?”
The clerk hesitated. Jarek, riding past at a walk, could see him begin to work the sum out, and could see that he did not care for where it was going.
“About eighty-seven crowns, I’d guess,” Jarek said.
The clerk turned and stared up at him. “Captain Voss.”
Jarek kept riding. “Never saw it.”
He had spent his whole career insisting that things be said plainly and in front of witnesses, and he found that declining, for once, to be one was an unexpectedly pleasant sensation. Behind him he heard the coils go into the wagon one after another, each with a dull and satisfying clank.
The Bronze Mantle Company left the Sanctuary in better condition than most Synapse crews, and Jarek knew precisely why, because he had made it so. He had insisted on advance payment before deployment, and had fought repeatedly, in writing and in person and once at some volume, to keep his company’s wages current.
On the morning they finally departed, his people formed up along the boundary road in good order — the dwarven riflemen, the human veterans, the minotaur shieldbearer, the two goblin crossbowmen, the lizardfolk tracker with his missing finger — fed, paid and ready to march.
Even so, thirty-one of his people had died during the expansion. He kept their names in a small leather book in the inside pocket of his coat, and the night before he had read them through by lamplight, all thirty-one, and closed the book, and sat for a while with it in his hand before he put it away.
Near the boundary he encountered Vaelor. Neither of them had arranged the meeting. Jarek was mounted, at the head of his column; Vaelor stood alone beside the abandoned road with his staff planted in the earth, as if he had grown there. Jarek’s eye went, as a soldier’s eye will, to the man’s arms and hands. Along the bark of the warden’s forearm, nothing stirred.
For a while they simply looked at one another. Behind Jarek the column had halted, and somebody’s horse stamped and was hushed.
Then Jarek said, “We’re leaving.”
Vaelor nodded.
“I lost thirty-one.”
Vaelor’s expression did not change. “We lost more.”
Jarek gave a tired nod. “Probably.”
Neither tried to compare numbers after that. Jarek had known soldiers who kept score of the dead like the tally at a card table, and he had never liked any of them, and he did not suppose the warden had either.
He looked past Vaelor toward the trees. “Hope I never see this place again.”
“So do I.”
Jarek almost laughed. It took him by surprise, coming up out of his chest like that, and he got it under control before it reached his face, mostly. He tipped his head once, which was as much as he gave anyone, and rode east, and the Bronze Mantle went after him.
Vaelor stood beside the abandoned road and watched the Bronze Mantle disappear down it, until the last rider had dwindled into the grey and the sound of hooves had gone out like a lamp. The road was already cracking at its edges where the roots had begun to work. He leaned on his staff and listened to the forest close in behind the silence, bird by bird.
He did not hate Jarek. That surprised him. He turned it over for a while, feeling for the hatred the way a man feels with his tongue for a missing tooth, and could not find it anywhere.
There were other people he hated enough.
The final Neon Synapse convoy left the Sanctuary weeks after the decree, and Sela Venn walked out with it, at the very end of the line, beside a chief engineer who had not looked back once all morning. It was far smaller than the procession that had first come west.
She remembered that procession — the roofs crowded with children, the shopkeepers in their doorways, the crawlers slapped for luck — and she tried not to.
Hundreds of machines remained behind. Some could not be repaired. Others had been stripped so thoroughly that only shells remained, and a few were simply too expensive to transport. What became of them afterwards, Sela never saw. The Sylvan dismantled some once the crews were gone. Others were buried beneath earth and root, and a handful were left where they stood and slowly disappeared beneath vines.
At the boundary, Tovan paused. Sela stopped beside him. Behind them stretched a long line of exhausted workers, and ahead lay the eastern road, pale and empty and running away into the hills.
Sela looked back toward the Sanctuary. The trees stood dark and enormous along the skyline, exactly as they had the first time she saw them, and gave nothing away. “You think they hate us?”
Tovan followed her gaze. “Yes.”
“All of us?”
“Some probably do.”
“Fair?”
Tovan thought about it properly, the way he thought about everything; she could almost watch him take the question apart and lay out the pieces in a row. “No.”
Sela waited.
He adjusted the pack over his shoulder. “But I understand why.”
That was enough. She could not have said why it should be, only that it was. She found the crushed paper twist in her pocket, with a few roasted nuts still in the bottom of it, and offered him one, and he took it without noticing. Then they crossed the boundary together and went on east.
Marcellin Auric returned to the capital before many of the workers had reached home, and the Gilded Coven received him with very little warmth.
The council chamber of the Coven smelled, as it always had, of beeswax and woodsmoke and the faint dry dust of old paper, and its long table had been polished so often that the lamps stood reflected in it like lamps in still water.
Marcellin took his usual place and laid his papers in front of him and listened. Some of his colleagues blamed him for pushing the project too far and provoking the intervention of the throne. Others blamed the Supreme Ruler, and argued that no commercial enterprise could function if political authority could terminate it after fortunes had already been committed.
A few believed that Marcellin had simply moved too quickly. Others believed he had not moved quickly enough. He found, with a certain detached interest, that he had some sympathy with the last of these.
The internal arguments lasted months, and Marcellin defended himself with figures: projected revenues, mineral discoveries, trade estimates, infrastructure already completed before the decree. He laid them out in neat columns, squared the edges of each report before he passed it down the table, and insisted, in a voice that never once rose, that the project had remained commercially viable until sovereign interference made continuation impossible.
He believed this. It was, after all, true enough to be useful, and the useful arguments were the ones he never had to remember.
Not everyone accepted his explanation. Enough did.
He lost money. He lost influence. Several allies abandoned him, and a number of men who had dined at his table during the good months discovered that they had other engagements. But Marcellin remained wealthy, connected and politically relevant, and in the Gilded Coven that was what survival looked like. He had always known how to wait.
To the stranded workers, that fact became its own indictment. In the evenings his carriage took him home through the lamplit streets of the capital to a house where the fires were always lit and the doors were opened before he reached them. The man who had overseen the project went home. Some of the people who had built it still could not afford to.
The first major Neon Synapse protest gathered outside a Gilded counting house in Veyra, and Tovan Rheel stood at the very edge of it, as far from the middle as he could get without actually leaving.
It was a bright, hard morning, and the square smelled of horses and frying dough and the river. The counting house had shut its great bronze doors, and behind its windows pale faces came and went.
Hundreds had come to stand in front of it: engineers and mechanics, families of the dead, workers who had returned with injuries, widows carrying copies of unpaid compensation claims. There were dwarves among them and goblins, horned folk and orcs, a pair of lizardfolk riggers blinking in the hard light, and they were all of them, for that morning, simply Synapse. They did not arrive as revolutionaries. They arrived with documents.
One sign contained only a number.
87 CROWNS
Tovan knew what it meant; by then nearly everyone did. It was the amount owed to the mechanic who had carried copper coils out of the abandoned depot. The story had spread up and down the eastern road faster than any official notice, and somebody had painted it in letters a foot high.
Another placard listed the names of the Synapse workers who had died at Thalenor, in small careful script, and Tovan did not need to read it to know how long it was. Someone had suspended a broken gear from the counting house gate, where it turned slowly in the wind.
Sela moved through the crowd helping workers organise their claims, a sheaf of papers under one arm and a pencil behind her ear, stopping every few yards to bend over someone’s contract. Tovan remained near the edge. He disliked crowds. He had not suddenly learned to enjoy this one.
A young technician approached him, a thin human lad with a burn scar across the back of one hand and the look of someone who had been told to find a particular person and was not sure he had found him. “You’re Rheel?”
Tovan frowned. “Yes.”
“You kept records.”
His stomach tightened. “Who told you that?”
The technician glanced toward Sela. Tovan followed his gaze. She was standing on the far side of the square with her papers, watching the two of them, and she did not look remotely apologetic. She lifted her pencil to him in a small salute.
“What do you want?” Tovan asked.
“Copies.”
“Why?”
“Because every time we show them a payroll sheet, they say the site report says something else. Every time we show them a site report, they say the incident report says something else.” The technician looked toward the counting house, and his jaw set. “We need what actually happened.”
Tovan thought of the private archive he had begun months earlier, behind a shut door, when the official reports first began to change. Engineering warnings. Casualty reports. Orders, and the accounts of those orders, and the changed accounts that had come after. Names. Dates.
He had kept them because the official record kept shifting under his feet, and he had needed one fixed thing to stand on. He had never once imagined that anyone else would want to stand on it too.
He looked again at the closed bronze doors of the Gilded counting house. Then at the workers gathered outside it, with their placards and their papers and their bandaged hands. A very long way to the west, a long time ago as it now felt, a woman with leaves at her temples had laid her palm on his chest and told him to remember.
“How many copies?”
The technician looked surprised. “As many as we can make.”
Tovan nodded. “Then bring paper.”
In the counting houses and lawyers’ offices of the east, where the ledgers were kept in locked presses and the clerks worked on long after the lamps were lit, the claims ground slowly on. The Gilded Coven eventually paid some of them. Others took years. Some families received compensation only after long legal fights that cost them nearly as much as they won.
Some workers discovered that the companies named on their contracts had been dissolved, transferred or absorbed into larger Gilded holdings, so that they were left holding a promise from a name that no longer existed. A few gave up. Many did not.
Within certain Neon Synapse circles, the expansion acquired a different name. It was not the Western Development to them, nor the Sylvan Crisis, nor the Gilded Expansion, whatever the official histories might say. They called it the Abandonment.
To them, the central story was no longer simply that the Sylvan had attacked their machines, or that the Supreme Ruler had stopped the project. The story was that the Gilded Coven had hired them, demanded greater risks as the expansion worsened, kept pushing even after the deaths began to mount, and then tried to avoid paying them when the enterprise collapsed.
That grievance found fertile ground among people who understood information systems better than armies.
The first acts of retaliation were small. A Gilded accounting network suffered a mysterious corruption that erased several weeks of transaction history. An auction house discovered that every debt record in one district had been duplicated with conflicting figures, so that nobody could say with any confidence who owed what to whom.
Private messages belonging to a Gilded financier appeared anonymously on public Synapse boards, to the great entertainment of everyone but the financier. None of it caused great damage.
Then, one night, every mechanically controlled lock in a wealthy Gilded estate opened at the same time. The household woke to the sound of it, a single soft click repeated through every wing at once, and found doors standing open on dark corridors, the strongroom ajar, the gates swung wide onto the street.
Nothing was stolen. When the household checked its Synapse-enabled display panels, every one of them showed the same message.
87 CROWNS.
The story spread. Among younger hackers it became a joke, then a signature, and eventually a symbol for something larger than the original unpaid wage. Most of them had never met the mechanic whose claim created it, and never would. That no longer mattered. They had inherited the anger.
In workshops up and down the eastern roads, where the air smelled of hot solder and cold tea and the benches were scarred with a hundred years of burns, the records went from hand to hand.
Tovan did not create the hacker cells that followed. Neither did Sela. They did not plan an underground campaign against the Gilded Coven, and would have been hard put to say how one might be planned. But the records they preserved travelled farther than either of them expected.
Copies passed between workshops, then between guild houses, then through private networks, until nobody could have traced them back to a supply tent at the edge of the Sanctuary. Young Synapse engineers who had never seen the Sanctuary read testimony from those who had.
They saw the payment disputes. They saw the altered reports, and the warnings ignored at Thalenor. They saw how much the Gilded Coven had earned during the project, and how carefully it had contested its obligations afterward.
For some, the lesson was about contracts. For others, it was about power: a guild wealthy enough could reshape events simply by controlling which version of them became official. That realisation changed the nature of the grievance. If the Gilded Coven controlled money, the Neon Synapse controlled systems — and systems could be entered, and copied, and altered, and exposed, and destroyed.
The hostility that began around unpaid wages gradually evolved into something ideological. Distrust of the Gilded Coven became part of the identity of certain Synapse factions, taught to apprentices along with their first lessons in soldering. Most never became extremists. Some did.
Years later, one such faction would pursue a weapon so destructive that its intended target was not a contract office or an estate, but the Gilded Coven’s capital itself. The weapon would become one of the darkest products of a resentment that had begun in abandoned work camps at the edge of the Sanctuary, in the mud beside a payroll desk, with a woman holding up a bandaged hand to a clerk who could not authorise the payment.
Within the Sanctuary, recovery took a different form, and it took it slowly, in the way of forests. In time the trees reclaimed many of the roads. Roots split the foundation stones and lifted them aside.
Abandoned bridge supports disappeared beneath moss until they were only green humps above the gullies, and beasts returned to some of the valleys once the engines were gone, stepping warily at first over ground that still smelled faintly of oil.
The Blue Breathing produced new fungal colonies after many years, though their colour and their seasons were different from those of the colonies that had burned, and the Sylvan who went to look at them could not decide whether to call them the same valley or a new one.
Other losses proved permanent. The morrahn never returned to Oruun Hollow. Their descendants established a new birthing ground in the northern interior, and the old cavern remained empty.
Ilyr’s Rest bloomed again decades later, but only a fraction of the great white flowers emerged, and the Sylvan elders who gathered to witness the return found themselves mourning as much as celebrating, standing among the sparse blooms with their heads bowed.
Thalenor Root survived longest and suffered most strangely. Some of its memories remained clear. Others appeared only as fragments.
A voice might speak half a sentence and never finish it. A song could repeat for hours because the part of the network that remembered its ending was gone, and those who sat with the Root would hear the same few phrases rise and fall and rise again until they could not bear it and went away.
The Sylvan did not describe Thalenor as dead. They described it as wounded. That distinction mattered, because the Root itself appeared to understand what had been taken from it.
Years after the expansion, Eryndra returned to Thalenor with Vaelor. It was evening, and the light beneath the bark of the great Root moved faint and slow, like embers under ash, and the air around it was so still that she could hear the sap.
Both of them had changed. The Root had changed more. Where whole galleries of light had once run through the wood, there were long dark stretches now, and the voices that had filled it when she was a child had thinned to a murmur she had to strain to hear.
She went to a surviving section of wood and placed her palm flat against it, and closed her eyes.
At first she heard only the faint movement of sap. Then came laughter — young, and familiar. Eryndra’s eyes opened. The sound lasted only a few seconds, bright and careless, and then it was gone, and the leaves at her temples, which had gone quite still, did not move again for a long while.
“Lethari,” she said.
Vaelor stood beside her. “You heard her?”
“Yes.”
He nodded. “Good.”
Eryndra kept her hand against the Root. “I thought she was gone.”
“Most of what Thalenor held is scattered now.”
“That is not what I said.”
Vaelor looked at her, and she watched him turn the words over and then understand them. “No,” he said.
They remained there together until the light beneath the wood had dimmed almost to nothing, and the first stars showed through the canopy above. The birds came down and settled in the branches, and Vaelor leaned on his staff, and neither of them was in any hurry to leave.
Eventually Vaelor asked, “Would you do it differently?”
Eryndra knew exactly which decision he meant. The warnings. The restraint. The long journey east. The months she had spent believing that they could contain the conflict without forcing the throne to intervene, while the machines went deeper and the names piled up. She had asked herself the same question more times than she could count, and she gave him the answer she had come to.
“Yes.”
Vaelor waited.
“I would have gone to the ruler sooner.”
He nodded. “And after that?”
Eryndra thought for a moment, with her palm still flat against the wood. “I would still have tried to stop this from becoming a war.”
Vaelor looked toward the damaged Root, at the dark stretches where the light no longer ran. “I would still have fought at Thalenor.”
“I know.”
“I might have fought sooner.”
Eryndra looked at him. “I know that too.”
There was no reason to reopen the old argument. They had both lived with its consequences long enough. She kept her hand on the Root a while longer, in case the laughter came again, and Vaelor stood beside her in the dark and did not ask her to go.