Month 1, Day 9, Evening
An axe was going somewhere ahead of us, two strikes and a rest, then two more. We all heard it at the same time, and the whole line stopped walking. After five days of things screaming in the dark, a person chopping wood was the strangest sound I could remember.
"That's ours," Rafi said, rough. "That's the camp. We're actually..."
He left it there and walked faster instead.
The last stretch went down through thinning trees. Sometime past midday the tree's shadow had swung off us, and now the light came long and orange between the trunks. Jonas took the slope on the stick Nikita had cut him that morning, planting it two-handed at the bad spots, and every step down dragged a small sound out of him. He kept going anyway.
The fence showed first, with two torches burning at the corner post where one used to be enough. Up the rise past it, the camp sat lit the whole way around, more fire on the perimeter than I'd ever seen on it. Small figures were still moving along the top of the half-built wall. They'd been busy while we were gone, and scared, and both showed from here.
A guard saw us at maybe thirty steps out. He lifted his torch, leaned forward over the gate post, and then took a step back instead and shouted over his shoulder for somebody, and his voice cracked doing it.
"Squad Seven!" Rafi called up. "It's us! It's Rafi, open the..."
"You're dead." The guard said it straight down at us with the torch shaking in his hand. "They wrote you off three days ago. There was a list."
"Yeah, well." Rafi spread his arms. "The list's wrong."
Antoine stopped a few steps short of the torchlight, pulled the tie out of his hair, and bound it back fresh with both hands. Then he walked in first.
People started arriving before the gate had fully opened. They came from the fires and the wall at a run, and the noise built fast, names shouted back into the tents, more coming. The questions reached us before the crowd did, and every one of them was about the tree.
"Did you see it come up? Were you out there when it..."
"It grew in an hour. We watched it, the whole camp watched it, what IS it?"
"Is it getting closer? Somebody said it's closer than yesterday..."
It stood a day's walk behind us and it still filled a corner of the evening sky, and this camp had spent the whole day under it with no answer. We were the first thing to come out of the woods since it happened.
Then a big man with a hunter's braid pushed through to the front and asked about none of that. He went down our faces with his eyes, one at a time, twice, and the second pass came slower.
"Where's Basha?"
Rafi opened his mouth and closed it again. The man looked down our row once more. Then he turned with his torch and walked back through the crowd without another word, and the shouting died around him as he went, ring by ring, out into the tents.
Carmen came through the gap he left.
She hit me at a run, hard enough to stagger me back a step, and her arms locked around my neck and stayed. My own arms worked out what they were for about a second too late, but they got there.
"They had a list." Her voice broke up against my shoulder. "A list, Aleks, your name was on an actual list, and I, five days, five..."
"I know."
"You don't, you weren't HERE." She pulled back to look at me, crying openly and furious at the same time. Her hands went over me fast, shoulders, arms, the side of my face, hunting for the wound that had to be there somewhere. She found the split corner of my mouth and stopped, her thumb resting next to it. "Okay," she said, quieter, tucking her hair back behind her ear with the other hand. "Okay. You're real."
"Mostly," I said, and she laughed wet, hit me once on the chest, and held on again.
Daisuke arrived already talking. "No way, no, I heard the yelling and I thought there's no way, RAFI!" He grabbed Rafi's arm with both hands and pushed his glasses up, fast, and his eyes went down our row while his mouth ran on. "You're really, okay, wait." The second look was slower. "Where's the old guy? Ben? And where's..."
He read it off our faces and stopped talking, all the way, and he was still standing there with his mouth half open when the crowd folded over us.
They walked us up through the tents in a moving ring of torches. Somewhere in it I lost Carmen's hand, and a woman I'd never once spoken to pressed a water skin into my chest and squeezed my arm through the jacket before the crowd moved her along.
Lydia stood waiting outside the assignment hut with a lamp burning behind her, and she got straight to it. "Squad leads and whoever can still think, inside. Amina, take the rest to the med tent. Food, water, and eyes on that knee." Her look crossed all eight of us once. "Ten minutes," she said to the crowd, and the crowd actually backed up a step.
Inside, the hut smelled of tallow and charcoal. On the wall behind the table hung the valley map, and the tree had been drawn onto it twice that day, once small and crossed out, once again bigger. Elena sat at the table's end with a board on her knees. A bottle of wine stood at Lydia's elbow, a third gone. When she sat, she moved it to the floor by her chair leg, out of her own reach, and picked up a stick of charcoal instead.
"Numbers first," she said. "Who came back."
"Eight." Rafi stood nearest the table. "We went down twelve."
Elena's charcoal moved on the board. Lydia looked at Rafi and waited.
"Names of the dead."
Nikita took that one. "Old Ben. The reptilian, Viktor, and one more out of Squad 1." He let a breath go by. "And Basha."
The charcoal stopped. Elena looked up, first at Nikita, then at Lydia, and set the stick down flat on the board. Lydia sat very still. Then: "How."
"A thing in the temple, under the city. Big." Rafi kept his voice slow and careful. "It liked playing with us first. Jonas was closest when it quit playing, and Basha put him out of the way, and it caught her instead. She was gone before she hit the stone." He folded his arms and looked at the wall over Lydia's head. "It was fast. She didn't have time to be scared. That's something, right?"
Lydia's hand went out to where the bottle had stood, found the table bare, and came back. "Basha ran my whole east watch," she said, level. "Her people are going to hear this tonight, and I get to pick which of them hear it from me." She straightened her back. "Go on. All of it."
The story came out in pieces after that, mostly in Rafi's voice and Nikita's. They gave her the stair under the ruin, then the city, whole and empty under the ground, big enough to hold every camp in the valley. Somewhere around the sealed gate Lydia stopped writing and just listened. When Rafi reached the armory, the dwarf stepped up without being asked and laid his hammer on the table, blue head toward her, and the lamplight ran along the edge of it.
"That's what does it," he said. "Blue stone. Put it through one of those things and it stays down for keeps. There's a room under that city racked with hundreds of these, and we walked out with what you see."
Lydia put two fingers on the hammer's edge and took them off again. "Can anyone get back in?"
"Down the hole the tree came out of." The dwarf took his hammer back. "A sheer drop into a burning city. So, aye. If a man's done with living."
Her mouth went thin, and Elena wrote something anyway.
"The thing that killed Basha," Lydia said. "What was it."
"It talked." My voice came out before I'd planned on using it, and everyone in the hut looked at me, so I kept going, because stopping would have been worse. "Full sentences, our language. It had been waiting down there for us, and it knew things about us that it had no way of knowing."
Lydia looked at me a beat too long. "It talked," she said, flat, and that went onto Elena's board too.
"Dead." Antoine had kept to the edge of the lamplight the whole time, and now he came off the wall. "My spear, through the eye, from the dark." He said it flat, looking only at Lydia. "Your east watch is paid for. I put it down."
Beside me, Nikita's hand closed on his knee until the knuckles stood up, then opened again, slow. He kept his eyes on the valley map and said nothing at all.
Elena's charcoal moved, and I watched Antoine's version go down onto the board in neat rows, turning into the record. Every word of it was true, too. The spear was his, the killing throw was his. All he'd left out was everyone else, and which sentence of that was I supposed to stand up and call a lie?
Lydia's eyes went around the rest of us once, slow. "Anything to add."
The lamp hissed. Nikita studied the map. I found a knot in the floorboard and stared at it.
"Fine," she said, and let it lie. "The tree. Somebody make me understand the tree."
That part she took standing: the roots, the dragon lying in them, the thing it guards and wouldn't name, and the climb it pointed us up. Nikita gave her the deadline in one piece. "It said the dark comes up in half a year, in full, all of it. It said it will fight that day. Its words, not ours."
Lydia stood with her arms crossed. Behind her hung the two charcoal trees, the small crossed-out one and the bigger one.
"Half a year," she said. "The sky said six months. That was nine days ago." Across the table, Elena had already stopped writing on her own.
"Elena." Lydia turned back around. "Light lines double tonight, every gap, whatever it does to the oil count. Wall crews go to dawn-and-dusk shifts starting tomorrow, both ends toward the middle. And by morning I want a count of every blade, point, and arrowhead in this camp made of that blue." She came back to us, and for a second the command went out of her face and left the tired underneath. "I expected a different list tonight." She was already bending over the map when we filed out. "Med tent, eat, sleep. The rest starts tomorrow."
Through the whole report the elf woman had stood beside the door flap, arms folded, adding nothing. She slipped out ahead of us the moment Lydia turned away.
Outside, the med tent had a queue. Amina ran it off a charcoal board with time slots ruled onto it, and by the time we got there she'd already chalked our eight names into a fresh column, spelled right. "Water's on the post. Stew comes to you, so don't crowd my fire. Cards."
"The ration cards are under a city," Rafi said. "Along with my other shirt."
"Replacements." Amina was already writing them. She tore the first chit off, held it out to Rafi, and looked at him over it for a moment. "Glad you're not dead," she said, brisk, and moved to the next card. Mine she handed across with two fingers and a shorter look. "Don't lose it."
Jonas got the end cot, and a med volunteer knelt at his knee and started wrapping it high and too loose. "It's fine," Jonas said, with sweat coming up on his lip. Mirae crossed the tent before anyone asked her to. She knelt by the volunteer, unrolled the wrap he'd just finished, and started it over from below the joint, working the whole way up without once looking at his face. The volunteer watched her hands for a moment and moved off to the next cot.
"Thanks," Jonas said, to the top of her head. Mirae tied the wrap off, patted his boot once, and stayed sitting there beside the cot with her arms around her knees, facing the fire. It was the first spot she'd picked for herself in three days.
The stew reached us at the fire outside. Four spoonfuls in, my stomach closed, and I had to sit still and wait it out before the fifth. Carmen sat down against my side with a folded cloth in her lap and put it on my knee. "Bread, and the dried meat you like," she said. "For midnight. You never eat enough the first time, and then you wake up starving."
I looked at the cloth a while. "Thanks."
A man I knew by sight and nothing else came down the fire with the ladle and filled my bowl first of the three of us sitting there. "Torch kid," he said, and nodded at me. "Heard you held the light on its eye so the Russian could throw." He moved on down the fire before I'd found anything to say back.
Behind us at the next fire, somebody was telling the whole thing loud to a ring of listeners. "...one throw, out of the full dark, fifty steps if it's one, straight through the eye..." Antoine sat two fires away, eating slow. He didn't have to say a thing. Nikita ate facing the other way.
Daisuke sat at the edge of our fire with his bowl going cold on his knees. He'd talked nonstop since the day I'd met him, and tonight he had nothing.
Late, when the bowls were down and Jonas had his leg up on a rolled blanket, Rafi looked over at him. "Wall's going to want carriers tomorrow. All of us, probably."
"I'm medically a spectator." Jonas patted the wrap. "Ask my doctor."
Mirae, still sitting by the cot flap, lifted one hand without turning around and let it drop. A quick, low laugh went around the fire, and Jonas grinned down into his bowl and kept the grin.
Cealith came late, when the crowd had thinned, and folded down next to me without a word. The firelight put an orange edge on his grey hair. He looked at me once, all the way through, and then east, where the sky had gone dark over the ridge. Stars were coming out clean across the whole spread of it, except for one wide column where no stars showed at all.
"There were stars there yesterday," he said.
"I know. We were on it."
He thought about that. "And under it?"
"Deep," I said. He nodded once and let me keep the rest, and we sat while the fires burned lower.
Somebody had put a blanket over my legs at some point, and I hadn't even seen who. Out on the wall line the axes were still working, dusk shift or dawn shift or both at once. Rafi lay on his back nearby with his eyes open on the sky.
"Half a year," he said, quiet, and let it sit there a moment. "What do you even do with half a year?"
Nobody answered him, and out past the tents the axes kept going in the dark.