Chapter_37_The_Southern_Sky

The first drill after the mustering was a mess past watching.

Three hundred men stood in the old positions. The twelve old hands at the front did not move an inch; behind them, the two hundred eighty-eight pointed muzzles every direction there was. One man used his rifle butt for a walking stick, planting it on the ground between steps. Another snapped his heels so hard on attention that the crack carried. A driller from the mines, one of the blasting men, held his rifle across his chest like a man carrying a child. At the tail of the line a half-grown boy stretched on tiptoe for the second shelf of the gun rack, missed twice, said nothing, and went on stretching.

The twelve old hands took one row each and still could not cover them all. Da Liu came over from the arsenal and stood half a stick of incense, and said one line only:

"Muzzles off the men."

Then he left; three cannons were waiting on him at the workshop.

By midday Chen Jin broke the drill. He left Da Liu's line with the old hands to pass around, and went back to the duty room to file the roster — three hundred names, page by page into the camp's regular book, thumbprints under each, the year and month written on the spine. On one page he stopped: one name with a crossed-out mark over it, and a new name pressed under the mark. He copied it as it was, the crossed mark too, erased nothing. Some accounts you do not erase. When the ink dried he set the regular book on the shelf and put the twelve pages of the provisional roster away in the drawer.

The moment the book settled into place, the panel in his pocket lit up.

[Roster: 300. Scan width: expanded.]

He stood looking at it for two breaths. What "scan width" was, he did not know, and the panel did not explain. He tapped the frame and let it go — things it did not mean to tell, a hundred questions would not pry out. Three hundred names into the regular book, and it offered one extra line; what the extra line was for, it would not say. He set the matter with the accounts he had never finished counting — three cannons finished, the reloading line falling behind — and went out to run the afternoon drill.

The afternoon went half straight. The blasting man leveled his rifle at last, after an old hand spent half a stretch bending his elbow into shape. The tiptoe boy never reached the second shelf; an older soldier lifted him onto a stool by the first, and the boy's ears went red coming down. Chen Jin walked the line once, without stopping. Muzzles still drifted. Tomorrow they would bend again.

Wen Heng came at dusk-light to check on the eleven with the faint circles. Nine had lived past the day she wrote inside the circle, and she struck the circles out; two still held. Before she put her little book away she looked once more at the two unstruck names — at the days she had written beside them, not at the men. She said nothing, folded the book into her sleeve, and went. Zhou Zhengting came at noon with his pencil turning at the roster's edge.

"Three days of grain."

"Shelter district first. Old method," Chen Jin said.

Zhou Zhengting made his sound, said again that the reloading line had to keep up, and left.

At dusk-dark Chen Jin walked out to the gap once. The three cannons sat squat on their positions, mouths toward the shoal, the same way as by day. The new crew he had drafted stood listening to Xiao Mao's count, loading one round, calling one number, the numbers steadier each round. He stood a while, did not cut in, and came back.

Night. The duty room held one man. He turned the lamp wick up half a notch.

He pulled the tag string out of his collar. Lei Changgeng's tag sat deepest in the string — black iron, no characters, the flame mark on its back worn almost flat; you needed the lamp at an angle to make the outline show. The cord hole was grooved deep, a ridge beside the groove from decades of cord.

The garrison had a rule: the tag comes back, and where the man is buried, the tag does not say. Lei Changgeng had collected tags his whole life — what he collected was what he handed over; his own had come out of the East Sluice mud in Chen Jin's hand. Chen Jin turned the tag over and looked at the cord hole against the lamp — deep in the groove a stub of old cord was still caught, rubbed to a shine. That was Lei Changgeng's cord. How many cords the tag had gone through before it reached him, nobody knew; this last one had not been changed since the day of the East Sluice.

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Chen Jin had not changed it. It had never occurred to him to change it.

On the night the sky fell, the tag had lit once — one faint signal — and never again. He had tried twice, pressing it to the panel, and the panel would not know it. After that he stopped trying. The tag had ridden against his chest all these days, become a thing of the chest, and he had almost forgotten it was ever a message.

Tonight he took it out and laid it on the panel.

Not because he meant to try. That line — scan width: expanded — had turned in his head all afternoon: three hundred names into the regular book, and the panel grew one more line of speech. What the grown thing was for, it would not tell; then feed it something to look at.

The tag touched the panel, and the light came up.

He had not called it. Cold light spread from under the panel and took the tag whole, and in that light the flame mark showed its outline, as if someone had traced it once with a fingertip.

[Candlebearer-issue tag detected.]

[Full-spectrum scan: initiated.]

Then the light held still — no flicker, no pulse, no sound.

Chen Jin sat down and did not hurry it. The room went quiet, quiet enough to hear the lamp wick pop now and then. He laid both hands open on his knees and watched the tag soak in the light, flame side up. It put him in mind of the mines, the old men keeping vigil — the way they laid a man out flat, face up, and the people below sat with him, one whole night through. He did not move. The panel did not speak, and neither did he. He was in no hurry to settle this night's account — the tag had waited however many generations; it would not grudge him this one.

After a long while, the light changed.

[Material: Candlebearer issue.]

[Serial: unreadable.]

[Archive unsealed: partial.]

[Fragmentary bearing: the Armory — southern sky.]

One line at a time, no hurry. Chen Jin read each to the end, and at the last one he stopped.

The Armory. An armory. An armory of the Sovereign's age, in the southern sky.

He did not know what lay under the southern sky. South of Lin'yuan Port was the sea, and past the sea the maps drew nothing. He made himself think one layer further: if an armory truly sat there — rifles, cannons, or things more whole than powered armor — and he stopped there. Three days of grain, three hundred mouths; an armory across the water could not save tomorrow's wall. But the war outside the wall had no end in it, and the city's stock was what it was. He set the account down on both sides and filed it with "scan width."

He tapped the panel. "Where in the southern sky?"

[Archive sealed.]

"Who sealed it?"

[Sealed by the Sovereign.]

The room sat quiet a while. The wick popped again.

Chen Jin looked at those words a long time. Your Majesty — that was what it called him. But the sealing, he did not remember. These hands of his had forged iron, loaded shells, killed men, written rosters; they had never sealed an archive. The panel did not explain. He knew already: what it did not mean to tell would come out the same at the hundredth asking as at the first.

The light moved again.

[Candlebearer: Bingzhu. Awaiting orders.]

He sat up straight.

These words were not like the ones before. The ones before were accounts; this one was a bow. Candlebearer. The flame mark worn flat on the back of the tag — Lei Changgeng had said it was called the candle, passed down generation to generation, worn flat or not, it does not get worn away. So the name was nothing chosen lightly — the mark on the tag, a name under the mark, and the name standing in the panel, waiting, through however many generations.

"Bingzhu." He said the two sounds once.

[Present.]

"What were the Candlebearers?"

[Archive sealed.]

"The tag's old owner — do you have him?"

[Roster check: Lei Changgeng. Struck off.]

The room stayed quiet a long time. He read those two words to the end and asked nothing more. The garrison's rule was: the tag comes back, and the tag says nothing of the man. The panel's rule was leaner — the man gone, the name struck. Both ends clean; neither end looked back. The groove in the cord hole had taken decades to wear; a line in a book struck off just like that. The tag did not run. The name did.

After a while he said, "I should have set the tag on it sooner."

The regret came as the words landed — it was not that he had not wanted to try; the tag stayed dead, the panel stayed dark, and twelve men's worth of scan width could not fish it out. But the words were out and could not be called back. Said to the tag, and said to the tag's old owner all the same. If Lei Changgeng were here, he would look at him a long half moment with that one eye, and then he would say: the tag is not going anywhere. What is the hurry. It was the seventeenth time his words had outrun his mind by half a step.

He took the tag off the panel and put it back inside his collar. That one bright point of old cord lay against his collarbone, warm.

He had not yet put out the lamp when the panel lit again.

[Ship inbound from the sea. No flag. Four days.]

Chen Jin rose and went to the window. Nothing to be seen on the water; the night was one whole piece, the tide going wave on wave, keeping the days the way it always had. Four days. Three cannons, three hundred men, one ship with no flag. As for the whistle, he had the shape of it already — the first lesson was one he had learned long ago: the bugs answer a whistle, so the men have to learn to answer one too, the old trick from the first night of the war, passed now from twelve men to three hundred. He stood listening a while, then turned his head and read the panel's words once more.

"Four days." He let the two words roll through his mouth once. "Enough to teach three hundred men to listen for one whistle."