Ember Legion

The works registry was older than the survey map.

The pages had gone yellow and brittle, corners curled, the recorder’s cramped hand packing every line: which drain, how many gratings, what material—one entry after another, the same format as an account book. Zhou Zhengting spread it across the well platform, weighed the corners down with stones, and read it out line by line while the work parties checked against it. ”West Three. Barred with two gratings and a gabion back then. Eleven gabions left in the old stockyard—I checked the ledger.” His finger walked down the column. ”Log what you use. I’ll square it after.”

Chen Jin set the rotation himself: twelve Ember Guard in teams of three—a rifle pair holding the mouth, pry men lifting lids, a welder with each team. The garrison detail put twenty men on sandbag and gabion haulage, and two men from Wen Heng’s station came along with med kits. Zhou Zhengting ran the whole sweep from the old customs house, runners going back and forth. When the list was read out, an old garrison man pushed the fastest drain toward the Ember Guard teams. You’re young, he said. Big Liu swung a sandbag up onto his shoulder. ”I can carry it.” The old man didn’t argue. He went off to shoulder gabions.

Eight drains were running: six under the shelter district, two at the foot of the north wall. From midday into late afternoon they bottomed out seven. The gabions went down one by one on slings, a dull knock rolling up out of each drain throat as stone met water, sandbags stacked on top, and after every course the water ran a little lower. One of the pry men probed the shallowest drain and came back saying there were old claw marks on the drain wall—deep ones, furred over with age. Nobody took it up. They logged the position and moved to the next.

Somewhere in the probing Chen Jin caught himself thinking about the mining camp rule: probe first, then walk, and nobody goes into a heading empty-handed. The old foreman used to say a heading never bites a man—a man gets bitten when he breaks the rule. He shoved the thought aside and watched team three lower a gabion.

The main junction was where the math stopped working.

Six drains met under the shelter district and ran out through one mouth to the moat—wide, fast water. Sandbags dropped over half of it held; over the other half the current heaved them off every time. Two garrison squads took turns lowering gabions into it, slings drawn bar-tight, and the baskets came up swinging loose in the current, never settling where they were dropped. Xiao Mao went down for a look and came up shaking his head, sketching it with his hands: the water had hollowed out a chamber under the mouth. No footing for a grating.

Zhou Zhengting turned the registry to the main junction page. In the margin, in pencil, so faint it was almost gone: Check again after the rains.

Nobody knew who had written it. Whoever ran this drain back then had feared the same thing, written it down, and waited out a few decades without the check ever coming. The well platform went quiet for a while; the aunties standing around didn’t leave. Zhou Zhengting traced the line once with his own pencil, closed the ledger, and gave the order: plug what you can, weigh down what you can’t, and where nothing holds—post men on it.

By dusk the deployment was set: the water line to Chen Jin and the Ember Guard, two teams nailed to the main junction mouth; the north wall to Lei Changgeng; Zhou Zhengting running both from the middle.

The north wall started early. At dark the northwest went to rumbling, tight and loose by turns, firelight hopping along the cloud base. At first there were bugles, hoarse, breaking off mid-call; later it turned to hammering—a length of rail hung on the parapet, two short and one long, round after round, a dead sound carrying half the city. Runners went back and forth with slips of paper: the north wall was asking for men. Chen Jin’s answer was one line: the water line can’t spare any. He thought a moment and added the rest: they’re pulling back in good order over there—it’s a feeler. Tell the Sarge to go easy on his voice.

After nightfall, the main junction took them.

The water bulged first, a line of bubbles, then the whole sandbag course sank, the top course sliding down, and shadows came out through the half they hadn’t closed—the front ones gaining the bank, the ones behind walking up the backs of the ones in front, wave after wave, the way water comes off a broken sluice.

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Both teams at the mouth opened up at once, torches pushed out over the surface till the water glared white. The Ember Guard fought it exactly the way they’d drilled it by day: hold position, alternate fire, one team shooting while the other swapped magazines—the fire never thick, never stopping. Chen Jin moved along the teams, and wherever the shooting on a stretch stopped, his bayonet came down on that stretch of the drain lip—one, and another. He didn’t count what the rifles dropped; he collected the ones still standing.

Bug husks rode the glare in layers, crowding downstream. Big Liu filled the collapsed stretch sandbag by sandbag—one on, half a step back, another on—blood from his shoulder soaking a dark patch into the top bag.

At the double-layer grating, the wave that hit it bounced three times and didn’t open it. Xiao Mao crouched behind it with the tool stock, looking at the new scratches through the bars, saying nothing, hugging the torch a little closer.

The war-hound came up from under the main junction.

It didn’t use the bank. It heaved at the root of the sandbag course, half of it slumped into the drain, water slapping over the lip. Chen Jin cut in from the side—the thermal lance wouldn’t draw a full flame in all that vapor, the blue pulling down to a thread—and scorched a seam joint, and that made it turn on him. It came over the lip shoulder-first and hit him like a cart, knocked him down into the drain, a mouthful of stinking water, his ears full of nothing else. He hauled himself up by the stones on the drain side, armor flooded, heavy as a second man strapped on top of him.

When he got his feet, the war-hound was up on the bank, slinging mud off its head, making for the crowd by the granary. He didn’t call a warning. He ran it down from behind, got both hands on a hind-leg joint, hydraulics biting into hydraulics, and swung the whole animal back off the bank into the water. Rifle fire pinned the surface on both sides; it couldn’t turn over in the drain. He stepped up onto its back and put the bayonet into the neck joint, and rode the thrashing up onto the bank.

In the small hours, the north wall went quiet.

The last slip from Lei Changgeng came in crooked handwriting, one line: lost a corner, two men, both alive. Voice still gone, so that was all. Chen Jin read it twice, crouched on the drain lip. Before the corner went, the north wall had asked for men once, and he’d answered with go easy on his voice. If the collapse had come while they were asking—he folded the slip into his chest pocket and sat there a long time. The torches crackled. Water heaved out of the drain, layer under layer. Nobody came near him, and he didn’t move.

The wind swung around after midnight; the firelight on the north wall dropped out of sight, and only the rail kept on, two short and one long, missing not one round.

[Night tally: Hound-class x11, War-hound class x1, Humans saved x9]

[Embers: 1071]

One thousand and seventy-one. He glanced at the panel, killed it, and went back to the sandbags.

One of the nine rescues came in the small hours. A kid leaned out over the east lip to look at the water and a swell took him off balance; one of the Guard dove for him and got him, and the current hauled the Guard two steps out before Big Liu took a fistful of collar and dragged him back up, forearm laid open half its length on the stones. None of that hit the ledger—the hands hadn’t been Chen Jin’s, and the system doesn’t log other people’s.

When he came back from collecting heads and heard about it, he walked over, picked up the other two kids gawking at the water, one under each arm, and handed them to their aunties at the granary door. Those two went on the books.

The man with the med kit wrapped the Guard’s arm while he winced, still saying don’t wrap it thick—thick wraps foul a rifle stock.

At first light Wen Heng came down the water line checking the wounded, worst first. When she reached Chen Jin he was peeling water out of the armor skirt, moat water running down the seams. She gave him two seconds. ”How many mouthfuls?”

”Three.”

”Logged.” She opened her little book, wrote one line, then pressed two fingers on the bruise where the hit had landed. She looked at it for a beat, looked down, and wrote another line without saying what it was. Two steps away she turned back. ”Water out of these drains—nobody drinks it straight. Boiled, either.”

Xiaosui came over from the granary with hot water. All the kids were there, not one of them scattered. She set the bucket down, and the first thing she looked at wasn’t him—it was the grating. A new scratch across the double layer, white, shallow, not through. She touched it with one finger and turned around. ”Xiao Mao’s weld.”

Behind the grating Xiao Mao was packing his tools. He didn’t look up. ”Three passes.”

Chen Jin walked a circle around the main junction. The seven dead drains were all dropping, visibly, a thin drip ticking in each drain throat. Only the main junction mouth was wrong: the sandbag course hadn’t failed, but the water under it kept seeping through, curling around the stone blocks, one ring after another, coming up from below—and the sound it made was a dead sound. He crouched and watched a long while. The stone block nearest the mouth had shifted with the swirl. Half an inch.

He put his hand on the stone. The water swirled under his fingers, cold.