Ember Legion

The north wall came through the night untouched. The gun sat under its tarp, and the black smear under the breach had faded gray in the sun. Chen Jin was finishing half a flatbread behind the parapet when Lei Changgeng’s note arrived.

Two lines, the hand more slanted than the last two days:

”New scrapes on the east sluice gate grating. Last night.”

The north wall being untouched didn’t mean the thing hadn’t come. There was a gun on the parapet now, throwing iron four hundred paces, and the one on the high slope had watched it do it. It had stopped trying the north wall. It was trying another door.

He reached the east sluice by midday. The moat stood half a hand’s width below the gate mouth, a length of grating showing, and the scrapes were down on the lower bars just above the waterline—the bites were fresh, husk fragments still caught in them, wet mud and all. Something had come up on the water in the night.

Lei Changgeng’s squad was stationed here. Two in ten of the garrison had been pulled off to the berth works, his squad had gone thin for it, and now a gate had been split off too—the men stretched between the pier and the wall, thick nowhere. Two courses of sandbags stood on the gate pier, laid the same way as the wall, torches set all around. A man who had held walls his whole life had come to the water and was holding it like a wall.

Chen Jin crouched to the scrapes. Lei Changgeng stood by, watched a breath, and asked, ”That thing on the north wall—can it be moved?”

”The trunnions are fixed,” Chen Jin said. ”It stays where it’s set. It holds where it stands.”

Lei Changgeng grunted and asked nothing else.

”Night work?”

”Second watch. Right in the shift change.” Lei Changgeng kept his smoke-ruined voice down. ”I’ve run shifts for ten years. It took it three days to find the gap.”

”Then it’s found the right one.” Chen Jin picked a husk fragment off the bite. ”While it’s watching you, it isn’t watching anything else.”

Lei Changgeng said nothing. He crouched and built the sandbag course half a layer higher.

”Sergeant—the gate isn’t held from the pier. It’s held at the root,” Chen Jin said. ”They don’t come over the pier. They come at the grating’s root.”

Lei Changgeng looked at him, said nothing, took the course he’d built apart and re-laid it down both sides of the grating’s root. His squad watched from behind. Nobody asked why. The sergeant moved, so they moved.

The next day, two lines: ”Three came last night. Pushed off. One hurt, light.”

By day they patched the grating, strapping the chewed bars with iron strip. The strip came up from the repair station; Xiao Mao rode out on the cart with it, didn’t get down, left one sentence: ”The requisition cleared.” Then the cart went. The garrison men riveted the strip bar by bar and slept where they dropped on the lee side of the pier, one against the next.

That night Chen Jin stood watch on the main junction, and the gunfire came over from the east sluice in waves—not dense, never quite stopping, like a saw being ground somewhere past the edge of night: grind, rest, grind again. Everyone on the junction heard it. Nobody said anything. Each man pulled his rifle a little tighter into his chest. By morning the fire from the east sluice had died and come back four times.

The third day, one line: ”The water’s up.”

Chen Jin read it on the main junction at lamplighting. No rain. Nothing moving upstream. Water doesn’t rise from nowhere—he folded the note away, called for six men, and before he’d finished the sentence Da Liu was already at the door with his rifle slung. They ran for the east sluice.

It was clear at a glance. The water stood half a hand’s width higher than yesterday, and the grating showed only its crown. Lei Changgeng crouched on the gate pier, face half-lit by torch, a rifle half-cleaned in his hands.

”No rain,” Chen Jin said first.

”No rain,” Lei Changgeng said. ”Thirty years holding walls. First time I’ve watched water rise on its own.”

Chen Jin crouched at the grating, dipped a hand in, rubbed. The water was cold and gritted with shell fragments. He stood. ”Rod.”

The rod man pushed a hooked pole down under the grating’s root, worked it twice, brought it up. Half a crushed husk hung off the tip.

”There’s something laid in under the gate,” Chen Jin said. ”They pack dead ones in at the root at night. One layer, the water climbs a notch. Pack it full enough, and they ride over the top.”

Nobody on the pier said anything. Lei Changgeng stared at the water a while and ground it out through his teeth: ”So what I’m holding isn’t a gate. It’s their staging pile.”

”Then empty the pile,” Chen Jin said. ”Men on the pier, rifles on the water. They’ll come again tonight. The pile’s gone—it has to come and see.”

The rod man and two helpers went down to the gate root with hooked poles and hauled dead ones out one at a time—bloated husks turning in the water, laid out in a row on the pier. The water went down as they worked; with every stretch of drop, another length of rusted bar came clear. Nobody on the pier felt any better watching it fall. The water hadn’t risen on its own, and it could be made to rise again. Lei Changgeng had every torch pressed low, wall-side and water-side black into one black, nobody raising a lamp.

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Past midnight, the water surface moved.

The first sound wasn’t gunfire. It was the surface itself—a fine, line-by-line push, like something driving water ahead of it without breaking the skin.

Not a horde. Three, riding the surface up from downstream—riding it. When the first two hauled themselves onto the grating’s crown, Chen Jin was waiting on the pier; the knife went down, and one rolled off into the water, one spiked through the bar. The third swung around the side of the pier and came up. Da Liu’s shot caught it first and knocked it back off the pier face; it went for the dead-bug pile to burrow back in, and Chen Jin half-knelt out onto the laid husks and drove the knife down the seam to the end.

The kill in the water ran on the same drill as the junction. At the bottom there was only stone, and everything that turned over was clear to see.

Farther back, more shapes still coming—and then a howl from far off, short, and every shape in the water wheeled at once, gone in a few bounds. The rifle line poured two volleys across the water and hit nothing at all.

They didn’t come again that night. The water lay black; dead husks drifted down from upstream, here and there, riding east. How many of the ones the garrison had beaten off across two nights had died out in the water, nobody could count. On the books: three. The river’s books were not the panel’s to keep.

One thousand three hundred fifteen—seven hundred eighty-five short of a rifle. Two nights of the garrison’s rifles, and not one round, not one number, had landed on the panel. The garrison wasn’t on this ledger, same as the gun wasn’t.

They dug the gate root clear till first light. Twenty-six husks in the row, sizes mixed, old and new—the earliest ones waterlogged clean through, algae in the seams. Chen Jin crouched and counted them out. ”First scrapes were four nights ago. It packed this for three nights.”

Nobody answered. Three nights of packing, for one night of using. Two nights of gunfire—and the gunfire had been guarding the supply road.

Lei Changgeng called the roll on the gate pier. The names went down the page one by one, and at the waterline post on the pier’s back side, the roster answered and the post didn’t. Da Liu took men down the waterline and found him, dragged half under, rifle still in his fist, muzzle toward the water.

He carried him back up the way he’d carried the rail sections—slow, level, no jolt. A young garrison soldier, joined from the candidates last month—one of the forty-seven from the queue in the martial-law days, come with the fish spear his brother left, not empty-handed. The spear had gone to the stores; the man had gone to the squad. Chen Jin couldn’t put a name to him.

Not one shape on the water the rifles had covered. The wall torches on the landward side threw their light over the pier top—and past the top, down the back face, their reach ended a body-length short of the waterline. The one that had actually come up out of the water hadn’t used the grating and hadn’t ridden the surface—it had gone around every muzzle, up the pier’s back face over bare stone, through the one stretch of dark nobody had counted. The three riding the surface had been drawing fire for it from start to finish.

Lei Changgeng crouched, unhooked the boy’s tag, wiped it, and strung it onto the bundle on his neck. The bundle had gone past seeing the knot it hung from. While he strung it, his other hand closed over the whole thing—tags against tags, not one click. The water was still black.

He finished, stood, and went on with the roll. The names went down slower than before, and never stopped.

Wen Heng’s med station lit again past midnight—the man grazed by the grating had walked himself there, arm laid open by a bar, hand clamped over it, telling nobody. The lamp burned until the roll was done.

Chen Jin stood on the pier. When the roll was done he said, ”Sergeant, we’ll draft you two replacements.”

Lei Changgeng closed the roster and clamped it under his arm.

”The two we lost on the road—I walked them through checking their actions, hand over hand,” he said. ”Replacements start from nothing.”

A beat. ”From nothing, then. That pile under the gate—it’ll pack it again tomorrow night.”

Chen Jin said nothing. A replacement’s name and a lost name didn’t weigh the same. That was math he’d done too late.

Before first light he had Da Liu pull the six men off—no going back to the junction; they rested where they were, behind the pier. The north wall’s gun hadn’t fired all night. The thing on the high slope had listened to the east sluice for a whole night and heard no gun. On the slope past the road it rose again, stood a while, didn’t howl, went down. The pile it packed had been dug out—it had that now. No gun on this gate—it had that too.

Chen Jin crouched on the gate pier, worked small stones out from between the sandbags, and set them out in front of him one at a time. Twelve. He looked at them, then over the grass tufts on both sides of the gate, and moved the twelve stones into four clumps of shadow—two on the pier, two at the grating’s root, dozens of paces between, none of them touching.

Da Liu watched a long time from the side, crouched down, asked low: ”All twelve of us?”

”All twelve.” Chen Jin pressed the last stone into the dirt. ”Tomorrow night, nobody squats on the pier. Squat in the grass.”