Chapter 222: Chapter 222: The Warning (2)
Chapter 222: The Warning (2)
He did not wait for a decent hour.
Draven walked into the Lord Commander’s private office at twenty past five in the morning, and Helion Goldmane was already awake and dressed, because Draven had never once caught him otherwise.
Draven told him everything and Helion listened.
When it was finished he walked to the window and looked north, at the dark, where a three hundred foot lattice was standing on a plain humming to itself.
"Forty-one to nineteen," he said.
"Yes."
"They will not target the tower then?"
"No. They will target the site itself."
"Of course not the tower." Helion’s voice did not rise at all. "If they target the infrastructure, it would leave major traces, but a genocide is different for them, I guess."
He stood there a while.
"You came to me first this time," he said.
"Yes."
"Good."
He turned around and let the moment sink in.
"You know I cannot go," Helion said.
It was not a complaint. He said it the way another man might read out a measurement.
"I will sit in this city, and I will send other people to stand in a field. I will hear about it afterward."
"I know," Draven said.
"Yes," Helion said. "I imagine you do."
"Do we pull them?"
The question sat in the room for a long time.
"If we pull them," Helion said, "they live."
"And the project dies."
"Completely." Helion sat down behind his desk. "Well, we cannot be having that now, can we? "
He folded his hands.
"Kest does not need to kill anybody. He only needs us to be frightened enough to save them. He wins either way, and he wins cleaner if nobody dies at all."
"And if we keep them there," Draven said, "we are using two hundred civilians as bait."
"Yes."
Neither of them said anything.
"I am not ordering them to stay," Helion said at last. "I will not have that on this desk. And you will not order it either."
"No," Draven agreed.
"Then there is only one honest way to do this."
"Tell them," Draven said. "All of it. And let them decide."
Helion nodded slowly.
"It is the decent option," he said. "It is also the cruelest thing either of us will do this year, so do not walk out of here feeling clean about it."
---
In the afternoon, the people were briefed about the upcoming situation by Draven.
He gave it to them straight and told them about the attack coming from the Capital.
He even told them everything about the Senate order and the voting that took place. He perfectly made villains out of them. Hearing it, silence fell upon them.
Petta broke the silence and it was not a surprise for anybody.
"They are sending soldiers," she said. Her voice was very thin. "At us. At us, we are, I lay block, I am nineteen, I lay block."
"Aye," Odran said.
"They are going to make it look like animals ate us."
"Aye. That is what he said."
She turned on him, furious, because furious was easier.
"You are the one who said it! Two nights ago on the scaffold, you said it, what happens on the day they are not standing here? You said it, Odran, and now they have told us the day is coming and you are standing there saying aye like a stone!"
Odran, forty years a rigger, scratched the back of his neck.
"I did say that," he admitted.
"So?"
"So I have been thinking on it since." He looked around at the frozen ground, at the trench line, at the north face of the mortar barrel where the moss had gone all the way up. "And I have decided I asked it wrong."
"How is it wrong?"
"Because I asked what happens when they are not here." Odran nodded at Bram, then at the girl in the shade under the water tanker. "And they are here. All ten of them. That is not the question."
He looked back at her.
"The question is what happens if we go home."
"We live, Odran."
"We go back through that gate," Odran said, "and we live in a city where the air comes out of a machine, and we eat grain off a Capital ship, and every man on this crew spends the rest of his life knowing that the one time it was for something, he got in a wagon."
Petta stared at him with her eyes full.
"And my grandmother was not lying," Odran said, quieter. "That is the other thing I have been chewing on. She was not making it nicer than it was. I have got moss on my boots. It is out there. It has been out there under the fog the whole time and I have been walking about for forty years thinking she was a sentimental old woman."
Sella put her ladle down on the counter.
"I have fed field armies for twenty years," she said. "I have never once fed anything that was going to make a thing that stayed."
She sat back down on her stool.
"I am not moving. Somebody has to cook."
The vote was not taken. There was no show of hands.
The masons simply went back to their trench line, and the riggers went back to the scaffold, and eleven minutes later Halvers was shouting at somebody about spacing.
Two hundred and six had come out.
Two hundred and six stayed.
The rigger’s boy was the only argument.
"He goes," Draven said.
"He does not want to go," Odran said.
"He is nine."
"He is nine and he has told three separate people that he is the tower’s water lad and he is not leaving his crew." Odran rubbed his face. "I will put him in the transport myself. He will hate me."
"He will get over it."
"He will not, actually," Odran said. "But he will be alive to not get over it."
By dusk the site was not a construction site anymore.
Nyx walked the perimeter alone and marked her lines, and for the first time since the convoy left the wall she looked genuinely pleased about something.
Reina laid the outer ground with a thin sheet of ice that would not hold a man’s weight but would tell her the instant something heavier crossed it.
Bram built berms. Natalie sat on the tower’s third platform and ranged the whole plain in every direction, and wrote her numbers down.
Cole and Lyra worked out of the back of a wagon on something neither of them would explain.
Aegon walked the crews through what to do when it started. Not how to fight. Where to run, when to drop, which side of the berm to be on.
Draven stood at the northern edge of the site as the light went.
He opened his interface and looked at the counter he had started keeping four days ago.
Three days until the next leaf.
He looked out at fifty miles of clear, open, visible ground.
’You will not wait for the second tower,’ he thought.
’You have one week to make sure there is never a second one. And you have already spent one day of it.’
Behind him the arc lamps came on, one after another, and the site lit up like a lantern in the middle of nowhere.
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