The Fortress Rises

Halvard Crane had killed his first man at fourteen and his thousandth at thirty-one, and he could not remember when he had last been sick.

He was sick now. He stood in the lee of a half-built buttress on the summit of the Black Ridge, with one hand against the white stone and the other pressed to his mouth, and retched into the dust until nothing came. His knees were water. When he straightened, the world swam, and a gray-robed overseer who had been watching from a discreet distance stepped forward with a flask.

"Commander. Are you unwell?"

"It is the heat."

"Of course, Commander." The man's voice was smooth as oil. "It is very close, this high up. The air is thin. Many find it so, in their first month." He offered the flask. "A little wine?"

Crane took it. His hand shook so badly that the wine slopped down his chin. He drank anyway, and the sour taste of it gave him something to think about besides what lay at his feet.

It was a ramp. That was all. A broad curving ramp of pale stone, rising from the quarry floor to the base of the nearest pillar, wide enough for six carts abreast. It had been laid in the last week. The surface was still wet with the gray slurry that the masons used to bind it. And he had stood at the bottom, an hour before, and watched a column of laborers go up it, and one of them had stumbled, and the overseer's whip had come down, and the man had fallen against the parapet.

The parapet had been newly finished. The man had been very thin.

Crane did not look at the dark stain on the white. He had learned that morning that if he looked, he would not be able to stop.

…

It had begun, as such things did, with a favor.

Three months ago the Emperor had called him into the study at midnight and handed him a sealed order. The Black Ridge, he had said, is to be garrisoned. Ten thousand men, and a labor force of equal size. The Church will supply the plans. You will supply the guards. He had said it in the tone of a man discussing the lease of a field. There had been no explanation. There had been, in his eyes, something shut and set and dreadful, which the Commander had seen only twice before: once on the night that the old Emperor died, and once at the siege of Tarn.

Crane had asked no questions. He had followed three Emperors, and he knew the price of a question.

He had marched the Black Guard up the Ridge in the dead of winter and set up the camps. He had drawn the labor from the prisons, the poor-houses, the debtor's courts, the beggars' lanes of the capital. He had told himself that it was a mercy: work, shelter, a meal a day. He had told himself that the Church's overseers were hard but fair. He had told himself many things, and he had believed most of them, and each night he had gone to his cot in the guard-barracks and slept the deep, grim sleep of a soldier who has done as he was ordered.

Then, a month ago, they had begun to work the pillars.

He had not understood, at first, what they were made of.

The stone came from the quarries on the north side. A fine pale stone, almost white, that cut like cheese and hardened in the air. Or so the foremen said. He had watched it come up the ramps in sledges, and be set into the great molds, and be poured. He had seen it harden into those curving shapes that rose from the summit like the ribs of a ship. He had thought them handsome.

Then, one night in the third week, a laborer had come to him in the dark.

He had been a gaunt man in rags, a former stonecutter, with a face as seamed as a walnut. He had stood in the door of the Commander's hut, twisting his cap in his hands, and said in a whisper, "Sir. I wouldn't trouble you. But you're a decent man. The lads say so."

"What is it?"

"The pillars, sir." His eyes slid away. "I was a mason thirty years. I know stone. That isn't stone."

"Then what is it?"

"I don't know, sir. I only know that when we break it, there's a smell. And the lads that work the molds, they say sometimes in the night they hear..." He stopped. "Sir. I took a piece home. A chip. I put it under the glass my daughter has, that she got from the old clockmaker. And it had grain. Like wood. Like bone."

Crane had gone very still.

"Bone," he had said.

"I'm no scholar, sir. But I've seen enough ox-bones under a glass."

The man had left. And in the morning, when Crane went to the quarry, he found that the northern face had been sealed by order of the Church, and a white-robed guard posted at the entrance, and the stonecutter was nowhere to be found.

…

He had gone back that night.

He did it alone, in a dark cloak, with a shuttered lantern. The sentry had been bored and half drunk, and had waved him through with a grunt. The tunnel was long and cold and smelled of lime and something older. At its end, a vast hollow opened in the living rock, and he held up his lantern and saw what the Church had been mining.

It was a graveyard.

Not a human one. The bones were too large. They lay in the stone like fossils, in the pale chalk of the cliff: vertebrae the size of cartwheels, ribs that arched thirty feet overhead, a skull the length of a barge with its empty eye sockets staring at the lantern. A dozen of them. A hundred. Whole beasts, whole flights, laid down together in the ancient dark, and chiseled out, row after row, by a thousand silent hands.

He had stood for a very long time.

Then he had gone out into the starlight and been sick behind a rock.

Dragonbone, he thought now, leaning against the white buttress with the flask in his hand. They are grinding the dead into pillars.

He knew what it meant. He knew it with the part of him that had been a soldier long enough to recognize a design. A ring. A web. A heart. He had seen the plans, in the end, in the Pontiff's own hand, brought up the ridge in a locked box by a priest who had not wanted to meet his eye. He had seen the small clear script: the Seat. He had seen the name at the bottom.

For the use of the Empress.

He did not know what it would do to her. He only knew that it was being built for her. And that the Emperor, who loved her, had signed every order with his own hand.

…

"You are looking pale, Halvard."

The voice at his elbow was dry and kind, and his heart gave a hard, sick thump. He turned.

The Pontiff stood in the shadow of the buttress with his white robe stirring in the thin wind. He had come up the ramp unattended. He often did, now, in the evenings, strolling among the workers like a farmer among his fields, pausing to lay a blessing on a bowed head. The laborers adored him. They knelt as he passed. They said that he had a gentle touch.

"Holy Father."

"You have been walking in the quarry."

"I have been overseeing."

"Of course." The silver slits turned toward him. "A soldier's duty. I admire it. There is nothing finer than a man who sees to his work." A pause. "I trust that you find our arrangements satisfactory."

Crane's mouth was dry.

"The men are dying," he said.

He had not meant to say it. It came out low and hoarse, and the words hung in the evening air.

"Three hundred a week," he went on, because there was no going back. "I have counted. Not from the whip, mostly. From the cold, and the dust, and the work. The overseers do not feed them enough to climb the ramps. They go down to the pits on the morning shift and do not come up."

"It is regrettable."

"It is murder, Holy Father."

The Pontiff did not stir. The silver mask caught the last of the light and held it, cold and still. When he spoke, his voice was very gentle.

"Commander. I will tell you something I tell few people. I have been alive for a very long time, and I have buried a great many. I do not enjoy it. I would give everything I have to spare them." He sighed. "But this is a work of healing. It will save a world. And the world is large, and the price is small. Ten thousand, twenty thousand. In the end, they will be forgotten. And the Empire will endure."

"You said the same of the Festival."

"I did."

"Four hundred and twelve."

"And how many did Orloff's rebellion save, by the Empress's intervention?" the old man asked mildly. "How many would have died, in a long and bloody civil war? I do not weigh these things lightly, Halvard. I weigh them with great care." The mask tilted. "I would ask only that you do the same."

Crane was silent.

He thought of Tarn. He thought of a burning village, and a boy of fourteen, and a line of fire that had run across a field and consumed an entire regiment because the officer in command had followed an order he did not understand. He thought of the old Emperor's eyes. He thought of the way the Emperor had looked at the Empress in the palace garden, with something between terror and worship.

I have followed three Emperors, he thought. I have never once asked what they were for.

"I will consider it," said Crane.

"Thank you." The Pontiff laid a long white hand, very lightly, on his sleeve. "You are a good man. I have always said so. There will be a place for you, when it is over."

He walked away down the ramp. The laborers knelt as he passed.

…

The order was waiting on his desk when he returned to the barracks.

It was a single sheet, sealed with the black wax of the Imperial household, bearing the Emperor's own signature. It had come that afternoon by courier. He broke the seal and read it standing.

By command of His Imperial Majesty. The labor force on the Black Ridge to be doubled by the first of the month. Rations to be reduced by one-third. The work to be completed in forty days. No exceptions.

Under the line, in the Emperor's own cramped, hurried hand, was a note.

Halvard. I know what I am asking. I will explain, when it is done. I need you to trust me one more time. K.

He read it once. He read it again.

Then, very slowly, he took the sheet in both hands and tore it down the middle.

He sat for a long time with the two halves on the desk before him, in the failing light. Outside, the horns were blowing for the evening shift. He could hear the tramp of feet on the ramp, the clink of chains, the weary mutter of ten thousand men being driven up into the dark.

I could stop it. The thought came quite clearly. I could close the gates. I could march the Guard to the capital and tell the Empress. I could walk into the Emperor's study and put my sword on his desk and say: no more.

He reached for the pen.

He did not know why. His hand moved of its own accord, steady and soldierly, and pulled a fresh sheet from the drawer. He wrote the date. He wrote the heading. He wrote the orders, word for word, exactly as they had been given: the doubling, the ration cut, the forty days. At the bottom, he signed.

Halvard Crane, Commander of the Black Guard.

He sanded it. He folded it. He put it in the courier's satchel for the morning.

And then he went to the window of the barracks, and stood looking out at the dark summit of the Ridge, where the white pillars rose against the stars like a ring of teeth.

"God forgive me," said Commander Crane, very softly, to no one at all.