THE MARCH ON RAVENPORT

We rode into Ashgrove Estate at dusk on the third day, and the first thing I saw was the people.

There were hundreds of them. They stood along the avenue of poplars that my mother had planted, and on the lawn, and in the sheep meadow beyond the wall. Redwater ranchers in dusty hats. Miners from the Iron Pits with their lamps still strapped to their brows. Women with babies on their hips. A dozen old soldiers in the faded blue of the Frontier Guard, standing in a rank with their medals pinned on crooked. Somebody had hung a bedsheet from the gate, and somebody else had painted on it, in red house-paint, in letters a foot high:

WE REMEMBER HER NAME.

I pulled up the mare and looked at it for a long time.

"Mabel's doing," said Josie, behind me. She was trying to sound offhand, and failing. "She printed a thousand handbills. The laundress's story, the Whitlock inquest, page forty. She sent them down the line on every train that would carry a mailbag. I think she may have overdone it."

"A little," I agreed.

"Tam, you're crying."

"It's the dust."

"It's not the dust."

"Josie."

"Right. Dust." She sniffed loudly. "Terrible dust, round here."

…

We held the council in the old library, because it was the only room in the house with a table long enough.

I had not been inside it since the day I inherited the place. It was a tall dim room, paneled in walnut, with a gallery running round the walls and a ladder on a brass rail. My mother's books stood in their ranks. Someone had lit the fire. Someone had put out bread, and cold mutton, and a great brown pot of coffee, and a map of Ravenport spread across the table, weighted at the corners with an inkwell, a candlestick, a pistol and a sleeping cat.

Nimbus, who was the cat, opened one silver eye and closed it again.

They gathered round. Declan stood at my right hand, with his arms folded, in a clean shirt that Hawk had somehow produced. Hawk sat at the foot of the table with the long gun across his knees, and a pipe he was not smoking. Josie perched on the arm of a chair. At the far end, hunched over a stack of papers, with her spectacles pushed up in her hair and ink to the elbows, sat a small dark woman of forty who had come up from the capital in the baggage car of a freight train, and whose name was Mabel.

She had worked in the Glass Relay for fifteen years. She knew every wire.

"Right," I said. "Tell me what he has."

…

Declan did it. He spoke in the flat dry voice of a man who had planned a great many campaigns and buried a great many of the men who fought in them.

"Four things," he said. "The Marshal Corps. The Guard. The Senate. And the Engine."

He laid a finger on the map.

"The Marshals are the visible part. Six thousand, perhaps seven, drawn from the Houses, quartered in the Ravenport barracks and the Colosseum. Not all will fight. Many are clerks in gray coats. But two thousand are real. Silver and above. They will hold the gates and the Founders' Stair." The finger moved. "The Guard is the Chancellor's own. Eight hundred. Gold, mostly. They will be around him."

"And the Senate?"

"Three hundred and twelve Senators. Perhaps a third of them know what the Tithe is. The rest believe what they have been told." His mouth thinned. "It will be the first time many of them have seen the truth. I do not expect them to enjoy it."

"The Engine."

He was silent a moment.

"I have not seen it," he said. "I have only felt it. Beneath the Senate house there is a chamber, very old, very deep. It is where the drain ends. Every Tithe taken from every child in the Republic for sixty years has gone there, and been bound in the stone, and fed up through the ward-lines to the Houses." He looked at me. "The Cantor said he would press a button. I believe she meant something like that. If the Chancellor can close that circuit while we stand in the chamber, he will draw on the whole of it at once."

"What would that do?"

"To an ordinary mage, it would kill. To you, or to me..." He lifted a shoulder. "I do not know. I do not think he knows. I think that is what frightens him."

I looked at the map. The Senate house stood at its heart, a white drum with a dome, ringed with courtyards and statues and wide shadeless steps. Around it the city spread in a grid of avenues, canals, rail-yards and glass.

"Four ways in," I said.

"Five." Declan touched the north wall. "If your Dean keeps her word."

"She'll keep it."

"I hope you are right."

"I am. She's too proud not to."

…

The plan came in pieces, over three hours and two pots of coffee. It was not elegant. It was a fist, a lever and a lie, and I had never been prouder of a plan in my life.

The lie was ours. Word would go out that Tamsin Reeve had been seen at Skyfall, three days ago, ill and exhausted. That she was in the foothills. That she was weeks from the capital, and would not be at the Senate. Mabel would put it in the Relay's evening bulletin. Hawk would leak it to a train conductor who owed the Corps money. By the fourteenth, every Marshal in Ravenport would know it for a fact.

The lever was Hawk's.

"There's a rail," he said, and set down his pipe. "You know the one, Tam. The Ember-Rail. It comes in from the west along the Cinder Basin, a hundred and ten miles of it, straight as a ruler. That's how the Chancellor feeds his Engine. Every tithe-wagon in the Republic runs along it, and every ward-line in the capital drinks from it. And I know it." He tapped the table. "I helped lay the Basin stretch, when I was nineteen. There's a trestle at Mile Ninety. Two hundred feet of timber, over a dry wash. Nobody guards it. Nobody ever thought to."

"You can cut it."

"I can cut it." He grinned. It was a thin, savage, boyish grin, and it took thirty years off him. "Wouldn't be the first time I blew a rail for you, girl."

"Hawk—"

"Hush. I've got six kegs of blasting powder in the barn. Been saving 'em for a rainy day." He sat back. "It's raining."

The fist was mine and Declan's.

I would go in at midnight, by the Dean's postern, with Declan and Nimbus. We would cross the Academy cloister, the Great Hall, the Founders' Stair. We would stand on the Senate floor at noon, when three hundred and twelve men and women in black robes had gathered to hear their Chancellor name me an outlaw and a murderer. And when he had finished, I would stand up.

"You'll want an audience," said Mabel.

Everyone looked at her.

She did not look up. She was pencilling something on the back of a handbill. "You'll want a bigger one than three hundred Senators. They're the people who already know. The rest of the Republic's the one that needs convincing." She tapped the pencil on her teeth. "How many have a Glass in their parlor? Eight million? Nine?"

"Mabel," said Josie slowly. "You're not suggesting—"

"The Relay's wired for a Senate broadcast. It always is. The Chancellor addresses the Republic from the floor at the opening of every extraordinary session." She finally lifted her eyes, and they were very bright. "Every Glass in every house, every bar, every railway station. Nine million of them. All on one circuit. All tuned to the same channel. All waiting."

"You can take it?"

"I can't." She smiled, a small, hard, determined smile. "We can." She nodded at Josie. "She's the best artificer I've ever met. And I know where the wires are."

Josie stared at her. Then she went crimson from throat to hairline.

"Oh," she said. "Oh, yes."

…

The next day was the last quiet one.

I spent the morning in the practice yard with Declan. We did not spar. There was nothing more to learn from sparring. I had my Archmage's body now, with the Heart settled deep and the nine black limbs of the tree coiled round my arm and cheek, and he had the star on his breast and the ninth chain gone. We stood opposite each other in the long grass, with swords loose in our hands, and we simply looked.

"Is it strange?" he said.

"What?"

"To be the thing you are."

I considered it. "It's like having a very large house," I said. "And I've lived my whole life in one room. I keep opening doors."

"And?"

"And there are a great many rooms I don't want to look into." I tilted my head. "You?"

"I have lived in this house before."

"Was it bad?"

"It was lonely." He looked away across the field. "I think that was the worst of it. Not the power. Not the burden. A man who can move mountains learns very quickly that there is no one left to talk to."

I thought of a tall figure in chains, forty years in the dark, who had asked me, in all that time, for nothing at all.

"You can talk to me," I said.

His eyes came back.

He did not answer. For a moment I thought he would. His lips parted. A thing moved in his face, quick and bright and private, like a bird going up out of a hedge.

Then he shook his head, with a faint rueful smile.

"Not yet," he said. "When it is over."

…

We left at dawn on the fourteenth.

I will not forget the sight of it. The avenue was lined with them, the whole length, on both sides: ranchers, miners, old soldiers, women and children. They did not cheer. They stood quite silent in the gray light, with their hats in their hands. As we passed, one by one, they reached out. A man touched my stirrup. A girl pressed a flower into my fist. An old woman with a face like a walnut caught hold of my sleeve and said, in a cracked Frontier voice, "Go on, lass. Go on and give 'em hell."

Behind us, from the gate, the bedsheet snapped in the wind.

Josie and Mabel had gone ahead, the night before, in a closed wagon packed with copper wire, glass tubes and a case of artificer's tools. They would be in Ravenport by noon. Hawk had left an hour earlier, alone, on the sturdiest mule in the stable, with six kegs in a hay-cart and a sack of biscuits. He had not said goodbye. He had only taken my face between his big rough hands, and looked at me with his faded blue eyes, and pressed something into my palm.

It was a pistol.

I knew it. I had seen it in a glass case, in a shop called Boone & Daughter, on the first day I had come in out of the rain. It was a small, plain, beautiful thing, of blued steel and walnut, with a spell-chamber the size of a thimble and a sight no longer than a grain of rice. It had been made by a man with a screwdriver behind his ear, who had had it, he said, for a rainy day.

"Hawk, I can't—"

"You can." His voice was gruff. "It's the last one he ever built. He made it for the girl who'd be standing at the end of all this. He didn't know who she'd be." He swallowed. "I think he'd be pleased."

"Hawk."

"Your father would be proud, Tam."

I could not speak.

"Go on, now." He let go my face, and turned away, and wiped his nose on his sleeve. "Go on. I've a bridge to blow."

He climbed on the mule, and clicked his tongue, and rode away down the white road toward the west, a small stooped figure in a battered hat, growing smaller and smaller until the dust took him.

I watched until I could not see.

…

We reached the ridge above Ravenport at sunset on the fourteenth.

I reined in. Declan drew up beside me. Nimbus, who had ridden the last twenty miles in the crook of my arm, stood up and put his paws on the saddle-bow.

The city lay below us in the dusk.

I had last seen it from a train window, in the dark, running for my life. It was so much larger than I remembered. A vast sprawl of white stone and gleaming glass, laid out in a grid of lamps, with the black ribbon of the river winding through it and the great dome of the Senate burning at its heart like a coal. Smoke rose from a thousand chimneys. Trains crept in and out of the rail-yards, tiny and bright as beads. Somewhere a bell was ringing.

And along the western wall, a long way off, I saw what I had been looking for.

A line of camp-fires.

Hundreds of them. Thousands. They stretched from the river to the hills in a vast crescent, twinkling in the blue dusk like fallen stars. Gray tents. Wagon-lines. Horse-lines. The pale glint of steel. Banners hung limp in the windless air, each one bearing the sigil of a House.

The Marshal Corps was waiting.

Declan was silent for some time.

"Six thousand," he said at last. "Perhaps more."

"I make it eight."

"Yes." A pause. "I had hoped you would be wrong."

I looked down at the encampment. I looked at the lines of fires, the long winking crescent, the dome gleaming over it. A cold wind stirred my hair. I felt the Heart in my chest, vast and slow, turn over like a sleeping beast.

Then I looked at the wall to the north, where a small dark tower stood up from the Academy roofs, and a window in the topmost story burned with a steady yellow light.

Midnight, I thought.

"Declan."

"Yes."

"If this goes wrong—"

"It will not."

"If it does." I didn't look at him. "If we don't get out. I want you to know that I don't regret any of it. The Rail. The cell. The chain." I took a breath. "I'd do it all again."

For a moment he said nothing. The wind rose and fell. Far below, the bell had stopped.

When he spoke, his voice was very low.

"After this battle, Tamsin," said Declan Marrow, "if I live, I will say what I have not yet said."

My heart missed a beat.

"I would rather you lived to hear it."

"I intend to." He turned, and his gray eyes held mine. "But I would not make you wait for a thing I might never be able to give. I wanted you to know there was one."

I swallowed.

"Don't die," I said.

"I shall do my best."

"That's not good enough."

"No." The corner of his mouth lifted. "It rarely is."

We sat there for a moment longer, side by side, in the last of the light. Then I gathered the reins, and clicked my tongue, and the mare went down the long hill toward the city, and the dark came up around us like water.