The note lay flat on the council table, smoothed out by Zhou Zhengting's own hand. Beneath Lei Changgeng's two slanted lines sat the grain ledger, its pages spread between three old maps.
"The ledger says forty-seven days." Zhou Zhengting's finger rested on a line mid-page. "That's a count that assumes the wagons keep coming—the north depot, one run every five days, five wagons a run. The road's cut. The number means nothing now. What's actually in the granary, rationed tight by household, is thirty days." A half-finished calculation lay under his hand: one run every five days, six runs a month. The road had cut off the fourth.
"And the patrol fleet?" Bi Chengzhang stood at the far end of the table.
"Forty days at the fastest—that was on day eleven. Today's day twenty-two," Zhou Zhengting said. "Thirty-one days left."
Bi Chengzhang didn't answer. There was a third ledger on the table: one night of reloading fire burned three days' output, and the copper counted on day nine lasted to day thirty-nine. Three ledgers, each shorter than the last, and nobody had ever laid them out side by side on one sheet of paper. Today somebody had.
"The wagons were mine to send," Bi Chengzhang opened. "Five wagons, twelve men. Supervisor He of the port office led them. The depot held four hundred twenty sacks—three-day reports, and the last one is nine days old."
The grain numbers came off his tongue without a pause. The men's names: he gave one.
"I'll sign the order now. You pick the men. Back before the bars close tonight—past that, the gate stays shut and no relief goes out."
He signed fast and set the pen down without capping it. Zhou Zhengting held the order up, read it once more, and passed it over. When Chen Jin took it, Bi Chengzhang said one thing only: "However many wagons come back, the grain holds until the fleet."
Nobody picked that up.
They went out by the north postern. The gate sat at the foot of the north wall, rusted shut for more than a year; two drillmen worked half an hour to crack it open a seam, rust sifting down off the hinge pins, a drift of red on the ground like someone had shaken a sieve of red dust under the door. Lei Changgeng was already waiting in the gate passage—two old garrison men behind him, and a day hand with a hunting bow slung on his back. The booklet had him down for the bow: an old hunter who'd run the north road in his day.
"I don't know this Supervisor He," Lei Changgeng told Chen Jin. "But the two garrison men seconded to the wagon run are from my squad."
Both old soldiers carried rifles, old ones, wiped bright. Lei Changgeng checked each action without a word, then waved them forward.
Eleven men went out the gate under an overcast sky.
The north road was emptier than he'd imagined. The wheel tracks died half a li out from the gates, and past that there was nothing on the road but wind. They passed a way-station fallen in on one side, a village burned hollow; as the sun leaned west, the things by the roadside multiplied—a single shoe, half a rein, a pair of goggles with the lenses gone. Beyond one last rise, there was the convoy.
Five wagons. Three tipped over mid-road, two canted into the ditch. Every grain sack sat split open, grain spilled in a line. No people.
Lei Changgeng walked the whole length of it and came back with his jaw set tight. Nobody went for the grain first—two of the Ember Guard went to the overturned wagon, lifted the side boards, called out. Nothing answered. Chen Jin hadn't moved. He crouched at the edge of the spill.
The grain had a direction to it. Sack by sack, from the wagon pile all the way to the north end of the road, drawn out in a white line forty paces long, dead straight, laid right down the center of the road.
Bugs don't eat grain. The grain was bait.
"To the wag—"
He never finished the word. Things stood up out of the ditches.
Hound-class rose on both sides of the road—out of the drainage ditches, from behind the collapsed walls, off the wild-grass slopes: one wave to cut the head, one to bite the tail. His order left with the first shots: "Form up! Wagons for walls!"
Ten men didn't break. Three or four of them heaved an overturned wagon body up and propped it across the road; grain sacks went up along the gunwale as a breastplate—the bait it had laid, stacked into their own works. Reloaded rounds were precious, so the rifles split three ways, left, right, and center, firing by rotation—one section crackling while two reloaded, the sound never dying and the rounds stretching. One order ruled: let them get close.
The first three hounds to come on dropped inside twenty paces; a fourth came up the ditch bottom low and fast, and the bow arrived first—an arrow under the wagon body, into the foreleg joint. A hunter's way: not the body, the joint. One arrow to ruin a leg, the bayonet to finish the neck.
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Lei Changgeng held the tail of the ring with the two old garrison men. He never touched a rifle—he'd given the rifles to the younger men and taken up an entrenching tool instead. A soldier beside him started, "Squad leader, you—"
"Fire your own lane!"
Two waves beaten off, and then the road went quiet. The bugs neither came in nor pulled back. At twenty paces they sat in a ring, a line of ridged backs heaving in the grass.
"What are they waiting for?" Lei Changgeng spat.
Chen Jin followed their line of sight north. Something stood on the high ground at the far end of the road, too far to make out a shape. The wind carried the roar over—three short, one long.
The roar fell, and the thing on the slope crouched down.
The War-hound came down the road from the north. A head and a half taller than the hounds, it ran flat along the roadbed, the scrape of its claws on stone carrying fifty paces into the ears. It didn't circle. It took the front of the wagon ring head-on and rammed itself into the gap between two wagons—exactly the gap Chen Jin had been waiting for.
The Ember Guard on both flanks swung the wagon bodies inward and wedged it fast; the old hunter's second arrow skimmed the ground and went into its left eye; Chen Jin ran up the wagon shaft, set his bayonet into the seam above the right eye, and drove the whole blade home on the strength of its own head-shake.
[Kill confirmed: War-hound class x1. +50 Embers.]
It made no sound. It heaved twice, brought half a wagon down with it, man and all—and while Chen Jin was still on the ground the roar rose from the slope again, three short and one long, the tail note bent upward this time. The ring of hounds left all at once: a few bounds, and the empty country held not one of them.
Lei Changgeng leaned on his tool and watched them go clean. After a long while he said, "Pulling back."
"That's not pulling back." Chen Jin crawled out from under the wagon. "It's done."
The words were out and the cold came with them. The gate had opened once today, and the bugs had gotten today's battle out of it. What they'd eaten wasn't the point. They'd cleared up three things: the city will open its gates; here's what comes out when it does; and here's how thick the guns are.
Two men came out from under the wagons. The garrison man who'd ridden escort had a broken left leg, splinted with a strip he'd wedged off the axle; the convoy cook had hidden four days in a culvert by the road, moving by night, crawling out to grab raw grain, throwing half of every mouthful back up, his hands cracked open with frost sores. When they carried him out he still had half a sack of rice locked in his arms. Asked why he hadn't dropped it: every grain of it belongs to the city.
Twelve had gone out. Two were coming back.
The soldier with the leg didn't ask about the leg. "Squad leader—the tags." A jerk of his chin toward the first overturned wagon. "Didn't let the tags get lost. Kept them all."
Lei Changgeng took the handful of dog tags from the man's arms, wiped each one against the wind, threaded them, hung them on his own neck, crowded in with his own. Tags clicked against tags, a fine dry sound. Chen Jin stood alongside and said nothing the whole time.
"Back in the city, I'll put you all in for commendation," he said.
The words were out before he heard them. Twelve men. Two came back. Who's the commendation for.
The grain couldn't all be saved. Two wagons would roll: one with its axle whole, one loaded with the wounded and what sacks they could spare. They picked through and loaded not quite a wagon and a half, and left the rest scattered on the road—nobody dared linger. The old hunter walked rear guard with his bow; the wounded lay packed on the wagon bed; at dusk a torch glow showed through the crack of the north postern.
Nobody spoke in the gate passage. The wagon wheels ground over the flagstones all the way to the granary.
Bi Chengzhang waited at the granary door. He didn't look at the men; he looked at the wagons. The workers unfastened the sacks and he stood counting them, one by one, and only then spoke: "Nineteen." A pause. "Spilled on the road—write it off as loss. Tomorrow we send wagons again—"
"There's no tomorrow." Zhou Zhengting handed over a sheet of paper—dictated by the soldier with the broken leg, flat on the wagon bed on the way home: the north depot is empty. Half a month ago the depot people went south with grain and wagons both. The convoy loaded the old stock off the platform. The next depot north is a hundred and twenty li out.
Bi Chengzhang's fingers tapped the wagon frame twice and stopped. He folded the paper into his coat, walked two steps, stopped again.
"Thirty days of grain. Forty days of fleet," he said. "You keep that ledger better than I do, Manager Zhou."
He left without looking back.
Wen Heng came with a lamp in the small hours. The soldier with the leg and the cook were bedded down in the med station; she examined them one by one, writing as she went: "Left leg, closed break—splint it." "Frost sores on both hands—warm water soaks, no fire." At the frost-sores line she asked the cook what he'd eaten those four days, heard him out, and added a small note in the margin. At the door, Chen Jin stood outside the lamplight. She glanced up at him once.
"You're not hurt."
"Mm."
She bent back over her notes. The lamp wick crackled once.
Night. The barracks. He opened the panel:
[Night tally: Hound-class x8, War-hound class x1, Humans saved x2]
[Embers: 1275]
Eight hundred twenty-five short of a rifle. He killed the panel and laid both ledgers out on the table. Grain: thirty days at the tightest ration, thirty-one days left on the fleet's count—one day of margin, and that day existed on paper only. Copper: dry by day thirty-nine, and tonight's fight had burned two more days of output.
The thing at the far end of the road made no sound all night.
It didn't need to come. It left the road open, let the grain come back, let the men come back—grain in the city means wagons out again; men home alive means the gate opens again.
Chen Jin took Lei Changgeng's note out and smoothed it flat. Crooked writing, two lines. He turned it over and added one line on the back in pencil:
Depot's empty. Closest one, a hundred and twenty li.
He folded it and put it away in his breast pocket, in the spot where notes went. The rail signal carried over from the north wall—two short, one long, not one beat missed. The north road lay black. The wagons would be mended, the road would be run—there was no way around that. And every one of those hundred and twenty li, end to end, lay inside its sight.