Early in the morning, in the barracks, Chen Jin opened the panel in the first hour of the tenth day of curfew, while the city was still half asleep. A new line jumped out ahead of everything else:
[Authorization unlocked: Tier-1 Bastion Gun Blueprint.]
He stared at the line for two breaths. Out on the north road, the War-hound's carcass still lay in the center of the roadbed. One night had passed; nobody had gone near it, and the bugs hadn't touched it either. The authorization had been shot out of it, and the system understood that better than anyone in the city.
The blueprint opened. A gray-black line drawing, done in the same hand as the barracks sheet from the beginning, clean, without one rough edge. A full cross-section of a gun position built into a parapet: barrel length, powder chamber depth, the height of the trunnions, how round the bore had to be—even the thickness of the rammed-earth bedding under the position, measured and marked. The last page held a list of standard fittings: one ignition unit, brass-bodied, priced at 300; one mold set for premeasured charges, priced at 120. His balance read 1275. On the other pan of the scale in his chest sat a rifle at 2100.
He looked at the ignition unit line a beat longer than he needed to, backed out, and killed the panel. The money only went so far. Spend it on the gun, and the rifle moved another step away. The wagons were a dead hope too—"no tomorrow," said yesterday. If the wall got climbed one more time, no amount of money would matter.
Every ember spent here was a step back from the rifle.
At the granary wall the weighing line already reached around the corner, sack after sack hugged into chests as the owners moved off. He kept to the wall and went around them. Somewhere on the way to the repair station he settled one thing: the blueprint went to Xiao Mao, and not one ember would be spent.
In the repair station Xiao Mao was changing the belt on the reloading press. Chen Jin dictated the blueprint to him: how long the barrel, how wide the bore, how deep the powder chamber, at what height the trunnions sat. Xiao Mao kept working—and stopped halfway through.
"The bore part. Say it again."
Chen Jin said it again. Xiao Mao hung the belt back on its hook and wiped his hands on his apron. "You have a drawing?"
Chen Jin drew it from memory. Pencil, on wrapping paper cut from a supply crate. Xiao Mao leaned in and studied it for a while. "This drawing's clean."
"Clean's bad?"
"Too clean." Xiao Mao tapped the corner where the powder chamber sat. "Iron forged by human hands doesn't come this obedient." He looked down at the lines again. "You drew these yourself?"
"Mm."
"Then it's fine." Xiao Mao flattened the paper out. "A hand-drawn line knows its own width. Rifling's out of our reach—smoothbore, canister. And we're not buying their ignition unit; I'll build it a striker. However a rivet gun drives a nail, that's how it lights the charge." He rolled the paper up and stuffed it inside his jacket. "Materials?"
"The old stockyard. Broken piles, dead axles—take your pick."
"Rails?" Xiao Mao asked. "Thick web. A bore planed from a thick web comes out round."
Zhou Zhengting signed the requisition slowly. His half-finished ledger work lay under his hand—the grain ledger, fresh lines added below the entry where the road had cut off the fourth run. First he asked about the powder: how much per shot. Half a jin, give or take. Then: how many rifle rounds does one shot replace. Chen Jin reckoned it the way you'd reckon a mine blast: canister spreads—a fan as wide as the breach—thirty rounds' worth.
Zhou Zhengting tapped the paper twice with his pencil and signed. Then he added, "The black powder comes out of the reloading press stock—I'll keep the ledger. The gun eats iron, not copper. Every day it fires is a day the copper ledger breathes. I'll be checking that one every night."
They turned the old stockyard over for an afternoon. Xiao Mao picked the two thickest-webbed rails in the pile, cut them, matched them, welded. Da Liu came over from the works detail for a day and carried both rail sections on his own shoulder—the crews, he said, had fought over who got to send their strongest man once word spread that a gun was going up on the wall. Every seam Xiao Mao finished, he struck a punch mark into the metal beside the weld. When someone asked what the marks counted, he said: the count.
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By the second day of welding the barrel had taken shape. At night the repair station stayed lit past midnight, welding sparks spattering, visible half a street away. The night patrol stopped at the door for a while and moved on—the chops on the work-detail slip were all in order. A mine-cart axle, cut down, became the trunnions; a broken pile, half-buried, became the carriage. When Chen Jin came to inspect, Xiao Mao didn't look up. He reported numbers. "Bore: straight. Trued it three times with the calipers. Seams: three. All water-tested. No seep." Then he added, "The rest is the powder's job."
When the last seam cooled, Xiao Mao didn't get up right away. He crouched at the barrel and wiped the torch down, inch by inch, for a long time. Da Liu squatted nearby and kept him company, saying nothing either. Down the lane a hawker's cart creaked past collecting the night market. The wheels faded, and Xiao Mao was still crouching.
The gun went up on the north wall at dusk. They pulled a corner of the parapet apart and laid the muzzle square on the old collapse—a gap that had failed twice; everyone on the wall knew it by heart. A clerk from the relief officer's office came around, leaned on the parapet, and asked who had authorized modifying the wall. Chen Jin handed him the requisition with Zhou Zhengting's signature. The clerk read it, handed it back, and left without a word.
The first shot was a dud.
Smoke seeped from the touchhole in a thin line. No report. Xiao Mao started to lean over the breech; Chen Jin hauled him back by the collar. A garrison soldier nearby suggested poking it with a rod. Chen Jin stopped that too.
"A dud waits a stick of incense," Chen Jin said. "Mine rule. The men who hurried in close are all still down there."
For a stick of incense, nobody on the wall said a word. A torch burned down a finger's width; one jumpy soldier kept hoisting his torch up and down until Lei Changgeng shut it down with a look. When the smoke had thinned away, they reamed the chamber out, recharged, and re-seated the striker.
The second shot spoke.
When the report went out, dust rained off the parapet. Scrap iron fanned out four hundred paces away and beat the road surface into a rising haze. Lei Changgeng walked a full circle around the gun and smacked the barrel with his palm. "Louder than my mallet." He handed the mallet to the nearest sentry and went down off the wall.
Wen Heng came up to the wall root with her med kit and went down the soldiers with ringing ears, one by one. She wrote down three names and added a line of small print in the margin. Before she left she said to Chen Jin, "Next time, before the gun fires—tell every man to open his mouth first." The mines said the same thing before a blast. He nodded. She didn't look at him again; she took her kit down off the wall.
For a day after the test, nothing moved outside the north wall, and the gun sat on the parapet under a tarp. The second night, that changed.
Night came down on the thirteenth day of curfew. It started at the old collapse. The night watch heard the grit trickling first, grain by grain, and then the smell came up out of the seam. By the time Chen Jin reached the wall in his armor, the shadows below had stacked two deep. The rifle line fanned out along the parapet, three relays, hold until they're close—the rule the road had taught them.
"Gun."
The first shot went down the seam and thinned the shadows by a layer. In the reload gap the rifles filled in, pinning the climb. The second shot swept the seam mouth with scrap, and what was left of the shadows folded back into the ditch. One came over the parapet through the smoke anyway. Chen Jin met it and put the bayonet through the neck seam.
[Kill confirmed: Hound-class x1. +10 Embers.]
Nothing else moved below. Torchlight showed the rocks outside the seam smeared black, running toward the ditch. Chen Jin had men pack earth along the seam line—none of that going into the ditch water. That was Wen Heng's rule, and the water ban hadn't loosened once since the day it was set. Far up the road, on the high slope, something black stood against the dark. It didn't move. It made no sound. After a while, it sat down.
Back at the barracks he opened the panel:
[Night tally: Hound-class x1]
[Embers: 1285]
One thousand two hundred eighty-five—eight hundred and fifteen short of a rifle. The gun had fired twice today, and what it put down ran to more than that number. The panel didn't carry them. What a gun drops doesn't go on the ledger. He knew this kind of account from the mines: a blast brought down the whole crew's coal, and the scale weighed the baskets, not whose pick had swung. The scale wasn't wrong. The scale just didn't care.
Passing the gun position on his rounds, he stopped. By the light on the parapet, he counted the punch marks along the barrel. Twenty-seven.
Before sleep, Xiao Mao came by to square the gun's account—half a jin a shot, a jin for the two tonight, entered in Zhou Zhengting's book. Squared up, he didn't leave. He handed over a list instead: one rail, thick web; two dead axles; a foot of felt for the trunnions, to soften the recoil. Then he asked, "The second gun. When do we start forging?"
"The gun crews, from now on, come out of the repair station."
The weight of it landed only after the words were out. Of everyone in the repair station, Xiao Mao was the youngest. He had just nailed a sixteen-year-old to the loudest post in the city.
Xiao Mao grinned, slinging his tool roll over his shoulder. "Done. I'll write out the materials list tonight." At the door he turned back. "And the second gun?"
"When it comes again."
"Will it dare?"
Chen Jin didn't answer. A long while later, from the high slope north of the road, a long howl came over—three short, one long, the tail note dragging out flat. Not high. Not low. Xiao Mao stood in the doorway a moment, cinched his tool roll tight, and left.