Davis went out at moonset.
Big Ed had brought him to the central fire and laid the plan for him with the controlled economy of a man who had been giving operational direction for thirty years in his motorcycle club and knew exactly what a runner needed to carry into difficult country and what he did not. The route — the southern edge of the broken country between the draw and Titusville, the line that would put Davis at the settlement's eastern approach well ahead of the column. The message — warn the settlement, urge evacuation if any of the routes out were open, position the settlement to receive Shane and Big Ed's team before the column arrived. The recognition that the settlement might not believe him. The instruction not to push them if they did not. Just deliver. Then come back to the team's position by way of the route Big Ed marked for him.
Davis listened. He filed the route in the way country runners filed routes, which was by walking it in his head against the ground he knew. Gerald watched the briefing with the quiet attention of a man who had chosen Davis for this work because Davis was the man who carried messages correctly through bad country. When Big Ed finished, Davis looked at Gerald. Gerald nodded once. Davis went to his horse.
He took the southern route. The horse moved at the working trot of an animal that had been ridden through this kind of country since it was old enough to be ridden and the country was the country it knew. The moonset gave him the dark he needed. He cleared the draw's eastern slope and was gone into the country south of the road before the team finished breaking camp.
The team broke camp. Big Ed ran it with the focused organized authority of a man who had been running operational mobilizations since he was old enough to lead a club run. The fires were buried. The gear was loaded. The horses were brought up from the picket line and saddled in the order that would let the team move through the country at the column Big Ed had set for the approach. Mike worked the camp's exit point at the southern rim — the small terraform that would close the draw's southern access behind them and leave the cover undisturbed for anyone reading the country from the road. Mike's work was clean. The Earthen Bastion ran its quiet read through the ground and the south rim's geometry adjusted itself to the configuration Mike directed. Big Ed set the formation. He put Hill at point. Hill's tracking range would read the country ahead of them, the scouts Jesper would push out before his column made the next day's halt, the small disturbances in the ground that would tell Hill where the column's perimeter was. Hill moved with the working economy he brought to point work — Thrud moving at his right at the distance she always moved at his right when the two of them were in the field, the Jafna-Gaddr in the working carry across her back. Hill and Thrud were not announced as a unit. They were a unit. The team had learned to read the proximity between them as fact rather than statement and Big Ed had built his formation around the fact.
Dave took the flank with King and three of the working redbones. The Focus of the Pack ran its full read through the dogs and the dogs read the country around the formation and reported what they read back through the dogs and Dave received the picture continuously. He was no longer talking when he moved with the pack. The pack was an extension of him and the talking was unnecessary. Clint took the other flank with the AR-15 Shane had given him across his back and the night vision optic mount and the runes on his inner forearms warm with the working frequency of a hunter moving into hunting ground. He had Brick with him — Eisla and Vigor's pup, Silas and Penelope's dog who had been on the road with the team since they left Sanctuary. Brick worked the flank with the focused attentiveness of a younger redbone who was building the experience that older redbones held in their bones.
Rustam and Magomed took the rear with the gear wagon and one of the Miller Mountain men. The two of them moved with the parallel discipline they brought to everything. The runic marks were latent in their skin at the working register. Zas's thunder god blood ran in the ink at the quiet frequency that the marks held until the marks were called.
Zabit moved with the formation's middle. The system slot ran the team's intent through his awareness. The speed rune on the inside of his left wrist was latent. He read the formation as it moved and filed what he read and did not yet have language for the small unease he carried in him since the camp's debrief, when Shane had described the column's leader and the architecture above him without elaborating the rest. The unease was below his conscious attention. It was present.
Rachel and Kelly took the formation's eastern walking flank with Big Ed at the center. The two Valkyries moved with the quiet upright quality of women who had been in operations of this scale and weight before and were absorbing the present one with the discipline the work required.
Gary took the formation's western walking flank with Mike beside him and Johnny Rotten on Mike's other side. Gary had the crossbow in the ready carry and the Model 29 at his hip. The morning's conversation with Mike at the stable was inside him in the way the morning's conversation with Mike at the stable would be inside him for the duration of the operation — present, working, the contract Mike had made with him about telling him before the loop took him sitting in Gary's awareness as a thing he was holding for both of them.
Shane, Freya, and Thrud moved together at the formation's interior. Hill stayed at the point position with Thrud but the four of them — Shane and Freya and Thrud — operated as a unit within Big Ed's larger architecture, and Hill stayed within Thrud's working radius the same way Thrud stayed within his. Vigor moved at Shane's left.
The Miller Mountain men distributed through the formation according to Gerald's assignments — Gerald himself at the formation's near rear, his oldest man at the formation's near front, the other three spread through the middle. The country country boys with their old rifles moving in the gaps the working corridor people held the perimeter of.
They moved.
The country between the draw and Titusville's eastern approach absorbed them. The early morning gave them the cold of a spring pre-dawn that had not yet committed to warming, the fog low over the wet ground, the small wood lots and the broken hills and the empty country that Freya had read as empty from the air. They moved at the unhurried efficient pace Big Ed had set — fast enough to reach the settlement's outer position before the column's afternoon halt, slow enough to keep the formation tight and the country clean of their passage.
Shane and Freya moved at the interior of the formation in the small acoustic space the Þögn produced around them when Shane chose to extend it for conversation. Not the full Silence — the moderate register, the field that contained their voices to themselves without removing them from the formation's awareness. Vigor moved at Shane's left. Thrud was three paces ahead with Hill at the point.
Freya said, quietly: "How much can you do." Shane drank from the thermos. He looked at the country ahead. He said: "The threads do not like the gas." He let that sit for a moment. "It is clear to me that I can stop that. The Loom shows me the canisters before they leave the mortar tubes — there is a window. The threads open at the moment of release. The release is what the contract reads as the escalation that crosses out of the mortal sequence. Phosgene at scale against a settlement is not what would happen if I were not standing here. It is what these people have brought because they have the resources to bring it, and the resources came from above the mortal layer. When the canisters are fired I can act on them. Before that I cannot." Freya looked at the country. She nodded. Shane said: "There is more I did not share with the group. I want you to carry it with me." Freya said: "Yes."
Shane said: "Veles is running the proxy who is the layer above the field leader. The field leader — Jesper — is not the top of anything. He is acting on instructions from a man named Mikhail. Mikhail is Veles's proxy. The architecture above Mikhail is layered with one other proxy I have a name for and at least one I do not. The alliance is real. Veles is at the level above Mikhail and above Jesper."
Freya looked at him. She had been Vanir long enough that the name Veles carried what the name Veles carried, which was the specific weight of a Slavic god she had not engaged directly across the long history of her work in the world but knew about completely. The mountain god. The underworld god. The thunder god's enemy across the cycles. She filed it. She said: "And Jesper himself."
Shane said: "His teardrops are Veles marks. Russian prison tradition with the god's frequency added. Defiance — the kind of mark that pushes against outside divine authority. The marks are real. They function. I do not have the full read on Jesper's combat capability because the marks themselves create the static that prevents the read. What I have is the structural read — the threads point to Jesper leaving here alive unless a mortal kills him." Freya looked at him. She said: "The marks resist your direct action."
Shane said: "Yes. They were built for it. Veles knows what I am and what I can do. The marks are how he keeps his asset operational in proximity to me. I can fight him. I can address him at a level. But the threads close every time I try to read a thread where I am the one who ends him. The threads that end him cleanly run through a mortal in our group." Freya nodded. Shane said: "There are a couple others in the column with similar marks. Not the full investment Jesper carries — lower-tier marks, the dagger through the neck, the smaller patterns. They are operating at enhanced capability. Not the way AN does it through possession the way it took Adams or Hugo. These are runic. Like our tattoos. From a different divine source. The mechanism is parallel. The frequency is different. The men carrying them are matches for most in our group — not the full divine register, the enhanced mortal register." Freya said: "The team needs to know that the column is not entirely mortal."
Shane said: "Big Ed knows. I told him before we mounted. He knows what to look for and what the marks will do when they flare. He will direct the response." Freya nodded. Shane said: "You and Thrud and I handle the gas. The team handles the rest."
Freya said: "Okay." She looked at the country.
Shane drank from the thermos. He looked at the country. He said: "There is one more thing." Freya looked at him. Shane said: "Zabit. The conversation in the tent — Jesper said his next assignment after this one is to take the three Dagestani men. Veles wants them off the board. The brother and the cousin because of the marks. Zabit after them because Veles will not leave the speed runner running once the other two are gone." Freya was quiet. Shane said: "I cannot warn him. Every thread I look at where I warn him about the assassination — every one of them ends badly. Not just for him. For the operation we are walking into. The warning produces in him a reaction that the threads close around in ways the threads do not close when I leave him to find it himself." He paused. "Zabit has the capability. The system slot, the speed, the strength, what he is. The fight he is walking toward — at Elmira, after this operation — is his fight. The threads show him alive at the end of it if I do not interfere. They show him not alive if I do." Freya said: "And the brother and the cousin." Shane said: "Their threads are tied to his. The three of them walk the same path. The marks they carry — Zas's blood, the work we did — those marks are what saves them. Not warning. The capability we already gave them is what gets them through the assassination attempt that is coming for them." Freya was quiet for a moment. She said: "He is going to know we did not tell him." Shane said: "Yes." He paused. "After. When the situation has resolved and the threads have closed and the contract has been honored — we tell him. We tell him everything. We tell him why we held it back. He will be angry. He has every right to be angry. He will also understand. Zabit is the kind of man who understands." Freya said: "Yes." She looked at Zabit ahead of them at the formation's middle, the slot running in him with the working frequency, the man walking into operations he did not yet know he was walking into. She felt the small heat behind her eyes that came when she was carrying something difficult and let the heat be the heat and did not act on it. She said: "I will carry it with you." Shane said: "Thank you." He dropped the Þögn back to its passive register. They moved with the formation.
The country resolved toward Titusville's eastern approach in the middle of the morning. Big Ed brought the formation to a halt at the wood line that overlooked the cleared ground around the settlement's perimeter walls. The settlement was visible at three hundred yards — the perimeter Freya had described from the air, the walls of mixed salvaged materials that the post-Shroud settlements had built themselves with, the smoke from the cooking fires rising in the small even columns of a community in its mid-morning work. The gates were closed. Sentries on the walls. The community was alert in a way the falcon had not read it as being alert the day before. Davis had reached them.
Big Ed assessed the position. He looked at Hill. Hill ran the tracking range from the wood line and read the country between the settlement and the western approach the column would use when it arrived. He looked at Big Ed. He said: "Clean. No column scouts in the immediate area. The column is still moving toward this position from the west. They will be in the country by mid-afternoon." Big Ed nodded. He looked at the cleared ground around the settlement.
He said: "Mike. Position the cover."
Mike looked at the cleared ground. He read the geometry — the lines from the column's approach toward the settlement's western gate, the angles the mortar tubes would use, the elevation of the ground between the column's likely staging position and the settlement's perimeter. He looked at the wood line. He looked at the cleared ground.
He said: "Two berms. One at the wood line's southern edge for the rifle element. One at the northern edge for the heavy element. The wood line gives us additional cover on the eastern approach. The cleared ground gives us the engagement lane." Big Ed said: "Build them." Mike crouched at the wood line's southern edge. He put both palms flat on the ground. The Earthen Bastion ran its full read through the cleared ground and the topsoil and the subsoil and the rock at the bedrock layer below it. He held the read for a moment. Then he began the work. The earth at the wood line's southern edge began to move. Not violently. The directed slow lift of someone working with a capability that had been refined through years of use, the topsoil rising in the controlled accumulation of a berm that arrived at the height Mike was building it to without the dramatic register that the Bastion was capable of producing. He built it long — twenty yards across the wood line's southern face, the height at four feet with the slope on the engagement side cleared for rifle work and the slope on the team side stepped for crouching positions. He built it at the working pace.
Thrud's expression registered the small relief that came when she watched Mike do precise work without strain. Mike had been through a year of the Shattering Hand running at registers that were not always the Bastion's quiet defensive work. The slow careful building of the berm was a different register. It was the register the corridor needed him in. When the southern berm was finished Mike moved to the wood line's northern edge and began the second one. The same scale. The same careful directed work. While Mike worked, Big Ed moved the formation into position. The heavy element — Rustam, Magomed, Big Ed himself, Johnny Rotten — to the northern berm. The rifle element — Dave, Clint, Gary, Mike when he finished, the Miller Mountain men with their old rifles — to the southern berm. Zabit at the connecting position between the two berms with the speed rune available. Rachel and Kelly at the wood line's interior with the Valkyrie capability available for whatever came across the engagement lane that the rifles and the heavy element did not address. Hill at point ahead of the wood line with the tracking range reading the country.
Mike finished the second berm.
Big Ed looked at the work. He said: "Good." He looked at the settlement.
He said: "Shane. The settlement." Shane nodded. He looked at Freya. He looked at Thrud. The three of them moved across the cleared ground toward the settlement's eastern gate. The gate did not open. A man on the wall looked down at them. He was in his late forties, weathered, the practical attentiveness of a settlement leader who had been running a community in difficult country for years and had developed the read for strangers approaching his walls. He had a rifle in the working carry. He had three other men on the wall behind him, also armed, the close formation of a community that had been warned and was holding its position.
He said: "Stop where you are."
Shane stopped. Freya stopped beside him. Thrud stopped on Shane's other side, the Jafna-Gaddr across her back with the working presence of a polearm she was not currently using. Shane held his hands visible. He said: "My name is Shane Albright. I am from Sanctuary at Lake Onondaga. Davis from the Miller Mountain settlement came to you this morning." The man on the wall looked at him. He said: "He came. He told us what is coming." Shane said: "Then you know we are not what is coming."
The man on the wall looked at him. He said: "I know what your runner told me. I have also been hearing things about Sanctuary across the past months. Settlements hit by people who looked like your people. Communities saying you have been doing things you should not be doing. I do not know what to make of any of it. Your runner came to me this morning and told me to expect an attack and to hide my non-fighters. I am inclined to believe him because he is not Sanctuary and he had no reason to come to me with that warning if it was not real. I am also inclined to keep my gate shut until I see for myself who is doing what, because the runner could be wrong and the rumors could be right and I do not have the room to be wrong about which it is." He looked at Freya and Thrud. He looked at Shane. "You can stay at the gate. We will not shoot you. We will not let you in until what is going to happen happens and I know which version of you we are dealing with."
Shane nodded. He said: "Understood. We do not need to be inside. We are here to make sure what is coming for your people does not reach your people."
The man on the wall looked at him. He looked at the wood line behind Shane where Big Ed's formation was building the position. He looked at Mike's berms — at the work that had been completed during the time it had taken Shane and the two women to cross the cleared ground. He said: "You did that just now."
Shane said: "Yes."
The man on the wall looked at the berms. He looked at Mike at the southern berm finishing the final grading. He looked at Shane. He said: "What was that."
Shane said: "One of my people. He can work earth. He built you cover between this gate and whatever is coming across the cleared ground." The man on the wall looked at the berms again. He looked at Shane. He did not say anything for a moment. He looked at his own wall. He looked at the gate. He looked back at Shane. He said: "You will stay at the gate." Shane said: "Yes."
The man on the wall said: "The non-fighters in our community are going into the cellars and the basements. We have the storage spaces. We will use them. If your runner is correct about what is coming we cannot evacuate. There is nowhere to go without being in the open." He looked at the country behind Shane. "We do not have the routes." Shane said: "I know." The man said: "Then we hide what we can hide. We fight what we can fight. We trust your runner about the part we cannot fight."
Shane nodded. The man on the wall turned to one of the other men beside him and said something Shane could not hear. The other man went down from the wall. After a moment the gate opened just wide enough for a woman to come through — middle-aged, the practical quality of a settlement medic, a cloth bundle in her hands. She walked to Shane and Freya and Thrud and stopped at the distance the wall had set for them. She set the bundle on the ground. She said: "Water. Hard bread. In case you are at the gate for a long time." She looked at them. She did not say more. She turned and went back through the gate. The gate closed behind her. Shane crouched at the bundle. He picked it up. He looked at the wall. The man on the wall said: "We are not who the rumors said we were either." Shane said: "I know." The man nodded once. He did not say anything else. He turned to watch the western approach.
Shane, Freya, and Thrud moved to the position at the gate's near edge where they could watch the western approach with the wall at their back and the cleared ground in front of them. Shane set the bundle on the ground beside them. He looked at Freya. He said: "The gas." Freya said: "Yes."
Shane said: "If it hits the canisters will fall in the settlement interior. The gas will hug the ground. The cellars and the basements have airflow even when they are sealed. The gas will find them." He paused. "The settlement leader does not know that. He is doing what makes sense with what he knows. What he knows is wrong." Freya said: "We stop the canisters before they leave the tubes." Shane said: "Yes."
Thrud was looking at the cleared ground with the focused assessment of a Valkyrie reading the engagement lane that was about to fill with what was coming across it. She said: "How far out are they." Shane ran the Loom against the country to the west. He held the read. He said: "Close. Hill will read them before I do. They are moving toward this position. They will be in the country an hour out by mid-afternoon." Freya said: "And the canisters." Shane said: "They will set the mortars at the position the wood line will not give them a clean read of. We need to be where we can see the tubes. The Loom will show me when the canisters leave. The three of us address them in flight."
Thrud said: "Yes."
The three of them stood at the gate's near edge in the spring sun with the bundle of bread and water at their feet and the cleared ground in front of them and the wood line behind them and the settlement at their back. The man on the wall watched the western approach. The settlement was quiet behind the wall in the way settlements went quiet when the non-fighters were hidden and the fighters were waiting.
Hill's voice came through the wood line at the formation's frequency. He said: "Movement on the western approach. The column. Scouts ahead of them — two of them — moving cautiously through the country two miles out. The column itself behind the scouts at a half mile of distance from them. They are setting up their position. They are not coming straight at the settlement yet. They are making camp."
Big Ed said: "Distance to their camp position."
Hill said: "Three quarters of a mile from the settlement's western gate. They are using the small rise behind the wood line on the western side. They have line of sight to the gate from the rise. They have cover behind the wood line for the column. They have the angle for the mortars." Big Ed said: "Their scouts. Are they working toward us."
Hill said: "They are working the country between their position and the settlement. Not toward our position yet. They will be at the southern edge of the settlement's approach in an hour. They will see the berms then."
Big Ed said: "Hold position. Do not engage the scouts. Let them see what we want them to see." Hill said: "Understood." The team held the wood line. The column held the western rise. The settlement held the walls. Shane and Freya and Thrud held the gate.
The afternoon began to move through them.