Glory

16 Novambar; 1895 A.D. The Raw: Fostercy Air Base

The ecstasies and humiliations of the past had seldom been further from Crispin’s mind as he stood outside Hangar Three with his crew. It was about two in the afternoon, but the cloud cover made the day as dark as if night were falling. The men’s faces were as dark as the sky. An hour ago, along with Festhre’s and Keinze’s crews, they had participated in a total wipeout. Crispin’s crew, fetched from fifteen miles away, had not arrived until the worst was over, and thus had not lost anyone; but Festhre’s crew, though they had fought fearlessly, had lost three men. And Keinze’s had lost four. Including Keinze himself. The oldest of the lieutenants, a year away from his pension, Keinze had been with 80 Squadron since before Vichuisse replaced Esethre as its captain. He, alone among the lieutenants, had been able to influence Vichuisse’s decisions. Silent and cautious, he had kept to himself, holding no grudges against anyone. When he drank he was a different man: no one could tell funnier jokes or play better poker. He had commanded his crew with such efficiency, for so long, that it had been a running joke that he was immortal.

As always, they had been wrong.

Crispin looked around at his men. “We did well,” he said heavily. “A kill for you, Eakin, a kill for you, Cochrane.”

They did not react.

“We incurred minimal damage to materiel. We upheld our name. We’re the number one crew in this squadron, boys—you know that, and I know that. What happened wasn’t our fault.”

He couldn’t allude any more closely to today’s disaster. A lieutenant must never admit failure in front of his men. Crispin forced an upbeat tone.

“Keinze died honorably. He took three of them with him! It’s official. Can you think of a better way to go?”

Reluctantly, they shook their heads.

“What’s with all these long faces I see, then? As far as we were concerned, the engagement was a success. All right?” Crispin smacked his fist into his palm. “All right? We downed two lizards and lost no one! If that isn’t a success, tell me what is!”

“Yes, sir,” they mumbled.

Crispin suppressed a sigh as he looked around at them. Jack Harrowman, tall and lanky, surreptitiously rubbing his injured shoulder, which had healed well, but was still stiff. At his side, Fergus Dupont, a wiry young northerner with prematurely gray hair. Then Harry Potter, a Kingsburg man with a shady past and a face that showed every one of his thirty years. When Crispin was a regular, he had served with those three. When he was made lieutenant, they had accepted him without dissent, and continued to give him their best, as they had given it to Fischer. If they did not love him the way they had loved Fischer, that was understandable; after all, Crispin was still relatively new to his command. What mattered was that he and they trusted each other implicitly. He counted on them to boost the morale of the other two: Tim Cochrane, a southerner who looked far older than his nineteen years, and Sam Eakin, a talented newcomer to the squadron. But all five faces were slack with weariness and frustration. He knew intimately the mixture of euphoria—at having made it home alive, when so many had not—and guilt—over the same thing—that was running in their minds now.

“Go to the barracks,” he finished, knowing he could do no more to stir them. “Debriefing is in one hour. Have your reports ready. You did a marvelous job. Keep your heads up.”

They saluted and turned away. But Potter did not move. “Crispin?”

It was Potter’s privilege, as it was Dupont’s and Harrowman’s, not to call him “Lieutenant.”

“Yes?”

“When are they going to read Keinze’s eulogy?”

“Oh, that’s right, you knew him.” Potter and Keinze, though not of equal rank, nor of the same crew, had been the two oldest men in the squadron; they had survived longer in combat than many new recruits dreamed possible. They had understood each other as few others could. “It might not be until tomorrow,” Crispin said, remembering. “The captain has been closeted with his visitors. He may be too busy.”

“Too busy for Keinze?” Potter said with quiet wrath. Crispin winced at the sight of his burning gaze, but he could not be openly disloyal to his captain. He could not admit that this time, he was not in Vichuisse’s confidence: the visiting officers had arrived in a jeep two days ago, and Vichuisse had received them in his quarters. Nothing had been heard from any of them until yesterday, when the bizarre order for a full-squadron demonstration had come. Everyone asked Crispin what the occasion was; he gladly let them know he had no idea, either. It was ridiculous, but orders were orders: quietly cursing Vichuisse, all the able-bodied pilots on base turned out and flew formation over the base. The visitors and Vichuisse stood by the runway, watching. A good two-thirds of the squadron were still airborne, waiting their turn to land, when they went inside. That kind of rudeness came only from civilians, or very high-ranking officers. Crispin did not know what Potter guessed about the visitors’ rank, and he wasn’t about to venture any guesses himself. “The other lieutenants and I will put it to the captain later,” he temporized. “If he says he’s too busy, I’ll put your name forward. Would you like to read the eulogy?”

“Isn’t that irregular?”

It was, but Crispin felt he owed it to Potter to try and bend the rules for him. “Since he will have such a lot to deal with now, I dare-say it’ll be acceptable.”

“Such a lot to deal with,” Potter echoed.

“Yes.”

They glanced around the hangars. Most of the activity following their return had died down: the injured men and damaged planes had been removed from the runway. But the stillness seemed to boil coldly—as if the air were full of frenetic, invisible activity.

“You wrote Keinze’s eulogy—didn’t you?” Potter said at length.

“Yes,” Crispin said shortly. “With Lieutenant Redmanhey.”

“How long ago—if I may ask?”

“Six months.”

“I see,” Potter said. “Downtime, then. See you in one hour.” He saluted ironically and turned away. An injury sustained at the beginning of his career made him list sideways. Crispin watched him go. Then he started toward Hangar Two. He would have to see that the riggers were giving his crew’s kites due attention. They were so lazy! Sometimes a catastrophe galvanized them, but more often, it worked the other way—not only would they protest that they were working as fast as they could, they would actually slow their pace, as if in defiance of their superiors. Donkeys!

Crispin stood outside the side door, clenching and opening his fists to try to get rid of the after-battle shakes.

“Lieutenant Kateralbin?”

Crispin’s nerves were so taut that he actually yelped and spun around. Fire—

A slopboy. Such as Crispin himself had been at the very beginning.

“The c-c-captain.” The boy was even more nervous than Crispin himself; he must think he had offended him. “The captain requires your p-p-presence in his quarters?”

“Oh, yes,” Crispin said, collecting himself. “Of course.” He nodded sagely. “Dismissed.”

What the hell could Vichuisse want to call him from his affairs on a day like this? As he trudged toward the mess hall, he met Butch coming from the other direction. His eyes were bleary, and he was buttoning the neck of his sweater. He slid his arm around Crispin’s shoulders and thumped him gently. “Heard. Sorry,” he said with uncharacteristic succinctness.

Crispin jerked his head. Butch dropped his arm. “‘S all right.”

“Is it?”

“Didn’t lose anyone. Didn’t get there early enough to.”

“Where?”

“Twenty-two miles southeast, by the front.”

“What happened?”

“Keinze intercepted a whole flight of them on their way to ground-strafe an ordnance dump behind the front lines. He delayed them with three of his men while he sent the other two to find me and Festhre—”

“Four? Against sixteen?”

“Yeah. They were all winged by the time Festhre got there, and all down by the time I did. We couldn’t get many of the bastards, but we delayed them long enough for one of Festhre’s boys to go signal the ordnance dump what was coming. I don’t know how many lizards finally got through. We had to run for home, or we would’ve been daemonsmeat.”

“That’s tough,” Butch said. “It’s all up to the ack-ack gunners in the end, isn’t it?”

“Yup. Sometimes—” Crispin did not finish. He knew Butch knew what he meant. “Queen, I’d like to be in an offensive unit,” he said vehemently.

Butch nodded, but said nothing, his long face set and thoughtful. They had reached the door of Vichuisse’s quarters. “Are you—he didn’t send for you, too?” Crispin said.

Butch said only, “Yeah,” but Crispin, glancing sideways, glimpsed a suppressed smile. They went in. The little, bare entryway smelled exactly as the entryway of Vichuisse’s quarters in Pilkinson’s Air Base II had—stale and somehow older than the rest of the base. Inside the office, the stale smell was worse. Vichuisse and his visitors lounged with their backs to the fire. Two of the officers occupied the only two chairs; Vichuisse himself sat on his clothes chest and the third officer on half an old barrel. The floor was tracked and dirty. Wine bottles lay everywhere like fallen ninepins. On the desk, maps were spread and pinned. The door to the bedroom was closed. Butch and Crispin remained standing. Crispin fought the urge to fidget. The three visitors were looking at them as if they were recalcitrant boys called in for a scolding. “Reporting, sir,” Butch said, and Crispin joined in at the last possible moment.

“Lennox—Figueroa—Duncan.” Vichuisse steepled his fingers. “These are my two best lieutenants, Daniel Keynes”—he pointed—“and Crispin Kateralbin.”

“Honored, sirs,” Butch said immediately, and again Crispin joined in when it was almost too late. What were these men here for? All three must be forty at least. He looked again at the one called Lennox, who was sitting in Vichuisse’s own armchair. Crispin had heard Vichuisse mention him before, with the elaborate casualness that accompanies name-dropping. Captain Lennox? Commandant Lennox?

Figueroa, an elderly man with sallow southern skin, lounging at ease on the half barrel, directed a withering stare at Butch. “Keynes? I thought it was Keinze.”

“Perhaps I was not clear,” Vichuisse replied. His laugh, always something of a cackle, sounded nervous. “This is not Keinze. Keinze was killed today, in that—um—unfortunate engagement of which we were recently notified.”

“An alternate.” Commandant Figueroa pursed his lips. “Keynes.” He said it with distaste. “He had better be good, Tony. You understand that.”

“I certainly do!” Vichuisse laughed nervously again. “Believe me, if he doesn’t come up to par, he’ll have me to reckon with!”

Butch looked paralyzed. Small wonder, Crispin thought. He dreaded the moment when they would turn their attention on him.

“They both seem awfully young,” Lennox said. Though his face was lined and weary, his voice was as light as a boy’s. “Haven’t you others, Tony? Of course, I trust your judgment—and if they’re not good enough, it’ll be on your head, not mine—but... ”

“But young blood is the hottest, isn’t it?” Vichuisse said with another nervous cackle. Both Figueroa and Lennox winced visibly when he trotted out the old maxim. Duncan sat on the straight-backed office chair, his face wooden. Crispin guessed that he was not of equal rank with the others: an aide-de-camp, perhaps. He held a notebook in which he scribbled from time to time with a pencil. “And this,” Vichuisse reached over and patted Crispin’s arm, as if he were a racehorse—“this is one of the best lieutenants I have been privileged to command in all my years leading this squadron. Before joining up, he was a professional daemon handler. He has a way with the regulars that is beyond belief.”

Crispin felt a stab of panic.

“Where does he come from?” To Crispin’s relief, Figueroa did not sound particularly enamored with Vichuisse’s portrait of Crispin. “Cype? Why is his hair so curly?”

“His mother was a Pacific islander,” Vichuisse explained. “But his temperament hasn’t suffered by it. He’s as Ferupian as they come.”

Pride.

“Are you certain?” Duncan said suddenly.

“Oh, they’ll do, they’ll do, James,” Lennox said. “We didn’t see any flagrant muck-ups in the demonstration yesterday, did we? And this thing today—well... ” Vichuisse seemed to shrink under Lennox’s considering gaze. “I don’t suppose it matters, after all, the paperwork is already complete... ”

“It wasn’t any of our faults.” Crispin heard his own voice before he realized he was speaking. “Butch—Keynes, I mean—wasn’t even there! We lost our very best lieutenant, that was Keinze, because we were spread too thin to get to him in time. It was four against sixteen of them, sirs. It was plain bad luck.”

All four officers looked blank. With a shock of excitement Crispin realized he had surprised them. Then, simultaneously, Figueroa said:

“In war, Lieutenant, nothing can be blamed solely on bad luck.”

And Duncan, speaking for almost the first time, said: “I like an independent spirit, Tony. Perhaps your judgment is not at fault. Theo, you’re right. They’ll do.”

His voice was deep and confident. From the way the three others looked at him when he spoke, Crispin realized he had been wrong: not Lennox, but Duncan, was the highest-ranking of them. He scribbled something in his notes, then rose and shook Crispin’s and Butch’s hands. He was a lanky man, tall for a Ferupian: his eyes were on a level with Crispin’s. “Pleased to make your acquaintance, Lieutenants. You would probably like to know what’s just happened to your careers.”

Crispin did not dare drop his gaze to Duncan’s decorations, but out of the corner of his eye he saw Butch mouthing: sublieutenant-marshal.

A lieutenant-marshal was in charge of an entire parallel, giving orders to five to ten flight commandants, who each commanded a squadron themselves and had five more (like 80 Squadron) answering to them. The lieutenant-marshal’s sub acted for him, exercising nearly identical powers. Westanthraw, lieutenant-marshal of Lovoshire Parallel, was practically a figure of myth, wielding the power of life and death over the careers of close to forty captains like Vichuisse.

“My name is James Duncan, acting for Lieutenant-Marshal Thraxsson of Salzeim Parallel. These are Commandants Lennox and Figueroa, both of Salzeim Parallel. Your Vichuisse is now a commandant, also of Salzeim Parallel.” He did not give the bombshell time to sink in. “You two are now captains of Salzeim Parallel. You will be leading standard thirty-five-man squadrons in an offensive capacity, answering to Vichuisse, as before.” The hint of a smile crossed Duncan’s lean face. “We have had a good many vacancies open unexpectedly in the defensive units. We are reassigning several of these units to the offense, and we hope that with captains like yourselves in command, no more vacancies will open.”

In the background, Vichuisse grimaced nervously.

Duncan said, “Congratulations, both of you.”

A sweet taste filled Crispin’s mouth. Flames were leaping in the corners of the room, sprouting like malignant fireworks from the necks of the empty bottles on the floor. When he heard Butch saying fervently, “I accept the assignment with all my heart, Sublieutenant-Marshal,” he managed to prise his lips apart.

“Accept, sir.”

“Then you are dismissed.” Duncan turned his back on them. Crispin paid the rote obeisances to the officers and followed Butch out of the room, doing his best not to stumble. His skin stung from the biting heat, and he thought over the roaring of the flames, It’s a good thing I learned to read.

“Vee has to have pulled strings,” Carl Redmanhey said from his bunk. “There’s no other way it could be possible.”

It was past midnight, yet no one had suggested they get some much-needed sleep. The long, awful day of report-making and accounting for damages was over. Every minute of it, Crispin—and, he guessed, Butch, too—had vacillated between euphoria and acute nerviness. Vichuisse, unfathomably, had taken his crew out on the night patrol duty that should have been Festhre’s. It was as if he wanted to give his remaining lieutenants some time alone to discuss the change in two of their fortunes. The visitors had not appeared in the mess at supper: Festhre and Redmanhey had taken this as a personal affront, and both of them were already in a bad mood when the lieutenants retired to their quarters after several hours of dissembling in front of their men.

“There’s absolutely no other way,” Redmanhey repeated irritatingly. “I don’t mean to slander him, but he hasn’t, done anything to merit a commandancy! And commandancies are almost always given to captains from within the parallel, anyhow. A promotion to Salzeim? Vichuisse?” He blew a series of smoke rings. “I smell a rat. Several rats.”

Butch was warming his hands at the brazier. “It’s wildly improbable,” he said wretchedly. “I thought that myself. Cris, you saw me!”

“You were a bloody wreck,” Crispin agreed. In the presence of the commandants and the sublieutenant-marshal, Butch had been a model of reserve; but outside, in the wet, he had come as close as made no difference to breaking apart under the stresses of shame and honor and euphoria. And Crispin had been grateful, because the necessity of making Butch pull himself together had driven the flames away.

The flames.

They had come back, for the first time since that awful morning when they surrounded him and he thought he was going to die.

He added more kindly: “I was a wreck, too, if it comes to that.”

“Oh, surely not you,” Festhre said from his bunk. He, too, was smoking—not tobacco, but his “specials” that he kept for disasters and celebrations. “Surely you’ve always known you’d be the first one Vichuisse would choose, if something like this happened.”

Crispin jumped to his feet. “I didn’t fucking ask for it, if that’s what you’re implying!” Festhre looked up placidly at him. “The last thing I wanted was a Queen-damned promotion! He’s plagued me because of I don’t know what since day one, and now he’s taking me to Salzeim so he can go on plaguing me! It’s pure fucking sadism is what it is!”

“You know that isn’t true,” Festhre said.

“He hates me! Do you deny that?”

“I do, as it happens. I didn’t think even you were paranoid enough to confuse favoritism with sadism.”

“I’m not his favorite!” Crispin jabbed his thumb at Butch. “If he has a favorite, it’s his man the—Kirekuni! Vichuisse favors him the same way he does me, only worse.”

Crispin hadn’t meant to mention the Kirekuni. But for the past twelve days Mickey Ash had been on his mind, in his peripheral vision, like the hallucinatory flames.

“But I meant the promotion,” Festhre said as if Crispin had not interrupted. “You’re more ambitious than any of us. You wanted it. If you deny that”—Festhre paused, as if trying to word his thoughts as delicately as possible—“I shall know you aren’t half the man I have thought you.”

Crispin could not deny it. The realization took the wind out of his sails, at the same moment as Butch said definitely, as if Festhre’s jibes had been directed at him: “I did want it. Who doesn’t? But I wouldn’t have wanted it at this cost.”

“What cost?” Crispin shouted. “There was no fucking cost! It doesn’t matter that we’re an insignificant squadron in an insignificant parallel, it doesn’t matter that we’re on a ten-year losing streak, it doesn’t matter that we got shifted to a dead-end base... ” In the back of his mind he knew he was about to explode. His muscles were tight with frustration. “All that matters is that Vichuisse comes from a Kingsburg family with plenty of court connections, he’s always known he wouldn’t have to succeed to get promoted, and he’s probably been pulling strings behind the scenes for years to set this up! It’s absolutely literally a gift from the Queen! There is no cost!”

Redmanhey jumped down off his bunk and put an arm around Crispin’s shoulders. “Calm down, boyo. You’re all worked up and no wonder. Sit down.” He guided Crispin by force to Keinze’s bunk, its blankets neatly folded by the dead man that morning. Still gripping Crispin’s shoulder, he fished in a pocket and lit another cigarette. Crispin took it thankfully.

Butch looked at him. “I meant Keinze.”

“Oh, shit,” Crispin mumbled. He took a deep drag, and coughed.

“Yeah.” Redmanhey took his arm from around Crispin and braced his hands on his knees as if about to rise. But he did not move. “Poor old Keinze. He’s going to get forgotten in all this excitement, if you ask me.”

“I was supposed to ask Vichuisse if one of my men could read his eulogy,” Crispin said.

“One of your men?” Redmanhey looked at him in surprise. “Whatever for? I’m gonna. And Vichuisse can stick me if he doesn’t like it.”

Crispin shook his head. They were all silent for a minute. Crispin guessed the others, too, were remembering Keinze. A loyal servant of the Queen for so many years, hardened by survival, a year away from the pension whose material value would not have meant much to him (for he had been the heir to a squiredom in Lynche) but the accolade of which would have made him a contented man, his services to Ferupe finally honored. All gone in a half minute of bad timing.

Bad timing gets every one of us in the end, Crispin thought.

The officers’ quarters were chilly and oppressively neat, the half-hooded brazier gave off a light so cold that the temperature seemed ten degrees lower, the floor was tracked with muddy footprints, the lieutenants were gloomy; but the fact that Crispin was sitting here among them seemed suddenly the most precious gift he had ever been given. Far more precious than a promotion to Salzeim. So far my luck’s been good... extraordinarily good. He shivered. Look how far I’ve come. lf it weren’t for the Old Gentleman... If it weren’t for Rae... if it weren’t for Colonel Sostairs... If it weren’t for the flames, said the part of him that remembered Prettie Valenta lying crumpled on the red-and-white lino in the ring.

Festhre was smoking pensively. Butch was staring at the tiny daemons twisting in agony under the hood of the brazier.

Redmanhey got up. “I’ve had enough of this,” he said. “I’m going to bed. You kids can stay up. I’m not particular.”

“‘Kids’? Captains, you mean,” Festhre murmured.

“In the name of the Queen, lay off, Brian!” Crispin burst out.

Festhre looked up. “What, dearie? Does it really bother you?”

Butch let out a strangled snarl. “Yes!”

“Then, of course, your wish is my command... sir.”

“Fuck you, Festhre!”

“My pleasure.” There might have been a twinkle in Festhre’s eye. “Good night, dears. Don’t forget to thank the Queen twice over.” He kicked off his boots and wriggled under his blanket.

Some minutes later, when Festhre and Redmanhey were both snoring, Crispin sat down on the floor next to Butch and wrapped a blanket around his back as carefully as a mother. Butch shifted slightly, acknowledging his presence. “I can’t stand that motherfucking fag sometimes,” he mumbled. “Gonna be glad to get out of here. ‘S truth.”

“Yeah.” Crispin confessed. “Me, too.”

Butch was trembling. Crispin lit two cigarettes at once and gave him one. They used the brazier as an ashtray.

“Fucking shame we have to take Vichuisse with us though. All I was hoping for when he summoned me was that he was gonna tell me he’d got promoted or transferred or demoted. It wouldn’t’ve made any difference as long as he was leaving and we were gonna have a new captain.”

“I don’t think there’s much to choose between any of them,” Crispin said.

“Not if those ponces we met today are a fair sample, no!”

“Scheming aristocratic fools,” Crispin said vehemently, and then realized he had committed a faux pas. But the faint smile on Butch’s face reassured him.

“I’m an aristocratic fool if it comes to that.”

“Not a schemer, though. You’ll make a better captain than any of them.”

“Queen grant.”

They could hear rain falling again. Crispin wished Vichuisse, out on patrol, joy of it.

Butch said suddenly, “But you know what really gets my goat? I have to take the fucking Kirekuni with me.”

“Do you?”

“I can’t exactly leave him and bring the others. And I’m not leaving Jansson, or Lance. They’re my right-hand men.”

“Yeah,” Crispin said slowly. Then, “Listen, I’ll take him off your hands.”

“You’ll what?”

He had said it. It was too late. “I’ll give you Potter and take him. Do you a favor.”

“Potter’s your best man. You’re crazy.” Butch was breathing quickly, shallowly.

“Nope. This is what I figure.” It hurt to say it, but he had to. “I figure him and me understand each other better than anyone else could. And Potter—Potter’s getting just a bit too forward for his own good, lately. I don’t trust him anymore.”

“That thing with the eulogy,” Butch said understandingly.

“Yeah. That was Potter. He shouldn’t have asked.” A minute later Crispin remembered that Potter had not asked, he had offered; but again, it was too late. The brazier sputtered blinding blue light as one of the daemons died.

Crispin wondered uncomfortably: Did Butch look at me differently when I said that? He had always tried to discourage even the ghost of the idea that he and the Kirekuni might be similar in any respect. He dreaded his friends’ perceiving him as other—the thing that the Kirekuni indubitably was.

But Butch knew him better than that. They could say anything to each other.

The brazier was down to two-thirds power. “If you’re sure, then,” Butch said cautiously. “I’ll tell him tomorrow.”

“I’m certain.” Crispin gave Butch’s arm a squeeze. Butch looked at him in surprise, and then grinned.

“You’re a peach, you know that?”

Crispin got up. “Give us the blanket... ”

As he lay down in the top bunk, he saw the face of the Kirekuni like a ghost before him on the darkness. Mickey Ash was not wearing his usual closed, inscrutable expression but smiling superciliously. In an odd way the thought of him was comforting: as long as Ash was there, Crispin felt that he was in no danger from the flames, or the visions, which were really the daytime and nighttime aspects of a single horror, a horror that frightened him beyond reason, considering it was entirely in his head.

But he managed to forget both it and the Kirekuni without too much difficulty by dwelling on the uncomfortable prospect of telling Potter that he was coming to Salzeim, but not as a member of the crew with which he had served for eleven years.

22 Devambar; 1895 A.D. The Raw: Salzeim Parallel

Two, and only two, ground routes led through the Wraithwaste to the war front. Troops, supply convoys, messengers, and armaments trucks clogged them daily. One route started in Salzeim; the other in Thrazen Domain.

The Thrazen route had been opened in the 1850s, when it became apparent to the Queen’s generals that the war had spread south, that it was not going to be won in the immediate future, and that a southern access was needed to prevent the Kirekunis from taking control of the South Waste. Thrazen had been chosen because in that domain, the daemonmongeries of the west existed side by side with the commercial culture of the south. Thrandon City was only two weeks by truck from Valestock and one week from Naftha, a southern port metropolis, the second biggest city in Ferupe. Before the war, Naftha had flourished hugely on profits from the metal-and-daemons trade with Kirekune; when war broke out, its economy started to collapse, only to be saved by the southern-spreading army’s fortuitous need for supplies. Via the Thrazen War Route, Naftha drained the south of its young men and daemons, as Thrandon drained the west and the heartlands.

And Salzburg City, in Salzeim, drained the north and the east. The Salzeim War Route was older, broader, and shorter than the Thrazen. Its Ferupian terminus lay in rolling green farmland, whereas the Thrazen route led into the difficult western hills. It had been established in 1802, at the very beginning of the war, when Kirekuni forces first moved on the Wraithwaste. It was the first road anyone in living history had ever cut through the Waste. Ninety percent (so the soldiers’ tale ran) of the troops ordered to hack that first path through the pines had died, some from overwork and accidents, most from stranger causes.

Even now that the Wraithwaste was being felled on a daily basis, its western fringe constantly eaten away by the Ferupian army’s retreat, the soldiers still told horror stories about the deep forest. Not one of them, though they dreamed constantly about going to Shadowtown on leave, would have considered pursuing their dusky-skinned whores into the woods where the girls came from. They hated the Wraiths largely because the Shadow people weren’t afraid of the forest—and the forest was not inimical to them! It was an outrage. Everyone knew that if a soldier marching on the war route strayed from his comrades, only his bones would be found in the morning! Wild daemons and humans shouldn’t mix, and that was that. The Wraiths were simply unnatural. Unhuman.

A few objected that daemons didn’t kill trickster women, either. And that traders invaded the forest regularly with impunity. Ah—but trickster women and traders never had to hack down Waste pines for cookfires with trembly-triggered sarges watching their backs—did they? The gorgons are smart! the soldiers averred. They know what’s theirs, and they want to hold on to it!

In 1815, the daemon rifle was developed to defend troops against the dangers of the Waste, which was then taking a ridiculously high toll on recruits. “Kirekuni” guns with their metal bullets couldn’t hurt a dematerialized demogorgon. Only another daemon, fired at high speed from a bazooka, had any effect at all. And even then, it could only slow a Waste daemon down, not kill it.

It was thus, through experimenting with a series of flawed prototypes, that the Ferupians discovered the “screamers”’ effect on men. A few years later, the Kirekuni rampart gunners were being answered with hailstorms of screamers—a vast improvement over the sabers and flamethrowers with which the Ferupian soldiers had previously had to face the bullets.

Daemon engineering advanced by leaps and bounds, on both sides of the Raw. By 1830, hundreds of small aircraft—invented a half century earlier but never daemon-efficient enough for civil use—had been adapted for warfare. From these beginnings the QAF was born. The ever-resourceful Kirekunis quickly developed their own air force, which would soon be larger, better trained, and better equipped than the QAF; but during the few years when the Ferupian pilots owned the air, they were lauded as the instrument of Ferupe’s salvation, and the lingering effects of this acclaim kept the QAF safe from criticism for several decades.

Only in the 1880s did the eye of the court, constantly on the lookout for a scapegoat to blame for the Kirekunis’ unstoppability, light on the air marshal general, by then a senile nonagenarian. He was replaced in quick succession by seventeen other air marshal generals—which instability hastened the decline into which the air force had already fallen. The facts were that the QAF budget had been surreptitiously tapped to provide for the ballooning infantry, and that most of the flight commandants and lieutenant-marshals were as incompetent as the notoriously pettifogging ranking officers of the army and of the minuscule navy that guarded the southern coast. Each QAF squadron was also having to cover a far vaster area than it had in the thirties and forties. Poor organization and a shortage of pilots meant inevitable defeats. And in the nineties, as the war seemed to be going worse and worse, blaming the air force became fashionable among the rank and file, too. One thing the QAF officers were doing a good job of was keeping their own men nearly as ignorant of the big picture as the general public at home in Ferupe. Of course, nothing could keep the pilots from tasting personal failure, but they had no idea how badly Ferupe was in fact losing—or how vitriolically the infantry blamed the air force for their own defeats. A QAF regular coming into first contact with an infantryman, whose experience of those defeats was far bloodier and more personal, would be in for a nasty shock.

And back in the twenties and thirties everything had been going so well for Ferupe! The distribution of screamer cannon had cut losses in half, and the near rout with which the war had begun had slowed to a manageable “strategic retreat.” Some blamed the death of King Ethrew, and the succession of his infant daughter Lithrea to the throne, for Ferupe’s inability to reverse that retreat. But it was widely guessed, if not admitted by anyone without decorations, that screamers were simply not as marvelous an innovation as they had seemed at first. They caused more devastation than bullets when they hit their targets. But they were just as apt to cause it among the men who had fired them in the first place. If a volley fell short in no-man’s-land, it was quite possible the starved, ferocious tiddlers would get disoriented, turn around, and scramble back the way they had come. If you fumbled loading your screamer cannon it was nearly always fatal. And whereas a Kirekuni ammo dump strafed by Ferupian airplanes was no danger at all, a Ferupian ammo dump was literally a tinderbox. The only way to destroy a horde of escaped screamers was to set them on fire! Luckily, the Kirekuni flight commanders did not seem to realize this, for when they attacked Ferupian ammo dumps or screamer factories, they usually bombed them with fire-jennies—burning the screamers in their barrels, and causing far fewer deaths than they would have if they’d used bullets. Such delightful misapprehensions were what kept the Kirekunis from winning outright. The lizards might be military geniuses, but when it came to daemons they were remarkably stupid. And, of course, the Kirekuni war effort was hampered by their shortage of daemons, which almost, but not quite, negated the advantage of their access to most of Oceania’s metal.

The Ferupian generals still held that daemon weapons were the technology of the coming century. When the right kind of magazines were developed, and screamer factories had been standardized like traditional houses of trickery, no force would be able to stand against Ferupians equipped with daemon rifles. The war would be over in a matter of months. But the regiments at the front still muttered longingly about bullets.

And not just bullets. Mechanisms, shielding, and metalware of every sort. By the 1890s, the Ferupian need for metal had become desperate.

Cookpots were made of pig copper. Privates’ helmets were made of Cypean tin you could bend with two hands. Gun barrels were made of gold. Gold! Kirekuni iron and steel—that was what was needed! Forays into no-man’s-land were just as often for the purpose of capturing Kirekuni materiel as for the ostensible purpose of recapturing lost ground. Often, a shot-down Kirekuni aircraft was requisitioned by a dozen different COs who all claimed it had crashed on their territory.

The Wraithwaste was a boundless reserve of lumber for everything that could possibly be manufactured of wood. But the fact remained: metal was necessary to a war effort. And the richest veins of ore in the world lay under the mountains of Kirekune. The biggest ironworks in the world were in Djicho; the only steelworks in Okinara. The Ferupian Snowlands—the domains of Thaulze, Cerelon, and Dewisson—had copper. The supplies were extremely limited, and of no better quality than the tin coming out of Ferupe’s protectorate Cype. But it was all the authorities could offer the desperate quartermasters.

And the copper and tin all came, under heavy guard, along the Salzeim War Route into the Shadowtown which had grown up around the metal depots and smelteries.

Metal had made this Shadowtown into a city. A miniature city, and a filthy and unusual one, whose inhabitants were as used to seeing dogfights in the sky as they were to seeing clouds. Built in the middle of the Raw, it was populated by soldiers who passed to and fro, by Ferupians running the legitimate businesses which had sprung up, and by several thousand Wraiths, prohibited from most spheres of activity, who took care of the illegitimate side of things. (Although the word “illegitimate” was really inappropriate. So far from Ferupe, the city existed under the aegis of military law, which bore few resemblances to the laws enforced in civilized lands.)

Fittingly enough, the city was named after a long-dead general, a scion of the Cerelon family of Cerelon Domain, where most of Ferupe’s copper was buried. Cerelon’s Shadowtown.

Twenty-four QAF bases stood at varying distances from the city, scattered across the parallel. The pilots were seldom seen in the city, only above it. They got little free time, and so amplified were the standards to which they held themselves that they generally chose to spend it in the air, even if they were hallucinating from lack of sleep and were more likely to kill themselves than their enemies. The Salzeim Parallel saw heavier fighting than anywhere else on the front. The Kirekunis knew that Cerelon’s Shadowtown lay a mere twenty miles behind the lines, and they knew its strategic importance to their enemies. But the concentration of Ferupian troops in the area had held them more or less at bay for twenty years. To the north and south, the front was creeping back, the war closing in around Cerelon’s Shadowtown like the sea around a peninsula. But in Devambar of 1895, when Crispin transferred to Cerelon’s Air Base XXI (or Sarehole, as it was known to its men), the Raw around the base was so quiet, so ghostridden, and the city of Cerelon so bustling by contrast, that for a time it seemed to him that he had come to a transposed bit of Ferupe. Only on his first free evening, a week later, did he discover how different Cerelon was. Nothing in the Lovoshire Parallel had prepared him for it.

On the day he arrived in Sarehole with Harrowman, Eakin, Ash, Dupont, and Cochrane, Crispin confronted his new men, having them dragged out of bed if necessary. They stood at attention, grouped in crews of five, on an open stretch of ground outside Hangar One. One-thirty Squadron had sustained heavy losses recently: there were numerous gaps in the ranks. Crispin, facing them with his predecessor’s lieutenants at his back, felt as if he had met them all a hundred times before. Pilots living on their nerves, grappling daily with defeat, some of them spiritbroken (he would have the worst cases sent for a month’s leave), but most as implacable as daemons. There was a proud tilt to their jaws, as if they were trying to stare him down. His heart swelled. The wind blew harder and colder in Sarehole than in the Lovoshire Parallel. The pilots all wore layers of sweaters under their canvas macs. Their faces were chapped red.

Sarehole’s ramshackle buildings crouched on a stretch of empty plain littered with stunted bristlecones. The base was right at the edge of the Cerelon’s Shadowtown sector, and in fact right on the edge of the Salzeim Parallel. A few miles farther north and they would have been answering to a Lynche Parallel commandant. The chimneys of Cerelon puffed a black haze on the horizon.

“I am Captain Kateralbin.” Crispin raised his voice to carry over the wind. “First of all, my condolences on your loss of Captain Jimenez. In taking command of this squadron I’ll do my best to uphold his standards. I know how you must be grieving and I sympathize deeply.”

None of them moved a muscle.

“Yes, well, it has been quite a week, hasn’t it,” Crispin said sotto voce. A few of them heard and laughed. He guessed that they were not so much amused by his sarcasm as by his tacit reference to the fact that Jimenez’s death hadn’t been much of a loss to anyone, let alone 130 Squadron. (Earlier, Vichuisse had cattily told Crispin that the man had been a moron and an incompetent.) If slandering Jimenez got them on his side, then well and good, but he’d better not carry it any further. “I’ve heard good things about you,” he said instead, gauging their reaction to praise. “Your lieutenants speak highly of you.”

A few smiles.

“I’m honored to have been offered the opportunity to command you. What leeway I have in the matter of offensives, I’ll use to restore our victory ratio to what it should be, can be, and will be. This squadron has an illustrious record. I won’t go into the reasons it’s been slipping lately. Let’s just blame it on the weather.”

At that, a good many of them laughed. Crispin himself cracked a smile. But he had better change tack! Too much wink-wink-nudge-nudge and they wouldn’t respect him as they must. He cleared his throat. “However, the lack of Captain Jimenez’s influence is already showing.”

Stony faces. They were waiting to see what he meant.

He gave it just long enough, and then said harshly, “A week without leadership has done nothing whatsoever for your standards. I’ve been snooping around. Several of your kite daemons are dangerously underfed. And do you realize the hangars are utter pigsties? It looks as if people have been camping out in there.”

“People have,” muttered Jones, one of Crispin’s new lieutenants. “The riggers. It’s warmer there than in their quarters.”

“Thanks for telling me,” Crispin said sarcastically out of the corner of his mouth.

“Didn’t want to get my boys in trouble.” But Jones did not sound resentful. When Crispin first met 130 Squadron’s lieutenants this morning, they had openly expressed their philosophical view that no captain, however untried, however odd, could be worse than Jimenez had been. They were prepared to support Crispin. He just had to prove himself to them.

He rounded on the men again. “What if you had to scramble? You’d probably kill yourselves getting your kites out of the hangars, and if you didn’t, you’d go nose down on the runway. There are potholes on the runway. Potholes on the runway!”

“Haven’t been on any missions in a week,” muttered an unshaven pilot in the first rank, defensively.

“Well, that’s going to change soon enough,” Crispin said. “The weather’s been awful, I know, but I don’t feel rain coming. And even if it was, it’d be no excuse.”

All thirty of them knew what he meant now. No one dared to laugh. The unshaven pilot stared at Crispin, mouth hanging open as if he were paralyzed.

“And you!” Crispin said, pointing as if he’d only just noticed him. “Go scrape that hog-ugly gristle off your face! You—yes, you! Now!”

The fellow took one hesitant step out of line, and when Crispin snapped his fingers, he turned and shambled toward the barracks. Everyone watched him go. “Hold up your head, dammit, you’re Ferupian!” Crispin shouted after him.

There were sniggers. Crispin faced the pilots again, praying he’d picked an unpopular man. It could make all the difference. The rest of the men’s expressions ranged from relief that they hadn’t been chosen to outright approval; Crispin breathed an inward sigh of thanks. “One-thirty Squadron’s standards are higher than that,” he told them. “One-thirty Squadron flies in rain, snow, and hail. One-thirty Squadron slaughters Kirekunis in rain, snow, and hail.”

A few eyes slid toward Mickey Ash, standing among Crispin’s own men at the back of the crowd, but most of the pilots seemed not to have realized their new squadmate’s nationality yet. It was easy to miss when he was wearing a long coat.

“Most of you have come out here in half uniform! I’ll let that slide this once, but from now on I don’t want to see you—hear? I don’t want to see you unless you look like pilots. You’re not ground crew. You’re not infantrymen. You’re not, in the name of the Queen, vagrants! You are regulars in the Queen’s Air Force! Are you aware of that? In the future, you will look like airmen, and you will behave like it. I’ve heard that many of you put in too much overtime. I admire your patriotism, but from now on that won’t be necessary. Instead, we’ll schedule four patrols a day, not three. Backup will come from the other five squadrons managed by Vichuisse, our new commandant. He, I, and Captains Keynes and Emthraze have agreed that shorter shifts will improve your health, your reflexes, and your kill tallies.”

Vichuisse now commanded five captains. Out of those, Burns hadn’t been there for the meeting, and Eastre had opposed Crispin’s plan on the grounds that he liked to fly alone with his crews. But Eastre had been devoted to Commandant Elliott, Vichuisse’s predecessor, and during the meeting he had made it obvious that he would oppose everything Vichuisse said as a matter of course. He had been overruled.

“Kill tallies. That’s what we are here for, men. Make no mistake. We aren’t here to fly demonstrations. We are here to shoot down so many of the enemy that the tide will turn back from the Salzeim Parallel!”

They were hanging on his words. Crispin’s own crew, at the back, were chuckling among themselves. Crispin shot Harrowman a furious glance. They pulled straight faces.

“In cooperation with the other squadrons in and around Cerelon, we are going to mount a new offensive against the enemy. We are going to devastate him behind his lines, where it hurts him most, and recapture the Raw for Ferupe. Are you with me?”

Someone was breathing heavily: ssss, ssss. The wind swept coldly out of the Raw. Crispin squinted into it, his eyes watering. “Axe you with me?”

“Yessir,” roughly half of the pilots muttered.

“Are you with me?”

“Yessir!”

Sssss!

What was that? It came from the middle ranks. Crispin tried to locate it without letting them see he had heard.

Ss-ss-sss! Shshsss!

“Oh, Queen,” Lieutenant Taft muttered behind Crispin, “no, I was afraid of this, ignore them, sir!”

That was when Crispin knew it wasn’t his imagination. His stomach flopped sickeningly, for he recognized the hiss now. It was the noise soldiers in Shadowtown made at Wraiths.

Sssss! Shsh! Wraith! Wraith!

The cheek of them. The utter cheek of them!

He took a deep breath. What would Vichuisse do, what would any high-and-touchy aristo captain do in this situation? He would scream at them while pretending he had not heard. Therefore, Crispin would—

“Silence please,” he said in a voice that was not loud, but pitched to carry to the last rank.

Ssss!

“It sounds as if a few of you disagree with something I’ve said. You can’t be arguing with our need for a push to victory—and if you are, I suggest that you transfer to a noncombat capacity, because we don’t want you here. Therefore, I can only assume you think I’m not qualified to ask these things of you.”

On their faces, naked horror.

He had thrown them! He could not help grinning. “Perhaps you take me for a Wraith. Perhaps you’re saying to yourselves, ‘Our commandants must really be plucking at straws!’ Frankly, I had thought you above such pettiness. But in light of this... ”

Utter silence now. No more hissing.

Inwardly exulting, Crispin pointed at a boy whose face was browner than the rest, and whose bare head was fuzzed white-blond. “You look like an easterner. Are you?”

The boy’s mouth opened and closed, fishlike, a couple of times. He had been one of the loudest hissers. “Yessir!”

“Name!”

“Teralbanin, sir!”

“Kateralbin,” Crispin said, and tipped his cap with a smile, as if introducing himself. Teralbanin grinned sickly.

“My mother was Lamaroon,” Crispin said. “My father was from Linhe Domain. I’m Ferupian, born and bred. But even if I weren’t, it would be no reason for you to withhold your respect. I am astonished at your temerity. Among my crew is another non-Ferupian. Ash.” He beckoned.

Mickey came up around the crowd, frowning. Crispin gestured for him to stand beside him.

“Ash was born Kirekuni.” A few pilots gasped. “But he’s not the enemy. He is one of us. It’s actions that make the man, not origins, and Ash has shot down more lizards than half the pilots I know! You will tender him your courtesy as your squadmate, just as you will tender me your courtesy as your captain.”

“Yessir,” they said doubtfully.

Crispin held up one hand. “Your respect you may withhold until you have decided whether my command merits it. But your obedience I claim. And if you give it to me, I guarantee that we will earn more glory than any squadron in this sector.”

“Yes, sir!”

They had come physically unfrozen. The crews came close to dissolving as pilots elbowed each other, raising eyebrows, smiling. “Good going, sir,” Jones murmured behind Crispin. Another lieutenant seconded him. Crispin didn’t think he’d won them over, he’d simply stunned them; but it didn’t matter. “So, are we together?” he shouted at the regulars.

“Yes—”

“Yes what?”

“Yes, Captain!”

“Together?”

“Together!”

“What are we going to do?”

The responses came variously. “Kill ‘em! Slaughter ‘em! Shoot ‘em down! Fuck the fuckers over! Make the pension! Give ‘em woffor!”

Crispin had not known he was clenching his teeth until pain shot through his jaw. His fingers and toes were numb with cold. Beside him, Mickey lashed his tail in delight. Streaky dark clouds scudded across the gray sky, and in the distance, the lurid streaks of screamers marked an ongoing dogfight. The wind from Cerelon smelled of smoke. “I’m fucking proud of you,” Crispin shouted at them when the voices died down. “Fucking proud, hear!”

“Captain!”

“Proud! I’ll see Taft’s crew in ten minutes for night patrol! I want Joffrey’s crew in your bunks now; reveille’s at 5:00 A.M. The rest of you—at ease!”

As they straggled away, they kept looking over their shoulders at him, grinning and shaking their heads. Crispin thought, Still lucky. For now. During the briefing meeting at QAF HQ in Cerelon, Captain Eastre’s hostility had given him his first doubts as to whether he would have enough leeway to do his captaincy justice. His men, perhaps, he could handle, but they weren’t the only factor. The sheets of drizzle sweeping over the runway bellied strangely, as if an invisible face were pressing itself against the wet gray curtains; the cackling of the crows on the bristlecones sounded human, like the voices of the night birds in the Wraithwaste nearly three years ago. Vichuisse’s influence over Crispin’s career had not been broken, only diffused.

Briefly we Live. Briefly, then die. Wherefore, I say, he who hunts a glory, he who tracks some boundless, superhuman dream, may lose his harvest in the here and now and garner death.

—Euripides