[SPEAKER_01]: The record vaults of the Vesiosept, like deep beneath the surface of the world.
[SPEAKER_01]: In a quiet honeycomb of chambers, that the earth cast built into the bedrock, during the long, peaceful decades of the colonies' youth.
[SPEAKER_01]: And the man who worked in one of those chambers tonight had come to think of the place as something rather like home.
[SPEAKER_01]: He was a human after all, and humans are gentle creatures in their souls, and they grow attached to the places they spend a lot of time in.
[SPEAKER_01]: The chamber where he worked was as comfortable as any place he had ever known, and he had grown attached to it.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was late in his shift by the light of the chambers overhead lumens strips, which dimmed by careful degrees through the evening hours, so that those who worked the long shifts were not jolted from one quality of light to another.
[SPEAKER_01]: The strips were running by then, at a soft, cool blue, that pooled along the edges of the desk, and gathered in the corners of the vault.
[SPEAKER_01]: And made the polished stone of the floor, look rather like the surface of still water.
[SPEAKER_01]: The machines along the wall hummed in a low frequency that towel machines always hum.
[SPEAKER_01]: a sound so unlike the weasing rattling imperial machines of his childhood, on the colony of his birth, that it had taken him several years, after his conversion to the greater good, to stop noticing the difference.
[SPEAKER_01]: The air had the clean smell of the recycled atmospheres of tower installations, with a faint warm and a note of the small bowl of dried fragrant root that he had set upon the corner
[SPEAKER_01]: His coat, a thick padded archive coat that the earth cast had issued him three winters ago, hung over the back of his chair, and his fingers were a little cold at the tips, as he held a small ceramic cup of tea, steaming gently in his hands, the steam catching the blue light, and curling slowly upward into the soft dark above his head.
[SPEAKER_01]: He had been a Guevazer for 19 years now.
[SPEAKER_01]: There were still moments when he caught his reflection in some passing surface and saw the small brand of the greater good upon his colabone.
[SPEAKER_01]: When he could hardly believe the choice he had made or the kindness with which it had been received.
[SPEAKER_01]: The Tao did not entirely understand humans, and humans did not entirely understand Tao.
[SPEAKER_01]: And the gap between the two had been bridged in his own life, only by the work of a great many people on both sides who had been willing to assume the best of one another.
[SPEAKER_01]: He had been one of those people.
[SPEAKER_01]: He had, he liked to think, become rather good at it.
[SPEAKER_01]: The records before him tonight were not strictly speaking, forbidden.
[SPEAKER_01]: There were no truly forbidden records in the enclaves, or so he had been assured.
[SPEAKER_01]: But they were not the kind of records that were casually open to a human archivist either, and the trust that had placed them in front of him had been earned over a great many years of careful work.
[SPEAKER_01]: The task that had brought him down into the vaults this season was the largest he had yet been given.
[SPEAKER_01]: A biography, not a propaganda piece, his water cast mentor had explained to him in the mentor's gentle musical voice.
[SPEAKER_01]: but a real biography.
[SPEAKER_01]: The kind that took a long time to write and longer to revise.
[SPEAKER_01]: The kind that tried to set down the actual truth of a long life, rather than the version of that life that one's masters might have preferred.
[SPEAKER_01]: The mentor had a theory, which he confided only when no other town were present, that a human archivist might bring to such a project something the town themselves could not.
[SPEAKER_01]: The town, the mentor said, were not very good at ambivalence, humans were excellent at it.
[SPEAKER_01]: He had said it as a compliment, and the human had received it as one.
[SPEAKER_01]: The records were voluminous.
[SPEAKER_01]: The man had been at the work for some weeks.
[SPEAKER_01]: He had assembled by cross-reference and corroboration, a great mass of materials upon his desk.
[SPEAKER_01]: Drone capture footage after action reports, fragments of personal correspondence, transcripts of speeches both delivered and abandoned.
[SPEAKER_01]: The long chronicles of the enclaves themselves.
[SPEAKER_01]: They sat in their neat stacks around his cup of tea, like the slow careful turning of a man's life, laid out upon a table.
[SPEAKER_01]: He took a small sip from the cup.
[SPEAKER_01]: He set the cup down again.
[SPEAKER_01]: He drew his coat around his shoulders against the cold of the deep stone.
[SPEAKER_01]: And he selected, from the earliest of the stacks, the file he had been working towards all evening.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was the first file, the beginning of everything.
[SPEAKER_01]: He opened it, and the chamber around him, with its blue light and its quiet hum, and its small steaming cup of tea, faded gently from the edges of his attention, and the prose of the file rose up to meet him, and the tale began upon a different world altogether.
[SPEAKER_01]: Viola means hot blood in the town, and there has perhaps never been a name in all the long catalogs of the empire that fitted its world more truly than that one.
[SPEAKER_01]: It is a place of ferocious suns and hot dry winds, and skies so bright in the middle hours of the day that one learns, almost without being taught.
[SPEAKER_01]: To walk with one's head a little bowed, and one's eyes turn softly
[SPEAKER_01]: The light there is harsh.
[SPEAKER_01]: It wicks the children of the great training domes, long before they are ready to be woken.
[SPEAKER_01]: And it lingers late into what ought by rights to be evening, gilding the dust of the parade grounds, and warming the pale stone of the Academy walls, until those walls give back their warmth, all through the short blue night that follows.
[SPEAKER_01]: The people who are born beneath such a sun are shaped by it in ways they themselves rarely think to notice.
[SPEAKER_01]: They are quicker to laugh to than other town and quicker to anger and quicker to throw themselves headlong into a fight that other and wiser steps would have preferred.
[SPEAKER_01]: Their tutors at the great battle dome of Monterey, who have been teaching the children of viola for a very long time, have never tried to cool this fire in their students.
[SPEAKER_01]: They learned long ago that one cannot cool such a fire without putting it out altogether.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so instead, they do the gentler work of teaching it where to burn.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was into the bright, dry, sun-warmed life of this world, in a year that the history is now marked with reverence, but which must at the time have seemed quite ordinary to the people living through it.
[SPEAKER_01]: That a small boy arrived at the doors of the academy, three full terren years, before the standard age of enrollment.
[SPEAKER_01]: By what means he had managed this feat, history seems to confess, in its roundabout official way, that the thing had been accomplished through what they call fact-finding raids upon the recruitment centers of Monterey.
[SPEAKER_01]: He had talked his way in, he had charmed his way in, he had simply by all accounts,
[SPEAKER_01]: walked in and stood very politely in front of whichever official he found and waited to be allowed to stay.
[SPEAKER_01]: And at last some weary administrator of sufficient rank had given the matter up as hopeless and signed the papers and sent the boy through.
[SPEAKER_01]: He was the tutors all later agreed an extraordinarily polite child.
[SPEAKER_01]: He was also there came in time to understand, entirely impossible to refuse.
[SPEAKER_01]: They called him show, which in the old tongue of the towel means in a light.
[SPEAKER_01]: His tutors must have looked down at this very serious child standing very seriously in front of them on his first morning at the academy and felt the kind of vertigo that all good teachers come to know in time.
[SPEAKER_01]: He retained everything that crossed his path, the names of every cadet in his cohort, and the names of their parents, and the names of the steps from which their parents had come.
[SPEAKER_01]: The full telemetry of every battle simulation he had ever been allowed to watch, down to the smallest movement of the smallest figure on the furthest edge of the projection.
[SPEAKER_01]: maps, charts, the weather patterns of training grounds he had visited only once.
[SPEAKER_01]: He carried it all with him, as easily as another child might carry a favored stone in a pocket, and never seemed to find any of it heavy.
[SPEAKER_01]: Such a memory is unusual, but not in itself unprecedented among the firecast, whose long discipline has produced many remarkable minds over the centuries.
[SPEAKER_01]: What was unprecedented and what slowly began to disturb his tutors was what the boy did with the things he remembered.
[SPEAKER_01]: He would watch one of his instructors across the training hall and tell you before the instructor had finished crossing it.
[SPEAKER_01]: What questioned the instructor was about to ask him and in what order the instructor was likely to ask it.
[SPEAKER_01]: He would enter a simulation chamber that had been carefully and freshly designed to confound him, and within moments he would have located the trap that lay at its heart.
[SPEAKER_01]: Not because he had seen the trap, but because he had asked himself in that strange interior way of his.
[SPEAKER_01]: where he would have placed the trap.
[SPEAKER_01]: If the placing of it had been left to him.
[SPEAKER_01]: Once he had asked that question, the rest seemed to follow naturally.
[SPEAKER_01]: And the trap, wherever it lay, would unfold itself before him, as gently as a flower opening to the morning.
[SPEAKER_01]: In the war dome they called the jungle of a thousand eyes, which had been claiming partial victories from the cadets of Monterey, for longer than any of the current tutors had been alive.
[SPEAKER_01]: The boy ran the course again and again, without once being tagged by the hostile sim ghosts that lay in wait for him among its tangled imaginary foliage.
[SPEAKER_01]: The instructors checked the recordings at the end of the first week, suspecting some glitch in the systems.
[SPEAKER_01]: They checked them again at the end of the second, suspecting some deception on the part of the cadet himself.
[SPEAKER_01]: By the end of the third week, they had given up checking altogether and had simply come to accept that the boy had broken their simulation by refusing on principle to lose inside it.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was about this time that Commander Puretide came to Viola upon some matter of business and was prevailed upon by the masters of Monterey, who must, once suspects, have been almost beside themselves with pride.
[SPEAKER_01]: To be present at the induction ceremony of shows generation of cadets into the formal ranks of the firecast.
[SPEAKER_01]: The records describe a small boy in fresh fatigues that had been pressed perhaps a little too carefully for the occasion.
[SPEAKER_01]: An old commander, whose name was already known across the whole vast empire, and whose presence in a room could silence the most boisterous of generals into something resembling reverence.
[SPEAKER_01]: A whole full of tutors trying very hard not to look as though they were
[SPEAKER_01]: pure tide bestowed upon the boy, the rank of Shastla.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then, perhaps on some whim of his own, or perhaps because the tutors of Monterey had been speaking of almost nothing else for the better part of a week, and the old commander had grown curious in spite of himself.
[SPEAKER_01]: he asked the boy the question that everyone present had been longing to ask him.
[SPEAKER_01]: How is it he said?
[SPEAKER_01]: In a slow and careful voice that had calmed many a panicked battlefield over the long years of his service, that you anticipate even the most devious of the scenarios your tutors set before you.
[SPEAKER_01]: The boy answered politely, as he answered everything.
[SPEAKER_01]: He thought of the plans that he himself would set in place, if he were the tutor, and the task were his.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then having thought of those plans as carefully and thoroughly as he could, he worked to disable them.
[SPEAKER_01]: One by one, as best he was able.
[SPEAKER_01]: The hall was very quiet for a moment after this answer, meaning for glances were exchanged amongst the assembled dignitaries, the kind of glances that older people exchange over the heads of children when something has just happened that the child is still too young to recognize as having happened at all.
[SPEAKER_01]: Nothing more was said upon the matter at the time.
[SPEAKER_01]: The boy and his fellow novitiates were sent away to their first true war against the Iraqian incursions of the western veil, where the pale horrors of that long campaign were waiting to greet them.
[SPEAKER_01]: Behind closed doors of the academy, when the cadets had gone, command a pure tide in his aides spoke among themselves of what they had seen, and what they had heard, and what it might in the fullness of time come to mean.
[SPEAKER_01]: There is a cost to being marked for greatness so young.
[SPEAKER_01]: To be singled out at such an age is to be lifted, ever so kindly, out of the small and ordinary intimacies that other children are still permitted to enjoy without thinking.
[SPEAKER_01]: The tutors who once watched over you cease, in some small but irreversible way, to be your tutors any longer.
[SPEAKER_01]: They become instead your observers, and though the difference between those two words is a subtle one, it is a difference that the heart, even at six or seven years of age, can feel without being able to name.
[SPEAKER_01]: The pears who run alongside you in the training yards begin to glance at you sideways now and then, not unkindly and often without their realizing they are doing it at all.
[SPEAKER_01]: And somewhere deep inside the child himself, in a place too small and too soft for anyone outside to see, a door closes, the door behind which an ordinary life had been waiting all along.
[SPEAKER_01]: show stepped onto that road on a bright veal-an morning.
[SPEAKER_01]: At an age when most of the children of his sept were still learning the proper and respectful way to address an elder.
[SPEAKER_01]: He did not so far as any of the records suggest, complain about it.
[SPEAKER_01]: He may not in truth have noticed that he had done it at all, but the whole of the long life that lay ahead of him, every gleaming victory and every bitter exile.
[SPEAKER_01]: Every long silence in the wilderness of a world that was no longer entirely his.
[SPEAKER_01]: every moment of doubt in the deep places of the void where no ethereal could see him.
[SPEAKER_01]: All of it begins in a sense on that morning at Monterey.
[SPEAKER_01]: With an old commander asking a small boy a question, and a small boy answering that question honestly and politely.
[SPEAKER_01]: The western veil was not an important war, it was the sort of long and grinding campaign that the great histories tend to summarize in a single sentence, and then hurried past in some haste, eager to reach the more famous battles that lie a little further down the road.
[SPEAKER_01]: There were no sept Worlds at stake in the veil.
[SPEAKER_01]: There were no great cities that would be remembered in song, if they fell.
[SPEAKER_01]: There was only a slow cleansing of a region of space that the empire had decided that it could no longer leave to the things which lived there.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so, the young cadets of Monterey were sent, generation upon generation, into the pale nebula dust of that distant frontier, and many of them came home again in time, and some of them did not, and the war went on in its way, without troubling the wider
[SPEAKER_01]: very much at all.
[SPEAKER_01]: Into this campaign, in the cold weeks following his induction, the boy now properly called Shusla Shou was sent with the rest of his cohort.
[SPEAKER_01]: And there for the first time he met the things that the water cast had been speaking of in their dry briefings as the Arrequin.
[SPEAKER_01]: He had read of them at length on the journey out, and he had thought that he understood them.
[SPEAKER_01]: He had been mistaken.
[SPEAKER_01]: There are some creatures in this old galaxy of ours, which the written word can only ever sketch the outermost edges of.
[SPEAKER_01]: and the arrogant regrettably were among them.
[SPEAKER_01]: The females of the species whom the water cast had named the Ustromistics were vast pale things that hung in the silk and depths of their nesting places, like some terrible parody of the moons that show had grown up beneath, swollen and luminous, and almost peaceful to look upon.
[SPEAKER_01]: Until one understood what it was that they were swollen with.
[SPEAKER_01]: The males were smaller, and quicker, and worse, and they moved across the silk on legs that ended in long, curved blades, and they did not so much fight as harvest.
[SPEAKER_01]: For four standard years, show fought in that pale war, and the boy who had walked into it, walked out of it some considerable distance, further along the road of his life.
[SPEAKER_01]: than four years ord by rights to have carried him.
[SPEAKER_01]: He earned the trust of his shasui, a capable town named Monoka, and at the Battle of the Great Web, he turned that trust into something deeper still.
[SPEAKER_01]: When he saw his commander caught fast in a tango clutch trap and fired at such close and careful range that the silken cords parted without harming, the warrior they had
[SPEAKER_01]: And Monoka was pulled free of the exax that had been waiting in the dark for him.
[SPEAKER_01]: There are debts in the firecast which are settled with words and ceremonies and the proper exchange of gifts, and there are other debts which simply settle themselves into the bones of the warrior who owes them and remain there for the rest of his life.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was a death of the second kind that Monoca carried out of the web that day, and he carried it gladly.
[SPEAKER_01]: When the time came for show and his team to face their trial by fire, the ceremony that marks the passage of a fire warrior from one rank to the next, they were sent home to Viola for it, as was the custom.
[SPEAKER_01]: The trial itself is one of the older and more difficult traditions of the firecast.
[SPEAKER_01]: What can be said is that there were those at the academy who remembered shows earlier promotions with a certain resentment.
[SPEAKER_01]: For in being elevated so young, he had displaced others who had thought their own elevations assured.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so when his trial came, it was harder than it ought, in fairness, to have been.
[SPEAKER_01]: He was placed in a war dome of perfect darkness and live ammunition.
[SPEAKER_01]: And into that darkness were sent things which were described only as nameless horrors.
[SPEAKER_01]: And which once suspects the Academy itself was not entirely comfortable with having designed.
[SPEAKER_01]: His quick mind was of less use in such a place than it had been in the simpler challenges of his cadet years.
[SPEAKER_01]: And in the end, it was not his cleverness that carried him through, but the older, simpler fire of his sept.
[SPEAKER_01]: The thing that the masters of Viola had approved of in him from the very beginning.
[SPEAKER_01]: When a tentacle more thing came worrying down out of the dark towards Mon Oca, who was pinned and weaponless, and could not have lived another moment without help, show through himself bodily into its path.
[SPEAKER_01]: He was cut to ribbons the record say, and he died there in the dark.
[SPEAKER_01]: He woke some considerable time later, in a med bay he did not at first recognize, with the comfortable curve of battle dome montaia ceiling visible through the window, beyond his bed, and was told by his tutors with kindness that the whole of the trial had been a simulation, and that only those of his team who had died within it had passed it, and
[SPEAKER_01]: He was glad of his promotion, as anyone would have been.
[SPEAKER_01]: But when some hours later he asked after the cadets who had not died, and who had therefore not passed, his question was met with a silence so complete, that even he, with all his quickness, could not find a way through it.
[SPEAKER_01]: He asked the question once more, in case he had not been understood, and was met with the same silence.
[SPEAKER_01]: There is much in the discipline of the firecast that one does not press.
[SPEAKER_01]: Even when one is young and clever and full of the natural curiosity of the living.
[SPEAKER_01]: After his promotion, he was returned for a time to the Western Vale, but his masters had been studying him from afar with the attention that the firecast reserves for its most promising young officers, and they had come to a conclusion.
[SPEAKER_01]: He was, they felt, too eager to engage at close quarters.
[SPEAKER_01]: He took too much pleasure in the forward edge of a battle, and not enough in the long and steady considerations of the rear.
[SPEAKER_01]: and so when he reported back to High Command, expecting some new and exciting deployment, he was instead assigned to the X5-88 broadside teams of the veteran Rifleman, Chassavrea Oblutai, where he would learn the slow and anglamorous art of supporting other warriors from a great distance away.
[SPEAKER_01]: He hid his disappointment, as a good young officer is meant to hide such things.
[SPEAKER_01]: But it was hard, to be armoured at last in the great walking suits he had dreamt of since boyhood, and to have to use that armour to stand at the back of every engagement, watching younger and more lightly protected warriors do the close work he had once done so well.
[SPEAKER_01]: There is a kind of torment in such a posting, and show felt every hour of it.
[SPEAKER_01]: He took refuge as he had always done in study.
[SPEAKER_01]: He drank in the technical specifications of his heavy rail rifle, the way another young town might have drunk in a love poem, and within a single training cycle, he was out ranging Oblotai himself, who took the development with the good humour of a man who has lived long enough to be glad of being surpassed.
[SPEAKER_01]: They sent the cadre back to the veil, and there, in the pitiless work of dropping the great bloated aliens, from their silken thrones one after another.
[SPEAKER_01]: Show was given a new name by the warriors who fought beside him.
[SPEAKER_01]: They called him the young executioner, and the name was not entirely meant as a compliment.
[SPEAKER_01]: Though it was not entirely meant, as anything else, either.
[SPEAKER_01]: He left a leg in the veil in the end, a skittling swarm found a damaged seam in the carapace of his crisis battle suit, during the final phase of the war, and was inside the suit before he could close the breach.
[SPEAKER_01]: And by the time he was extracted, the leg below the knee was passed saving.
[SPEAKER_01]: He saw friends die in those last battles, too.
[SPEAKER_01]: Crisis suits torn apart at the joints by the Great Aragon Patriarchs, they called grandfather's.
[SPEAKER_01]: Warriors he had trained beside, ending in ways no warrior should end.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was during the closing battles of the Vale War, fighting in a new crisis suit beneath the command of the formidable Commander Dornstone, that he came at last to the Aragon Trinity at the heart of the War effort.
[SPEAKER_01]: The three great matriarchs, whose nesting ship was the long sought after, Silken Heart of the Campaign.
[SPEAKER_01]: He led Dawnstone to that heart, having unwound the maze-like logic of the cocoon corridors as he went, and there the stroke was struck that ended the Trinity and broke the back of the war forever.
[SPEAKER_01]: The veil was free.
[SPEAKER_01]: The cocoon ship burned in the void behind them as they returned to Viola in honour.
[SPEAKER_01]: And show sat in the quiet of his quarters, during the long journey home, and watched.
[SPEAKER_01]: Through the small porthole beside his bunk, the pale stars of the veil gross smaller and smaller, until at last, they were simply stars again.
[SPEAKER_01]: He had not been long aboard, and was still in his fatigues with his promotion ceremony, some days off yet.
[SPEAKER_01]: When the alarm sounded, and skittlings were found pouring out of the ship's vents into the corridors.
[SPEAKER_01]: Dawnstone and her command staff were caught unarmed in the council chamber, debating some matter of post-war reorganization, and show who was nearest the doorway, through himself into the breach and held it with his bare hands, and his fatigues, until the venom tusks had gone too deep into him, for him to hold any longer.
[SPEAKER_01]: and his commander and her aides were safely away.
[SPEAKER_01]: He died there a second time, or thought he had, with the pale ceiling of the council corridor blurring above him, and the high centre of his own blood in his nose.
[SPEAKER_01]: He woke again in the Medbey at Monterey.
[SPEAKER_01]: It had been a simulation, the whole of it, the skittling was the corridor, the dying.
[SPEAKER_01]: Dawnston herself sat at his bedside and told him so gently, as one might tell a child that the bad dream was only a dream.
[SPEAKER_01]: And informed him that he had passed his trial with such distinction, that the venerable commander puretied himself had agreed to take him as a personal student.
[SPEAKER_01]: He took the news with the proper grace, but somewhere there was a part of him where a small thought stirred, and once it had stirred, it could not be settled again.
[SPEAKER_01]: He had now died in the records of his life, twice.
[SPEAKER_01]: Both times had turned out to be simulations.
[SPEAKER_01]: He had spent his earliest training in war terms that were not quite real.
[SPEAKER_01]: And his cadet years in jungles that were not quite jungles.
[SPEAKER_01]: And now even the great moments of his courage and his sacrifice were beginning very gently.
[SPEAKER_01]: To reveal themselves as exercises set for him by careful elders he had not seen.
[SPEAKER_01]: He did not doubt that the war he had fought in the veil had been real, he had the missing leg to confirm it.
[SPEAKER_01]: But he began to wonder how much of the rest of his life was the world it appeared to be, and how much of it was something his masters had arranged for him to walk through.
[SPEAKER_01]: And whether he would always, when he reached the end of a thing and felt himself dying, wake up afterwards in a familiar med bay.
[SPEAKER_01]: Mount Canji rises out of the highlands of Dalith Prime.
[SPEAKER_01]: Its lower slopes are gentle and green, and full of the soft fluttering of the small creatures that live there.
[SPEAKER_01]: but its upper reaches are bare and white and silent.
[SPEAKER_01]: And the air thins as one climbs, until one's breath comes in small clouds, and one's thoughts come more slowly than one is accustomed to.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was to the topmost peak of this mountain that command a pure tide had withdrawn in the long years of his retirement from active service.
[SPEAKER_01]: and it was to that peak that the new initiate show was now sent, with nothing but his wits and his determination to carry him there.
[SPEAKER_01]: The journey up the mountain was by the design of the master who waited at its summit, a test in itself.
[SPEAKER_01]: There were no ropes laid in for the climbers, and no carefully maintained pathways, and no kindly attendance posted along the route to offer water
[SPEAKER_01]: There was only the mountain, and the cold, and whatever the climate had brought with him in the way of strength and ingenuity.
[SPEAKER_01]: Show took some considerable time to make his way up.
[SPEAKER_01]: He fashioned a sling shot of materials he found at the lower elevations.
[SPEAKER_01]: And with it, he killed a kanji and snowlinks that had the misfortune to cross his path.
[SPEAKER_01]: And from the dead weight of the links and a system of improvised pulleys, he had worked out in his head as he climbed.
[SPEAKER_01]: He made for himself a slow method of a scent that carried him up the sheer faces of the mountain kilometre by painstaking kilometre.
[SPEAKER_01]: He came to the topmost peak at last and found his master deep in meditation, and seated cross-legged in the snow before that master, to other young town, who had clearly been waiting for him to arrive.
[SPEAKER_01]: The first of them rose to greet him as he came over the lip of the final ridge, and gave him her name.
[SPEAKER_01]: She was Shazera of Asept, whose name he did not at first catch, and there was something about the way she stood and the way she looked at him, that made him feel quite suddenly, that he was being measured in a great many ways at once.
[SPEAKER_01]: She was not unfriendly, she was simply and rather wonderfully attentive, in a way that few warriors ever quite managed to be.
[SPEAKER_01]: The other young town did not rise, he was acquired with drawn figure, named Kai's, and he gave show a nod that contained the absolute minimum of social acknowledgment that politeness required, and then returned at once to the inward place, where he had clearly been spending most of his time.
[SPEAKER_01]: There was nothing rude in it.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was only that Kai's, even at that age, was a young warrior who carried his solitude about within the way another my carry a cloak.
[SPEAKER_01]: These two would be his fellow students for the duration of his apprenticeship, and these two, in the long, unwinding of the years, would become the closest thing to bondmates that show would ever know.
[SPEAKER_01]: They were also, from that very first afternoon on the cold peak of Mount Canji, his rivals, and the rivalry between the three of them would shape the destiny of the Tao Empire across more than a century of warfare.
[SPEAKER_01]: None of them, sitting in the snow that day with the wind moving softly through their hair, could possibly have known any of that.
[SPEAKER_01]: They simply knew that they had been chosen, and that they were here, and that the old commander before them had a lot to teach them, and not very many years left, in which to teach it.
[SPEAKER_01]: There were three great doctrines that Peotide taught is three pupils, and though every student studied all three of them, each pupil came in time to take one of them as their own.
[SPEAKER_01]: The first was Montica, which means the killing blow, and which is the doctrine of the warrior who waits and watches until the precise moment when a single decisive stroke will undo his enemy entirely.
[SPEAKER_01]: and who then strikes that stroke without hesitation and without remorse.
[SPEAKER_01]: It is the doctrine of decisive action, of bright fire suddenly let loose in the dark, of the lightning that is gone, almost before one has registered that the sky was full of it.
[SPEAKER_01]: Show, with his quick mind, and his hot violand blood, and his abiding love of the clothes and the immediate, gravitated to Montka, almost from the first lesson, and never afterwards strayed very far from it.
[SPEAKER_01]: The second was Caryon, which means the patient hunter, and which is the doctrine of the trap, rather than the strike.
[SPEAKER_01]: The Caryon practitioner does not pursue.
[SPEAKER_01]: She waits, she prepares the ground, she allows her enemy to come to her, and to commit himself, and to overextend, and only then.
[SPEAKER_01]: When the enemy has placed himself willingly in the position she has chosen for him, does
[SPEAKER_01]: It is a slower doctrine than Montica, and it requires a kind of stillness in the heart of its practitioner.
[SPEAKER_01]: Shacera took to it, as though she had been waiting all her life to find it.
[SPEAKER_01]: Watching her practice the cow yarn was, by all later accounts, like watching water learn the shape of a vessel, it had always meant to fill.
[SPEAKER_01]: The third doctrine was Monat, which means the lone warrior, and which is the strangest and least walked of the three roads.
[SPEAKER_01]: The Monat practitioner does not lead armies and does not coordinate trap or stroke with any wider force.
[SPEAKER_01]: He goes alone into whatever situation requires him, and he succeeds or he does not.
[SPEAKER_01]: Cies took the path of the Monat, because Cies had always been a lone thing in his heart, and the doctrine fit him well.
[SPEAKER_01]: Pyrtide taught all three of his pupils, all three of these arts.
[SPEAKER_01]: He set them tasks that required them to fight in the manner of one another.
[SPEAKER_01]: In the hope that each would come to appreciate the doctrines that were not their own.
[SPEAKER_01]: They did the tasks well enough, for they were gifted students, and they wished above all else to please their master.
[SPEAKER_01]: But each was, in the end, only ever truly at home in the doctrine they had chosen.
[SPEAKER_01]: There was a sorrow in this, the sorrow of the old commander, watching three remarkable young warriors turn slowly and inevitably into the thing that each of them was always going to be.
[SPEAKER_01]: The day came at last, as it had to, when pure tide had nothing more to teach them, that they were ready to receive.
[SPEAKER_01]: And the three pupils made their way down the mountain one at a time, and went out into the wider empire to take up their commands.
[SPEAKER_01]: They left the peak with new names, as was the custom of those who had studied beneath the master, names that bore the mark of Mount Canji upon them.
[SPEAKER_01]: Shacera became Shasoshacera, the great commander whom history would in time know as Shadowsan.
[SPEAKER_01]: Kai's became Monat, Shazou Kai's, and walked away into the long wars of the eastern fringes, where he is fighting still, so far as anyone has been able to tell.
[SPEAKER_01]: And sure, the young Vior Lan, with his quick mind, and his hot blood, became Shazou Shaw, and went down off the mountain with the snow still in his hair, and the doctrine of the killing blow, burning steadily in his heart.
[SPEAKER_01]: and turned his face towards the long and bright and terrible road that was waiting for him below.
[SPEAKER_01]: Arcanasha was a red world, from orbit it appeared as a great rust-coloured globe, a drift in the dark sea of space, and around its temperate latitudes, the earth cast had strong two long necklaces of biosphere, that pulsed with a soft, bluish white light through the long planetary night.
[SPEAKER_01]: so that the world looked when one approached it from the void, rather like some deep sea creature glowing gently in a darkness that had never quite seen the sun.
[SPEAKER_01]: The biosphere were the work of decades of hard labor, and they were beautiful, and the people who lived inside them, for there were a good many of them by the time of our story, had come to think of the red dust beyond their walls, as simply the colour the sky was.
[SPEAKER_01]: The way the children of older worlds think of blue.
[SPEAKER_01]: The red dust had a curious origin though, and the earth cast had puzzled over it from the very beginning of the colony.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was not properly speaking, a desert, in the way that other deserts are made.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was the residue of something, the metallic composition of the particulates was too varied, and the depth of the residue too profound, for the dust to have come from any natural process the scientists could account for.
[SPEAKER_01]: They had at last come to the unsettling conclusion that the whole of our canasia had once been covered in some distant and forgotten age, with metal structures of such immense scale that their grinding to dust over the long centuries had produced the very deserts the towel now walked upon.
[SPEAKER_01]: what had built such structures, and what had ground them into nothing again, the earth cast could not say.
[SPEAKER_01]: They wrote up their findings and they filed the reports, and they got on with the business of making Archanasia Bloom.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was into this world that the orcs came without warning.
[SPEAKER_01]: There was a strange storm that year, and odd glyphs were seen briefly against the sky by those who happened to be looking up at the right moment.
[SPEAKER_01]: And when the storm had passed, the Earthcasts monitoring stations reported, with some confusion, that the Eastern Void was now full of energy signatures.
[SPEAKER_01]: when no signatures had been a few hours before.
[SPEAKER_01]: There were hundreds of them.
[SPEAKER_01]: They were heading every one of them, directly for Arkana'sha.
[SPEAKER_01]: And they were doing so on courses that no civilized fleet would ever have plotted.
[SPEAKER_01]: For those courses ended, not in orbit, but in the planet itself.
[SPEAKER_01]: the first of them struck the desert within the week.
[SPEAKER_01]: The towel called what followed the Goraka, or the death hail, for the orcs had not come to the planet, in conventional ships at all.
[SPEAKER_01]: They had come in great porous bones of rock and debris, vast asteroid fortresses welded together with crude engines, and crude by warriors whose only intent upon arrival
[SPEAKER_01]: The defensive batteries of the biodones designed for elegant fleets that are approached in the proper way found themselves quite useless against such an arrival.
[SPEAKER_01]: The asteroids were too large and too crude and too indifferent to their firing solutions to be turned aside by the railguns that bristled the domes.
[SPEAKER_01]: They came down, they kept coming down, and the Orcs poured out of them in such numbers that the hunter-cardriors sent to contain each landing, was swallowed almost as soon as they engaged.
[SPEAKER_01]: By the time Shazou show arrived in orbit at the head of a counter-invasion fleet, the planet was, for all practical purposes, lost.
[SPEAKER_01]: The biodomes still stood,
[SPEAKER_01]: for the orcs had not yet found a way through the metres thick transparent armour that protected them, but the connecting infrastructure between the domes was gone, and each dome was an island now in a sea of green-skinned procedures, who hammered upon the walls and bellowed for those within to come out.
[SPEAKER_01]: The civilians watched their persecutors through the transplastic wars with a horrified fascination.
[SPEAKER_01]: They could not entirely manage to hide from one another and they counted their dwindling water reserves and they waited for whatever was coming.
[SPEAKER_01]: What was coming as it turned out was show.
[SPEAKER_01]: He landed uninterrupted, the Orcs being too occupied with the biodones to notice another arrival, and he was briefed at length by the trapped commanders of the planet, and he listened, and at the end of the briefing he asked for a meeting with his senior staff in the chamber of the mobile command vessel that he had brought down to the surface with him.
[SPEAKER_01]: show listened to his officers as they laid out the impossible numbers.
[SPEAKER_01]: The ratio of orch warriors to tower defenders was something on the order of 400 to 1.
[SPEAKER_01]: And the situation simply did not admit of a victory.
[SPEAKER_01]: He listened, and he nodded.
[SPEAKER_01]: And when his officers had finished speaking, he rose from the throne of his command skimmer, and crossed the chamber to the wall where, by violand custom, an ornamental sword of his sept was hung.
[SPEAKER_01]: He took the sword down, he returned to the throne.
[SPEAKER_01]: He drove the blade through the arm of the chair he had been sitting in, and then, with a single sharp motion, he snapped the blade in half against the metal.
[SPEAKER_01]: There it stayed, the ornamental hilt jutting from the throne arm with its broken blade, while show explained quite calmly what the broken sword meant.
[SPEAKER_01]: a weapon that allowed itself to be used at the enemy's reach was no longer a weapon at all.
[SPEAKER_01]: The orcs would not be defeated by the firecasts traditional doctrine of long range and clean engagement, for the orcs did not fight by such rules and could not be made to.
[SPEAKER_01]: They would have to be defeated by what lay between the ears of the warriors who fought them, and not by the weight of fire, those warriors could bring to bear.
[SPEAKER_01]: The sword had to be broken before the war could be one.
[SPEAKER_01]: It became in time, a famous metaphor in the firecast, that broken sword.
[SPEAKER_01]: There were cadre fireblades who had it tattooed upon their forearms as a reminder of what the Viorland commander had taught them.
[SPEAKER_01]: But on that first afternoon in the command chamber, with the broken hilt still quivering in the throne, his officers simply stared at him in a silence that contained the uncomfortable understanding that the war they had thought they were going to fight was not after all, the war that was going to be fought.
[SPEAKER_01]: What followed in the month after the broken sword became known, in time as the great thinning, and it was as terrible a campaign as any the firecast had ever conducted.
[SPEAKER_01]: Show had been studying the Orcs since his arrival, as he studied everything, and he had come to a number of conclusions that no Tao commander before him had reached.
[SPEAKER_01]: The first was that the Orcs mobbs, for all their numbers, were held together almost entirely by the presence of the largest Orcs in each band.
[SPEAKER_01]: removed that hawk and the rest fell at once into squabbling chaos.
[SPEAKER_01]: The second was that the hawks had no real loyalty to one another and would attack each other on the slightest excuse if there were no other foe immediately to hand.
[SPEAKER_01]: The third and most important was that this entire structure could be exploited by an enemy.
[SPEAKER_01]: wise enough to do the exploiting properly.
[SPEAKER_01]: He sent forward stealth contingents into the dunes and small battle suit teams, and these small careful forces did not engage the orc hordes.
[SPEAKER_01]: They simply located the largest orc in each mob they came upon, and they killed that orc from a great distance with a single carefully placed shot, and they vanished.
[SPEAKER_01]: fell to fighting amongst themselves over the question of who would inherit the dead ones authority.
[SPEAKER_01]: And a great many more, orcs died in the resulting brawls than the towel had killed in the original strike.
[SPEAKER_01]: Show watched the recordings of these brawls in the privacy of his command chamber, with an expression that his officers found difficult to read.
[SPEAKER_01]: For it was not quite satisfaction, and not quite distaste, but something cooler than either.
[SPEAKER_01]: The cool, focused interest of a scholar, coming to understand the grammar of a language, he had only just begun to speak.
[SPEAKER_01]: He came in time to speak the language.
[SPEAKER_01]: He learned the crude system of glyphs, the orcs used for their writing, and he learned by study of intercepted recordings, the guttural orc tongue itself.
[SPEAKER_01]: His own throat could not produce the sounds of course, but his earthcast allies cut audio fragments of Orkish from captured equipment and arranged for them to be delivered.
[SPEAKER_01]: At carefully chosen moments, into the com's networks that the Orkish had looted from fallen tower.
[SPEAKER_01]: A well-placed Orkish insult dropped into the righteer at the right time, could start a war between two green-skinned clans that had been allies the previous morning.
[SPEAKER_01]: and shows started a great many such wars, and the orcs of Akanasya, who had come to the planet in such numbers as to make their victory seem inevitable, began to chew upon their own tail.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was during these months that his officers began to call him by a new name.
[SPEAKER_01]: They called him Shova, which is to say far-sighted, for there was a quality to his anticipation of the Orcs behavior that seemed almost prophetic, as though he were watching something he had already seen unfold once before.
[SPEAKER_01]: The name caught and held, by the time the earth cast had rendered all of his observations into a single document.
[SPEAKER_01]: The book of the Beast, as he himself called it, and circulated that document to every cadre fireblades and battle suit Shazri, and crewed Shaper still operating on the planet.
[SPEAKER_01]: No one was calling him show anymore.
[SPEAKER_01]: He was command of far-sight, and the war was beginning very slowly to turn
[SPEAKER_01]: The years of triumph are remembered with a fondness in the long records of the firecast.
[SPEAKER_01]: Partly because they were the years in which far-sight came into the fullness of his powers as a commander, and partly because they were, in a way, beautiful to watch.
[SPEAKER_01]: The canyon networks of the equator became his favourite hunting grounds, and he learned to lure orc columns into the narrowing channels, and then to see your both ends of those channels with a single decisive vehicle kill at each terminus, and the orcs trapped in the canyons and unable to maneuver, would be slaughtered at leisure by firing from the heights above.
[SPEAKER_01]: his pathfinders ranged across the dunes in advance of every engagement and brought back the precise topographical information, his battle suit teams required to choose their ambushes.
[SPEAKER_01]: His crude mercenaries, adapting to the harsh climate of the world with the strange and rapid grace that only crude ever quite manage.
[SPEAKER_01]: Learn to weather the great rust storms that swept across the deserts and to plunge into them in pursuit of the orc war bands, who had been using the storms as cover.
[SPEAKER_01]: And they brought back the heads of Orc knobs as casually as another mercenary might bring back game from a hunt.
[SPEAKER_01]: Everywhere across the planet, the doctrine of the book of the beast was taking hold.
[SPEAKER_01]: The fire warriors no longer dance at long range from the orcs.
[SPEAKER_01]: They held their ground at chosen ambush points and let the orc charges come.
[SPEAKER_01]: And they laid down such overlapping networks of supporting fire that the charges broke against them like waves against a seawall.
[SPEAKER_01]: and any green skin who somehow made it through the lattice of pulse fire was met with the blinding flash of time delayed photon grenades.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then, while he reeled, was clubbed to the ground at point blank by fire warriors.
[SPEAKER_01]: who had taken to swinging the heavy barrels of their pulse rifles, like cuddles.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was not a refined way of fighting, but it worked, and far-sight's warriors took to it with a fierce and unexpected pride, and the progress charts in the central command chambers of the biodones began at last to climb upward, where for so long they had been falling.
[SPEAKER_01]: At a place called Goose Gorge, named for some old and unhappy business between two rival crude kindrids that had taken place there long before.
[SPEAKER_01]: A great orchard tried to push through a narrow canyon towards the bio domes beyond.
[SPEAKER_01]: There was a giant drilling engine in the midst of the hoard, a great walking thing built for the express purpose of cracking the armour of the biodones, and farside had no intention of letting it reach them.
[SPEAKER_01]: He drove his battle suit teams in close from above, and the air filled with plasma fire, and the cries of warriors, and the terrible roar of the Ork engines.
[SPEAKER_01]: And it was at that moment that the Ork's revealed something nobody
[SPEAKER_01]: Bubble fields, shimmered into existence over each orc mob, lit with the cascading energies of the rounds that struck and dissolved against them.
[SPEAKER_01]: Heavy rail rifle shots disintegrated against the surfaces of the fields, plasma fire ran off them and dissipated into the air.
[SPEAKER_01]: Even the great drilling engine had its own field, and the broadside teams whose careful shots should have ended the day in a moment, found themselves quite suddenly unable to do any harm at all.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was the young commander Brightsword, who first realized that the only way to bring fire to bear inside the fields was to be inside the fields oneself.
[SPEAKER_01]: and he led his team forward into the heart of an orc mob to test the theory.
[SPEAKER_01]: The theory was correct, but it placed the battle suits exactly where the orcs had wanted them, placed all along, and what followed was the worst single engagement of the entire war.
[SPEAKER_01]: Tao and Ork fought at close quarters in the cramped spaces of the Gorge, and the firecasts hit and run doctrines which had served them so well across the open dunes, simply could not be performed in such confines.
[SPEAKER_01]: Far sight himself made a daring vertical strike that immobilized the great drilling engine at the heart of the Ork advance, and that, at least, kept the biodome safe.
[SPEAKER_01]: but he could not save his people in the gorge.
[SPEAKER_01]: He gave the order to withdraw and watched a great many warriors he had personally trained, die as they fought their way out.
[SPEAKER_01]: And afterwards, in his command chamber, he sat for a long time and did not speak to anyone at all.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was after Goose Gorge that far-sight requested reinforcements from Viola.
[SPEAKER_01]: He framed the request carefully, but the substance of it was simple.
[SPEAKER_01]: The war had reached a point of decision, and a determined push of fresh hunters could end the campaign in the town's favour.
[SPEAKER_01]: There was a long silence from Viola, before the reply came.
[SPEAKER_01]: The reply, when it came, said that a single ship was being sent.
[SPEAKER_01]: A single orca dropship descended through the red sky some weeks later, and far-sighted in his closest advisors, met it personally upon a great natural plateau of the Argap Highlands, which had become by that point, his command stronghold.
[SPEAKER_01]: And after them, with no further escort and no apparent army, came a single ethereal.
[SPEAKER_01]: The ethereal introduced himself as Al-N-Chu of Viola.
[SPEAKER_01]: He was a veteran of many campaigns, a warrior of considerable personal accomplishment, whose body bore the marks of a great many old fights, and he carried himself with a silent assurance of one who had never doubted his place in the world.
[SPEAKER_01]: He explained calmly and with no ceremony that the fire cast was to withdraw entirely from Arcanasha.
[SPEAKER_01]: He himself would oversee the withdrawal personally.
[SPEAKER_01]: There would be no further offensive operations.
[SPEAKER_01]: The civilian population was to be evacuated to the plateau and held there until they could be lifted off the planet.
[SPEAKER_01]: And the plateau itself was to be defended for as long as the evacuation required.
[SPEAKER_01]: After that, the Tao would leave Archanasha to the Orcs.
[SPEAKER_01]: Farceite nodded and bowed and accepted these instructions, with every outward sign of respect that the situation required of him.
[SPEAKER_01]: There was nothing else for him to do, and ethereal had spoken, and a senior commander of the firecast did not refuse the words of an ethereal, no matter what those words might be.
[SPEAKER_01]: But somewhere in the deepest part of him, in a place that no ethereal could see, and that he himself was perhaps not quite ready to acknowledge, a small thing turned.
[SPEAKER_01]: Not a rebellion, not yet.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was hardly even a thought.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was only a small fisher, a hairline crack in something he had assumed all his life to be solid stone, and it would take many years to widen, and a great many things would have to happen before the fisher became visible at all from the outside.
[SPEAKER_01]: But it was there after that day on the plateau, and once such a thing has appeared, it does not ever quite go away again.
[SPEAKER_01]: It is worth considering what it costs a warrior to obey when something inside him refuses.
[SPEAKER_01]: The histories of these people do not consider it at all.
[SPEAKER_01]: They simply note that far sight exceeded to the ethereal's instructions and preceded with the withdrawal as ordered.
[SPEAKER_01]: But there is a weight to such an obedience, a weight that settles into the bones of the obedient one and does not lift.
[SPEAKER_01]: He had been on the brink of winning a war that he had given a great deal of himself to fighting.
[SPEAKER_01]: He had broken the back of the Orkin Kirgen through patience and intelligence, and the lives of warriors he had personally led, and he had been told, in the moment before final victory, to leave the field uncompleted and walk away.
[SPEAKER_01]: He walked, he had no choice but to walk, but he carried something out that he had not carried in.
[SPEAKER_01]: He did the work, and he did it well.
[SPEAKER_01]: He defended the Argap Plateau through a long, bitter year of relentless orchestral, and he extracted the civilian population, dome by dome.
[SPEAKER_01]: And he watched the great war that had once threatened to swallow the planet whole, grinded itself to pieces against the natural fortress of the Highlands.
[SPEAKER_01]: The plateau held, the civilians were lifted away.
[SPEAKER_01]: And in the end, when the ethereals had last permitted it, the fire cast returned to Akronasha and finished what had been left unfinished, reclaiming the planet from the broken remnants of the orc-hord in the space of less than a year, and reinstating the colonists in their biodones, one by one.
[SPEAKER_01]: Until the world glittered once more, in the dark sea of space, like a string of luminous pearls.
[SPEAKER_01]: But far sight was not there to see it.
[SPEAKER_01]: His destiny had already taken him elsewhere, to a different war on a different front.
[SPEAKER_01]: And the Arkana Shah, he had broken his sword for, was never visited again.
[SPEAKER_01]: He carried the broken sword away with him, in a manner of speaking, and the sword would not, in all the long years that followed, ever quite men.
[SPEAKER_01]: The dameckly's gulf is one of those places in the long galactic dark, that the navigators do not care to speak of more than they have to.
[SPEAKER_01]: It is not a true nebula, exactly.
[SPEAKER_01]: And not quite an empty void either, but something between the two.
[SPEAKER_01]: A yawning stellar anomaly, where currents of energy move in ways that no chart has ever quite managed to capture.
[SPEAKER_01]: ships entering the Gulf from one side cannot reliably predict where they will emerge upon the other.
[SPEAKER_01]: And for a great many years, the Tao, who had reached the core wood edge of the Gulf in the early sphere of their expansion, regarded it as a kind of weather, one simply did not sail into.
[SPEAKER_01]: It is a measure of the ingenuity of the earth cast that in the long years between the wars of our story.
[SPEAKER_01]: They invented an engine that could carry townships across the Gulf in something like safety.
[SPEAKER_01]: And a measure of the ingenuity of Anva that having been given the means to cross it, he chose to do so very softly and deed.
[SPEAKER_01]: The crossing was not at first a military matter at all.
[SPEAKER_01]: There were a great many human worlds upon the far side of the Gulf, and Alnva, who had a long understanding of how civilizations of different kinds might be persuaded to live alongside one another.
[SPEAKER_01]: Did not send the firecast against them?
[SPEAKER_01]: He sent the water cast.
[SPEAKER_01]: They came as merchants and as ambassadors, and as thoughtful guests of whatever dignitaries would receive them, and they offered the human world's things those worlds had never quite been offered before.
[SPEAKER_01]: Trade goods that work better than the equivalents the humans were used to.
[SPEAKER_01]: Medicines that heal more swiftly than the imperial cures.
[SPEAKER_01]: Schools eventually, where human children could learn alongside tower ones and councils, eventually, where human governors could sit alongside their tower counterparts and make decisions together.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was done very slowly, and very gently, and over the course of decades, a great many of those human worlds came, almost without their inhabitants realising it, into the soft orbit of the Tower Empire.
[SPEAKER_01]: The planetary governors stopped paying tithes to a distant terror, because the town had removed the need for them to do so.
[SPEAKER_01]: The cathedral stayed open, for the town were not interested in the spiritual lives of their new partners.
[SPEAKER_01]: But the worlds were no longer, in any practical sense, parts of the imperium any longer.
[SPEAKER_01]: They were parts of something else.
[SPEAKER_01]: The imperium of mankind is many things, and some of those things are slow, but it is not blind.
[SPEAKER_01]: And word came at last to the high lords of distant terror that are swath of their worlds upon the eastern fringe had slipped away from them.
[SPEAKER_01]: The response when it came was on a scale that the towel were not in their hearts prepared for.
[SPEAKER_01]: The cathedralships came across the gulf by means that the town did not understand and could not duplicate.
[SPEAKER_01]: Opening great wounds in the fabric of space and pouring through them with a sort of slow, terrible inevitability.
[SPEAKER_01]: They were vast, though ships, in a way that Tao had not seen a ship be vast before.
[SPEAKER_01]: Not beautiful, not elegant, simply enormous.
[SPEAKER_01]: With holes that resembled fortresses, more than vessels, and prowls that seem designed to ram their way through whatever lay in front of them.
[SPEAKER_01]: The Tao, Navy, brave and quick and beautifully built as it was, found itself outmatched in raw weight of metal.
[SPEAKER_01]: the ships of Dalith and Prayan and Dalia scrambled to meet the encursion, and they fought magnificently, and they were not enough.
[SPEAKER_01]: The Imperium pushed past them and into the heartlands of the Serpent, and one of the prime worlds of the Empire, Dalith itself, prosperous and ancient and full of light, found the war coming down upon it.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was at this point that far-sight, freshly returned from his long-awak campaigns, was reassigned to Dalia.
[SPEAKER_01]: He was told that he would be fighting alongside an old comrade in fire.
[SPEAKER_01]: And when he stepped at last into the council chamber where the defenders of the planet were laying their plans, he saw across the room, a figure he had not seen since the snow at the top of Mount Canji.
[SPEAKER_01]: Shacera had grown into the warrior, they had also suspected she would grow into.
[SPEAKER_01]: She was shas O Shasera now, the great commander whom the Empire would in time call Shadowsen.
[SPEAKER_01]: And she carried herself with the watchful grace of one who had spent the years between their parting, refining the doctrine of the hunter into something close to an art form.
[SPEAKER_01]: Their reunion was brief and formal, as such reunions tend to be when the city around the participants is on fire.
[SPEAKER_01]: They acknowledged one another, they divided the work between them, and then they went out each in their own way to fight the war.
[SPEAKER_01]: The styles of puretides, two great pupils, were painted across the battlefields of Dalith, in the months that followed in a way that had anyone been able to view the planet from a great enough distance, would have looked rather like the workings of a single mind, divided into two complementary halves.
[SPEAKER_01]: Wesher Sarah's stealth suit struck, the Imperial Columns blundered after ghosts, and overextended themselves in pursuit.
[SPEAKER_01]: and where the imperial columns had overextended themselves.
[SPEAKER_01]: Far side fell upon them from above, with his crisis battle suit teams in the swift hammerblows strokes of the Montka.
[SPEAKER_01]: She drew them out.
[SPEAKER_01]: He struck them down.
[SPEAKER_01]: Between the two of them they stitched a long careful pattern of blood across the Indigo grasslands of the planet.
[SPEAKER_01]: And the Imperium, for all the terrible weight of its arms, found that pattern very difficult to break.
[SPEAKER_01]: The space marines when they came were something else.
[SPEAKER_01]: They came down out of the sky in great blunt insertion
[SPEAKER_01]: crashing into the soil in clouds of steam, and the warriors who emerged from those pods were larger than men ought to be.
[SPEAKER_01]: And clad in armor, thicker than any infantry armor far sight had ever seen.
[SPEAKER_01]: They came at the city of Galbrin directly, in such a vertical and committed assault, that one could only admire the sheer directness of the strategy, even as one prepared to defeat it.
[SPEAKER_01]: Far sighted taken the precaution of equipping his crisis teams, with paired plasma rifles for precisely such an eventuality.
[SPEAKER_01]: and when the time came to meet the assault, he ordered his teams to descend in waves from the mantas above.
[SPEAKER_01]: So many of them that from a distance the descent looked rather like one of the seedstorms of his native viola.
[SPEAKER_01]: Soft white shapes drifting downward in numbers that the eye could not count.
[SPEAKER_01]: The Plasma Fire that fell upon the space marines that day, called them where they stood.
[SPEAKER_01]: It melted through the heavy plates of their armour and sent searing holes clean through their bodies, and the air filled with the smell that Plasma weapons leave in the wake of their use, sharp and clean, and slightly sweetly
[SPEAKER_01]: And yet, even as their comrades fell around them, the space marines who had been struck did not, in many cases, stop fighting.
[SPEAKER_01]: They went on firing their side arms from the ground, lying in pools of their own vital fluids, and shouting their defiance at the warriors above.
[SPEAKER_01]: and white armoured medics moved among them and a fire with a calmness that far-sight, watching from the cradle of his battle suit, found almost impossible to look away from.
[SPEAKER_01]: He had fought a great many enemies by that point in his career, and he had respected some of them and feared others, but he had not until that afternoon at Gelbrin,
[SPEAKER_01]: These were not the savages he had been told to expect.
[SPEAKER_01]: These were warriors of a kind he had not known existed, brave to the point of madness and discipline to the point of devotion, and the ease with which his team was dispatched them, seemed somehow not quite proportionate to what they were.
[SPEAKER_01]: By the time the support had arrived to clean the area, the space marina salt was finished, but far-sight stood for a long while, afterward upon a rise above the battlefield, and looked down at the smoking ruin of what those warriors had been.
[SPEAKER_01]: And he thought about what they had given, for the sake of a city they did not know, on a world that was not theirs.
[SPEAKER_01]: And he did not, in all his long life afterwards, ever stopped thinking about it.
[SPEAKER_01]: The war upon Daliith went on for many months, and it became more than anything else, a war of adaptation between two stellar empires that were only just beginning to understand one another.
[SPEAKER_01]: The Imperium had its own great tactical manual, the Codex Astators, and the space marine chapter that had taken the lead in the assault, the hammers of dawn,
[SPEAKER_01]: who would in time become a preoccupation of far-sight studies, adhere to that manual, with a fanatical exactness, applying its principles to whatever new situation the tower presented them with.
[SPEAKER_01]: They were good.
[SPEAKER_01]: They were very good.
[SPEAKER_01]: Whenever far-sight devised a new strategy and unleashed it upon them, they would within a few engagements find a counter, and the counter would be applied with the devotion of a chapter that did not deviate from its teachings, no matter what those teachings cost.
[SPEAKER_01]: He came in time to admire that adherence, even as he spent considerable effort into feeding it.
[SPEAKER_01]: He devised in response, the sun-forged pattern of battle-suit armament, in which crisis suits dropped down from mantas with paired fusion blasters, crippled their imperial vehicular targets at close range, and boosted away again, before any meaningful return fire could be brought to bear.
[SPEAKER_01]: The pattern proved so successful that it spread quickly across the entire firecast effort on the planet.
[SPEAKER_01]: Shasera meanwhile took her stealth teams to the dark side of Dalith and timed her every operation to coincide with the planetary night.
[SPEAKER_01]: So that the smoking wrecks she left in her wake seemed to appear out of nowhere and disappear into nothing.
[SPEAKER_01]: Far side tracked her progress in those months, less through formal reports than through the trail of ruined imperial vehicles she scattered behind her.
[SPEAKER_01]: They did not speak much, they did not need to, they had after all, learned the same lessons from the same master upon the same cold mountain.
[SPEAKER_01]: And there are some understandings between such students that do not require words.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was at the sea of Rallartas, that farside devised perhaps his most elegant defensive stroke of the war.
[SPEAKER_01]: The dome city was famous for its sculptures of living light, and when an imperial dropship landed unexpectedly within striking distance of its walls.
[SPEAKER_01]: with insufficient towel forces in the area to mount a conventional defence.
[SPEAKER_01]: Far sides response was to suggest that the city used what it had.
[SPEAKER_01]: The Earthcast artisans inside the dome diverted the entire potential energy of the city's light sculptures and co-generators and fusion arrays into a single massive electromagnetic pulse.
[SPEAKER_01]: And at the moment, the Imperial tanks began their breach, every codgitator within a mile of the war's fell silent.
[SPEAKER_01]: The tanks stopped, the walkers stopped.
[SPEAKER_01]: And out of the breaches in the city came the crude kindreds, who had made their homes in ralitasis, arboreal districts, falling upon the silenced imperial machines with a sort of joyful ferocity that the official records pass over in tactful silence.
[SPEAKER_01]: There was, in the latter stages of the war, an experiment that troubled him deeply.
[SPEAKER_01]: The Atherians, in their concern that the war effort might falter, had authorised the surgical implantation of neurochip prototypes, containing the recorded strategies of Commander Puritide, directly into the minds of certain Tao commanders.
[SPEAKER_01]: The implanted leaders, who came to be known as the swords of pure tide, were meant to function as a sort of distributed pure tide, each capable of drawing upon the master's stored experience to meet whatever situation arose.
[SPEAKER_01]: In practice, the swords did well enough against ordinary engagements, but failed badly against the human psychos, whose presence on the battlefield could not have been anticipated
[SPEAKER_01]: For those psychos had not existed in his original experience, and the implants had nothing to draw upon.
[SPEAKER_01]: A great many-tow died in the confusion that came from this, and the project was, in the way of such projects, regarded afterwards as something best not discussed.
[SPEAKER_01]: The war ended at last, not in the great encircling stroke, that far-sighted Shazera together had been preparing, but in a truce.
[SPEAKER_01]: A captain of the hammers of dawn, Sevaliac, his name was, had sent word across the lines that he would accept the terms the water cast had offered.
[SPEAKER_01]: And the Atherios, after their own private deliberations, had agreed to those terms.
[SPEAKER_01]: The Imperial Forces would be permitted to withdraw across the Gulf.
[SPEAKER_01]: The Tao would not pursue.
[SPEAKER_01]: Far sight when he received the order was already moving his warriors into the position from which he had intended to close the trap, and he sat for a moment in the cradle of his battle suit before he gave the order to stand down.
[SPEAKER_01]: He gave it, but the broken sword from Akhenasha was not by then, the only way he was carrying.
[SPEAKER_01]: The Imperium withdrew, and left behind a great sway of broken technology that the earth cast retrieved with painstaking care, and the ethereal settled into the long.
[SPEAKER_01]: Work of reckoning what had been one, and what had been lost.
[SPEAKER_01]: The swords of Pyrtide were ordered to report for the surgical removal of their implants.
[SPEAKER_01]: The procedure left those who underwent it, as drooling and client's simpletons, for the remainder of their lives.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was the water cast explained.
[SPEAKER_01]: The price of the technology, having been imperfect.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was a price the empire was sorry to ask its heroes to pay.
[SPEAKER_01]: But the implants could not be allowed to remain in heads that might one day be captured by an
[SPEAKER_01]: When Almver came in person with his honor guard, to collect Farsite's old comrade commander Chavastos for the procedure, Chavastos was not in his quarters.
[SPEAKER_01]: Farsite met the ethereal at the door and explained with every outward appearance of grief that Chavastos had fallen in the closing engagements of the war.
[SPEAKER_01]: His body, far-sight said, had been burned to an unrecognizable crisp by an imperial flamestrike, and there had been nothing left to recover.
[SPEAKER_01]: He bowed his head as he spoke, and his voice was low, and the words he chose were the proper words that such a circumstance required.
[SPEAKER_01]: He was lying, Chavastos was alive, and well, and hidden somewhere that Al-Vaz on a guard would not find him.
[SPEAKER_01]: Al-Vaz looked at him for a long moment.
[SPEAKER_01]: The ethereal said nothing, he simply looked at far side, with the attention of a being who had spent his very long life, reading the small signs that warriors and politicians and ordinary Tao gave away without realising they were giving anything away at all.
[SPEAKER_01]: The look held, and then after what felt to far sight like a very long time, Anva inclined his head and turned upon his heel and walked back the way he had come.
[SPEAKER_01]: His ceremony or guard falling in behind him, and the conversation was, to all appearances over.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was the first time far-sight had ever lied to an ethereal.
[SPEAKER_01]: He had lied for the sake of a friend, and he had lied well, and the lie had been accepted, or had at least been allowed to stand.
[SPEAKER_01]: But he stood for a long while afterwards in the doorway of his quarters, and watched the corridor down which Anva had gone.
[SPEAKER_01]: And he thought about the look the ethereal had given him, and he understood that something had changed between the two of them that afternoon, and would not be changing back.
[SPEAKER_01]: The hairline crack from Arcanasha had grown a little longer.
[SPEAKER_01]: He could feel it lengthening, very slowly as he stood there, and he turned at last back into his quarters and closed the door, and he did not that night.
[SPEAKER_01]: Sleep very well.