The battle of song against song lasted ten full days.
It was the strangest battle Sharlo had fought in either life. No guns, no postmortems. The battlefield was the mouths and hearts of twenty thousand men, and the weapons were words. Each morning, the two sides measured the previous day's result by listening—which verses had prevailed in the barracks overnight?
The opposing craft was excellent. The "hate version" needled every crack in the heart: it sang the dead, comrades with severed legs, "the men who will never return." It also possessed an immense advantage. Every two or three days, men truly died along the valley floor. Each casualty list from an "engagement" supplied fresh fuel for the hate verses.
Sharlo established three "laws of lyrics" for the survey team's response.
"First, we do not delete their words. Deleting verses means banning the song, and banning the song means defeat. The life of this tune is that 'no one governs it.' Second, we do not abuse them in return. They sing hate; we do not sing 'do not hate.' Telling people not to hate produces the most useless words in the world. Third—" On the safehouse wall, Sharlo wrote the last law. "They put their strength into the dead. We put ours into the living. Their words look backward. Ours look ahead."
Rules came easily. Lyrics did not. For the first two days, the old knight's veterans produced "forward-looking" verses that grew more proper with every attempt and attracted fewer singers. The barracks veterans reviewed them mercilessly: "Sounds like a quartermaster taking inventory."
The deadlock broke at a bonfire in East Camp Three. No one remembered who proposed that instead of several men composing in a corner, they should make it a contest. Sing a new verse on the spot. If others joined, it lived. If no one joined, bury it where it fell. The soldiers called this "dueling verses." Its rules were wild and its temper hot—perfect for the song.
Sharlo attended one contest. The bonfire towered; several hundred men circled it, and their heckling seemed capable of pushing back the fog. A former peddler sang a "market verse," and it lived. A cannonier with an enormous voice sang a satisfying complaint about the quartermaster skimming supplies. The old knight's veterans stopped him at once—"abusing our own violates the rules"—and buried it.
Sharlo's fingers itched, and he offered a verse too. He had polished it for two days and considered its language apt, its images sound. He stood beside the fire and sang. Several hundred men remained utterly silent. Not one joined.
In the chill that followed, an old soldier crouched by the fire and ventured a careful opinion. "Sir, those words of yours... they're good, certainly. Only a literate man has to chew on them to find the goodness. Our rule is: words rough, feeling true. The feeling in yours is true. It's only wearing a scholar's gown."
The whole circle exploded in laughter. Sharlo saluted in surrender, crouched beside the fire, and entered "scholar's gown" in his black notebook. Across two lifetimes in amateur theatre, this was the first lesson he had received from a company of common soldiers.
Viola did better. When hecklers called for "a verse from the government lady," she rose without expression and, in the cadence of recited regulations, sang four words at a time:
Through the mist runs the road home. One rule alone upon the road:
Walk it living. Don't look back. At roll call, not one name may be owed.
For two breaths after she finished, the entire circle was silent. Then they roared the verse back with one thunderous voice. Soldiers later called it "the roll-call verse," and sang it most often on the march. They said it "sounds like an order. You can put your feet under it."
Thereafter, new verses "grew by themselves" throughout the northern barracks. The old knight's men began; the soldiers continued:
Through the mist runs the road home; persimmons redden every hill. (A persimmon grove truly grew on the eastern slope, and the men saw it daily.)
The picker sleeps beside his basket. One more string of dried fruit; one sweet winter still.
Through the mist runs the road home; at its mouth the matchmaker waves her fan.
The matchmaker sleeps beside the threshold. Half the bride-price; a wife one year sooner for her man.
The "wife verse" spread across camp in one night. What recruit of seventeen or eighteen did not dream of that? On the third day, the melody drifting from the Flamecrown camp across the Mist River carried an unmistakable variant of it. Its rhymes in the Flamecrown tongue made the northern sentries laugh aloud.
In such moments, inch by inch, the scales of the war of words inclined.
Every day, Viola recorded the "spectrum" of the writing above the camp. After ten days, her report had become a heart-warming graph. The brightness of the 【Hate】 family rose and fell but flattened overall. The brightness of 【Home】 climbed steadily. On the tenth day, for the first time, the aggregate 【He will want to go home】 above twenty thousand heads surpassed 【He will hate the enemy】.
"Do you know why?" During their nightly review, Sharlo studied the graph and spoke softly. "Not because our lyrics are better. Because the two sides burn different fuel. Hatred must be fed a constant supply of new bodies. Home has a lifetime of fuel stored in every heart—Mother's insoles, persimmons on the hill, the wife one never managed to court. They burn firewood carried from outside. We light the fire people have carried within themselves all their lives."
* * *
But the opposing tuner had one final move. Sharlo expected it. He did not expect such cruelty.
On the eleventh day, the army post "happened" to deliver a batch of letters from home.
Such letters were a Mist Gorge soldier's lifeline. Once the inspector approved them, they were distributed without delay. But this batch was strange: more than three hundred letters, every one bearing bad news. Mothers ill. Fields flooded. Wives remarried. Brothers indentured for debts. More than three hundred households "happened" to suffer disaster in the same ten-day period, and the news "happened" to arrive in the same wagon.
That night, half the singing in camp went hoarse. The next day, the "hate version" swept back, carrying its most vicious new verse:
The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.
Through the mist runs the road home; at home's own gate it ends in a cliff.
Home is gone and kin dispersed. Why return? Stay in the mist with your brothers instead.
Sharlo borrowed one letter reporting an ill mother and examined it. Paper and ink were genuine. Every postal formality was present. The handwriting matched the soldier's previous letters from home. But on bringing it close for a third reading, his fingertips suddenly stopped.
The mother in the letter lay sick in bed, yet described her illness in methodical order. Opening, development, turn, conclusion: neat as a fair copy of an account.
Thomas flashed into his mind. The way clerks at the bill house moved their shoulders with every stroke, while Thomas's pen "advanced at a perfectly uniform speed."
"Raven." He passed her the letter, his voice taut. "Look at this. Not the content. Look at the person who wrote it."
Viola stared at the sheet for ten full breaths, then looked up with pupils narrowed to points.
"There is no lie on this letter. But there is no truth either." She enunciated every word. "Sharlo, when a living person writes, the words contain a heartbeat. This has none. It isn't a forged letter—a forgery would flash. This is..."
She found the word. When she spoke it, the blood in them both ran cold.
"A transcription. Something has transcribed three hundred real pieces of bad news from other places and put them into three hundred convenient envelopes."
Before they closed the net around the roll and copper basin, Viola settled one stray account.
The soldier who received the "mother ill" letter was a corporal in West Camp Two. For three days afterward he barely ate, and his face turned grey as the valley mist. Viola asked him to the letter stall, spread the examined letter before him, and went through it sentence by sentence in his presence.
"Who used to write your mother's letters for her?"
"The old scholar at the village gate."
"What phrase does he customarily use before the signature?"
The corporal blinked. "'The rest I shall not enumerate.' Every time. Mum says it's the scholar's fancy style."
Viola touched the end of the letter. There was no "the rest I shall not enumerate," only the neat concluding phrase, "Take good care of yourself."
"Now look here. When the sick describe their illness and reach the painful part, their strokes grow heavy or tremble. In this letter, the strokes in 'coughed blood' are as even as those in 'meals.'" She raised the sleepless eyes that had read more lies than any other eyes for six years and looked at the soldier. "I have read lies for six years. This letter contains no lie—but it does not contain your mother either. Soldier, a living person's words have a heartbeat. This letter has none. It is dead."
The corporal swallowed. "Then... my mum..."
"Write and ask." Viola laid out a fresh sheet. "We'll send it by the survey team's official courier, urgent. I will seal the wax myself."
The answer arrived ten days later, though that belongs later in the account. It was in the old village scholar's hand and ended squarely with "the rest I shall not enumerate." The body contained only two lines dictated by the old woman: I'm perfectly well. The pickles by the stove are waiting for you. What nonsense have you been swallowing?
They said the corporal clutched the letter outside the camp gate and cried like a child. When he finished, he opened his throat and sang the "roll-call verse" all the way back to his barracks.
* * *
The survey team dismantled the letter trick quickly and ruthlessly, because it exposed a weakness no earlier arrangement had revealed.
"Three hundred letters arriving in the same ten-day period is itself the mistake." At that night's conference, Sharlo spread the borrowed letters across the table. "They panicked. Twenty days before the equinox, with 'home' about to overpower 'hate,' they played the card at the bottom of the box. But this card can be investigated. The contents were 'transcribed' from disasters all over the kingdom, yet the postal route is real. Three hundred letters require three hundred originating points, must enter one military-post line, and must pass one inspector."
"The military post office." The old knight narrowed his eyes. "One of Viola's three 'lie points.'"
"The present inspector. The man who never takes the silver candle from his right hand." Sharlo nodded. "Master Hong, your work has arrived. Don't touch the man. Search his room. To mix three hundred 'transcribed' letters into the ordinary post, he must keep equipment there."
Examiner Hong's craft did not disappoint. Two nights later, in the rain, he waited until the inspector left on his regular trip to reconcile the main camp's accounts. He entered the locked shed behind the post office and emerged an incense stick later with nothing disturbed. His inspection report nailed the entire line in place:
One copper basin inside. Wax accumulated at bottom; sample shares source with "Day Seven of the Double." Several sheets of blank letter paper. No visible writing, but minute indentations discernible at close range—faded-ink paper. One register listing every soldier's hometown, relations, and family circumstances. A single word annotated in small script after every entry: WEAK POINT.
The method behind the three hundred letters stood exposed. Transcribe material from genuine disasters elsewhere. Assign it according to the register of weak points. Not to kill or wound, but for one purpose: to burn three hundred scars into twenty thousand hearts that had only just turned homeward—scars leading away from home.
"Do we take the register and basin?" Examiner Hong asked.
"Yes. This time we take them." Sharlo turned to the old knight. "Old Captain, this move must be yours. Use military law, not the occult. Forging military post and undermining morale—under wartime law, either charge could have a man shot three times over. The commander dislikes priests meddling in his command. Put the evidence on his desk. The army will handle the remainder itself."
Three days later, military police took the post inspector away for "forging family correspondence and undermining morale." The account book of military justice was clean and swift. Not one word mentioned wax, faded-ink paper, or the Dirge Society. A cook from Cookhouse Two and a clerk in the western ammunition depot were swept into the same case. Viola's three lie points fell in one net.
On the day the notice appeared in camp, something happened that no one had arranged.
The three hundred soldiers who had received "bad news from home" gathered of their own accord outside the military post. There was no disorder. They formed a line and, one by one, dropped the letters into the evidence chest set out by the military police. When his turn came, a weathered old soldier cast in his letter, stepped back, and spat upon the chest. Then he threw back his head and bellowed a verse in the tune the entire camp knew. He invented the words as he sang, and they were rough enough to shed splinters:
Through the mist runs the road home; someone set a snare halfway.
They caught the snare-setter, chained him tight. My mother's well and waiting—
He paused, then roared the final line. Every soldier in the street answered like thunder:
"I'M GOING HOME TO SEE HER, AND NO ONE STANDS IN MY WAY!"
That night, under the safehouse lamp, Viola updated her spectrum graph. The brightness of the 【Home】 family leapt in a single night to its highest point since the war began. In the graph's corner, she added a note in her lean, upright hand:
Day Twenty-Five. String has lost pitch. Two opposing attempts at retuning: both failed.
Fourteen days remain before the autumn equinox.
Sharlo read the note but felt no relief. He turned backward through the rehearsal log in his black notebook, page by page since their journey south, and stopped at the record of Sunken Chain Valley—the dark-gold light at the chain's end, brightening and dimming.
"What is it?" Viola asked.
"Something troubles me more each time I consider it." Sharlo watched the entry. "We won the battle of lyrics and the battle of letters. It was too easy. Raven, remember the lesson of the Low City? Grey had three layers in his plan, and the enemy lifted them all away because they never intended to fight him on those layers."
"You think the song, the words, the letters—"
"Were battles they humored us by fighting." Sharlo raised his head. "Perhaps it never mattered whether the 'bell' of twenty thousand men was perfectly tuned. Perhaps that was never the true instrument on the equinox. We saw the true instrument at the bottom of the chasm: ten miles of ash-wick net and three hundred miles of weight-chain. That thing does not need twenty thousand minds in unison. Perhaps it needs only twenty thousand people..."
He stopped. Outside the safehouse, evening artillery sounded on schedule. A smoke column rose from the valley floor, straight and handsome.
"...present."