The sealed report departed nine days before the equinox by the Vesper Bureau's wartime express—the fastest horse and hardest wax. Grey's reply arrived four days before the equinox, in his own hand. The writing was rougher than usual, plainly hurried:
Report concerning Organ Tower received. Archive Rat confirms: lights every night for the last ten days; "maintenance" doubled. Attend to your work in the valley. I will return the tickets for this recital in the capital.
Further: the Committee's urgent audit of twenty years of Everlight Society accounts found the tower's mortal point—not the organ, but the wind. The bellows for three thousand six hundred pipes are water driven, fed by a hidden conduit from Palace Hill. Its sluice appears in the rolls of the Bureau of Ancient Conduits, under Grand Belfry jurisdiction. This old man is acting Director-General. Closing one sluice is perfectly lawful.
On equinox morning, he plays his organ and I close my sluice. We shall see whose hand is faster.
Do not worry. I have recorded six chess games. I will collect every debt when you return.
The four passed the letter around the safehouse. For the first time in a month, their taut backs relaxed half an inch. The old knight read it twice and laughed roughly. "Close the sluice! A superb move. A thousand-pound organ and ten-thousand-pound composition, throttled by one water gate. Is this how accountants fight? I approve."
"Don't celebrate yet." Sharlo folded the letter and put it against his body. The news was good, but on his second reading his eyes stopped at perfectly lawful, and the thorn in his heart pricked once more. Grey would use the Director-General's authority to close the sluice. Would the Dirge Society not know the sluice lay in his hand? They had pushed him into that office. Could they have failed to calculate this move?
A sluice they themselves had placed in Grey's hands.
Sharlo pressed the thought into his black notebook and said nothing. Words would serve no purpose across a thousand miles. The battle in the valley was four days away.
* * *
The battle for the "instruments" was ten times harder than the battle for the "music." The music had an Organ Tower and a sluice. The instruments were forty thousand living people and an order none could evade.
"If we cannot stop the general assault, we work on how it is made." They held the council inside the old knight's patrol post. Veterans from every camp now "visited" the low lieutenant's post nightly. Five months of hidden accounts had accumulated not only intelligence, but regard. "The assault disposition reaches the camps in three days. Ladies and gentlemen, hidden on that diagram is a living road for forty thousand men."
From memory, the old knight spread his sketch of the valley floor. "The ash-wick net, the chain, and the chasm all lie under the central axis. The battle's script drives both armies headlong into one another on that axis, all forty thousand pressing down upon the string. But look at the flanks." His finger traced the rising ground on either side. "Persimmon grove and broken-stone slope to the east. The old riverbed to the west. Men can travel both, and neither lies over the string."
"You want to alter the disposition?" Examiner Hong frowned. "A patrol lieutenant cannot alter a general assault plan."
"I cannot alter the plan. I can alter 'habit.'" Forty years of old light shone in the knight's eyes. "Every soldier knows: a battle diagram is paper; legs are flesh. When fighting begins, where men run depends half upon orders and half upon which road their legs know. For these four days, I can pass suggestions about drill routes, route marches, and food transport through every camp. Make their legs learn the flanks. When artillery sounds and men's minds scatter—"
"Their legs choose the familiar road by themselves," Sharlo finished, his eyes brightening. "And we add one medicine. The song."
He seized the charcoal and circled each flank on the terrain sketch.
"Over the next two days, new verses of The Road Home will 'grow by themselves.' Put the eastern persimmon grove and western white-stone riverbed into the words. By the equinox, when forty thousand men enter the valley mist with their heads spinning, what will sound in their minds? The song they have sung for a month. If a road lies in the song, their legs will dare take it."
Thus, during the last three days before the equinox, new verses appeared in the northern camp. No one found it strange. The song had grown every day for a month.
Through the mist runs the road home; persimmons ripen on the eastern rise.
If you're lost, don't be afraid. Follow their scent; beyond the fog, home lies.
Through the mist runs the road home; the western bank is white with stone.
If you can't see, don't be afraid. Tread the white stones; running water leads home.
The soldiers sang and laughed, never knowing they were memorizing an escape map. Only Viola's daily spectrum recorded the truth: those two verses brightened faster than even the "wife verse," because beneath them lay the deepest word in forty thousand hearts.
Preparing the "familiar roads" went more smoothly than expected—smoothly enough to break the heart. The soldiers believed only that they had found an advantage.
Every cross-country drill route among the eastern camps changed overnight to the persimmon slope. The fruit was soft and fully red. After each run, every soldier returned with four or five persimmons hidden in his coat. Company commanders knowingly looked aside. The cookhouses even entered "persimmons" in the purchasing accounts under the dignified heading "local procurement; transport savings." In three days, two eastern regiments learned every path up and down the grove: which rock caught the feet, which narrow place required a sideways turn. Their legs remembered.
Little Tree's regiment held the western white-stone strand. Squad leaders began "taking a shortcut" through the old channel, again and again. Its bed had been dry for nearly a century. White stones supported every step, and it was faster than the official road. Returning from drill, Little Tree crouched beside the letter stall chewing his ration and boasted to Viola:
Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.
"Company commander says if we learn this road, it'll be a shortcut home when the war ends. Save half a day's walking!"
Viola's pen stopped. Looking directly into the boy's eyes, she said with care, "Yes. It will."
Not one word was false, which allowed her to say it. She did not explain the shortcut's more urgent purpose. Silence did not count as a lie. For the first time in six years, she found that boundary both profoundly useful and painfully sharp.
* * *
Viola prepared a "familiar road" of her own inside the casualty hospital behind the northern slope.
Five days before the equinox, she entered under the authority of a "field epidemic inspection." The chief surgeon was in his fifties, his beard grizzled. Beneath the numbness of a man accustomed to death, a small portion of compassion had refused to die. He opened the allocation ledger for her—and inside it, Viola saw the quietest savagery of the entire war.
A printed form sent from above: Projected Admissions. Beds, bandages, morphine, splints, shrouds—every allotment issued for "projected admission: 3,000–3,500 personnel." The number was not entered by hand.
It was typeset.
"In other battles," Viola said evenly, "casualties aren't known until afterward."
"Elsewhere, no." The old surgeon did not raise his head. "Here, they know before they fight. Best grow accustomed, girl. In three years, that table has never been wrong."
Viola stared at the type for a long time. Then she exceeded her authority. She took up a pen and doubled the quantities of bandages and morphine on the supply requisition. In the reason field, she wrote four words: PROJECTION SUBJECT TO CHANGE.
The old surgeon looked at her over his reading spectacles. "What if they ask questions above?"
"Tell them the survey team verified it." She pushed back the form. "If a projection that has been right for three years is wrong once, that error is thirty-five hundred people. I accept responsibility for the error."
The requisition went up and, improbably, came back approved. Sharlo later entered one sentence concerning the matter in his notebook:
She made the word "projected" her enemy. If this battle can be won, victory must begin with that word.
In passing, Viola exceeded her authority a second time. The hospital's admission register customarily recorded only a casualty's number and name. She ordered the clerk to add a field for place of origin, down to the village. The surgeon did not understand. "Why does a wound need a birthplace?"
"For roll call," she said, offering no explanation. Where there is a name, there is a road back. The sentence had proved true once in the Hall of Names. She sensed it would prove true a second time on the equinox. The surgeon studied her, then beckoned the clerk. "Do it. And another field: who waits for him at home."
"What is that field for?" Viola asked in turn.
"Persuading a man to remain alive," the surgeon said mildly. "Forty years in medicine, girl. The surest rope for pulling someone back into the world has never been medicine."
On the road to the safehouse, she repeated his words to Sharlo exactly. Sharlo added half a sentence to the notebook: Surgeon He, fair copy. If the postwar reckoning is ever truly settled, he deserves an entry under "the righteous."
On the eve of the equinox, the four held a final conference and confirmed every position. The old knight marched with the eastern flank. Examiner Hong took his wick-knife to the chasm entrance—"If the composition truly sounds, I will cut however many inches I can." Viola stationed herself in the casualty hospital. That was where the "instruments" would be received, and she had insisted upon it.
No one could dissuade Sharlo from the position he chose.
"I'm going to the valley floor," he said. "If forty thousand people stand upon the string, one person who belongs to no script should stand among them. You all know the rule of a Curtainbreaker by now."
He smiled, wound his pocket watch, and tucked it against his body.
"Where the stage stands, I stand."
* * *
The same night, three hundred miles away, in the capital.
Lights burned in the Grand Belfry past midnight.
Grey had signed the sluice order three days earlier under unimpeachable authority: annual inspection by the Bureau of Ancient Conduits; Palace Hill's hidden conduit closed for three days as routine. The same day, the receipt returned in perfect order: closed.
But Grey was Grey. The day after signing, he sent Archive Rat to inspect the conduit downstream in person. Archive Rat returned white as paper. The official channel was dry. But beside the old Organ Tower, water still sounded in a branch.
Someone had opened another watercourse beyond the sluice.
Tracing the branch backward uncovered something that chilled every informed spine. The hidden bypass was not newly dug. Its masonry was three centuries old. And it did not circumvent merely this sluice. It circumvented every gate on the Bureau's rolls. Whoever built that branch three hundred years ago had guarded against "the government closing the water" from the first brick.
"A contingency buried three hundred years ago." Grey stood before the conduit diagram for a long while, then laughed without a particle of warmth. "I wondered why they so readily put the Director-General's seal in my hand. This sluice was never the Organ Tower's mortal point. It was a sleeping draught prepared for men like me. They let you close it, let you believe the water stopped, let you tuck the words 'perfectly lawful' under your blankets and sleep soundly."
"What now?" Archive Rat's voice was dry. "Sever the conduit itself? The branch runs through Palace Hill's foundations. Digging it means digging beneath the palace. Without a royal order, no one dares."
"No time, and no need." Grey studied the tower on the diagram. "If we cannot cut the water, we change the question. Wind is not the only thing an organ lacks before it can sound."
He turned and removed a file from the sealed cabinet—miscellaneous material gathered in passing during the Committee's audit of the Royal Academy of Sacred Music, ignored by everyone: Inventory of Sealed Articles in the Old Organ Tower. The old inspector turned the pages until his finger stopped and tapped one line.
Page seven, instrument accessories: Principal-Reed Tuning Key, white brass, one. Note: sealed in headquarters Evidence as an exhibit in the Cold Sickness case.
"The principal reed of a three-thousand-six-hundred-pipe organ has not been tuned in twenty years." Grey's eyes lit like an old hunter finding a second set of tracks in snow. "Ebner has tended it for twenty years—moisture control, dusting, wood care. But the tuning key lies in our vault. Before he performs The Raising, he must do one unavoidable thing."
"Enter the tower and tune it," Archive Rat finished. "And to tune it, either he takes the key from our vault—"
"Or uses his own craft and tunes it by hand. Three thousand six hundred pipes by hand requires a full night at minimum." Grey closed the inventory. "On the night before the equinox, that elder will spend an entire night alone in the old Organ Tower. Not on Church ground. Not inside the mission's pavilion. Inside a building sealed for twenty years, title vested in the Everlight Society."
The old inspector took up his pen and wrote two orders.
The first went to headquarters Operations: three rings of concealed watchers around the Old Organ Tower on the eve of the equinox. Surround only. Do not enter.
He wrote the second very slowly. When it was finished, he placed the Director-General's seal squarely upon it, then sat alone before the order for a long time.
Its heading read: TO THE ARCHBISHOP'S SEE. Its body contained one sentence.
The old Organ Tower of the Royal Academy of Sacred Music will be sealed on the eve of the autumn equinox. The Church is invited to send observers. Barnaby Grey, Acting Director-General.
"Director-General." Archive Rat watched in alarm. "Inform the Church? If their people send warning—"
"The warning is the point." Grey set down the seal and looked into the deep night outside, calm as a man completing a long-calculated chess game. "Have you still not seen the board, Archive Rat? The Organ Tower is three hundred years of their effort. The hidden conduit is their three-century contingency. I cannot take it by assault. I cannot raid it unobserved. There is one possible method: make them decide that the place is exposed, contaminated, unusable."
"The rule of the theatre," the old inspector said slowly. "If the stage is fouled, the performance must move. Moving the stage means travelling at night. And on a night road—"
He placed the two orders side by side and blew the ink dry.
"Someone can see you."