Six days after Blion set my own stone back into my palm, by my best count, I gave up trying to keep the count exact. Nobody in that compound was going anywhere, and nobody was coming in either, which was precisely the trouble. The meals had been getting smaller each day. Eventually I let myself see it as a pattern rather than a run of bad luck in the kitchen. The bread came smaller. Whatever food should have oil, there was less oil in it. By what I think was the fifth day, there was no meat on the table at all, and nobody said a word about it.
"Nothing's coming in," Bastien told me. "Not food. Not water past what the cisterns already held before this started. Whatever used to come through that gate from the city has simply stopped coming, the same as everything else out there has stopped."
Outside the window, the fires that had taken Spartova's depots and granaries the night the Grand Assembly tore itself apart had mostly burned down to nothing, though the Hall itself, by every account reaching us, hadn't taken so much as a scorch mark. Whatever the ancients built it from evidently didn't know how to burn, however much of the city around it did. What replaced the fires worried me more. Patrols moved through the streets below in even ranks now, at regular hours, and the roads had gone quiet before the fighting even properly stopped.
Someone was clamping down on the chaos. Who was the question. A city burning at everyone's hands frightened me less than a city being organized at one person's, especially since I had no way of knowing. The second part of the question was whether they would treat this compound as friend or as foe.
New faces came through the side gate an hour before dusk. The compound had a sound of its own: unhurried footsteps, the rhythm of men who had been assigned to the same old posts long enough to stop thinking about them. These newcomers had a different one. Six men crossed the yard fast enough to worry the guards on the wall. They spread wide enough to cover each other. They were not uniformed. Whoever had dressed them had gone to some trouble to make sure that if any one of them fell in the street outside, nothing on his body would say who had sent him.
One man stopped the whole line with a raised hand. He looked at the gate guard, decided in less than a second that the man wasn't worth explaining himself to, and looked past him.
"I need whoever commands this house," he said. He kept his voice low.
The centurion reached him first. I recognized him by the way he moved, the same officer who had argued in the plaza that I was worth saving. He asked for orders.
The stranger produced a small case, opened it just long enough for the centurion to see whatever was inside, and closed it again before I could see anything. The centurion's face changed.
By the time the Legate arrived, wheezing across the yard with two of his men steadying his elbows, I had already worked out that they hadn't come for him. They had summoned him.
"You're Legion." The Legate said it between breaths, already reaching for relief before he'd confirmed there was anything to feel relieved about. "Command finally sent someone. I sent word six days ago. All they sent back was an order to hold the compound and wait for further instruction. I've been holding it."
"Command sent me."
"Then you'll get us out."
"I'll get you out." He was looking past the Legate's shoulder at the tower. "After. Who still has access to the relay floor? I need them accounted for."
The Legate blinked. He'd asked about his own life and gotten an inventory question in return. A look of fear crossed his face. He'd been dreading this possibility. "There were four operators assigned to that post," he said. "I can't tell you how many remain. The staff isn't a diplomatic matter. It's a Relay matter."
"We have two," the centurion said. "Maybe one working. I can confirm within the hour."
"Confirm within the quarter." The centurion was already moving before the sentence finished.
I watched all of this from the edge of the yard with Bastien beside me. We hadn't been spoken to yet. The Legion wasn't here to get us out. If he were here to rescue us, he would have told us that first. Instead, every question so far had been about the relay.
He came to me only after he'd finished with the numbers on the Needle. Coming to talk to me seemed like just one more item to check off a list.
"Prince of Heliqar." He didn't make it a question. "I am Sertorius. Fourth Legion." He reached into a pouch at his belt and set a small brass device down on the ledge between us. The finish had gone duller since I had last seen it cross a desk in an office on a mountain a very long way from here.
"The relay operator reported it," I said.
"The same hour he took it off your man," Sertorius said. "Before he'd so much as set it down. That's what the oath is built to produce, and it produced it. Perhaps he wanted to do something else, but training got there first."
"And you were sent."
"Automatically. Nobody higher than a garrison clerk decided anything. A Key surfaces outside the chain, a Legion element deploys to confirm it and contain it. That order doesn't wait on a vote, or a mood. The procedure is older than anyone currently alive to enforce it."
"The war happened afterwards," I said.
"The war is why I'm carrying charges instead of a dispatch case. I brought both to the city walls." For the first time he said something that sounded less than entirely flat. "A quiet confirmation, in a quiet year, is three men and a week of paperwork. This isn't a quiet year."
We walked over to the fountain, which days ago had stopped running.
"Whoever's left standing in this city by the week's end gets whatever's in this compound. Command isn't willing to risk leaving a live Relay tower for them to find. I was already coming. The war just decided what I'm required to do once I got here."
"So you're not here to rescue us."
He looked at me. "Everyone breathing when I leave is an outcome I intend to have. But it isn't on the Empire's list of priorities."
I turned the white stone on him anyway. Bad habit. It confirmed what he had already told me: an order to confirm and contain the breach. There was no extra instruction for how to handle a Prince of Heliqar or the Legate. There certainly wasn't one for a woman who worked the east cistern.
Sertorius made it somehow hard to hold his priorities against him. There was no cruelty in it. No vanity either. The Legate would have found some way to make even this about his own survival. A person like him had put his own survival first at every step just to reach that post. Sertorius hadn't. Like Ruvuk, his carefulness didn't extend to himself at all.
Within the hour the yard had split into two operations. On one side, Sertorius's men went up into the Needle's base with satchels, stripping the housing plates off the iron struts and calling measurements to each other in a shorthand I couldn't follow. On the other, the household packed what they could on short notice. Bastien directed most of it, since he had done this kind of leaving before and most of the staff hadn't.
Sertorius moved between the two groups the entire time. Every question he put to the evacuating side was really about how much time the demolition side still needed. Every order he gave the demolition side accounted for how far our motley group would have moved by the time the charges went in.
"When it goes, it goes fast," he told me once, in passing, his hands dark with grease and iron dust. "We'll move faster than that. Nobody will wait for anyone who can't keep pace on his own. Whatever happens here tonight stays inside this yard." He looked at me a moment longer than the sentence required. "If it comes to it, we were never here. Neither were you."
By the time the sun dropped behind the western wall, the base of the Needle stood stripped to its iron ribs, and Sertorius's men were packing the last of the charges into the gaps between the struts. The group assembled into a column in the yard. The Legate was at its center in robes that had been fitting him more loosely by the day. Bastien, at its edge, ran a count of heads.
I looked up at the tower a last time, at the mystery inside it that Elias had spent his whole life failing to reach, about to be reduced to slag and bent iron before anyone in this broken city ever got the chance to ask it a single question.