The Everburning City

Interlude 13, Sunset

Jian

His eyes hurt. It had been, after all, nearly thirty hours since he last rested them. And the distant click of the comms as some message came in felt like nails being driven into the side of his head.

Being so sleep deprived wasn't a strange feat today. Jian doubted many people in the City had slept much at all, since the Golems were first sighted. And some of those people, sleepless and weary, had been working ever since soldiers had pounded on their doors and pulled them out of bed.

His map of the City was half-covered with small tokens, odds and ends that his assistants could scrape up, and a few lottery tokens the soldiers had in their pockets. Most of them were now resting on the map, marking a few critical places where some of the most important fighting was happening.

And aside from Barleybarrel, the war was not being waged by soldiers.

"Any word from Siltmarsh?" Jian asked one of his aides, a military courier who looked distinctly less than happy to be here. Her disapproval was present, but never voiced, an unspoken protest that had faded over the long hours of work.

After all, unlike anyone who didn't rank quite a bit higher than she did, this aide knew what was happening in the City.

The aide flipped through several new communications for a moment, and tapped her finger on the map. On the east side, nearly twenty miles from the City proper, Siltmarsh was a harvesting depot that had grown into a town, and represented the largest grain hubs outside of the close fields behind Godichelli's Wall. The dot on the map representing the town had two lottery tokens and a hair clip stacked beside it.

Five lottery tokens for the hundreds of tons of grain that still needed to be pulled. And one hair clip for the labour crews working there.

"No, Commander," the aide replied after a moment. Commander, Jian recalled, a title that wasn't in the army's chain of command. A title granted for people who weren't normally in the command, but under certain circumstances would be obeyed as if they were. "Nothing about Siltmarsh."

Which meant work was in progress. Success — or disaster — would set the comms abuzz.

Forty-six lottery tokens lay on the map. Each one represented a source of harvestable food, mostly grains and vegetables that could keep for a long time. Each token represented about a week's worth of food for the City, one top of what was already in the silos. Nineteen of those tokens now sat inside the City, perhaps the second best piece of news Jian had received since the invasion began.

That good news wasn't an accident, wasn't simply good fortune. It was the achievement of the labours in the fields, the farmers and stonemasons and botanists and surveyors. The frontiersmen in a world where the frontier wanted to kill you. Unlike so much of the City, they knew the stakes. And had answered the call better than Jian had expected. As well, in fact, as he had dared to hope.

Far better than the army had, so far.

The hair clips represented the people Jian judged critical to surviving the invasion. Bringing down the Golems, surviving the lean years that would follow, and building back rapidly enough to grow the City past the heights it had already achieved, these were all part of what Jian was willing to call surviving. To achieve that, one of those clips rested on the stack of tokens beside Siltmarsh on his map.

Two clips rested in the heart of the City. One atop the Crafter Guildhall, where the City's mightiest weapons sat on their hands and waited for the end of the world to reach them. That it was being done by the command of the Lord Captain was galling enough, but the guildmasters, having just seen their chosen members die, would be happy for the excuse to keep themselves huddled beneath the rest of the City.