Breaking Ranks

Grant: The Levy

Deck B2

Port Agricultural Section of the Tranquility

My father used to tell me marks on your armor spoke of luck; of the Twelve above looking down on you in favor from their frozen slumber. My older brother dismissed it, once he had been a few years in Superintendent Salazar's Guard, saying the best armor was unmarred from sword or axe. Their armor had failed both of them in the end. Years ago, before my son was born, when raiders surged out of the Ghost Keep to raid our hydroponics facility for its crops.

I grasped my leather cuirass and smelled its sweet stink. Four campaigns I had sweated through in this armor, yet the only blood it was tarnished with was a few bandits and a comrade I hadn't much cared for. Yes, I was favored by the Twelve and I could smell my luck on my armor. My gaze fell to my son and the smile cracked even wider. I was lucky there too, the boy a recent addition to the Superintendent's Guard, and already strapping on his new armor, fresh from the armory, leather creaking as he buckled it on.

Give it a good stink, boy. Make your mark.

"It's so musty," my wife Greta said with a wave of the hand. I fixed my smile on her. There were few who saw my smile. I was thought of as a grim old man when among the Superintendent's Guard; a sturdy member of the shield wall but not much fun to drink with. Even most of the other old veterans don't much care for me. But for my wife I always had a ready smile.

"It's broken in, is all. Darian will get there soon enough."

"I hope not," Greta said, as she hugged my boy close.

Darian was the only one of our children to make it past six; and he'd managed another eleven since then. Every year the facility burbled and churned, producing crops of sweet potatoes fed by the river and the magic within, and most years we kept an uneasy peace with the superintendents of the other hydroponics facilities.

This year the peace had been broken.

Just days before, as Morgan turned to Lin, a great raiding party had splashed over the river dividing their territory. Now I'm to go to war; my son and I, and only the Twelve above know how it will end.

"Come on, boy," I said, my voice gruff as I slapped my son on the back, a solid thunk on the padded leather. "It's off to the keep. We don't want to keep the Superintendent waiting."

He led the way out of our family berthing, eager to see war as many young men are. As I had been once. Greta stopped me at the door with a hand on my armor.

"Grant," she said in a quiet voice. "You'll look after him, right?"

"Of course. He'll be beside me in the shield wall."

She nodded, but her expression of worry didn't change. Beside me in the shield wall, where my father had been. Where my older brother had been. Where the comrade I hadn't much cared for had been.

But I pushed past and together Darian and I strode through the streets of Sandstone. The streets were rough-paved dirt, dry even in the wettest months as the chemical rains never fell in towns. Sometimes you could get a mist blowing over and most folk tried to avoid it. The magic in the rains could bring on illness, or so the old tales said, though they spurred crop growth all through the Agricultural Section.

But Sandstone had one of the Ancient hydroponics facilities that dated back to Lift Off. Few in town could enter. The cultivators, mainly, trained in the arts of maintaining the equipment and harvesting the facility's bounty. And those of us in the Superintendent's Guard.

We were already at the guard post that ringed the facility and I nodded at the sentries, standing alert beside their guard dogs. They knew my faces and the dogs knew my scent and let me through without remark. A great gathering was mustering outside the hydroponics facilities. Most were levies, the common folk living in Sandstone's slums, a ragged lot looking uncertain in their loose groupings.