The Glass-Eyed Armistice

• Chapter 1 The Sanctuary of Sawdust
• Chapter 2 Form and Armature
• Chapter 3 Crosshairs Through Cobalt
• Chapter 4 The Salted Pelts
• Chapter 5 Arsenic Rations
• Chapter 6 An Anatomy of Ceasefires
• Chapter 7 Glass Beads and Suture Thread
• Chapter 8 Whispers in the Drying Room
• Chapter 9 The Hollow Mount
• Chapter 10 Shadows in the Curio
• Chapter 11 Preservation Protocols
• Chapter 12 Static Over No-Man's-Land
• Chapter 13 The Wintering Beast
• Chapter 14 Skinned Alliances
• Chapter 15 A Tanning of Flesh
• Chapter 16 Trophies of the Front
• Chapter 17 The Borax Vigil
• Chapter 18 Postures of Defense
• Chapter 19 Synthetic Arteries
• Chapter 20 False Eyes in the Dark
• Chapter 21 The Mortar and the Marrow
• Chapter 22 Scent of Formaldehyde
• Chapter 23 The Display Case Parley
• Chapter 24 Unstitched Truths
• Chapter 25 The Final Mounting
• Chapter 26 Relics of the Ceasefire

The concussive thump of an orbital torpedo hitting the lower caldera three kilometers away shook the display window hard enough to vibrate the teeth in a mounted timber-wolf’s jaw. Corporal Justinian Ross did not flinch, primarily because he was busy pressing the muzzle of an empty pulse-carbine into the hollow beneath the left ear of a man whose imperial uniform was the precise shade of curdled cream.

"If you twitch, I blow your ear canal out through your opposite nostril," Ross whispered. His throat was full of chalk dust and dried cedar shavings.

The man in cream—an ensign of the Core Hegemony, judging by the tarnished shoulder-braids—did not twitch. He did, however, let out a dry, rattling breath that smelled faintly of scorched copper and cheap synth-stim.

"You won't," the ensign said. He didn't turn his head. His eyes were fixed on the glass eye of an extinct river-panther perched on an oak bracket bolted to the brickwork. "Your power pack chirped dry three minutes ago, when we fell through the transom. I heard the bleed-off cycle. It sounds like a dying tea kettle."

Ross hesitated, his thumb hovering above the useless firing stud. Outside, beyond the thick, reinforced vitrine of M. Vane & Sons, Preservators of Natural History, the sky was a dull, bruised violet. The siege of Mor-Vander had entered its fourth terrestrial month, and the atmosphere had long since curdled into a broth of pulverized ferro-concrete, sulfur, and unburned hypergolic propellant.

"The bayonet is still sharp," Ross said, though he didn't have one fixed. He kept the muzzle jammed where it was.

"There isn't room to swing a bayonet between these workbenches," the ensign replied calmly. "And if you tear my smock, you'll ruin the only clean wool within six city blocks. Lower the carbine, Commonwealth. We are both buried alive."

Ross looked past the ensign’s shoulder. The shop was long, narrow, and sunken five feet below the street grade of the old artisans' quarter. The entrance was choked by six tons of fallen masonry from the apothecary that had once stood next door; the back door, visible down a corridor lined with tall mahogany cabinets, was blocked by the sheared titanium hull of an automated delivery skimmer that had nose-dived through the alley. The air here was cool, dry, and thick with an extraordinary scent: wood glue, bitter alum, powdered borax, dried lavender, and thousands of pounds of cured animal skin. It smelled nothing like the front line. The front line smelled like boiled cabbage, wet battery casing, and the sweetish, lingering grease of men who had stopped being men forty-eight hours ago.

Slowly, Ross lowered the carbine. His knees, locked in a crouch for the better part of twenty minutes, gave off three distinct clicks like dry kindling snapping underfoot. He backed away until his shoulder blades met the rough belly of a juvenile plains-strider mounted on a pine pedestal.

"Who are you?" Ross asked.

"Ensign Silas Vane," the other man said. He turned around carefully, keeping his palms out and level with his ribs. He was gaunt, with cheekbones that looked like they had been whittled out of lard, and dark circles under his gray eyes so deep they resembled smudge-pot grease. "And before you ask, yes, it was my great-grandfather’s establishment. Though I haven't been in this city since the garrison was mobilized twelve years ago."

Ross stared at him. He glanced at the faded gilt lettering on a framed certificate behind the counter: Imperial Guild of Naturalists and Preparators, Awarded to Master Martin Vane, 284.42 Post-Contact.

"You crawled into your own grandfather’s taxidermy parlor to die?" Ross asked. The absurdity of it caught in his chest like an errant crumb.

"I didn't plan the trajectory of the artillery barrage, Corporal. A mortar shell caught our light-skiff over the district plaza. The engine separated. I came through the skylight; you came through the coal chute. If you recall, we landed on the same bolt of burlap." Vane wiped a streak of gray dust from his sleeve. "I have no ammunition. My sidearm lost its casing when we hit the rafters. I believe the barrel is currently wedged inside the abdominal cavity of an un-stuffed tundra elk in the rear bay."

Ross looked down at his own hands. They were trembling, the skin raw and blackened around the cuticles from weeks of handling overheated coolant lines. He was twenty-two years old, an enlisted scout for the Seventh Colonial Fusiliers, and he had not eaten anything that didn't come out of a foil squeeze-tube since the rainy season began.

"My squad was three blocks north," Ross muttered, more to the room than to Vane. "The bridge collapsed into the drainage canal. The whole street went down."

"Then they are either on the other side of the silt, or under it," Vane said evenly. "The Hegemony Fourteenth Line was shelling that intersection until forty minutes ago. Then the guns stopped. Did you hear them stop?"

Ross nodded once. The silence from outside was not a peaceful thing; it was the heavy, thrumming vacuum that followed a saturation bombardment. It meant the spotter drones had run out of fuel, or the cloud deck had dropped too low for targeting lasers, or everyone in the battery had been called back to haul crates of heavier shells through the mud.

"They will resume at dusk," Vane said, walking past Ross with an ease that felt almost insulting. The ensign was tall and moved with the slightly stooped posture of someone used to low ceilings. He stopped at a zinc-topped workbench in the center of the room, brushing aside a drift of dried lichen and a collection of horn-handled scalpels. "Or they won't. The rumors in the redoubt were that the high command was drafting an evacuation protocol. Of course, the high command has drafted six evacuation protocols since the autumn equinox, and so far the only things evacuated have been the grain silos and the field hospital’s morphine supply."

"We’re holding the railhead," Ross said reflexively, the rote optimism of the Commonwealth morning bulletins rising unbidden to his tongue.

Vane looked at him over his shoulder, his thin eyebrows raised. "The railhead was slagged three weeks ago, Corporal. I watched the heavy cruisers drop magnetic sinkers into the marsh from my observation post on the water tower. You could paddle a boat across the crater if the water wasn't forty percent nitric acid."

Ross didn't answer. He knew the railhead was gone. He had seen the steam rising from the flats himself, ten miles off, like the breath of a dying dragon. But hearing it from an imperial officer in an accent that sounded like silver spoons clinking against porcelain made the knot in his stomach twist tighter.

He moved cautiously along the aisle, keeping his distance from the Hegemony officer. The shop was larger than it appeared from the street level. Beyond the narrow front showroom, where birds of paradise and miniature forest-martens were frozen on polished manzanita twigs, the room opened into a wide preparation hall. Here, the work was less decorative and more anatomical. Long tables of slate and zinc were fitted with drainage grooves. Skeletal iron frames—armatures, he remembered them being called—stood like wire ghosts waiting for clay and hide.

On a rack near the back wall, dozens of glass eyes were sorted into compartmented wooden trays: small amber beads for ground-squirrels; flat, cold yellow discs with slitted pupils for marsh-vipers; heavy, liquid globes of dark brown crystal the size of hen’s eggs, meant for the great draft oxen that the settlers had brought to the plains three centuries back before the engines took their place.

"The roof held," Ross observed, looking up. The rafters were stout balks of sea-pine, bolted with iron plates. A few slate tiles had slipped, letting down narrow, pale fingers of daylight that cut through the gloom like bayonets of dust.

"My family built for the long term," Vane said. He was inspecting a stoneware crock with a grease-pencil label on the side. He pulled the cork, sniffed it, and made a small, appreciative noise. "Neatsfoot oil. Completely unspoiled. If we had boots worth saving, we could grease them."

"I have two biscuits," Ross said. He didn't know why he offered the information. Perhaps it was because the lack of violence in the room was so thick it required a substitute transaction. "Standard field tallow. Tastes like paraffin."

"Keep them," Vane replied. "I have half a tin of salt-beef in my tunic, but the seal broke during the drop. It is covered in sawdust."

"Cedar or pine?"

"Both. With a light top-dressing of what I suspect is fifty-year-old dried ox blood." Vane set the crock down with a dull clink. "We shouldn't light a fire. The drafting flue is cracked near the cornice; smoke would pool in the alley, and the sweepers would drop an incendiary disc down the chimney just to be thorough."

"I wasn't planning on roasting a fowl," Ross said dryly. He walked over to the front vitrine and peered through the six-inch gap where the masonry hadn't quite sealed the glass.

The street outside was dead. A light sleet had begun to fall, turning the gray dust to a paste that looked like wet lard. Fifty yards away, an overturned personnel carrier was burning with a steady, oily flame that produced almost no heat, its magnesium-aluminum frame hissing softly whenever a pellet of sleet struck the wheel arches. Between the shop and the vehicle lay three bodies, already dusted white by the fall, their uniforms indistinguishable under the sleet.

"Is the water working?" Ross asked.

"In a city under siege for ninety days?" Vane gave a short, humorless bark. "The reservoirs were poisoned by retreating irregulars during the first landing. If the mains were pressurized, we would be drowned in greywater by now. But there should be a cistern under the wash-house in the yard. Rain catchment. It’s routed through an activated charcoal filter—or at least it was when I was seven years old."

Ross turned from the window. "Where is the yard?"

Vane pointed toward the rear of the shop, where a low archway opened into a storeroom stacked high with flat, folded skins. "Beyond the skin-drying room. The door is reinforced oak. It was meant to keep the street boys from stealing the hides when the market was good. We’ll have to clear two crates of salt to get the bolt back."

"Then we clear them," Ross said. He laid his useless carbine on the counter next to a stuffed owl whose feathers had turned the color of old newspaper. "And Vane?"

The ensign paused, one hand resting on the back of a wicker-framed mannequin. "Yes, Corporal?"

"If you find an iron rod in those boxes and you think about swinging it at my helmet, remember that I have two inches and twenty pounds on you, and I haven't slept on a feather mattress since the spring."

Vane looked down at his own long, pale fingers, which were trembling slightly with the cold. "Corporal Ross, if I wanted to kill an enemy of the Hegemony, I would have stayed at the battery with my binoculars and let the gunners do it from six miles away. At this distance, the labor-to-benefit ratio is exceedingly poor."

They worked for an hour in near silence. The crates were heavy, their pine slats gray with age and crusted with coarse crystals of pickling salt that had seeped through the seams like frost. Ross hauled; Vane pushed. The air in the storeroom was colder than the front shop, smelling sharply of brine, sheep-dip, and the bitter, medicinal tang of dried gall-nuts.

By the time they shifted the second chest, Ross's palms were bleeding where the rough wood had bitten into his calluses, but the low oak door was clear. It was secured by a heavy iron drop-latch that had rusted into its seat.

Ross picked up an old skinning mallet from a nearby shelf and struck the latch twice. The ring was shockingly loud in the enclosed room, a sharp, iron clack that seemed to travel straight up the chimney. Both men froze, holding their breath, waiting for the whistle of a descent-charge or the mechanical clatter of an infantry spider clambering over the roof tiles.

Nothing came. Only the thin, wet hiss of the sleet outside against the stones.

Ross lifted the bar. The wood had swollen in the frame, but after three hard shoves with his shoulder, the door gave way with an unctuous groan, spilling a draft of clean, bitter air into the room.

The yard was little more than a light-well between three tall brick tenements, perhaps twelve feet square. At some point during the summer, a heavy mortar had struck the parapet four floors above, sending a decorative stone balustrade down into the well. It lay there now like a jumble of broken teeth, half-buried under a three-foot drift of blackened snow and shattered roof slates.

In the corner, half-concealed by an overgrown, leafless wisteria vine that had died decades ago, sat a lead-lined wooden tank. A copper lead-pipe ran down from the guttering above, its end dangling directly over the open lid.

Vane stepped out first, his boots sinking into the wet sleet with a wet crunch. He knelt by the tank and reached down into the dark water, his sleeve riding up to reveal an old vaccination scar shaped like a crescent moon.

"It’s full," he said, his voice dropped to a low murmur. "And cold. There’s an inch of ice on the surface, but the bottom is clear. No scum."

He scooped a handful and brought it to his lips without hesitation. Ross watched him closely, watching for the telltale grimace that came with fuel contamination or heavy metal wash. Vane swallowed, blinked twice, and then wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

"It tastes like slate," he said. "And soot. But it’s wet."

Ross knelt beside him, plunged his face into the icy trough, and drank until his temples ached with the cold. The water was sharp and tasted faintly of ancient pine needles, but it was liquid, and it was clean enough. When he came up, his beard was dripping and his ears were burning from the frost.

He sat back against the cold brick of the wash-house wall and looked up. The sky between the high eaves was a strip of wet flannel. No contrails. No tracer fire. Just the gray, slow drift of atmospheric fallout, settling like ash on the ruins of a city that had forgotten why it was being defended.

"How long will the salt-beef last?" Ross asked.

"If we divide it into thirds? Two days. If we stretch it with the tallow from your biscuits, perhaps three." Vane was looking at the dead wisteria vine, his fingers idly stripping a strand of gray bark from the trunk. "Then we eat the grease in the neatsfoot crock. Or we begin boiling the hides."

Ross snorted. "You can't eat tanned leather. It’s full of chromium and bark-extract. It’ll dissolve your kidneys in twelve hours."

"Not the tanned ones," Vane said softly. "The rawhide. There are four dried steer skins in the middle loft that were only salted. They haven't seen the liquor pit. If you boil rawhide long enough, it turns to gelatin. My grandfather used to make glue from the trimmings. He said it tasted like very old calf’s foot jelly, provided you added enough clove."

"We don't have clove."

"Then it will taste like very old calf’s foot," Vane replied.

They went back inside, Ross pulling the heavy door almost shut, leaving only a finger’s width to keep the latch from clicking home. The comparative warmth of the shop felt almost luxurious after the raw air of the yard, though the temperature inside could not have been more than five degrees above freezing.

In the center of the showroom, the light was changing. The violet in the sky had deepened to an ink-stain black, and the glass eyes in the specimen cabinets had begun to catch the dull orange flicker from the burning personnel carrier down the block.

Dozens of them.

From every shelf, from brackets on the walls, from the shadows behind the counter, small pairs of artificial eyes reflected the fire. There were martens with needles of glass stuck into their skulls; an adult caribou with antlers like bleached driftwood, staring through amber rounds that were five inches across; a pair of pygmy herons mounted on a single piece of river-drift, their heads cocked at an identical, inquisitive angle toward the broken transom.

Ross sat on an upturned wooden tub near the front counter, his carbine between his knees. He reached into his pocket, found the two field biscuits, and snapped one in half across his knee. The dry cracker cracked like a dried shingle.

He held out one piece toward the Hegemony ensign.

Vane looked at it for a moment, then took it with a slight, almost imperceptible dip of his head. "Thank you, Corporal."

"Don't thank me," Ross said, chewing on his own portion. It was like chewing compressed flour and chalk. "If the Seventh breaks through tomorrow, you’re my prisoner. I get an extra half-ration of tobacco for every officer I bring in with his boots on."

Vane leaned against the counter, his biscuit held between his thumb and forefinger like an unlit cigar. He looked out into the orange dusk where the vehicle was still burning, its tires finally catching and sending up thick, spiraling ropes of black smoke into the sleet.

"And if the Hegemony secures the boulevard?" Vane asked softly.

Ross didn't answer right away. He swallowed the dry mass in his throat, then wiped his palms on his trousers.

"Then I’m your orderly," Ross said. "And you can tell them I was very good at dusting the birds."

Vane gave a single, quiet nod that might have been agreement, or might have been merely the acknowledgment of an inescapable, ridiculous truth. Outside, a long way off—perhaps out toward the salt flats where the railway had been—a heavy gun spoke once, a hollow boom that rattled the glass eyes in their wooden trays with a sound like dry peas dropped onto a snare drum.

Neither man moved. Ross took another bite of the cracker, and Vane, after a moment's consideration, did the same.

Morning arrived not as a sunrise, but as a graying of the cold dust hanging in the air. The darkness inside the shop dissolved into a murky, sea-green light filtered through the frosted glass of the skylight three stories above.

Ross woke with his skin pressed flat against the floorboards under the front counter, his mouth dry as pumice. His joints felt as though they had been packed with crushed gravel during the night. Across the aisle, Ensign Vane was already awake, seated on a flipped turpentine crate, methodically scraping the dried mud from the welt of his right riding boot with an ivory-handled mounting spatula.

"The wind shifted," Vane said softly, without looking up from his boot. "It’s coming from the north-northeast now. You can smell the chemical plants burning down in the flats."

Ross dragged himself upright, his spine crackling in sequence. He sniffed the air. The faint scent of bitter almonds and scorched sulfur had joined the shop’s baseline stink of dried glue and old wool.

"Any sign of sweeps?" Ross asked, reaching down to touch the cold casing of his useless carbine before remembering it was little more than a heavy club.

"Two skimmers passed overhead around four in the morning," Vane replied. "High altitude. Thermal reconnaissance, likely. But the roof of this building was insulated with six inches of dried cork and eel-grass back in my grandfather's day to keep the temperature steady for the hide vaults. We’re as cold as the brickwork around us. To a scanner overhead, we look like an empty coal cellar."

Ross stood up, stretching his arms until his shoulder joints popped. He surveyed the preparation hall with clear eyes for the first time. In the daylight, the detail of the shop was appalling.

It was less a store and more a temple to dead muscularity. Along the western wall, stacked three deep on heavy fir shelves, were plaster casts of animal trunks—flayed torsos captured in mid-stride, their muscle bands outlined in red chalk and wax. On iron pedestals sat wire skeletons of creatures that had vanished from the colonial territories a century ago: four-horned hill-goats, crested river-dogs, and broad-chested steppe-bears whose iron armatures had rusted to the color of dried liver.

"What is all this?" Ross asked, walking up to a skeletal frame made of twisted iron rods and wrapped in coils of coarse hemp cord. It resembled the ribcage of an armored hopper, but the proportions were wrong.

"That is a cast," Vane said, setting his spatulas down on a lead tray. He stood up and stroked the neck of the wire frame with two fingers. "The old way. Before the synthetic molds came out of the Hegemony capital, a preparator had to build the beast from the inside out. You didn't just stuff a hide with straw like an old mattress. If you did, the skin shrank as it dried, the nostrils collapsed, the eyelids drew back from the glass, and within five years you had nothing but a bag of hair and rotted parchment."

"So you built a skeleton," Ross said.

"We built an armature," Vane corrected him smoothly. "Steel rod for the spine. Heavy gauge copper for the legs, bent to the precise angle of the living tendon. Then you built up the muscle mass with wood-wool, wet plaster, and fine clay. You had to know every ligament, every fat pad under the flank, every bundle of fiber over the shoulder blade. If you made the armature half an inch too thick at the shoulder, the hide wouldn't close across the spine, and you’d split the skin trying to draw the stitches tight."

Ross picked up a small, crescent-shaped tool from the zinc table. It was made of blackened iron, its edge honed to a lethal hair-breadth. "Looks like a surgeon’s layout."

"My grandfather served his apprenticeship under the Chief Anatomist of the Second Expeditionary Fleet," Vane said, walking over to a set of shallow pine drawers beneath the main work bench. "He brought forty cases of equipment with him when he settled in Mor-Vander. Scalpels, braining hooks, bone saws, skinning knives with curved bellies for working around the ears... standard tools of the trade."

"And weapons, if it comes to it," Ross muttered, testing the tip of the iron tool against the callus of his thumb.

Vane paused, his hand on the brass cup-pull of a drawer. He looked at Ross through his dark, sunken eyes. "If I intended to cut your throat, Corporal, I wouldn't use a skinning scraper. The blade is ground on one side only. It strays to the left when you draw it. You’d end up cutting your own knuckles before you reached the carotid."

Ross lowered the tool slowly, placing it back on the slate top. "Good to know."

"Besides," Vane added, pulling the drawer open with a dry screech of wood on wood, "we have more pressing work than butchering one another. We need light, we need heat that doesn't smoke, and we need to seal the transom before the temperature drops tonight. The barometer on the wall is falling fast. There’s a frost-front coming off the glacier."

Ross walked over to the drawer Vane was searching. Inside were hundreds of small wooden spools wound with varying weights of thread—waxed flax, braided nylon, silver-plated wire, and heavy gut line that looked like dried sinew.

"What are we sealing it with?" Ross asked.

"Burlap and wax," Vane said, hauling out a heavy bolt of gray, coarse cloth that had been stored in a zinc-lined trough to keep out moisture. "We soak the cloth in molten paraffin from the candle stocks in the basement, then press it into the cracks around the broken glass. It cools hard, it’s waterproof, and it keeps the wind from howling through the rafters."

"Paraffin burns," Ross noted. "One tracer round hits the eaves, and this whole dry-house goes up like a stack of matchboxes."

"If a tracer round hits the eaves, Corporal, the white phosphorus will burn at two thousand degrees regardless of whether we have waxed burlap in the window," Vane replied crisply. "I would prefer to die in a fire five days from now than freeze to death in my boots by midnight."

Ross couldn't argue with the math. He grabbed the other end of the burlap bolt and helped Vane haul it up to the work bench.

As they unrolled the rough fabric, a small square of stiff card fell out from between the folds. Ross picked it up. It was a photographic plate, faded to a sepia tone, showing a younger version of Silas Vane standing beside an enormously fat, white-bearded man in a rubber apron. Between them, suspended from a block-and-tackle attached to a massive wooden beam, was the skinned carcass of a sea-leopard, its wet red muscles glistening under the bright flash of an early chemical magnesium lamp. The old man was holding a long, narrow carving knife, pointing with it toward the animal's exposed ribcage as if demonstrating a geometric proof to the boy.

Ross looked from the photograph to Vane’s face. The ensign looked older now than his years, his jaw lean and shadowed, but the set of his mouth was identical to the pale boy’s in the picture.

"Your father?" Ross asked.

"Grandfather," Vane said, not looking at the card. "My father was an engineer. He died in the first orbital drop on the northern redoubts when I was four. Martin Vane raised me in this hall. I spent my sixth winter learning how to remove the cartilage from the ears of a marsh-fox without puncturing the outer skin."

"Sounds like a quiet childhood."

"It was extremely quiet," Vane said softly. "Until the military governor decided the city needed a third artillery park and confiscated the block." He took the photograph from Ross’s fingers, looked at it for half a second, then slid it into the inner pocket of his cream uniform smock. "Let’s get the stove ready."

In the back of the preparation room, hidden behind a tall display case containing three stuffed horned owls whose feathers were molting in gray clumps, was a small, round-bellied iron stove. Its chimney pipe ran vertically up through the wall, disappearing into the masonry.

Ross knelt before the iron door, unlatching it to reveal a grate filled with cold, white ash from a fire that had been put out months ago.

"Is the flue clear?" Ross asked, reaching in to sweep out a handful of brittle clinkers.

"It should be," Vane said, returning from the storeroom with a wooden tub filled with grey, square blocks that looked like dried butter. "Paraffin cakes. Used for waterproofing the sea-bird mounts. They burn hot, clear, and with almost no smoke if you keep the draft open wide."

"And fuel?"

Vane looked around the room, his eyes scanning the shelves of plaster molds, wooden pedestals, and wire armatures. "We have twenty pine mounting boxes in the loft that haven't been painted yet. They’re dry as tinder. And there are six barrels of cedar shavings in the tanning shed."

Ross nodded, feeling a strange, hollow relief. Survival in the infantry was usually a frantic, messy affair—patching torn boots with grease-tape, scraping wet mud out of rifle breeches with a bent nail, shivering in a waterlogged trench while waiting for the next barrage to tear the sky open. Here, under the watchful, glass eyes of a hundred dead beasts, survival was becoming a matter of workshop routine. It was quiet, mechanical, and unnaturally clean.

They spent the next three hours clearing the back room and assembling their heat source. Ross hauled the pine boxes down from the low loft using a rickety wooden ladder that creaked under his weight. He smashed the boxes into manageable splinters using the flat head of a heavy taxidermy mallet, his arms working with the rhythmic, brainless efficiency of a man who had dug forty miles of communications trenches in the frozen mud of the northern front.

Vane, meanwhile, was preparing the stove. He cleaned the iron grate with an oil-soaked rag, checked the damper valve in the stovepipe, and carefully shaved pieces of the paraffin cakes into fine ribbons with a short skinning knife.

As they worked, the silence between them changed. It was no longer the tense, breathless silence of two men waiting to shoot each other; it had morphed into the tacit truce of two workmen sharing a bench on a cold afternoon.

"Where were you when the front collapsed?" Vane asked, his voice echoing slightly inside the empty metal barrel he was clearing out.

"In the drainage ditches by the sugar refinery," Ross said, wiping sweat from his forehead with the back of his sleeve. His Commonwealth smock was filthy, the gray-green fabric stained with oil and old mud. "We were supposed to hold the culvert until the third battalion pulled back their heavy mortars. But the Hegemony air-skiffs dropped white phosphorus into the cane fields. Everything went up in five minutes. You couldn't breathe for the smoke. The whole ditch turned into a chimney."

"I was at the optics station on the water tower," Vane said, his voice level, monotone. "We had six wide-angle rangefinders pointed at the main boulevard. My job was to calculate the wind-correction for the 200-millimeter shore guns down at the harbor."

Ross stopped his hammer mid-swing. He turned his head slowly to look at the Hegemony ensign. "You were calling the drops on the Fifth Regiment?"

"I was calling the drops on everything that moved along the asphalt," Vane said without heat or apology. "It was target grid four-dash-eight. We dropped three hundred high-explosive rounds into that sector between nine in the morning and noon."

Ross held the heavy wooden mallet in his fist. His knuckles turned white against the stained ash handle. "My brother was with the Fifth."

Vane stopped shaving the wax block. He didn't drop the knife, nor did he raise it into a defensive posture. He simply held it suspended over the tin dish, his gray eyes fixing Ross with a cold, clear stillness that was worse than anger.

"If he was in the culvert at target grid four-dash-eight," Vane said, "he died instantly. The first salvo was fused for air-burst at twenty meters. Nobody in the open survived the shrapnel."

Ross breathed out slowly through his nose. His chest felt constricted, as if an iron strap had been drawn tight around his ribs—not unlike the armatures Vane had been describing earlier. The air in the room was thick with the scent of pine splinters and old dust. Outside, the low, distant rumble of heavy artillery rolled across the sky again, a flat thump-thump-thump that made the mortar-jars on the high shelves rattle against one another like teeth in a skull.

"Why didn't you stay at the water tower?" Ross asked, his voice low and dangerous.

"A counter-battery round took out the lower three floors at twelve-thirty," Vane said. "The tower leaned over and went into the canal. My sergeant was crushed under the winch-gear. I jumped into the mud, crawled into a storm drain, and came up three blocks from here when the smoke cleared. I was trying to reach the imperial staging area at the post office, but your unit had machine-gun nests at every intersection."

Ross looked down at the mallet in his hand, then lowered it slowly back to the floorboards. "The post office is gone," he said softly. "Our heavy batteries shelled it yesterday morning. The roof fell in on the whole headquarters staff."

Vane was quiet for a long moment. He shaved a single, thin curl of blue wax from the block in his hand, letting it fall into the tray. "Then there is no staging area," he said.

"No," Ross said. "There's just this shop."

"And the two of us," Vane added.

"And the dead animals."

Vane gave a faint, dry twitch of his lips—the closest he had come to a smile since they had dropped through the roof. "They are by far the most reliable companions in the building. They don't require rations, they don't hold grudges, and they remain precisely where you put them."

"Unless the roof comes down," Ross said.

"If the roof comes down, Corporal, their opinions on the matter will be identical to ours."

Vane struck a heavy brass match against the side of the stove. The flame flared bright and blue in the dim room, casting long, jumping shadows across the rows of plaster torsos and wire armatures behind them. He touched the flame to the paraffin shavings. They caught instantly with a soft whoosh, spitting tiny sparks of yellow light up into the dark throat of the chimney.

A thin, sweet curl of pale smoke leaked from the iron door before the draft caught it, pulling the fumes up and out into the flues. The air around the iron stove immediately began to lose its razor-sharp chill.

Ross walked over, dropping his pile of split pine into the box beside the hearth. He held his hands out toward the dark iron plate. The heat radiating off the metal was thin at first, but to his frozen fingers, it felt like an extraordinary gift.

"We need to check the loft," Ross said, looking up toward the small hatch in the ceiling above the hide racks. "If there’s water coming through the slate up there, it’ll rot the wood under our feet before the week is out."

"There are three more skin-cases up there," Vane said, setting the stove door on its second latch. "And my grandfather’s private journal. He kept records of every mount he prepared between the Great Landing and the year he lost his sight."

"Why do we care about his journal?"

Vane looked at the iron stove, his thin face illuminated by the orange glow of the draft-vents. "Because he was a very practical man, Corporal. And if he knew of any other way out of this cellar that doesn't involve walking through the front display window into a field of land-mines, it will be written on the back pages."

Ross looked at the ensign for a long second, then nodded once toward the wooden ladder leaning against the wall.

"Lead the way, Naturalist," Ross said. "Let’s go see what your grandfather left behind."