war engines to spread across six thousand square miles—all the heavies are still in Isca. Meanwhile, they have all their engines at the front. Something like eight heavy and a dozen light minus what we guess they lost at Fallow Down. All of that wouldn’t be half-bad if their zeppelins didn’t outnumber ours by more than three to one. And as you know, that’s Saergaeth’s game.
“He pressed us to the river and dug in. Now he’s using the river as an easily maintainable line while he secures the keeps in the west as bases for the fleet of zeppelins he’s retrofitting day and night back in Miskatoll.”
“What about King Lewis?”
Yrisl snorted. “The intelligence the Pplarians gave us can’t be substantiated but personally I think you’d have better luck convincing a leper to spare change.”
“So he won’t help, but let’s assume he does. Assume we can convince him.”
“At the very best he’d give you four thousand infantry and a hundred knights. You can count Vale Briar’s zeppelins on one hand.”
“So it’s the zeppelins that will kill us.”
Yrisl nodded. “It’s just a matter of time.”
Caliph signed off on the order for a muster. As the fountain pen scratched across the paper, Caliph felt a terrible premonition.
“Do you think I should tour the field?”
Yrisl tilted his head with a pained expression and gestured as though the matter were highly debatable. In the end, his answer was simple. “No. I wouldn’t count on Saergaeth to move before fall when the leaves are gone and there’s less cover in the woods for our troops to hide. He’ll want maximum visibility. Stark contrast for the bomb sites. Men and machines will stand out even better against snow.
“Our morale will hold. No sense putting you in danger.”
They avoided the topic of Fallow Down as they talked. There simply wasn’t anything to say. Nothing new had come to light and all the papers printed were the speculations drawn by scholars who struggled for the limelight by claiming expertise in some tenuously related field. In truth no one knew what had happened to Fallow Down.
No one but Sena.
It had been particularly difficult for her to contain her rage when Miriam had gone to the papers in an effort to dislodge her from the castle. Obviously the Sisterhood suspected something. They were turning against her. But she was cut off from them now, with no way of knowing what they knew.
All she knew was that Megan’s hex was working. Finally. A month after the transumption hex, Fallow Down had disappeared. The Pandragonians were getting what they paid for . . . though they had yet to deliver the book to the Eighth House.
Holomorphy had become unpredictable as Gr-ner Shie’s influence adjusted numbers in the natural world. Vog Foundry had erupted in fungus, great mushrooms sprouting from the holomorphic energies in the furnace. Bilgeburg had nearly shut down. It was in the papers. Things that relied on holomorphy were turning wild. Vog Foundry had hacked out the fungi and gone back to pure coke. Factories adjusted. Chemiostatic power still seemed safe. Sometimes holomorphy worked just fine. But people were crumbling. They took their money out of banks. They stocked up. They stole. There were fires burning in Blkton. And Sena didn’t blame them. They relied on the papers for answers and the papers had no answers.
How could they? How could any of the journalists propose that some entity outside rational geometry was trying to eat them?
In reaction to Fallow Down people grieved and shouted in the streets. They wrote poems and articles and threats against the government. Some found purpose and friendship in the lonely urban wasteland by forming groups and posting flyers. They latched on to the tragedy in a peculiarly maudlin way that made less sentimental folks acutely uncomfortable.
Then there were the crasser lot, people without any direct link to the immense loss, whose lives and tiny close-knit circle of friends had been spared any lesson in privation. They grew tired of hearing about Fallow Down and thought up vulgar rhymes and pseudonyms, perhaps as a way of feeling strong in the face of horror, perhaps because they were simply ignorant. But even minority opinions, no matter how outlandish or cruel they seemed, found representation in the thronging streets of Isca.
“Fallow Down the vanished town,” some said. Others shortened the grim nickname to Fallen Down.
Sena marveled that Megan’s hex had actually cracked the prison. Like a histrionic felon scrabbling at the bars of his fabricated cell, Gr-ner Shie was