Dearest Martha, I shook hands with a dead man today. His grip was stronger than mine and his manners were better. He offered me brandy from a crystal glass and called me “son” just as he did when I was a lieutenant with mud on my boots and stars in my eyes. I almost forgot what he is and what he wants, and that forgetting is the most dangerous thing about him. Men like Beauregard make the monstrous feel civilized. They pour you a drink and ask about your family and then they feed your neighbors to machines that run on them.

  Tell the boy that manners don’t make a man, but actions do, even when the actions cost you everything.

  Yours, Hughes.

  * * *

  I give the orders in the war room with the door shut and the fire burned down to coals.

  Phelps gets the hardest job, and he knows it before I open my mouth. While I’m outside the walls playing diplomat, he’s to organize the civilian evacuation through the drainage tunnels beneath the south magazine. The tunnels run two hundred yards under the walls and come out at a culvert on the riverbank, screened by willow trees and brush thick enough that the Confederate pickets shouldn’t have a line of sight. I’ve sent two scouts down there already and they came back reporting the passage is tight but passable, four feet wide and five feet high, brick-lined and ankle-deep in cold water.

  “Women and children first,” I tell him. “Families with young ones at the front of the line. Every able bodied soldier’s wife carries a pack with two days’ rations and a blanket. No lanterns once they’re past the first bend. The noise carries underground and I don’t know how far Beauregard’s scouts range along the river.”

  Phelps nods and writes it down in the small leather notebook he keeps in his breast pocket. He doesn’t argue, because he knows why it has to be him and not me, because Beauregard won’t meet with a lieutenant and the parley only works if the man across the table is the one making decisions.

  “How long do you need?” I ask him.

  “Four hours to move two hundred people through a tunnel that narrow, assuming nobody panics and nobody falls and nobody’s baby decides to start crying at the wrong moment.” He closes the notebook and tucks the pencil behind his ear. “Six hours to be safe. Can you keep Beauregard talking that long?”

  “I knew the man for four years, and he’s always loved the sound of his own voice.” I turn to Mercy. “I need you on the walls while I’m gone. Visible. Walking the parapet with Mama Thunder where the Confederates can see you. They know what that cannon does and they’ll think twice about moving while it’s pointed at them.”

  Mercy gives me a single nod, which is her version of a twenty-minute briefing acceptance.

  “Clementine, you’re with the civilians. Anyone who can’t walk the tunnel on their own power, you get them through. Carry them if you have to.”

  “I’m a chaplain, not a pack mule,” she says, but she’s already putting her flask away and pulling on her boots, which means she’s going to do it regardless of what her mouth says about it.

  Then comes the part I’ve been putting off.

  ◇ ◆ ◇

  I go to the courtyard where the civilians have been sheltering under canvas tarps strung between the barracks and the north wall. Two hundred and sixteen people sitting on wet ground and crates and each other, wrapped in whatever they brought when they ran from their homes. Old men with pipe tobacco they can’t smoke because we can’t afford open flame near the powder stores. Young mothers holding infants against the cold. Boys old enough to carry a musket but too young to understand what carrying one costs.

  They go quiet when they see me coming. That’s how it works when you’re the one who brought them here. Every face turns toward mine and waits for the news, because the news is always something, and it hasn’t been good in a long time.

  I climb onto a supply crate so they can see me and I tell them straight.

  “General Beauregard has given us until dawn to surrender this fort. He wants you. All of you. He wants you for the infernal engines that power his army, and I won’t dress that up in language that makes it sound like anything other than what it is.” I let that sit for a second. Faces stare up at me. Some of them already knew. Some of them are just now understanding what they suspected. “The Federal Remnant isn’t coming to help us. We’re on our own.”

  A woman in the second row pulls her daughter closer. A man near the back closes his eyes and his lips move around words that might be a prayer or might be a curse. Nobody speaks, and the silence that follows is heavier than any words could be.

  “Here’s what we’re going to do. I’m going out under a flag of truce to meet with Beauregard and buy us time. While I’m out there, Lieutenant Phelps is going to lead an evacuation through the drainage tunnels under the south wall. The tunnels come out at the river. From there, you go south. You keep going south until you hit the township of Sutter’s Ford, and then you keep going until you can’t hear cannons anymore.”

  I pause because the next part is the part that’s going to cost me sleep for the rest of my life, however long that turns out to be.

  “I can’t take everyone through the tunnels. It’s too narrow and too slow, and the people who go last are the people most likely to get caught if Beauregard figures out what we’re doing.” I look at the old men, the wounded, the ones leaning on crutches and canes, the ones whose faces tell me they already know what I’m about to say. “Some of you can’t make the march even if you make it through the tunnel. The infirm. The wounded. Anyone who can’t move faster than a slow walk for six miles through rough country in the dark.”

  An old man near the front, Harlan Creedy himself, the tobacco farmer whose fields are now full of dead soldiers, stands up. He’s sixty-two and has a bad hip and hands that shake from nerve damage he got in the last war, the one before the dead started walking. “Just say it plain, Captain, and spare us the preamble.”

  “I need people on the walls. After the evacuation, when the army moves south, this fort needs to look like it’s still manned. Torches lit. Uniforms on the parapet. Muskets visible. If Beauregard looks up at these walls and sees them empty, he’ll know we’ve run, and he’ll send his cavalry down the river road and catch the families before they reach Sutter’s Ford.” I keep my voice level because these people deserve that much. “I need volunteers to hold the line. To stay behind and buy time for everyone else to get clear. I won’t lie about what that means.”

  Creedy looks at me for a long moment, his jaw working, his shaking hands still at his sides for the first time since I’ve known him. Then he turns to the crowd behind him. “Well, I always did look good in blue.”

  Nobody laughs. But eleven men stand up in the next minute, one after another, and walk to the front. Creedy. A blacksmith named Horace Burnsides with arms thick as fenceposts and a leg wound that won’t let him run. A schoolteacher named Ephraim Suggs who’s sixty-eight and nearly blind in one eye but says he can still pull a trigger if someone points him at the enemy. Two brothers, Calvin and Porter Meigs, both in their fifties, both too stubborn to admit they can’t keep up with their wives on the march south. Six others whose names I write down in my field book because someone should remember them.

  Eleven men who just volunteered to die on a wall so their families can live.

  「Virtue & Reputation: +10 (Protect Civilians). Alignment shift: Honored 60/100.」

  「Virtue & Reputation: -5 (Civilian Conscription). Net V&R: Honored 55/100.」

  Clementine touches my arm as I step down from the crate. Her face has gone tight around the mouth and loose around the eyes, anger and grief fighting for the same space. “Those men aren’t coming back from those walls, Hughes.”

  “I know that as well as they do.” I watch Creedy shaking hands with the Meigs brothers, the three of them standing in the rain and grinning at each other with the calm of men who’ve already settled their accounts. “They know better than we do what they’re giving up.”

  ◇ ◆ ◇

  I ride out through the main gate an hour before sunset with a white flag tied to a cavalry lance and nothing on my hip but Freedom’s Edge, because Beauregard will expect me to come armed and he’ll take it as an insult if I don’t.

  Colonel Breckinridge meets me fifty yards from the gate on a horse that’s still breathing, which makes him one of the living officers. He’s a tall man with a cavalry mustache and the tired eyes of someone who serves a cause he stopped believing in two promotions ago. He doesn’t speak beyond a formal greeting and a gesture to follow, and I don’t push for conversation because I’m counting paces and noting the positions of the Confederate pickets as we ride through them.

  The living Confederate soldiers watch me from behind their fieldworks with the hard curiosity of men sizing up an enemy they expect to to later. They’re lean and well-equipped, better supplied than my own people, wearing the gray-and-black of the Iron Confederacy with the bone-white trim that marks Beauregard’s personal command. Professionals, every one of them, and they carry themselves accordingly. I count rifles and cannon positions as we pass and file the numbers away.

  Forty-two artillery pieces visible from the road, most of them twelve-pounders, a few heavier siege guns dug into revetments behind the second line. Living infantry in good order, maybe eight hundred muskets that I can see, and the real strength standing silent behind them: rank after rank of dead soldiers holding the forward positions with the patience of men who’ll never need to eat or sleep or question their orders. Confederate supply situation: excellent. Morale among the living troops: Steady, maybe Tested. They’ve been winning and they know it. Our supply situation by comparison: desperate. The numbers stack against us from every angle, and riding through the middle of them makes the gap feel wider than it looked from the parapet.

  The dead don’t watch me at all as we pass. They stare straight ahead at the fort with their vacant faces and hold their weapons and wait. We ride through a gap in their ranks and the smell hits me, sweet and chemical, the preservative compounds the Confederate necromancers use to keep the bodies from falling apart too quickly. The smell is sweet and chemical at the same time, formaldehyde and tanning salts and something underneath both that belongs to meat left too long in warm air. The horse under me shies and stamps, and I don’t blame her.

  Beauregard’s command tent sits on a small rise behind the main line, a proper field headquarters with canvas walls and a wooden floor and a Confederate battle standard flying from the center pole. Two Death Knights in full plate stand at the entrance, their eye sockets burning with the cold blue light that marks Beauregard’s personal guard. They don’t move when I dismount and they don’t need to. I can feel the cold radiating off them from six feet away, a bone-deep chill that has nothing to do with the weather.

  「Liberator’s Gaze: Death Knight (x2). Threat level: Extreme. Individual combat value: equivalent to 40 infantry. Necromantic binding: elite. Recommend: do not engage.」

  Inside, the tent is a gentleman’s study transported to the middle of a siege. A folding desk with brass fittings. A camp chair upholstered in red leather. Maps pinned to a board with silver tacks. A bottle of brandy and two crystal glasses set out on a silver tray, because Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard has been dead for two years but he hasn’t forgotten his manners. And in the corner, on a low table between two camp stools, a chess set. Carved wood, dark and light, the pieces worn smooth from use. I remember that set from the officers’ mess at Fort Donelson, back when Beauregard used to beat every lieutenant in the battalion after dinner and then lecture them on what they’d done wrong.

  He stands when I enter, and I have to remind myself not to salute.

  He’s tall. Taller than he was alive, because the necromantic process does something to the bones, stretches them slightly, adds maybe two inches of height that makes the proportions just wrong enough to notice if you know what to look for. His uniform is immaculate Confederate gray with gold braid and polished buttons, and his face is preserved well enough that you could mistake him for a living man in poor light. In good light, you can see where the skin has pulled tight across the cheekbones and the jaw, giving him the look of a wax figure left too close to a candle. His eyes are the giveaway. They glow the same cold blue as his Death Knights, steady and unwavering, and they don’t blink.

  “Captain Granthem.” His voice hasn’t changed at all. Deep, cultured, with the easy cadence of a man who grew up giving orders to servants and subordinates with equal grace. “It’s been too long. Please, sit. I’ve had brandy brought from Charlotte. The good stuff, not the rot your Federal quartermasters peddle.”

  The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  He pours with a steady hand and slides the glass across the desk to me. I take it because refusing would cut this conversation short, and short is the opposite of what I need right now.

  “General.” I sit in the camp chair across from him and set the glass on my knee. “You look remarkably well for a man who’s been dead two years.”

  “Better than most, I’m told.” He settles into his own chair with the posture of a man who spent forty years in uniform before his first death and hasn’t relaxed since his second. “I see you’re still wearing Federal blue. Though I notice the insignia’s the same one I last saw on that collar. Still a captain after all these years.”

  “Questioning your superiors tends to hold a man back in the ranks.” I take a sip and the brandy is excellent, far better than anything the Federal quartermasters have ever issued. “Turns out the Federal Remnant doesn’t promote officers who ask inconvenient questions. That’s why I’m a captain and not a colonel.”

  “A waste.” He says it with the quiet conviction of a man who means it and doesn’t care who knows. “You had more talent in your worst day than half the colonels I’ve seen on either side of this war. I told them that, back when telling them things still mattered.”

  “You ask a heavy thing of me, General.” I set the glass down and let the words hang between us the way a man lets a line settle on still water. “Two hundred and sixteen people. Women and children among them. You’re asking me to hand them over to the engines, and I’m supposed to just ride south and live with that.”

  “I’m asking you to be practical.” His hands fold on the desk, perfectly still, the way only a dead man’s hands can be still. “Those civilians die in the assault or they die in the engines. The only variable is whether your soldiers die with them.”

  “And if I told you I needed time? Time to talk to my men, time to make arrangements, time to let these people say goodbye to each other?”

  “You’re stalling, Hughes.”

  “I’m asking for what any officer would ask for in my position.” I hold his gaze, those cold blue eyes that used to be brown, and I don’t blink because I can’t afford to look like a man who’s already decided. “You’ve been on the other side of a surrender. You know how it works. There are details. Logistics. My men have personal effects, letters to send home, wills to write. The civilians have children who need to be prepared for what’s coming. You can’t just snap your fingers and have people march out a gate with a smile.”

  He watches me for a long moment, and I can see the tactician behind those dead eyes running the numbers, weighing the cost of patience against the cost of haste.

  I let my gaze drift to the chess set in the corner. The pieces are set up, white and black, waiting for a game that hasn’t been played yet. Beauregard follows my eyes and something shifts in his expression, a loosening around the jaw, the closest thing to warmth I’ve seen from him since I sat down.

  “You still play?” I ask, letting the question land soft and easy.

  “Who would I play against? Breckinridge plays like a quartermaster, all defense, no imagination. And the dead aren’t much for conversation between moves.” He looks at the board with the expression of a man studying a photograph of someone he buried years ago. “I haven’t had a proper game since Fort Donelson.”

  “Then let me offer you one.” I lean forward, elbows on my knees, and hold his gaze. “A game for the civilians.”

  The tent goes quiet. Outside, a horse stamps in the picket line and a Confederate sergeant calls for evening mess. Beauregard’s eyes don’t leave mine, and for a second the blue light behind them flickers in a way I haven’t seen before.

  “You want to stake two hundred lives on a chess game.”

  “Just a game General. A proper game against someone who can make you work for it. And I want those people to walk free if I win.”

  He doesn’t answer right away. His jaw works slightly, the muscles moving under skin that shouldn’t be able to move at all, and I can see him turning it over from every angle before committing, the same deliberation he used to give a battle plan back when his blood still ran warm.

  Then he shakes his head, one slow and deliberate motion.

  “I won’t give you a way out, Hughes.” His voice is quiet, and for the first time tonight it sounds like the man I remember instead of the thing he became. “I can’t. Those civilians power my supply lines for the next two months. My orders from Charlotte don’t leave room for generosity, and President Crane doesn’t accept excuses dressed up as sportsmanship.”

  I don’t let my face change, but something inside my chest drops about an inch.

  “But.” He holds up one hand, a finger raised, the gesture of a professor making a fine distinction. “If you win, I can give you until noon. Time for goodbyes and last affairs before my guns open. Dawn is the earliest I’d attack regardless, so you’re really playing for the morning. A few hours. That’s the stakes.”

  Dawn to noon. Six hours. That’s not freedom and it’s not salvation. But it’s time, and time is the only currency I’m spending tonight.

  “You always did open with the Queen’s Gambit,” I say, and I stand and walk to the corner table and pull out a stool.

  “And you always declined it.” Beauregard follows me to the board with something that might be eagerness if the dead were capable of eagerness. He sits across from me and reaches for the white pieces with the proprietary comfort of a man who has always played white and has never been told otherwise. “Shall we begin?”

  ◇ ◆ ◇

  The game lasts four hours, and every minute of it is borrowed time.

  Beauregard opens with the Queen’s Gambit, because he’s Beauregard and changing his opening would be admitting that someone once made him reconsider his approach, which is a concession a man with his pride would rather die twice than make. I decline it with the Slav Defense, same as I always did, because the Slav is a patient opening and patience is what I need more than brilliance tonight.

  We don’t talk much for the first hour. The tent fills with the small sounds of wooden pieces on wooden squares and the pop and settle of the camp stove in the corner. Breckinridge brings fresh candles when the first ones burn low and stands in the doorway for a few minutes watching before Beauregard waves him away. The general doesn’t like an audience when he plays and never has.

  He trades pieces methodically, exchanging resources at favorable rates and building positional advantages that don’t look dangerous until you realize you’ve run out of room to maneuver. By the second hour he’s up a bishop and a pawn and his rooks control the center files, and anyone watching would say black is losing.

  I’m not playing to his expectations. I give him problems to solve instead of threats. A knight on an awkward square that takes four moves to deal with properly. A pawn chain that looks weak but costs him tempo to break. Every time he’s about to simplify, I muddy the position again, and every time I muddy the position he stops and thinks, really thinks, the same focused deliberation he used to show over the maps at Fort Donelson when things got interesting. He’s enjoying himself, and that’s what I’m counting on.

  “You’ve gotten better,” he says during the third hour, moving his queen to d5 with a deliberation that tells me he’s not sure it’s the right square. “You used to play faster. More direct. This is something different.”

  “I had a good teacher, once upon a time.”

  “Yes. You did..” He looks at the board and then at me, and the blue light in his eyes is steady and focused. “You’re not just stalling, though. There’s something underneath all this mess you’re making of the center. I can feel it.”

  He’s right, and there is something underneath all of it. The complications aren’t random. Every ugly, awkward position I’ve forced him to spend time untangling has been pushing his king one square at a time toward the corner of the board, so gradually that even Beauregard hasn’t noticed the net closing around him. I’ve been trading pieces I couldn’t afford to lose in order to open diagonals I need, and the bishop I sacrificed in the second hour wasn’t a blunder but an investment in a position he couldn’t see coming.

  I move my rook to the seventh rank and say nothing.

  “I taught you that trick,” he says, leaning back in his chair with his fingers steepled against his chin. “Didn’t I. When you can’t beat a superior force, make the engagement expensive enough that they question whether the objective was worth the cost.” He moves his king out of the back rank, slow and careful, and he doesn’t see it until the piece is already on the square.

  His hand freezes on the king, fingers still curled around the piece.

  “Ah.” He sits back and studies the board with the quiet attention of a man reading a letter that contains news he wasn’t expecting. His rooks are pointed the wrong direction. His queen is on d5, dominant and useless, pinning nothing, threatening nothing that matters. His king is on g1, and my remaining rook and knight have him boxed into a mating net he can’t escape without giving up the queen, and if he gives up the queen the endgame is mine because I’ve still got two connected pawns on the queenside and he hasn’t.

  “You let me take the bishop,” he says, his voice carrying a note I haven’t heard from him before, something between admiration and irritation. “Fourteen moves ago. I thought you’d miscounted.”

  “I don’t miscount, General. You taught me better than that.”

  He stares at the board for a long time. Then he does something I’ve never seen him do in all the years I’ve known him, living or dead. He laughs. It comes out dry and papery, like wind through old leaves, and it doesn’t sound right because the lungs pushing it haven’t drawn a real breath in two years. But it’s a real laugh, and it reaches whatever passes for his eyes.

  “Queen takes rook,” he says, and makes the capture with a sharp click of wood on wood. “I’m going to make you work for it.”

  “I’d expect nothing less from the man who taught me.”

  It takes another eleven moves. He fights for every square with the same stubborn tenacity he showed at Fort Donelson, giving nothing away for free, making me prove I’ve earned every inch of the position. But the endgame is mine. The connected pawns march forward while his king chases ghosts on the other side of the board, and when I promote the a-pawn to a queen with check, there’s nowhere left to run.

  “Mate in two,” he says before I can announce it, tapping the board with one finger.

  “Mate in two,” I agree, and neither of us moves for a long moment.

  He tips his king over with one finger. The ivory piece rolls on its side and comes to rest against a captured pawn, and the small click of wood on wood sounds louder than it should in the quiet tent.

  “Until noon, then.” His voice is quiet, and he doesn’t look up from the fallen king. “For goodbyes and last affairs. A minor prize, but the only one I can give, young man.”

  “Noon is enough, General, and I’m grateful for it.”

  “Use it well, Hughes.” He picks up his fallen king and sets it back on its square, standing upright, centered, returned to dignity with the care of a man who understands what it means to be toppled and set right again. “I won’t offer a second game.”

  “I know you won’t, and I wouldn’t ask for one.”

  “And Hughes.” He finally looks at me, and the blue light behind his eyes flickers unsteady, a candle in a draft. “For what it’s worth, I wish you’d taken my terms. The march south is survivable. What comes at noon isn’t.”

  “I know that too, General, and I appreciate the honesty.”

  He nods, once and seems regretful, and I leave the tent with six hours of borrowed time in my pocket and the taste of good brandy on my tongue and a plan forming in the back of my skull that Beauregard would recognize immediately if he could see inside my head, because it’s the same play he taught me over this same chess set six years ago.

  When you can’t beat a superior force, don’t try. Change the objective.

  ◇ ◆ ◇

  Back at Fort Independence, the evacuation moves in the dark.

  Lieutenant Phelps stands at the tunnel entrance beneath the south magazine with a hooded lantern and a watch, counting heads as they pass. The tunnel is worse than the scouts reported, four feet wide in most places but narrowing to less than that where the brickwork has shifted over the years. The ceiling drips a steady patter of cold water onto the heads of everyone passing through. The water on the floor is closer to shin-deep than ankle-deep, and cold enough to make the children gasp when they step in.

  Garrison status while I’m gone: six hundred and thirty-one soldiers on the walls, eleven civilian volunteers in borrowed blue, and the fog pressing close enough to cut visibility to a hundred yards. Powder stores unchanged, six hours of sustained fire if it comes to that, less if the rain keeps soaking through the magazine tarps. Four operational golems running on patched seals and a mechanic’s prayers, steam cores down to seventy percent after four days without a proper maintenance cycle. Readiness: Fatigued and dropping. Morale: Steady, but the steadiness has a shelf life, and every hour without orders erodes it by fractions that don’t show on a ledger until the moment someone breaks.

  They go in family groups. A mother with two daughters under ten. A pregnant woman being steadied by her sister. An old woman being carried by her grandson, a boy of fourteen who’s trying very hard not to cry because the captain told them no noise after the first bend.

  Clementine works the line like a sheepdog, moving people forward when they hesitate, squeezing past the column to check on anyone who’s struggling, her flask abandoned for once because she needs both hands free. She murmurs prayers under her breath out of habit rather than faith, though she’d argue the distinction if anyone asked.

  “Keep moving,” she tells a family that’s stopped because the father is trying to adjust his pack in the narrow space. “You can fix it on the other side. Right now you need to walk.”

  On the walls above, Mercy walks the parapet with Mama Thunder on her shoulder, eight feet of sanctified iron and consecrated brass silhouetted against the fog, making herself visible to any Confederate scouts watching the fort. The eleven civilian volunteers stand at intervals along the battlements in borrowed uniforms, holding muskets they mostly know how to fire, looking out at the silent army of the dead with the careful blankness of men who’ve already made their peace.

  Harlan Creedy leans on the parapet near the northeast bastion with a musket across his arms and watches the dead standing in what used to be his tobacco field. His hip aches in the cold and his hands shake against the stock of the musket. He thinks about his wife, who died of fever six years ago, and wonders if she’s out there somewhere in that silent crowd, wearing whatever they dressed her in when they pulled her from the ground.

  He decides it doesn’t matter. The woman he married isn’t in that field. Whatever’s out there wearing her face isn’t her and hasn’t been for a long time. He adjusts his grip on the musket and watches the fog roll in thicker as the sun goes down.

  Two hundred and five civilians enter the tunnel between sunset and the tenth hour of the night. Eleven stay behind on the walls.

  Phelps checks his watch by lantern light and notes the time. Four hours since the captain rode out under the white flag. The first families should be clearing the culvert and moving into the tree line on the far bank by now. He closes the tunnel entrance behind the last group and goes up to the walls to wait for the captain to come home, because everything that happens next depends on how much time the captain bought them.

  He waits, and the dead in the field wait with him, and neither side makes a sound.

  * * *

  === CAMPAIGN STATE: YEAR 3, DAY 1 (NIGHT) ===

  Location: Fort Independence / Returning from Beauregard’s Command Tent

  Virtue & Reputation: Honored (55/100) [+10 Protect Civilians, -5 Civilian Conscription]

  Treasury: 340 Dollars

  Army: 631 soldiers + 11 civilian volunteers (642 total wall defenders)

  - 5 War Golems (4 operational, 1 parts donor) [Readiness: Fatigued]

  - 1 Hex-Cannon (Mama Thunder)

  Morale: Steady (58/100) [Boost from civilian volunteers’ courage]

  Supplies: Low (8 days rations, powder for ~6 hours sustained fire)

  - Weather: Rain (-15% ranged accuracy, gunpowder -50% reliability)

  - Fatigue: Accumulating (4 days siege, sleep-deprived, -20% accuracy)

  Civilians Evacuated: 205 of 216 (cleared tunnel, moving south to river)

  Civilians Remaining: 11 volunteers (holding walls as decoy garrison)

  Key Intel: Hughes won the chess game. Beauregard grants until NOON before assault.

  Confederate force: 12,000 undead, 800 living cavalry, 42 guns, 1 wyvern.

  Tunnel evacuation complete. ~6 hours from dawn to noon to execute escape.

  Notable Casualties: None new.

  Recent Political Impact: Parley bought critical time. Chess victory earned hours, not freedom. Civilian evacuation successful but Beauregard doesn’t know yet.