Dearest Martha, I won't tell you what we did tonight. You'll read about it in the dispatches if the war lasts long enough for dispatches to matter, and whatever they print will make it sound cleaner than it was. I'll say this much: we followed them back to their camp and we didn't leave anyone alive to report what they'd found. The men performed. I'm the one who has to sit with what that means.

  Hughes.

  ◇ ◆ ◇

  The war council in the church takes nine minutes, which is seven minutes longer than it needs to be.

  "They're scouts," I tell the table. "Eight riders on the third ridge means a cavalry company somewhere west of here, probably camped within ten miles. Those riders will report back tonight or at first light, and when they do, whoever commands that company will know there's a settlement in this valley with smoke coming from a forge and soldiers drilling in the fields."

  Phelps leans over the map we've drawn on the church floor in charcoal, ridges and valleys sketched from memory and observation. "If they report, we've got a day at most before a company-strength force comes down that ridge to investigate. If they've got a hex-slinger with signal capability, less than that."

  "They won't report." I put my finger on the third ridge where Cobb spotted them. "We follow them back to their camp tonight, and we kill every one of them before sunrise."

  Marsh looks at me across the map. He's been absorbing men he didn't train all day and running drill formations that aren't tight enough for open battle, and his face says he knows what I'm about to ask of him and he doesn't want to do it, but he'll do it regardless of what his face says about it.

  "How many?" he asks.

  "Cavalry company is eighty to a hundred and twenty." I trace the ridge line on the charcoal map with my finger, east to west. "Standard Confederate patrol doctrine puts the main body within a day's ride of the screening element, so Colonel Breckinridge's column is somewhere east of us, probably still consolidating at the Chestatee or moving south along the main road. Breckinridge commands the advance for General Beauregard, and Beauregard doesn't send his cavalry ahead without infantry and necromancers behind them. These riders are the Colonel's eyes. We cut them out and he's blind in this sector for at least two days while he figures out why his scouts stopped reporting."

  "And if the company is a hundred and twenty?"

  "Then we'd better hit them while they're sleeping."

  「Tactical Decision: Night Raid. Target: Confederate cavalry company (estimated 80-120). Objective: Destroy scouting element, prevent intelligence report to Col. Breckinridge / Gen. Beauregard main body. Secondary: Capture supplies, horses, ammunition. Risk: HIGH. Reward: Blinds Confederate advance for 48-72 hours. Secures Lenalune departure window.」

  I take sixty men from 1st Company. Phelps picks them himself, and he picks the ones I would've picked: veterans from Fort Independence and the Blackwater, men who've done night work before, men who know how to move in the dark without talking and kill in the dark without hesitation. Every one of them carries a musket with bayonet fixed, a knife, and twenty rounds. No packs, no canteens, nothing that rattles or clinks or catches moonlight.

  [RAID FORCE] 60 soldiers (hand-picked veterans, 1st Company). Leader: Cpt. Hughes Granthem. Equipment: Muskets w/ bayonet, knives, 20 rounds each. No heavy equipment. No hex-cannon (0 shells). Stealth priority. Formation: Dispersed (noise discipline). Power: 180 (light infantry, no support assets).

  [DEFENSE FORCE — LENALUNE] Sgt. Major Mercy commanding. 178 soldiers (1st Company remainder), 238 soldiers (3rd Company, Sgt. Marsh). Total: 416. Orders: Prepare for immediate departure. Pack wounded, strike camp, form march column. Be ready to move south at first light regardless of raid outcome. If raid force doesn't return by dawn, march without us.

  Mercy doesn't argue with the order. She nods once and goes to organize the camp for departure, and the set of her jaw when she turns away tells me she's already working through what happens to four hundred and sixteen soldiers and twenty-seven stretcher cases if I don't come back.

  I find Harwell on her porch. The ledger is closed for once, sitting on the railing beside a cup of something that's gone cold.

  "Confederate cavalry on the third ridge," I tell her. "Eight riders, scouting west. They saw the valley."

  Her hands don't move and her face doesn't change. She's had six hours of warning since we arrived that this moment was coming, and she spent those six hours counting grain and writing numbers in a ledger, which is what people do when they're preparing for something they can't stop.

  "I'm taking men out tonight to deal with it. My people will be packing to leave while I'm gone, and we'll be out of your valley by morning."

  "And the scouts you're going after?"

  "They won't be reporting what they found."

  She picks up the cold cup and holds it with both hands, wrapping her fingers around it even though there's no warmth left in it to hold onto. "Then I suppose we'll pretend nobody was ever here."

  "That'd be best."

  "Captain." She looks at me for a long time, and what's in her face isn't gratitude or anger. It's a woman figuring the odds on whether I'll keep my word, and whether it matters if I do. "Don't come back here. Whatever happens tonight, don't lead them back to us."

  "You have my word, Mayor, and I keep the ones I give."

  ◇ ◆ ◇

  We leave Lenalune at ten and climb the east hill in a column of twos with no torches and no talking.

  The moon is a quarter-crescent behind thin cloud cover, enough light to see the man in front of you and not enough to see the ground properly. Men stumble on roots and loose stone and catch themselves without cursing because the sergeants made clear before we left that the first man who makes a sound louder than his own breathing gets sent back to camp. Nobody tests it.

  Night march conditions: quarter-moon, thin overcast, ground visibility under ten yards. Temperature dropping through the forties and still falling. Sixty men in dispersed column, carrying light, moving at a pace that favors silence over speed. Fatigue status on the raid force: these men slept four hours in Lenalune's barn before I pulled them out, which puts them at functional but brittle. They'll fight sharp for twenty minutes, and after that the fatigue debt starts collecting interest. The window for this raid is narrow, and everything that happens in the creek bottom needs to happen fast or not at all.

  Cobb leads because Cobb watched the riders and Cobb knows which direction they went. We crest the first ridge in twenty minutes and drop into the hollow on the other side, and the hollow is thick with scrub pine and the footing is worse than the ridge because the runoff has cut channels in the dirt that are invisible in the dark. A corporal named Briggs goes down on his knee in one of the channels and his musket stock hits a rock and the sound of wood on stone carries in the quiet air for what feels like a hundred yards. Everyone freezes. I count to thirty in my head. Nothing answers the sound except the wind and the insects and the breathing of sixty men who are holding still and listening to the dark with everything they've got.

  We move on. Second ridge. Third ridge, the one where Cobb spotted them. From the crest I can see west along the ridgeline, and the terrain drops into a wider valley than ours, darker, with a tree line along a creek at the bottom. No fires visible, but that doesn't mean anything because a cavalry company on patrol would bank their fires after dark and post sentries instead of advertising their position with light.

  I send two scouts forward. Privates Cobb and Ennis, the two best sets of eyes I've got, moving low along the ridge crest with orders to find the camp and count heads and come back without being seen. They go into the dark and disappear within thirty yards, and I sit on the ridge with fifty-eight men and wait.

  They're gone forty minutes. The waiting is the part that costs the most because waiting in the dark before a fight is where men's minds go to the places you don't want them to go, and by the time Cobb comes back up the ridge on his belly I can feel the tension in the column pressing against discipline hard enough to leave marks.

  "Found them," Cobb whispers, close enough that I can smell the pine needles on his collar. "Creek bottom, half a mile west. Ninety to a hundred men, most of them down. Horses picketed on the south side along the creek. Four sentries that I counted: two on the east approach, one north by the horse line, one west on the far side of the camp. Fires banked but still warm, and no hex-slingers that I could see, but they've got a bone-works wagon parked by the creek."

  A bone-works wagon means a necro-engineer, which means the dead don't stay dead unless we make sure of it.

  "The east sentries, how far from the camp?"

  "Fifty yards, maybe sixty." Cobb wipes mud off his chin with the back of his hand. "They're sitting on a fallen log at the tree line where the trail comes down from the ridge. Both of them are awake but one of them is doing most of the watching and the other one is cleaning his musket by feel in the dark."

  「Tactical Assessment: Confederate Cavalry Camp. Location: Creek bottom, 0.5 miles west of third ridge. Estimated Strength: 90-100 cavalry (dismounted, sleeping). Sentries: 4 (2 east, 1 north/horse line, 1 west). Assets: Horses (est. 80-100), 1x bone-works wagon (necro-engineer likely present). Fires: Banked. Alert Status: Low. Terrain: Creek bottom, tree line provides concealment for approach from east.」

  I brief the sergeants in whispers, faces close enough that I can smell the tobacco on Sergeant Hollis and the sweat on Corporal Fenn and the gun oil on every one of them. Four two-man teams for the sentries, knives only, simultaneous. The rest of the force splits into three elements: blocking teams north and west to cut off anyone who runs, and the main assault force of forty men coming through the east approach the moment the sentries go down.

  "When you hear the first shot, that's the signal. Not before. We do the sentries quiet and then we come in loud and we don't stop until everything in that camp is on the ground and staying there."

  Hollis spits tobacco juice into the dirt beside his boot. "And the bone-works wagon?"

  "Burn it. Whatever's in it, I don't want it getting up after we're done."

  ◇ ◆ ◇

  The two men on the east approach are sitting on a fallen pine with their backs to the camp and their faces toward the ridge, which is the right way to post sentries and the wrong way to stay alive when sixty men are coming down that ridge in the dark.

  Sergeant Hollis and Private Oakes take the one on the left. Corporal Fenn and Private Trask take the one on the right. I watch from thirty yards back with the main body crouched in the tree line, and what happens next takes less than four seconds.

  Hollis comes up behind the left sentry and puts his hand over the man's mouth and drives his knife into the base of the skull where it meets the spine. The blade goes in at an angle, between the first and second cervical vertebrae, and the sentry's legs kick once against the log and his musket slides off his lap and Oakes catches it before it hits the ground. The right sentry turns his head at the sound of boots on pine needles and Fenn's knife goes into the soft tissue under his jaw and up through the floor of his mouth. The blade punches through tongue and palate and the tip stops somewhere behind the man's nose. He makes a wet gurgling noise that lasts about two seconds before Fenn lowers him to the ground and holds him there until the legs stop moving and the blood pooling under his jaw goes still.

  Both sentries dead. No alarm. I signal the blocking teams and they move into the tree line left and right, sixteen men sliding into position to seal the north and west exits before the camp knows it's dying.

  I give them two minutes. Then I stand up and draw Freedom's Edge and walk toward the camp with forty men behind me.

  The north sentry dies next. I don't see it happen but I hear it, a brief scuffle in the dark followed by a sound that could be a man choking on his own blood or could be a boot shifting in wet leaves, and then nothing. The west sentry I don't hear at all, which means Private Yates did it clean.

  「Sentry Elimination: 4/4. No alarm raised. Camp alert status: Unchanged. Proceeding to assault.」

  We're fifty yards from the first sleeping men when a horse on the picket line smells us and whickers. The sound carries across the camp and a Confederate trooper rolls over in his blanket and props himself up on one elbow and squints into the dark toward the horse line, and he's still squinting when the first rank of my assault force steps out of the tree line fifteen yards from where he's lying.

  He sees us. His mouth opens.

  "First Company, forward. Kill them all."

  ◇ ◆ ◇

  What happens in the next six minutes isn't a battle. A battle requires two sides that know they're fighting.

  The front rank hits the sleeping camp at a run. Private Oakes drives his bayonet through a man's blanket and into the chest underneath. The blade enters between the third and fourth ribs on the left side and the steel slides through lung tissue and the man's hands come up and grab the musket barrel and try to push it away, but Oakes has his weight behind the thrust and the bayonet goes deeper and punctures the pericardial sac and the hands lose their grip and slide down the barrel leaving wet red smears and fall into the dirt. The man next to him wakes up to the sound of his tent-mate drowning in his own blood and rolls sideways out of his blanket and gets Oakes's boot on his face before he can stand. The bayonet comes out of the first man with a sucking sound and goes into the second man's throat just below the Adam's apple and the second man's blood sprays up the musket barrel and across Oakes's hands and forearms in a warm arterial jet that steams in the cold night air.

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  The camp comes apart. Men scramble out of blankets and trip over equipment and reach for weapons they can't find in the dark, and my soldiers are among them with bayonets and knives and musket butts, and the killing is close and fast and ugly in a way that doesn't translate to words because words require distance and there is no distance here. A man on the ground reaches for his pistol and a bayonet goes through his wrist and pins it to the dirt and he screams and the scream lasts until a boot comes down on his throat. A Confederate sergeant gets to his feet with his saber drawn and takes two steps toward the nearest Blue Coat before three musket balls hit him in the chest from three different angles. The first ball enters below the left collarbone and exits through the scapula. The second punches through the sternum and fragments inside the chest cavity. The third catches him in the right lung and he sits down hard and looks at the holes in his body with an expression that isn't pain yet, just the brain trying to process damage reports that don't make sense, and then his mouth fills with blood and he falls sideways and doesn't get up.

  I'm in the middle of it with Freedom's Edge in my right hand and a pistol in my left. A trooper comes at me from between two horses that have torn free from the picket line and are bolting through the camp. He's got a carbine up but he's not aiming, just pointing it in my direction and pulling the trigger. The ball goes past my left ear close enough that I feel the heat of it against the skin, and then I'm inside the carbine's reach and Freedom's Edge opens him from hip to sternum in a single upward cut. The blade parts wool, then skin, then the abdominal wall, and his intestines push through the gap before he hits the ground. He lands on his back and his hands go to his stomach and try to hold the wound closed but the incision is eighteen inches long and his hands aren't wide enough to cover it.

  「Freedom's Edge: Kill confirmed. Trooper (Confederate Cavalry). V&R: No change (combat engagement, legitimate target).」

  A knot of Confederates gets organized near the bone-works wagon. Six men, maybe seven, with muskets loaded and a corporal shouting orders that are half-coherent because he's trying to form a firing line while men are dying on both sides of him. They get one volley off. The volley hits three of my men. Private Scully takes a ball in the shoulder. The ball enters through the front of the deltoid and cracks the head of the humerus on its way through, and Scully goes down spinning with his arm hanging at an angle that shoulders don't allow. Corporal Briggs catches one in the thigh and drops to one knee with both hands on the wound and blood running between his fingers. A private whose name I don't know yet goes straight down and doesn't move, and the hole in his face where the ball entered is small but the back of his skull is open and what's inside it is on the ground behind him.

  The volley buys the Confederates four seconds to reload, and four seconds isn't enough because my second squad is already on them from the north flank where the blocking team heard the volley and closed in.

  The fighting at the wagon is the worst of it. Close quarters, bodies pressed between the wagon bed and the horse line, no room to swing a musket or level a bayonet. Sergeant Hollis kills two men in five seconds. The first takes his knife through the left eye, the blade entering the orbital socket and punching through the thin bone at the back into the brain, and the man drops straight down without a sound. The second gets his head driven into the iron rim of the wagon wheel, and the skull fractures on the first impact with a sound I can hear from ten yards away, a wet cracking noise that carries over the screaming and the gunfire and the horses. A Confederate trooper gets both hands around a Blue Coat's throat and the Blue Coat drops his musket and pulls his knife and puts it into the trooper's ribs four times fast, short punching stabs that go in and out between the same two ribs, widening the wound with each stroke until the blade is going in to the handle without resistance. The trooper's hands don't let go of the throat until the fourth stab and then they open and the trooper falls backward into the wagon's undercarriage and hangs there with his boots trailing in the mud and blood running down the wagon spokes in thin lines that drip off the iron rim onto the ground.

  I find the necro-engineer under the wagon, curled into a ball with his hands over his head and a hex-pistol on the ground beside him that he didn't have time to pick up. He's young, younger than Cobb, wearing the gray coat with the black sleeve-bands that mark the Confederate Necromantic Corps, and his hands are shaking so hard that the buckles on his gloves rattle against each other.

  I point Freedom's Edge at his chest. "Is there anything in that wagon that can move?"

  His mouth works but nothing comes out for three seconds. "Two," he manages. "Two revenants, transport stock. They're bound to the wagon's anchor glyph and they can't activate without the command phrase. I swear they're dormant, they're just transport stock, please."

  "Hollis, burn the wagon."

  The necro-engineer starts to say something else and I'm already past him, because six minutes have passed since the first bayonet went in and the fighting is winding down to its final stage: the stage where the men on the losing side realize there's nowhere to run and the men on the winning side realize nobody told them to take prisoners.

  A Confederate officer breaks for the horse line on the south side. He's half-dressed, one boot on, his saber in his hand, and he's running hard for the picketed horses because a man on horseback can outrun infantry in the dark. I raise my pistol and fire. The ball hits him in the back of the left thigh, entering through the hamstring and fragmenting against the femur, and he stumbles but doesn't fall. He makes it three more steps before Corporal Fenn steps out of the tree line where the blocking team has been waiting and puts a bayonet into his chest. The blade enters just below the right clavicle and slides between the ribs and the officer grabs the musket barrel with both hands, the saber falling into the mud, and tries to push himself off the steel. Fenn twists the bayonet a quarter-turn and pulls it free and the officer drops to his knees and stays there, and the blood coming out of the chest wound is dark in the moonlight and it comes in pulses that match his heartbeat and the pulses get weaker and slower until they stop.

  「Battle Complete: Night Raid on Confederate Cavalry Camp. Result: Decisive Victory. Confederate casualties: 94 KIA, 3 captured. Blue Coat casualties: 2 KIA, 7 WIA (1 serious: Pvt. Scully, shoulder). Enemy assets destroyed: 1x bone-works wagon (burned with 2 dormant revenants). Enemy assets captured: 62 horses (usable), 87 carbines, 40 pistols, 2,200 rounds ammunition, 12 days rations (cavalry standard), 1 command tent with dispatches, 3 hex-pistols (Confederate issue, low charge).」

  ◇ ◆ ◇

  The camp smells like blood and gun smoke and burning wood from the bone-works wagon that Hollis lit with a slow match and a handful of dry grass.

  The wagon burns hot because whatever preservative chemicals the Confederate Necromantic Corps uses to keep their revenants transport-ready are flammable, and the two bound dead inside the wagon catch fire and burn with a green-tinged flame that stinks of copper and rotting meat and something underneath both that doesn't belong to any honest fire. The anchor glyph on the wagon bed cracks in the heat and the glyph's light dies and the dead burn the rest of the way down to bone and char without moving, which is better than the alternative.

  I walk the camp while the sergeants count bodies and collect weapons. Ninety-four dead Confederates. Most of them died in their blankets or within three steps of their blankets. Some of them have wounds that say they were awake when it happened: defensive cuts on forearms, hands wrapped around blades that cut them open, faces locked into expressions that got frozen when the body stopped. Most of them just look dead, bundles of cloth and cooling meat that used to be men and aren't anymore, and the blood soaking into the mud around them is already going dark and cold.

  My two dead are Private Lott, who took a musket ball through the face during the volley at the wagon, and Private Innes, who got stabbed by a Confederate who was playing dead and wasn't. Innes killed the Confederate after the knife went into his stomach, which means he died fighting, which means the report will say he died bravely, which is what all the reports say because nobody writes a report that says a man died surprised and bleeding in the mud at two in the morning with six inches of steel in his gut.

  I read the officer's dispatches by the light of the burning wagon. The company commander was a Captain Avery Sills, Third Virginia Cavalry, attached to Colonel Breckinridge's advance screen. His orders are dated two days ago and they tell him to sweep the hill country west of the Chestatee from the river to the Shenandoah road, identify any Federal forces or sympathetic settlements, and report back to the main body at Cold Harbor ford by the end of the week. The orders are signed by Colonel Josiah Tate, commanding Breckinridge's cavalry brigade, and there's a postscript in different handwriting that reads: *By order of General Beauregard, commanding Army of the Confederacy, Western Theater. All Federal remnants to be destroyed on contact. No terms offered.* The General wants us dead, and he's sent Breckinridge ahead to find us.

  「Intel Captured: Confederate dispatches confirm Col. Breckinridge's advance column at Cold Harbor ford (~18 miles east of Lenalune). Cavalry brigade commander: Col. Josiah Tate. Screening operation covers hill country from river to Shenandoah road. Sills's company was one of at least 3 screening elements. Report deadline: 2 days from now. When Sills fails to report, Tate will know something happened in this sector. Estimated reaction time: 24-48 hours after missed deadline. Standing orders from Beauregard: destroy all Federal forces on contact, no terms.」

  Two days. Maybe three if Tate is slow to react and four if Breckinridge has to reorganize his screening pattern. That's the window. After that, the hill country between the Chestatee and the Shenandoah road will have more Confederate cavalry in it than this valley can hide from, and Lenalune won't be able to pretend nobody was ever here.

  "Hollis, get the horses rounded up. Every man who can ride gets a mount, and the rest of the horses carry the supplies and the captured ammunition." I fold the dispatches and put them inside my coat. "We strip this camp clean and we're gone before the fire burns down. The column at Lenalune should be formed up and ready to march by the time we get back."

  "The prisoners, sir?"

  The three captured Confederates are sitting in the mud by the creek with their hands tied behind their backs. Two of them are troopers who surrendered when the blocking team caught them trying to cross the creek. The third is the necro-engineer, who is still shaking and hasn't stopped since I found him under the wagon.

  I use the Gaze.

  「Liberator's Gaze: Prisoner Assessment.」

  「Trooper Wilkes: Loyalty 22/100 (Confederate, fading). Alignment: Neutral. Assessment: Opportunist. Low flight risk if offered alternative.」

  「Trooper Hargrove: Loyalty 48/100 (Confederate, committed). Alignment: Lawful. Assessment: True believer. Won't turn. Flight risk: HIGH.」

  「Necro-Engineer Poole: Loyalty 14/100 (Confederate, nominal). Alignment: Neutral/Lawful (unstable). Assessment: Conscript. Necromantic Corps. Complicit in revenant operations.」

  Here's the part they don't put in the dispatches.

  We can't take prisoners. We're a guerrilla column with four hundred wounded and sixty miles of Confederate-controlled hill country between us and anywhere safe. A prisoner who escapes tells Breckinridge we're here and which direction we're moving and how many we are and what condition we're in. A prisoner who doesn't escape eats our rations and slows our march and requires guards we can't spare. There's no version of this where keeping them doesn't cost us something we can't afford to lose.

  I walk to the creek where they're sitting and I look at each of them and the Gaze tells me what I already know: one of these men might be useful, and the other two are liabilities that will get my soldiers killed if I let sentiment run the decision.

  "Wilkes." The first trooper looks up. He's maybe twenty-five, sunburned, with the calloused hands of a man who's held reins his entire life and held a musket because somebody told him to. "Your war is over if you want it to be. You march with us, you follow orders, you carry a Federal musket. You try to run, you get shot. Decide right now."

  Wilkes looks at the two men sitting beside him in the mud. He looks at the burning wagon and the bodies scattered through the camp and the Blue Coats stripping the dead of everything useful. He looks at me.

  "I'll march," he says, and his voice is steady enough that I believe him.

  "Cut him loose and get him a musket. Put him with Hollis's squad."

  Hargrove knows what's coming. His jaw is set and his eyes are fixed on a point somewhere past my left shoulder and he doesn't blink. Loyalty 48. Confederate to the bone, the kind who believes in what the gray coat means and won't stop believing because a Federal captain told him to. If I let him go he walks straight back to Breckinridge and tells him everything. If I keep him he's a knife in my pocket pointed at my own ribs.

  "Sergeant Hollis."

  Hollis steps forward with his pistol already in his hand. He doesn't ask what I want because he already knows.

  Hargrove spits into the mud. "Get on with it, then."

  Hollis puts the pistol against the back of Hargrove's head and fires. The ball enters the occipital bone and exits through the forehead and Hargrove goes face-first into the mud and doesn't move. The sound of the shot flattens out across the creek bottom and comes back from the far ridge as a single dull echo that fades into the insect noise and the crackle of the burning wagon.

  The necro-engineer starts screaming. He's pulling at his bonds and twisting sideways in the mud and the words coming out of his mouth aren't coherent, just raw noise, the sound of a man who's watched someone die two feet from him and knows he's next.

  Loyalty 14. A conscript. A boy who got handed a gray coat with black sleeve-bands and told to do things to dead men's bodies that would've put him in an asylum before the war started. The Gaze says he's cooperable. The Gaze says his alignment is still forming, still soft enough to reshape.

  But a necro-engineer who builds transport stock for the Confederate army isn't a conscript who held a musket and pointed it where they told him. He's the one who makes the dead walk. He's the reason Creedy and the volunteers on the wall at Fort Independence had to fight men who should've stayed in the ground. Every revenant that walked against our walls was built by someone with Poole's training and Poole's tools and Poole's black sleeve-bands.

  I don't enjoy what happens next. I want that written down somewhere, for whatever the record is worth.

  "Hollis."

  The second shot is quieter than the first, or maybe it just sounds that way because I'm expecting it. Poole falls sideways into the creek and the current takes his blood downstream in a thin red line that thins to pink and then to nothing within twenty yards.

  「V&R: -5 (Execution of prisoners. Military necessity acknowledged. Moral cost applied). Virtue & Reputation: 65/100 (Honored, slipping).」

  Wilkes is standing ten feet away with his newly cut bonds at his feet and a captured musket in his hands and an expression on his face that I've seen on men who've just learned something about the people they're now required to follow. He doesn't say anything, and he doesn't need to. The lesson teaches itself.

  We strip the camp in twenty minutes. Sixty-two horses, eighty-seven carbines, forty pistols, twenty-two hundred rounds of ammunition, three hex-pistols with enough charge left for maybe four shots each, twelve days of cavalry rations, and a set of dispatches that tell me where Colonel Breckinridge is and how long before he knows his scouts are dead.

  I leave ninety-six bodies in the creek bottom for whoever finds them. No burial, no markers, no ceremony. By the time the Confederacy sends someone to look for Captain Sills and his Third Virginia Cavalry, we'll be twenty miles south and moving fast.

  The bone-works wagon burns down to its iron fittings and the revenants inside it burn down to ash and the anchor glyph cracks into pieces that go dark one by one, and by the time we crest the third ridge heading back toward Lenalune the fire behind us is just a red smear in the creek bottom that could be anything and doesn't matter anymore.

  Private Lott's body is wrapped in a blanket and tied across the back of a captured horse. Private Innes is wrapped in his own coat because we ran out of blankets. They ride with us in the dark, and the living men riding beside them don't say a word about it because there's nothing to say that the blankets and the silence aren't already saying.

  ◇ ◆ ◇

  === CAMPAIGN STATE: YEAR 3, DAY 4 (PRE-DAWN) ===

  Location: En route from Confederate camp to Lenalune (returning). Column at Lenalune formed and ready to march at first light.

  Virtue & Reputation: Honored (65/100) [-5: Execution of prisoners]

  Treasury: 124 Dollars

  Army: 485 soldiers (2 KIA: Pvt. Lott, Pvt. Innes. 1 absorbed: Trooper Wilkes, former Confederate)

  - 1st Company: Lt. Phelps. 236 soldiers. Power: 455.

  - 3rd Company: Sgt. Marsh. 238 soldiers. Power: 440.

  - HQ Element: Cpt. Hughes. 10 soldiers + Mercy, Clementine, Decker. Power: 120.

  - Total Combat Power: 1,015. Morale: 52/100 (Steady, boosted by decisive victory).

  - Combat-Effective: 425 (7 new WIA from raid). Non-Combat: 59 (wounded).

  Golems:

  - Gospel: Repair complete. Cold start sequence initiated 0200. Estimated combat-ready: Dawn, Day 4. HP 52%, Shoulder: Functional (field repair, 70% tolerance).

  - Big Greta: Abandoned south bank. Behind Confederate lines.

  - Old Faithful: Destroyed. Temperance: Destroyed. Lazarus: Stripped.

  Hex-Cannon: Mama Thunder (0 hex-shells). Captured: 3x Confederate hex-pistols (low charge, ~4 shots each).

  Captured Assets: 62 horses, 87 carbines, 40 pistols, 2,200 rounds ammunition, 12 days cavalry rations, dispatches (Col. Breckinridge at Cold Harbor ford, ~18 miles east).

  Supplies: 2 weeks half-rations (Lenalune) + 12 days cavalry rations (captured). Ammunition resupplied.

  Wounded: 26 stretcher (stable, pre-existing) + 7 new WIA from raid (1 serious: Pvt. Scully, shoulder). 36 walking wounded (light duty). 1 amputation recovery (Alden).

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