Dearest Martha, there's a stretch of country between Meridian and the Shenandoah road that the maps don't warn you about. The cartographer drew the ridges and the hollows and the creek crossings, and he marked the old roads with dotted lines that suggest a world where people still use them. He didn't mark the places where the dead were raised and the necromancers who raised them were killed and nobody came back to put them down again. He didn't mark those places because nobody who walks through them walks back the same direction to tell the cartographer what he missed.

  We're learning what he missed.

  Give my love to the boy. Tell him his father is still walking south.

  —————

  We leave Meridian at first light on Day 5, and the column that moves south down the cart track is a different animal than the one that arrived yesterday afternoon.

  Four hundred and eighty-seven soldiers in two companies and an HQ element, six new recruits who haven't been issued proper coats yet, two hundred and thirty civilians carrying everything they own on their backs and in handcarts, a twelve-foot war golem walking with her steam vents sealed for overnight cool-down, and a hex-cannon with no ammunition riding on a captured pack horse beside a half-giantess who keeps looking at it the way a soldier looks at a weapon she can't use.

  Phelps has organized the march order with the precision of a man who understands that seven hundred people on a single-wagon road through hill country is a logistics problem before it's a military problem. First Company leads behind Gospel and the scout screen. Civilians in the center with their handcarts and their children and their livestock, what livestock they managed to save, which amounts to eleven goats and a mule that Temperance Albright won't explain the provenance of. Third Company brings up the rear with the wounded, the supply horses, and Mama Thunder. HQ element walks the center where I can see both ends of the column if I climb a ridge, which is never, because the ridges are two hundred feet above the road and the column stretches a quarter mile and I can't see either end from where I'm standing.

  「March Status: Day 5, 0600. Column strength: 487 soldiers + 6 recruits + 230 civilians (723 total). Formation: road march, extended. March rate: 1.4 mph (civilian pace, handcart limited). Direction: south toward Shenandoah road crossing. Distance remaining: 12 miles. Estimated arrival: Day 6, late afternoon. Gospel: cool-down mode, 0 combat minutes available until thermal cycle completes (est. 1400 today). Mama Thunder: 0 hex-shells. Scout screen: Cobb and Ennis, 1 mile ahead on captured horses.」

  The morning air smells like woodsmoke from the fires that are still burning in Meridian's south end, and the civilians walk with the particular silence of people who've left everything they can't carry and are trying not to think about what that means. The children are the loudest thing in the column, because children don't understand that the world ended yesterday and won't understand until they're old enough to remember it as something other than the day they walked a long time with strangers in blue coats.

  ◇ ◆ ◇

  Everett falls in beside me an hour south of Meridian, and he walks with the long, efficient stride of a man who's been covering ground alone for nine days and has learned to match his pace to whatever company he's in without appearing to adjust.

  "You tracked us from the fort." I don't frame it as a question because it isn't one. "Nine days through Confederate-held territory, alone, following a column you weren't certain existed."

  "I was certain enough." He adjusts the satchel on his shoulder, the one that holds Hartwell's maps. "The magazine crater told me the garrison didn't surrender. The tracks heading west told me someone walked out. The count of boot impressions in the mud told me it wasn't a handful of survivors, it was a formation. A formation means an officer, and the only officer Hartwell cared about at Fort Independence was you."

  "What did you see between the fort and here?"

  He's quiet for thirty yards, which is longer than it sounds when you're walking at the pace of a column of refugees. "I saw three burned settlements. Two of them were empty. The third still had people in it, living in the shells of their houses, cooking over open fires in their front yards because the chimneys collapsed. I saw Confederate patrols on the main roads, cavalry mostly, riding in groups of fifteen to twenty with no particular urgency. I saw a bone-works convoy heading north toward the fort, six wagons with a full necromantic detail, and I spent two hours in a ditch forty yards from the road while they passed."

  "And between the roads?"

  "That's where it gets interesting." He steps over a root in the trail without looking down, which tells me he's spent enough time on bad roads to navigate them by feel. "The country between the main routes is emptying out. Farms abandoned. Livestock gone or dead. I passed four homesteads in one day where the doors were open and the furniture was still inside and the food on the table had gone to mold. People left in a hurry or people were taken, and I couldn't tell which from the outside."

  "Taken by who?"

  "Confederate conscription details, some of them. They're pulling men off farms to fill infantry regiments that are short on bodies." He pauses, and the pause has weight to it. "But not all of it. Some of those homesteads had marks on the doorposts. Hex-chalk. The kind of symbols you see around Confederate bone-works sites, but drawn wrong, like someone copied them from memory without understanding the grammar."

  I process that while we walk another fifty yards. "Unaffiliated necromancers."

  "Possibly. Or Confederate deserters from the Necromantic Corps who went independent. Hartwell's scouts have been reporting incidents for months. Settlements raided, bodies taken, livestock killed and drained. Not by any organized force, not with Confederate insignia or orders, just individuals or small groups operating in the spaces between the armies where nobody's watching." He glances at me sideways. "The locals call them corpse-pickers. They raise what they find and use the dead as labor, or as guards, or as currency. There's a market for controlled dead among the bandit groups that operate in the hill country. A man with ten dead soldiers walking behind him doesn't get robbed."

  "How far does that market extend?"

  "Far enough that Hartwell considers it a secondary threat. Not organized enough to be an army. Not disorganized enough to ignore. They prey on refugees mostly, because refugees travel without military escort and carry enough to be worth taking and don't have the firepower to argue." He looks back along the column, at the two hundred and thirty civilians walking in the center of our formation. "Which is why I'm telling you this now, Captain. The road between here and the Shenandoah crossing passes through the kind of country where corpse-pickers operate. Two days at civilian pace, on a cart track through hollows where the ridgeline blocks your sight lines and the tree cover is thick enough to hide a company."

  "We've been through worse terrain."

  "You've been through worse terrain with a combat-ready golem and no civilians. This is different math."

  He's right, and I don't waste time pretending he isn't. The column is strong enough to handle bandits or a small group of unaffiliated dead, but the column is also a quarter mile long on a road that barely fits a wagon, with two hundred and thirty non-combatants in the middle, a golem that won't have combat time available until mid-afternoon, and a hex-cannon that's been a very expensive paperweight since Fort Independence.

  "Tell me about Hartwell's defensive situation." I change the subject because the terrain will present whatever it presents and worrying about it before I can see it is wasted energy.

  "Eight months south of the Shenandoah road with twelve hundred soldiers in three battalions." Everett recites it like he's reading from a report, which he probably is, from memory. "He controls a stretch of river crossings that the Confederacy wants back but doesn't have the forces to take while Breckinridge is committed further north. He's been holding a defensive line along the river, trading space for time, falling back when pressed and counterattacking when the opportunity presents itself. Competent. Methodical. Doesn't waste soldiers."

  "What does he actually need from us?"

  "Numbers. He's been losing soldiers at a rate he can replace with local recruitment, but the replacements aren't trained and the veterans are exhausted. Your column adds four hundred combat-effective soldiers with recent engagement experience, a war golem, and a hex-cannon that his supply convoy can actually feed. That's not a patrol anymore. That's a force that changes the calculation for every Confederate commander within fifty miles."

  "And what does he offer in return?"

  "Supply. Shelter. Intelligence. The four hex-shells are a down payment, not the whole arrangement." Everett meets my eyes directly. "And command independence. Hartwell's letter was specific about that. You report to him for coordination, not subordination."

  "He's Western District. I'm Eastern. He can't give me orders without a formal transfer from Whitcomb."

  "That's the legal reality, yes. And under normal circumstances, that would be the end of the conversation." Everett leans back on the barrel. "But Whitcomb hasn't responded to Federal communication in longer than anyone wants to admit, Captain. Not to Hartwell, not to the Remnant Council, not to anyone. Silence from a district commander long enough is grounds for Hartwell to assume operational authority over any Eastern District assets he encounters. He could force the issue and nobody left in the chain of command would argue the point." He pauses. "He's choosing not to. He wants you to come in willingly, not on a technicality."

  I think about Whitcomb's Eastern District, where I sent eighteen months of requisition forms into a hole that never sent anything back and received one letter in return that said hold position and await further orders, and the further orders never came because Whitcomb had already written Fort Independence off his ledger and reassigned the supply allocation to a unit that still filed reports on schedule.

  "That's a different kind of general," I say, and Everett nods once without elaborating, because the statement doesn't require elaboration.

  ◇ ◆ ◇

  By midday we've covered six miles, which is better than I expected with the civilians and worse than I need to feel comfortable about the remaining distance.

  The terrain south of Meridian changes character around the four-mile mark. The ridges flatten into low hills covered with second-growth hardwood, and the hollows between them widen into valleys where the creek bottoms are thick with alder and willow and the kind of undergrowth that grows fast where the canopy was cleared for farming and then abandoned. The farms themselves are still visible in the landscape if you know what to look for. Stone foundations with charred timber fallen into them. Rail fences half-swallowed by blackberry. An orchard gone wild, the apple trees grown into each other until the branches form a continuous thicket that nothing larger than a rabbit could navigate.

  And the smell.

  It starts faint enough that I think it's coming from the column, from the wounded or the livestock or the latrine situation that develops inevitably when two hundred and thirty civilians who aren't used to marching eat field rations and keep walking. But the smell gets stronger as we move south, and it's not the smell of the living. It's the wet rot stink I know from Fort Independence, the smell of dead flesh that's still moving instead of being allowed to finish breaking down. Sun and rain and six months of exposure have done their work on the meat, but the binding won't let the bones stop, so the rot just keeps going on a body that keeps walking through it.

  Mercy smells it before I say anything. She shifts Mama Thunder on her shoulder, the empty hex-cannon moving from rest position to something closer to ready, which is a reflex she can't do anything useful with because the weapon has no ammunition, but reflexes don't consult the supply manifest before they activate.

  "How old?" she asks.

  "The binding holds the bones together long after the flesh gives up. Six months of weather and the meat's mostly gone, but the glyph doesn't care about meat." I'm scanning the tree line on both sides of the road, and the Gaze is reaching out ahead of me in the way it does when I'm looking for something I'd rather not find. "If there's a battlefield nearby, the bodies were raised and the necromancer either left or died, and nobody came back to burn them."

  Cobb rides back from the scout screen at a canter, and the expression on his face is the expression of a man who's found something he needs to report and isn't happy about what the report contains.

  "Half a mile ahead, Captain. The road drops into a hollow and there's an old camp on the west side. Confederate, by the look of it. Been there a while." He swallows. "There's dead in the tree line. Standing."

  "How many?"

  "I counted fourteen before Ennis pulled me back. They're not moving. They're just standing in the trees about thirty yards off the road, facing different directions, like they don't know where to go." He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. "Some of them are missing pieces. Arms, jaws. One of them doesn't have a head. It's just standing there with its neck ending in a stump and its hands at its sides."

  Feral dead. The anchor glyph that bound them degraded or the necromancer who controlled them was killed, and the binding didn't dissolve cleanly, and the dead were left standing in whatever position they occupied when the signal stopped. They're not dangerous the way controlled dead are dangerous, because they don't have orders and they don't have coordination and they can't form ranks or execute maneuvers. But they respond to stimulus. Noise draws them. Movement draws them. Warmth draws them. And a column of seven hundred living people generates enough noise and movement and warmth to draw every feral corpse within a mile.

  「Liberator's Gaze: Feral Undead. Count: 14+ (additional contacts likely beyond visual range). Binding status: degraded, no active controller. Binding residue: Confederate standard anchor glyph, estimated 4-6 months degraded. Threat level: Low (individual), Moderate (if drawn to column in numbers). Behavior: ambient response to stimuli. No tactical coordination. No ranged capability.」

  "Phelps." I don't raise my voice because the column is close enough to hear panic if I put any into my tone. "Halt the column. Close up the formation. Civilians to the center, tight as you can get them. I want muskets loaded and bayonets fixed on both flanks."

  Phelps begins giving orders before I finish the sentence, because Phelps has been listening to the same information I've got and arrived at the same conclusion two seconds behind me, which is exactly the gap a good lieutenant should maintain.

  The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.

  "Everett." The spy is already watching the tree line with the focused attention of a man who's spent nine days alone in country where the dead walk. "How many reports of feral dead in this area?"

  "Hartwell's scouts documented two abandoned Confederate camps between Meridian and the crossing. One was burned out and cleaned. The other wasn't." He touches the hilt of the knife at his belt. "This is the other one."

  ◇ ◆ ◇

  I take 1st Company forward with Gospel while 3rd Company holds position with the civilians.

  The hollow is a quarter mile long and two hundred yards wide, with steep wooded slopes on both sides and the cart track running along the creek at the bottom. The abandoned Confederate camp occupies a clearing on the west side where someone cut timber for a bivouac and left the stumps and the fire pits and the refuse of a company-sized force that occupied the position for at least a week before moving on or dying. Tent stakes still in the ground. A latrine trench that was never filled. The remains of a bone-works wagon, its iron fittings rusted and its wood rotted, with the anchor glyph on the bed cracked into three pieces that have gone dark but still carry a faint phosphorescent stain where the binding energy leaked into the wood before it died.

  The dead are exactly where Cobb described them. Fourteen Confederate soldiers standing in the tree line on the west slope, arranged in no pattern, facing directions that have nothing to do with threats or objectives. Six months of sun and rain have stripped them down to leather and bone. What flesh remains has dried tight against the skeleton, blackened where the sun hit it and greenish-white where it didn't. Eye sockets empty or clouded over with a film that reflects nothing. Jaws hanging open on tendons dried to cord. Hands holding weapons that have rusted to uselessness, muskets with barrels gone orange and bayonets that would bend before they pierced cloth.

  The headless one stands closest to the road. Its hands open and close in a slow rhythm that has nothing to do with intention and everything to do with the residual nerve impulses that the degraded binding still pushes through dead muscle. Open. Close. Open. Close. The fingers are missing their nails.

  "Mercy." I keep my voice level and specific. "Take a squad with bayonets. Put them down and pile them for burning. Head or spine, nothing else works on a binding this old. And send someone for Clementine. She's got the consecration prayers that prevent re-raising."

  Mercy nods and selects four soldiers from 1st Company, veterans who've fought dead before and understand the specific requirements. A musket ball won't stop feral dead because the binding doesn't care about blood loss or organ damage. You need to sever the connection between the skull and the spine, because that's where the anchor glyph's residual energy concentrates once the primary binding degrades. Head off, or spine cut at the neck. Everything else is wasted effort on a body that doesn't process pain.

  The first one goes down easily. Corporal Fenn steps up behind it with a hatchet and takes the head off at the third cervical vertebra with a single clean stroke, and the body drops like someone cut the strings on a puppet and lies still with a finality that the standing didn't have. The head rolls three feet downhill and stops against a tree root, and the clouded eyes stare at nothing and the jaw works twice more before the last of the binding energy dissipates through the severed neck and the face goes slack.

  The second and third go down the same way. The fourth turns when Fenn approaches it, a slow rotation of the torso toward the warmth and noise of a living body that takes four full seconds to complete, and Fenn steps inside the rotation and puts the hatchet through the back of the skull and the body drops forward onto its face and doesn't move again.

  Seven of them are down and burning in a pile with Clementine's consecration words being spoken over the smoke when the Gaze lights up.

  「Warning: Additional contacts detected. Count: 30+. Direction: south and west slopes. Movement pattern: converging on column position. Speed: slow (degraded binding, impaired mobility). Estimated contact: 4-6 minutes.」

  "Cobb." I don't have time for sentences that waste words. "What's south of this hollow?"

  "The road climbs out through a cut in the ridge. Narrow, maybe eight feet wide, rock walls on both sides for fifty yards."

  "And north?"

  "Open ground back the way we came. The ridge flattens out near the road."

  Thirty or more feral dead converging from two directions on a column that includes two hundred and thirty civilians and a golem that won't have combat time for another two hours. The dead are slow, but slow adds up when the column can't move faster than its slowest member and the road ahead narrows to a gap that's eight feet wide.

  "Phelps, get the civilians moving north. Back up the road, double time, get them out of the hollow and onto the flat ground above the ridge. Third Company escorts. Nobody stops until they're clear of the tree line on both sides."

  Phelps starts running toward the center of the column.

  "Mercy. First Company holds the hollow. We're the cork in the bottle. The dead come to us instead of the civilians." I draw Freedom's Edge and check the load on my pistol. "Bayonet line across the road. We don't need to kill them all, we need to hold them here long enough for the civilians to get clear."

  Mercy sets Mama Thunder against a tree stump, because the hex-cannon is dead weight without shells and she needs both hands free, and she picks up a captured carbine and checks the bayonet attachment with the casual efficiency of a woman who's killed more things with a blade on the end of a stick than most soldiers have killed with bullets.

  "Gospel." I look up at the golem, twelve feet of iron standing in the creek bed with her steam vents sealed and her thermal core cycling through cool-down. She can't fight. The combat timer is empty and the thermal core needs another two hours to complete its cycle. If I push her now, the core overheats and the emergency shutdown engages and I lose her entirely. "Stay behind the line. Don't engage. If one gets past us, step on it, but don't push the core."

  The ground shakes once, which is what Gospel does when she acknowledges an order she doesn't like.

  First Company forms a bayonet line across the road and into the trees on both sides, two hundred and thirty-six soldiers standing shoulder to shoulder with steel at the end of their muskets and the certainty that what's coming through those trees can't be reasoned with or accepted into surrender or marched to the rear as prisoners. The dead don't negotiate. The dead don't surrender. The dead come until you put them down or they put you down, and the distance between those outcomes is measured in the number of heads you can take off before the bodies press you back into the people you're protecting.

  They come through the trees on the west slope first. Thirty-two of them by the Gaze's count, moving in the stumbling, disjointed gait of corpses whose muscles don't fire in sequence anymore. Some of them are wearing gray. Some are wearing blue. Some are wearing the remnants of civilian clothes, which means the necromancer who raised them wasn't choosy about where the bodies came from. They carry no weapons because feral dead drop things when the binding degrades, and their hands are empty and open and grasping at the air in front of them with the same rhythmic flexing as the headless one, the reflex of dead fingers reaching for warmth they can sense but can't understand.

  "Hold." I wait until they're at thirty yards because patience costs nothing and ammunition costs everything when you don't know how many more are coming. "Hold."

  Twenty yards. I can see the damage on them now. The one in front has a bayonet wound in its chest that was never stitched, the edges of the wound pulled apart by six months of gravity until the ribcage is visible through the gap. The one behind it lost its left arm below the elbow, and the stump has dried to something that looks like tree bark. The third has no lower jaw and the tongue hangs from the upper palate like a strip of leather, swaying with each step.

  "Volley. Fire."

  Two hundred muskets discharge at twenty yards into a mass of bodies that can't dodge or duck or go to ground, and the effect is catastrophic to the front rank. Bodies blow apart. Heads disintegrate. Torsos open up and spill whatever dried remnants of organs the binding held in place. The volley drops eleven of them outright, the ones who took head or spine hits, and staggers the rest without stopping them because a musket ball through the chest of a dead man is a hole in a body that doesn't need its chest to keep walking.

  "Bayonets. Take the heads."

  First Company charges.

  The engagement that follows isn't combat in any sense that a tactician would recognize. There's no formation on the enemy side, no coordination, no flanking or fire support or retreat under pressure. There's just dead flesh walking toward living flesh, and living flesh cutting dead flesh apart with bayonets and hatchets and the occasional musket butt swung at a skull with enough force to crack it open. Fenn is the best at it, because Fenn figured out the neck strike during the cleanup of the fourteen and now applies it with mechanical efficiency, stepping past each corpse's reaching arms and putting the hatchet through the spine at the base of the skull with a backhand stroke that separates vertebrae and drops the body in one motion.

  I take two of them myself. The first I shoot through the face at four feet, and the ball enters the left eye socket and exits through the back of the skull and takes enough of the upper spine with it that the body folds. The second grabs my coat before I can reload, and its fingers close on the wool with a grip that has nothing to do with strength and everything to do with the binding's last instruction, which is apparently grab and don't let go. I put Freedom's Edge through its skull above the right ear, and the blade goes through the temporal bone and into the brain cavity and the hand opens and the body drops and the fingers leave four rips in my coat that Clementine is going to lecture me about when she sees them.

  Four minutes. The west slope is clear. Twenty-three feral dead put down, nine still twitching on the ground with non-fatal damage that Mercy's squad is finishing with hatchets and bayonets. First Company has zero casualties, because feral dead without weapons and without coordination aren't a military threat to a disciplined line of soldiers who know where to aim.

  Then the south slope.

  More of them. The Gaze counts forty-one, and these are different. They're moving faster, and they're moving together, and the binding residue on them is brighter than it should be for dead that have been standing in a forest for six months.

  「Warning: Binding signature anomaly. Southern group undead show active necromantic reinforcement. Binding age: recent (hours, not months). Controller detected. Range: 200-300 yards, south-southwest, elevated position.」

  Someone is controlling them.

  Not the Confederate Necromantic Corps, because Confederate necromancers travel with bone-works wagons and military escort and announce themselves with formation tactics and signal bolts. This is something else. Someone who found the feral dead in this hollow and spent the time to rebind them with fresh hex-work, and who is now pushing them down the south slope toward a column of living people with the deliberate coordination of a handler driving livestock toward a pen.

  "Mercy." My voice carries the weight of a man who just watched the tactical situation change from nuisance to threat. "That's not feral. Someone's driving them."

  She's already looking at the south slope, and the hex-cannon against the tree stump is fifteen feet away and has zero shells and she knows it, and the expression on her face is the expression of a woman who's calculating range and trajectory and elevation for a weapon she can't fire and arriving at a number that would solve every problem in front of us if it weren't a theoretical number attached to an empty tube of iron.

  "I need that ridge," she says, pointing south. "Whoever's up there, they're calling the shots."

  "Take ten. Find them. Don't engage alone." I pause. "And Mercy. If they've got dead between you and them, go through."

  She picks up a captured carbine, checks the load, and takes ten soldiers from the far end of the line at a run toward the tree line on the south slope.

  The forty-one dead hit our line thirty seconds later, and these ones have purpose. They don't stumble or wander or reach blindly. They come at the bayonet line with the coordinated pressure of a cattle drive, spreading wide to overlap the flanks and pressing the center with the mass of bodies that don't care about the bayonets going into them because the handler on the ridge doesn't care about losses, only about the result.

  I fight in the line because there's no command decision to make that the lieutenants can't make for themselves, and because forty-one controlled dead pressing a two-hundred-man line is a fight that needs every blade including the captain's. Freedom's Edge takes a head off at the jaw and the body stumbles past me and Fenn finishes it, and I'm already turning to the next one, a dead woman in a blue dress with her arms reaching for my throat and her mouth open on a scream that dried up six months ago and never came out.

  Three minutes of cutting and stabbing and the line holds and the dead fall, but I'm counting the ones Mercy's squad hasn't reached yet on the south slope, and the count keeps climbing because whoever is on that ridge has more than forty-one. The trees on the south slope are moving wrong, the branches shaking in patterns that wind doesn't produce, and the Gaze is giving me numbers I don't want to read.

  「Updated count: 60+ additional contacts emerging from south tree line. Active binding confirmed. Controller maintaining position on southern ridge, estimated 250 yards. Hex-signature: non-standard. Not Confederate military protocol.」

  A hundred dead, at minimum, being driven by a single controller from a ridge two hundred and fifty yards away, funneled into a hollow where my column is split between the soldiers holding the line and the civilians retreating north, and Gospel can't fight and Mama Thunder can't fire and Mercy is somewhere in the trees trying to reach a necromancer whose position I can sense but can't see.

  From the south ridge, the sound of a hex-pistol discharging. Then another. Then Mercy's captured carbine, the flat crack of black powder unmistakable against the whining discharge of hexwork.

  Then a voice, amplified by something I can't identify, rolling down from the ridge and into the hollow with the resonance of a man speaking through dead vocal cords.

  "That's enough, Captain."

  The dead stop. All of them. Mid-stride, mid-reach, mid-step, frozen in place with their arms extended and their empty eyes pointed at the bayonet line that was about to receive them. The silence that follows is the silence of a battlefield where everything that was trying to kill you simply stops, and the only sound is the breathing of living soldiers who don't know yet whether what's happening is a reprieve or a trap.

  "I know who you are." The voice comes from the trees, from the ridge, from the darkness between the trunks where hex-light flickers in patterns I don't recognize. "I know what you're carrying. And I know what the woman with the cannon doesn't have to feed it."

  The Gaze reaches toward the ridge and finds something it can't fully resolve, a figure wrapped in necromantic residue so thick that the alignment reading returns as static, the first time the Gaze has failed to produce a clean read since I've had it.

  「Liberator's Gaze: Target obscured. Necromantic interference preventing alignment/loyalty read. Class: Unknown. Threat level: Significant. Note: This is the first instance of Gaze obstruction. Possible counter-measure or extreme necromantic saturation.」

  From the south slope, the sound of Mercy's voice, distant but clear: "Captain! I've got eyes on him! One man, heavy hex-work, elevated position, sixty yards south of me! He's got a dead line between us, twenty or more, and they're active!"

  The voice from the ridge laughs, and the laugh sounds like it was recorded a long time ago and is being played back through equipment that wasn't designed for the purpose.

  "Tell your half-giant to stay where she is, Captain. I didn't come to fight you. I came to talk." A pause that carries the weight of someone who knows exactly what they're holding and what you aren't. "I came to sell you something you need, and I know you need it because I've been watching your column since Meridian, and that beautiful cannon hasn't fired once."

  Silence in the hollow. The dead standing frozen. First Company's bayonets dripping with the residue of the twenty-three they already put down. Gospel's thermal core humming behind the line, unable to fight, unable to help. And a necromancer on a ridge who knows too much about my logistics and wants to have a conversation about it.

  I sheathe Freedom's Edge because a drawn weapon says one thing and what I need to say is something else.

  "I'm listening."

  —————

  === CAMPAIGN STATE: YEAR 3, DAY 5 (MIDDAY) ===

  Location: Unnamed hollow, 6 miles south of Meridian. Cart track toward Shenandoah crossing.

  Virtue & Reputation: 75/100 (Honored)

  Treasury: 124 Dollars

  Army: 493 soldiers (487 + 6 recruits)

  1st Company: Lt. Phelps. 236 soldiers. Engaged, 0 casualties. Holding bayonet line.

  3rd Company: Sgt. Marsh. 240 soldiers. Escorting civilians north, out of hollow.

  HQ Element: Cpt. Hughes. 11 soldiers + Mercy (detached with 10-man squad), Clementine, Decker.

  Total Combat Power: 995. Morale: 58/100 (Confident, steady under pressure).

  Attached Civilians: 230 (Meridian refugees). Moving north under 3rd Company escort. Leader: Temperance Albright.

  Golems:

  Gospel: Cool-down mode. 0 combat minutes. Thermal cycle completes est. 1400 (2 hours). HP 52%.

  Hex-Cannon: Mama Thunder (0 hex-shells). 4 hex-shells at Federal rendezvous (still 6 miles south).

  Engagement: 23 feral dead destroyed. 41 controlled dead halted by unknown necromancer. 60+ additional controlled dead in southern tree line, held in place. Total hostile undead in hollow: 100+.

  NEW THREAT: Unaffiliated necromancer. Male, solo, heavy hex-work. Controls 100+ rebound dead. Gaze can't read alignment (first observed Gaze obstruction). Has been observing column since Meridian. Knows Mama Thunder is empty. Wants to negotiate. Not Confederate military.

  Mercy's Position: Detached with 10 soldiers on south slope. 60 yards from necromancer. Dead line between her and target.

  Hughes Level: 22 (XP pending)

  Cumulative KIA: 153 soldiers + 11 civilians. Today: 0.

  ======================================