Robert Kane - The Foundry District

The shells came in lazy arcs that morning, you could watch them rise over the eastern wall like black birds, and Kess marked each impact on the acetate overlay with a red dot. Three hits on the main furnace building. Two in the slag yard. One that took out half of Meridian Street including the tavern where the night shift boys used to drink off their burns.

“You getting this down accurate?” Drum squatted beside the overturned cart they were using for cover, his rifle across his knees like he was hunting rabbits instead of waiting for the Tertian advance scouts.

“Every crater.” Kess pulled another overlay from the leather satchel, this one marked FOUNDRY DISTRICT - TACTICAL, and began transferring the morning’s damage. “Your Tambor was right about the furnace. They’re targeting the heat signatures.”

“Tambor knows his business.” Drum spit into the ash that covered everything now, three days of shelling had turned the district into a gray wasteland that crunched underfoot like snow. “Forty years feeding those flames, he can tell you which pipe carries steam and which carries death.”

The boy Vel came running between the ruined buildings, dodging shell fragments and twisted metal, his face black with soot except for the clean tracks his tears had made. “Drum, they’re coming up through the drainage canal. Tambor says maybe twenty men, moving quiet.”

“Moving quiet.” Drum smiled but there wasn’t anything pleasant in it. “Tertian regulars don’t know quiet from a brass band. Must be irregulars like us.” He looked at Kess still bent over the map. “Your drains marked on there?”

“Every one.” Kess traced a blue line with one finger. “Main trunk runs right under the casting floor. They come up there, they’ll have cover and high ground.”

“They come up there, they’ll have hot metal for breakfast.” Drum was already moving, motioning for Vel to follow. “You mark where we go, mapmaker. Someone ought to know how this played.”

Tambor was waiting by the furnace controls, a man shaped like a barrel with arms like bridge cables, his face scarred by forty years of flying sparks. “They’re down there now,” he said to Drum. “I can hear them in the pipes. Maybe ten minutes before they reach the access point.”

“Can you flood the tunnel?”

“With what? Water’s been cut since yesterday.”

“Not water.” Tambor’s grin showed teeth like broken glass. “We got twelve tons of molten iron needs somewhere to go.”

Kess looked up from the map. “The drain feeds into the river. You flood that tunnel, you’ll kill everything downstream for miles.”

“Everything downstream is already dead,” Drum said. “Or it will be when those boys come up shooting.”

The first explosion shook the building, and through the cracked windows you could see Tertian uniforms moving between the slag heaps, advancing in the textbook pattern Drum had taught them to recognize. Bounding overwatch, one team covering while the other moved, professional and deadly.

“Now would be good, Tambor.”

The foreman’s hands moved over controls he could operate blind, valves opening with metallic screams, and the sound that came from below was like the earth dying. Steam and smoke poured from every drain opening, and the men who’d been creeping through the tunnel never made another sound.

Vel was at the window with Drum’s field glasses. “Jesus. The river’s glowing.”

“Mark it,” Drum told Kess. “Mark all of it.”

So Kess marked it, the red overlay showing the Tertian advance positions, the blue showing the drainage system, and now a new color, orange for the molten death flowing beneath Valdris toward the harbor. Each mark was precise, careful, because someone had to remember how it really happened.

“They’ll come again,” Tambor said, watching the Tertian squads pull back from the glowing river. “Different way next time.”

“Let them come.” Drum was cleaning his rifle with the mechanical precision of a man who’d done it ten thousand times. “We know this place. Every pipe, every shadow, every way in and out.”

“For now.” Kess rolled up the completed overlay and sealed it in the waterproof case. “Until there’s nothing left to know.”

Outside, the shells were falling again, and the map of the Foundry District grew a little smaller with each red dot.

The mansions stood empty with their doors hanging open like mouths, and Kess moved through the Merchant Quarter marking each building’s condition on the survey sheets. Looted, burned, intact but abandoned. The categories were simple but the stories they told weren’t.

“Look at this.” Vel held up a silver candlestick from the Margrave house, heavy enough to brain a man. “Just sitting on the table like they’re coming back for dinner.”

“They ain’t coming back.” Drum kicked through scattered papers, bills of lading and promissory notes that had meant everything a week ago and now wouldn’t light a decent fire. “Rich folks got boats. Got places to run to.”

The Tertians had pulled back after the foundry, regrouping beyond artillery range, but their scouts still moved through the outer districts at night. Kess had tracked their movements on the tactical overlay, red arrows showing probe patterns, the slow methodical tightening of professional siege work.

“Check the library,” Kess said. “Margrave collected maps, old surveys of the river approaches.”

They found the library untouched, leather-bound volumes still neat on their shelves while everything else in the house lay scattered. Even looters respected books they couldn’t read. Kess pulled down atlases and survey records, most dating back fifty years to when Valdris was just a trading post with pretensions.

“Here.” The map was hand-drawn on vellum, showing the city when the Merchant Quarter was still farmland. “Look at the streets. They follow old property lines, not tactical considerations.”

Drum studied the ancient boundaries, creeks filled in and hills leveled for construction. “Means what?”

“Means the Tertians don’t know about the old Kellerman tunnel. Runs from the cathedral crypt to the wine cellars under Provision Street.” Kess traced the route with a finger. “Built during the Succession Wars, when the merchants needed somewhere to hide their gold.”

“Still open?”

“Only one way to find out.”

Tambor found them in the basement of the Kellerman mansion, trying to move a wine rack that had been built to look permanent. “Tertians are moving,” he said. “Coming up Merchant Row in captured uniforms, maybe a dozen men.”

“Our uniforms?” Drum asked.

“City Watch. They got the armbands right, but they march like soldiers.”

“How long?”

“Ten minutes if they keep to the street. Five if they cut through the gardens.”

The wine rack moved aside to reveal a tunnel entrance, stone blocks fitted so tight you could barely see the mortar lines. The air that came up smelled of earth and old fear.

“Vel, you stay here. Anyone comes through that door ain’t us, you put them down.” Drum handed the boy a captured Tertian rifle, bolt-action with a scope. “You know how to use this?”

“Point and squeeze.” Vel’s voice tried to sound steady and almost made it. “I got it.”

Kess led them into the tunnel, moving by feel more than sight, the ancient passage sloping down toward the cathedral district. The maps had shown this route but maps couldn’t show the way sound carried in the dark, footsteps echoing off stone that had been laid when Valdris was young.

“Stop.” Drum’s hand on Kess’s shoulder, his voice barely a whisper. “You hear that?”

Voices ahead, speaking Tertian field dialect. They’d found the tunnel from the other end.

“Back up,” Drum breathed. “Slow and quiet.”

But as they tried to retreat, the sound of rifle fire came from behind them, single shots from Vel’s position. The boy was earning his keep.

“Forward then.” Drum drew his sidearm, the click of the safety loud in the confined space. “No choice now.”

The tunnel widened into a chamber carved from living rock, and the Tertian squad had their backs to them, focused on the entrance ahead. Professional soldiers, but they’d made the amateur mistake of not securing their rear.

Drum’s first shot took their sergeant, Tambor’s second dropped the radioman, and then it was close work with knives and gun butts in the echoing dark. When it was over, Kess sat against the stone wall and marked the engagement on the tactical overlay with hands that shook only a little.

“Mark them dead,” Drum said, checking the bodies. “All of them.”

“Already done.” Kess looked at the tunnel that led back toward Vel’s position. “The boy?”

“We’ll know soon enough.”

They found Vel behind the overturned dining table, the Tertian rifle empty beside him, three enemy dead in the doorway. The boy had a crease along his scalp that leaked blood into his eyes, but he was grinning like he’d won a prize.

“They came in talking our language,” he said. “But their boots were wrong. Tertian issue, with the hobnails.”

“Good eye.” Drum helped him to his feet. “You’ll do.”

Kess updated the maps, marking the tunnel as compromised, the mansion as fought over, the street approaches as known to enemy scouts. Each mark was a story, each story was a small death, and the Merchant Quarter grew a little emptier with every entry.

“They’ll try the University next,” Tambor said, looking at the patterns on Kess’s overlay. “Books burn easy, and students don’t fight back.”

“Students, no.” Drum shouldered his rifle and looked toward the spires visible over the rooftops. “But professors got tenure. They might surprise you.”

The harbor stank of dead fish and diesel fuel, black water lapping against hulks that had been merchant vessels three days ago. Kess crouched behind a loading crane and sketched the tide patterns on water-stained paper, noting how the current carried bodies toward the eastern breakwater.

“Refugees tried to swim for it last night,” Drum said, watching through field glasses as Tertian patrol boats worked the channel. “Maybe thirty of them. Maybe more.”

The morning tide had brought them back.

Tambor spat into the oily water. “Fools. That water’s been poisoned since the foundry drain hit it. Touch that current, you’re dead in minutes.”

“They knew.” Vel sat on a coil of rope thick as a man’s waist, cleaning his rifle with the careful attention Drum had taught him. “They just didn’t care anymore.”

Kess marked the patrol patterns, the way the Tertian boats swept back and forth like pendulums, methodical and patient. The enemy had all the time in the world. They owned everything outside the walls now, and they knew hunger would do their work for them.

“Tide charts,” Kess said, pulling folded papers from the map case. “If we time it right, we can put swimmers in the water during the shift change. Thirty minutes when the patrols overlap and leave gaps.”

“Swimmers to where?” Drum lowered the glasses. “Every boat in the harbor’s been holed or burned. Every pier’s got Tertian spotters.”

“Not every pier.” Kess traced a finger along the old charts, showing depths and approaches that predated the modern harbor. “Coal pier, out past the grain elevator. Built for shallow-draft barges, abandoned when they dredged the main channel.”

Tambor squinted toward the ruins of the industrial district. “That pier’s been underwater for twenty years.”

“At high tide. But these are spring tides, lower than usual. Should be enough clearance for small boats.”

A shell whistled overhead, impacting somewhere in the University district with a crump that rattled the crane’s metal framework. The Tertians were methodical about their bombardment too, working through the city district by district like clerks processing paperwork.

“Small boats from where?” Vel asked.

“Harbor master’s office. They kept emergency launches for rescue work.” Kess showed him the location on the survey map. “Rigid hulls, designed to handle rough water.”

“If they’re still there.”

“Only one way to know.”

They moved along the waterfront in bounds, using the burned-out warehouses for cover, Drum always watching the patrol boats while Tambor navigated the rubble by memory. The old foreman knew every building, every alley, forty years of shift changes had burned the routes into his brain.

The harbor master’s office was a concrete bunker built to survive storms and apparently tough enough to handle artillery. The launches were still there, four of them chained to a floating dock that rose and fell with the contaminated tide.

“Engines?” Drum asked.

Tambor checked the first boat, running his hands over the motor housing with professional competence. “This one’s good. Maybe that one too. Others are scrap.”

“Fuel?”

“Diesel tank’s half full. Enough for maybe twenty miles in calm water.”

Vel was watching the patrol boats through a crack in the harbor office wall. “They’re turning. Coming back on their sweep.”

“How long?”

“Five minutes. Maybe six.”

Kess worked on the charts, calculating distances and currents, marking safe approaches to the neutral zones upriver. The math was simple but the variables were deadly. Current speed, fuel consumption, enemy response time, and the thirty variables that couldn’t be calculated.

“We could take maybe eight people,” Tambor said. “Any more, we’ll be too low in the water.”

“Eight people out of how many left?” Drum’s question hung in the air like smoke.

They all knew the numbers. Three thousand civilians when the siege started, maybe eight hundred now. The rest had fled, died, or disappeared into the tunnels and cellars that honeycombed Valdris like a diseased lung.

“The children go first,” Kess said. “That’s not negotiable.”

“Children can’t row,” Vel pointed out. “Can’t fight if we get intercepted.”

“Children go first,” Kess repeated, and there was something in the mapmaker’s voice that made Drum look up from his weapon check.

“You got children in this?”

“Had.” Kess folded the charts with mechanical precision. “They’re waiting at the cathedral now. Three of them, ages six to twelve. Their parents didn’t make it past the foundry.”

Tambor was coiling rope, preparing the boats for launch. “Cathedral’s two miles from here. Through University district, where the shelling’s been heaviest.”

“Then we better move fast.”

The patrol boat was closing, its wake spreading in a white V across the poisoned harbor. They could hear its engine now, the steady throb of diesel pushing steel through water that glowed faintly in the afternoon light.

“Tonight,” Drum decided. “Low tide at 0200, patrol change at 0230. We bring the kids here, launch in the gap, and pray the engines don’t cough.”

Kess marked it all on the tactical overlay, the routes and timing, the tidal calculations and fuel estimates. Each mark was hope measured against mathematics, and the harbor chart grew a little more desperate with every notation.

“Mark this too,” Vel said, pointing toward the eastern breakwater where something white bobbed in the current. “So someone knows they tried.”

So Kess marked that too, another small cross on a map that was becoming a monument to things that couldn’t be calculated.

The University burned from the inside out, philosophy texts feeding flames that climbed toward heaven like prayers nobody was answering. Kess moved through the quad with the survey sheets, marking which buildings still stood and which had become monuments to all the useless knowledge in the world.

“Tambor.” Drum’s voice carried across the courtyard where marble statues of dead scholars watched their life’s work turn to ash. “Tambor, where are you?”

But Tambor wasn’t anywhere anymore. The sniper’s bullet had found him reading graffiti on the Mathematics building wall, some student’s joke about infinite series that would never be finished now. He’d been laughing when the shot took him, and his face still held the expression like he’d figured out the punchline to a joke nobody else would ever hear.

“Goddamn it.” Vel knelt beside the body, his young face working through emotions he didn’t have names for yet. “He was just reading the wall.”

“He was silhouetted against white stone in broad daylight.” Drum scanned the surrounding buildings through his rifle scope, looking for muzzle flash that wouldn’t come again. “Professional sniper doesn’t give you a second chance.”

Kess sketched the sight lines on the tactical overlay, marking the probable shooting positions, the angles that would put a bullet through a man’s head while he contemplated academic humor. The mathematics were simple once you reduced human life to geometry.

“Library’s still intact,” Vel said, trying to find something positive in the ruins of higher learning. “Maybe the maps you wanted are still there.”

They moved toward the history building in tactical bounds, covering each other like Drum had taught them, but keeping low felt like desecrating hallowed ground. This had been a place where people came to think great thoughts, and now it was just another place where people came to die efficiently.

The library reading room was untouched, afternoon sunlight streaming through tall windows onto wooden tables where open books waited for readers who would never return. Kess found the cartography section and pulled down volumes that chronicled Valdris through two centuries of growth and war.

“Here.” The siege map from 1847 showed defensive positions, sally ports, the underground passages that connected key buildings. “They held out for eight months that time.”

“How’d it end?” Drum asked, though his tone suggested he already knew.

“Starvation. The defenders opened the gates rather than watch the children die.”

Vel was at the window, watching smoke rise from the cathedral district. “Maybe that’s not the worst way.”

“Maybe not.” Kess traced the old tunnel system with one finger, noting how it connected to the modern storm drains. “But maybe we’re not done fighting yet.”

A shell landed in the quad outside, close enough to rattle the windows and shower them with plaster dust. The Tertians were walking their fire across the campus, methodical as always, destroying knowledge with the same professional competence they brought to destroying everything else.

“Time to move,” Drum said.

They gathered the useful maps and headed for the basement levels, where the building’s foundations merged with older stonework. The tunnels from 1847 were still there, carved from living rock by desperate men who’d understood that sometimes civilization had to go underground to survive.

“This connects to the cathedral crypt,” Kess said, consulting the overlay. “But it’s been sealed for decades. We’ll need to break through.”

“I got some ideas about that.” Drum patted the demolition charges he’d salvaged from Tertian sappers, men who’d died trying to mine the foundry walls. “Chemistry department probably has what we need to make them work better.”

They found the chemistry lab on the second floor, glassware still neat on the shelves despite the shelling. Vel gathered acids and accelerants while Drum worked on the charges, mixing military explosives with academic chemicals in combinations that would have earned him a degree in applied destruction.

“Fire in the hole,” he called, and the blast that followed opened the sealed tunnel like a flower blooming in reverse.

The passage beyond was older than the university, older than the siege maps, carved when Valdris was just a fortress on a hill and learning meant knowing which end of a sword to hold. They followed it toward the cathedral district, guided by maps drawn in blood and desperation.

“Tambor would have liked this,” Vel said, his voice echoing off stone walls. “Underground, where the sniper can’t see you.”

“Tambor’s done with liking anything,” Drum replied, but there wasn’t anger in it, just the flat acceptance of a man who’d buried too many friends to waste energy on grief.

Kess marked their route on the survey sheet, adding another layer to the palimpsest of Valdris at war. The tunnel system was more extensive than the old maps showed, generations of defenders had expanded it, each siege adding new passages like rings on a tree.

The cathedral crypt was full of refugees when they emerged, families huddled between stone tombs that had been carved for bishops and merchants, for people who’d died in beds instead of streets. The children Kess had mentioned were there, three small faces that looked up with the hollow-eyed trust of those who’d learned that adults were just taller targets.

“We can get eight people to the boats,” Kess told them. “Children first, then whoever can help row.”

“Eight people,” said a woman holding a baby that cried with the thin wail of starvation. “Out of sixty.”

“Eight more than yesterday,” Drum pointed out. “Eight more than tomorrow if we don’t move.”

So they chose, because choosing was what you did when mathematics met mortality and there wasn’t enough mercy to go around. The children, the woman with the baby, two men young enough to handle oars and desperate enough to try.

Kess updated the survey sheets, marking the cathedral as refugee shelter, the tunnel system as operational, the sniper positions as active threats. Each notation was precise, professional, because someone had to document how civilization came apart one careful measurement at a time.

Above them, the University continued burning, and the smoke that rose carried the dreams of dead scholars toward a sky that didn’t care about education or hope or the mathematical certainty that eight was infinitely better than zero.

The cathedral bells had been silent for six days, their bronze tongues stilled by Tertian counter-battery fire, but the tower still offered the best view of the city’s death. Kess climbed the spiral stairs with the survey equipment, each step taking them higher above the smoke and closer to God’s indifferent eye.

“Movement in the Government Quarter,” Vel called from the eastern window, his young voice carrying the professional calm of someone who’d learned to measure horror in degrees. “Maybe a full company, moving toward the Old Town.”

Drum was at the western opening, watching through field glasses as the last civilian boat tried to make the harbor run. The Tertian patrol craft were closing like wolves, their wakes white against the poisoned water. “They won’t make it.”

“Mark it anyway,” Kess said, sketching the boat’s position on the nautical chart. “Someone should know they tried.”

The cathedral below them was full of the faithful and the desperate, people who’d come seeking sanctuary and found only postponement. Father Mendez still held services, his voice echoing off stone walls that had heard eight centuries of prayers and were no more sacred now than the rubble in the streets.

“Blasphemy,” the priest had said when Drum’s unit first occupied the bell tower, bringing weapons into the house of God. But he’d stopped objecting when the Tertian shells started falling on the refugee camps, when it became clear that God helped those who helped themselves to military hardware.

“There.” Kess pointed toward the Old Town, where smoke was rising from buildings that had stood since Valdris was founded. “They’re burning the archives.”

“Smart.” Drum collapsed his field glasses and checked his rifle. “History’s dangerous to occupying armies. Better to start fresh with their version.”

The archives held the city’s memory, land grants and tax rolls, birth certificates and death records, the bureaucratic DNA of eight hundred years of human struggle. Now it was going up in smoke that smelled of parchment and broken promises.

“My maps are in there,” Kess said quietly. “Forty years of survey work. The complete cartographic record of the river delta.”

“Were in there.” Vel was still watching the Government Quarter, tracking enemy movement with the methodical attention Drum had beaten into him. “Past tense now.”

A shell whistled overhead, close enough to shake the tower’s ancient stones. The Tertians were ranging in on the cathedral, drawn by the military activity in the bell tower or maybe just following their systematic plan to flatten everything that stood taller than a man.

“Time to relocate,” Drum said, but as they gathered their equipment, the sound of rifle fire echoed from the nave below. Not the distant crack of sniper work, but the rapid hammering of close combat.

“They’re inside,” Vel said unnecessarily.

They could hear boots on stone, orders shouted in Tertian field dialect, the screams of civilians caught between consecrated walls and unholy violence. Father Mendez’s voice rose above the chaos, Latin prayers mixing with gunfire in a liturgy of desperation.

“Tunnel,” Drum said, pointing toward the passage that connected to the old wine cellars. “Move.”

But Kess was still at the window, still sketching positions on the survey sheet with hands that remained steady despite the chaos below. “The Tertians are using the main entrance. Two squads, maybe three. They don’t know about the crypt passage.”

“They will when they start searching.”

“Then we better make sure they don’t get the chance.”

Drum looked at the mapmaker for a long moment, reading something in Kess’s face that went deeper than tactical assessment. “This is personal for you.”

“Everything’s personal now.”

They could hear the Tertians working through the cathedral systematically, searching pews and confessionals, the efficient brutality of soldiers who’d done this work before. Father Mendez’s voice had stopped, which meant either surrender or something worse.

“Grenades,” Drum said, checking his remaining demolition charges. “We can drop them from here, clear the nave, give the civilians time to reach the tunnels.”

“And bring down the whole tower,” Vel pointed out. “This stonework’s older than gunpowder. It wasn’t built for explosions.”

“Nothing was built for this,” Kess said, updating the tactical overlay with calm precision. “But we work with what we have.”

The rifle fire below was sporadic now, mop-up work as the Tertians secured their prize. Soon they’d start on the tower, climbing the same spiral stairs that had carried eight centuries of bell-ringers and altar boys and mapmakers who’d thought their work would outlast the wars.

“Drop one charge,” Drum decided. “Not to bring down the tower, but to convince them it’s not worth the climb.”

He armed the explosive and leaned out over the nave, judging angles and blast radii with the professional competence of a man who’d learned demolition in harder schools than any university. The charge fell like a metal prayer, and the explosion that followed shook dust from stones that had been fitted when the world was young.

The screaming stopped, replaced by the groans of wounded men and the settling sounds of masonry finding new configurations. When the smoke cleared, the Tertians were pulling back, dragging their casualties toward exits that might or might not still exist.

“They’ll be back,” Vel said, watching the retreat through gaps in the ancient stonework.

“Maybe.” Kess folded the completed survey sheets and sealed them in the waterproof case. “But not today.”

Below them, the cathedral held its breath, and the smoke that rose from the Government Quarter carried the memory of a city that was learning to die one district at a time. The bells remained silent, but the tower still stood, and sometimes that was victory enough.

The Government Quarter had been the city’s brain once, all marble columns and brass nameplates where clerks in pressed uniforms processed the paperwork that kept civilization running. Now the Mayor’s office was a crater, the Tax Bureau was rubble, and Kess moved through the ruins updating survey sheets that documented the death of bureaucracy.

“Records office is gone,” Vel reported from what used to be the Department of Public Works. “Nothing left but ash and melted file cabinets.”

Drum was examining a pile of documents that had blown from the burning archives, singed papers that fluttered in the hot wind like dying birds. “Military requisition forms. Supply manifests. Someone was keeping careful track of how much this siege was costing.”

“Past tense,” Kess said, sketching the blast patterns on the damage assessment overlay. “Everything’s past tense now.”

The Tertians had pulled back to consolidate their gains, but their artillery kept working, methodical as a metronome. Every twenty minutes another shell screamed over the walls, impact coordinates calculated by men who reduced destruction to mathematics. Kess understood that precision, had once practiced the same clinical attention to detail.

“You never said what you did before.” Vel was cleaning his rifle with the obsessive care of someone who’d learned that dirty weapons meant dead friends. “Before the maps, I mean.”

“Same thing.” Kess pulled a surveyor’s transit from the equipment case, the brass instrument unmarked by the violence that had claimed everything else. “Just for different people.”

“Which people?”

“The ones with better uniforms.”

Drum looked up from the scattered papers, his expression unreadable. “You mapped for the Tertians.”

“I mapped for the Royal Cartographic Service. The Tertians were clients, not employers.” Kess began setting up the transit, adjusting the leveling screws with practiced efficiency. “Before the war, everybody was somebody’s client.”

“And during the war?”

“During the war, I learned that maps don’t choose sides. People do.”

A shell impacted three blocks away, in what used to be the Planning Commission building. The sound echoed off the remaining walls like thunder, and dust rose in a column that caught the afternoon light. Kess noted the time and location on the artillery plot, adding another data point to the pattern of systematic destruction.

“They’re walking fire toward the Old Town,” Vel observed. “Softening up for the final push.”

“Maybe.” Drum was studying a half-burned requisition form, squinting at the watermarked letterhead. “Or maybe they’re looking for something specific.”

He showed them the document, scorched but readable. Emergency Authorization. Priority Immediate. Subject: Cartographic Survey - Strategic Tunnel Systems. The signature at the bottom was smeared but recognizable to anyone who’d worked for the Royal service.

“That’s your signature,” Drum said.

“Was.” Kess adjusted the transit’s focus, bringing the distant targets into sharp relief. “Three years ago, when the Tertians hired us to map the old defensive works. Standard commercial survey, nothing classified.”

“Nothing classified.” Drum’s voice held the flat calm of a man processing betrayal. “You gave them the tunnel maps.”

“I gave them what they paid for. Historical survey data, architectural drawings, the kind of information you could get from any municipal archive.” Kess swiveled the transit toward the Old Town, measuring angles and distances with mechanical precision. “I didn’t know they were planning to use it for this.”

“Didn’t know or didn’t care?”

“Both. Neither. Does it matter now?”

Vel was watching them argue, his young face working through implications that kept getting worse. “The tunnels we’ve been using. The ones that saved us at the University, at the cathedral. They know about all of them.”

“They know about the ones I surveyed.” Kess made a final adjustment to the instrument and began recording bearings. “But cities are like icebergs. Most of what matters is hidden below the official records.”

“Hidden where?”

“That’s what we’re going to find out.”

The transit showed what maps couldn’t capture, the subtle relationships between surface structures and underground spaces, the way buildings settled and foundations shifted over centuries of use. Kess worked through the calculations, cross-referencing elevation data with historical construction records, looking for gaps in the official survey that might mean passages in the unofficial reality.

“Here.” The measurement pointed toward a subsidence in the Old Town, a barely visible depression where Foundry Street met the ancient city wall. “The elevation’s wrong. Should be two meters higher based on the original grade.”

“Means what?”

“Means there’s empty space down there. Big empty space, not on any of the maps I drew for the Tertians.”

Drum folded the requisition form and tucked it into his jacket pocket. “How do we get to it?”

“Same way people have been getting to secret places for eight hundred years.” Kess collapsed the transit and packed it away with the same care a priest might show handling sacred relics. “We follow the money.”

The old Customs House was still standing, its thick walls scarred by shell fragments but intact enough to provide cover. They moved through the wreckage of maritime bureaucracy, past ledgers that recorded cargoes from cities that might not exist anymore, toward the basement levels where the real business had always been conducted.

“Smuggler’s tunnel,” Kess explained, pointing to irregularities in the foundation stonework. “Every port city has them. Officials pretend they don’t exist, merchants pretend they don’t use them, everyone pretends the tax revenue isn’t important.”

The hidden passage opened behind a false wall that had been disguised as structural support, clever masonry that had fooled inspectors for generations. The tunnel beyond was older than the Government Quarter, older than most of the city, carved when Valdris was young and corruption was still an art form.

“Where does it go?” Vel asked.

“Away from here,” Kess said, consulting compass bearings that pointed toward safety or death with equal mathematical precision. “That’s all that matters now.”

They descended into darkness that smelled of centuries and secrets, leaving behind the ruins of official power for the older, more reliable authority of human greed. Behind them, the Government Quarter continued burning, and the smoke that rose carried the last remnants of a bureaucracy that had kept careful records right up until there was nothing left to record.

The Old Town had been dying before the siege started, narrow streets and crooked buildings that belonged to another century, but now it was dying faster. Kess moved through alleys that twisted like broken fingers, marking structures on the historical survey with notations that read like obituaries.

“They’re not shelling anymore,” Vel said, crouched behind a fountain that had run dry three days ago. “Why aren’t they shelling?”

“Because they want it intact.” Drum was studying the Tertian positions through field glasses, watching soldiers who moved with the careful precision of men following specific orders. “Something in here they need.”

The Old Town was where Valdris had started, when it was just a fortress on a hill and the river was highway instead of sewer. The buildings leaned against each other like drunks, connected by passages and bridges that formed a three-dimensional maze nobody had ever properly mapped.

“The Mint,” Kess said, pointing toward a squat stone building that squatted like a toad among the medieval architecture. “Built on the original foundation, where they coined the first Valdris currency.”

“So?”

“So the Royal Treasury maintains emergency reserves in all the old mints. Gold, silver, bearer bonds. The kind of portable wealth that makes occupying armies very interested in preservation.”

They could hear the Tertians now, moving through the streets with the methodical care of men conducting a search instead of a battle. Boots on cobblestones, orders called in voices that carried the authority of approaching victory.

“How much wealth?” Vel asked.

“Enough to fund a government in exile. Or buy passage to places where this war doesn’t matter.” Kess consulted the architectural drawings, noting the discrepancies between official blueprints and actual construction. “Maybe enough to make someone forget which side they were mapping for.”

“Is that what this is about?” Drum lowered the field glasses and looked at Kess with something that might have been understanding. “The maps you gave them, they didn’t include the Mint’s defenses?”

“Couldn’t include what I didn’t know.” Kess traced the building’s outline on the survey sheet, marking approaches and sight lines with professional detachment. “The Treasury Department has its own cartographers, its own secrets. Even Royal service didn’t get access to everything.”

“But you think the gold’s still there.”

“I think the Tertians think it’s still there. Otherwise they’d be shelling this district flat instead of trying to take it room by room.”

A rifle shot echoed from Market Street, single and sharp, followed by silence that felt heavier than the noise. Someone had found someone else, and only one of them was still breathing.

“Sniper,” Drum said. “Ours or theirs?”

“Does it matter?”

The Old Town was a sniper’s paradise, windows and rooftops that offered concealment and overlapping fields of fire. Every doorway was a potential ambush, every corner a killing ground. The Tertians knew this, which meant they were paying in blood for whatever they hoped to find.

“Vault’s in the basement,” Kess said, studying the Mint’s blueprints. “Three levels down, accessible through the main building or the old smuggler’s tunnel we used yesterday.”

“Tunnel connects to the Mint?”

“Tunnel connects to everything, eventually. That’s how smuggling works.”

They moved through the maze of medieval streets, using doorways and overhangs for cover, navigating by dead reckoning and the kind of urban geography that existed in the spaces between official maps. The Old Town had its own logic, patterns laid down by centuries of human movement that no surveyor had ever documented.

“Contact,” Vel whispered, pointing toward a Tertian patrol working its way along Fisher’s Lane. “Squad strength, moving toward the Mint.”

“They found it too,” Drum observed.

“Or they’re following the same logic we are. Limited objectives, maximum security, probably contains something worth preserving.”

The patrol was professional, soldiers who moved like they’d done urban warfare before. They checked corners, cleared doorways, communicated with hand signals that spoke of training and experience. But they were also strangers here, following maps instead of instinct.

“We know the ground,” Kess said, sketching the patrol’s route on the tactical overlay. “They know the business. Question is which advantage matters more.”

“One way to find out.”

They followed the patrol at distance, using the Old Town’s vertical maze to stay above the street level action. Rooftops connected to rooftops, bridges spanned alleys like stone webs, and the medieval builders had created a city that existed in three dimensions.

The Tertians reached the Mint and began their assault with professional competence, explosives to breach the main entrance, covering fire to suppress response, tactical movement that belonged in a textbook. But the building had been designed by people who understood siege warfare, and it gave ground slowly.

“Vault’s probably empty anyway,” Vel said, watching the attack develop. “Treasury would have evacuated the reserves when the siege started.”

“Maybe.” Kess was making notes on the architectural survey, recording how the building responded to modern military pressure. “Or maybe they couldn’t move that much wealth without advertising their weakness.”

“Either way, people are dying for it.”

“People are dying for lots of things. At least gold has measurable value.”

The battle for the Mint continued below them, soldiers with twentieth-century weapons trying to break into a vault designed by fourteenth-century paranoids. The mathematics of the engagement were simple: enough explosives would eventually overcome any masonry, but the question was whether the Tertians had enough time before reinforcements arrived.

“What reinforcements?” Drum asked when Kess voiced the thought.

“Exactly.”

So they watched the Old Town change hands one building at a time, and Kess updated the survey sheets with notations that recorded the transfer of eight centuries of accumulated wealth to whoever was strong enough to carry it away. The streets grew quieter as the afternoon aged, and the silence felt like anticipation.

Market Square had been the heart of Valdris for eight hundred years, where farmers brought grain and merchants brought dreams and everyone brought the kind of hope that could only be purchased with hard currency. Now the cobblestones were stained with substances that didn’t wash away with rain, and Kess moved through the ruins updating survey sheets that recorded the death of commerce.

“They’re all here,” Drum said, crouched behind the overturned cart that had once sold apples to children who would never grow up. “Every route leads to this square. Every tunnel, every street, every way in or out of the Old Town.”

The Tertians knew it too. Their positions formed a perfect perimeter, soldiers who’d studied the same maps Kess had drawn three years ago when mapping was just business and war was someone else’s problem. Professional spacing, overlapping fields of fire, the kind of tactical deployment that left no room for amateur heroics.

“Vel.” Kess looked around the square, noting the absence that had been following them since the University. “Where’s Vel?”

“Saving something stupid,” Drum said, and his voice carried the flat exhaustion of a man who’d buried too many friends to waste energy on surprise. “Kid thinks he’s protecting what we used to be.”

They found him in the toy shop at the square’s eastern corner, cradled around something small and broken, his young face peaceful in a way that suggested he’d finally found whatever he’d been looking for. The Tertian bullet had taken him in the back, clean and professional, while he was trying to rescue a wooden horse that some child had dropped during the evacuation.

“Jesus,” Drum said, but there wasn’t grief in it anymore, just the mechanical acknowledgment of mathematics. “He was supposed to make it out.”

“Nobody was supposed to make it out.” Kess knelt beside the body, gently removing the wooden toy from hands that would never let go. “That was always the point.”

The toy was carved from local wood, painted with the bright colors that children loved and adults forgot how to see. It weighed nothing and meant everything and represented the exact kind of useless beauty that wars were designed to eliminate. Kess placed it carefully in the map case, next to the survey sheets that documented more practical forms of destruction.

“Sentimental?” Drum asked.

“Evidence.”

They moved through Market Square like ghosts haunting their own deaths, noting how the Tertian positions controlled every approach, every exit, every possibility except surrender. The mathematics were elegant in their simplicity: converging forces, concentrated firepower, the kind of tactical perfection that military academies used as examples.

“Your maps again,” Drum said, studying the enemy deployment. “They’re using the survey data to position their units.”

“My maps, their bullets, our bodies.” Kess sketched the Tertian positions on the tactical overlay, adding another layer to the palimpsest of professional destruction. “Everyone contributes what they do best.”

“What we do best is die, apparently.”

“What we do best is witness.”

The square was quieter now, the kind of silence that followed completed business. The Tertians had what they came for, control of the commercial district and access to whatever wealth the Old Town still contained. Their victory was mathematical, inevitable, the logical conclusion of superior force applied with professional competence.

“The children made it to the boats,” Kess said, consulting the nautical charts that showed tidal patterns and harbor approaches. “Low tide was at 0200, patrol change at 0230. Small window, but enough.”

“You sure?”

“Sure enough.”

They could see the harbor from the square’s southern edge, black water reflecting flames from the burning districts, patrol boats moving in patterns that suggested routine security rather than active pursuit. The Tertians controlled everything that mattered now, which meant the things that didn’t matter were free to slip away in the darkness.

“So what’s the point?” Drum was cleaning his rifle with the obsessive care of a man who no longer had anything else to clean. “We map the destruction, document the defeat, preserve the records of our own failure. For who?”

“For whoever finds the maps.”

“And if nobody finds them?”

“Then nobody finds them.”

A shell whistled overhead, impacting somewhere in the Inner Keep where the last defenders were making their final stand. The sound echoed off the square’s ancient buildings like thunder, and dust settled on everything with the gentle persistence of snow.

“The Inner Keep,” Kess said, consulting the architectural surveys that showed the citadel’s layout. “Last stop on the grand tour.”

“Last stop anywhere.”

They gathered their equipment and prepared to leave Market Square to its new owners, the Tertian soldiers who would catalog its commercial value and add it to their ledgers of conquest. The wooden horse remained in the map case, evidence of something that couldn’t be measured in military terms.

“Mark where we found him,” Drum said, looking back at the toy shop where Vel had discovered that some things were worth dying for. “Mark it accurate.”

So Kess marked it, another notation on a survey sheet that was becoming a monument to small acts of pointless courage. The square grew quiet behind them as they moved toward the Inner Keep, and the silence felt like an ending that hadn’t quite finished happening yet.

The cobblestones held their stains, and the overturned carts would serve as monuments until the Tertians cleared them away for more efficient commercial arrangements. But the wooden horse rode on in the map case, carrying the weight of all the children who would never play with toys again, toward whatever destination waited in the mathematics of siege warfare.

The Inner Keep was where Valdris had begun, stone blocks fitted so tight you couldn’t slide a knife blade between them, walls that had watched eight centuries of armies come and go with the patient indifference of geology. Kess climbed the ancient stairs with the survey equipment, each step echoing in corridors that had been carved when mapmaking was still more art than science.

“Last defensive position,” Drum said, checking his ammunition with the mechanical precision of a man who’d learned to count bullets like prayer beads. “Nowhere left to run after this.”

The Keep’s defenders were what remained of the City Watch, clerks and shopkeepers who’d traded ledger books for rifles and discovered that courage was easier to find than competence. They moved through the fortified positions with the awkward determination of amateur soldiers, following orders from officers who’d learned tactics from the same books the Tertians used.

“How many?” Kess asked Captain Morel, the watchman who’d assumed command when the real soldiers died or deserted.

“Thirty-seven effectives. Maybe forty if you count the wounded who can still hold weapons.” Morel’s uniform was torn and bloodstained, but he wore it like it still meant something. “Not much against what’s coming.”

Through the arrow slits they could see the Tertian forces massing in Market Square, artillery pieces unlimbered and positioned with mathematical precision. The enemy had stopped pretending this was anything but extermination now. No more careful preservation of infrastructure, no more surgical strikes on military targets. Just the brutal calculus of overwhelming force applied to eliminate resistance.

“They’ll breach the outer wall first,” Drum said, studying the assault positions through field glasses. “Concentrate fire on the main gate, bring up assault teams while we’re dealing with the rubble.”

“How long?” Morel asked.

“Hour. Maybe two if we make them pay for every stone.”

Kess was sketching the Keep’s interior on the architectural survey, noting structural details that hadn’t been recorded in the official blueprints. Secret passages, concealed chambers, the kind of defensive features that medieval builders had included for situations exactly like this one.

“Map Room,” Kess said, pointing toward the Keep’s central tower. “That’s where all the city’s cartographic records are stored. Survey data, land grants, boundary markers. Eight hundred years of geographic intelligence.”

“What’s the point now?” Drum asked. “City’s gone, records don’t matter.”

“Records always matter. That’s why they keep trying to destroy them.”

The first artillery barrage began at sunset, shells arcing over the walls with lazy precision, each impact calculated to maximize structural damage. The Keep’s ancient masonry groaned under the assault, stones fitted by medieval craftsmen slowly separating under pressures they’d never been designed to withstand.

“Moving to the Map Room,” Kess told Morel. “If anyone survives this, they’ll need to know what really happened.”

“Nobody’s surviving this.”

“Someone always survives. That’s how we know about all the other sieges.”

They climbed the tower stairs while the Keep shook around them, each explosion bringing down chunks of mortar that had held firm for centuries. The Map Room was at the tower’s peak, a circular chamber lined with charts and surveys that represented every inch of ground the city had ever claimed.

“Here.” Kess pulled down the master survey, the comprehensive map that showed Valdris as it really was instead of how the politicians wanted it to look. “Every tunnel, every passage, every way in or out of the city.”

“Including the ones you didn’t give to the Tertians?”

“Especially those.”

Drum was at the window, watching the assault develop with professional interest. “They’re bringing up the siege towers. Won’t be long now.”

The towers were medieval technology updated with modern engineering, steel and concrete platforms that could deliver assault troops directly to the Keep’s upper levels. The Tertians had studied their history, learned from eight centuries of successful sieges, adapted old techniques to contemporary warfare.

“Final phase,” Kess said, updating the tactical overlay with calm precision. “They’ll take the outer positions, consolidate on the main level, then work their way up floor by floor.”

“Standard siege protocol.”

“Nothing standard about it. This is personal now.”

The master survey showed everything, all the secrets Kess had spent forty years discovering and documenting. The hidden tunnels that connected to the harbor, the concealed passages that led beyond the city walls, the escape routes that medieval lords had built for exactly this situation.

“Could still get out,” Drum said, studying the tunnel system. “Follow the old smuggler’s route to the river, take our chances in the water.”

“Could.”

“But you’re not going to.”

“Someone has to finish the map.”

The Keep’s outer wall collapsed with a sound like the world breaking, stones that had stood since the city’s founding finally surrendering to the mathematics of modern explosives. Through the dust and smoke they could see Tertian soldiers advancing, professional killers who moved with the confidence of men completing inevitable business.

“Last stand,” Drum said, checking his rifle one final time.

“Last map,” Kess replied, spreading the survey sheets across the Map Room’s ancient table.

Below them, the Inner Keep prepared to join all the other fortresses that had learned the hard lesson about stone versus steel, medieval engineering versus contemporary firepower. But in the tower’s peak, surrounded by eight centuries of cartographic knowledge, Kess continued working on the survey that would document exactly how Valdris had chosen to die.

The wooden horse from Vel’s final gesture sat beside the maps like a small guardian, painted eyes watching over the geographic record of a city that had existed for eight hundred years and would be remembered for as long as someone kept drawing accurate maps of where it used to stand.

The Map Room filled with smoke that tasted of burning history, and Kess worked by the light of fires that consumed everything the city had ever been. The final survey lay spread across the oak table like an autopsy, each notation precise as a scalpel cut, documenting the anatomy of defeat with clinical accuracy.

“They’re on the stairs,” Drum said from his position at the door, rifle trained on the spiral staircase that climbed toward their aerie like a stone throat. “Maybe ten minutes before they reach us.”

Below, the Keep’s last defenders were dying with the methodical efficiency that characterized everything about this siege, each death another data point in the Tertians’ tactical calculations. Captain Morel’s voice echoed up the tower shaft, shouting orders that would be his last contribution to military science.

“Survey’s complete,” Kess said, making the final notations on the master overlay. “Every tunnel, every passage, every route in or out of Valdris. All of it.”

“Beautiful and useless and absolutely necessary?”

“Something like that.”

The master survey was forty years of professional obsession reduced to mathematical precision, the complete cartographic record of a city that had learned to die with more grace than it had ever managed while living. Each line was accurate to within centimeters, each elevation mark verified by instruments that measured truth in degrees and minutes of arc.

“What’s it for?” Drum asked, though his attention remained focused on the stairs where boots were beginning to echo with metallic regularity.

“For whoever finds it.”

“And if nobody finds it?”

“Then nobody finds it.”

The wooden horse from Vel’s last gesture watched over the proceedings with painted eyes that had seen too much, a child’s toy that had become a monument to the kind of innocence that wars were designed to eliminate. Kess placed it carefully at the survey’s center, where Market Square was marked with the red notation that meant commercial district, fallen, date recorded.

“They’re close now,” Drum said, and the rifle’s safety clicked off with the small sound of decisions being finalized.

Kess rolled the completed survey into the waterproof case that had protected it through ten days of systematic destruction, sealing forty years of professional work inside materials designed to survive what people couldn’t. The case was heavy with the weight of accumulated knowledge, all the secrets that Valdris had whispered to patient surveyors over eight centuries of growth and war.

“Window,” Drum said, pointing toward the tower’s eastern opening. “You could still make it to the river. Take the maps, find someone who gives a damn about accuracy.”

“Someone who gives a damn is finishing the job.”

The first Tertian appeared on the stairs, helmet and rifle emerging from the stone throat with the deliberate precision of professional killers. Drum’s shot took him center mass, the bullet’s impact echoing in the confined space like thunder, but there were more behind him, always more.

Kess was at the window now, looking out over the city that had been home and workplace and the subject of four decades worth of careful measurement. Valdris burned with the contained ferocity of a well-managed fire, each district feeding the flames in the sequence the Tertians had calculated for maximum efficiency.

“Beautiful,” Kess said, and meant it.

“What?”

“The pattern. Look at how the fires spread, following the wind currents and fuel loads. It’s like watching mathematics become visible.”

Drum fired again, working the bolt with mechanical precision, buying time measured in seconds and bullets. “You’re insane.”

“I’m accurate.”

The Tertians were advancing up the stairs with textbook fire and movement, one man covering while another advanced, professional infantry tactics applied to the business of murdering cartographers. They’d reach the Map Room in minutes, and then the survey would become another casualty of war.

Unless.

Kess looked at the completed maps, the waterproof case, the window that opened onto forty feet of empty air above the Keep’s courtyard. The mathematics were simple: terminal velocity, impact forces, the probability that sealed materials could survive what flesh couldn’t.

“Mark this,” Kess said to Drum, and stepped backward through the window into the Valdris night.

The fall lasted forever and no time at all, the city rotating slowly around the fixed point of professional completion. The survey case hit the courtyard stones with the sound of knowledge meeting granite, bounced once, and came to rest beside the fountain where Tertian soldiers would find it in the morning when they came to catalog their victory.

Drum’s rifle continued firing from the tower, single shots spaced with the rhythm of a man who’d learned to make every bullet count. But the shooting stopped eventually, because everything stopped eventually, and the Map Room fell quiet except for the sound of boots on stone and papers rustling in hands that belonged to the new management.

The Tertians found the survey case at dawn, when the fires had burned down to coals and the mathematics of conquest had reduced Valdris to columns in a logbook. Professional soldiers, they recognized the value of accurate intelligence, understood that maps were worth preserving even when the places they depicted had been systematically erased.

The wooden horse lay broken beside the fountain, painted fragments scattered across stones that had witnessed eight centuries of human ambition. But the survey survived, sealed and waterproof and absolutely precise, waiting for whoever would need to know exactly how a city had chosen to document its own destruction.

In the end, that was what maps were for: to show where things had been, and how they’d gotten there, and what it had cost to measure the distance between hope and mathematics. The Tertians could own the ground, but the ground belonged to whoever drew it most accurately.

And somewhere in the ruins of the Map Room, among scattered papers and broken instruments, Drum’s hand reached toward the place where the survey case had been, fingers closing on empty air and the kind of completion that could only be measured in degrees of professional satisfaction.

The siege was over. The mapping was complete. The rest was just paperwork.