[Tristan]

Within minutes of the landing, the airship crew had the disembarkation complete like a well-oiled machine, Bridge crossing aftereffects notwithstanding. The artillerymen aboard were twenty, two whole squads. We hadn't met any of them aboard Stargazer because they had been all locked up in a passenger compartment close to the tail of the airship.

I lost track of Lieutenant York, but I supposed I could find him later in the barracks.

A gunnery sergeant barked a series of orders I could barely understand, and the artillerymen (the real ones) marched to an empty hangar. Agatha and I followed them. The air was hot and smelled like acid and gunpowder smoke. I could feel tiny grains of sand against my cheeks.

The artillerymen lined up in two rows inside the hangar, and Agatha and I shrugged and took position at the end of the first row, bags between our feet and hands behind our backs like all the others. The artillerymen were mostly boys and girls roughly our age, maybe a little older but not more than two or three years. A couple of redheads stood out among the others, a wide-shouldered boy probably eighteen and a curly-haired girl that couldn't be any older than nine or ten. Brother and sister, in all likelihood. The boy looked like he was managing to hold it together somehow, but the girl in her oversize uniform with rolled-up sleeves and trouser legs was the very portrait of terror.

The gunnery sergeant was looking at us impassively, ramrod-straight, eyes fixed on a point somewhere above our heads. To kill time I studied the ceiling, two hundred feet above my head. A lattice of steel girders crisscrossed by pipes and wires, caged electric bulbs that could do little against the cavernous vastness of the hangar interior, crane bridge rails running for the whole length of the hangar.

The constant background of muffled screams was setting my teeth on edge.

After a few minutes, a door opened somewhere in the dark depths of the hangar, and a man, a woman, and a Ghost marched in.

The man and the woman were tall, thin, ascetic, uniforms perfectly tailored, eyes of someone who had seen too much.

They took position in front of us, and after a moment the man took a step forward.

"Welcome to Castle Vostok. I am General Steven de Ridefort of the Awakening League Mountain Infantry. I give you Chancellor Harcourt's most heartfelt thanks. You are about to join in the bloodiest, longest war mankind has ever fought, a war that has been going on for sixteen centuries and a half. Here on Gliese the monsters are still roaming loose. Here the wounds of the world never healed, and the Age of Monsters never ended.

"I'm telling you this because this is a unique place, the only one in the Lands Beyond where the Awakening League and the United Kingdom of Chimaera and Tiangong fight side by side. In every other land, General Liao and I would be fighting each other to the death, yet here we are, like old comrades, and I'd be honored to die serving at her side. In the next weeks, everyone of you will fight, and many among you will die, but remember: as long as we are on Gliese, we fight as one, and we die as one."

He stepped back.

The woman stepped forward.

"I am General Daiyu Liao of the Royal Marine Corps." She cleared her voice. "You have all been briefed before being deployed to Castle Vostok, so you know very well why you are here and what's at stake, but since so many of you are going to sacrifice their lives for the good of mankind, please allow an old woman a few more words.

"We are living in the tenth century of the Age After. The last monster was killed almost a thousand years ago during the Battle of Venera, and that marked the end of the Storm Ages. Only, here on Gliese the Storm Ages never really ended. Here, we are still paying the price for the crimes of our ancestors.

"Nineteen centuries ago, the Demon Bridges were opened, violating the most fundamental laws of nature. The Demon Bridges permitted our ancestors to seek refuge in lands that otherwise would have taken hundreds of generations of effort and sacrifice to reach, but it all came at a steep price. The Demon Bridges opened fissures that led to other realms, and evil creatures seeped into our lands from one of those realms, the Unholy Realm. Things with the powers of gods and the malevolence of demons.

"It was the Age of Monsters, and it came to an end when the Invisible Light was summoned, cutting all the Demon Bridges, and leaving the monsters weakened and stranded. The Storm Ages followed, when all the Lands Beyond were cleansed of the horrors from the Unholy Realm. All the Lands Beyond but Gliese, because Vulcan Bridge survived the Invisible Light, and the fissures from which the monsters spilled into our realm from the Unholy Realm remained open.

"So, the monsters kept infesting Gliese.

"And that's why we are here. We are the dam that holds the monsters back, the wall that keeps the madness outside. The rest of the Lands Beyond is safe from the monsters because of us. Because of you. And this is an honor I'm proud of sharing with you."

***

I had never seen a Ghost before.

In a way, it looked like the two generals: tall, thin, impeccably dressed in a full uniform. But looking more closely, you were going to see there were quite a few differences: the uniform didn't bear any insignia, its chiseled features were androgynous, and its age was totally unfathomable.

Beside the fact that it was translucent and made of cold light, of course.

"I am Albedo, the Ghost of Castle Vostok." The Ghost looked uneasy. "I've seen thousands like you during the centuries I spent here. Tens, hundreds of thousands of boys and girls and women and men, all here to deliver on a promise made by your ancestors. We have unleashed the monsters, your ancestors and my folk, and now we share the burden of keeping the Lands Beyond safe.

"But there's more than the Lands Beyond at stake here, much more.

"When the Invisible Light spared Vulcan Bridge, there would have been an easy way out: sever all the Bridges connecting Gliese to the other Lands Beyond and forget all about it. Vulcan Bridge is a one-way bridge to Gliese, the other Lands Beyond would have been in the clear.

"But we had outgrown that kind of attitude. The monsters on Gliese were our fault and our responsibility. We could not turn our backs and just let the monsters spread freely in our realm, staining it with their evil and their madness, just because they were not an immediate threat to us anymore. So, we decided to close all the Faraway Bridges to Gliese except for Aaru Bridge, and we built Castle Vostok.

"I have forsaken my people, the Runaway Gods, to stay here and carry this burden alongside you.

"Now it is your time to join the fight, and for this I honor you all.

"Not many of you will survive the next few weeks but be assured no one of the fallen will be forgotten. Ever."

"Surely doesn't beat around the bush," Agatha growled.

The gunnery sergeant shot her a dirty look. The Ghost too looked at her for long moments, an unreadable expression on its patrician face. Then it nodded almost imperceptibly. I didn't dare to turn to look at Agatha but saw her tense up in the corner of my eye.

I wondered what was actually going on.

Albedo fell silent and closed its eyes. The generals did the same.

The silence stretched on for a few minutes.

Then they opened their eyes and nodded at the sergeant, who stepped forward. "All right, people. Break ranks. Muster here tomorrow at five a.m."

***

[Agatha]

There was a massive brass clock hanging over the counter in the mess hall, according to which it was a little after seven in the evening. The wooden benches and tables were sticky with soup and wine stains, almost invisible in the dim light of the petrol lamps hanging from the ceiling. After a couple of spoonfuls of porridge, I began to think that maybe the low lighting was intentional. In plain daylight, probably the soldiers would have killed the cook on the spot. The mess hall was a big room with row after row of tables. There were more than a hundred people having supper, but all the soldiers were talking softly, and my ears were full of the background noise of muffled screams. A League Mountain Infantry platoon had been taken by surprise by a particularly stealthy monster, and not even the intervention of a squad of Abominations had been enough to save them.

Go figure something so dreadful not even the machine-corpses were able to compete with it.

Tristan and I ended up sitting close to the carrots, in compliance with some kind of gravitational law among outcasts. The boy was stuffing his face with brown goo like there was no tomorrow, while the girl was lost in contemplation of her bowl.

"Something wrong, kid?" Tristan asked.

The girl shook her head without looking up.

I snorted. "Maybe she isn't used to having horse manure for dinner."

Tristan offered his hand to the big brother. "Tristan Nelson. Pleased to meet you."

The carrot shook Tristan's hand. "Jack Kelly. And she's my sister Saoirse."

"The gourmet lady is Agatha," Tristan added.

I nodded in acknowledgment. We ate in silence for a while. Saoirse kept staring into her bowl without touching her food. A soldier some tables away stood up on a bench and toasted to a dozen of names that were presumably casualties. Everybody slammed their glasses against the tables and then downed the contents.

Tristan put his spoon down. "If you don't mind me asking, Jack, isn't your sister a little too on the young side to be enlisted?"

The carrot tensed up. "Actually, I do mind, man."

Tristan opened his mouth to speak.

I kicked his shin.

Tristan fell silent.

"I don't want to die." Saoirse's voice was small and trembling.

"Dying isn't in my wish list either, sweetheart," I grumbled.

***

[Tristan]

I thought I knew enough about Gatling guns. I had been asking questions to just about everybody who was still sober enough to talk (and a few who definitely weren't) back in the pubs of Tarasque. I had even taken notes and sketched drawings, and one lucky afternoon I had found a book in the town library about machine gun maintenance and read it all in one go.

What I sorely lacked was hands-on experience.

The weight of the bullets, the slipperiness of the polished-metal shells, the effort of cranking the handwheel, the deafening roar of the thing when it fired, shaking and bouncing like a runaway horse. The acrid smell of gunpowder, the stench of horse manure when we moved the guns, the stink of our own sweat after hours of training. The bullets were dummy loads, of course, the actual ones were too precious and way too toxic to be used in drills, but we were dressed in full field uniforms anyway, complete with elbow-high thick leather gloves, gas masks and polarized goggles. The training included only Gatling guns and rockets, not personal weapons. Airship crews and ground troops weren't equipped with personal weapons because of the risk of mutiny and suicide. Only the Military Police had service pistols.

As I left the training field at night, bathed in sweat and covered in gunpowder residue, I felt like I wasn't going to survive another day, yet every night I fell into a dreamless sleep of exhaustion in my bunk, and the morning after it started all over again.

And that was just the training.

Agatha too was finding it difficult to live up to military standards but was apparently so hell-bent on humiliating me that she never uttered a complaint. The Kelly brothers too looked like they were about to collapse and die every day, yet somehow managed to hold on.

The drill sergeant put the four of us on the same team and declared us the Canary Team. At first I was amused at the nickname, but then he explained that it was because of coal mine canaries, the little birds that warned miners of the presence of toxic gas by dying first. The drill sergeant made it publicly clear that as a team we were so incompetent that he expected us to croak long before anyone else in the company. After that, most of the other gunners steered well clear of us, both in the training field and in the mess hall.

Lieutenant York didn't show up, and I didn't dare to go looking for him. He had struck me as a really honorable man, and I was sure that he was trying to find a way out for Agatha and me. I was sure he'd get in touch as soon as he had come up with a plan.

What really unnerved me was the perpetual, unending background of muffled screams.

And the Abominations.

Seen up close, the things were as disturbing as they were scary. An Abomination is basically an armored hydraulic chassis to which the corpse of a dead soldier has been grafted, with a generous scattering of pumps infusing ungodly chemicals and an overlay of electric devices providing a cruel mockery of senses.

Back in the Age of Monsters, the creatures from the Unholy Realm were so horrifying that even the toughest soldiers were helpless, because they went crazy at first sight. The Guild of Abominations, helped by the Ghosts, had come up with the idea of mixing two things that were utterly impervious to fear: dead people and machines. And it had worked, at least to the extent that the Abominations could stand the sight of Monsters long enough to hindrance them.

During the Storm Ages, the Abominations had done most of the dirty work of exterminating the monsters, but since the Battle of Venera, the only monsters left were on Gliese, and the surviving fissures between the realms were narrow enough to let only slightly weaker monsters through. There was no real need for the Abominations anymore, but instead focusing on decommissioning the ungodly contraptions and quietly closing up shop, the Guild of Abominations had sided with the Awakening League and had kept on building the things for the League Army. The lifespan of an Abomination was measured in centuries, and according to rumors there were still first-generation specimens alive and kicking, if you wanted to call that a life, of course.

The Abominations moved without a sound, well-oiled mechanical joints and heavy robes slipping fast and stealthy. A Guild of Abominations support team kept a wary eye on the machine-corpses from observation platforms at the four corners of the training field every time the machine-corpses took part to the drills, white-clad figures with big binoculars constantly scanning the mock battlefield in search of operational anomalies in the Abominations. Every now and then, one of the technicians put down his binoculars, grabbed the intercom bolted to the platform railing and said something, and other white-clad technicians at ground level sprinted through the training field, reached an Abomination and walked it to a hangar at the side of the camp.

Later, as the boot camp week was drawing to an end, an aide of the drill sergeant told me the Abominations weren't actually there for our benefit. What we had seen were malfunctioning specimens, specimens that were either so old to be reaching the end of their centuries-long lifespan, or that had been exposed too much to the monsters. The Guild support teams were there to assess whether the repairs were holding up well or not. All the Abominations came from the League, since King Bruce of Chimera and Tiangong had sworn never to employ the things, and the League took good care not to send its best units.

The Guild of Abominations still manufactured new ones, but in very small numbers, and the League didn't deploy one of its most precious weapons to almost secure destruction.

Accidents had already happened before, Abominations had turned against their comrades or against human troops without warning, and having the things roam freely among us during our drills was meant to stress them and see how well they held it together.

I decided not to share this bit of information with the rest of the Canary Team.

In the meanwhile, still no news from Lieutenant York.

Then the day of deployment arrived.

***

NEXT UP: Agatha and Tristan go to war, and of course everything happens according to Murphy's Law