This Is How You Lose the Time War

I ask because we could have trapped you here. This strand’s a prominent tributary; Commandant could field a swarm of agents without much causal risk. I imagine you reading this, thinking you would have escaped them all. Maybe.

But those agents are busy elsewhere, and it would be a waste of time (ha!) to recall them and dispatch again. Rather than bother Commandant with something I could handle on my own, I interceded directly. Easier for us both.

Of course, I couldn’t let you steal these poor peoples’ god. We don’t need this place in specific, but we need something like it. I’m sure you can picture the work required to rebuild such a paradise from scratch (or even recover its gleam from the wreckage). Think, for a second—if you succeeded, if you stole the physical object on whose slow quantum decomposition this strand’s random-number generators depend, if that triggered a cryptographic crisis, if that crisis led people to distrust their food printers, if hungry masses rioted, if riots fed this glitter to the fires of war, we’d have to start again—cannibalizing other strands, likely from your braid. And then we’d be at one another’s throats even more.

Plus, this way I can repay you for that trick in the catacombs—with a note of my own! But I’m almost out of room. You like the Strand 6 nineteenth century. Well, Mrs. Leavitt’s Guide to Etiquette and Correspondence (London, Gooseneck Press, Strand 61) suggests I should end by recapitulating my letter’s main thrust, whatever that means, so, here goes: Ha-ha, Blueser. Your mission objective’s in another castle.

Hugs and kisses,

Red

PS. The keyboard’s coated with slow-acting contact poison. You’ll be dead in an hour.

PPS. Just kidding! Or . . . am I?

PPPS. I’m just screwing with you. But postscripts sure are fun!

* * *

Trees fall in the forest and make sounds.

The horde moves among them, judging, swinging axes, bowing bass notes from pine trunks with saws. Five years back, none of these warriors had seen such a forest. In their home stand sacred groves were called zuun mod, which means “one hundred trees,” because one hundred were all the trees they thought might be gathered in one place.

Many more than a hundred trees stand here, a quantity so vast no one dares number it. Wet, cold wind spills down the mountains, and branches clatter like locust wings. Warriors creep beneath needled shadows and go about their work.

Icicles drip and snap as the great trees fall, and felled, the trees leave gaps in green that bare the cold white sky. Warriors like those flat clouds better than the forest’s gloom, but not so much as they loved the blue of home. They loop the trunks with cord and drag them through trampled underbrush to the camp, where they will be peeled and planed to build the great Khan’s war machines.

A strange transformation, some feel: When they were young, they won their first battles with bows, from horseback, ten men against twenty, two hundred against three. Then they learned to use rivers against their foes, to tear down their walls with grappling hooks. These days they roll from town to town collecting scholars, priests, and engineers, everyone who can read or write, who knows a trade, and set them tasks. You will have food, water, rest, all the luxury an army on hoof can offer. In exchange, solve the problems our enemies pose.

Once, horsemen broke on fortifications like waves against a cliff. (Most of these men have not seen waves, or cliffs, but travelers bear stories from distant lands.) Now the horsemen slaughter foes, drive them to their forts, demand surrender, and, should surrender not ensue, they raise up their engines to undo the knot of the city.

But those engines need lumber, so off the warriors are sent, to steal from ghosts.

Red, hard-ridden for days, dismounts within the wood. She wears a thick gray del belted with silk around her waist, and a fur hat covers her hair, preserving her scalp from the chill. She walks heavily. She broadens her shoulders. She has played this role for at least a decade. Women ride with the horde—but she is a man now, so far as those who give her orders, and follow hers in turn, are concerned.

She commits the enterprise to memory for her report. Her breath smokes, glitters as ice crystals freeze. Does she miss steam heat? Does she miss walls and a roof? Does she miss the dormant implants sewn through her limbs and tangled in her chest that could shore her against this cold, stop her feeling, seal a force field around her skin to guard her from this time to which she’s been sent?

Not really.

She notes the deep green of the trees. She measures the timing of their fall. She records the white of the sky, the bite of the wind. She remembers the names of the men she passes. (Most of them are men.) Ten years into deep co

ver, having joined the horde, proven her worth, and achieved the place for which she strove, she feels suited to this war.

She has suited herself to it.

Others draw back from her in respect and fear as she scans the piled logs for signs of rot. Her roan snorts, stamps the earth. Red ungloves and traces the lumber with her fingertips, log by log, ring by ring, feeling each one’s age.

She stops when she finds the letter.

Kneels.

The others gather round: What has disturbed her so? An omen? A curse? Some flaw in their lumberjackery?

The letter begins in the tree’s heart. Rings, thicker here and thinner there, form symbols in an alphabet no one present knows but Red. The words are small, sometimes smudged, but still: ten years per line of text, and many lines. Mapping roots, depositing or draining nutrients year by year, the message must have taken a century to craft. Perhaps local legends tell of some fairy or frozen goddess in these woods, seen for an instant, then gone. Red wonders what expression she wore as she placed the needle.

She memorizes the message. She feels it ridge by ridge, line by line, and performs a slow arithmetic of years.

Her eyes change. The men nearby have known her for a decade but have never seen her look like this.