Chapter 30 – The Road Home

The first thing I had noticed was that the garrison grounds occupied the entire western quarter of the inner wall.

I had seen the outer edge of it the previous day from the corridor of campaign maps, but walking through it was different. The training fields alone were larger than Hekou’s entire fenced perimeter.There were four separate yards with different surface conditions ranging from packed earth to sand, as well as stone flags, and a raised platform of hardwood that flexed slightly underfoot. Impact structures along the eastern wall built from a stone composite I didn’t recognize, harder than what Gao Ren’s forge produced and shaped that implied either a mold-casting process I hadn’t seen before.

“What’s the binding agent used for the impact walls?”

Xu walked beside me with her arms folded as she nodded as the passing soldiers and administrators who acknowledged her. ” It is river clay fired with ground iron slag. It absorbs impact better than stone and it doesn’t fracture the way packed earth does in the winter.”

I looked at the surface closely. The texture was consistent throughout with no visible seams and the color was a uniform grey-brown. “How thick is it?”

“Forty li at the base, tapering to twenty at the top. The weight distribution keeps them from shifting in heavy rain.”

I noted all of it. The construction list I’d been building in my head since before I left Hekou was growing more specific by the hour. Zone three’s impact walls at Hekou were packed stone and they worked, but this composite would work better, and if Gao Ren could source the slag in sufficient quantity from the ridge cave operations then the binding process would be replicable.

We moved through the supply depot next, and I took notice of how every category of material had a location, a rotation schedule, and a designated party whose name was on a placard at the station. The documentation was current to within two days, which meant that no food or resource would be out of date or expired.

“Your quartermaster chain,” I began to say, “How far does it extend before the information degrades?”

Commander Xu pondered my question. “To about the third outpost which are all approximately twenty li apart. Beyond that, reports tend to arrive late.” She moved past a row of weapon racks she knew without looking at them. “The eastern territory is the weak link as the distances are longer and the roads are newer.”

“Hekou is on the eastern road,” I realized.

She nodded.

I looked at a stack of supply manifests on a desk near the depot’s main entrance. Three years ago Wang Su had supplied me with enough paper to run my village’s administrative records. This depot must have consumed more paper in a week.

“I want to see the map room,” I said.

The map room was off the campaign corridor I’d walked through the previous evening. Xu unlocked it herself, which told me something about who had access, and we went in alone.

The room was adorned with territorial maps, campaign maps, supply route maps, population density charts, and seasonal weather patterns for the eastern and western regions. The Opal Continent was rendered in detail with more projections than I had known existed.

I found the eastern territory first which housed the river fork where Hekou sat. I traced the road west through the settlements I’d ridden past on the journey and then wider, taking in the full shape of the Western Reaches’ territory and its borders.

Hekou sat close to the eastern edge. I had known this abstractly, but seeing it rendered at scale made it concrete in my mind. The Western Reaches extended far to the west and south, a relatively tame territory with established infrastructure and population centers.

To the east, the border was thinner and the settlements smaller and the garrison outposts were visible on the map due to the fact that the territory depended on them.

Meishan sat at the boundary between the Western Reaches and Qinghe territories, exactly as Administrator Wen had described. A prefecture-sized territory controlling the passage between east and west, marked with a different notation than the surrounding settlements.

The lands to the south were mainly unmarked, which to me meant that it was mostly unexplored territory. Shan Pei’s tribe was from the south, as most hill tribes in our region were, but he never spoke much about the surrounding territories. The hill tribes lived a more nomadic lifestyle, so perhaps Shan was tired of it and wanted to settle down for once.

I looked for Chenjia village but found that the scale was too broad. The small farming villages that had made up the world were below the map’s resolution. They existed somewhere in the eastern territory’s notation but individually they were invisible, swallowed into the aggregate.

“Your position concerns you,” Xu said from beside me. She saw that my finger had still lingered on Hekou and that I had been tracing the surrounding lands.

“Hekou is close to Meishan,” I noted aloud.

“That it is,” she replied.

I looked at the passage between the two territories. The road that connected them ran through a river valley that was defensible in some areas but exposed in others. It proved to be a natural separator between Qinghe and the Western Reaches. If Meishan were to fall, then it could be used as a launching pad for another campaign.

“What does your Lord want after he takes Meishan?” I turned to ask Xu as my curiosity got the best of me.

“Why do you ask?”

“Because Meishan is a crossing, not a destination.” I turned my eyes back to the map and traced it with my finger. “If he takes it, then he controls the passage between east and west. That also means that he can either hold the line or push through it.”

Commander Xu’s lips curled into a grin as she seemed rather amused by my question, perhaps because it was one that she had asked herself.

“Lord Shen Yue is his father’s son,” she said. “His father, Shen Bowen, unified the Jade River territories, which ran from Lanyu to Meishan and beyond to Qinghe. His eldest son Shen Yuan took Qinghe to the east and his second eldest son Shen Yue took the Western Reaches, meanwhile Shen Yang took Meishan to act as a buffer.”

She moved a few steps along the wall. “Lord Shen Yue is ambitious, but what he will do beyond reclaiming his father’s lands, I do not know for certain.”

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I looked at the map.

Hekou sat on the eastern approach to Meishan. If Shen Yue’s ambition ran east after he took the crossing, the eastern territory wasn’t a border region anymore. It was a staging ground. And a village that produced cultivators and had a defensible position on the main road was not, in that context, a school.

It was a forward asset.

I thought about Zhao Ping on the night of the vote, saying “Better terms on paper doesn’t mean better terms in practice.” I had believed then that the Western Reaches contract came with better terms. I naturally, even at that time, understood that Zhao Ping’s skepticism hadn’t been wrong either.

Whatever came next, we would handle it the way we had handled everything: Together. Though I preferred if we operated ahead of any crisis than beside it.

I now understood that the question was no longer whether the war would reach us, but whether we would be ready to do when it did.

“I’ll need the stonemason team as soon as you’re able,” I said.

“You’ll have them.” She turned from the map and headed towards the door. “I’ll have the seal and the authorization documents prepared before you leave tomorrow.”

I gave her a gracious bow, “Thank you, Commander Xu.”

She nodded back at me as I turned to look back at the map one last time.

The river fork.

The eastern road.

The passage at Meishan, a crossing where two brothers would inevitably meet and swallow up innocent lives over their familial dispute. I couldn’t ever imagine Hao and I doing such a thing, especially when one considers that the territories themselves paled in comparison to what surrounded them. This continent was so large yet my limited view of it was so small, it gave me a perspective on what I wanted to accomplish and made me wonder who else in this world was building something similar…

“You coming?” Commander Xu asked as she opened the door.

I nodded and followed her out.

Xu handed me a small map on the morning of my departure.

I unfolded one corner and saw that it was rendered in great detail and regard to Hekou, the river fork and ridge caves to the east, as well as the road north to Tongshan.

There was also Chenjia village on the map, the place where Mother’s people had come from and where she had also apprenticed under Sun Ai. Father’s settlement must have been somewhere on this map as well, I just didn’t know the name of it yet.