Later, when the fires guttered and the zealots were drunk on the comfort of a routine, I walked up to the altar and took the band of cloth from Maru's hands. Eri, flushed from the strain of the day, watched me with what looked like hope. I did not need hope. I needed certainty. I placed the band into my palm and squeezed it until the fibers creaked.
"Good work," I said aloud, and the zealots cheered like a crowd that had been told a miracle. They fed the altar small things and called it salvation. The rune in my palm hummed like a satisfied insect.
At dusk, a scouting alarm rang—sharp and single from down the river. Dagon's reach was never far. The cadence changed; a small edge of panic sliced the ritual. Maru snapped his head like a puppet, and a dozen zealots moved on cue. The festival broke into order. Their efficiency became useful in a way that felt honest.
The attack came in waves—smaller than the last assault but more cunning. Waterborne minions, half-city, half-rot, slipped through alleyways and tried to snap the patrols into the river. They smelled of old iron and algae. They came fast and they came with a new trick: they carried collars—straps of rusted metal embedded with tiny runes that, when wrapped around a man, stiffened his limbs and forced his mouth open like a puppet.
Dagon had learned to make tools out of living things. He wore the city like a trader wears coats—stripping, stitching, selling.
Maru's zealot wedge met the first surge with the ritualized ferocity of trained men. They fell in patterns, cutting off tendrils of the attack with knives and hooks, jamming pipes into mouths, smashing gas drums until the creatures' flesh unstitched. The survivors behind them learned the choreography: do not scatter, press the line, use the debris. For once, doctrine and defense made the same shape.
We lost three. A boy from the outer ring had his throat ripped open by a water-thing and drowned into clean, cold oblivion. Two zealots—men who'd grown up rough in the city's teeth—fell with exultant curses on their lips. Their deaths were quick and stylized; the crowd named them martyrs and learned the song of their passing. Juro wrote the names with a hands that trembled.
Later, when the bodies were hauled in and the river's slime was scrubbed from boots, Juro came to me with his ledger closed like a compendium. "You used them," he said. "You staged their faith and then let the river take them as proof of the covenant."
"I used reality," I answered. "Reality does not wait for permission."
"It paints you as god," he said. "And gods are asked implacable things."
"I'd rather be a god who keeps people alive than a man who watches them die for nothing." I said it flat. The cold truth sometimes looked like cruelty and sometimes like salvation. Which it was depended on what you were willing to do.
He tapped the ledger. "One day your ledger will be asked in court by ghosts. I will read the names."
"Good," I said. "Have the courage to read them aloud."
His jaw worked. He left with the quiet of a man carrying a dangerous promise.
When the night fell and the zealots resumed their chants, I walked alone the perimeter of the camp. The river grumbled in the dark like a beast with a belly full of secrets. The city watched with glass eyes.
I thought of the ledger—Juro's list—and of the ledger in my head. Two tallies that would eventually cross. One records names. One records utility. Each man will choose which ledger matters to him when the future closes like a fist.
Maru walked beside me. He was not sure if he belonged to me or to the flame. He asked me in a small voice that had practiced humility, "Vessel, shall we expand the ring? More faithful would make a bigger order."
I looked at the zealot's face: the edges of hunger polished into pious sheen. He meant the camp, the doctrine, the scale. Expansion meant more hands, more rations, more ritual fuel.
"Not yet," I said. "Stabilize the ring. Prove a week. Then we add another hundred. Not for power but for fuel." I said the last word quietly, and perhaps only Maru heard it. "We don't want numbers; we want supply."
He bowed as if I had spoken scripture.
I walked back to the tent where Juro slept, his ledger tucked under his arm like a talisman. He woke and looked at me with sleep-roughed eyes.
"You could stop them," he said again. "You could crush the doctrine tonight."
"And be the tyrant the next morning," I replied. "I am already a tyrant of sorts. I prefer to be a tyrant with results."
He looked at me long enough that I felt the ledger's weight in his stare. "One day, the ledger won't be enough to keep you honest."
"Maybe," I said. "Maybe I'll make it so that when that day comes no ledger can find me. Or maybe I'll let you read it and burn me when you have the courage."
He didn't speak. He only closed his eyes and wrote his name on the top of a page. I imagine he meant it as a promise or a threat. I do not always know which people mean when they say things to me. The city teaches you that ambiguity is the last courtesy left alive.
I drifted into a sleep that tasted like iron. The rune thrummed under my skin and answered the zealots' song, matching cadence. Belief strengthened it. Ritual lit it. The ledger waited for paper. The city kept making names.
Day by day, the doctrine ate. Slowly. Deliberately. They called it mercy because mercy is a kinder word than theft. I called it survival planning.
Both are true, but neither saves the soul.
In the morning we would go north. The river would show us teeth. The ledger would grow. The Covenant of the Emberhand would either feed us or feed itself. Either way, the arithmetic would continue.
And numbers, I have learned, do not lie. They only choose what to keep.