The Soldier's Hymn - Chapter 1: The Cathedral Province

The border smelled wrong.

Ren crouched in the shadow of a stone wall that had once been part of a farmhouse and pressed his sleeve against his nose. The scent-masking paste he'd applied at the tree line was holding — the boneglass-reactive compound that Ludo's journal had provided the formula for and that six months of fieldwork had refined into something that actually worked — but the paste only blocked what the demons could smell. It didn't block what Ren could smell, and what Ren could smell was the particular wrongness that gestated territory produced: sweetness over rot, like overripe fruit in a charnel house, the olfactory signature of biological processes that had been hijacked by something that used the body's chemistry for purposes the body had never intended.

The Cathedral Province's border was three days' march from the army's new staging camp, and the territory beyond it was worse than anything Ren had scouted in the southern campaign.

He'd been watching for two hours. The farmhouse's remaining wall provided cover and elevation — a vantage point that the thief's habit of reading terrain had identified within the first ten minutes of reaching the border zone, the guild-trained eye evaluating every feature for its utility as observation post, escape route, or ambush site. From here, the landscape spread west toward the cathedral that gave the province its name: rolling fields that had been farmland, orchards that had been productive, a river valley that had supported six townships and a market town and the kind of quiet, functional civilization that made the church's tithing system profitable. All of it gone. Not destroyed — transformed, the way the southern campaign's demon territories had been transformed, the gestation process converting living landscape into something that served the plague's purposes while maintaining the architecture of what had been there before.

But the transformation was different here. Ren had scouted enough gestated territory to recognize the stages: fresh eruptions were chaotic, the landscape torn and restructured around the boneglass growths that the gestation produced. The southern campaign's territories had been weeks old, months at most — raw, disorganized, the demons that emerged from them feral and reactive. The Cathedral Province's gestation was older. Years older, possibly decades, the dormancy period that the army's intelligence estimated at five to fifteen years having produced something that had time to settle, to organize, to adapt.

The fields below the farmhouse were orderly. That was the word that Ren's mind produced and that his instincts rejected — orderly was a human word, a word that described the product of human intention, and the fields below were not human. But they were arranged. The boneglass growths that protruded from the soil were spaced at regular intervals, their crystalline surfaces catching the morning light with a faint luminescence that pulsed in a rhythm Ren couldn't identify but that the figurine in his pocket responded to with a warmth that was directional now — stronger when he faced the growths, fainter when he turned away, the crystal's sensitivity providing a compass that pointed toward the deposits with the same reliability that a lodestone pointed north.

The demons moved among the growths with purpose.

Not the mindless patrol that the southern demons had performed — the territorial circling of newly erupted creatures whose behaviour amounted to guarding the nesting site and attacking anything that approached. These demons moved in patterns. Groups of three and four, following routes that repeated on intervals Ren was still timing, passing through junctions in the boneglass field where the growths were thickest and pausing there the way sentries paused at guard posts. They were organized. They were running patrols.

Ren pulled his scouting journal from his belt pouch — the leather-bound notebook that the army's intelligence section issued to scouts and that Ren had supplemented with the notation system that Tik had taught him for recording observations in the field: abbreviated, coded, readable only to someone who knew the guild's shorthand. He sketched the patrol routes. Marked the junctions. Noted the intervals: twelve minutes between rotations at the nearest junction, eight minutes at the one beyond it, the timing staggered so that the coverage overlapped and the gaps between patrols never opened wider than four minutes at any single point.

Four minutes. That was a professional interval. That was the kind of gap that a disciplined guard force maintained — tight enough to deter, loose enough to allow the guards to function without exhaustion, the balance between security and sustainability that Tik had called the watchman's equation and that the guild had exploited for decades because the watchman's equation had a flaw: it assumed the threat would approach through the gaps. A thief didn't approach through the gaps. A thief created new ones.

But demons weren't watchmen. Demons didn't get tired, didn't get bored, didn't get distracted by conversations or card games or the particular variety of inattention that accumulated over long shifts. These patrols had been running for years — the gestation's long dormancy allowing the demons to establish and refine their patterns until the patterns were as reliable as machinery, as predictable as clockwork, as dangerous as any professional security Ren had ever evaluated because the predictability wasn't a weakness here. The predictability was the point. The demons weren't guarding against infiltration. They were maintaining a system.

The figurine pulsed. A slow, deep warmth that Ren felt through two layers of cloth and leather — the boneglass responding to the crystal field below with the resonance that he'd learned to interpret over six months of carrying it. The pulse was different from the southern territories. In the south, the figurine had reacted to proximity — warmer when approaching boneglass, cooler when retreating, a simple gradient that Ren used as a detection tool. Here, the figurine's warmth was constant. The entire Cathedral Province was a boneglass formation, the crystal embedded so deeply and so extensively that the figurine couldn't distinguish between closer and farther because everything was close.

A patrol passed below. Three demons — humanoid in shape, the basic bipedal architecture that the gestation preserved when it worked from human hosts, but altered in ways that the southern demons hadn't been. Their skin had the crystalline sheen that all gestated creatures developed, but the sheen was darker here, a deep amber that absorbed light rather than reflecting it. Their movement was fluid, coordinated, the three bodies operating in a formation that covered sight lines and approach angles with the unconscious efficiency of soldiers who had drilled together until the drill was instinct.

They were adapting. The southern campaign had taught the army how to fight gestated demons — the vulnerabilities, the attack patterns, the responses to divine fire and alchemy and conventional weapons. If the army had learned from the southern campaign, then the demons had learned from it too. The amber skin was darker than the southern demons' crystalline surface, harder to spot at distance, better camouflage for the terrain they occupied. The patrol formations covered angles that the southern demons had left exposed — the blind spots that Ren's scouts had exploited, the gaps that the army's tactics had been designed to penetrate. The gaps were closed.

Ren marked the adaptation in his journal. New entry: skin coloration, darker, reduced visibility at range. Formation discipline: tight, coordinated, covering approach angles that southern deployment left open. Assessment: these demons have either observed or been informed about the army's tactical methods. They are counter-adapted.

The word sat in his mind like a stone. Counter-adapted. Not just different from the southern demons — responsive to the army's specific methods, the modifications precisely targeted at the weaknesses that the army's tactics had exploited. The implication was not comfortable: the demons were learning from the army the way the army was learning from the demons, the two forces engaged in a tactical evolution that accelerated with every engagement and that favoured the side that could adapt faster.

The army adapted through doctrine, training, institutional knowledge — slow, deliberate, filtered through command structures and theological approval. The demons adapted through gestation — biological, instantaneous, the information encoded in the process itself and distributed to every new emergence without the institutional friction that slowed human learning.

Ren knew which side would win that race.

***

He retreated from the border as the sun climbed past the midpoint, following the route he'd marked on the approach — a path that avoided the patrol junctions and the boneglass concentrations and the sight lines that the adapted demons' formations covered. The retreat took twice as long as the approach because the approach had been based on the southern campaign's assumptions about demon behaviour, and those assumptions were wrong here.

The scent-masking paste held. The demons' olfactory sensitivity — the enhanced chemical detection that gestated creatures used to locate prey — remained the primary threat during withdrawal, and the paste's formulation was still effective against the Cathedral Province's demons. That was useful information: they had adapted their visual camouflage and patrol discipline, but their sensory capabilities were the same. The paste still worked. The alchemy still worked.

Small comfort, but comfort nonetheless. The army's alchemical capabilities — the tools that Ren had developed from Ludo's journal and that had become standard issue for the scout corps — were still an advantage. The demons could counter the army's tactics, but they couldn't counter its chemistry. Not yet.

The staging camp materialized from the landscape two hours later — the army's new position established three weeks ago after the southern campaign's conclusion and the Hierophant's announcement that the Cathedral Province was next. The camp was larger than the southern staging area, the army's ranks swollen by the reinforcements that the church had drawn from the eastern dioceses and by the refugees that every campaign absorbed and converted into soldiers because the machine's appetite was constant and the volunteer line — the branding tent, the screaming, the divine fire's golden glow — never stopped growing.

Nella met him at the scout barracks.

She was waiting — not waiting exactly, but positioned where his approach route intersected with the command area's perimeter, the physical placement of a commander who had calculated when her scout would return and who had arranged to intercept the intelligence before the institutional reporting chain could delay it. She wore her field armour. The branded forearm was uncovered — the sigil visible on her left arm, the geometric pattern healed to a raised silver line against the skin that was, three weeks after the branding, the permanent addition to Nella's body that the church called holy and that Ren called what it was: a mark of ownership.

"Report," she said.

The command voice. Flat, efficient, the tone that three weeks of post-brand adjustment had stabilised into something that was not Nella's voice — not the voice Ren remembered from the refugee road, from the planning sessions, from the quiet conversations that happened after the command meetings when the commander set down the mask and the woman beneath spoke with the warmth and the directness and the particular quality of caring that expressed itself through competence. That voice was quieter now. The command voice had absorbed it, the brand's modification reducing the emotional range that the voice could carry until the professional tone was the only tone, the flattened register of a woman whose feelings were still present but whose expression of those feelings had been compressed into a bandwidth that didn't include the frequencies Ren listened for.

"They've adapted," Ren said. "Patrol formations, visual camouflage, coverage discipline. The southern playbook won't work here."

Nella processed this with the efficient analysis that the brand had enhanced — the faster cognitive processing that came at the cost of the pause for emotional response that unbranded people maintained between receiving information and acting on it. The pause was gone. Nella heard the report and immediately began converting it into tactical implications.

"How bad?"

"Four-minute gaps between patrol rotations at the border junctions. Coordinated three-unit formations covering the approach angles our tactics exploited in the south. The amber skin is darker — reduced visibility at range. They know how we fight, and they've restructured to counter it."

"The alchemy?"

"Scent-masking still works. They haven't adapted their sensory capabilities. The chemistry is still an advantage."

Nella nodded. The nod was precise — a single movement that communicated acknowledgment without the additional motion that an unbranded response would have included. "Write it up. I need the full report for the command briefing. Lethane is addressing the army tomorrow."

"I know."

"She'll want specifics. The Hierophant doesn't lead campaigns on generalities."

Ren looked at Nella. The thief's assessment — automatic, relentless, the trained eye that evaluated every person in every interaction for the signals that the surface concealed — identified the changes that three weeks had produced. The steadiness was more pronounced. The flat affect that the branding had introduced had settled into a baseline that Nella occupied naturally now, the emotional reduction no longer a visible alteration but a permanent state, the new normal that the woman inside had adapted to because the woman inside had no choice but to adapt. The warmth behind her eyes — the quality that Ren had watched diminish in the branding tent, the fire banked but not extinguished — was still present. Dimmer. Steadier. The flame reduced to a pilot light that maintained the minimum warmth necessary for the connections that the machine hadn't taken.

Yet.

"I'll have it ready," Ren said.

Nella turned to leave. Then stopped. The pause was brief — a fraction of the pause that the pre-brand Nella would have held, the emotional processing compressed but not eliminated — and she looked at Ren over her shoulder with an expression that the brand's modification couldn't quite flatten.

"Was it as bad as the south?"

"Worse."

"Good. I was getting bored."

The humour was thin. A ghost of the woman who had joked about tactical disadvantages on the refugee road, the gallows wit that the survivors had shared as currency in the economy of mutual survival. The brand hadn't killed the humour. It had thinned it, reduced it to a line that was technically a joke but that lacked the warmth that made humour human, the emotional investment that distinguished comedy from commentary.

Ren smiled anyway. Because the joke was there, and because the fact that it was there meant that Nella was still fighting the reduction, still finding the frequencies that the brand's compression hadn't reached, still human in the ways that mattered even as the ways that mattered were slowly, incrementally, being defined downward by the thing in her arm.

"Get some rest," she said. "Tomorrow is going to be loud."

She walked toward the command area. The steady, balanced gait that the brand had installed — the enhanced movement that was better than human and that cost something human in exchange. The silver sigil on her forearm caught the late-afternoon light and flashed once, a bright point in the camp's dusty geometry, before Nella turned a corner and was gone.

Ren stood outside the scout barracks with his journal in one hand and the figurine warm in his pocket and the border's wrongness still in his nose despite the three hours of clean air between the Cathedral Province and the camp. The demons had adapted. The army would learn this tomorrow, when Lethane addressed the assembled forces with the Hierophant's particular combination of manipulation and divine power, the performance that passed for leadership in an institution that measured its leaders by the volume of their fire and the absoluteness of their certainty.

The demons had adapted. The army's doctrine said that demons were mindless, that gestation destroyed intelligence, that the creatures that erupted from the earth were beasts wearing human shapes. The doctrine was wrong. The Cathedral Province's demons were not mindless. They were organised, disciplined, counter-adapted to the army's specific methods — they were learning, evolving, meeting the threat that the army presented with the biological imperative that the gestation process served.

The army would adapt too. Ren would make sure of that. The report he wrote tonight would contain the specifics that Lethane wanted — the patrol routes, the formation discipline, the camouflage adaptation — and the recommendations that the thief's tactical mind generated when the old methods met new obstacles. New approaches. New angles. The guild's code applied to a war that the guild had never imagined: survive first, steal second, never betray your own.

The Cathedral Province waited. The cathedral at its centre — the boneglass-corrupted structure that the army's intelligence identified as the primary gestation site and that the campaign's strategic objective required them to reach, infiltrate, and destroy — sat beyond the adapted patrols and the organised defences and the counter-adapted demons that guarded it with the patient, relentless discipline of creatures that had been waiting for years and that would wait for years more if the army didn't come to them.

But the army was coming. Lethane had announced it. The machine was marching. And Ren would march with it, as he had marched with it since the conscription, because the machine was where his people were and because the thief's code demanded that you protected your own even when your own were scattered through the mechanism that consumed them.

He went inside. Lit the lamp. Opened his journal. And wrote the report that would tell the Hierophant what her holy war was actually fighting.