The next morning went as usual. Mazelton played it cool about the renaissance. The fewer people who knew, the fewer greedy thoughts would fly around. So he waited until lunch and his usual rounds, before he approached the Bissetts’ wagon.

“Polisher. Need anything charged, Humble?” Mazelton called in a bored voice. Humble Bissette didn’t even stick her head out of the wagon.

“Get in here, Mazelton. I got a job for you.”

“If it’s a non-standard job, you gotta dicker with Policlitus about the rates.” Mazelton hauled himself into the large wagon. In a quieter voice, he added “A free service, of course, is on me.” He grinned.

Humble Bissette gave him a half smile in return. Whatever was ailing her was bad, today. Soon over.

“You’ve been a good friend to Loranne, and us too. I would have thought you were courting her, if I didn’t know better.”

“Just friends.”

“Yep. Turns out Loranne prefers a man with more meat on his bones.” She smiled to show she was joking, and Mazelton acted like it didn’t sting.

“Working on that, honestly. And speaking of work.”

“I expect you know where the hatch is. I won’t be helping you lift it.”

Mazelton nodded and pulled up the floorboards. The beacon was still in parts, mostly in its original packaging. He didn’t recognize the marks for most of the parts, though he noticed that the cores were stored in boxes stamped with the Ma Clan symbol. Old Radler Ma.

“I wonder which kinfolk worked on this.” He muttered.

“Relatives of yours? We just ordered and paid for it, never met ‘em.”

“Yeah. They wouldn’t have left the city. They would have been people of status in the main line.”

“Would have? As far as I know, they are still alive.”

Mazelton’s heart seized for a moment, and he couldn’t breathe.

“When did you last hear of them? Or write to them, or whatever?”

“Oh, some two years ago? We worked through some covens back east, who ordered it from the Ma. And you lot are famously long lived.”

Mazelton closed his eyes, the disappointment sinking deep into his gut.

“Not much longer than anyone else. We just take good care of ourselves.” He started slowly unpacking the cases, pulling out the sturdy machinery. Not much in the way of moving parts, he noticed. A small mercy.

Humble Bissette was wheezing, and he noticed her hand drifting to her side. Around where her liver should be, Mazelton thought. The organ failure must be pretty advanced.

“That’s better than most, I’d say. So why do you think they are dead?” Bissette had that combination of cheeriness of a suicide’s final days, and an old lady’s bone deep cynicism. It was a strange mix, and it neatly poked a hole in the fragile balloon of Mazelton’s mood.

“Old Radler Ma.”

“So?”

Mazelton just looked at her.

“Oh right… there was that big accident. Didn’t a whole bunch of people die?” Bissette looked like she was struggling to recall it.

“Everyone died. The whole city, and my entire extended family, died. I don’t talk about it, but I figure you won’t spread it around.” Mazelton looked calmly over at Bissette. “Let's say that I am very happy to help contribute to a renaissance. The notion of the Ma restoring life to the world even after one branch is exterminated.” Mazelton shook his head slightly and let the words trail off.

Bissett slowly lowered herself onto a box. “You are right about that. Both those things. Alright, do your thing, Mazelton. I won’t disturb you.”

Mazelton pulled out the parts and checked them over, trying not to think about why she didn’t know everyone died. Why she could just ignore the death of an entire city. It wasn’t like it was some kind of small thing. A whole city. Old Radler was one of the biggest cities on the Eastern Edge. Certainly the richest. How was the murder of a city just not her problem?

The core of the beacon emerged- the crystal rod that would catalyze the rebirth of the land. He hadn’t seen one before. It was purple crystal, slightly translucent, and quite rough looking. About two meters long, it looked like a series of thin purple reeds had been pressed and fused together into one larger crystal.

Which, according to his very vague understanding, was more or less what it was. The crystals weren’t natural- they were a manufactured product. It required very precise chemicals in the exact right conditions to grow the little crystal tubes, and even more exacting conditions to fuse them into a single mass. It was about as free of heat as anything Mazelton had ever seen. Mazelton smiled. Good. Its job was to get rid of heat, transmit it very carefully across the area being restored. It would be a problem if it was retaining heat.

The Clan does good work.

He started checking the couplers that would connect the rod to the cores. Then carefully looking over the cores, keeping their shielding in place to prevent a cancer cluster breaking out in camp. They were damn hot. And there were a lot of them. Mazelton estimated that the sheer weight of the processed cores was several times that of the entire rest of the Beacon. He carefully peeked under the shielding. The core felt a little off.

Mazelton let his senses run over the cores, swirling around the very regular, even carving on them. The polishing work was genuinely top notch- perfectly spherical in shape, exactly identical weight, the carvings beautifully identical. He could confidently state that each core had the exact same amount of heat in them. They were as perfect as if they rolled off an assembly line.

Which was impossible. Cores were harvested from living organisms- trees, usually. But no two were perfectly identical. They could be polished into the same sizes, you could select for weight, you could certainly, up to a point, excite the particles within to make it more radioactive. But all perfectly identical? No. Very, very close, but not perfect.

He drummed his fingers on his leg. The cores, and their outstanding polishing, ment that the heat supplied to the beacon would be very steady. No strange spikes or dips, no random “noise” to confuse things and damage the results. These cores were, essentially, a primer, triggering a change in the world. More reliable primer means a more reliable result. So it made sense that they existed, but got him no closer to how. Natural organism simply weren’t identical, even farmed trees. They only time you got truly identical things was with a production line and manufactured goods. Mazelton considered that for a moment, and it was lucky that there was no nearby wall for him to bang his head against.

The fucking mist plant. The.. Mazelton groped around for sufficient profanity and failed. All the normal swears didn’t cut it, and blasphemy wasn’t even an academic notion to the Ma.

The mist plant. The evening fogs of Old Radler, rolling down the city, sweeping up the heat and dust that would naturally accumulate in a city that dense. Pushing it along until it was finally filtered out in the vast, apartment building sized filters under the city. He had always believed that the dust was used for heat stones. Just pack it in with some filler, maybe add some extra heat on top from intact cores, then press it into slabs and ship it out. Easy money.

But nothing was that simple with the Ma. Operating such a huge machine, making yourself a target, inviting attacks because of your wealth? That wasn’t the Ma style. They weren’t exactly low profile anywhere, but since when did the Ma give a shit about money? They were in the power business.

And what would be more powerful than being able to transform the world? Turning barren, hot wastes into productive land? They must have figured out a way of pressing all the incredibly fine radioactive dust particles into spheres, then funneling the energy from the collected heat into them. Constantly homogenizing, smoothing, compacting, energizing them. Until they were ready to carve perfectly symmetrical lines into them, probably using a jig to keep everything identical. A phenomenal, insane expense to make cores, only useful for insanely sophisticated technology. Which meant, again, power for the Ma.

What would it look like if you could persuade people to buy their holy beacons, or at least the cores of the beacons, from you instead of making them yourselves? Or the cores for their most advanced technologies? That was the reason the Confeds made such a big push for the city, and why they couldn’t let the Ma live. They couldn’t tolerate the threat to their power.

Malima, Grandmother, must have figured it out. So she smashed the machine. It killed everyone, but now, the only people who might be able to develop “manufactured” cores were the Ma. The Confeds wouldn’t dare try to exterminate the clan. Not after seeing how suicidally resolved they were. Scatter, she said, and eat carrion. I listened, Grandmother. I’m doing it now.

He drew a shuddering breath, composed himself, and got back to work.

The reflectors, the boundary markers for the renaissance, were big, flat boards of some laminated material. He didn’t know what went into them, but they appeared solid. Finally the “Final Handshake,” or “The World’s Embrace” or “The Trigger of Glory.” It had dozens of names, every language and culture contributing more and more over the epochs. It was the bit that the sacrificial people held on to that connected the “Martyr’s Crown” to the machines. The bridge between the mind of the sacrifice and the machine. The machine then turning that will into action.

He looked into the last two boxes. There were the crowns. Simple little things. Unadorned. Some people liked making them look fancy. The Dusties kept it plain. The copper bands formed and adjusted according to some rules he never learned. He was never good enough to learn about it. Given the way his career in the Clan was going, he never would have learned it either.

The crowns were fine. No defects appeared to any of his senses. The Bissettes had managed a miracle of their own. They kept everything intact the whole way here.

“Do you have a standard or colors you want me to fly? Generally, if a polisher is the ancient, we fly the trifolium under the colors of the celebrant.”

“Yeah. Jo made something. Blue bag. Not too big?” Her breathing was getting labored. Hopefully she would last until tomorrow.

“No problem. I might not be meaty, but I’m not so feeble either.” Mazelton smiled at the Humble. She just nodded in reply.

The land rose gently but steadily upward, rising up over the most distant spur of the mountains. Mazelton had seen topological maps of the Ramparts before, and he always thought that these little shoots of the range looked like plant roots. The little root hairs extending out into long ridge lines, feeding back into the main roots and then the tap roots that soared miles above the surface. Then you got closer to the map, squinted at it and you could just see those little veins of streams and rivers coming down the mountains. A second network of roots laid over the first. He sometimes liked to imagine he was a bird, flying between the peaks, then swooping down along the streams. Letting his mind grow with the rivers and mountains.

Now he was climbing those same ridges. Just much more slowly. They were still golden from the drying grass, but the novelty of moving in three dimensions for a change had yet to wear off.

It had been very, very, boring crossing the prairie.

The road this close to Cold Garden was in good shape, and the campsite was in regular use. They met up with a local caravan that night, with much singing and dancing. It wasn’t a big caravan, no emmigrant settlers. It was just really nice to meet people on the road after all this time. Mazelton was even able to sell some cores.

The sun rose to find Mazelton saddling his cheve. He had told Policlitus that he had an errand to run in the settlement and he might be a day or two. Policlitus just shrugged and said that his cargo would reach New Scandi with or without him, so he best hurry up whatever it was.

It turned out that trying to secure a flag pole to a horse that you are riding on is not easy. He had to kind of stick it in the left stirrup, half wedge his foot in there with it, and then hold it in his left hand as he held the reins with the right. He wouldn’t call it optimal, but it should work for long enough.

It worked for about a hot minute. The damn thing kept popping out of the stirrup cup, alternately braining Mazelton, scaring the cheve, falling on the ground, and just generally being a miserable piece of crap. Mazelton didn’t know what he was missing, but he was clearly missing something. He just gave up and tied it to the back of the saddle. Now the cheve had wooden bars sticking out a meter on either side of it, but there wasn’t really anything for them to snag on. Mazeltong jolted his way along, trying desperately to stay in rhythm with the cheve. He thought he was getting better at it, but his aching thighs told him it was early days.

By cheve it was only about an hour to the settlement. There was a hard packed dirt road that ran through the middle of the town, then split into branches. Each plot was not square, but roughy circular. Each little house was surrounded by plant life- herbs and little kitchen gardens steps from the front door, then in concentric circles outwards, crops with longer and longer times until harvest. It was far from the most efficient use of space, but it did mean every home was more or less self sustainable. The big cereal crops were grown in common fields on the edges of the town, each family contributing labor, the sales going to improve the settlement. Not the most efficient, but at this scale, it worked. Mazelton’s entrance into the village was noticed by many, and he was hailed straight away.

“Hello there, stranger.” A calm voice called out. Mazelton stopped his pony, cupped his hands into a circle and bowed from the waist.

“Greetings brother. I come in advance of the Nimu Caravan, and the emigrants coming with it. They are about three or four hours behind me.”

That caused a stir, and the speaker, an older man with a hoe on his shoulder, nodded in reply.

“Welcome then, brother. You bring good news. By any chance is that a flagpole tied to the back of your cheve?”

“It is. Are you the local Humble?”

“No, my wife is. And yes, we all know what the Bissettes are coming to do.”

“I stand as their Ancient.”

He looked around. It seemed like most of the settlement was within earshot and looking at him. He untied the flagpole, and let the standards fly. The Bissettes had chosen a blue flag with a simple drawing of the world on it, and under the world, two hands clasped together. Under their standard, Mazelton had hung the smaller bright yellow and solid black of the Black Trifolium. He raised it high, his arms straining with the effort.

“I stand as the Ancient for Brother And Sister Bissette, who will offer their lives to heal the world! I call upon you. I call upon you. I CALL UPON YOU. STAND WITH ME!”

His voice roared, the fire of a burning city heating his words. He was met with silence. Then a girl of ten walked out of her house, struggling to carry two spears and a gun. She handed one spear to her brother, the gun to her mother, and held the last spear herself. Up and down the village, weapons appeared, people dipping into houses and barns, turning up with whatever they could. The old man nodded at Mazelton, as his wife trotted up with a rifle and a bow.

“We hear the Ancient’s call. We rally to the colors.” The Humble replied, loud enough for the whole village to hear her.

“Joyful are we. Thankful are we.” The village replied. It sounded like a declaration of war.