The rain fell in long, grey threads, stitching the black sky to the blacker water of the river delta. It was a cold, persistent drizzle that soaked through the heaviest wool and chilled a man to his bones. From their position in the reeds along the bank, the world was a mess of dripping leaves and the smell of wet earth. Twenty of them, huddled in the darkness, waiting. Sineus felt the cold seep into him, a familiar companion these last few weeks. He was no longer an observer in a warm palace antechamber. He was here, in the mud, a part of the machine.
Alessandro Volpe stood beside him, a low, solid shape in the gloom. The Italian inventor was unnervingly still, his focus aimed downriver. Not far from the bank, their primary weapon sat low in the water, a dark predator holding its breath. The Carbonari called it a steam-craft, a low-profile, armored boat powered by a compact, furiously hot engine. It hissed softly now, a kettle just before the boil, smelling of hot metal and coal. Sineus could feel the contained energy of it, a thrumming impatience that matched his own.
A runner, barely a boy, splashed back from the forward listening post. He whispered to Alessandro, his words lost in the sound of the rain. The Italian nodded once.
— They are coming.
There was no triumph in his voice. Only the flat, final tone of a man about to do a hard job. He looked at Sineus, his eyes catching a flicker of distant light.
— You are ready?
— I am, — Sineus said. The plan was a fusion of their two worlds. Alessandro’s brute force, his fire and steam. And Sineus’s unseen art, turned to a new, cruder purpose. Not the clean excision of a single memory, but the deliberate sowing of chaos.
Then they saw them. Three hulking shadows, lumbering barges moving slowly with the current, their decks laden with canvas-shrouded cargo. They were escorted by two smaller, faster vessels, French cutters, their silhouettes sharp and alert. The convoy moved with the quiet confidence of a power that did not expect to be challenged here, in the heart of the territories it had already conquered and unwritten.
Alessandro raised a hand, held it for three long seconds, then dropped it.
The signal.
The steam-craft’s hissing intensified to a roar. The water behind it churned to white foam as the engine engaged, and the boat surged forward, accelerating to a shocking twenty knots. It was a battering ram of iron and steam aimed at the heart of the French escort.
The lead cutter’s crew shouted in alarm, a frantic scramble of activity on their deck. They were too slow. The steam-craft hit them just aft of the bow, the impact a deafening screech of tortured metal that echoed across the water. A thick rope securing a deck cannon snapped, its severed thread whipping through the air like a dead snake. The French ship heeled over, its hull integrity compromised, water pouring through a ragged gash in its side.
— Now! — Alessandro roared.
From the banks and from the deck of the steam-craft, the Carbonari opened fire. They did not use rifles. They used alchemical fire projectors, strange contraptions of brass and copper tubing. Gouts of liquid flame, a sickly, brilliant green, arced through the night. Where the fire touched wood, it did not just burn; it consumed, spreading with an unnatural speed. Where it touched water, it hissed and sputtered but did not go out.
The night erupted into a vision of hell. The French forces were thrown into chaos, men screaming as the green fire clung to their uniforms, to the decks, to the rigging. Their return fire was panicked and inaccurate, a scattering of musket shots that were swallowed by the darkness and the rain.
Sineus ignored the physical battle. He found a space near the steam-craft’s hot engine, the vibrations grounding him. He closed his eyes, shutting out the green flames and the screams. He reached out with his mind, his senses expanding to perceive the unseen world, the memory-script that held reality together.
He saw the French command network, a shimmering web of silver threads connecting the officers on the cutters to the men on the barges. It was a structure of authority, of orders given and received, of shared tactical awareness. In his old life, he would have targeted a single thread, the memory of an officer’s duty, and cut it with surgical precision. A clean break.
He did not do that now. This was not surgery. This was sabotage.
He gathered his will and pushed it into the network. He did not cut. He twisted. He wove threads of phantom orders, echoes of contradictory commands, whispers of fear from forgotten battles. He poured memory-noise into their disciplined structure, turning their greatest strength—their cohesion—into a weapon against them. It was a messy, brutal act, and he felt the strain of it immediately, a sharp, stabbing pain behind his eyes. The price for this kind of power was always paid in the flesh.
The effect was instantaneous and total. On the second cutter, an officer screamed an order to turn to port, an order he had not received but now remembered with absolute certainty. The helmsman obeyed, turning the ship directly into the path of one of its own barges. Another officer on a barge saw a phantom signal to abandon ship and began shouting for his men to jump into the river.
The elegant web of command frayed into a thousand severed threads, a nonsensical tangle of panic and confusion. The French command integrity collapsed. Their coordination fell to zero. They were no longer a military unit. They were a panicked mob, trapped on burning ships in the middle of a dark river.
Through the chaos, Alessandro’s voice cut like a razor. — The barges! All fire on the barges!
The Carbonari, disciplined by years of fighting against impossible odds, refocused their alchemical projectors. The green fire washed over the three lumbering vessels. The canvas covers ignited, revealing the shapes beneath: the heavy, brutalist forms of the Lethe Mortar components.
One of the barges exploded, a concussive blast that sent a plume of fire and water high into the night air. A second followed a moment later. The third, already burning fiercely, began to list, its deadly cargo sliding into the black water with a great hiss of steam. Three out of three. The mission was a success.
— Withdraw! — Alessandro commanded.
The steam-craft’s engine roared again, its propeller biting into the water as it pulled away from the crippled cutter. The Carbonari on the banks melted back into the reeds, their work done. They left behind a scene of burning wreckage and dying screams, the green fire reflecting on the rain-slicked water.
They regrouped a kilometer upriver, in a secluded cove hidden by weeping willows. The adrenaline of the fight gave way to the grim reality of the aftermath. The victory had been paid for in blood. Four of Alessandro’s people were dead. One had been caught by the alchemical fire, his body a blackened horror. Two others had been hit by musket fire in the initial chaos. The last had been thrown from the steam-craft during the collision and was lost to the river.
Sineus looked at the faces of the survivors, their expressions grim in the dim lantern light. These were not the faceless soldiers of an imperial army. He knew their names. He had shared their bread. This was the interdependence he had chosen, and this was its price.
The rain began to soften, the downpour easing to a gentle patter on the leaves above. The smell of ozone and burnt chemicals hung heavy in the air, a bitter perfume of victory.
A scout splashed through the shallows, his face pale and urgent, and made his way to Alessandro. He delivered his report in a low, strained voice.
Their raid had been noticed. The main French force was rerouting.
A much larger convoy was now heading for a fortified mountain pass.
