The Steam Age: Gears and Bones

Chapter 70

Perfit stood on the steps of the fortress’s main tower, with the Elector beside her, giving the procession heading to the capital one last check.

The carriage was already harnessed, and the iron cage was secured to the carriage with heavy chains. Inside the cage were the infected people that Belfast had captured.

The iron cage was made from the thickest iron bars that could be found in the fortress's blacksmith shop, and was personally reinforced by Perfit using alchemy. Each iron bar was as thick as a thumb, and the gaps were so narrow that a hand could not even be stretched out.

The infected creature in the cage had its limbs chained and a double-layered leather muzzle over its mouth, but it was still struggling desperately. Its chained limbs banged against the inner wall of the cage, and black blood seeped from its broken finger joints, congealing into a pool of dark liquid that was slowly spreading on the bottom of the cage.

Ludwig, mounted on a warhorse, was ready to depart, while the gray-armored knights formed a guard around the carriage.

The Elector had already dispatched messengers in advance to notify the outposts along the way to prepare for changing horses and resupplying.

He also wrote a personal letter bearing the Elector's personal seal and the insignia of the Northern Legion, enough to allow Perficot's troops free passage in any Romulus city.

From Wild Boar Ridge to the capital of Romulus, she had checked the route against the map three times. Every day's itinerary, every horse change point, every possible unexpected situation and corresponding contingency plan were all kept in the notebook in Perfit's coat pocket.

Everything is ready.

Just as she was about to wave to signal departure, the Elector's adjutant rushed out of the main command building.

He clutched a newly translated telegram in his hand, his face looking extremely pale in the gray morning light. The sound of his military boots pounding on the gravel was urgent and chaotic, like someone striking a broken drum with a drumstick.

Perfit's hand froze in mid-air.

She didn't ask "What's wrong?" because she could already tell from his face—a telegram that could make an old staff officer who had held out for weeks under siege show such an expression could not be good news.

The adjutant ran up to her, panting, and handed her and the Elector a telegram. Then, in a hoarse voice, he reported: "The border has been breached! Not on our side—it's to the south, the border between France and the Empire."

Large numbers of infected people are pouring into the southern part of the Empire, and several border towns have lost contact. The source of the infection is not from Ross, but from Frans.

Perfit took the telegram and read it line by line.

The telegram was an urgent plea for help from the Romulus garrison on the southern border; the wording was chaotic, and the words were filled with terror.

Almost all of the port cities in northern France have fallen, and the infected are spreading between cities far faster than their defenses can withstand. Some of the infected have already crossed the border into Romulus.

She didn't speak immediately after reading it; her brain was still processing the information behind those lines, trying to connect them with another set of earlier data in her memory.

The port of Frans, the same port they had stopped at a few months ago on their way to Ross aboard a cruiser, had only one quarantine officer smoking at the checkpoint. The sandbags in the quarantine zone were just one layer deep. The tired quarantine officer said that the council was still arguing about funding.

"I understand what you're saying, but the parliament's response to me is: there will be no additional funding for supplies. I bought these sandbags and protective suits with my own salary."

She had also vaguely heard a few lines in briefings from the port of Stocana about the nobles of Ross fleeing to France by sea.

Chertzov and the soldiers he brought to Viktoria were just among the luckiest of the countless refugees fleeing from Russia. More ships, more people, and more latent infections followed them, landing at the ineffective quarantine stations in France.

How could those exiled nobles, accustomed to being flattered and fawned over at every turn, possibly accept a temperature check by a quarantine officer? How could they possibly stay obediently in the quarantine area for a few days? And how could they possibly tolerate a civilian in a cheap protective suit turning them over and over?

Then, Frans became the second Rose.

Perfit carefully folded the telegram and handed it back to his adjutant.

Her fingers brushed lightly across the paper, as if touching something she had long foreseen but was powerless to stop. She turned to look at the Elector, then turned back to face the carriage, the iron cage, and the fully equipped army.

The infected person in the cage was still banging against the iron bars, bang bang bang, each bang sounding like the drumbeat of some cruel joke.

She spent the entire night battling with herself on the spire.

She rejected a plan that would sacrifice innocent people, and then devised a more risky and difficult scheme that would not require the deliberate sacrifice of anyone—to take the infected to the capital and let the nobles sitting high in their halls see for themselves what they were refusing to confront.

She made all the preparations, from the route to the horse-changing points, from the guard configuration to the number of rivets on the iron cage.

She forged her resolve into tangible objects—a carriage, an iron cage, infected individuals, the Elector's authorization, and a map of outposts marked along the route by Chertzov's messengers.

But all her efforts seemed meaningless in the face of this telegram from the Franco border.

The problem she was supposed to solve no longer exists. Not that it was solved, but rather that it was crushed by a crueler reality.

Once news of the collapse of the Roland border reaches the capital, the parliament will no longer ask any questions.

They no longer needed the envoy's report, the Elector's plea, or a Victorian noblewoman showing everyone in the council hall the infected in the iron cage and the black filaments seen under a microscope.

France's fall did all the persuasion work for her, achieving the result she had longed for at an unexpected cost.

She stood there, while the infected in the iron cage continued to bang against the bars, bang, bang, each thud like the vulgar way this era was beating a broken drum.

She suddenly felt that all of this was utterly absurd.

She spent the entire night atop the spire battling with herself, weighing her conscience and reason on the scales, rejecting one insane plan and devising another, more difficult but cleaner one.

She had planned every step meticulously—the route, the horse-changing points, the guard configuration, even the number of rivets on the iron cage—and then the collapse of a country's pandemic response rendered all of that worthless.

The moral dilemma she found herself in was kicked away by reality in the most unexpected way.

She should feel relieved.

What she came here to accomplish has now been done without her having to do anything more—France's fall has convinced everyone else who still needed to be convinced.

But she just found it ridiculous.

She was like a joke, a clown who put all her effort into preparing for the performance, but ended up making all the audience laugh by tripping and falling before going on stage.

She raised her hand to cover her face, letting out a very short, forcibly suppressed sigh through her fingers.

The sound was somewhere between laughter and tears—she was laughing because the heaviest stone on her shoulder had finally shattered; she was crying because it had been shattered by how many corpses?