Martyrs' Teeth

#On the Platform

Martyrs' Teeth is a heavy-gun platform on the eastern salient of Bastion-Przemyśl, the Carpathian fortress that holds the western passes for the middle-northern stretch of the Sagittal Line. It faces east, toward the highlands that Atheron crowns with spires for the pleasure of being looked at. It has guns and it has crews. The files of the Bureau of War reproduce its name without comment, which is the Bureau's way of saying nobody has asked.

Its place in this Codex rests on one autumn day of A.S. 195, when the Spire-Crusher came out of the eastern saddle and every heavy position on the salient fired on it for nine hours. The garrison calls that day the Nine-Hour Rubric. Four platforms are named in the after-action sequence: Casimir, Ulrich, the Orchard Eye and Martyrs' Teeth. Battery Saint Ulrich opened. Casimir rang its bells blind. The Orchard Eye watched, as its name obliges. Martyrs' Teeth made the hole.

One hole. The Ledger has canonised men for less, and plenty of platforms have served a century without producing a sentence worth filing.

#On Its Place in the Salient

The platform stands behind the Wire Orchard, the electrified grove of pylons and barbed strand that gives Przemyśl its nickname and its smell of rust and wet rope. Beyond the wire the ground breaks into ravine, scree and old shell pit, climbing toward the Ebon Heights. Behind it lies everything the wire protects. There is Taghouse Row with its hot wax and sweat, the Rail-Throat Yards, the Chapel of Counting, and the ration lines that open each dawn with a blessing and close it with a count.

The gunners of the salient hear the wire before anything else. It hisses in wet weather and in dry, and in the autumn of 195 it hissed under a load the Orchard Wardens had never been asked to carry. Ration tags hang from the barbs. Bells mark the hour and the curfew, and under fire they ring the Humility Sequence. Ammunition comes forward by hand, in relays. The salient's lift cages and mule roads were built by men who expected a siege of ordinary height.

I must be exact here, because the Bureau of Engineering will be reading. These are conditions of the salient at large. No surviving report gives the stance of Martyrs' Teeth, the stone of its parapet, the number of its pieces, or its distance from Tower Nine. Its crews filed no poetry. They fired.

#On the Third-Hour Breach

By the third hour the Spire-Crusher had taken two hours of shelling from the whole salient and grown through all of it. Shells that struck the lower galleries turned to ornamental dust. Shells that struck mid-shaft peeled stone away in banners and showed more shaft underneath. The tower answered every hit by being taller afterward, which is the most insulting reply a target can give a gun crew, and the crews had begun to take it personally.

Then a shell from Martyrs' Teeth struck the westward face at approximately five hundred feet.

The face opened in a triangular wound, a wedge cut out of black stone, and while it stayed open the witnesses on the salient could see inside. A staircase climbed in a spiral around an empty core. Nothing stood at the centre to bear the load. There was no shaft, no chain and no furnace, only the turning stair and the hollow it turned about. Figures stood on the stair, a great many of them. They faced outward, toward the guns. Their hands were folded and their heads were raised.

None of them moved.

The next shell arrived and the gap was gone. The reports say it was filled, erased or closed; they use all three verbs and agree on none. Nobody saw inside the Spire-Crusher again. Nobody has said, under oath or behind the confessional screen, who those figures were, whether they were men or had ever been, or why they stood on the stair. Engineering has no structural account of an empty core holding up a tower that size. The Bureau of Doctrine has an account and has not released it to me, a discourtesy I note here for the permanent record.

I will not supply what they withhold. The witnesses saw folded hands and raised heads, and the gap lasted until the next shell.

#On Fire Held in Common

The third-hour breach did not bring the tower down. It is the platform's own line in the Ledger, and I give it to Martyrs' Teeth without reservation. The other six hours belong to the salient.

From the second hour the heavy guns fired in overlapping sequence, so that one platform's reload covered another's laying and the tower never had a quiet minute to compose itself. Ammunition crews ran relays until their hands bled through their gloves. In the fifth hour Sun Spear fire came through the ventilation slits beneath Platform Casimir and blinded the bell crews at their instruments. They kept striking the Humility Sequence from memory. That ordeal is Casimir's and stays at Casimir. I will not lend it to a neighbour for the sake of a better paragraph.

Below the tower the Crownguard advanced in ordered files, with Sun Spear on the flanks and at least two Mirror-Lords among the thaw pools. The spotters kept reporting the tower's height when they should have been reporting the enemy's range.

By the sixth hour the Spire-Crusher stood at the outer wire, measured at nine hundred feet. Provost-Marshal Vanna Rook ordered the eastern Orchard current doubled. The tags on the barbs caught fire one by one. The forward pier entered the charged field and stopped for twelve minutes. Then the tower grew again and lifted its pier over the wire.

Major Cestian Rell ordered every battery onto a single mark, the narrowing of the forward pier below the lowest gallery. Every range slate had cracked, so Sister-Adjunct Hilde Marek worked out the angle on a requisition form. The final salvo began at eight hours and fifty-three minutes. In seven minutes the participating guns put thirty-eight heavy shells and four hundred and twelve secondary rounds into that narrowing. At the ninth hour the forward pier broke, and the tower folded down into forty feet of rubble.

Martyrs' Teeth fired in that salvo, along with every other gun on the salient. No document assigns the breaking shell to any one platform, and I will strike out any regimental history that tries.

#On the Eye after the Gun

The sky-fixation lasted three days. Men across the salient looked up at the empty air where the tower had stood. They flinched when clouds moved. They judged parapets against a height that was no longer there and found them wanting. The condition is recorded for the garrison as a whole. The Ledger holds no separate return for the crews of Martyrs' Teeth, and I will not invent one to make them interesting.

The tactical lesson had already been paid for during the battle. An observer who reports grandeur is not reporting range. While the salient's glasses were tilted toward the summit, the Sun Spear and Crownguard below it walked forward through the footnotes. Przemyśl has since written its answer onto a card. The A.S. 201 revision of the Spire Alert Card orders measurement by number only, eyes down between reports, the Humility Sequence on low bells, dirty smoke over the platforms and no clean brass. It also orders continued fire at the narrowing after any visible effect, and after despair.

That is salient doctrine, issued years after the Rubric, and Martyrs' Teeth did not write it. The file does not say whether the platform is staffed today, whether its guns are the same guns, or whether the card hangs on its wall.

#The Ratification

This Codex ratifies Martyrs' Teeth for one shot: the third-hour shell that opened the westward face of the Spire-Crusher at approximately five hundred feet and showed the salient what stood inside. The fall of the tower is credited to the eastern salient in common, to its guns, bells, wire, smoke and hands, under Major Rell's mark and Sister-Adjunct Marek's arithmetic. Pride may keep its own accounts of the day.

The platform's founding, its namesakes, its calibre and its present crew are not in the file. Send enquiries to the Bureau of War, which will lose them.