Oglethorpe, determined not to weep, watched the flames take his home.

“Why, sir?” Parmenter asked quietly, the red light playing across the hard planes of his face. “Spiking the cannons, yes, and poisoning the wells, perhaps. But this?”

“They'll get nothing from us,” Oglethorpe replied. “Nothing. If in the end we lose this war, and Azilia goes down to dust, then I will not have our enemy sitting in this house again, benefiting from my work.”

“And the assembly?”

“Yes, I should see them now. But this had to be done first.”

“To set the example.”

“Aye.”

And to set me free, Oglethorpe finished silently. To sever him from the idea of defending Azilia, which couldn't— shouldn't—be done. He had built it up once, and he could do it again. But for now, he had a bigger war to win and precious little to win it with. His attachment to the margravate would only hinder him.

The assembly hall of Fort Montgomery was less than three years old, for the old one had burned down and nearly taken the town with it. Oglethorpe would never forget that night, the soot-blackened faces, the men and women straining on the bucket line. And then the rebuilding and the celebration. They always took time to celebrate when they could in Azilia.

The assembly was thin, for many who had sat in it had died, and there had been no time for elections. Oglethorpe stood up and cleared his throat. But before he could say anything, Robert Taft stood to be recognized.

“Mr. Taft?”

“I only wish to express, Margrave, how happy we are to see you. We had thought ourselves lost, but now you have returned to us. I speak for all of us here, I think, when I say we are at your service.”

“You most certainly do not speak for all of us, Mr. Taft,” another man shouted, his long face a furious red beneath his bedraggled periwig. “For this war was not voted on by us! We should be with the Pretender, not against him. He is our king, by God, and all of our tragedies may be laid on that man.” He thrust his finger at Oglethorpe.

Oglethorpe sighed. He set his shoulders back and clasped his hands; then, removing his hat and setting it on the table, gazed across at men who had once trusted him. “How many of you are with Mr. Prescotte and feel I have embroiled you in the wrong sort of war?”

It came, he reckoned, from the confusion of yeas and nays, to be about half. He smiled grimly. “More of you will agree with him soon, for I am come here to give you some hard truths. The first is this: We are at war with the Pretender and his diabolic allies. If you think you can make peace with them and live as free men— or live at all—you are naïve and do not know what I know, and I will take no further steps to convince you. Stay here and wait for them if you please. But I am margrave, and, further, I command the army of the continent.”

“That army you destroyed?” Prescotte roared.

“If my strength is all gone, then come for me. Depose me. Try to pry my men from me, Mr. Prescotte.” He aimed a finger at Prescotte. “During all this, while good men have died, where have you been? You and all the other naysayers in the assembly, all those craving to crawl on their bellies to the Pretender and give them all we've fought for. You were on your plantation, eating corn and pork!”

“I could not leave my family alone with my slaves, not in times like these! You know that well.”

“Oh? Many planters fought with me. I myself abandoned my own plantation.”

“But you have no slaves.”

“True. But Williams did, God rest him. And Mr. Thomas Gerald.” He frowned at the memory of their deaths, then shook his head. “No matter. I am freeing the slaves. Slaves weaken free men. They've weakened the margravate, and you men are proof of it.”

That brought an explosion all right.

“You can't do that!” Josiah Marner shrilled. “They are our property!”

“Stop me,” Oglethorpe said, and he said it so coldly and quietly that it actually brought the furor to an end. They sat or stood, mouths agape, as he continued. “We need the slaves free so they will fight for us, not against us. Freemen will fight in their own best interests, and that interest is in defeating the Pretender.”

“Errant nonsense!”

“Right now my men are collecting a levy of slaves to put under arms. They are being informed of their freedom and the freedom of their families.”

“They'll run away!”

“Some will, some won't. The smart ones won't, because there's no place to go, really. But they won't stay here. When the redcoats come to burn you out of your plantations, they won't find slaves here to conscript.”

“But you just said we're going to fight.”

“Not here, not at Fort Montgomery.” He paused significantly. “Not in Azilia. This very day, we start a retreat through Apalachee territory, where we will find lodging for the women and children. Soldiers under Governor Nairne will march on to New Paris. I have another mission.”

“But what of Montgomery?”

“I'm going to burn it. And each of you, in turn, should burn your plantations. I've already destroyed mine.”

“Burn Montgomery?” Prescotte shrieked. “This exceeds your authority, Oglethorpe, all of it. All of it!”

“Authority? These are martial times. My authority is in my scabbard. Will you test that, sir?”

Prescotte withered beneath the stare. “But—burn our homes, free our slaves—I'll be ruined!”

“You are already ruined, you babbling fool,” Oglethorpe snapped. “You were ruined the day that army of devils set foot on this shore. We're going to fight them until they are gone or until there is no breath left in us. And what I cannot save, I will burn, for they will not have it. Now, gentlemen—I do not ask you to love me, or even to believe that God does. But you must follow me. You must follow me or perish. Your childhood is past. Be men. Be men, or God damn you.”

And with that he rose and left the shadowy hall.

Parmenter found Oglethorpe on the bluff, looking down at the river.

“They're with you, sir. You won.”

“All of them?”

“It don't matter about Prescotte and his like, does it? Some vowed to stay. But the whole commons was with you, sir. Few of them hold slaves, and the rest resent them that do. And the army is behind you, and ‘most all of the folk. They love you, sir.”

Oglethorpe looked at him in genuine surprise. “They do?”

“Of course they do. You hardly seem human to ‘em. How many times have you stood up for them—against Howe, the bloody Spanish, Carolina? Each time you come out with a victory for them. If it weren't for you, there wouldn't be no margravate, and only a fat-assed fool wouldn't know that.”

“After today, there won't be a margravate.”

“Sir, wherever you go, there the margravate will be.”

Oglethorpe nodded, then exclaimed in surprise.

“Sir?”

“The first good news we've had in a long while, Captain Parmenter. Look there.”

Across the river, just becoming visible from the forest, stood an army.

And they did not wear red coats.

“I'll be damned,” Parmenter swore. “It's Martin, from North Carolina. And, if I make no mistake, those are Cherokee with him.”

“No mistake, Mr. Parmenter. No mistake.”

“How did they know to come here, with the aether-schreiber messages taken and all?”

“I do not know, but I am grateful for it.” He frowned. “And cautious. Find me a boat, so we can go talk to him.”

“Sir, that's hardly cautious.”

“A boat.”

Martin, it seemed, had been a few days behind him for almost a month.

“I pressed ahead faster than I thought possible, and hoped to meet you on the upper Oconee, where our Cherokee friends heard tell of a battle. We got there late and found a lot of red-coated corpses and fallen demon ships. The last we'd heard on the aetherschreibers was that we would fall back to Azilia if things got tough north, and that looked liked where you were going. We thought you could use the help.”

“Damned if we couldn't.” Oglethorpe grinned. “And you nearly missed us again.”

“Oh?”

Oglethorpe outlined the plan.

“Margrave, I've got nigh two thousand men behind me— stragglers from Virginia and both Carolinas, a good number of Cherokees, and even some Oconees who have broken with the Coweta empire. Are you sure you wouldn't just rather hold this fort?”

“I'm sure. Mar was a fool. A real general, with all the alchemical weapons the Russians have on hand, could reduce Montgomery in seconds. We can't sit in one place—we have to move, strike, and retreat. We have to worry them like a pack of wolves worries a buffalo herd. The only reason Nairne held up here was because of his civilian charges, and he was preparing to march again when Mar caught him.” Oglethorpe wondered if he could have made that decision a few days ago. With his plantation drifting smoke, it was easy.

Things were looking better, but they had to have the Swedish king, his ships, and his men. Which meant they needed to go, fast.

“Come on across,” Oglethorpe told Martin. “We've plans to make.”

Oglethorpe left the next morning, boarding a hundred men into his amphibian ship. The great exodus was already beginning, Nairne and Martin at the head of four thousand troops and five thousand invalids, women, and children. Of course, of that four thousand, nearly half were Negroes, many of whom had never held a gun before, most of whom still did not. Despite his confident talk, Oglethorpe did not think the freedmen could be trusted with arms. But they could dig trenches, build redoubts, and cook meals. A few could be armed.

Montgomery was a column of flame and smoke.

“General, it's time y’ came on board, ain't it?”

Oglethorpe glanced over at MacKay, whose head stuck up out of the amphibian they had named Azilia's Hammer.

“I shall,” he said, trying to think of a reason to put it off. But he needed to do this. Even mounted, they could never follow the marsh-edged Altamaha as fast as the ship could sail down it. And speed was their chiefest need. “Make way.”

Oglethorpe stepped tentatively onto the metal back of the artifice, then, determined to appear bold and unconcerned, went down the small wooden ladder.

Inside, the amphibian positively reeked of men and oil. Mostly it smelled like the sulfur his men had used to clean the Russians out. And it was close inside, terribly so. The bridge was the size of a rowboat, and four people were already crowded into it. A wooden bulkhead cut them off from the rest of the ship, so the effect was that Oglethorpe felt he had been stuffed into a small box.

Panic squeezed his lungs, but he forced himself to breathe. He had never liked small spaces. Never. He'd been trapped in a pantry once by one of his cousins, and had not been discovered for hours. When they found him, he had beaten his hands bloody.

He concentrated on other things. The most obvious were the windows. Plates of alchemical glass—really a sort of transparent metal—were bolted into the ship's frame, so he could see the yellowish blue murk of the Altamaha's water, though such was the nature of the stuff that no one outside could see in. The occasional silver glimmer of fish flashed there, but otherwise there wasn't much to see. In fact, the obfuscating water did nothing to lessen his discomfort. No, rather, it heightened it, for he was a poor swimmer, and the thought of water pressing in on him from all directions was unpleasant.

“How does it work?” he asked MacKay.

MacKay indicated a wheel, smaller but not otherwise vastly different from any other ship's wheel. “This goes back to the rudder,” he said. “And this makes her go.” He indicated a long lever with several notched settings.

“How? How does it go?”

“There are wheels on the side, as you've seen, with paddles attached.”

“Yes. What turns the wheels?”

“A demon, sir.”

“Yes, yes, but how?”

“I do not know. I only know she works, sir.”

“Where is the demon?”

“This way, if you want to see.”

“I do.”

They passed the bulkhead that separated the bridge from the rest of the ship. Behind, there were two decks: an upper, where supplies were stored, and a lower, where the rest of the men were packed in tight—an awful, windowless place.

“Hello, lads,” he said, as he went among them. “Cozy down here.”

“Yes, sir!” they answered.

Near the center of the ship, the lower hold was interrupted by a metal cylinder, a bit too large for Oglethorpe to put his arms around. From that, two heavy shafts stretched out to the sides of the ship, where they slipped through gaskets to turn the wheels outside. On the large cylinder was a small door. MacKay produced a key and opened it.

From inside the cylinder, a giant red eye stared back at him.

“Good God,” he swore. He looked quickly away, but his gaze came inevitably back.

It wasn't an eye, exactly, but a large sphere of some translucent material, inside of which was a red glow with a black center that looked very much like a pupil. He had seen globes very like this powering the Russian airships.

“This turns the shafts, somehow. And keeps us down?”

“No, sir. We use ballast, just as any ship would, except we want to sink, of course, so we have a lot of it. The boat has big bilges, too, and clever pumps the lads work to clear them. They don't work if we go too deep, though—if we do that, we have to drop the solid ballast and replace it later.”

Oglethorpe shook his head. “Clever indeed, except for the reliance on the devil to power it. Why didn't they use steam, I wonder?”

“I reckon you'd see bubbles rising, and then not be so invisible.”

“I'd think the water would take the steam back to its bosom, as a liquid,” Oglethorpe argued. “I think instead these Russians have become as reliant on their pet demons as our planters on their slaves. And so it makes them weak, don't you think?”

“In a way, I suppose. But this ship ain't weak, sir. Far from it.”

“You mean those flame cannons?”

“Oh, there's more,” MacKay said, eyes twinkling. “We've a magazine of bombs that float up if we release them.”

“Why? Oh. You would swim the ship under a man-of-war—”

“And let ‘em float up. Yes, sir, and I'll wager blow a great huge hole right in the bottom.”

“Delightful. And if we encounter another amphibian?”

“The Russian pilots said they had nothing for that. They reckoned they would never meet an amphibian that was an enemy.”

“And yet we will. We certainly will, and we must think of some countermeasure.”

“Well—we could always drop them bombs from above, onto amphibians below.”

“I thought they floated, these bombs?”

“We could take off the air bladders. They'd sure sink then.”

“And drop them how? Through the deck?”

“Ah!” MacKay shook his finger, grinning. “I haven't shown you the other hatch. Here.”

He walked a few feet farther on, knelt at a round, metal screw, much like the one on the top of the ship; and began turning it.

“MacKay!” Oglethorpe protested. “You'll let the water in.”

“No, sir. Not as long as the upper hatch is closed.”

“What on earth do you mean?”

“Here.”

The screw lifted out, and beneath was water. It bobbed there, coming no higher.

“How?”

MacKay shrugged again.

“Don't know, sir, but it works.”

Oglethorpe considered that. “Yes, it does,” he said finally. “But can we trust it? And in any event, if we are positioned to drop mines on them, won't they be positioned to let theirs float up to us?”

“Aye. But they won't know we're the enemy, at least not the first time we do it.”

“Not the first time,” Oglethorpe agreed. “We shall need another weapon or stratagem after that.”

“Well, there are the guns. We've fired ‘em underwater. They work tolerable well, though they churn the water fierce and makes cones instead of clean lines. At short range they ought to work.”

“They can be fired from inside the hatch, then?”

“Aye, though not aimed. We have to point the ship to orient ‘em.”

“Well. That's better than I feared. I wish Franklin could see this. He would invent something, no doubt, that would do us good.”

“No doubt,” MacKay replied. “But he's not here.”

“Aye,” Oglethorpe replied, clapping him on the back. “We poor soldiers will have to make do. So let's set sail, or start swimming, or whatever term we should use for this unnatural business.”

“Aye, sir.”

And a few moments later, still gritting his teeth, Oglethorpe stood near the helm and watched the mud of the Altamaha flow by.