#On the Eastern Gap
"Report all gold on the eastern slope by bell, not by hand." — Alpine Watch Standing Order, A.S. 201
An army coming from the east toward Bastion-Sibiu has three ways through the mountains. Turnu Roșu takes the southern throat. The Bran corridor climbs from the northeast. Predeal is the eastern gap, and it faces the most direct way into the country of Velmora, Sin-General of Greed.
The Transylvanian Alps are the barrier: granite, pine to the treeline and bare rock above it. Sibiu sits on the protected plateau behind them, in Zone 4, the middle sector of the Sagittal Line. Predeal is one of the few places where the barrier lets a road through, so the Church has had to put guns on that road.
The Predeal pass-fort stands outside the city's rings, beyond the Wire Ring and off the plateau. Strictly speaking it is no part of the bastion. It takes Sibiu's orders anyway, and no order has yet been delayed by that distinction. The emerging Church administration designated Sibiu in A.S. 66 and ratified it in A.S. 72, while the Line was defensible but still unfinished. Older entries say the Synod "arrived" in A.S. 66. It could not have, because the Synod did not exist until the Concordat of Strasbourg in A.S. 90, and Bureau seals on earlier frontier work were added afterwards. Nobody has filed the year the Predeal redoubt was raised.
#On the Works Above the Road
The fort is built to the pattern used at all three approaches and fitted to the rock it stands on. Gun-redoubts command the road. Wire crosses the approaches. Above both rises a catechism-tower, from which the Bureau of Doctrine sends hymnal suppression down the eastern valley. Demolition charges are packed into the road cuts and the avalanche shelves, ready to drop the mountain onto anything that climbs it. Signal towers connect Predeal to Bran, to Turnu Roșu and to the plateau.
The Doctrine of Layered Death is drilled here in its mountain form. Sector instruction lets the first layer be terrain, so long as the terrain has been prepared, witnessed, mined and blessed. The second layer packs charges. The third raises relic-ash into wind that keeps trying to take it. The fourth beats rhythm against the echo. The fifth is already ruled into the casualty book with numbers and blank spaces for names. The arrangement is simple. A valley that admits a column only in single file shows that column to the guns in single file, the wire keeps it where the guns can reach, and the tower sings over the whole business.
The parent entry claims a competent battery can close such a pass in three salvos. That is an engineers' boast about passes in general. The file holds no Predeal action of that kind, and I have not drafted one to improve the paragraph.
The difficulty begins at the back door. Everything the fort eats, burns or fires has to come up from the plateau, and snow decides when that is possible. The road the guns exist to deny is also the road the bread arrives on. Engineering solved half of this problem with admirable confidence. The quartermasters are still waiting for the other half.
#On the Battalion
One battalion of the Alpine Watch holds Predeal. The records released to this office give neither its number, nor its strength, nor its commanding officer. The forty-two thousand authorised at Sibiu are the bastion's figure. Readers who divide that figure by three and call the answer Predeal will be fined for arithmetic.
The duty is fixed. A patrol goes into the high country every day, and once a week a reconnaissance goes down the eastern slopes into the trees, where the Church's jurisdiction thins out to a matter of opinion. Every report travels the same route: from the fort to the Alpine Watch commander, then to the garrison commander, then to the Bureau of War's Transylvanian Desk in Budapest. In practice the garrison commander answers to the Bureau of Tithes' Sibiu Comptroller, who holds the pay-chests. War gives Predeal its orders. Tithes decides whether the men are paid to carry them out.
Holding the gap and escorting the supply traffic are different jobs. The battalion's job is the pass. The roads behind belong to the Convoy Escort Corps, which walks the three supply corridors from Budapest, from Przemyśl and from the Danube crossings near Irongate. Those three roads are a different list from the three defended approaches. No document assigns any of the corridors to any of the passes, and I will not be the clerk who invents that table.
Men posted to Engine watch carry no loose coin, no medals, no family rings and no private reliquary fittings. Their buckles are black iron. Their rifles have had the brass taken off wherever the rifle still works without it, and their pay is kept at the plateau. That is how a soldier dresses at Predeal when he expects to be tempted.
#On the Eleven Minutes
The Avarice Engine, the war-golem of fused gold and silver that Velmora sends into the field, was first documented below the Bran redoubt. The second documented sighting came in A.S. 194 at Predeal.
According to the published dossiers, the Engine stood on the Predeal ridge for eleven minutes, close enough to be seen through field-glasses, and did not advance. The detailed account says it raised one hand. In Sibiu's Market Ring, a long way behind the wire, every unpaid chit is reported to have pulled eastward against locked drawers, pinned boards, pockets and strongboxes. By morning, thirty-seven soldiers had confessed debts they had never declared. Purity praised them for confessing, and Tithes fined them for confessing late.
The Engine is Velmora's instrument. Nothing in the file puts the Sin-General herself on that ridge. Witnesses also disagree about its head: one describes an ingot-mask, another a furnace-mouth, a third a strongbox with a bell inside. I record the disagreement and choose none of them.
That same season a Debt-Binder was captured at the Sibiu perimeter and burned, and its ashes formed a receipt. The capture did not happen at Predeal. The two events share a season, and the file shows no other connection.
The ridge left droplets of cooling gold on the eastern scree below the Predeal watch-line. Three detachments went down to collect them. The first came back cheerful with fourteen ounces. By dusk every man in the party had accused another of hiding some. By Compline two of them were dead. The metal was melted down under guard, and when the crucible was opened it was empty.
Early Sibiu bulletins classed the metal shed on the Predeal scree as "recoverable enemy residue of potential revenue value."
Withdrawn. The residue left the crucible taking three wedding rings, a paymaster's molar filling and the silver wire from a chaplain's prayer book. Enemy metal that recovers itself does not count as income, and the Bureau of Tithes is instructed to stop forecasting it.
#On the Accounts Behind the Wire
The guns at Predeal point at a slope. Velmora's real work happens behind them.
Wallachia lies east and southeast of Sibiu. It is old trade country, and its roads now carry credit as well as carts. Velmora's gold comes from the Gilded Chasm, a place whose location the surveys cannot agree on, and it pays for bribed teamsters, forged scrip, falsified paperwork and relief loans. The Ten Thousand Keys lend in the highland villages between the passes and the plateau. Their loans are generous and their terms are clear. The collateral is a warm brass key that fits no lock the borrower owns.
The Bureau keeps borrowers and cultists in separate files. A farmer who signs for seed after a frost is a debtor. That is a misfortune, and the Bureau does not classify it as demonic. The cult's own members belong to its five ranks, from Debtor up to Inheritor, and those ranks are filled by people who chose to climb them. Hunger, deceit and fear make that choice easier. They do not make it for anyone. The Great Deceiver deals in persuasion. The Creator made men capable of refusing, and the Bureau of Purity has been charging them for the privilege ever since.
Here the battalion's needs meet the economy of the sector. Supplies for the pass-forts wait behind the Weighhouse queue at Sibiu, where convoys are held for four to eleven hours under Serial Reconciliation Protocol. Across the whole bastion, Tithes counts eleven corrupted convoys a season and estimates that twenty-two per cent of the Crown scrip in circulation is false. Those figures cover Sibiu, not Predeal. A soldier on the eastern gap is still paid in that money and still buys his sausage with it.
#On Present Duty
As of A.S. 201, the survey year for this entry, Predeal holds. The fort is garrisoned, gunned, wired and drilled. The daily patrols go out and the weekly sweeps come back. No assault has been recorded, and the Engine has not been seen on the ridge again. Velmora's war goes on behind the battalion, in currency the battalion is paid in and has no means of assaying.