Atten-tion! At ease. See that? Nobody executes the drill sharper than I do.
I am a shrimp soldier of the East Sea Water Court. Enlisted and registered: 147th Battalion, spear number 3,621. Small as I am, my family has eaten army rations since the day the Dragon Palace was founded. My great-great-grandfather guarded the treasury back when the Sea-Calming Needle still stood in it, un-borrowed. My great-grandfather walked the coral roads on night patrol. My grandfather lived to see the last Grand Muster. And my generation —
my generation has lived to see nothing at all.
You may not know how orders travel in the Water Court. Not by paper, not by gong — by tide. The palace presses the command into the water, and the tide pushes it out wave by wave, and we lay our ears against the current to read it: three long, two short — assemble. Two long, three short — rotate the watch. One tone, held to the end — all posts stand easy. The elders say that in the great days, an order ran from the inner hall to the farthest picket in half an incense-stick, every syllable crisp, as if the King himself spoke against your ear.
Now go and listen to today's tide.
The orders still come. But they come rotten. Half a stray tone bleeds into the three-longs; the two-long-three-short breaks off mid-phrase; some nights the water repeats a single note over and over that no one alive can parse. The old soldiers call it the disordering of the tides. Shore people just think the tide runs early or late. To a soldier's ear, it is the sound of command itself rotting, year by year.
So every soldier in the East Sea now executes the last order that ever came through clean. The one from three hundred years ago.
Seal the gate.
Two words. No reason given. No duration. No word of what comes after. But an order is an order. The gate was sealed, and we have held it since. Gate-keepers keep the gate, reef-walkers walk the reefs, and the rest of us drill. I drill every day. Spearwork, formations, the Eighteen Changes Underwater — nothing skipped. Our squad leader barks: drill for what? Drill for whom? I don't talk back. But I think: precisely because no one is watching — that is why we drill.
In years when orders rot, the soldiers must not rot with them. If a new command ever sounds from the inner hall, someone has to be fit to receive it.
A few days ago, strange travellers came from the shore: a boy with a medicine basket, with a monkey, a Drillwind, and a catfish who turns out to be from my home ravine. They went toward the palace, saying they'd come to read the tide-marker stones. Saying the Sea-Calming Treasure was missing.
Missing! In the barracks no one dares say it above a whisper. By Water Court law, a theft from the treasury means the guards answer for it as one. But here is the strange thing: from above — nothing. No inquiry. No punishments. No new orders. A silence quieter than the crime, and more frightening.
That night I lay with my ear to the water from dusk to dawn.
And inside the garbled tide, I think I heard something. Not a command. Counting. Somewhere very, very deep, something is counting — slow strokes, steady strokes, the way one counts one's own breaths. Or the way one counts what remains.
I reported it to the squad leader. His face went white. He said: this goes no further than you. Never speak of it again.
Why not? Who is counting? And what is it that is being counted down?
I don't know. I'm only a shrimp soldier. But since that night, I drill harder than ever.
Because when the new order finally comes — what if it comes from the far side of the gate?