The March North (17 page)

Blossom’s looks goes complex, losing some of the mild.

“It’s well ahead, in capability terms per file.”

Blossom nods, face settling into the completely proper captains'-discussion mild expression. The Part-Captain’s next words are still unusually quiet.

“Thanks. I’m
starting to believe I’ll get some of them out of this.”

So am I.

“It’s easier to do when you think it could be possible.”

Blossom nods, I do the hand tip — all done — and Blossom starts heading back toward the battery.

Ten is more than zero.

The Part-Captain has dozens yet; may the math be easier to remember.

It is well and truly sunset, mountain sunset where the shadows lengthen and the light changes and then the mountain-teeth eat the sun out of the sky with suddenness, when a host with banners comes north over the pass.

HOLD FIRE
.

I don’t know if I said it first, or Blossom did, but the battery does.

I killed them!
, quite offended, from the Master Gunner, and
They just marched out of that
ground-level cloud
from the observers up on the ridge line.

It’s not perfectly intact, that host; if you look closely you can see the odd bandage, dents in the cuirasses, and the guys, even in the front rank, who have lost their spears. A lot of the helmet plumes have been better, too, but it’s clearly an entire army, focused and determined and well able to impose its will. The guy riding in front,
if you look for awhile, is sometimes wrapped in a small crackling of lightning, and the sorcerers and officers coming behind look just about as grimly determined.

It’s an amazing show; something like twenty thousand troops, marching to the voices of kettle drums and singing together.

They’re headed straight at the fortress’ battered south wall. None of it fell in, though parts of it caught fire,
and most of it looks chewed.

The army is about three hundred metres from the south gate when the trumpets scream a halt, faint and clear in your ears, close and shrill through the focus. The guy with the crackles and fifty or sixty officers and wizards and sorcerers ride forward another fifty metres, and stop, and a banner unfurls, a long tube of silk back from a snarling beast-head of some kind.
The trumpets scream again, differently.

You can feel the waiting coming off them, as a minute passes, and another. Five. Ten. There’s a little shuffling in the ranks, but not much.

Someone strides out of the front gate, bare-headed and robed in white over armour black as hammered iron. Sixty or so of the Iron Guard, in steel touched with gold, follow, overtake, form around the striding figure.

All the will in them to straighten their spines isn’t enough to throw off the hammer of despair; they’ve been a day in the fortress, breathing that cloud. It says something impressive about the will in them that they could stand up, never mind walk out of the fortress.

They come on, toward the army. The guy in the white robes stops maybe five metres from crackly guy on the horse, as close as one
can get without obviously having to look up.

There’s a pause, maybe enough time to inhale, and the army melts into demons and nothing. Crackly guy melts into Rust, who is smiling the smile your nightmares smile when they see you know you shall never escape.

White-robes’ eyes go wide, and then the whole figure moves in the small aimless way of someone surprised out of knowledge of what to do, as
does the Iron Guard all around. White-robes convulses into coughs, once and twice. With thrice, lungs come out, cinders and burning. White-robes topples forward, body landing with its face half in the puddle of burning lungs.

Rust climbs down off the ghost-horse, and, excellent symbolism, decapitates the body with a line-issue warsword.

It’s not like everybody we started with still needs theirs
comes from Twitch, and the beginnings of muttering in the focus die away.

The Iron Guard do not move; they’re swaying in the way of those who cannot move, whose wills have been shut away from their flesh. Three or five of them fall.

Rust takes the head by the hair, and flourishes it to the four quarters, the one burning cheek flaring and smouldering as the head waves and is still. Rust is watched
by the blank horror in the eyes of the Iron Guard and the hungry glitter in the eyes of crouching demons.

Rust flings the head high, very high, a hundred metres or more, and the demons rise in a screaming cloud to see which of them shall seize it, and bring the head of an Archon of Reems to Halt.

Halt comes back quietly.

Sitting in the howdah, knitting away, the howdah’s got the swords put away, while Eustace rolls forward at a gait between a trot and a walk. We’re going to leave it aside that, focus or not, alert or not — Rust’s illusion of an army made a mighty contribution to the general alertness — five tons of trotting sheep got maybe three hundred metres from the focus-edge
before anyone noticed.

Halt makes no attempt to cross the focus; Eustace stops and turns, at the tallest part of the cliff-palisade, and faces out.

Blossom makes a couple of waving motions, and Twitch gives some commands, both to make sure no one has themselves in a bad place, and then Blossom squats down and puts a bare left hand on the big copper strip of the anti-demon ward. The ward comes
up strong enough that your eyes go out of focus for ten seconds or so until your brain can adjust.

Sergeant Dove and a couple of other volunteers head down the palisade stairs with one of the camp tables, a big balance — meant for making sure the five kilos of raisins in the platoon pudding is indeed five kilos — and a freshly preserved demon heart in its sealed glass jar.

Dove’s unmarked sword
arm had got a slow look before Dove checked that the fresh warsword was all unmelted. Dove’s two steps over the demon-ward before the other two volunteers follow.

I pick up the whole of the focus. Everybody but three volunteers and two Independents is inside it; the observation point up on the ridge came back down while there was, just, enough light. Halt and Rust didn’t leave much moving over
there.

Blossom’s horse-thing is trying to put its whole head under Blossom’s arm, and getting scritched back of the ears as a substitute for success. The bronze bulls went back into their hoods with perhaps not the best grace — these are obviously not well-organised humans, to be doing this
again
 — but they went.

It’s going down for full dark, and the focus and the warding aren’t much for the
awareness of how many shapes of demons the night’s full up with.

Halt goes right on knitting.

Halt has obtained from somewhere a completely shapeless round hat. It can’t make Halt look harmless — even if you have no idea who Halt is, sitting calmly on top of Eustace just won’t get in grabbing range of harmless — but it makes Halt look like someone who ought to be. Dove cracks a remarkably natural
smile, seeing it.

The table’s set, and level, the balance gets set down on it, and the glass jar goes in one balance pan, chill and glittering and glowing a bit on its own.

All around me the living are nearly as quiet as the dead. The focus holds them, Line and of the Line together. Twenty nigh-hale files and another fourteen files of the indwelling dead, and they might argue with a battalion,
for a little while.

This mass of demons would be an army job, if all the brigades were hale and fast and lucky.

One demon flows forward, moving like the biggest, fastest snail there ever was. Tongue or tentacle, a rather battered head with gold earrings and the sticky remnants of a cloth cap is held out. Visibly, rigidly blank volunteers on either side, Dove takes it on a plate held up in bare
hands — Blossom’s proof gauntlets, offered, are unworkably too small — and sets it in the other balance pan.

The head sinks, but not to level; the light in the high stalky demon-eyes got darker, redder, and somehow a tiny fraction less tense, watching the pan come to rest.

The volunteer to Dove’s right carefully hoists the head up on its glass plate, holding it high and off to the right, the right
looking out, toward Eustace. Eustace, in an obvious demonstration of best table manners, lips the head carefully off the plate and is even more careful those live hands are well clear before the crunching starts.

It goes on for awhile, head by head, or parts of head. The demons figure out pretty quickly that all of those with the parts of the same head have to come forward together. It takes them
longer than that to figure out which fragments go together. One enterprising five-armed, five-legged demon like someone tried to make a hominid by stacking starfish has a head and a half in total, as parts of seven heads.

There’s jostling, but it stays orderly under the terrible weight of Halt’s complete indifference.

Three whole heads aren’t the right heads; the head-side of the balance sinks
to the table, and Dove tosses the head forward. Not “back”, never “back”, something difficult to do — the human impulse is not to make the disappointed demon angry — and Dove does it well.

The distraught demons would be more sympathetic if it were not for the rapid, messy head consumption which follows.

The reconstructed head, still not quite whole of right eye, either ear, or upper lip, is presented,
still in its preserves can. The balance likes it, can or no can, and it gets passed up. Eustace makes a martyred ear-flip, and very clearly remembers that moving any feet is entirely forbidden just right now, before there’s the strange clunking noise and the narrow metal jaws come out, to pick the can up as delicately as tweezers.

Sculpted head paté and tinned steel can might not be Eustace’s
favourite treat — there’s a couple metres of faint purple fire from the flesh nostrils with the can-chewing — but the clanking, crunching sounds of shearing metal are steady.

There are a lot of heads, and a lot of demons. Demons never stop arriving, some well after dark, marks of haste and fighting on them. Those later-arriving bring some heads that look extremely surprised; from the half-braided,
half-not-oiled look, one of them was having their hair done. Halt’s command didn’t say anything about where the people whose heads Halt wanted delivered were.

There are hundreds of heads. Reems the idea, Reems the thing with armies, this Reems so far east of Meadows Pass, has died, and the heads that held the idea of it are going down the gullet of a five-tonne sheep by the courtesy of demons.

Halt goes right on knitting, and Eustace goes right on eating heads.

Dove’s doing fine; the guy with the spare glass pan-plates for the balance is starting to shake. Only needed one spare pan-plate so far. I have no idea what that head had been dipped in or dragged through or if the demon carried the head somewhere in its digestive system, but raw brains aren’t that squooshy. Raw brains don’t have
hair.

Eustace ate it, plate and all, and the trooper doing plate lifting changed gauntlets, leaving the old ones on top of the next head.

Eustace ate those, too, with a big rolling cud-chewing jaw motion.

The slope below the camp stops heaving and jostling with arriving demons; it settles, as a last few charred and bearded heads are presented. Full night came hours ago.

It’s not full dark; there’s
a sky full of stars, and a field full of demon eyes, and the demon ward inside the focus leaking faint light.

One last demon strides forward; not very large, showing bite marks down one flank and claw wounds about the head, but it comes on so completely not showing what it must cost it to stride like that you know the cost is high.

The head of the Archon dangles from one hand.

The balance pan
fails to dip at all.

Eustace gulps the head down whole, and the volunteer sets the plate back down in the balance pan.

Halt stops knitting.

With demons, you can’t count the eyes and divide by two, but there are truly a lot of them out there. Five-brigade job, the full army that the Commonweal’s never put in the field.

Halt sort of waves, a gesture that looks like trying to brush crumbs off a table.

All the demons that brought heads, that completed a service, are gone.

Five are left; three prostrate, two grimly defiant.

Behind them, behind the place the mass of demons was gathered, Rust is sitting the ghost-horse, a dimmer shape than demons.

Blossom’s helmet gets tossed off, Blossom stuffs something in both ears, moving fast; the teams on tubes two and four are turning to look, worried, or
putting their hands over their own ears, when Halt says something.

The usual Independent “noise or words?” sounds liquid, fluid; this sounds like chips being hammered off the doom of all that lives, right behind you, close enough the chips should hit you. From behind and above, through the focus and major warding, it hurts to hear it with an ache like broken bones.

Halt tosses the broad half-twisted
loop of knitting just now made, spinning.

The demons dive for it, vanishing through it.

One hesitates; Halt says something else, harsher.

That last demon leaps, and is gone. The loop lands on the grass of the meadow, spinning down in a smell of crushed flowers and warmth.

Ow
says Toby, out of the focus.
How could that hurt in here?

Not entirely a physical effect. It’s proportional to talent.
Blossom,
sounding sad.

You don’t always lose the ones you can spare.

You don’t always lose them all. Dove looks appalling, but is still up, somehow. There are five or six others looking wobbly.

Halt looks across at me, and a very little up, Eustace and the howdah about adding up to the palisade height.

“Captain. The re-making of the binding of despair is beyond the Archonate of Reems.”

“Thank you, Staff
Thaumaturgist.” Polite, calm, voice that little bit absent, I think I got that just right.

It’s not like I’ll ever have another chance to say that to Halt, or that Halt isn’t grinning at me with a mad delight.

At me or the colour party trying to will themselves to start breathing again, it’s hard to say.

Rust starts riding forward, ghost-hooves on the demon-slick grass.

Rust’s smile is not good,
or plain. But it is honest.