The March North (3 page)

Marching back into town gets us some looks.

The artillery going first is just odd; five tonnes of sheep with blood drying in its underwool and eel-tree ichor splattered all over the rest of it is unexpected.

Rust has found a couple of horse-favouring town kids happy to earn some money by making much of the horse-ghost’s feeding and grooming. It’s essential to the ghost to have contact
with some technical variety of innocence Rust is unable to provide. A delegation of matrons resulted; Blossom was able to reassure them with impeccable tact that the definition of innocence was on the order of “never summoned a demon”. Since good Creeks don’t do any such thing, and even more do not mark themselves as suitable for consumption should a demon arrive, all was well.

Halt’s comprehensive
definition — never consumed a human soul, never slaked wrath by wide killing, and, oh yes, never coerced a bound demon into a shape empty of all but pain — was not provided to the matrons. Even more fortunately, Halt’s oddly wistful expression was not observed by any townsfolk at all.

The true list is longer, and gets into strange technical questions of removal of the will and self; it’s quite
all right, apparently, to send someone quietly to sleep in the middle of attacking you. Overriding the will in lesser actual degree to make them more willing to obey is not.

Eustace has no such requirements; Halt’s wave sent Eustace into an inadequately fenced paddock shining clean by a mechanism no more apparently strenuous than the waving hand.

It’s only two days in ten for drill. So the sergeants
and their dents are dismissed with their platoons, and the Quartermaster’s clerks make a point of letting the public houses know the company is being dismissed thirsty, and I get to figure out how to use the next four days.

Which is why the Captain’s House has a meeting room.

“Part-Captain; how is your battery for ammunition?”

“Expended fifty shot per tube, all short black-black-black. Full caissons
have an even hundred per tube of that. Resupply is slow” — the Creeks have no canal or Hard Road connection to the rest of the Commonweal, there’s an inescapable slow haul with waggons for a hundred-odd straight-line kilometres and four days of decent but very twisty road over the Folded Hills, that were towering mountains once and are still tall enough for mountains now — “but it’s just iron.
Get me the iron and we’ll make shot.”

Of course they will. Not quite straightening nails, but close enough.

“Is there any of your ammunition you could not make?”

It’s a small thing, but the Master Gunner looks alarmed. Blossom actually smiles, not the grin. “I
can
make all of it; I shouldn’t make the hot reds here. It’d be messy if I slipped.”

Blossom’s purely thoughtful.

“The materials for some
of the red-red-reds aren’t local; there might be substitutions.”

“The Standard-Captain understands that any substitution is a complex question in both fabrication and effectiveness.” The Master-Gunner, excruciatingly formal. Halt is smirking. And, yes, Halt can doubtless substitute frogs where it says “turtle feathers”, but still. Hank’s right. We don’t want unpredictable shot, and we entirely
don’t want to damage Blossom, tubes, or gunners.

“The Creeks don’t mine much iron.” Tin, historically, some copper, coal, but all the local iron comes out of small bog deposits. The smithing collectives with those in their keeping won’t be keen to sell the Line tonnes of the stuff. “How much iron to replace all your black-base shot?”

Blossom tips the question to the Master Gunner.

“Five tonnes
finished per tube per caisson; we’ve got three caissons per tube. Sixty tonnes finished all told.”

“And one caisson of the scary stuff.” Blossom’s brief grin flits past. You can tell what part of the job Blossom
really
likes.

Twitch’s head shakes. “I doubt a hundred tonnes of new iron comes into the Creeks in a year, even if we count hobnailed boots.” All of it very much wanted by someone, and
not available to be turned into long shot.

“You do have a river of blood.” Rust’s tones can be good and plain and honest, too. Can be.

Blossom’s eyes light up. “Half a gram per litre, two tonnes of blood per kilo, twelve thousand tonnes of blood, that’s only a third of a kilometre out of the middle of the river. And it’s right there.”

Twitch twitches, hard and sudden. Good Creeks don’t think
about Split Creek much, and certainly not as an iron mine. “It’ll be venom and fire before it’s blood again.”

“When’s it blood next?”

The Quartermaster pulls out the astrological table that predicts Split Creek’s doings. “Next third day. But that’s the flaming kind. Next plain blood is fifth day, décade after next.” Chuckles’ tone has it that we’ll all be buried by then, which is why Chuckles.

“Flaming? What colour?” Halt and Rust are paying extra attention, too. Quietly.

“Like snot when you’re just catching a cold. Kinda greenish.”

Thank you, Chuckles.

“You have a river of dragon’s blood?” Blossom takes a careful breath, pauses, speaks very carefully like someone who believes what they’re saying, who isn’t trying to call anyone crazy. “Actual, thaumaturgically active, stays on fire
if you take it out of the river, dragon’s blood?”

“It keeps burning in a bucket”, Twitch says. “Better be a glass bucket.” Which is why the stuff doesn’t get used for outdoor lighting; too easy to break the bucket and then things get exciting. Which is the explanation for certain facts concerning the pathway paving in the back garden of the Captain’s House.

“I have five days to get ready to mine
dragon’s blood for iron to make into short shot…” Blossom trails off. There’s this three-beat pause while the pleasant young officer — Blossom looks maybe nineteen — act falters a little, and you can see the sorcerer much more clearly.

“Sir! Request permission to detach the battery for a logistical exercise!”

“I want the tubes, two files per tube, and at least three of the gunners kept well away
from Split Creek.”

“It needs eighteen files to work.” No
sir
, but that’s fine. Blossom’s really asking.

Halt’s snort could stop rather more than this conversation. “Only if you’re all newfangled about it. I’ll make you some glass jars, Blossom dear, and” — the blunt end of a knitting needle jabs at Rust — “will handle the lift.”

Blossom nods, slowly. Rust looks sardonic.

“And you don’t need to
bother with tidying up, the leftovers are going to be shy some iron and some vitriol” — and one or two other things, if Rust’s expression is anything to go by — “and there’s no reason not to put that right back in the river.”

Blossom blinks, blinks again, gaze tipping down from the ceiling, and says “Five files, for two days. No requirement to detach the battery.”

“Very well. Set up and do this.”

“How do we get the iron back from the creek?” Twitch would never come out and
say
that the Part-Captain, might, possibly, get a little excited and make a wee bit more iron than sixty tonnes.

“One waggon-load at a time?” Blossom knows Twitch has a reason for asking, but clearly no idea what it is.

Chuckles provides that. “No drayage; waggons for the battalion we ain’t, but no drayage.”

“How much
copper do you mine here?” Sorcerer again.

Twitch shrugs, Chuckles grabs the almanac. “Two, three hundred tonnes a year.” Copper pots last pretty well, but not forever. Same with sheet-copper roofs. Not all there to melt down and make new.

“The main mine’s pretty big and really old.” Chuckles’ best attempt at a suggestive optimistic tone may explain why Chuckles does without much social life.
Though I know Chuckles’d do worse than try to sound cheerful to get some regular drayage.

“The Line has gleaning rights on tailings.” There’s enough tailings that several of the hills support outright forest. A very old mine. So we could pull tonnes of copper out of just the bare tailings without setting any forest on fire. Maybe a couple hundred tonnes, once we get the hang of it.

“How many
bronze bulls can you use?” This is very nearly pure Part-Captain. Twitch and Chuckles both get a little straighter, and Halt looks, ever so faintly, approving.

“No drovers. Territorial Line, drovers get hired.” Chuckles’ best “what do you expect? Less pain?” tone doesn’t get used often.

“So we’re nailed to Westcreek Town?” A bit of appalled leaks into Blossom’s tone.

“Yes, we are. I want that
fixed.”

Even Halt looks like someone paying attention; maybe that came out a bit strong.

“Either the Line or Parliament thinks something is going to happen here.

“I don’t know, maybe nobody knows, if it’s something coming out of the eastern waste, out of the swamps to the southeast, or if they want us ready to hold the west edge when it turns out what the Eighth fought a few years back was just
a probing attack and the real trouble comes out of the Paingyre.

“And, yeah, nothing is certain. So we can act like there’s a real risk, and be ready, and maybe we’ll look like idiots or maybe we’ll win, or we can get crushed because we were unprepared.

“Idiots is a good outcome; it means that there wasn’t really a threat. Winning is an outcome; we might manage to do it while there’s still peace
behind us. The only good thing about getting crushed is we probably won’t see how everybody very slowly does not die.”

One or two deep breaths, and Twitch manages to say “Captain, we’re one short company.”

The look Blossom gives Twitch, I’m surprised nothing nearby catches fire.

Much to everyone’s surprise, Rust speaks up.

“At the end of the march that made the Hard Road, Sergeant-Major, there
were perhaps one hundred ninety of the Foremost still active. I assure you they were effective in a way ‘one short company’ would not imply.”

Twitch looks croggled, Halt looks amused, and Chuckles like someone whose drawers contain ants undertaking renovations. The social convention that Independents are normal people with an unusual job works against your composure sometimes.

“We might do real
well, yeah. But if the Captain’s right, where’s the regular battalion? Fire, where’s the brigade being moved up to Headwaters, just in case?”

Halt is looking at me almost gently; Rust produces, rather than a pitcher of table cream, a silver flask, and waves it interrogatively. I manage to wave “not now” back, and go on to answer Twitch. A pity the sergeants aren’t here for this. I’ll probably
have to say it again.

“When the Iron Bridge over the Dread River collapsed and the Bad Old Days came north out of the Paingyre, the Third Heavy of the Eighth had the guard, and formed up to stop it.” It has another name, above the escarpment and before the Lily Swamps, but after you get to where you can feel the Paingyre, even over the horizon, it’s the Dread River.

“Sixty-two days later, the
Second, Twelfth, and Sixteenth brigades got to where the Eighth as a whole had been pushed back and started shoving the incursion south again. When the brigade focus dropped, there were eleven living.”

The Master Gunner looks a good deal less shocked than Twitch does; better rumours. Blossom didn’t know the precise numbers. Rust and Halt look like they know more, but they would.

“They
beat
a brigade?”
Twitch doesn’t believe it.

“No. We held them in that narrow stretch, between the Slow Hills and the Broad Swamps, about ten kilometres downstream of Wending, and they did a lot of dying. They just would not stop; it was like a dam breaking when whatever warding was on the bridge dropped into the water. Nearly all our dead were exhaustion. We spent the last thirty-odd days in continuous focus.”

Meaning the brigade made a conscious collective decision to die, rather than run or be bypassed. I can see that flowing over Twitch and the Master Gunner, and, rather differently, over Blossom, who’d have lasted, lasted while the artillery threw rocks and the dying crews bound to the iron.

“You were
there
?” Twitch isn’t twitching at all. Pity what it takes to stop the infernal tapping.

“Captain
in command of the Second Company of the Third Heavy of the Eighth on the day the bridge went down.” If I get a tombstone, that’s going to be the first thing on it.

“So you believe in the Bad Old Days.” Rust’s smile is honest, I’ll say that for it.

All I can do for reply is nod.

“The standards of the Eighth Brigade are currently in retirement; there’s still a couple hundred lives bound to each
of them, and the signa of the Brigade isn’t calm. So when I was made a Standard-Captain, I was sent here, because it’s very quiet in the Creeks.”

That gets a smile out of Twitch, and almost one out of Chuckles.

“The point is that where the Line used to garrison in the south with battalions, they’re using full brigades. Between the Iron Bridge creatures and the concern about Reems, there isn’t
anything substantial to send. Which tells me no one knows for
sure
there’s going to be a problem here.”

Or that if they have to lose somewhere, the Creeks will hurt the least.

“It might tell me some cynical general figured that whatever it might be, they’d get a report back from at least one of Halt or Rust, or there wasn’t much point in worrying because we’d never stop it anyway.”

Halt stops
knitting to give me this look.

“Nothing on feet gets over the Folded Hills” — the road goes over at the narrowest point, and that’s a hundred-twenty kilometres as a straight line on the map, a mess of thickly-treed green mountains and ridgeland along the west-south-west edge of the Creeks — “very fast, and there are any number of places where any decent Independent could close the road. I will
bet you anything you like that there’s four or so Independents with geological interests coincidentally present along that road this summer. So the Commonweal as a whole is less threatened by what happens to the Creeks than the Creeks are by what happens to the Commonweal.” Which is the same as saying we’re a tripwire at best if there’s bad trouble. Everyone in the room is smart enough or experienced
enough to hear it that way.