The March North (8 page)

Don’t want to get too close; have to get close enough, or the ground shock is just a noise. The outwash down this valley’s pretty deep; the bedrock’s metres down. Which is good, in that the Reems guys probably didn’t build the temporary wall down to bedrock. It’s bad in that shaking the bedrock works better.

The tough call is just when those guys are going to come off the wall.

Halt
.
Amused spiders, which is fine; the whole half-square of a formation stops, as I meant it to.

About four hundred metres. Chewing-on-entrails range for nines, but still.

Captain, Battery. Two rounds, maximise flash. Let’s see if the heat pulse gets through that ward.
A surprising number of outlander wards are protections against fire, rather than heat. There’s some sorcerous difference.

Tubes two
and three pull their bundles of pointy sticks, and switch to long shot with white nosecaps. The teams hoist the trails and roll the tubes forward, to get the muzzles forward of everybody else. Throwing anything that hard is going to light the grass on fire. No sense having anybody lighting up at the same time.

Artillery to fire on a three count; everybody, duck and avert your eyes by the two
.

I get a bit of appreciation from Blossom, who is in the process of turning the horse-thing around. Spare shirts, bags, in one case a hardtack box, are going over bronze bull heads. Halt closes the howdah curtains. Eustace’s eyes narrow, nothing more. I have no idea what kind of cud you get from eating the stores-barrels, but whatever it is, Eustace is chewing away at it.

The Master Gunner starts
counting.

Ready on the one!

Ready on the two!

Twitch ducks last.
Hold your faces down
.

I turn my helmet around and hold my hands behind my back. The standard goes right on showing me the guys along the wall, visibly wondering what devilment we’re up to now.

Ready on the three!

Start shifting anything hitting the focus
down
, and start from the peak, so by the time it rolls down to shoulder-height
it won’t interfere with the

HEAVE!

You can feel it, the tubes kicking back, hard — the momentum transfer hasn’t got any recoil, but air in the tube getting hammered out of the way of the shot surely does — and the great white bloom of heat, like opening a furnace door, just ahead of an awesome crash, like thunder when you’re under the lightning strike.

Pointy sticks going back in, a profane undertone
and
Hot!
getting mixed, some of the Reems guys keeling over from what looks like heat stroke, grass fires under the muzzles and along a hundred metres of wall, maybe even a bit of backward tipping in the wall. No mass frying through the ward. Probably didn’t need to order eyes averted.

Kinetic dump’s getting most of it.
Blossom doesn’t sound surprised.
I could probably melt whatever they’re using
as the dump if we shot it enough
.

There are better ways to make lava.
Ones which don’t waste ammunition.

It’s really a pity we’re downhill of that wall.

Everybody see the little dimple in the grass fire, where the scorch from the shot tracks crosses?

General agreement, in the midst of the grass fire right along our front being strangled. The breath-sucker started as a fire-suppression trick.

We’re hitting that on three. Sergeant-Major, count.

One
.

Twitch has the great trick of all good Sergeant-Majors of sounding really, really calm, no matter what is happening.

Two
. Really good latch, best I’ve ever had from this company. Blossom’s battery is all back of Blossom, pushing; the Part-Captain looks wreathed in slow white fire to the standard.

Three
. One big push into the focus, and I
grab a mass of gravel and scree that starts about two metres down and has an oval shape a metre thick and maybe four metres deep by forty wide and send it down and back towards the wall. You want a real wave, you need displacement.

Most of the Reems infantry go down; the wall-top visibly waves through a couple metres forward and back and comes to rest rippled. Timber stockade under there for sure,
not good for much except ward-anchor.

Good!

Again, on three.

You could mistake this one for a battalion push; Blossom’s own magical back’s into it and the company has fully cohered. This one starts deeper, and goes back half-level and half driving right.

There’s a great noise as the gate-timbers snap, part of the whole wall toppling right and forward. There’s an appalling three-note twang, like
cables coming taut in the otherworld, and the road to the gate comes apart in dust. It rises and rises, the whole surface turning into a single great pall.

The Reems guys, the most of them who got clear of the wall, come up running right at us. They’re foaming at the mouth.

Battery, suppress attacking infantry!

Steady rate; the pointy stick bundles won’t tolerate rough handling. And this is
close
, some of them will get to us.

The smoke of the grass fire twists into words.
Their road is dust back to the permanent fortification, twelve kilometres up the valley. The entire ward has recoiled.

Prepare to receive nutcases
. Twitch’s whole tone is perfectly laconic.

The focus runs like a wire, the loop of our whole front. It only needs to be about three metres high, and fifteen or so deep. Hit
a zone with no oxygen and you go down
fast
. Fifteen metres is at least a couple of seconds for tired guys running in armour.

The first four bundles go out, tosses. The Reems guys are down to about two hundred metres, and they get chewed. Blossom seems to like variety in pointy-stick effects.

The focus staggers, staggers again, and collapses, all of Three Platoon drops out, then tube four, then
Four Platoon and tube three. Concentrated oxygen spills across dull burnt grass, waking brief flames. You can hear the Reems guys howling. Didn’t think they were berserks on their own.

The light goes out of the world, dust and worse than dust.

I’ve been here before.

HOLD.

HOLD.

Flickers, the beginnings of latches to the standard. It’s not going to be in time.

The Captain gets a signaler’s wand,
not a sword. It’s a metre of stick with a white end and a shiny end. And warswords are, quite properly, not really what you’d want. They’re meant for close fighting in ranks, there’s an edge and a point and a back edge and a pommel you can crack skulls with, but they’re also meant for cutting turf and clearing brush and prying ration boxes open, nobody really expects the Line to get down to swordwork
this century. So I grab one from a couple of the colour party, those easiest to reach when they get the worst of a beard-on-fire frothing berserk, and I get in front of the standard and get to work.

It’s a complete mess, but they’re coming back. Even some of the dead.

Dove’s been here, Dove’s will is writing
never stop
fixed and certain across Three. Three’s in good order and fighting.
Good order’s
not a good situation
runs through my mind, memory, as I feel Twitch go, fighting, not a part of Three but managing pretty well for the odds. Hector goes, stabbing spectacularly with a short-gripped pointy stick, a pile of Four is going, there’s not a lot of cohesion left there.

FOUR PLATOON, FORM ON TUBE FOUR
. That gunner’s still up and whatever screaming the gunner’s doing isn’t in despair.

Blossom cycles tubes two and three by sheer force of will; staggers from the effort, that I would not have thought any one sorcerer could make. While Blossom’s staggering the horse-thing kicks a couple of Reems guys hard enough they spray, bites another’s helm and head through in a scream of jewel-teeth. The clouds of pointy sticks look like they clipped the last hundred off the charge.

Halt, very
calm, is standing under Eustace’s head. Eustace has a spear through one ear and a snarl that’s stopped a howling block of Reems guys, paused at the apparent reach of the flames. Halt’s right hand moves with a knitting needle in it, the way you’d tap printed flowers on the tablecloth because you were bored.

I’ve never seen someone who has had a fencepost rammed through their skull, but that’s what
comes to mind, watching that block of Reems guys go down.

Radish’s choice of profanity is repetitive, but Two is holding. They stagger forward a step, then another, starting to hit a rhythm.

About half the colour party’s still up; a couple of them drift right and start grabbing pointy sticks from Four’s dead and chucking them over the pile in front of me. I drift left; the pile’s getting too high
to see over.

One’s about gone. Some guys from tube two run over with bundled up pointy sticks, and a gasped “
Absolutely
no stabbing”. I toss the right hand sword to my left, grab one, and try the toss past tube one where One’s going down and the Reems guys are starting to leak in at the baggage.

These are the little version of the whirling glass tentacle thing. Good. The ones leaking between tube
three and where Four was are too close for that, so I get a file closer and what’s left of the colour party throwing at that leak past One and drift right.

Blossom and Halt are talking, hands waving and bits of dust sparkling between them.

The Reems guys mobbing tube one turn, screaming, into an awful red mist under the molten wings and implausible jaws of a vast steel cloud of butterflies.

They’re
starting to thin out a bit to the right of tube three; I’ve got another pile started, but it’s only some past waist high.

Blossom says six presumably utterly improper words, because Halt’s eyebrows lift to the hairline. Something, briefly, smells of ugly and tastes of fire.

The light comes back, and the focus. There’s about sixty, seventy guys in the standard. Less than half, maybe.

Everything
firms up, in fits and starts and staggery bits as the last of the Reems guys need killing. None of them run, none of them even look like they’re thinking in words any more as anybody still standing tries to fend them off and the butterflies flow over them like phase change.

Radish’s brain is stuck. “Idiot, idiot, botched it, idiot…”

Sergeant.

Radish stops, in a staggery sort of way.

The dust was some kind of cogitoxin. Most of those are slow, they sneak up on you. This was more like stepping on a rake.
Really don’t want to start talking out loud, I’ll be making blood-gargling noises getting my mouth clear. I’m getting something like attention, anyway. And
there’s still plenty of shouting and screaming going on, so the standard works better.

Sergeants, report.

Dead, sir.
Toby sounds abashed.
One has nine up, twenty down, and fifty two dead, sir.

Thirty five up, eleven down, six and twenty nine dead, sir.
Radish’s grip’s getting firmer.

Sixty seven up, five down, eight dead, sir.
Dove’s take on calm might be real.

Solid silence, for a beat and another
beat. The pointy stick seems to have convinced Hector’s shade it was dead in some thorough way. None of Four’s file closers come in, which isn’t good.

Blossom comes in:
Tubes two and four are effective, tube three’s reduced, tube one’s ineffective.
The battery’s lost eight files, sixty-odd guys out of two hundred some.

Radish, Two gets everybody who’s down, company and artillery, to the medics,
start now. Don’t wait for the medics to do the carrying, they’re getting overwhelmed. Get a file checking where Four was soonest.

MEDICS! Back to the central point, triage as they get brought in.
I get heads up and wild eyes and nods. Medics are
of
the Line, not
in
the Line, and these are all excellent medics and good Creeks. Treating those who have been half hacked apart by berserks is a new
experience. Having to help friends in that state is new, too, but not those who’ve been mashed by timber or crushed by rocks, so I can hope the habits transfer.

Dove, Three hands their down to the medics, does a gear check, drinks up, forms up, and heads up the valley. Don’t get within five kilometers of the permanent fortifications; find a good rise for a camp, lay it out, picket it. We’ll be
along.
Everybody gets that.

Sir.

Just for Dove,
Get water into them and get them chewing on the march. It’s going to hit hard when the fight wears off
.

Teach Halt to scare demons, sir
.

Rust?

Steel-winged butterflies rise off stripped corpses into an elegant curve of interrogation mark.

Go with Three. Keep them out of trouble. Trouble you can’t keep them out of they are to retreat from and rejoin,
and you, too.

The butterflies do something that looks for all the world like a formal bow of acknowledgment. Dove’s eyes roll before all the sergeant’s attention turns back back to Three Platoon, starts detailing who carries the hurt, who lays out the dead of the Line, and who gets water. Dead Reems guys are our problem, cleanup, everybody in Three’s getting checked for what they haven’t noticed.

The shouting’s about stopped; still a few screams. Hardly ever helps but it’s hard not to when the spear through your foot wobbles.

Halt is sending me a couple of stunned looking drovers with buckets. It’s a very good thing that bronze bulls don’t really breathe, so they don’t have to smell this, and that they all had their eyes wrapped. A stampede reaction wouldn’t have helped.

Stunned, or terrified.
I stick both swords into the turf, one on either side of the standard. It might help the terrified, and it will for sure help the picking up a bucket part.

I get my head doused; no matter how carefully you bend, it sluices down your collar and moves the blood further down your armour coat. Never mind the coat, this one’s going to rot out the cuirass straps. Hand, other hand, drink the last half
bucket, hand it back. Still not looking too calm, either drover. See how much of the bloody hand prints on the first bucket will wipe off on the grass. Not as much as the drover wants, but they can hold it by the bail. Both of them head back.

The Master Gunner’s over at tube one. The other three tubes all have their gunners up and Radish’s guys are getting handed the non-walking down artillerists
on stretchers. Not
enough
stretchers, the medics are putting pads down and sending the stretchers back.

Blossom is standing in the saddle to get the spear out of Eustace’s ear. Blossom gets a really heartfelt eyeroll, but Halt’s got Eustace by the nose. It takes more stupid than five tonnes of mutton can manage to try shaking Halt loose.

There’s a sparkle around the spearhead, and a wet pop like
failing cartilage. Most of the shine goes off the spearhead. Blossom grabs the thing by the socket, and the shaft crumbles into dust. Halt lets go, and Eustace’s head gets a good shake, ears flapping like tent canvas, horns sweeping like death. There’s not much blood at all, and what there is shines a deep shade of purple.

Blossom drops into the saddle only long enough to dismount. Halt takes
the spearhead and looks disapproving as Halt and Blossom start heading toward me. Eustace lies down, baas, something you can feel up through your boots, and starts cud-chewing again. Blossom’s horse-thing leans over, snorfles at the hurt ear, and then appears to go to sleep, one hind leg slack.

Down to the medics
. Radish has gone grim round the edges. Seeing to carrying sixty-odd comrades who
were hale and fine a quarter hour ago to where they might not die will do that.

Lay out our dead.

Stack theirs.

Sir
.

Twitch, you in there?

Captain
. Calmer, for sure.

Sort the colour party up and the up survivors of Four into a new colour party. Make sure they’re all clear on who’s a file closer and who’s senior and get them physically moved to around where I’m going to put the standard.

Sir
.

Two files from Two show up, look at the waist-high stack and the above shoulder-high stack — over my head is doing well to get over shoulder-high on Creeks — and have a very visible “why move
that
?” reaction.

It’s not hard to check. “There are four of our dead and seven of our down under the main pile.” Nobody even curses, they just start lifting bodies with a fair show of briskness. “The smaller
pile’s all them.” Four was pretty much gone by then. Radish heard that, and has realised all the down aren’t to the medics yet. Another file trots over, and then another with stretchers.

I take up the standard, and nod toward the gap between the baggage and three. No piles of dead Reems infantry there, and none of ours, either. Halt and Blossom follow along.

Quietly, now.

“What was that?” Since
Blossom got rid of it, Blossom should at least have an idea.

Halt drops the spearhead point down in the turf, looks disapproving at it, taps it twice with the walking stick, frowns at the dust, finds a stable bit of grass so leaning on the stick works, and visibly discards the first three things Halt had considered to say. “The foundation of the road was despair.”

“Solid despair?” I can understand
how you would want to get vigour in the cranberries, but making a strong emotion solid is only marginally less strange than going and making a road out of it.

“You know how there are different binding figures for enchantments? And the number of points matters?” Blossom’s quiet voice manages to be without the hope this is not a rhetorical “you know”.

I nod. You see enough of the things, that gets
obvious.

“Minerals all have characteristic crystal shapes; you can get a bunch of different numbers of points that way, if you squint, and it looks like somebody had an empirical success in getting despair to bind to anything with a body-centred cubic structure. Because they were binding with individual atoms as the points, they could get an enormous amount of the stuff in there.”

“Hence the stepping
on the rake.”

Blossom nods.

Halt looks troubled. “It was not synthetic despair.”

“How
many
people?” Even the amount of road we broke would be an implausible number.

“Millions.”

“Or hundreds of thousands, more than once. There’s no reason the drain is destructive.”

Blossom’s ears repeat those words back, and Blossom winces. “Fatal.”

Halt nods. “You could prevent crippling dread like this. The
drained would be functional.”

I look directly at Halt. Gets easier with practice.

“It would unbalance the humours. Irrevocably, if repeated.”

Humours are arcane, not physical. People would get crazier and crazier in a slow, rot-of-sense way.

“Then why? An especially good road?”

Blossom’s head shakes. “It’s not a good road, as such, but it might be a better defensive ward than they can produce
otherwise. It could be like having a layer of salt in the road, to keep plants from growing up through it; all that despair makes it tough for the Hills to shift it around, the motivation for the change would leak out.”

Deep breath. This is information.

“Reems is under such external pressure they’re turning their collective despair into the enchantment binding together the road they’re driving
forward in the hope of escaping their doom?”

Halt looks up from knitting. Didn’t hear the needles clicking, don’t hear the needles clicking. “Can’t prove they’re not.”

“Captain.” One of One’s surviving file. Not that they were all in the same file when this started. Trooper’s shaking, leftover
why aren’t we dead?
from the flesh. Not the only trooper standing here, when I look around. I’ve got
a reorganised colour party.
Thanks
goes to Twitch, and something like a smile and a salute comes back at me out of the standard.

“Radish says everybody’s laid out and all of theirs are stacked.” Visible deep breath. “There were two hundred and four of theirs dead of sword cuts in the big pile.”

That does have something to do with why I’m sticky and smell really bad, trooper.

Ain’t in here
wafts
out of the standard.
Everybody pay up
.

“The Captain’s not a demon any more than Eustace is a demon, goodness no.” Halt sounds really amused. Sounds like Halt might just laugh.

The live trooper doesn’t have the will or the spine to flat contradict Halt, that’s a list short as eyes, but it’s clear they don’t, any of them, have any belief in what Halt just said, either. The dead more doubtful than
the living.

“Eustace is like that” — Halt waves at the five tonnes of wool and iron and malice — “because a wizard wished it so. Your Captain’s like that”―Halt’s chin lifts to point at me, much better than the blunt end of a knitting needle — “because a wizard wished it so a kind and species, the Captain’s grandsires all.”

Several missing greats in front of “grand”, but I suppose if you’re Halt
you lose track of time.

“The Wizard Laurel”, says Rust in a voice of ghosts and burning grief out of the clear blue mountain afternoon, “was not known for shoddy work.” Rust’s riding along beside Dove, half a kilometre away.

There’s this absolutely stricken look on the trooper’s face, and I can feel the dead sort of curdle.

“Uh, Captain, you’re a
graul
?” Boggled might be the word for the expression.
It’s not polite to notice that much embarrassment.

I nod, showing the best calm face I can manage with dilute blood drying in my hair.

There’s abashed looks all round, except for Blossom, who is at serious if subtle risk of a dignity failure, and Halt, who is grinning.

“Uh, sorry, Captain, I, uh, had no idea graul were short. Sir.”

I smile; I just about have to. I clap the trooper’s shoulder and
say “Short is different outside the Creeks.”

Outside the Commonweal, where everyone gets fed.

The trooper practically scuttles aside, can’t go far, colour party, but can at least withdraw to the back of it, and Blossom takes a deep, deep breath, raises one finger at me,
hold up
, and then makes a broad both-hands gesture liquid and lengthy. The blood goes away, all of it, and I feel clean. Haven’t
heard Blossom say anything to use the Power, no spoken spells, those six improper words might not count, but there’s still the “words or music?” Independent thing going on.

“Trick from Grue, Captain. Hope it helps.”