The March North (12 page)

There’s just something about thinking better when I’m chewing. One of the seldom-mentioned great things about the standard-binding is that you can go right on chewing while you talk.

Part-Captain
.

Captain?

When you said the despair encapsulation looked like an empirical success, did you mean the make-despair-solid part, or the whole extract-and-bind-despair process?

Making it solid.
You
can
feel
the flare of understanding. Blossom doesn’t curse, I suppose you can’t when things are going to happen if you say it, but the whole command can feel Part-Captain Blossom get angry. There’d be fewer wild eyes if Blossom did curse. That’s at least an indication that someone right here isn’t going to eat the angry.

Blossom gets it tamped back down. Halt drifts over toward me. Eustace, with
a sort of slobbery glee, is eating a big brambly berry bush of some kind. I can see Halt wanting to get clear of that; even those most enthusiastic about getting some of the berries are giving up. Even without the snorting fire to worry about, when Eustace slobbers it’s extensive.

Blossom carefully hands over formal control of the battery to the Master Gunner before heading over. Face isn’t angry,
face is calm, but apparently Blossom can’t do much about the hair full of sparks.

It’s never clear if Halt’s camp chair follows Halt around or not. It always seems to be right there when Halt wants to sit down, but you’d think someone would notice a chair trotting along, and no one has.

Very polite of them, but now I have to talk out loud.

Or maybe just listen.

“Sorry, Captain. I should have caught
that.” Blossom crouches down, no creak or clank of armour. That’s a trick. I hope that’s something else being tested for the armoury. “Despair, joy, love, vigour, anything like that, extracting it is ancient. There are written instructions tens of thousands of years old.”

Tens of thousands?
Twitch, seriously startled.

Halt looks up from knitting. The simultaneous voice and spiders is a new experience.
“Readable writing perhaps older than a hundred thousand years is known. Writing exists between twice and thrice that age.”

I get a lot of bogglement back from Twitch. I’m a little boggled myself. The oldest translatable writing I knew about was under ten thousand.

“It was a mighty feat of necromancy.” Not, I think, Halt’s feat, but still. A tone of voice you wish Halt wouldn’t use.

“The basic
three-to-five-century cycle for a dark-lord style sorcerer to rise, fall, and be replaced has been going on for a long time.” Blossom’s tone goes scholarly, and Blossom as a whole starts losing the hair-sparks. Halt’s knitting has this contented clicking tone to it. Either I should be reassured that Halt knows what Halt’s doing or seriously concerned that Halt worries about Blossom having a loss
of temper.

“Sometimes there is a thousand years or more of a single rule in absoluteness.” At least one of which was Halt’s, and you can tell the spiders think fondly of it. “But mostly things are the same; a sorcerer rules, falls, and another rises. Most are peasants, and try to avoid horrors and death.”

Twitch subsides into complete bogglement. Officer’s School, the scholarly qualification
for a warrant of commission, tries hard to describe the Commonweal as a novel social organization; when you go out there and keep external enemies from breaking it, you had better understand how it works as a
whole
. You have to be a complete idiot not to pick up how fundamentally fragile the whole idea is, in terms of maintenance effort. It’s for-sure much better, but that doesn’t make it easy
to keep the great and accidental run of luck going.

To a sergeant the Commonweal is pretty much eternal, something older than your grandmother’s grandmother.

Blossom has this look. “I didn’t do the math. Extraction’s ancient, but it’s slow and it’s fussy and it takes lot of practice. It’s fussy in large part because it’s easy to go too fast and kill the subject, so no one cares about making it
work better.”

“So the road represents more work than could be done since Meadows Pass?” Which doesn’t really change anything in terms of what we have to do. It might change a lot about what we expect the Reems guys to have done, though.

“It could be a giant necromatic construct, if they had enough people to sacrifice. I have no idea how much is a whole person worth of despair.”

Commonweal experimental
ethics boards are fine with making life, if you’re careful enough; Eustacen and alleged horses and new food crops are all fine, but fatally draining anybody of anything for experimental purposes most completely is not.

“More than the individual encapsulations, Blossom dear.” Halt goes right on knitting.

“So this is probably a long-term project, not a response to Meadows Pass.” Blossom still
sounds intensely rueful.

Most Independents aren’t quite this distressed by making mistakes. I suppose enchanters have to worry more about getting it wrong; vast and terrible energies are one thing, stuffing hours worth of them into small physical objects quite another.

There’s a thump and a clang as Rust topples off the ghost-horse.

What clanged?
Nothing came through the focus that I could tell.

I get a mass shrug, and a couple of guys from Two go help Rust up. Rust is apparently fine, if a little staggery. Rust’s hat is off, the single butterfly on the band surrounded by a globe of pulsing orange and green fire, and the hat itself is smoking.

Rust notices this reaching for it, hand almost on the fire, definitely staggers, does that word-or-noise thing Independents are so fond of, three
liquid syllables, and there’s a distinct
pop
sound as the flames go out. The butterfly’s wings flick, once, twice, from closed to open and back to closed. It’s still shining and molten and apparently content.

Rust, even straighted up and back on balance, looks a bit haggard. The guys from Two are suggesting Rust ought to eat something. Presumably they didn’t get that in the old days, but the Independents,
even the Twelve, have to be used to being surrounded by people who know from experience that using the Power makes you really hungry.

It’s a sign of social acceptance that they’re not asking “hungry for what?” in Rust’s case.

Got the illusion about five kilometres over the crest. Someone dropped a mountain top on it, damaging the road further.
Not much smoke, last wisps or first.

Thank you. Go
eat.

“Anyone figure they think we’re really under there?”

Halt makes a gesture at the air, and there’s a little image of a big, big pile of rock, still with a few trees on top of it, crackling and hissing and slumping oddly toward the middle, in a very credible imitation of an attempt to shield with the focus failing under sheer mass. Lack of air will get you eventually, too, but I figure Rust
wanted the fakery to go quick; less work that way.

Blossom’s got an intent, note-taking look, and even Halt appears to be stuck with expressing grudging approval.

“So they more than half-believe it, but they’ll check? And then they’ll head down to the line of the wall, and see how bad things are, but not in any huge hurry?”

Blossom nods. Somewhere, spectrally, Twitch isn’t nodding, it’s a request
for attention.

“Twitch, go ahead.” I pass that through the focus, too. Not enough rules for these mixed-mechanism conversations.

Take a look
. Twitch swings the viewpoint through the full circle, low, because the focus is crouched looking innocuous and adding things up from everbody’s eyes isn’t helping yet. There’s a file headed out every cardinal direction but east, along with a couple artillerists
with telescope cases per file. East, and the gully we came up, is being watched by the whole sited battery, which ought to do for eyes. Getting that organised is part of Twitch’s job, so I wonder what’s been noticed already.

It’s a very symmetric little meadow; nearly perfectly circular, food plants or at least berry bushes near the middle, grazing so excellent about a quarter of the bronze bulls
are contemplatively chewing on a few grass stalks and Blossom’s horse-thing is stuffing itself, a stream in from the west, and implausibly steep and even rock walls all the way around. It doesn’t look like it’s what erosion did, somehow. And the rocks above the upwelling spring of the stream are bedded flat.

They really do look like rocks, too, not old bricks or ashlars; the thicknesses are uneven
and the edges aren’t really parallel.

Not that a spring at the high edge of an alpine meadow, a big, constant, stream-feeding one, is an especially plausible natural occurrence.

“Has the battery got anything in the hot red range for destruction that could be adapted to trigger when somebody from Reems walks over it?”

Blossom gets the slow smile I’m coming to associate with finely divided aggregate.
The metal-bending grin goes with looking maybe nineteen; this one goes with Halt looking uneasy.

“The Part-Captain is not going out to plant it; I want to send less than four files, two if that will work, one company, one battery.”

“It’ll take about an hour to set up, unless you want it to be ridiculously specific about when it goes off.” Blossom manages to keep the “why don’t I get to have fun?”
out of voice or face, transitory irk notwithstanding.

“The centre of any group of more than a hundred that isn’t us.”

“Sir.”

Blossom starts to get up, and I wave to keep going. Will get the rest of this through the focus anyway.

Twitch, check the water; if it’s good, we refill. Then get a couple-four files working at the rock wall back of the spring; treat it like it’s an old stone wall and
see if it comes down neatly.

Sir.

While that’s going on, detail one company file and one battery file to carry the Part-Captain’s device back down to the main valley; have them place it about half a kilometre downhill of where we turned.

Twitch doesn’t quite manage to form the question outright, but I answer it anyway.

As carefully and as sneakily as they can; check with the Part-Captain before
they go out about how deep to bury it. The intent is to cause the host of Reems casualties, not to deter them.

Sir.

Attention to orders.

Heads go up all over the meadow.

It’s nap time, duty files and pickets and rock-moving detail excepted. Finish eating, get ready to move, and rack out. The plan is to wake up at dusk, get dinner, and move out in the dark. Rude strangers may alter that plan, so
pickets look sharp.

Toby, One, you rack out too. You’ve been pulling extra watch.
There’s faint surprise under the
Sir
but they do it. It helps keep the dead attached to living concerns if they keep acting like they’re alive. It doesn’t usually last, but all I really need is long enough to get them home in shape to say their goodbyes.

I get a surprisingly relaxed diffuse
Sir
back, and everybody
does just that. Even Rust racks out; body safely far away or not, having a mountain dropped on an active complex construct like that can bruise you in the talent.

It takes Blossom forty minutes to set the thing up, and the two files Twitch detailed head off with it. It looks like a standard five litre metal jar, and it’s obviously fairly hefty.

“Copper’s medium dense, and it’s mostly copper.”
Blossom takes a cup of tea from Halt with a smile and a sort of social bob-of-acknowledgement; I take one too, because, well. Prudence.

“It’s from parts, not a hot red shot, so inventory’s the same.”

“Parts, Blossom dear?” Halt does a matronly voice full of disbelief incredibly well.

“Most secure place I’ve got is the battery commander’s waggon. Wasn’t planning on doing any shot fabrication
on the move, I couldn’t bring myself to leave some of the hotter supplies lying around without supervision.”

Halt nods over sipping, and makes it look graceful. Some of that stuff will try to get out of its jars, a subject covered in dreary detail in the field manual, mostly under putting out fires and restraining the suddenly struck mad.

It’s rather nice, for tea.

Halt’s shawl is still up; Eustace
finished the berry bush and fell asleep in the ruins, as it were. The howdah, looking morose and splattered, has crept up to crouch behind Halt. Halt cocks an eyebrow at Blossom, who looks wry and waves meaning across the empty air. The howdah is suddenly shiny, and then not at all morose.

Can’t see how it could make any noise, never mind contented chirping, but it does.

“I’ll keep an eye on the
sapping party; you get some rest as well, Part-Captain.”
You, too, Twitch. No need to push it yet, so we don’t.

“How much sleep do you need, Captain?” I’ve never heard of an Independent who needed as much sleep as humans typically do. It’s either wanting to point that out or plain curiosity behind Blossom’s question, I can’t tell.

“Twelve hours, twice a month, is plenty. Go a season awake and
I’ll sleep five days.”

Blossom looks outright startled.

“Laurel’s is one of the few examples of troop-improvement that worked.” Halt’s looking at the pouring, topping up only Halt’s cup of tea. Mine’s not far enough down to justify additions.

Blossom goes and lies down; Twitch gets the pickets set up to swap in three hours, which should be halfway through the down time, and pretty much everybody
in camp racks out.

I sit there, and finish my tea, and my lunch, even the alleged cheese, and keep a fairly distant eye on the sappers; no sense having the focus right there and possibly alerting someone.

With the focus and the camp quiet, it’s mostly a chance to listen to the mountains.

The four files on rock-moving duty aren’t sure whether to look pleased or worried.

They’ve done a good job; there’s a nice hole in the otherwise solid rock, and behind that there’s a long stretch of cave.

A little bit of bridging over the spring and the cave looks entirely fine for waggons. Eustace is going to have to mind horns and ceiling, but I expect will manage.

Quick work, too;
the replacement files for the pickets are getting collected to head out.

“Good job. One file stays on watch, the other three rack out.” Doesn’t look like I’m going to have to be more specific than that; the file closers aren’t even looking like they’re going to resort to dice to decide.

About an hour before dusk, the two files sent off to be sappers comes back. So far as a distant over-watch
can tell, nothing paid them any attention beyond a few birds; something like a crow, but with a lot of blue. Blossom left them some vigour and cranberries with the gunner in charge of the watch to the east. They drink it. A range of faces get made.

There might be a reason of art you have to leave the vigour and cranberries purely tart. Or maybe this Grue likes the faces.

Dinner, actually cooked,
or at least boiled a little, and actual coffee. The company gets its great vat of much-boiled wood lettuce root stuff, and seems better for it. Rust is recovered enough that the pitcher-of-cream trick works fine, but obviously not entirely recovered. Blossom takes a slow squinty look at Rust and comes back from the battery commander’s waggon with a silver flask and a stern look. Rust takes a couple
of good swallows from the flask, and doesn’t make faces. The grass for a metre around Rust’s feet goes from knee high to past a Creek waist, but Rust doesn’t make faces. Blossom tsks a little, taking the flask back, and Halt outright grins. Even Halt is eating something, instead of just drinking tea. I may someday get used to seeing pieces of hardtack balanced on the edge of Halt’s saucer like
they’re sugar cookies.

The medics are moving around making sure that anybody bruised or battered has applied their diverse unguents, and that the variously lightly damaged have stayed patched. One or two of the medics seem sufficiently challenged by Halt’s dosing the badly hurt that they may go for Independents. Creeks don’t tend to leave, even to study; it’s not like the area is sparse in talent
with the Power. The way the south frontier with the Paingyre is going, they might not be able to leave.

We can leave here, though, no problem. None of the pickets have seen anything, the buried surprise hasn’t gone off back in the valley, and there hasn’t been so much as a stray thought land on the focus.

It feels like Twitch is standing behind my left shoulder when Twitch is paying attention
to the outside world. Not turning to look takes a bit of effort. It would be easier if it didn’t look like Halt and Rust can see Twitch standing there just fine. Blossom and the Master Gunner are to my right and there’s this sort of space off to the left for Eustace, who is maintaining a martyred look while the howdah, under stern injunction from Halt, climbs back down and puts on what I have to call
shoes.

“The Northern Hills have been considered suspect terrain for longer than the Commonweal has existed; I think what we’ve seen today is an indication that it is in fact a conscious terrane. If that’s true, I believe it wants Reems’ attempts to colonise it stopped, and for whatever reason can’t do that itself.”

Probably wasn’t expecting bulk solid despair, either.

“If that’s not true, there’s
at least a chance that this is an elaborate setup on the part of Reems to get us to bury ourselves.”

Elaborate goes with Reems. Subtle doesn’t, and this would be subtle, if that’s what it was.

“So far as I’m aware, the level of subtle control over the landscape we’re seeing is inconsistent with anything
but
a conscious terrane; that no matter what their best wizards know or how much power can
be channelled through the Archon, there is no known mechanism whereby they could make subtle changes in the landscape in response to our presence.”

Rust looks at Halt, gets half a head shake, and looks back at me. “Not that I’ve ever heard of.”

Here goes.

“Attention to orders.”

“The battalion will proceed into the cave behind the spring. Two Platoon will lead, then tubes one and two, the colour
party, the baggage, tubes three and four, Three Platoon trailing. One Platoon will attend on the standard.”

“I believe we are being assisted by the conscious terrane of the Northern Hills, which doesn’t like being colonised by Reems.” Since everyone knows the Hills are a lot less fussed about travellers or naturalists than anybody trying to log or mine, this gets taken calmly.

“Be polite; no
graffiti, no trash, if you just have to take a crap use a bucket.”

“Two, Radish — there’s a fine line between haste and recklessness. I want to move just on the haste side of it, but I want to NOT fall in a hole even more. Got it?”

Radish’s “Sir” is clear out of the mass acknowledgement.

I do the thing with focus that would be looking at Twitch if Twitch were walking around, and get a surprise.

“Everybody remember their Granny’s stories about the Hollow Hills?” The ghost’s voice is strong, the focus shaking air, and even half of the artillerists are nodding. Every single Creek is nodding, Line and drover and medics. It makes me wonder just how their ancestors got to the place.

“Do this right, and you’ll get to tell your grandchildren you walked under the Hollow Hills yourself, with Halt
and a graul Standard-Captain.”

There are weird grins, and some bashful eyes, and Twitch gives them half an inhale before “Advance in order of march!

“Two Platoon, march in haste, march!”

Which is just what they do; it’s a neat job of bridging, too, broad and arched and shifting the spring pool a little deeper and to one side. I can feel the Master Gunner sorting out with the still short-crewed
tube one that it’s tube one, tube two, then all the spare caissons.

I’ve been in a line battalion where the lead company going into an open field battle didn’t have this mood.

Even an easy-going bunch of Creeks aren’t too fond of Reems after the last couple of days.

Blossom’s standing to my left with a sword on, to all appearances a Line issue cavalry sword, that rare item, and is leading the
horse-thing. It’s pretty clearly convinced we’re all quite mad to be going in that hole, and it just as clearly knows in its bones arguing with Blossom never works.

Halt’s standing on my right with the howdah out front; I suppose that makes sense, it’s got lots of limbs and extra grip if the ground gets bad in there. Then Halt, then Eustace, who likes this less than Blossom’s horse-thing does.
Can’t explain to Eustace that the caissons are heavier.

The ghost horse shows no sign of caring, nose at Rust’s left shoulder, both standing outside of Blossom.

The first bunch of spare caissons rumbles over the bridge, and then it’s the colour party’s turn. Two files ahead of the standard, two behind, and the Staff Thaumaturgists and the Captain and the Part-Captain all in the middle, along with
the riding animals. Which is not a good plan if there’s a cave-in as we go by, but, well. It’s not different from the overall risk.

There’s really good footing in the cave, wet sand mixed with drip-lime that’s mostly concreted it; the caisson wheels aren’t leaving ruts, never mind the stores waggons.

We get round the first turn and start to head down, a nice, even, curving passage with just enough
grade you can tell it’s for-sure down. Blossom’s left hand waves — reins in the right — and the driving lights on the caissons in front of us come on. It looks kinda like water erosion, but much too even, and regular, and there’s still that excellent footing.

“So what’s the plan?” Just spoken, quietly, from the Part-Captain. It doesn’t feel like walking all that quickly. We’re at a good hastening
pace, somewhere between five and six metres per second, but it doesn’t feel like it. It’s hard enough to keep track of how fast you’re really moving when hastening when you can see landmarks. Without needing to build the road, though, we could be a hundred and twenty kilometres away in six hours. That puts Rust’s worst-case peak-of-pass distance well within range.

“When we emerge, we’re going
to be extremely lost. If there’s a major Archonate fortification there, we reduce it, making sure we destroy any major enchantments in the process. If there isn’t, we skip straight to getting un-lost.

“Anything more specific waits until we see the terrain; for all we know now, we could have to bubble everything up from under a glacier.”

I get a flash of the metal bending-grin.

I can feel the moment
the tail end of Three Platoon crosses into the cave; the rock wall slumps up and restores itself out of the bridge.

Looks like it kept the larger pond.