The March North (6 page)

I wind up leaving the logistics operation — getting supplies piled up at the roadhead, from as close as we can get them by barge — to a Creek with no previous connection to the Line who goes by the unfortunate appellation of “Tankard”. Somewhere well over twenty-one decimetres and looks like someone who can do the horseshoe trick with any two toes. None of the drovers have a problem taking
Tank’s orders, honest, in the standard’s view, and from a regular trade that involves growing roses. Not much temptation to turn hardtack into compost. Chuckles is stuck back in Westcreek town, making sure there’s stuff showing up for this guy to manage.

Last thing I hear marching out is an arriving drover shouting “Hey, Tank!” in what are at least cheerful tones.

It takes a kilometre or so to
get everything settled down; One and Three Platoons are leading, Two and Four are trailing, in between Blossom has tubes one and three on the right, the Master Gunner has two and four on the left, and there’s a clump of stores waggons between the tubes in the column. It’s not especially fast, it’s not especially good if we get jumped, but we can get the whole thing in a clump and move no matter what
the terrain does to us, and we’ll eat OK for twelve days. As a movement, it’s a lot more like someone trying to move resupply than meet an invasion. Give me a regular battalion and I’ll follow doctrine.

There’s a general undercurrent of concern; most of the company know some guys from Reems got grabbed, and that’s about it. Blossom’s battery doesn’t generally even know that much. We’ve still got
close to six hours of light, and we’re going to use them.

The march settles down well enough. I have to remind Dove that the new road needs to be cold before feet hit it, in preference to the lasting roadbed Dove just reflexively wants to put in, but that’s nothing much for an extemporised road march in haste. Rust’s right up front, between One and Three; can’t latch to the standard, can’t participate
in the focus, can talk to it, and listen well enough. Same with Halt. It’s like a smell of smoke and having spiders on your eyelids, respectively.

Blossom’s battery isn’t officially a unit; they don’t have a battery banner, and they don’t have even a theoretical artillery battalion standard of their own. So the crews are latching to the tubes, and those are latching to Blossom, and Blossom’s latching
to the standard. That shouldn’t work, but I’m giving up on “shouldn’t” this summer. The individual artillery teams can latch directly to the standard if they want to, we tested that, they’re just happier treating their commander idolatrously.

The drovers have no real idea what’s going on; there’s a blur going past and the world has filled up with the sound of marching boots and steel tires. Blossom’s
new-model bronze-bull enchantment produces bronze bulls that recognise the standard much better than the usual mix of a hundred years or so of bronze bull makes and models you usually get, and they’re perfectly happy with the new road.

If Eustace is happy, there are jets of lavender fire in my peripheral vision that argue otherwise. Halt seems fine, though, and Blossom’s nearly gleeful. Not the
sort of thing you get to practice much right in the middle of the Commonweal. People get mad when you run a road through their garden pavilions.

If there are any garden pavilions up in the Northern Hills, hopefully Rust will manage to direct us around them.

The thing Blossom insists is a horse has sparks coming up a metre high from where its cloven hooves hit the road. Whatever it is, it thinks
this pace isn’t worth hitting a trot.

Listen up
.

There’s this little ripple, not a bad one, but let’s not have anyone getting unfocused. Having a file come unstuck marching like this isn’t good.

Just keep marching. Your feet and your ears are far apart for a reason
. Almost a chuckle back. So far, it’s a nice day, we haven’t hit anything tougher than a bit of dolostone sticking out of the sparse
dirt, Toby’s stopped worrying about what One Platoon will think of their sergeant being just as careful as Dove moving turtles and ground-nesting birds’ nests out of the way, and I’ve got six whole files of artillerists pushing their awareness out as far as the standard can carry it. So this is the best time I’m going to get.

Those ten in Westcreek were members of the regular army of Reems. They
had good magical support, to be down in Westcreek and not die. Making that support, finding Westcreek as a route, means they’ve been scouting for a substantial while. Reems tried an open invasion six years ago. It didn’t work. So the presumption is they’re a long way east and trying sneaky. Our job is to stop them before we’ve got the Iron Guard running loose in the Creeks.

There’s what would
be muttering if it was out loud; the Master Gunner and Twitch both contribute images of the Iron Guard, and that settles. To Creeks, the Iron Guard are just bearded guys in heavy armour; they don’t seem particularly big. Maybe after generations of digging up eel-trees they don’t seem especially mean, either.

Staff Thaumaturgist Rust
 — definitely a chuckle — 
captured some of their fears from those
guys in Westcreek. It’s a statistical process; it gives us an idea where their pass is, but it’s only an idea. To know for sure, Rust would need a thousand prisoners or so. By the time we’d know where to get those, we’re going to know where the pass is, so we are moving on what we’ve got.

When we run into guys from Reems, the company will screen; either the company stomps them fast, or holds them
for the artillery. We keep doing that until the artillery can range on the pass, and make it unusable. Then we mop up anybody from Reems on this side of the Hills.

Mop up?
floats up at me, pretty generally.

For every one of us here, there’s a thousand people behind us in the Creeks. Anybody from Reems left on this side gets one chance to surrender. If they take it, and we can send them home without
opening the door to another invasion, we send them home. If they don’t, or we can’t, we kill them. We can’t get tied down fighting; even if we win the fight, another whole army from Reems could get past us while we’re doing it.

Regulars would know that, but, well. Regulars aren’t what I’ve got.

What happened last time?
That’s somebody in Four. And it will give
mop up
time to settle a bit. Anything
to create a presumption of victory.

I grab the memory and push with it, that tricky balance between making it easy to see and not having anybody trying to march onto terrain that’s very far from here.

Second Company of the Third Heavy of the Eighth meant I was on the left edge of the right half of the battalion front. The battalion colour party was just to my left, complete with Standard-Captain
and standard. The focus was up for the whole brigade; we’d come up the long alpine valley in the expectation of a battle.

We didn’t get one; as we got closer, the standard showed us a great block of men. The Iron Guard of Reems, ten thousand strong and marching out to offer battle. They’d begun marching in better formation; they had flags and banners and kettle drums, when they started. They had
shining steel armour inlaid with gold.

The meadow-flowers of that mountain valley chewed the armour off them.

Rustling grasses ate the flags, and the banners, and broke the banner-poles into dust. The great copper bowls of the kettle-drums crumbled into green dust wrapped in columbine. The ashwood spears of the Iron Guard took root, and swirled into a nothingness of dry golden ash leaves, while
the spearheads flew up singing words for death on steel wings where every feather had the edges of a razor.

When we got up to maybe a hundred meters, the Iron Guard, mostly naked, was pressed into a tight ring only maybe sixty metres across by grass rustling all the dark names of famine, and starting to flinch, no matter what their pride could do, away from the pure light of angry shining out
of the edges of the stems and the faces of meadow flowers.

Rust was standing there, in field boots and a surveyor’s hat and a sensible brown denim coat with some years of service on it. The idle gestures Rust was making only with the left hand, like someone trying to remember a word, those had something very visibly shining and sliding through Rust’s fingers. Every time Rust’s hand closed the
circle of flowers shrank a little, and the light of angry grew brighter and bluer.

Not very many of the Iron Guard tried to run, maybe a hundred. They didn’t even scream.

The Archon surrendered.

I get a mass wave of
No, really?
back, company and battery and Blossom, too. A tiny waft of apple-wood smugness crosses Rust’s sensation of woodsmoke.

It won’t work again; none of the sorcerers with that
army survived.

No one with that army remembered that there were any sorcerers with it, or any of those specific sorcerers ever existing. Nor does anyone but Rust know precisely what sudden silent invisible lethal thing happened to six mighty sorcerers, seventeen fire-priests, all their apprentices and acolytes, and the Archon’s soothsayer.

The current Archon won’t have tried this without believing
there’s a way to avoid that fate
.

Grudging agreement, and a few hopeful thoughts about eel-trees. I have to smile.

Much as it would please me to find such a helpful use for eel-trees, we must suppose that our good Staff Thaumaturgist will be occupied.

The company settles into a better temper. I can feel the platoons coalescing tighter; they do know each other well, and they’ve all thought about
an actual fight. Which gives them some of the virtues of veterans. The battery are the kind of regular artillerists who volunteer to use experimental tubes to see if they work; the idea of getting to prove they work registers as a positive.

There’s that indescribable tapping sensation, and I get a single clear thought from Blossom.
Reinforcements
?

Let’s be very careful only the Part-Captain gets
this bit.
Not in time. Best case is a brigade relieves us where we’ve plugged the one pass.

The brigade we’re not getting?
Blossom can do understated wry through the standard. Not everybody with a warrant of commission can.

The brigade we’re not getting
.

If I didn’t get to die with the best company I could have had, I could have done worse than the company I look to get.

Halfway through sunset
Rust guides us up onto a broad flat hilltop. There’s a “What, actual
rocks
?” from Radish, and the field camp goes up, the whole company together. The artillery sets up, just for drill, but what we’re really relying on just then is Halt, just in case anybody’s found us and thinks they can take Rust quick.

Toby and Dove flip for first watch — One and Three had the lead, they get first and last watches
of four; we’re doing coalesced platoon watches, here, and one tube on duty in rotation.

Seventy-one kilometres today, and no further sign of anybody from Reems.

Feed everybody, break camp, keeping a platoon up on guard the whole time. That’s tricky; you have to have a guard looking out and everybody else moving rocks looking in. Mess it up, and you demonstrate how not much benefits from being pelted with rocks.

The artillery, entirely unpelted, chivvies the drovers into line while they’re forming up. The drovers held up fine, got a solid breakfast
down, proceeding in haste means the Line eats like famished wolverines in a pile of bacon, when all the drovers have to do is keep their bronze bulls from getting so lost in the happy stomping rush they start drifting off the line of march, they’re not extra hungry, but they have no idea what’s happening around them, no way to tell, not able to latch to the standard. So you have to watch they
don’t drift off themselves and forget to eat.

This bunch are at least clear that walking into the maelstrom of reforming bedrock might hurt.

Another few days of proceeding in haste, maybe even just today, would finish coalescing this implausible third of a combined battalion into an active field formation.

We’ll hit something from Reems today. Maybe it’ll be small.

Eustace, looking not in the
least put-upon, ate the empty stores barrels, hoops and all. After the second barrel, the reflexive wincing as Eustace crunched through various metal bits mostly stopped. There just wasn’t time.

Blossom’s alleged horse gets by on hardtack and a handful of nails. The nails are apparently a treat; lunging after the keg gets it biffed on the nose and a compensatory and apparently entirely acceptable
carrot.

Blossom looks up, awareness floating through the battery, the Master Gunner takes it as thoroughness, not distrust, and Blossom gives me the thumbs up. Battery’s good. Twitch does the same thing for the company, without following it up with any flinging into the saddle.

Part-Captain Blossom swaps hats, battery commander for battalion second in command, and the floating awareness goes out
wide, company and supports as well as the battery. Takes just long enough to justify the precise
Ready
.

I wave at Rust — get moving! — and we do, down off the empty open hilltop and turning back to nearly northwards. Two and Four lead today, which means I’ve got Radish and Hector closest to trouble. Their platoons have, for the first time in three centuries, been equipped with throwing sticks
and six of what are either big darts or floppy javelins each. The Line gave up on those after artillery got away from weights and the neck-sinews of oxen; there was just no point. These, along with being a spike on a stick, are the practice pieces Blossom’s been having the shot-factory workers make. Safer and cheaper to practice on, and the artillery has got some rig where the tubes can toss bundles
of twelve of them if the range gets really short.

I just hope they get thrown far enough; Blossom’s notion of anti-personnel is the kind of thing you want to be well away from. Back of a couple-six metres of firm dirt, say.

Radish, of all people, starts singing some song I don’t know about how miserable it is to be away from home because you have work to do.

The whole company apparently agrees
about who should sing lead, and who should only come in on the choruses, and they all do. After waiting one whole chorus for politeness, all the drovers sing along on the next one. Apparently not an obscure song to a Creek. After a couple of verses, the battery is humming along, too, and I’ve shoved my awareness up as high and as far as the standard can let me push it.

There’s another sign in
the entrance hall of the Officer’s School. It’s over the inside of the outer doors, so you see it every time you go back out into the world from inside the school.

Grant us strength to die
.

Dying’s pretty easy.

Try going last.