The March North (10 page)

For some
terrible and final value of “get rid”.

“The bad part is something’s creating the road, and we haven’t found it yet. If it’s just back of that wall over there, great. But it’s probably further up the road; to the extent that the Independents can say what’s normal for this kind of enchantment, if it is an enchantment, they think it’s at the peak of the pass. So we keep going until we find the enchantment
and break it.”

Hoping all the while you can do that and survive; there’s a lot of the Power in something able to hold down a mountain range. Suspect, conscious, old-fashioned uncanny, it doesn’t especially matter to the amount of Power this has to take.

“Then we get home by a route that avoids this road completely; the Hills won’t be happy about it, and where the Hills are unhappy we don’t want
to be.” A great deal of specific agreement comes back to me.

“Do we really need to kill all these Reems guys?” One of the team on tube two.

“Our goal is to break the road, enchantment or otherwise. If we can do that without killing anybody, we do that. Once that’s done, we withdraw. Nothing good is served by killing anybody we don’t have to kill to break the enchantment.”

Which isn’t really
what the artillerist was asking.

“If Reems had sent an ambassador, or sent a herald out in front of the host coming down from Meadows Pass last time, or just generally indicated a willingness to talk, Parliament would have had to figure out what to do. It might not have involved fighting; there’s no shortage of land that still has to have the eel-trees or whatever” — 
whatever
is a distressingly
long list — “pried off of it.

“What’s happened is that we’ve seen a technical invasion, those guys in Westcreek, and we’ve come up into the Northern Hills to do something about it. It might have been one sorcerer and some guys trying desperately to escape internal politics in Reems.”

Rust describes Reem’s internal politics as vicious, “in the full artistic sense”.

“Instead it looks like the entire
Archonate is making a road out of their own despair to get through the Northern Hills. When they realised someone was coming, they put a bunch of troops out front, which is only caution, and a bunch of fire-priests with militant banners, which for the entire hundred-odd years the Commonweal has been in contact with the Archonate has meant ‘no quarter’.”

Fire-priests have an uncomplicated theology;
immolating people purifies them from sin, so the more people you burn to death the less sin there is in the world, and the more holy you are for doing it. They can sound quite pleasant to talk to, briefly, but as a practical matter they exist to immolate the Archon’s enemies, foreign and domestic.

“It’s entirely possible they didn’t know they were heading into the Commonweal when they started
scouting down Westcreek. They may have though they’d found a way around what happened to them six years ago at Meadows Pass. We have no way to know. We can’t even say we know with complete certainty that were the Archonate to get through to the Creeks they wouldn’t wander about greeting everybody with glad cries, chocolate, and candied rose petals.”

You can get a shrug through the binding. Overdo
it, and all your listeners will shrug, too. So far as I can see, only four. And some shoulder-twitches.

“I’m the only Standard-Captain in the Creeks.” It is unusual for there to be even one, and everyone knows that. If it turns out this wasn’t forethought but a chance to get me somewhere I was unlikely to do harm, I am going to have to find a remote hilltop and laugh and laugh.

“Which means that
in law, it is my inescapable duty to respond to an invasion.”

Various nods, a tiny thread of relief from Blossom.

“The traditions of the Line do not look kindly on waiting and asking Parliament.” Another laugh, mostly from the battery. Do that, and it’s a tossup whether the Line or Parliament hangs you. One specific time, it was both, because neither was willing to not do it themselves.

“Doing
the job by the least-sufficient-means, here and now, means I expect we’re going to kill thousands more people from Reems. Should we succeed, and they really are trying to get away from something overwhelmingly terrible, you could argue we’re going to kill all of them.”

Presuming.

“I don’t see any alternative way to stop the invasion that removes the road, and we have to remove the road.” Slow
nods. Nobody has any doubt that there are worse things than Reems in the world; Reems could never have produced Split Creek, anything able to do that would eat the Fire-Priests, one way or another, and it’s an article of faith in the Creeks that the existence of Screaming Buttweed proves that there is indeed a single master devil, the cruel Adversary of Mankind.

“Our Staff Thaumaturgists have
no alternative suggestions.” Rust is standing beside the ghost-horse, drinking coffee, the complete picture of a man with no words to offer. Halt has found a chair, a small table complete with stem glass and decanter, and a bemused trooper to hold the light. The clicking of Halt’s knitting needles is briefly very loud, and I can
feel
the ancient terror’s certainty that we must be sure to kill
all those responsible for the road-enchantment with the same ease and clarity that I can feel my feet. The lake of faces all stay thoughtful, though, so, no, Blossom’s getting it, too, and Blossom doesn’t like it at all but agrees.

There’s this settling through the binding, as everyone, living and dead, agree they don’t have a better idea.

“Can we keep them out of the Creeks?” Sergeant Dove,
asking it as a simple and practical question.

“Won’t know until we try.” That gets a ghostly grin from Twitch, and a live one from Blossom and most of the gunners, and some narrowed eyes from the Company. It’s the customary Line rhetorical response to questions about the future. The dead will feed that to the living, given a little time.

“Reems must have a lot of people here. The troops we’ve
seen have been protected from direct use of the Power, and can apparently be sent berserk all at once. That sort of thing gets done for advantage in a close fight; once you’re closely engaged, your guys get more dangerous.”

“Kinda hard on the soldiers.” Someone from the company, and alive.

Rust’s actual voice is the quiet, considered thing you’d expect from the plain and honest exterior. The
one steel butterfly could be a hat-band decoration, if you didn’t see it fly there. The smell of dim smoke, as from some vast burning of kingdoms far off, and the quiet voice filling the whole camp from edge to edge at the same volume, are not.

“God-King autocracies are a means to concentrate the Power, much as the battle-standards of the Commonweal are a means to concentrate the Power. Unlike
the battle-standards, autocracies are inefficient; where the combined focus of a formation on its standard is greater than the sum of its parts, the power of the Archon is much less than the sum of the Archonate’s subjects.”

Rust’s voice stays good and plain and honest. Listening, I think about preserved specimens in jars, dim dead floating in formaldehyde, without ever anything that would let
me tell you why.

“From this you may correctly deduce that nothing available to the Archonate of Reems permits any combined use of the power to greater effect. What is considered modest personal prosperity in the Commonweal is the mark of wealth and rank in Reems, and obtained through effort extracted from subordinates. The majority of this must in turn be passed upward, toward the Archon, who
permits no rival hierarchy to divert effort away from the Archon’s purposes.”

“They put up with this?” Many sources, some of whom are dead.

“Any rival hierarchy begins weak, facing an Archon whose justification for holding power is victory.” I could have lived forever without hearing Rust say “weak” in just that way.

“Such a social organization exists to continue itself. There is little hope
that it will ever value an individual.”

Rust knows, you can tell Rust knows, that a good Commonweal Independent really ought to disagree.

“It was my guess at Meadows Pass that comprehensive defeat without death would provide the possibility for an otherwise popular and powerful Archon to seize on
success
, instead of victory, as a substitute legitimacy.”

“Send a strong man home naked, and hope
they find a way to call that success?” Sergeant Radish.

“When the alternative is some horrible death? When the success, through negotiation or simply asking, might well be easy? When anything that permits the Archon to live also permits the majority of their supporters to survive? When it is as clear as the second boot to the face that victory is not a possibility?” This builds, not in volume,
but in smoke, the smell of burning iron, until there are sneezes. Eustace sneezes, a thoroughly apocalyptic effect, and Halt gives Rust a look,
tone it down
, exactly as one might look at the loud child at a party.

Every butterfly on the wall opens and closes its wings, ten thousand molten mirrors throwing the sunset sky across us.

“It was a guess. It was wrong.” I’ve never heard of anyone, anywhere,
not even in legend or rumour, lighting grief on fire, but that’s what Rust’s voice smells like.

“You just heard one of the Twelve admit to guessing.” Blossom’s voice is a strange light thing. “You could live twice your life and not hear that again.”

Snickers.

Somewhere, from a Creek, living or dead, comes “So it ain’t the job we want. Anybody going to say it ain’t the job we got?”

No-one does,
and the artillerists visibly straighten, as all the Creeks in the company go from a willingness to follow orders through an agreement that the thing needs doing to an unbending conviction that the thing shall be done. Ghostlight flickers around the standard, gold and green, and fades again.

The clink of Halt’s glass going back on the table is quiet, and perhaps no one else hears what I do not
think Halt meant to say aloud. “Five hundred years since I felt
that
.”

“If you’re living, eat, wash, and then
sleep
. Tomorrow is another day. That don’t mean it’s a
better
day.” That’s practically a proverb in the Creeks, and it certainly is in the Line, so I get a nicely general grim chuckle back.

Now the hard part.

It takes me three tries to say the words. Everyone pretends not to notice.

“The dead have the watch.”

Nothing comes to trouble the dead.

Not surprising. The Fire-priests were the maneuver force, there’s certainly another one somewhere but not here yet, maybe not certain what it ought to be fighting.

The down wake up ready to bite Eustace, and almost mad enough to do it.

Get breakfast into them, and four or five litres of water through each of them, and the only thing left of the dosing
or their hurts is a mass complaint that even the air they breathe tastes of a demon’s dreams of bolted spinach, after it had rotted the second time. Nobody else has the direct problem but there are several strongly-phrased requests to quit it with the repeated vivid description during breakfast.

Halt can’t quite stop smiling.

There’s no rush; the newly-up get sorted into their new platoon structures,
equipment gets checked, sometimes for efficacy of repairs, and the camp comes apart into marching order. The camp demolishes, and there’s the valley, and about five kilometres off, that same stone wall.

We stop about a kilometre from it. The standard gives plenty of detail, and this isn’t just a stone barrier wall; this looks like one face of a fortress, complete with subsidiary towers and an
extended wall section masking the gate. Looks like it’s really three or four half-walls that interlock in the middle, with gate-castles over the inside and outside of each turn. The outer ends of the walls anchor into carved-back bare rock on the sides of the valley, backed by full-scale castles extending out from the wall.

That seems excessive.

There’s a brief feeling of vertigo while Twitch
and Blossom sort out who has the main viewpoint. Bits of fortress briefly seem to shine, and there’s a thread of rapid discussion, mostly among Twitch, Blossom, and the gunners.

It’s more meant to stop something coming the other way
.

We’re well below the peak of the pass; Rust thinks it could be another hundred kilometres of ground and two kilometres of elevation before we get there.

As a pile
of rocks, it’s not very impressive. We could march through it, if there was no-one in it to object effectively. With the ward, it’s going to be more of a problem.

There are people, at least a thousand; the valley is about twelve hundred metres across here and it looks like they’ve got about one per two metres of wall and more in the towers.

Attention to orders.

Rust
.

Captain?
Cedar-wood smoke,
and not too much of it. Rust is in a better frame of mind this morning.

Once the battery’s set up to get a good look at the ward as it goes fully active, I want you to do something that will get them to take it fully active and keep it fully active. If the ward breaks, great, but a good look is preferred to immediate breakage.

Since it’s very unlikely Reems piled up all those rocks and were total
incompetents with the warding part.

Captain, Battery, deploy in line to range on the fortification.

Two has the left, Three has the right, One has overwatch. Don’t get distracted by the pretty lights, there have to be some actual sorcerers in there.
Just enough to hold it, if they didn’t come try Rust in the dark.

Various versions of “Captain” come back. The artillery moves forward about fifty
metres, and the two living platoons shift out to cover the flanks. I’m left with the colour party in front of me, well back from the battery. Halt and Eustace to my right, Rust to my left, and the drovers and stores waggons a little behind. The drovers are, rather philosophically, covering the heads of the bronze bulls and stuffing cotton and pitch in their own ears.

Three of four gunners are
busy setting up instruments on heavy tripods; tube one’s dead gunner has to get someone from the shifted two files of living artillerists on tube one to do that. The Master Gunner and Blossom have an instrument each, between tubes two and three. They look like view cameras, only the lens in the front isn’t glass and don’t look transparent. The artillerists on the caissons are covering the heads of
their bronze bulls, too, though with hoods made for the purpose instead of sacking.

Battery, Captain, ready
from Blossom.

Everybody firm up on the focus and remember Rust’s on our side.

Rust, do it.

It comes, skipping down from mountain peak to mountain peak, then hill to hill, a great roaring vortex of dark fire a kilometre tall. There are sudden flashes of magenta light, a slowly growing golden
glow in the centre of the vortex, and a disturbing sensation that the spell is a creature with stable, central, watchful eyes. The ground shakes and keeps shaking, the wind of its onset shredding all before it. The spell begins to lose height and gain width, and I have to put more attention into the focus to hold back the wind. There’s an inescapable sense of infinite malice, bearable because
the focus stops most of it and we’re not the target.

You can see, bare-eyed, individual stone blocks in the face of the wall glowing as the ward comes up from standby to full strength, and various bright lines snaking along the mortar lines between them.

Rust’s spell hits the ward and slowly, slowly, grinds itself away on it. It must take close to ten minutes, and from the changing patterns in
the ward it makes a good solid try at chewing its way through. The ward is so dense you can see the sharp line through the air over the wall, where the daylight hitting it is starting to refract into rainbows.

It looks like a few of the infantry on the wall fainted or collapsed; there are under-officers of some kind running around where the spell hit. There’s a little cluster of sorcerer-types
on the west end of the nearest wall’s gate castle, looking relieved and triumphant and uncertain about either.

You can hear them talking, if you concentrate. I can’t make anything of it.

Anyone know what they’re saying?

Relief at their victory, follow by speculation on the profitability of selling such large women to a teahouse.
Rust says this absently, with nothing like full attention. Only a
few wisps of smoke, like a house over the next hill. A unit of the Regular Line would not be surprised; they would have encountered the Bad Old Days pressing on the marches or wandering over the border.

Women?
Blossom says this in such a completely neutral tone of voice that even Rust looks suddenly cautious.

I do not believe they can clearly see that there are women with the column. The remarks
appear speculative, and concern those expected to be found in our homes.

Rust pauses, and the butterflies fan, restless. A man at war between duty and tact, or honesty and caution.
The word translated as ‘teahouse’ is entirely an euphemism.

Halt snorts, quietly. “The ham. Wants to see what Blossom’ll do.” That’s even quieter.

I get, Halt and Rust get, a sort of schematic view of the wall. It’s
got various things marked on it but the important bit from the Captain’s perspective is that the ward is redundant in enchantments―it can lose a lot of those individual stone blocks — but not in terms of the connection between them; that’s one thing, and likely some physical thing. It’s also incapable of operating itself; it’s got to have a capable sorcerer directing it.

Are they dis-informing
us?

The response was characteristic of active direction.
Rust is completely certain of this, to the point where there’s more of the smell of a hot clean fire than smoke.

That spear-point in Eustace’s ear wasn’t much; there are modest talents with minimal formal training in the shot-shop back in Westcreek Town doing better enchantments for stuff we expend. And it was special; none of the others
had one. The amulets are fussy, over-complicated, lapidary little things that don’t show much grasp of theory.
Blossom is no less certain.

Another image, this one a graph of particle size versus distance. Larger particles stop much sooner; extremely fine particles may not stop at all.

We’d have to do it a few more times to be absolutely sure, but it looks like they’ve got the basic idea of a kinetic
dump built in but haven’t figured out how to tune it so it reacts to kinetic energy directly. This looks precisely like the raw result, where all you get is size.
The Master Gunner, sounding almost bored.

The next attempts to be made with carefully sieved sizes of coloured chalk?
Rust is amused, and so is the Master Gunner.

Not that Rust couldn’t or wouldn’t do it. Or that the Reems guys might
not think it’s a demon-summoning trick, and over-react, but I’d prefer something more direct.

Captain?
Blossom, talking to just me and the other Independents.

I can break at least the first wall’s ward; we don’t know how connected it is across the walls. It will take an hour or so to set up and I’ll need the company to provide a lot of oxygen to a fire on the wall; just air molecules should go
right through that ward.

Very good, Part-Captain. Carry on.

There’s a brief, esoteric discussion about aiming points, and Blossom asks for advice at the end.

“Aim a little low, Blossom dear; that way the air blast will be pushing the fire into the overhanging stone, it should hold it in place better.” Very watchful spiders.

Blossom grins, and nods, and turns back to the people actually standing
around the battery commander.

“Get me a keg of salt, a keg of fluorspar, a fifty-litre metal bucket of mineral oil, and a regular fire bucket of sand. Put them over by tube one.” On the left of the line.

“When we get to it, tube one’s going to fire at the boss sorcerer; tube two’s going to fire at the wall.

“Tube three loads long black-red-red, optimise destruction, and aim where you think it
will knock down the most of these layers of gate castle in the middle. Three takes the first shot you get that you think you can get it through a wobble or a stutter or anything. If you need to try another, try another. Fling is fast enough at this range you don’t need to heave.”

Blossom pauses, there are nods, no one looks away.

“Tube four loads long hot red-red-red, aims for the minimum safe
distance, burst just off the ground, and
does not
fire until the ward is right down, not wobbling, not stuttering, DOWN. Got that?”

There’s a concerted, emphatic “Sir!” back, and much rushing about.

Captain, Sergeant-Major, keep them looking out, and up, and all round. The artillery is going to be doing lots of interesting things for a bit.

Rust dismounts, and starts going through the most amazing
sequence of summoning preparations; coloured smokes, complex glowing figures with their lines crawling and waving so they pervade the grass, which waves teal and cyan in the breeze with strange characters no one could possibly read because of the waving. It just keeps getting larger and larger and more involved, and after awhile it’s built up so it’s got three-dimensional height and can’t decide
which Platonic solid it wants to be. Sometimes it’s a nested series. Eventually Rust floats up and stands on the tip of the enclosing tetrahedron and starts carrying on in a theatrical way.

And Rust, too
, comes from Twitch with a grin.

And Rust, too.

Neither Halt nor Blossom seem the least bit concerned, so I push out some generalised reassurance. Either Rust is doing it as a distraction or it’s
not the complete end of the world.

The Reems guys are anything but reassured; there are telescopes showing up on the wall, and more junior sorcerers, some of whom are taking notes and arguing about what they see through the telescopes. There are various preparations among the troops, including what looks like an over-hasty amulet issue.

The Master Gunner is looking anything but reassured, too.
But not because of Rust.

Blossom has produced what looks like an extra-shiny long shot, which is already loaded in tube two, and something that looks like a three-handled teacup.

A very tall three-handled teacup, very shiny and bluish. There’s a matching saucer, and the sand bucket is empty. So is the salt bucket, and there’s a major dent in the keg of fluorospar.

All of the artillerists are well
away from Blossom’s work table with the cup and saucer on it. It looks like it’s good for about four, maybe five litres.

“We’ll get at least twenty seconds; we need less than ten of those for the toss. The dead can cycle the tube, so it’s just a question of loading it without dropping it.”

“Just.”

“Hank.” Blossom pauses, striving to be fair. “I know you hate the stuff, but think what it will
look like to the guys on the wall.”

The Master Gunner visibly seizes upon all the will and courage to be found within with both metaphorical hands.

“Sir.” The Master Gunner’s in full-on lab gear, kinda shiny with bare eyes and glowing if you look through the standard. Blossom hasn’t bothered. Which can be the right thing; becoming a heat casualty in the middle of your complex wreaking is not
a good outcome.

NOBODY joggles the Part-Captain’s elbow.
Twitch’s best Sergeant-Major voice, and the various interested dead make a point of directing their interest elsewhere.

Whatever Blossom is doing, it involves the bucket of fluorspar and air and complexity.

“If anyone ever asks you, Standard-Captain, what the worth of the Commonweal is, look at that.”

Halt’s chin points at Blossom. Blossom’s
wreathed in clouds of condensation and hard to see; whatever this wreaking is involves a lot of energy, and the use of the Power to manage it is bending the light.

“We’d have killed Blossom in the old days, just as soon as we realised how much talent the child had. It would have been that or accepting the dominion of a multi-millennial dark lord.”

“The Part-Captain is that talented?”

Halt snorts.
“At least that talented. And smart enough. Grue is the other way around, and they’re good for each other, which is something else the Commonweal may count toward its worth. There was no friendship among sorcerers in the old days.”