The March North (13 page)

It’s maybe an hour until effective dawn. We’re high, and it’s cold, and the air’s thinner, but not too thin.

I’ve marched over worse roads in the Commonweal.

There’s the major fortification, all right. Maybe two kilometres away.

How can we tell it’s Reems?
Getting suckered into smashing somebody else wouldn’t be a good start to the day.

Halt points, cane, not a chin lift. Blossom gives
some quiet orders through the standard, and the gunners pull out the instrumentation. The word comes back before all of Three is settled on the right flank. It’s the same road.

We’ve emerged on the west side of the
north
slope of the pass: we’re coming back at the fortress from the Reems side. The terrane has a sense of humour.

The pass isn’t dead straight; there’s a kink to it, the point of it
pointing a bit south of east. We’re on the west side, inside and just a bit higher; somewhere between the outer and the inner battlements in height. From the look of the rock, and the vertical slope the cave opened in to emit us, we’re standing on where the folks who built that fortress quarried the stone.

Standard-Captain.
The first quick crackle as the tinder catches and you get that whiff of
pine-sap going up fast.
The Archon of Reems resides in that fortress in this hour.

My eyebrows aren’t the only ones going up. Halt’s gone so far as a head-tilt.

By my name in The Shape of Peace.
Like walking past a lime kiln.

The standard is utterly certain Rust is telling the truth.

Halt mouths a word; five square metres of rocks go slick with frost. Blossom gives Halt a prim look.

An artillerist
with a telescope throws an image at me, the east tower of the north gatehouse and five guys wrapped in scarlet cloaks with gold-chased helms and serious spears. Iron Guard.

The first faint blush of dawn touches the top of the peaks to the east. From inside the main keep, a scream and a light build together into a flash and silence.

Fire-priests.
Various concerned looks slide into disgust or disdain.

Attention to orders.

Rust, I want you to try to reduce the fortress. I don’t think it’ll work, we’re not going to wait to see if it works, but this is not a diversion.

Unless you derive an essential benefit from fighting from inside the focus
 — Rust demurs — 
I want you to attack from somewhere that won’t draw attention toward the battalion. Beyond that, I don’t care where, so long as you can get
there before the valley floor hits functional twilight.

Rust flips back a coat lapel, and there’s the white thread and the black. I doubt Rust needs sunlight to distinguish them any more than I do, but at least I know Rust understands.

Once you start, One, Two, the colour party, and Halt will assault the western fortress face. Objective is the road enchantment. Three covers the battery and the
baggage. Use the time where the assault is crossing the valley to dig in, there’s no telling what’s coming out of there. Make sure you’ve masked the baggage and the medics.

The assault will continue until the enchantment is destroyed or all of Rust, Halt, and the Standard have fallen.

There’s a settling through the company. The battery spreads out a bit, and starts shifting the caissons so the
spares are up even with the primary. Some of the artillerists are looking a bit wild around the eyes, picketing bronze bulls.

All clear on the objectives?

Nods, a curl of brimstone, a toast with a teacup from a grandmotherly woman, head under a shawl drawn up like anyone would in the cold, something that feels like what would happen if you could make a bell out of the Power and get it to ring.
A mass
yes
from the Line. It’s getting harder to tell the artillery and company voices apart, even the live ones.

Privately now, especially since I wouldn’t bet that bell thing means Blossom is
happy
.

Sergeant, Part-Captain; Dove’s got the cover force because Three’s got the best odds of keeping you alive if a ground force gets here. Blossom, you manage the door-knockers and then you leave the
shooting to the gunners. You’re in command, not running an artillery tube. If Rust and Halt and the Standard go down, get out: you, personally, get word back to the Commonweal by whatever necessary means. That specifically includes abandoning anything or anyone that’s going to risk your return. That is a direct, specific, and binding order.

It’s important Dove knows that too; the standard knowing
is normally the important thing, but if this order applies the standard’s not going to be available.

Three’ll handle any Archonate troops, you’re going to have to deal with everything else and it could be anything. Whatever it is, elegant buys no yams; overkill.

I can feel Dove nodding, Dove’s head isn’t moving. I can feel Three agreeing with Dove, too.

Overkill?

That is a technical question,
and a good reminder. It gets a not-private answer.

Part-Captain, Staff Thaumaturgists, those serving in the Line, those of the Line; the Line is engaged in war beyond the borders to prevent invasion of the Commonweal. Do no harm to one another; by all other expedient means, achieve the objectives of your orders this day.

A Standard-Captain of the Line, I declare this the duty of the Line, necessary
and unavoidable.

The standard swallows a memory of the words; there’s going to be a court, when we get home, and they’re going to want to hear them.

All three Independents look a little croggled. I don’t think Blossom knew the restrictions of the Shape of Peace on the exercise of the Power had an abeyance clause. The company heard it as “don’t worry about who might be behind the door, just kick
it in” which is true, too. The battery is going to shoot what Blossom tells them to shoot, unless the Foremost show up and stand in front of the tubes, but that was true already. And maybe even then.

Rust, get going. Good luck.

A wry wave at Rust’s hat, and at least eight hundred years of not dying rides the silent ghost of a horse away into shadows.

Drop your marching kit with the baggage. DO
NOT drop your water.
I was expecting this arrangment back in the meadow, and so was Twitch, so there isn’t much in the way of moving pointy sticks around. We’re low, and the colour party has most of them.

Blossom hands me four; the tips are flaked glass, a dull dark cullet glass with unsettling colours in it. The other eight from the bundle go to individuals in the colour party. “Suitable for
annoying demons.”

Quietly, Two, Halt, and the colour party move downhill and left, so we’re under the line of fire.
Twitch, you’ve got tactical control once we’re through the wall. Up to the wall, we bubble up and move as fast as we can. We start running just as soon as Rust starts in on the fortress.
Ten metres per second, two kilometres, a bit less; call it three minutes. Practically forever.

Blossom, we’re going to start running as soon as Rust starts in; if they start raising the wall-wards, start shooting. Otherwise start shooting whenever you’ll have the breach in the outer wall just before we get there.

Halt, once we’re through the wall, we’re there to keep you from being bothered while you destroy the road enchantment. Communicate wants.

Everybody, until Rust starts, we’re going
to keep the focus obscuring us, and hunker down and not move.

It’s a long, long wait. Blossom passes
three, four, two, six, one, five
, the order to fire the door-knockers in, with such clarity that it’s stuck in
my
head. Which probably means everyone’s got this particular order forever, along with an awareness that doorknocker shot have flavours.

Next couple after that will be short black-red-red;
don’t try to assail the breach until there’s been eight hits.

Got it.
The Part-Captain is thorough; extra fiery death just in case the rock-shattering, ward-cutting rain of fiery death didn’t clear the space back of the wall.

It’s getting bright out, almost actual dawn for the valley floor; you can see the line of the sunlight sliding down the treed mountain slopes.

Can’t see what’s happening,
but various Reems guys start running all over the battlements, striking gongs, and blowing horns. South-east corner, it looks like. No wards coming up; the fortress has them, but whatever Rust is doing hasn’t triggered them.

Everybody’s standing. Toby and Radish give Twitch the nod, one or two troopers who want to start drawing warswords or an adci get told not to be idiots, and Eustace heaves
upright from lying with a
huff
. Doesn’t
have
to breathe fire, though you can tell Eustace prefers to.

At the run.

The Line will advance!

We’re running flat out in what’s left of the dark.

It’s not especially physically tiring, not for the first twenty kilometres or so, and we’ve only got two. It takes a real effort of talent but we’re getting a lot of benefit from the dead. The standard isn’t any heavier for them in it, and the strength of the focus is greater than it would have been were they living.

Eustace, keeping the flames in, and keeping up easily, doesn’t look
anywhere near top speed. I’d like to know what Halt meant to do, what intent got past the ethics board, creating Eustance’s kind.

Half a kilometre from the wall, it’s clear there really is no moat, not even a dry one. Keeping water, or flowing water, off the wards is often more of a concern than keeping siege engines away from the wall, but it still seems off.

Mind your line
from Blossom.

Edge
left
.

Shot
. I think it’s the ghost-gunner on tube one.

The first door-knocker goes in, a streak and a flash and clinging cyan fire; the focus lets me see a sentry, half-in and half-out of the flash. The outside half topples into the cyan fire, dissolving in its turn.

Second one hits, third one hits, and it’s getting very bright on the part of the wall Blossom’s targeting. Perfect five second intervals.

The shock’s wearing off the surviving sentries. There are shouts, gestures, none of them pointing at us, some more horns being blown and gongs rung, but the problem with that sort of general “attack! attack!” alarm system is that it’s worthless for telling you where the second attack is coming from, or even that there is one. It sounds just like the alarms, still going on, for the first
attack.

Rust is still at it; the ground shakes, twice, and some high-pitched howling noise has started around to the south side of the fortress.

Four, five, some kind of horizontal vortex of darkness forming with the cyan fire outside it, pulses as someone in there tries to get the outer wards up and can’t, and we’re just crossing a hundred metres from the wall as six hits, fifty metres to our
right.

Straight at the wall
.

The acknowledgement has grins in it. Our timing isn’t perfect, but it’s not looking much like perfect is required.

A strip of molten rock five metres wide flies backward, out of the wall, from below ground level to clean through the crenellations. Another ten metres to either side of mostly intact stone blocks follows it, in a great dusty crash that’s just finishing
as the first red shot screams through the gap. I have to bounce some of the back-blast up with the focus, and we still get some heat, like walking outside into full summer sun. That’s it for being hard to see with the focus going off sneaking and into offence/defence.

Short shot or not, it’s got some kick to it.

The second red shot goes through and goes off on the ground instead of at the height
of the outer wall. Substantial stone blocks fly out of the breach, the ground shock mingles with another of whatever Rust is doing, and the flash out-lights the dawn.

GO
.

Two Platoon sprints through the gap, dancing on the rubble and the focus.

It’s pretty much clear in the outer courtyard; the high red shot hit everybody on the wall with the flash and the blast. There will be more, as soon as
someone gets a door open, but nothing much is active in there now. There are interior curtain walls, just lower than the outer walls, so the space inside the outer walls would be nine squares if the central keep wasn’t the middle one. Very geometrical.

Eustace rumbles through the breach surrounded by the colour party. Halt’s still under that shawl, but is looking very intently around.

Low in the
keep
, say the hungry spiders.

Twitch, we’re going to try to dig in. No room to drop the wall.

No room to drop the wall without being hip-deep in rocks, and that hurts.

Sir
back, and the inevitable assignment of two to watch the walls around us and one to do the digging.
Just like ploughing, only deep enough to plant Eustace.

The courtyard paving ripples up and turns over, the line of a deepening
ditch angling at the inner wall. There’s a right angle turn and the spoil starts fusing into a roof. Wouldn’t have been able to fit the whole ramp into the courtyard in a straight line, and the bend is a good idea anyway in case of blast.

A door opens in the back of one of the towers anchoring the interior curtain wall, the one south of the breach. Radish grabs it, slams it full open, and does
a full-platoon rock toss through the doorway.

Something vast and dark and angry spirals overhead, shuddering and falling on the south-west tower of the inner keep. Jets of white fire, inhumanly loud shouts, and a crackle of lightning bolts meet it. Reems has got wizards here; good thing they’re busy.

Nothing on the foundation.
Twitch doesn’t believe that, and I don’t either.

Try to melt it anyway.

Halt, heads up for surprises.

Heat gusts out of the trench, and again as the stone that flowed into paving and shoring arches for the tunnel gets cooled. It’s neat work; there’s only a little smell of hot rock in the heat.

It’s one big open space in there.

Far from the best way to build your fortress. Could be ritual space, could be a requirement of whatever enchantment they’re using, could be
a megalomaniac Archon’s personal quarters. Hard to tell from this end of the tunnel even what’s in there.

Somebody in Two expends a pointy stick on a doorway that’s spewing archers along the inner fortress battlement. It juices a couple of them but doesn’t stop them. Defending against arrows is easy but starts to fix the focus in place, we’ve only got so much attention for threats. Don’t want
that. They’re certainly firing enthusiastically.

Captain, Company, fire support
from Twitch.

Got it.

Twitch has to worry about catching the arrows, and anybody else from Reems who shows up.

Captain, Battery. Fire support. Three short black-red-black at fifteen second intervals, prep and hold one long white-red-black.

Battery, Captain.
Hank the Master-Gunner.
Call your shot.

Meaning doing intervals
from two kilometres is insane and I’d better have the target picture really firm in the shot before it’s fired, so no, we’re not doing fifteen second intervals, we’re doing called shots.

Hank’s the expert.

Shoot
.

Dead centre on the door. Since it went through a merlon to get there, it’s slowed down enough to bounce around inside the tower. I was expecting to just punch out through the far wall
and maybe make any more archers nervous.

Shoot
.

It isn’t kind to the tiny enchanted will-to-hit in the shot, but if you give it an impossible turn you can get it to hit sideways. It’s not perfectly sideways, but shooting at the side of one of the middle merlons means the shot hits the next one over almost flat, and a couple hundred kilos of high velocity gravel splashes down the battlement.

You’d
have trouble doing that with a long-shot heave from a five-layer tube; I could get used to having nines around.

Let’s do that again.

Shoot
.

There’s some flames from the tower, and about half the archers are down. No panic yet, they haven’t had time to realise what’s happening. The flames in the tower suggest there’s a lot of wood in there, maybe the floor, and if they were idiots enough to do
that maybe the fighting platform is wood, too. I’ve got a nice two-merlon hole in the stone cover, so let’s try for the floor.

Shoot
.

It’s wood. Idiots. There are flaming flinders everywhere, some of them stuck in archers, some of them rattling off the focus. Twitch is telling Radish not to worry about missing the door, you can’t look everywhere at one time and you have to catch them
quick
. I
hope Twitch listens, still true when you’re the Sergeant-Major.

Not all the archers are down, but none of them are firing. Twitch uses the focus to put them all down by slamming a merlon left-right-left along the whole fighting platform.

Twitch has a couple of files moving down the tunnel; have to get somebody
in
there, or we’ll never see what’s around the tunnel mouth.

The flames behind the door
the archers came out of go
out
, like dropping a pot lid on a grease fire.

Captain, Battery. Prep the hold
.

Two files of the colour party toss pointy sticks up and back, toward the southern tower. From the patter of gravel on the focus, some missed. From the thuds, and screams and awful wet
splurch
sensation on the focus, it’s the razor glass tentacle thing again, and only some missed. Small some.

Battery, Captain. Live hold.

Green robes, no beard, mean eyes, starting in with the big wide staff gestures the instant the standard comes into sight, looks, in the focus, not as bad as Rust.

Shoot
.

Ow.
Holding the target means NOT using the focus to block the thermal bloom. Going to wind up with a peeling face burn from that one. That bunch of fire-priests could mostly stop rippled long shot;
this is a heave, and I think it’s tube one’s vigorous ghosts again.

You generally want to burn the heads of serious wizards, any of the better sorcerers; anything else isn’t reliably going to kill them. There are historical examples of twenty-days-in-a-pressure-cooker levels of effort to do it, too.

This one is gone down to the short ribs, and there’s a roaring fire in the room behind again.

I’m going to suppose the shot
did
hit the wizard’s eyes.

Captain, Battery. Well done.

I can feel the chuckle come back from the Master Gunner at the image of the partial wizard toppling backward into the flames.

There isn’t room to drop the whole inner keep wall, but Twitch seems to have decided there’s plenty of room to drop the tower south of the breach, as long as it falls
out
.

It takes both
breached sections of wall with it, and the air goes thick with dust outside the focus.

Inside’s not clear but there’s room to deploy.
Twitch doesn’t like it.

Can’t say I like anything much since Rust found those guys in the dry Westcreek.

Move inside.