The March North (14 page)

Captain, Part-Captain. We’re headed under. Risk of wards. Anybody from Reems starts poking at this end of the tunnel, stomp them.

Sir. Advise some notice before emerging.
There’s a ghost-grin with that.

Will do.
Might be tricky if some ward forces the focus into separate nodes.

Even with the dust and the smoke and the fortress-shadow, it’s a bright day outside.

The tunnel is dim and even,
a circle with a chord off for the floor. Excellent traction.

This huge space is uselessly dark.

Did we put any lights out?

Nope.
Twitch has gone outright laconic.

Halt?

The enchantment lies below.

Halt’s losing the Granny-face in a rustle of spider-feet.

Step and pause advance.
We can upshift body heat into enough light to see by.

Not a thing shows, either with eyes or the focus. It’s an artificial
square cave thirty metres on a side and at least five high, and I can’t get anything at all through it, not Rust’s fight, not any sign of enchantment. We’d have lost the battery if it wasn’t for the hole in the wall.

Listen
drifts through the standard-binding. Someone heard something, and everyone stops and tries to breathe quietly, even Eustace.

Shot.
The Master-Gunner, sending an image of at
least a company of Reems heavy infantry sprinting into the courtyard and headed for the hole.

There’s a flash through the hole, sudden full daylight. That’s around the dogleg. What kind of idiot is in charge of these Reems guys?

The walls and ceiling in here are a dull black. Really dull; soot has more shine than that.

Anybody still hear anything?

Nothing comes back. It’s eerie in here. Could
be the ritual requires silence, could be a side effect of solid despair under the enchantment the Reems guys are using to hold the conscious terrane still, could be all sorts of things.

What it feels like is a trap.

Step, pause, step, and we’re near the middle of the room. No matter how keyed up you are, fifteen metres just isn’t that far. The floor doesn’t look like blocks, it looks like someone
levelled living rock.

It’s clean, scrubbed clean, can’t feel any dust. Black and even and all about the same temperature. With the focus upshifting heat, Eustace is one big light, and there’s no detail at all.

Anybody see any writing or incisions or anything like that?

Nothing comes back from that, either.

Down shields.

They do, the half of them that have them. That’s a command for inspections,
not the field, and I can feel the confusion.

I grab the focus and slam the shields overhead and hold them as the whole ceiling lets go and the focus can’t grip it at all.

The bit that’s still up, hung on the shields, isn’t all that heavy; I doubt it weighs as much as Eustace. Still completely not there to the focus, and draped down from the shields, so we’re packed in a little tighter than we
were. Some of the guys along the outside got knocked down, but it doesn’t seem to have hurt them.

Shields hold it up, so it’s material, or at least tangible, not an idea of solidified darkness to go with the despair.

Has us pinned better than massed archery would.

Watch OUT. Watch UP
. Twitch, so laconic it’s somewhere past conversational. It’s very, very dark in here with the focus all gone into
holding up the heavy solid darkness.

Whatever this is, it bends; something might come through it.

Trying to slide the shields outward works fine, to get a bigger space.

There’s a crunch, and the thing pushes down. Down hard; we can’t hold it steady, and it presses very slowly downwards.

Toby’s chanting “
Hold
,
Hold
”, calm and steady, and it helps keep everyone focused on lifting and not what more
force than we’ve got means, pressing down.

Outside, where we can’t see at all, there’s maybe words, and faint cruel laughter. The ring of shields is down even with the howdah-top, and Eustace’s face works to the accompaniment of small flames.

The soft sheep-face pulls back and gapes more than a sheep should, and another set of jaws slides forward past the ovine teeth, narrow and serrated and metallic.

LOOK AWAY FROM EUSTACE
.

Probably not enough.

COVER YOUR EYES
.

Toby’s chant doesn’t change, and the lift doesn’t falter.

I’m standing dead in front of Eustace; moving aside, moving the standard aside, can go with looking away.

Purple fire, Eustace’s full gape’s worth. It splashes off a far wall, something we can see dimly through the black thing over us, and does nothing at all to our covering except
flow through it.

Even looking away, that was bright in the darkness, and it’s hotter in here.

LIFT
.

The shields don’t budge, and we lose another couple decimetres to the next crunching heave. Another couple of those and we’re going to have a problem.

Eustace crouches, involuntarily. The focus-invisible stuff pressing down on the howdah is pushing Eustace down. The noise Eustace makes is halfway
between a moan and bleat, and the laughter comes back louder.

There’s a ringing noise, like a light hammer on steel, rapidly over and over. The shields surge up; there’s a whirling object moving back and forth over us, with the line slowly widening into an oval, then almost a circle.

Eustace surges up, dim in the red glow of the whirling thing.

The howdah top folds up, like the complex umbrella
it is. The corner pillars bend and twist, four long arms with five elbows each, stowing the folded top somewhere, and coming back up with four big curved swords.

The sword edges shine.

There’s at least another ten metres of open space above, that the thing that fell on us hid. Two levels of galleries. Cables gone slack, hooks and pulleys in the ceiling that held up whatever fell on us.

Both layers
of galleries are lined solid with demons.

Explains the laughter, and the crushing.

Captain, Part-Captain. Fort’s full of demons.

I get a distant — someone’s back up the hillside enough to see away south — view of the valley that points back toward the Commonweal side of the divide. A substantial army is coming, in glory of array. Probably who dropped most of a mountain top on Rust’s illusion.
Hope so; otherwise there’s two. Ten kilometres, call it a couple hours out.

Pretty much all of the power-invisible stuff is wound up on the spool that was whirling overhead, which must weigh somewhere over twenty tonnes now. It’s clattering to a stop behind us, two metres high and five across and glowing a hot red while it grinds into the floor.

A demon makes a long leap for the standard.

Twitch
bunts it up with the focus, and one of the colour party gets it with a pointy stick.

Good throw
.

It won’t stay hurt, and it certainly isn’t dead, but the fire and fragments flipped it back and away, and better, it’s holding still.

Same guy throws one of Blossom’s demon-specials, and that does the job.

The increased ghastly light of the demon eyes and the
smell
of the dying one are not improvements
at all, but this many demons would be a hard job for an army.

Halt?

Halt stands up, between the sword edges, and the shawl slips back.

I’m told people hear because pressure waves in the air move tiny bones in their ears.

When Halt cares to, all your bones move.

Can’t tell what Halt said, wouldn’t understand even if my head wasn’t ringing from the second syllable.

About a third of the demons pitch
out of the galleries and prostrate themselves, sometimes on each other.

One huge demon, eight-armed and shining-fanged, bounds down, hands full of swords and hooks.

Metres of fabric coil from Halt’s knitting bag and swathe the demon.

It screams, screams that start deafening, ringing back from the fortress walls in layers of agony, and get quieter as the cracking, crunching noises get louder and
the volume wrapped in fabric shrinks and shrinks.

One of the prostrate demons is half across the remnant end of a cable; I can see the wisps of smoke rise, the staring light of the demon eyes is that bright. It doesn’t move, it’s not even shuddering where it burns.

The fabric uncoils, leaving a lump the size of a horse head rolling to a stop just under Eustace’s nose while the fabric rises shining
to ripple over Halt’s head like a banner.

“Someone give that a good smack with a hammer.” Halt sounds cheerful.

I nod; Twitch passes it to Radish, Radish passes it to a file closer, and that worthy takes their own adci — if you leave the head hooked on the handle, you can drive tent pegs with the flat — and smites the lump briskly.

The lump shivers into fragments, some of them shining like opals.

There’s a wide collective moan from the demons. Maybe a third of them fling themselves off the galleries at us.

Backs to Eustace. HOLD THE STANDARD.

Halt laughs.

Not anything like your granny, Halt laughs.

The swords around Halt move, and demons fly apart.

When it’s over I’ve still got two of Blossom’s anti-demon pointy sticks only because the colour party passed me theirs. They figured out pretty quick I was doing much better at guessing which way the demon was going to swerve.

Two dead, six down.
Half a file from Two are holding belts and hands to lean out of the focus far enough to grab an arm that hasn’t dissolved yet.

Thanks
, quiet
and a bit stunned from the dead guy whose arm that is.

Can’t leave you out of the barrel.
Toby, voice full of a mood you can’t explain to the living.

Halt is standing up very straight in the howdah, and the four swords go from having shining edges to blazing daylight light.

Not a place I want to see better.

There’s a hideous mix of fluids and deliquescing demon parts up the side of the focus,
knee deep on a Creek. Bits of the prostrate demons stick out of it, and the huge spool of whatever that power-invisible stuff was, still glowing faintly in a mist of cooking demon ichor. Swathes of the floor are dissolving. Not all of it, probably depends on the demon.

Sergeant-Major, get Toby on the air quality.

Sir.
It’s not like Twitch is going to notice air quality personally.

Sergeant Radish,
armour check. Anything smoking, take it off, chuck it well out of the focus.

Sir.

Halt says one word at that same bone-shaking volume.

The level of mess starts to drop, and some of the prostrate demons start to swell.

Halt?

I told them to drink, Captain.

The demons still up on the galleries, maybe a sixth of the original total, are trying to turn their eyes away.

Some of them start visibly when
a dozen or so armour bits splash into the slop.

Halt says something else, and the mass of jumpy demons looks back. Demons don’t have a standard body plan, never mind body language, but the ones that have half-familiar shapes all look scared.

Demons will have to find another way to say “Fed by Halt”.

If this is spiders, it’s spiders playing a web of triumph like a harp.

You’ve done this before?

This time, it is what I fed the demons. Last time, it was what I fed the demons
to.

Some of the living and most of the dead are laughing. It’s that or sit and gibber.

Gone a little mad around the edges or not, Toby’s got the air quality under control. It isn’t great, but it doesn’t hurt to inhale.

My focus
.

Sir.

Using the focus to push liquids only works if you’re dealing with something completely
smooth and completely flat. This floor is neither, so I peel back the top few centimetres of floor, down to dry rock, shoving the focus out wider. Not as far as the prostate demons, but enough so the living can take a few steps away from Eustace and we can let the down sit or lie. Two of them look like dead waiting to happen.

There’s a wave in the wet stuff, back out to the walls. A bit slops
up the entry tunnel, and flows right back down again. More ripples over the prostrate demons; not as high as the original high-ichor mark.

Any of the prostrate demons going to explode
? Most are looking somewhere between swollen and bloated; a few have doubled in volume.

Not on their own
.

There’s a wordless expression of disgust from the living as the level of slop gets low enough that they can
hear the slurping.

Sergeant-Major, your focus. Avoid leaking.

Privately,
Nobody’s very effective with their feet dissolved off.

Sir
.

Captain, I need someone who can draw. Two would be better.

Radish — two guys who can draw, report to Halt.

Halt doesn’t move; Halt goes right on standing there in the howdah looking like a monument to other people’s bad ideas.

The howdah produces a pair of small
arms, with only three joints, on each long side of its length. Those rummage around and hand down some sticks of luridly green chalk and a parchment rolled up with a matching luridly green ribbon.

Same long axis as Eustance.
Eustace shuffles feet, changing that slightly.

Start just past the lump of slag.
The slag with opalised insides that used to be a demon.

A couple of very deep breaths, and
they get to it. I get Radish to note their names; getting right down to work when you’re handed to Halt to help with ritual magic deserves some recognition.

We go through green, blue, a hideous shade of yellow, white, and a shiny grey-red, one parchment per, while the demons in the galleries watch with shining eyes and the prostrate demons finish consuming the liquefied remnants of their fellows.

Most of the floor has stopped smoking. Don’t want to walk on it unless we must, but we might manage to get away with nothing more than needing a new issue of boots.

The guys with the chalk finish handing the grey-red chalk and the last sheet of parchment back to the howdah, and, sensibly enough, move back into their files.

Halt nods imperiously at the design, and Eustace, serrated metallic jaws
still exposed, gapes.

LOOK AWAY FROM EUSTACE
. Me, Twitch, Radish, a couple of guys in the colour party who are standing in front of Eustace’s jaws and diving backwards. Lots of looking away and arms over eyes. Lots of wincing among the demons.

The room doesn’t heat up as much this time; Halt’s bound the vast outpouring of violet fire into the design on the floor, and the rock bulges up into an
arch like a bridge span.

The rock doesn’t look hot, it just looks…bendy.

Shot.

There’s a bit of shudder through the floor; it’s so bright in here the flash isn’t noticeable.

Couple files’ worth in the tunnel.
The Master Gunner sounds harried.

Radish, Two, watch the tunnel. Stay inside the focus.

Twitch, if it’s a choice between spears through and scunge through, pick spears.

Sir.

The arch is big
enough Eustace could walk under it, if it weren’t for the complete lack of floor. You can see down the sides of the bent rock, about as far as the thickness of the arch above, and then a narrowing view about that far down again beside a bar of complete darkness. Absolutely nothing from the focus. Just like the whatever on that big spool, now smoking faintly in a coating of baked scunge. Didn’t
dissolve much if at all.

Battery, Captain. What have you got?

Demons, demons moving troops uphill of us.
Still the Master Gunner.
Position is stable.

Carry on.

Halt, Captain. What’s next?

We don’t have time to see if your previous experiments about demons dying of terror are repeatable.

I get a look which suggests Halt heard the whole thing.

The enchantment is in the pipe. The pipe is cold iron,
all the way around. It could have been a tunnel with the cold iron only on top. Breaking the enchantment by hammering the cold iron into it will be violent
.

Violent
in a detached tone from the Independent who thinks nothing of putting us knee-deep in liquid demon.

Non-survivable?

For some tens of kilometres.

Halt gives me an utterly unreadable look.

Downward.

The road?
someone says, I think they’re
dead; the question comes with an image of the great soft clouds of hopelessness.

Halt’s reply is a complex diagram, steady, difficult to think about even with Halt keeping the thought whole. This thing isn’t an iron bucket of despair bound to sand, the cold iron’s keeping pure despair contained; there isn’t any matter in there, the despair’s compressed, extremely compressed, Halt’s saying
irresponsible
, the runes of the enchantment are standing waves of pressure. There’s a property of mystical smoothness involved, the despair’s rotating, cold iron’s not perfectly mystically opaque, only close, the effect gets out because it’s rotating. The whole thing only just barely holds together, just barely works,
short term
comes through from Halt clear and disapproving.

That’s where my comprehension stops.

Unsafe for the terrane to mess with?
Toby says.

Anyone, until the mischief gets into it.
Halt really doesn’t approve.

Is there an alternative means of destroying the enchantment?

With the cold iron closed? No.
Halt’s very definite.

Captain, you’re not going to set it off?
Somebody in One.

The job is to keep Reems out of the Creeks by the least sufficient means. If this thing
 — I wave at the bar
of blackness in the hole — 
exists, Reems can invade the Creeks. If it doesn’t, they can’t. Either because the blast will have killed their power structure, or because the Northern Hills conscious terrane will be free to kill them all.

And all of us die?

If you aren’t willing to die, and they are, you lose, and then they kill you.

Every graul alive would look at you, and nod, and say “of course.”

A bunch of good honest Creeks, well, they’re much better farmers than graul.

We’re fighting an army from a state larger than the Commonweal as a whole. If they have enough people to hammer out tonnes of cold iron, it could be ten times larger. We’re a very short battalion. One company, one battery, and we got kicked hard finding out this thing is built out of despair. All of us dying is expected.

There’s a sort of ringing silence in the focus.

It’s not like they can’t do, haven’t done, the math. Five hundred dead protecting five hundred thousand is a clear win. Add in the other seven million for the Commonweal as a whole and it’s a great victory.

Expected isn’t the same thing as preferred.
I try to say it gently.

Halt, how much margin have we got to bend that pipe?

Halt shrugs.
This is
new.
Tentative spider-steps across the eyelids.

A completely different unreadable look.
Do not dent it
.

There’s a shudder in the floor again, but not from the west.

Rust, I presume?
Not spreading the focus far enough to look myself.

Halt nods.
Having fun.

Halt sighs.
Do not heat it.

Drat. Cold iron, well, a spot going yellow-hot won’t be cold iron, and ought to release any physical pressure.

Halt’s head shake comes with diagramatic explanation, the smoothness, all the smoothness, will fail, Halt’s fairly sure, this is new, Halt’s never seen this before, someone making cold iron a better mirror for the Power.

The prostrate demons look like dying abruptly maybe wouldn’t be so bad. The ones in the galleries go right on watching. If they think Halt is going to let them go free without
obeying, well. Never knew demons could be optimists.

No time to get anything from the baggage. I hand one of the two warswords I’ve been carrying to Radish, the pointy sticks to one of the colour guard. I hold the other warsword up, reversed. Eustace’s alternative jaws have continuous teeth, and they’re not entirely closed. I can just stick the pommel between some shearing teeth, holding the tip
of the hilt and standing on tiptoe.

There’s a crunch, and I get the eye, and a couple metres of purple fire jetting up from all four visible nostrils. “Good lad!”

I swap swords with Radish, who is grinning. Getting the pommels off without either a vise and the correct wrench or some serious free time to use the focus very, very carefully is pretty much impossible. Which is good design, but inconvenient
right now. If you can’t get the pommels off all the other furniture stays on.

Halt says something to Eustace, and the other pommel comes off with smaller, sulky fire jets and no attempts to shorten my arm.

Radish strips the first sword down to a bare blade, and I do the second one. A couple of the colour party hand me down into the hole, very carefully next to the pipe. It’s not all that far,
but discovering that landing on it flexes the pipe enough to go boom would be a stupid way to die. It’s maybe fifty centimetres thick, and even with my face right up to it looks totally featureless. It’s not even really black; it just doesn’t reflect any light.

Radish hands me down the sword blades, one at a time.

It’s easier to get a foot on either side of the pipe than to twist around; I set
the sword blades down, spines in, a couple handspans apart on the top of the pipe. It’s tough to get a feel for cold iron, but parallel to the pipe seems less bad than across it.

Colour party, you’re watching for physical threats. If you find any, you’re backup for Two.

Twitch, you’re on scunge barrier and tunnel watch. If the colour party finds anything else, deal with it. Two, Radish, you’re
supporting Twitch.
Little cat-feet through the focus as that gets sorted out.
Those couple of files of Reems guys are still in the tunnel. Maybe they’re nerving themselves up, maybe they’re too scared to move, maybe one of them is a sorcerer who is busy sacrificing the infantry for terrible power.

Gotcha.
Twitch thickens up the focus toward the tunnel, adding some depth and some layers without
letting the low barrier to the scunge drop. It’s not
very
wet out there but it’s still wet, and nobody’s much good with their boots burning off. Never mind what Halt might do to the demons still on the galleries.

It’s surprisingly hard for even a competent sorcerer to kick in a prepared platoon barrier on the first try. Halt would laugh, and Blossom would get insulted and that would be terrible,
but odds are the first thing will bounce.

Twitch, any screaming berserker charges — 

Breathe scunge.

Half of Two grimaces.

Carry on, Sergeant-Major.

One, Toby, you’re supporting me. My focus.