The March North (15 page)

Sir.
Toby sounds like someone who’s forgotten you can’t die twice, but the feed into the focus from One is strong and steady.

One slow push to run the spines of the sword blades together gives me a bulge;
not much of one, maybe a centimetre higher than the sword blades are thick.

Pick up one foot, set it behind the other foot, reach up and behind and vault out of this hole while thinking of the sword blades pressing together.

Standing behind the arch is an invitation to death by gravel; I take a couple steps back, wave the colour party behind me, and try to make the sword blades exchange places
on the flat while lifting that flat plane straight up two metres.

“Inescapable consignment to the indescribable silence”, Halt says in reverent tones.

Three or four of the demons up in the galleries squeak, and one of them, well, call it faints.

I don’t think Halt thought that would work.

The only remaining regular use of signal mirrors is looking around corners; the idea that you’ll need to flash code to other units of the line who are too far away
to communicate with through the standards didn’t make a lot of sense five hundred years ago, and it makes less now.

The cold iron of the pipe…displaced, can’t even really say it sheared. It’s dragged out in a couple of thin tendrils that are still coiled around the warsword blades. Definitely a hole.

Just enough of a hole, pure iron’s ductile. Didn’t change the curve, the iron’s still cold.

Toby,
One, DELICATELY, lid at the level of the floor.

Sir
.

Toby does an excellent job; there isn’t even a breeze around our ankles, but the coiling grayish-yellow colour stays under the arch of rock and below the level of the floor. The dust was more than bad enough, don’t want to breathe this.

Well done.

Halt, what is that?

Keeping the lid on has little value if it starts dissolving the rock.

Despair,
Captain. Immaterial and entire. Only despair.

There’s someone half-a-sorcerer in the tunnel after all; they send a couple lines worth of spearmen straight at us, and start in with the Power.

The spearmen have their cloaks cut into strips and wrapped up their legs to the knee and some kind of wetness-warding on the cloth, I’ll give the sorcerer that.

None of them thought to keep a strip of cloak
over their face. The working bounces off the focus in a cloud of pretty lime and avocado coloured lights — some of the prostrate demons turn their heads for a better look — and a smell of burning ginger. Twitch grabs a sixth of the floor worth of scunge, complete with chips and chunks of underlying rock, and down it goes.

The sorcerer’s second try goes off into the ceiling of the tunnel, as one
of the prostrate demons grabs both legs with one prehensile paw-foot and yanks them over.

Halt gives that demon the narrowest shadow of a nod, and there’s another flash, darker green, as the demon bites the sorcerer in half. Not a demon that chews; there’s a messy bolting gobbling gulping process, and the demon has some sort of crop, because as the demon lies back down there’s a protracted set
of bone-cracking noises and some boot-belching. The noises go on just about as long as it takes all of the infantry to dissolve into vague heaps from their prone positions, maybe thirty seconds.

Nothing else out of the tunnel, and no other demons move until those near the spreading patch of dissolving infantry start slurping up the mess. Radish is patting some guy in Two awkwardly on the shoulder;
that’s hard to do in armour. Radish looks like turning away is just what Radish would rather do, too, even if Radish’s got a much firmer grip on not puking than the guy being patted.

The hole in the floor under the arch of rock is dark with despair. The shine from the sheared edges of the iron is gone, and the blades of the warswords are dim.

Halt, Captain; is the enchantment broken?

Eustace has
been standing like a statue; there’s an unpleasant popping noise as the inner jaws slide back in, and Eustace produces an experimental bleat. Halt’s spine couldn’t be straighter, but the howdah arms raise the swords higher.

Now, but not forever.

I don’t know how to tell that Halt is about to use that bone-shaking voice again, but the focus as a whole can tell, and the awareness that Halt will
runs round it wordlessly.

If it had to be words, it would be
don’t lock your knees
.

One of the demons tries to fly; something catches it out of the air, glints and shadows, and stuffs its feet in its mouth. Arms flailing, wild of eye, it starts chewing. The glints keep pushing, and when its legs are half gone, start adding arms, one by one by one by one. Both pairs of wings go swollen and rigid
with its inability to scream.

Halt, Captain; is this necessary?

I am Halt. I will be obeyed.

Time was, every living thing.

Kill cleanly
.

The glints collapse through the demon, which becomes oily smoke, thick enough to fall.

Halt goes right back to using the bone-shaking voice, and I feel One Platoon recovering from a rigid expectation of immediate death right along with Two and the colour party.

Whatever Halt is saying has the cadence of orders. The demons peel themselves off the floor, some of them visibly sloshing, and rise up and out through the galleries, taking those demons with them.

They will bring me the heads of those who made the enchantment, who serve Reems with the knowledge to contain despair, or who bound demons under the chain of despair.

When?

By sunset; the time a typical
human standing in the place the battery now is could not tell a white thread from a black.

Captain, Battery. Status.

Battery, Captain. Two tubes active, one tube ready, one tube down.
Still the Master Gunner.

Captain, Battery, report our entry. Prep and hold short black-red-red.

Battery, Captain. No movement in your entry courtyard. South-east corner of the curtain wall looks like the stone is
on fire. Lots of non-focus exercise of the Power.

Twitch, have we got any iron smiths?

Four in Two Platoon, one in the colour guard.

Which one is the best singer?

Don’t get to flummox Twitch often.

It takes a minute or so, and Twitch and Radish agree that it’s a particular guy in Two.

Halt, if you can warn Rust we’re pulling out without being a distraction at a bad time, do it.

Attention to orders.
The battery is going to kick our entry courtyard. The company will withdraw on the battery.

Two, then Eustace, then the colour party, will proceed out the tunnel, cross the line of the curtain wall, and withdraw on the battery, marching in haste. Defensive and mobility focus is the Sergeant-Major and One. Two and the colour party will be singing the Curse Upon Iron, following the lead of the file
closer of file seven, Two Platoon.

Singing?
comes back from pretty much everybody who isn’t Twitch or Halt.

I’ll be feeding the song back into the cold iron pipe under the floor here.

Sir, how? The Power will slide off the iron?
A file closer in One.

Yesterday, I killed hundreds of Reems guys with the swords whose blades are wrapped in the cold iron. Feed it to the sword blades
 — through a strong
enough blood connection to reach
through
cold iron — 
and the iron will start to pick it up.

The Curse Upon Iron is an old smith’s song, a complaint about the nature of iron, rather than an account of making a curse, or a cursing ritual in and of itself. Imparting the knowledge of being worked with fire to the cold-iron pipe will, eventually, make it stop being cold. Without any actual fire or
heat, just in case. The despair’s leaking, it’s not working, but it’s not all out of there. Someone, someone skilled and lucky, might just be able to fix it, or some of it.

Worked iron cannot contain despair, or much of anything; there’s a reason enchanters like copper and silver and gold and glass. The enchantment utterly depends on the weight of despair to hold down the conscious terrane and
bind the demons to obedience, and if the despair, the complex pattern of the enchantment in the despair, made out of despair, gets away there’s no way Reems will be able to fix it in time. Collecting the despair has to have taken years. It’s like making your enchantment out of ice, nearly enough, rare ice made from the sorrowful tears of unicorns.

It takes the focus about a minute to work all
that out and share it around and agree to it.

Captain, Halt. Am I risking your vast crater scenario?
Quietly, and privately, as Twitch is getting everyone organised into order of march and designating stretcher bearers to get the down and the dead out with us.

No, Captain.
Halt is sitting down again. The howdah arms have folded carefully, so there’s a sword pointing forward and one pointing behind
on each side. One arm can do a lot with five elbows.
The containment is not complete.

I have informed Rust.
Halt smiles a quiet, contemplative, terrible smile.
Rust and I agree that it would be well to be at least a kilometre from this fortress before the nature of the iron changes.

Captain, Battery. Prep the hold.

Battery, Captain. Live hold.
That quick, they’re not shooting at anything right
now. Good.

Shoot.

Halt’s had the howdah dim the swords, or this one hits closer to the tunnel mouth; everyone’s shadows flash up stark and dark for a moment.

The Line will withdraw on the battery.

Nothing moving in the courtyard. Bits of the flanking curtain walls have collapsed away into the adjacent courtyards; too much red shot for the mortar, probably.

The entry is worse than it was; that
tower Twitch heaved over spilt stone blocks all through the neat cut from the door-knockers. It’s not too bad; certainly not so much stone that Twitch and One can’t plough the blocks aside for a clear road.

Some brave souls in the tower to the north of the breach shoot at us, well, me, specifically, with arrows. The arrows get hung up in the focus. Radish is getting set to suppress them.

Radish,
let it go. We’re leaving; let’s get singing.

It’s not as though the four or five of them can hope to get arrows through the focus, or even pin us, no one has to think about so few archers.

I don’t know the words, at least half the company doesn’t know the words. But the focus will let all the smiths, who know the words well, pass them around, and it makes keeping tempo off the selected lead singer
easy.

There’s some wailing from the archers when the singing starts; it’s not a cheerful song, and they certainly don’t know the words, what we’re trying to do. It puts a complex certainty about the behaviour of the hot bending iron into a shape of power very well, cheerful or not, and that goes into the forged blades of the warswords as readily as if I held them in my hands.

March in haste, march!
from Twitch.

We sing the whole way.

We’re maybe half a kilometre from the camp when there’s a lapse in the pressure coming back from the warswords.

Everybody goes right on singing and I go right on pushing. That’s likely enough the despair anchor gone beyond fixing, but the cold iron wouldn’t all go at once. Getting rid of more of it can only help.

The battery is a mess and Three’s not looking well, but the baggage is still
in neat lines and the bronze bulls are standing in the traces, chewing cud that isn’t there. Not overrun, not quite.

Dove or Blossom didn’t have the camp ditched, they peeled back the overburden from the bare rock so there was two to three metres of cliff all the way around the front arc; the back was already cliff, old quarry workings running back and up into the mountain. The pile of dead Reems
guys washes up and over that front palisade in six places, and bits of the little cliff have collapsed or melted in.

Blossom’s facing north, up the slope; looks like a straight-up Power duel with a bunch of Reems sorcerers. Blossom’s wrapped in white fire you can see with your eyes, no human shape; through the focus Blossom looks like a metal fire.

Three and the battery’s focus node is still up,
there’s some sort of secondary ward inside it with demon-corpses boiling off it. There’s a last live demon; Dove is standing under it on a ladder held by two panicky-looking drovers, cutting out its heart.

Tube one’s carriage is a twisted, melted mess; tubes two, three, and four look in service.

No scorching around tube one. Looks like the team’s all dead; bodies under blankets, no stretchers.

All three servicable tubes are trained north. The Master Gunner’s right arm is in a sling, but definitely walking. There’s a guy way up the mountain feeding a view southwards back to the Master Gunner, so the main Reems host is still over there.

Twitch brings us to a stop two hundred metres out, still singing.

We finish the verse and the chorus, and there’s a weakening in the remaining resistance
to the knowledge of iron.

Push
.

The Line should do more singing; one live and one dead platoon, and you could mistake the push for the output of two hale companies in no particular hurry.

Looking back, the Reems fortress has gone dull yellow-green in a cloud.

Twitch announces our presence very formally.

Hallo the camp!

It makes a lot more sense when you remember that the words got picked six centuries
ago by people who had to shout them.

Even when the standards know for sure who is us, charging home and merging loci will do things like bobble their active focus and it might crash that secondary ward.

Best let broken demons finish boiling.

Hallo the standard!
comes back, from a file closer in three.

Status?

Dove answers from where a drover’s pouring water over Dove’s sword arm and what hits
the rock is boiling.
Captain. Three Platoon has twenty nine dead, four down, thirty eight walking.

The necessary pause of tradition.
Fifteen hale and the Sergeant.

Fire and anguish.

There were these little things with venomous spines. The walking got one or two spines per; the down are spears. Medics are cautiously optimistic.

Meaning they’ve seen a venom vaguely like it before, or the walking
aren’t getting worse. Both if we’re very lucky.

Demons?

Critters. You gave us enough warning to deploy the extra ward before the demons hit.

Inside the focus, so as to be relatively safe from Reems troops trying to cut it to support the demon attack. Something else that should go general-issue, if it works without an Independent to deploy it.

Blossom did the first one.
Dove waves, notices the
state of the warsword, and drops the mangled remnant into the smoking hole in the rock. Both drovers have come back with refilled buckets, and one starts pouring again. Dove’s initial wave might have been indicating a row of large glass jars, over by the battery. That demon is far enough gone that it’s a mostly-orange melted blob, sliding down the curve of the demon-ward very slowly.

Then the
Reems sorcerers started in. The Part-Captain asked me if I’d seen how it worked, with the first demon, I said yes, Part-Captain said, great, do the others.

Dove’s shrug turns into an actual smile.
Couple guys from battery support started running jars. Battery-commander’s waggon had a lot of suitable jars.

It’s so encouraging when they remember their lessons.
Halt, in a voice of utter sincerity.

Shot
from the Master Gunner, and tube two shoots, pointed high.

Excellently well done, Sergeant.

EYES AWAY!
from Twitch, in a sort of weary spectral roar. It’s tough to react like you’re safer not looking for where the hurtling cataclysm is going to land, but part of a Sergeant-Major’s job is to act like it’s easy.

The shot-track is way high; it’s tens of kilometres up before it tips over and starts
heading back down.

One of the sorcerers Blossom is fighting starts running in circles, increasingly on fire.

It can’t be lungs-only shrieking, especially not from someone on fire. It grates like a big dull saw.

“Blossom’s notion of subtlety.” Rust sounds amused. How Rust and the ghost-horse got three metres to my left through the focus without anyone noticing, well. Rust
is
one of the Twelve.

Tubes three and four shoot, heaves that clear the ridge line southwards by maybe a metre. That ought to bounce them on the shockwave and spoil the aim. Presumably these are middle-red.

YES!
from the Master Gunner as a green-white flash fills the southern horizon.

Somebody else Blossom is fighting converts into a thick greasy-looking mist, then a second and a third and a fourth.

“Whereas that is
Grue’s notion of directness.” Rust still sounds amused.

“And if Grue was being subtle?” I’m not seeing much of a distinction between dissolving people and lighting them on fire, subtlety-wise.

“Grue devised means to make opponents violently allergic to their own brains.”

“Can’t they fix that?”

Rust’s head shakes. “In principle, but the necessary skills are rare. The attempts generally fail to
possess curative properties.”

I suppose getting the sorcerous opposition to destroy their own brains is suitably subtle.

Captain, Battery. Status?

Battery, Captain. Observers confirm that last salvo got the Reems field commander. There’s a bunch of active sorcerers and maybe a couple thousand effective troops remaining over there, but they’ve lost their big collective power concentrator.

Tube
one is non-serviceable and the team’s dead, tubes two, three, and four are active, observation party has no-one hale, nobody’s opened their third caisson yet, twenty eight dead, four down, six walking.

Very good.

Not that it is.

Halt, Rust, is Blossom going to need assistance with this lot?

One of whom stretches to be about ten metres tall before snapping, loudly, as I’m asking.

No, Captain
from
the primmest spiders in the world and
If that worked?
in smoke-wrapped tones of amusement and doubt from Rust, waving at where the sorcerer cracked like taffy.

Halt, Rust, go back south over the pass, avoid risk to yourselves or the battalion, do what you can within that constraint to make sure Halt’s gang of demons collect all the heads they were sent for and to discourage any sorcerous survival
or organised activity over there. Return no later than one hour before apparent sunset.

I get two very similar nods, and the ghost horse and Eustace start moving downslope, more west than south and accelerating. The howdah’s long arms are coming up around Halt again, swords in hand.

Twitch, Dove, Master Gunner; the standard will rejoin the camp with all due caution.

I get the chorus of “Sir” back,
and Twitch starts in on clearing the palisade. It’s not clear if Twitch or Dove are most concerned to make sure all the things with spines are dead and disposed of.

Radish has the stretchers moving up to the front, and is talking to the medics.

Blossom’s down to four opponents; three of them go over all at once, and the remaining one does something emphatic.

Green and purple fire claws at Blossom
through the focus; there’s swearing from the — utterly surprised — file closer on focus watch. There’s just the equivalent of two hale files from Three active on that node; the focus bends inward and fails locally. There’s a spectacular thunderous roar as the green and purple grounds out on Blossom’s coiling white.

I turn my head and close my eyes; nothing safe to look at either bare-eyed or in
the focus.

Blossom, or at least the figure in the centre of the pulsing purple roar of burning rock, makes a fingers-apart gesture at the last sorcerer, who looks horrified and then both translucent and eight times as big before there’s a flash and a bang like the world cracked.

Part-Captain, Captain. Immediate sorcerous attack defeated.

Captain, Part-Captain. Very good. Is your position secure?

Position secure.
You can tell; the coiling white fire is fading from sight, though not the riotous mass of sparks in Blossom’s hair.

Part-Captain repair to the standard.
If we need to move, getting the artillery back out of there is likely to be the hard part.

Blossom starts walking, headed toward where the first clear section of palisade is getting stairs. Blossom’s maybe ten metres from tube
one when the Master Gunner makes a round-the-head wave. Blossom nods, and the tube teams start moving well away from tube one, the Master Gunner making one-handed chivvying motions at them.

Blossom goes on striding forward without pause, but makes a crisp circle-round-the-head gesture, one that means something, and pushes that hand at the twisted carriage of tube one.

There’s a crack and a flash
and a splash of molten steel from a patch of the mangled carriage, which sags into an increasingly less functional shape. Blossom’s hair has lost its mess of sparks.

In five minutes, it will be five o’clock in the morning.