The March North (18 page)

It’s cold at night at this altitude.

It’s a reminder of the flash burn on my face. The medics are harried enough that someone tosses me the usual wooden jar of burn goo without comment. Burn goo does a lot for keeping your skin on and nothing to speak of for pain. Pain is a separate problem.

Peeling eyelids are worth expending some burn goo to avoid even when a minor flashburn doesn’t
hurt worth mentioning. I give the jar back, and make encouraging noises at both of the conscious wounded and the heap of increasingly worried walking.

There’s no shortage of blankets. There wouldn’t have been even without casualties, Chuckles won’t stand for minor pilfering, even the older-for-new swapping that always goes on. Most quartermasters have spent some of their nights out in the rain,
so I don’t know what makes Chuckles such a stickler but I’m glad to have it.

I take the watch with the dead, and leave the living as bundled up as they can manage.

Halt sits and knits all night; something complex, with sleeves. Every now and again, one of the howdah’s long arms reaches out and tops up Halt’s glass, or provides a plate of nibbles from some undisclosed location.

The pair of short
howdah arms on the side away from Halt are busy turning one of the smaller chunks of opalised demon into what I presume are buttons. I have no idea where the howdah keeps its eyes, or what it uses instead, but it seems to manage well enough. The faint chortling noises would, coming from a human, sound mad, the kind of mad that’s not let outside without supervision, far less provided stone-working
tools, but they don’t get loud.

Eustace lies down, head turned away from the howdah, ears rolled up, and goes to sleep. There’s a three metre band out from Eustace where there’s no frost on the grass.

Rust unsaddles the ghost-horse, unbridles it, and grooms it. The ghost-horse rolls its eyes, but doesn’t get too skittish. It winds up standing nose-to-tail beside Blossom’s horse-thing, one hind
leg slack and apparently content. Rust winds up rolled up in the bedroll you’d expect — good, plain, and well-used. Rust must get new stuff sometimes; the hook clasps on this one are a design not twenty years old. But you can’t tell that from looking at any of Rust’s gear.

Blossom gets up with every change of watch, every two hours, and does something to keep the medic tents warm. Looks much more
sorcerous wandering around in a nightshirt and riding boots than the Part-Captain does in armour. The actual temperature adjustment appears to consist of scowling at the effrontery of the air in cooling off since last time.

Keeping the injured warm, or dry, or whatever, is normally up to the watch and the focus; heat’s an easy thing to generate. You can’t have the dead do it — no sufficiently
precise sense of how warm things are out among the living — but I could do it just fine.

Blossom might have remembered about the dead and forgotten about me, but I’d say at least the Part-Captain rests better for getting up to take care of the injured, and has stopped making much distinction between artillery and infantry.

Exactly what you want in an officer. Worrying when the Independent Blossom
does it.

A completely peaceful night. Some nocturnal scavengers come for the finely divided corpse-bits from where the sorcerers Blossom fought died. None of them try digging into the grave mounds with the Reems guys in them, either out of awareness that the tasty bits are three metres deep, or because the terrane wouldn’t like that. Maybe both.

There’s a bit of movement in the Reems fortress,
what looks like survivors trying to find each other. Some large fangy critter creeps out of it and creeps up to have a look at the camp, just past midnight; I make eye contact and it goes elsewhere.

Sensible critter.

Half an hour before dawn, a half-company, maybe twenty files, of Reems guys comes over the pass. They’re formed up, moving carefully; not marching, it’s hard to march in the dark
when you can’t see in it. But it’s definitely a formation.

No wards, no obvious use of the Power.

Blossom’s up with the watch change. Three hours of collecting heads pushed things out; didn’t see any reason not to run the full four night watches, eight hours, and get everybody as rested as we could.

Part-Captain. A moment of your expertise.

Half-awake and out of armour, Blossom’s not maintaining
the junior officer act.
Sorcerer
comes through clear enough to twist your neck as the Independent walks over.

Any active Power with these guys?

I pass the location of the Reems guys as apparent brightness in the focus. Halt knits intricate things in the black dark; Blossom’s making a tiny, red, down-pointing light to avoid putting a foot wrong, at the paling-eastern-sky end of a clear night full
of stars.

There’s an odd sensation of stretching in the focus, not quite like having two active viewpoints, like the current viewpoint getting sharper and better able to resolve detail.

Specific detail to which I’m nearly blind. Not much different from Blossom’s light to walk.

They had a worse day than we did.
Blossom’s scholarly voice.
No indication of active talent, any use of the Power, or
any concealed entity.

Looks like everyone left in that army who can walk.
Still the scholarly voice, but the more interested one. A sensation of counting.
Figure they’re closer to a tenth or a half percent?

The expected range for survivors of a demon rampage. Surviving wounded are rare.

A hundred fifty eight guys are half a percent of thirty-thousand something.
It’s never going to be
exact
, the
neat percentages mislead.
A tenth is way too big, there weren’t a hundred and fifty thousand of them.

Blossom sticks a hand out, rocks it back and forth.
Eustace ate six hundred and sixty two heads.

We don’t ask where even a five-tonne sheep puts a meal that’s got to be more than three tonnes of heads. Halt might tell us.

Half the command structure, at most; not everyone would have been in on
the despair binding, it would have been a secret of the ruling faction, not universal knowledge amoung every commander of a company or collector of taxes.

Hard to get less than eighty brigade-equivalents out of that.
Blossom nods. Neither of us have a clue what that says about Reem’s population; the Commonweal maintains sixteen brigades with seven and a half million, but could double that readily.
In extremity, we could run eighty brigades for two years or so, before not doing anything else but fight wrecked the work of living.

If the Reems guys are trying to get away from something utterly terrible, they could be functioning at that level of mobilization.

Seems unlikely; the infantry we’ve seen have been too close to the prime age, too even in size. Reems is big.

About of a third of the
heads were whole, the rest arrived in parts. So a thousand demons
showed up
; more than that were involved, over the pass and scattered through Reems. They didn’t all start under that fortress; Halt’s offer must have…

Halt, did you command the demons under the fortress to communicate your instructions to other demons in Reems service?

The clicking of needles stays completely even.
No, Captain.
I gave the command in a way that addressed it to every demon subjugated by anyone who owed service by any chain of obligation to the individual in control of the despair enchantment.

Demons don’t co-operate. Or we’d all have passed through demon guts long since.
And the demons passed it on?

If they hadn’t, I might have been angry.
Spiders can’t have a neutral, oh, maybe I’ll wear the purple hat,
tone, but these are trying.

I take a quick little shudder break. Blossom looks sympathetic. “My grandmother was once a student of Halt’s, not the way I am, but enough Halt came to my birthday parties when I was an infant and child.” Blossom’s got a good grasp of the quiet voice that doesn’t carry.

I can’t even imagine.

Blossom’s head shakes, and smiles. “It was wonderful. Halt did illusions when
I was six, whatever we asked for. There was a big room full of unicorns just the right size for a six year old to ride, and substantial enough to do it.”

“Real unicorns?” Jewel-toothed, anthrophagic, sophont, wild drunk on poetry and the music of trumpets, unicorns….

“Aside from the colours? They looked right. Halt explained that they could only be our friends for today, because it was a special
day.” Blossom dimples suddenly. “They ran as fast as real ones, too. There are still people in town who get funny looks about that.”

Blossom passes me an image;
I got this from Grandma, much later
.

Twenty seven six year olds, riding an exploding rainbow of half-scale unicorns in no kind of order and, as Blossom said, as fast as real unicorns, which means the open canter has them going about twenty
metres per second. They’re sticking to the turf section of the roadway, not really breaking any traffic rules unless there’s a local ordinance about shrieking in glee or the thunder of hooves.

Blossom’s right out in front, on a unicorn the purples and blues of new-quenched steel. Beside Blossom is another girl on a unicorn uniformly the liquid scarlet of fresh blood.

“Tell me your horse-thing
isn’t.” I manage to keep it in the quiet voice. It’s hard.

I get the real smile, not the grin. “Real unicorns are just as smart as people; that would be slavery, even if you made it from the dead dry dust.”
Dead dry dust
is the wording of a Commonweal judge, in a judgement almost five hundred years old. Blossom is quoting. Enforcing that judgement has something to do with why there aren’t many
Independents in their fourth and fifth centuries.

“So no, not really; if they’re not smart you dare not give them so much access to the Power. Stomp’s about as smart as a pig” — right at the legal limit — “and much better-tempered.”

Which explains why, pig-temper or unicorn-temper, it hasn’t eaten a bronze bull or eight files of infantry on a whim.

“Really, Captain; Grue wanted to go that fast
again, not pass in terror.” Blossom’s voice is gentle.

It’s a surprisingly convincing explanation.

“If we meet a real unicorn?” The Northern Hills being the sort of place where you might.

Blossom shrugs. “No horn. If it doesn’t have the horn, it’s not a unicorn.” Blossom trying to look tactful is cheering, even right now. “Grue did ask first.”

Two hundred and…seventeen years ago, a Part-Captain
got a detached company slaughtered by being impolite to a unicorn in a particularly incompetent way. It’s on the lengthy “these would not be novel errors” curriculum, so I know, and Blossom, graduate of the same school, knows I know, that the horn isn’t a material structure. If Stomp can’t be given extensive access to the Power, it can’t have a horn.

How you’d even
start
to ask a unicorn if it
minded the creation of artificial hornless unicorns as beasts of burden. You’d never come out and say what you wanted to do, not if you wanted to live.

An image opens in my mind, carried there by spiders. Spiders on their ever-so-delicate best behaviour.

You can tell the plan was for cake inside, and the combination of six year olds and unicorns moved the cake outside without much conscious thought.
There’s enough cake, even with the unicorns being offered their own slices in an awkward combination of wild enthusiasm and solemn politeness. Parents around the edges look pale and troubled — unicorns smell like panicked tigers, and these are amazingly real unicorn illusions — and I can just see the bundle of the current project at the top of the knitting bag on the grass just to the viewpoint’s
left.

In the middle of the image, the purple-and-blue unicorn and the wet-red unicorn have lain down, right down, necks stretched out and chins on the grass. Two of the infant children, girls, are sitting between them, fancy, festive-occasion hats back on, leaning on their respective unicorns’ shoulders, eating cake, petting unicorns, and talking with a steadily collapsing shyness.

You got two
of them.
Just to Halt, and as lacking in accusation as I can make it.

Social hints are mighty things.
Spiders do smug very well.

Social hints moved by honesty and good-will being something to which Commonweal law refuses to object. They’re not precisely
fair
, not when some of the hinters are centuries old, but the purpose of the law is not that sort of fairness.

A mighty Commonweal means I am
safer, Captain. It means I need spend less time maintaining the Peace and may spend more on sheep-breeding and the flower garden.

Your human selective breeding project?

I encourage traits that benefit the Commonweal as a whole, Captain. As is my plain duty.

If you squint
from Blossom. Halt hasn’t been especially quiet about Halt’s side of the conversation.

Not very much, dear. A tiny amount of
social selection so we get more high-talent people like you and Grue and fewer high-talent people like Shimmer.

Shimmer is one of the Twelve. Shimmer isn’t anywhere sane can send messages.

There’s a small sigh from Blossom. “I had a complete fit about this when I was twenty-three.”

“Mother sat me down and ran me through the available evidence that there’s three different ways to get a high-talent
person, and that one of them is certainly dire and one of them is deeply iffy and one of them is just somebody with a lot of talent for the Power.”

“Halt’s been telling people the odds.”

Blossom nods. “Halt’s been telling people the odds.”

“Also how to do the tests and what to check and how to calculate the odds; it’s hardly something that works by Halt’s authority. There’s a whole field of study,
and none of the active workers in it are Halt.”

There’s a rather larger sigh from Blossom. “It’s also impossible to argue that, without that knowledge, high-talent people who are just people, instead of utterly paranoid or actively indifferent to the fate of anyone else, are not what you tend to get. Talented people get smitten with each other in completely unhelpful ways.”