The March North (20 page)

No one knows why the Captain’s House is down in Westcreek Town. The tradition has it that the Line just got that far and stopped, but everyone admits there’s no historical support for the tradition.

From the house-foundations, it’s more likely the Foremost put it there in Laurel’s time, and the Foremost weren’t much for writing stuff down, being illiterate. It makes history difficult.

My take is that Headwaters, however much closer to the traditional centre of the Commonweal and however defensible, is built on a pile of cobbles in a swamp. It’s a productive swamp, and one of the things it produces are biting bugs that would give skeletonising Eustace a brave honest try. The Creeks who live in Headwaters mostly manage, but the other Creeks consider them an excessively stoic lot.

It’s not that big a pile of rocks, as towns go, but it’s a large swamp. You march up, all right, and run out of ground before you get there. Then there’s seven kilometers of causeway creating a sort of one-banked canal where it isn’t tarred timber bridges meant to be burned defensively.

The folk of Headwaters town test a bridge by lot every ten years. Fifty-odd years ago, a bridge being tested
didn’t light on the first try in the rain. There was a complete change of civil government: grandchildren and great-grandchildren of those replaced, born after the event, speak of the non-ignition as a bitter personal embarrassment.

Captain, Rust.

Mind the butterflies.

I get a wave, cheerful enough.

The whole remnant battalion is cheerful enough, marching through the rain. Keeping the focus up
enough to ward the rain off would risk shearing the bridge-truss timbers as we went through them. Breaking step for a bridge is enough like difficult for today.

It’s still summer, and it’s warm lowland rain, and almost half of them aren’t dead.

Even the dead still able to complain are going home. The line of march has spread out, so that One Platoon is leading. Anyone watching will notice their
feet disturbing no puddles and the rain splashing back up through them, but from a couple hundred metres out they are not obviously dead to the sight of eyes.

No regular barracks in Headwaters; not enough space on the pile of rocks to put in something that would be used so seldom. There are a couple of warehouses in the keeping of the Food-Gesith on the swamp side of town, used for a couple of
décades every year. By custom and expediency, those are available to the Line for quartering when they’re not full of barrels of whiskey and wheels of cheese headed over the Folded Hills. There’s a whole extra floor on the hospital, too.

Over the second, relatively short, bridge puts us five kilometres out of town.

There’s an active standard in Headwaters.

It’s been three days; just enough time
to get anybody over the Folded Hills, in a hastened march, but not enough time if the news of invasion had to get to them first.

Captain; Halt, Rust. Did you send any fast invasion messages?

Halt is beside me; I get a head-shake
no
. Rust’s
no
drifts back as a wisp of warmth in the warm rain.

Toby’s doing the challenge and response. What gets up to me from Headwaters comes through clear.

Iron Bridge,
Second Heavy of the Seventieth. Report.

“Report” has the emphasis you expect from generals when the duty sergeant’s dead.

Invasion threat in abeyance.

Battalion not fit for continued operations.

First Company, one hundred twenty up, forty five down, one hundred ninety dead, ninety one dead yet serve. Experimental Battery, ninety eight up, fifteen down, one hundred and seven dead, seventy two dead
yet serve.

Records of the last three days are sliding out of the standard and forming copies of themselves over in Headwaters, and everyone can feel that, even when they don’t know what it is.

Listen up. The general of the Army of the Iron Bridge is in Headwaters. That odd feeling is the general asking the standard what you did.

There’s a pause, good for a couple hundred metres of marching, from
the battalion and from the general, too.

Iron Bridge, Second Heavy of the Seventieth, All. Well Done.

Tired spines straighten around me. Even Halt gets the ghost of grin.

Privately, I get
Report to the pennon once you get them to put to bed.

“Put to bed”, between having had a whole company’s worth of space left for us by the General’s associated colour party, delegation to Blossom and Twitch, and prompt response by the hospital’s doctors, entirely able to see our arrival, count, and remember the thumb rules relating dead to injured, goes quick.

Which sends me off looking for the general.

A standard is a place to live. A good
one; it’s not as though the roof can leak, and if I believed in survival of the soul I’d burn incense to whoever put in the bathtub. Plus the metaphysical nature of the closet space and pantry shelves. You’re not expected to have guests, or at least not more than one or two at a time. Battalions get one job at a time.

A signa is more like having a public hall; a brigadier has a planning staff,
and can hold meetings in the signa without the battalion commanders having to go outside and get the maps rained on.

A general, well, a general doesn’t have anything to do with assembling the focus; the focus can’t usefully get bigger than a brigade. If it isn’t useful, the Commonweal won’t accept something that’s plain trappings of rank. So in practical terms a general is a battalion commander
 — it’s called the army colour party, formally, but functionally it’s a heavy battalion — only that battalion’s standard is referred to as a pennon, and usually the battalion, so everybody knows it’s the general’s.

If it weren’t for the associated army, it’d be the best job in the Line.

So unlike a brigadier, you know you’re meeting a general outside. In this case, in the Headwaters Civic Formal
Garden, which you get all to yourselves.

There are two expected kinds of general; the one that could have been an Independent and is still sorcerer enough to last notably longer than the regular run of men, and the kind that are relatively low talent and proverbially stubborn. This general, who goes by Chert, is one of the first kind.

Battalion commander, Full-Captain if you’re being very formal,
Brigadier, and General are all appointments, in the Line; the rank is Standard-Captain. So in law and custom, when we’re off by ourselves, the Standard-Captains of the Line are equals, a band of brothers.

Having fifty-eight brothers, last you heard, is odd. Doesn’t keep some of them from being very obviously your
older
brothers.

Chert nods, I nod, and we set out round the garden, doing the Officer’s
Stroll and keeping our faces carefully pleasant.

Your assessment of the operation?

Success resting on luck, the best single battery of artillery the Commonweal has ever fielded, complete strategic surprise, overwhelming Independent support, and a company of territorial heavy infantry too inexperienced to recognise the level of risk agreeing that they were fighting for their homes and becoming
immeasurably determined in consequence.

The casualties?

Surprisingly light. I expected and had accepted total destruction of my command.

Chert has a really excellent mild and unconcerned face, but that cracks it. I get a hard look until the general recognises that this is not my notion of funny.

On what grounds, Captain?

This could be either “on what grounds did you expect them?” or “on what grounds
did you accept them?” The “expect” part is obvious.

Success. Sufficiently damaging Reems in a place where there was a reasonable expectation that the terrane actively opposed them meant there was a chance success could prevent an invasion the Commonweal lacked the resources to repulse directly.

I didn’t know how bad it really was when we started marching up there, but.

Trying to stop that mass
of demons from eating everybody while repulsing the Iron Guard once the demons were spread out into the Creeks? We’d be trying to hold a communications corridor long enough to evacuate the recoverable survivors over the Folded Hills into otherwise reduced territorial holdings.

I don’t say
against whatever those things from the Paingyre are
. I don’t need to. There’s absolutely no way the entire
Line could have handled both fully active threats at once, not with the Foremost returned in glory.

Stability of success?

The amount of cold iron found puts the Reems population estimate up; if there are fifty million of them, killing twenty thousand is nothing, even with their authoritarian organization. Killing about a thousand sorcerers and eminent nobles might be more.

Or we could have got
rid of the politically dominant blinded-by-grandeur types, replacing them with able, ruthless pragmatists. Don’t need to say that, either.

Personal best guess, half-life of the victory around ten years.
Rising god-king empires usually last a hundred years or so, by which time most everybody making decisions grew up in the thing, believes they are invincible, and makes terrible decisions. The death
throes aren’t pretty, but so far as we can tell, Reems is still headed up. Tipping them over would be a good, even if it likely reduces the half-life of the victory. Somebody trying to prove that the glories aren’t fallen by foreign military victory is typical early death throes.

That gets me a nod, and a gesture at tasty-looking rose bush. Worth noticing; it’s blooming madly, and we are, technically,
strolling through here to enjoy the garden.

Utility of the nine-layer artillery tubes?

It’s a real warm smile. Nobody but the general is going to be able to tell what caused it, so letting it show is fine.

Excellent. Four tubes disabled a prepared block of fire-priests with three-black shot.

A priests-and-acolytes block of fire-priests that size could have shrugged heaves from fives all day.

No occasion arose to evaluate the greater range, and most decisive uses were with varieties of red shot. Increased shot velocity was generally advantageous by reducing the response time of the targets.

First-shot overkill from outside the opposition’s volume of awareness is what you want; it’s tough to get, and it won’t last, as hostile sorcerers start maintaining more distant awareness, but right
now it’s real. Chert produces a real smile, less wide and less warm.

Your opinion of the battery commander?

If the general wanted what that sounds like, I’d have been asked what I thought of Part-Captain Blossom. This is a formal request for my judgement of Blossom as a Line officer, two steps more formal than contributing to a quality of service report.

The Part-Captain is personable, approachable,
personally brave, inspires devotion, delegates well, and readily sustains an easy and absolute authority which subordinates are confident in accepting. The Part-Captain displayed no confusion concerning infantry capabilities when undertaking command of a mixed detachment in desperate circumstances.
Despite no prior infantry command experience, but Chert knows that.
The Part-Captain’s experimental
artillery command functioned with impressive resilience and sustained effectiveness. The successful novel artillery tube design for which the Part-Captain’s Independent persona is responsible properly compels a re-examination of Line doctrine concerning the use of artillery. The Part-Captain’s willingness and ability to support the operations of the battery by establishing a logistical support
apparatus for the composite battalion was exemplary, and directly contributed to the success of recent operations.

The existence of a Line officer who is also an Independent is questionable policy; the existence of a Line officer who is also an Independent who is an exceptionably able militant enchanter, evidences great command potential, and is personally some form of a live example of the standard-binding
is difficult to view as anything other than an existential threat to the Commonweal.

While I expect that there is a policy purpose in having Halt present to ensure that the Part-Captain does not attempt to depart from the strictures of either the Line standards or the Shape of Peace, Halt does not believe Halt will necessarily be able to win in any confrontation between them. Certainly not for
the indefinite future.

I must recommend that Part-Captain Blossom be viewed as that existential threat by the Line.

A very cool, considering look. We’re just about around the garden. Small pile of rocks.

Your personal view of Part-Captain Blossom, Captain?

It was an honour to serve with the Part-Captain and I would count it an honour to serve with Blossom again.

Have to get the stresses exactly
right when you say that, but I think I do. It’s trickier than the difference between “So-and-so is an
able
officer” and “So-and-so is an able
officer
” when a sergeant says it.

Another pale smile.

The Part-Captain will be one of the five persons performing the working that establishes the Shape of Peace for the Second Commonweal, Captain. Provided the Independent Blossom does so, and this working
succeeds, I believe you may justly cease to be concerned for the existential threat.

Deep breath. Another deep breath. Don’t think anything beyond a little mild surprise showed in my face.

The Eighteenth is gone to ghosts. This avoided a breakthrough north of the containment zone
 — I ask the pennon’s maps, and that’s still about five kilometres north of where the actual bridge was, along some
low hills — 
but this cannot be sustained.

No, it certainly can’t.

The Eighteenth remains in the Line, and has volunteered to be
 — I can feel a very careful word choice, here — 
emplaced along the south-western face of the Folded Hills.

The other big ward goes in along that long rise above the Lily Swamps?
That’s an old escarpment, not quite contiguous enough to have one customary name. All thus-and-such
mountain or rise, two hundred kilometres of local names and local roads.

The general nods.
Preliminary’s done. Lottery for the anchors has been held.

Which means about a dozen people have been picked by lot out of those who volunteered to die as part of the primary ward creation ritual.

Final pool was nine hundred and eighty one.
Chert sounds really, really tired, just for that sentence. General
of the Army of the Iron Bridge, it’s Chert’s job to keep that from being necessary.

We’re pulling the main force off Meadows Pass to backstop the Lily Swamps. Everybody below the Lily Swamps gets evacuated up above them or into the Folded Hills. Once both big wardings are in, the Army of the Iron Bridge pivots up on to the Folded Hills. There’s some hope the creatures are sticking to the specific
river valley, and won’t follow.

I can feel both of us thinking
hope is not a plan
at the same time. Both of us produce some approximation of a natural smile.

There’s that rosebush again. No trace of my appetite.

I’m here to tell the folk of the Creeks they’re going to lose communication with the rest of the Commonweal in a lasting way.

I guess I don’t get to be a general until I can say something
like that and manage wry.