The March North (21 page)

Chert accompanies me to the hospital.

Everybody who got stuck by critter-spines is off in one big room; two of the four doctors in there aren’t in smocks, and look rushed.

Sprinted in. Not their shift
comes from a file closer.

For a decidedly sorcerous general, Chert’s good at having a quiet presence. Quiet doesn’t entirely save a general; two of the doctors trap Chert in a corner, and
then, after the discussion starts to get arm-wavy, slide Chert out the door and down the hall.

I get a quieter doctor; late middle age, printed spiral patterns on the hem and yoke of their smock, and a strip of sorcerous tattoos across the forehead. Not obviously less intense.

I can confirm that we didn’t have anybody with more than two spines in them live; I can have someone trot over with the
standard, so various of the spine-stuck dead can half-condense and talk to the doctor or the various hospital staff taking notes.

In between, I do my best expression of interest. It seems to work. Getting back to the Commonweal and a hospital with interested doctors much better at hiding their bafflement has helped more, but I seem to be getting credit for the return.

The standard goes back to
the company, and I start going through the other floor, with the regular injuries. They are generally worse off than the spine-stuck, but there’s very little doubt about what to do for them. Only one of the doctors here has seen demon-bites before, but they’ve all studied that category of injury and the reference books are comprehensive. All the broken bones have been checked and a couple re-set,
the staff are making up a surgery schedule and another list of who needs what grown back. That’s usually an Independent job, from a sparse list of Independents. It’s not doing morale any harm, as a prospect. Neither is getting to an established hospital’s ability to banish pain. I can see the injured relax as it really stops hurting.

The general sends me on; the two doctors want to talk hospital
readiness against serious casualties, which is theoretically present and fraught with practical concern. Chert’s going to be awhile, and I really ought to get to the company, which is hosting all the gerefan and some dozens of concerned citizens.

The Creeks lose about three hundred in an average year to causes other than age and illness, a lot of it weeding and most of the rest plain accident;
trees falling wrong, rocks moving, kicked by a cow, and the like. To lose three hundred dead in three days isn’t able to become a real thing, emotionally, not as one real thing with the news. It might work for their heads but not their hearts.

It doesn’t help that I don’t think anyone born in the Creeks and stayed in the Creeks has seen a demon in five hundred years. I doubt any of them would
claim demons don’t exist, but having to consider that they might exist
here
isn’t helping anybody believe the casualties. Nor is the idea that despair can kill you a natural one; that was a new thing to the Line and Halt both. We can excuse peaceful Creeks their doubts.

So there’s a duty to listen and explain, to tell them why there are so many dead.

By the time I get to the warehouse, Blossom
catches me at the door.

If you are come with the authority of Parliament or someone in the Line asks it to, a standard can show you what it remembers. We don’t use it, much simpler to just slide knowledge straight into your head, but there’s enough illusion-spinning in there to make pictures on the air. You don’t get the smells or the voices or the remembered terror, that way, but anybody can
see it.

Twitch, spectral but easily visible and naturally audible, is running through what happened for the gerefan. Half the dead are linked up and pushing, so the view is big, one whole wall of the warehouse, and clear. If it weren’t for the silence and the viewpoint shifts, it’d be standing there watching it happen the first time.

The gerefan, and the various townsfolk, and even a few of the
drovers, are looking bad. Twitch has got as far as the fortress fight, and the standard’s memory is creating a belief in demons.

It was dark, and messy, and disturbing in there, especially if you don’t know that the standard was generally in front-right of Halt, and Eustace, and the howdah, and that this is why partial demons keep hurtling past, and sometimes through, the standard’s view. Twitch
accedes to some imploring gestures, and cuts the view.

A jump forward, and they get the great yellow-green cloud of despair, behind us, and then a jump back in time to what the standard got from Blossom, just like Blossom was a company banner, and the artillery tubes, which are at least supposed to work like that.

They get the view, off to one side, tube one stayed trained on the advancing army,
of half a thousand Reems infantry, the block of demons, the sorcerers, the awareness that it should have been more than enough.

They don’t get Dove saying “You kill them one at a time”, or the laugh. The body language — armour or not — the mood comes through, but not the laugh.

For the best; the laugh was mad.

The critters with the spines get winces and scowls and some angry muttering, about why
anyone would think they had to add something like that to the world. Tube one’s view of what Blossom did to the demon possessing its carriage gets wide eyes and stares. “In their kingdoms of wrath” is a standard phrase, about the pre-Commonweal existence of the Twelve specifically and the terrible sorcerous denizens of the old days generally. No one thinks about it, anymore than they think about
wishing people good day.

Blossom’s kingdom would have spanned a continent.

Somebody from Headwaters, back of the shaky looking gerefan, points, and says “What’d
that
do?” Which is just plain rude, as a choice of phrasing.

You get the tone a fair bit. It’s not as though we don’t, survivors don’t, keep ourselves awake at night wondering what we’re doing alive, so it’s hard to object to the viewpoint.
The guy wasn’t there, but the Line didn’t raise the kid we didn’t bring back, either. It’s close enough to even.

Thinking all that keeps me from thinking about how Twitch is likely to respond.

Twitch drops them into the view from just behind me, when the Reems infantry piled in south of the first wall, and they get it in clock time, not perceptual. Half of the audience are ducking and covering
their faces, like they expect blood splash to hit them.

Twitch talks calmly over the view and the wordless unhappy noises.

“Everybody talks about the politics, that the Line is run by Standard-Captains with their lives bound to the Shape of Peace through the standards, and we’ll never get a warlord or a Line takeover of government that way.”

Twitch’s shade stares round the room.

“The reason they’re
Standard-Captains is so they can’t run. They can’t get more than about four kilometres from their standard. So the standard falls, they fall.” It’s the ancient and inflexible view of those in the Line with warrants of authority, I’ll give it that.

Twitch’s spectral hand points at me. The big image has a wall of corpses, and a couple of artillery guys running up with bundles of pointy sticks.
“Captain did a good job of not dying.”

The form of the backhand cuts needs work.

Embarrassingly true, despair or no despair, but it gets Twitch to stop talking.

“Have they seen the army of Reems, Sergeant-Major?”

“No sir.”

This one is easy; the first view from the ridge top observation point, and then the seconds-for-minutes step through as the great mass of the might of Reems comes closer and
closer.

“Honoured gerefan, this is the army that was scouting into the Creeks. It had something like a thousand demons under its control.”

Twitch, aware that “a thousand demons” is a real quantity now, throws up the shadowed field emptying of demons at Halt’s gesture of dismissal.

There’s a modest reduction in tension as that sequence completes, and even a few smiles at the last five demons diving,
frantic, through the hoop — they can’t hear what Halt said — and I use that little gap to slide the last clear view the standard had of that dejected half-company of Reems survivors up into the big image, to replace the pride of onset. Twitch holds it there.

“This is all that survived of that army.”

It might be too much; even decent, peaceful Creeks know what broken people look like. Lose your
family to some ancient disease, lose everything you worked on for thirty years to ill-luck and wrong judgement, you get to looking enough like the Reems survivors that everyone in the room can tell what they’re seeing.

“I would rather have had a full battalion, or a brigade. I will die wishing we had known the road was built of solid despair before we broke it, and breathed it.”

Deep breath, and
ignore the general’s silent entry into the room. Try to pitch my voice so the company knows I’m talking to them, more than the gerefan and the Headwaters townsfolk. The battery are regulars, and I can feel them listening in that this-is-us way.

“The living don’t win. They…fail to die. You have to remember, and you have to go on, and it’s a variable burden.”

Which is about all there is to say,
if I’m not going to talk for the next three months.

“The Line can win, and the Line did.”

Chert’s nodding beside me, but the general stays silent.

“The Line won because you made it win. All of you. Those who aren’t here, and those we’ve still got, and those we can’t keep.”

The enquiry happens the first full day back. It’s a full geans-gathering, a full provincial council, by co-incidence of the available moot-muster that was called in response to the invasion warning. It carefully follows all the rules. Every clerk and court in the Commonweal has the Whole Book, the Creeks not excepted, and if the Commonweal has rules for it, they’re in the Whole Book.
I explain what the battalion had done and what I was trying to achieve by doing it five times from beginning to end.

The only actually troublesome point is the formally problematic one, letting the Independents loose. Nobody from the Creeks except the Headwaters Town Clerk had known that was possible, so I have to walk through the parts of the Standing Orders which apply. The Clerk has to dredge
up the reasoning for allowing that from the very first Book Describing The Law.

Nobody looks all that completely reassured; yes, it’s better to let the Independents do something surpassingly awful to invaders than have the invasion work, but, still. The idea of having uncontrolled major sorcerers around is not a comfortable one, even by implication of time limits, direct service to the Line, and
the ultimate control resting with the Shape of Peace.

Halt has to explain what, precisely, Halt had done, why sending demons off to kill people was entirely outside Commonweal law, and how sending demons off to kill some broad category of people was even more so. Using demons to obtain the parts of people you use in rituals involving demons, well. As a crime, that doesn’t have a name, because
so far as anyone knows, only Halt has ever done it.

History indicates lots of people have tried. Even if Commonweal law had applied then, none of them left anything you could put on trial.

Halt’s grandmotherly persona can manage to explain not knowing how many people Halt’s killed for “rather some millennia, now” without cracking. Some of the folks on the civil side of the enquiry get stuck on
that. Chert pointed out, gently, that this lack of knowledge applied to anyone who had ever commanded in battle, and most of those who had fought in one.

Neither Halt nor Blossom can explain how the despair-binding worked in detail; we’re all generally willing to admit we’re guessing, even if Halt has the expected reluctance to use the word guess. Rust just shrugs, and points out Blossom is the
enchanter.

It takes several extra go-rounds, past the five full explanations, to convince anyone on the civil side I really did expect we’d all die. After that, I have to manage to explain why we kept going, or why I tried a military response to the invasion in the first place. It really has been remarkably peaceful in the Creeks, these five hundred years.

The formal record asserts a true threat
of invasion. Mechanism used to thwart the invasion greatly exceeds anything regularly permissible to an Independent under Commonweal Law. The Independents necessarily held guiltless due to having been lawfully released from those constraints by a Standard-Captain of the Line, while in formal service of the Line. Just because that’s never happened before doesn’t mean the Law isn’t there, to set
rules for the possibility. Mechanism chosen arguably insufficient; certainly not known to be overkill, vengeful, nor indulgent of passions. Demons involved were Reems’ own demons, freed from a condition of subjugation. All observed demons banished by a variety of means. Banishing implied demons is asking a lot, even from Halt. Standard-Captain’s actions consistent with declared judgement that an invasion
was unrecoverable if permitted to occur. Release of constraints on Independents permissible. Commonweal can’t act if it can’t get itself into the future; ethics constrained by requirement to permit Commonweal existing in future.

Chert looks, if you can see through the standard-binding, deeply relieved. Halt goes on looking contented.

The general hasn’t spent any time in the Creeks; most of Chert’s
service has been watching the long South-west Edge, that mess of small hills. No time over in the Creeks and not much down by the Iron Bridge. Chert got pulled in, the Twelfth got pulled in, when the Eighteenth…refused to abandon their posts in extremity. And now the general and the army have a mess that won’t stop growing, so Chert wasn’t expecting good results from the enquiry.

I wouldn’t have,
two years ago.

Peaceful Creeks, sure, but no one is that peaceful by accident. They take “getting into the future” seriously.

The next day the general, pennon, and associated colour party start marching out of Headwaters and back toward the Army Of The Iron Bridge at dawn. The Fourth Battalion of the Twelfth, three days on the road, marches past them into Headwaters. They weren’t part of the original
plan, but something has to provide cover against stray demons and the possibility of a resurgent Reems.

The hundred kilometres of ground we didn’t march on, either direction, could have had another Reems army just as big in it. I doubt it very much, but even one medium sorcerer would be a problem for what’s left of the Wapentake of the Creeks.

Stray demons are wretchedly inevitable, but one demon
at a time isn’t close to trouble for an alert battalion. It would be less a comfort if demons seemed able to figure that out, but not so far.

Having two battalions passing each other on the road is another thing the Creeks haven’t seen for five hundred years. Barges stop in the canal so the crews can watch.

Aside from written orders and policy for the Fourth of the Twelfth, the remnants of the
Wapentake, and Blossom’s experimental battery, Chert’s leaving behind gerefan, clerks, and regular Creeks all in a hurtling mass of preparations for electing a Parliament, a discussion about where to put the second Commonweal’s Shape of Peace, another one about whether there’s a judging-hall large enough to be the Main Court somewhere in the Creeks, and a massive exercise in food accounting. This
winter isn’t a problem; next winter will be, at least as planning. The half-million displaced folks in the Folded Hills will be hard-pressed to get sufficient agriculture started in one summer, and no-one in the Creeks knows for sure what the displaced are going to be able to bring with them, or if anybody in either group knows enough about weeding in the Folded Hills.

The general’s more than
done a general’s job by getting everyone to believe in the necessity of a second Commonweal without having to come right out and say that the Commonweal as was, the First Commonweal, isn’t especially likely to survive the creatures coming out of the Paingyre. No-one knows what the Iron Bridge warding was, so no-one knows how to put it back. If the creatures are bound to occupy the whole watershed,
stopping them for more than ten years or so has to be considered unlikely. A distinct watershed — the things out of the Paingyre have had centuries to get over the flanking hills, and even closer to the sea no one’s seen in a thousand years, what at least
was
a flat coastal plain — has better odds.

Rust returned to the Commonweal the first day, wanted up by Meadows Pass, as soon as the ghost horse
can get there.

Another chance to kill an Archon ornately
had drifted out of Blossom’s head toward mine, watching Rust ride away night before last.

“Shan’t insist on ornately” had been Halt’s contribution, spoken out loud to apparently empty air. Just precisely how Halt had heard us, or how the standard had known to pass a distant Halt’s words on to me, and to Blossom, and to no-one else, well.
Some things you have to explain by shrugging and saying “Well, it’s Halt”.

Rust was dutiful and useful and I still can’t bring myself to mind having Rust far away. No amount of good and plain keeps you from expecting the honest.

The Standard-Captain of the Fourth of the Twelfth goes by Crinoline. I don’t find out why there are all these face-cracking looks from townsfolk until after I get through
my best attempt at a situation briefing. Had no idea that a crinoline is what you wear under your dancing skirt. Two classes ahead of me in Officer’s School, and one behind Blossom.

Halt does me the kindness of explaining to Crinoline directly that Halt will be leaving, but not for very long. There’s some stuff Halt needs to go retrieve, people sharing a newly-former dwelling place to inform,
some bequests to make, and some transport to arrange, before Halt returns. Halt remains a Staff Thurmaturist, and very properly and formally petitioned me for leave to go do those things. Rust had asked leave to depart, a formality after Chert’s orders, but polite.

Eustace is staying. Halt has it that Eustace is serially digesting three tons of heads, and isn’t up to travelling in any real haste.

That’s visibly reassuring to some of the Headwaters folk, that Halt is leaving livestock. Leave that much sheep, and they can believe you’re coming back.

Crinoline, faced with the prospect of roving demons and no Halt, isn’t looking delighted. Can’t manage a really grim face, because the howdah has not only just finished putting on shoes, it’s doing limbering-up exercises, and the Foremost in their
wrath would have trouble looking completely grim watching that. Halt is putting in some extra hat pins, donning an over-wimple dust-cloth thing over hat and, sweepingly, shoulders, more hat pins, a demon-faced brooch to connect dust-cloth to Halt’s coat, and then actual goggles.

That Blossom will be staying doesn’t reassure. Crinoline has never heard of Blossom.

Dove hauls a succession of images
out of our standard, Blossom setting up the demon-ward, the range and variety of demons that got stuck in it, and their melty fates. Crinoline looks marginally reassured, and then a great deal more so when Halt conveys a last “strict herbivory Blossom dear, not even any eel-tree” instruction to Blossom and Eustace, already a vast dejected lump of mutton, contrives to look morose.

The howdah really
does have a boarding door in its right side. Halt steps in, sits, waves jauntily, and is just gone. You can hear the thunk of the door closing, and a fading pat-pat-pat sound from the howdah’s feet running across the water of the swamp.

Blossom looks, briefly, furious. What looks like a letter hadn’t made it all the way out of the back of Blossom’s sword belt, and slides back in. Blossom exhales,
eyes closed, face smoothing out. There aren’t any sparks anywhere, especially not in Blossom’s hair. That might be good.

Blossom looks at Eustace with apparent calm. “We going to have the argument again?”

Eustace’s nose drops to the dirt, ears drooping.

“Good sheep.” Blossom’s gauntleted hand rings off the front of Eustace’s great curling right horn, pat-pat-pat, before Blossom starts walking,
back toward the experimental battery. Eustace’s head comes up, just enough, to follow like a puppy at Blossom’s heels.

Crinoline looks at me, says
Artillerist
like a curse.

The Part-Captain is an exemplary artillerist.

I get narrowed eyes.
Which list?

Short List.
I don’t tell Crinoline what I told Chert, about Halt’s assessment. That’s what gets described as “highly prejudicial”.

Crinoline’s heavy
battalion is close to full establishment at two hundred twenty-three files. Five files short of book-strength, when they haven’t been purely in reserve. Hell things cost you, they haven’t managed to cost Crinoline much. Custom says that’s entirely the troops’ credit, and not Crinoline’s. Custom doesn’t want the Standard-Captain to start listing dead names.

One battalion’s still nothing like enough,
you’d need four brigades to really cover the whole northern-trending-south-as-it-goes-east edge of the Creeks, out to the limit of settlement where the alkali flats and the wasteland starts.

It’s not likely we’ll see anything medium out of the Northern Hills; if there’s anything from Reems intact up there, it’ll either be small, sneaking groups, four files at most, or a brigade-plus in size, an
actual army.

Two solid hours of maps has Crinoline planning to move Chuckles’ supply point east, to the upper Blue Creek, some south and well east of Headwaters.

Chert commended Blossom, and left orders that have Blossom securing the full range of artillery shot in regular production, a new carriage for tube one, exploring tube production, and, if successful with tube production, training new
artillerists, in that order, but Part-Captain Blossom’s been relieved from command of the formerly experimental battery.

The Master Gunner will be out of the cast in a décade or so, the doctors having taken some pains with encouraging forearm bones to knit. Hank can run an emplaced battery just fine. Crinoline would second some files to the battery if necessary, but it looks like they’ll be able
to recruit enough. Nothing like half the Territorial company not coming back to convey that things are serious.

Fourth of the Twelfth can march out, do enough wall-building at the supply point that they could all fit, and then patrol in big loops between there and Headwaters, which will cover every plausible route down from the mountains to the dry Westcreek. The battery gets emplaced on the east
bank of the West Wetcreek, above the landing for the original supply point. Covers the whole patrol loop, just, and at least a hundred kilometres of the road through the Folded Hills, which we must hold irrespective of the direction of threat.

Crinoline doesn’t really believe the range numbers, or like the idea of using red shot at that range, but that will let them cover the Folded Hills east
to about hundred kilometres past Blue Creek, half the Creeks, more than half the population, and keep the Fourth concentrated. A full heavy battalion ought to be able to get in front of anything Reems could send, and once blocked the battery can hammer them. There are only two of the heavy hot reds left, which is why making shot is Blossom’s first job, but enough fast iron will get the job done.

It’s all sensible and logical and Crinoline doesn’t believe it. Seen it, so far as the Wapentake’s standard’s memory goes, but as visceral belief it’s not there.

When you get them emplaced out there, get the Master Gunner to show you a heave with plain long shot.