The March North (5 page)

The Gerefan, and the Clerk of the Meeting, that diligent soul, would very much have liked to commit paperwork. They’re completely right that declaring an invasion alert for the whole of the Creeks is expensive. A lot of work isn’t going to get done, and a lot of plans needs must be deferred.

The Line’s Officer School is in some great, draughty, and frankly ugly pile of shaped stones that
alleges to be a fine example of pre-Commonweal architecture. The course of study is Senior School, for a warrant of commission. It must have made sense to someone at one time.

The entrance hall is a fifth as wide as it is high, so it feels narrow despite being almost seven metres wide, and there’s this immense, horribly realistic mural along the whole north side of it, above the human-level panelling,
twenty-four metres high and forty-eight metres long.

The mural shows what was obviously a prosperous town, before it was sacked. You can always find some new unpleasant bit, if you are ever so unwise as to stop to look at the thing, and the tall narrow windows in the south wall are glazed with old glass variously tinted in reds and oranges, just in case the wavery stripes of shadow through the
uneven glass weren’t enough.

Way high up, not centred, pretty much exactly where you look as you’re trying to find the part of this immense artwork that isn’t a screaming portrait of destroyed humanity, there’s this tiny — it’s not, it’s three metres wide, but it looks tiny from the floor — brass-on-iron sign that says “This is defeat.”

It’s supposed to stick with you.

It stuck with me, until
I saw what happened when the Iron Bridge went down.

We got a lot of people out; maybe we even got most of the people out. Sure as death we didn’t get all the people out, especially right at the start when it was just the Third Heavy trying to save them.

Some of this about had to show in my face; nobody so much as glanced at Halt.

There’s the usual thing where you get all formal and the colour
party marches the standard in and you sort of condense out of it. Everybody looks at you funny, but they can’t possibly argue that you’re not who you say you are without trying to repudiate the standard. You’re in the room because their best ability to check that this is an authentic standard of the Commonweal Line has already told them yes, yes it is, so that’s not going to work.

If you’re who
you say you are, they have to do it, too. The Line might come back and apologise; Parliament might provide recompense against the expense. The Line might even decide I am such a waste of effort as to hang me, if I make a sufficiently horrible mistake. But right at that moment you’re the Officer Responsible and if you say the Bad Old Days are come over the border, that’s the end of the discussion.
They take you seriously and do what the law says they must, both because it’s the law and because if you’re right, not doing that goes beyond expensive and gets into other words starting with “e” like “extirpated” and “enslaved”.

The Clerk makes a try for “incursion”; we have, after all, only got a file or so of scouting party, calling it a fullblown invasion might be premature?

At which point
I get stuck on what to say first; getting the scouts over the Northern Hills, mountains, it depends on the phase of the moon, if we start at “finding a pass and making it workable” Reems must have expended close to a battalion to get that far. Unless they’ve figured out something like a standard-binding, in which case we are in for a grim season. The scouts are for-sure regulars, and finding the
dry bed of the dry Westcreek and figuring out what it does and making and testing some wearable charm to block the effect aren’t quick, aren’t simple, and represent even more effort.

Halt does something then, subtle cane-motion. Not a tap on the floor. The clerk looks, at the cane or Halt, and sees something that isn’t the grandma act. Clerk sits right back down. Doesn’t faint, though right at
first I wouldn’t have bet not.

It gives me a moment to get unstuck. “I believe two of the honourable Gerefan are in timber?” I get two rather bewildered nods back. Representatives of logging collectives; the logging collectives club together and run sawmills in the Creeks instead of the sawmills letting blocks of time at auction. There are only three men, out of eight Gerefan. The women uniformly
look like the responsible sort who don’t say no fast enough when someone tries to stick them with a job that’s mostly settling boundary disputes at the level of lost sheep and figuring out which culvert to fix next.

“What would it cost to take trees from the top of a pass in the Northern Hills?” The creepy, shifting geology of same seems to have a thing for really big trees. There’d be some serious
worth to it if not for the logistical difficulties.

The bewildered turns to horrified. “You couldn’t, you’d never get anybody back alive without years of road-making…” and the honourable Gerefan subsides. Subsides, and then the confused look, the confused looks of the other other eight, all firm up together. Anybody at all from Reems, come by stealth over the Northern Hills, is an invasion.

Armoured
regulars sneaking down the determinedly dry bed of Westcreek is an invasion way too far along, but there’s not much point in saying that out loud.

“Thank you. Please ensure that the warning goes out with all possible speed.” I get nine nods, counting the clerk. I think they’re shaken enough to start thinking it could be real, which is about all I can do without taking over the machinery of government
myself. Which is plausibly legal, but pointless. It’s not like I’d do any better than they’re going to.

Pretty much obligatory to disperse back into the standard after showing up in it, so I do that, and it gets carried down to the turning basin. There’s a barge to grab; it can take Eustace and the available six tonnes of field rations — twelve hundred troop-days, a comfortable two days for the
combined battery and company, and I hope like Fire Twitch thought to call in all those newly beholden drovers — down to a landing not much more than ten kilometres from where the company ought to be.

Barges can, and this one does, keep going all night. It’s downstream current for this part of the trip, so there’s no chanting or dancing to stuff momentum into the keel to push the thing along, and
the colour party can sleep. I’m told we won’t hit the lock until around dawn.

Sleeping was never my best skill. Inhabiting the standard hasn’t improved it.

The quiet thumping sound coming forward is almost familiar now. The barge deck isn’t quite the same sort of sound as the floor in the Captain’s House, but wood is wood. Halt’s looking shrouded, shawl right up over, covering Halt’s head completely.
Has to be for some reason other than the night air.

“You didn’t ask if Eustace could keep up.” The colour party had used the standard to march up to Headwaters and, rather like Rust’s horse, proceeded a good deal quicker than it looked like they were marching.

Eustace’s fire-snorts had been running about two metres long and denser than usual by the end, so you couldn’t see through them any more,
but Eustace’d shown not the least difficulty in maintaining the pace. The combination of five tonnes of hastening mutton and the saturated lavender fire might not have done the road any good but that’s just not a major worry right now.

“Blossom’s alleged horse might be faster than Eustace. I am completely sure even the hastening marching pace of the Line is not.” Because you know how fast that
is, and would never, ever show up riding something that couldn’t keep up.

I get one of the grandma-face “Such a good boy” smiles.

It might be possible to get used to those, in a hundred years.

“And ‘keeping Halt back’?” Not even a little of the grandma voice.

“There’s no way whoever gave those guys in the dry creek their protection from desiccation isn’t keeping at least a passive eye on them,
through the amulets or whatever. It’ll be obvious someone with real power found them, because they’re marching in circles and they won’t answer if anyone tries to contact them.

“So Reems knows we know, now. And they have to know there’s at least one major sorcerer involved on our side.”

If they found Westcreek, the dry Westcreek, not the province, they have to know a lot more than that.

“We find
out where the pass is. We march straight up there, stomping on any sentries or pickets or small forces we find in the process. As soon as we hit something that can stop us, the company holds them while the artillery throws cataclysms at the geologic structure of the pass or, if it works out that way, at whatever the guys from Reems put in to make the geologic structure stable. If we’re not that
far yet, the artillery chews them up until we can move forward.”

Good plans are simple plans, I’ll give it that much. Plans made in a complete absence of facts are another kind entirely. This is almost pure guess.

I’m looking out into night, over the dark water and the sleeping fields, not at Halt. Every now and again a farm goes by, or a mill and a house by the water, where some actual creek
comes in.

“The Archon has to think this is going to work, and failing the Archon is a bad idea. So whoever is there making the plan work thinks they can make it work. When they ran into Rust last time, one guy beat their whole army bad enough the Archon publicly submitted and went home.” Which is one reason we think they have a new Archon.

“So whatever they’re bringing, they think they can beat
Rust. They don’t know we’ve
got
Rust, probably, but they have to assume that they’re eventually going to have to take on at least Rust. Since they don’t have a very good idea what happened last time, that could be wishful thinking, but let’s plan on the assumption they can do it.”

Halt snorts loudly enough that Eustace, head in a mesh bag Halt swears is totally fireproof, makes a very unsheeplike
noise before subsiding again.

“If they can it’s not likely fast, and it should involve their full attention.” If you set out to kill a wizard, you don’t do anything else between when you start and success. Not even deeply mad fire-priests from Reems are going to ignore that bit of conventional wisdom.

“While that’s happening, they shouldn’t know you’re there. You figure out what’s making the
pass stable, so the artillery can get rid of it, or you can get rid of it, whatever works fastest and with the greatest thoroughness. Until the pass goes, nothing else matters. After that, the Line needs to hold. After that, stomp as many opposing power-wielders as you can.”

I’m still looking out into the night, but I can feel Halt smile.

Whoever Reems has looking into the Creeks, I really hope
they can’t.

They come up out of the dry river staggering.

Dust, but it looks wrong; no sweat to cake on, and it’s beyond dry, so it’s sticking by static to the armor, not their weary faces.

Ten guys, and only two have started reaching for daggers when Toby’s platoon grabs them. One Platoon’s file of sheep-shearers shucks them out of their armour, a thing of clanging and pops as the straps part. A
couple of high ping sounds as buckles shear, and it’s done. Their armour is in a pile to the side before you can see the staggering exhaustion in their faces change to a more specific despair.

I don’t know what the word is for their faces when they see Rust. Rust’s hands wave at the pile of armour, and twenty or thirty little blobs of metal on strings float out of it. Ten of them slide aside,
start spinning around each other, fuse into a larger shape that glows red-orange-yellow-green and subsides, hissing and muttering to itself and slowly losing altitude. Rust called that an autonomous lie when we were planning this; take the locator beacons and make them a source of non-specific doubt.

The rest of the amulets separate into groups; ten of what must be protections from the thirst
of Westcreek, and then little groups of three and four. I suppose Reems doesn’t have a uniform supply of protection amulets. Group by group, all but one sparkle into butterflies. Halt, head under shawl, face closed, apparently entirely silent of voice, mutters a faint “show-off” that comes in the ear with a sensation of the tiny feet of spiders.

One and then two of the guys from Reems start to
buckle; profanity from the file-closer of the sheep-shearers slithers through the standard’s disapproval of intemperate anger, and both guys’ jaws open and their tongues get pulled back out of their throats where they swallowed them.
Trying to die
sparkles through, just as angry, and Toby’s
quiet
rings across the whole of One Platoon. The Reems guys’d be sore, but not dead, which is an amazing
fineness of control. Didn’t chip any teeth, never mind break any jaws.

One Platoon subsides; the idea that it’s better to die than to fall into Commonweal hands is a very strange one to honest folk from the Creeks. None of them disagree with the consequences for invasion, a relief to me, but thinking about it has made them angry.

Rust looks up from the middle of an expanding cloud of butterflies.
“They are in the process of failing the Archon.” The surviving amulets float into a bag Rust is holding out. “Failing the Archon is not encouraged in Reems.”

Four drovers come forward with a bucket and a couple dippers each, and start getting some water in the Reems guys. Not very fast, but fast wouldn’t work, the state these guys are in.

They’re going from despair to a little wild around the
eyes, now, but One Platoon’s grip tightened up after the suicide attempts and hasn’t slacked back. They can, just, swallow the trickles of water, and roll their eyes, and breathe, and that’s about it. I wouldn’t trust a Regular Line unit to do this; all those sheep and jam jars were good for something. A regular platoon would have pushed someone’s spleen out their nose by now, trying for a grip like
that.

Butterflies start landing, very delicately, on the heads and hands of the men of Reems. I’ve already figured out that if they recognise Rust they were at least with, and probably in, the Iron Guard six years back. The butterflies are purple, and gold, and black like a hole in the night, and from the low under-mutter of the company, butterflies like that aren’t from around here. Walk the
standard’s perception in and you can see the jewel-facets of the crystal bodies and be certain no caterpillar was involved. Butterfly by butterfly, tiny proboscides start sampling new sweat.

Rust smiles like a caricature of avarice, into faces going half-slack with outright fear now, under their crowns of butterflies.

A drover waves an empty dipper at Rust, from beside the last guy from Reems.

Somewhere in the focus, there’s a mutter with
not dying dry
in it.

“Farewell”, says Rust, and ten of the men of Reems sag in the grip of the standard.

I push
good job
through the standard.

In a little while, they will realise that it was.