Copyright 2015 Graydon Saunders

All rights reserved.

For Claire Dalmyn, for asking such good questions.

Copy editing courtesy of the splendid Marna Nightingale. Any surviving errors are entirely my own.

Additional content fixes courtesy of Christopher Tate.

Cover design by Tiger Bright Studios.

Authorial mood adjustment via a whole lot of Sabaton, particularly 40 to 1 and (especially) Union.

Chapter 1

“They’re sending us a Rust, somebody who goes by Blossom, and Halt.”

“Halt?” Twitch says the name again, emphasis different. Not supposed to be anything surprising in the monthly update. “What could we possibly have done to deserve Halt?”

Twitch might be appalled.

“Five years in fifty means they’ve got to send Halt somewhere.” Which is just true, not an explanation. Not when Independents don’t serve with the Line — there’s five centuries of custom back of that.

“West Wetcreek isn’t somewhere. Even back in the day, Westcreek wasn’t anywhere.” Twitch was born here, says this like the laws of the universe are being changed. Twitch don’t like it.

These days there’s a Westcreek (dust dry), a West Wetcreek, a Lost Creek (swamp), and Split Creek (on some fixed astrological schedule: fire, blood, venom, beer) in the province of Westcreek. I’m leaving out the rest of the Creeks, plural, the stuff further east.

For a place that wasn’t anywhere back in the day, stuff happened — Split Creek’s not a little working. Despite that evidence of past activity, Westcreek Town, Westcreek the province, West Wetcreek the watershed, the whole of the Creeks, is full of people who claim nothing happens here.

Strange claim when the population tripled with the Commonweal and The Peace Established, steady for the last three hundred years or not. And the better beer-barley, and, well, it’s a list.

Creeks will still tell you nothing happens. They’re proud of it — happenings imply a lack of care, I think. Or maybe inadequate social decorum.

If I ever get Creek social decorum figured out I’ll be doing well. There are days I figure this century would be a notable achievement. I’m pretty sure that has something to do with how few other folk have ever visited, never mind migrated. Polite, certainly, but still such a long and lonely way from the rest of the Commonweal.

Works the other way: a few militant Creeks into the Regular Line, a few more gone for training — doctors, our sergeants, the occasional engineer. Engineers are both ways; Creeks love their canals. Clerks and members of Parliament and judges go up to The City Of Peace. They all come back.

It’s the only place I’ve ever been where spring feels planned. Even the lambs are orderly.

Does a good solid reliable job of peaceful.

So why…“Hand me down The List, will you?”

Twitch: twitchiest guy ever — tongue clicking, toe-tapping, will drum on any small object you don’t take away provided an absence of immediate lethal threats — looks at me a bit funny and hands The List down, tapping on the cover.

There’s a lot of Independents these days, sorcerers good enough that the basic deal — the Line don’t extinguish them, and in return they show up for five years in fifty and do subtle clever things to make the Commonweal work better, besides staying out of trouble and politics — applies. That’s the List, the sorcerers good enough to make themselves ageless by a means the rest of us will tolerate. But the List contains the Short List, too. Parliament gives it a polite name, but what it means is, “if this one causes trouble, send a battalion”. There’s fifty-odd names on the Short List, out of the couple thousand on the List as a whole.

Out of the Short List there’s the first page; no-one tries to give it a polite name or come up with some reason for it. It’s a list of twelve names, all them older than the Commonweal. Halt’s name is the first of that dozen, by any measure: knowledge, terror, or simple grim seniority. Even Twitch, born and bred here, left West Wetcreek only into the Line, has heard of Halt.

If any among the Twelve causes trouble, the standing orders are to send nothing less than a full brigade in full array. That might be overkill: the Foremost, Laurel and the Foremost, back in the day, took down everybody on the first page of the Short List, and everybody else with the Power and pretensions of lordship, and the Foremost mostly weren’t what would muster as a full battalion these days.

No one wants to take a bet any of the Twelve haven’t learned something in five centuries of The Peace.

I’ve met Rust. Rust is not obviously anything. One of those people who could be thirty or fifty — Rust could be a schoolmaster or an architect or a team lead for a manufacturing collective, anybody in a trade both dry and not too dusty. Neat, clean, clothes and eyes are good and plain and honest. Rust’s name is the fourth name of that dozen, and Rust and Halt do not get on.

Anyone who has been in The City Of Peace for any length of time would know that. Rust and Halt may stay out of politics — they’re both known for being abrupt about it — but if you tell one of the terrors of the earth to solve a problem, you’re telling them to make policy. They don’t agree about policy and they’ve been writing snarky articles at each other in the scholarly journals for so long that the earliest ones were two major vowel shifts ago.

Blossom, though, Blossom is under a hundred and on the Short List already.

Either someone’s decided that Split Creek desperately needed plugging about a hundred years ago, or someone else is afraid that Halt and Rust’s long feud is soon to have a failure of decorum and believes the devastated landscape ought to be far away from City of Peace.

There’s a third option.

There was a time when I could have believed the third option wasn’t what we were going to get for, oh, at least a minute and a half.

“Twitch?” Who has to look up; I’m handing back that thin damned book.

“Yeah?”

“Next drill night is full array. Like it’s the Bad Old Days returned.”

Chapter 2

The drill night wasn’t a disaster.

When the Line sets out to decide if they’re going to give you a warrant of authority, one thing they pound into your head over and over is that there are no bad troops. You work with what you’ve got, with equal emphasis on “got” and “work”.

The West Wetcreek Wapentake — don’t think I’ll say that five times fast — isn’t bad, precisely. Aside from me, and Twitch, four (it should be five, but we’ve got four platoons instead of five short ones) sergeants and a quartermaster, none of them think this is their job. It’s something they do, but the job is what gets food from the earth or on to the table. So in files of eight they’re splendid; most of them work together all the time, farming or timbering, and pretty much all of them have been pulled into cleaning wool or helping with the canning, so there’s a reliable delicacy of touch you don’t expect to find in the Regular Line. Foremost, there are stonemasons and glassblowers and copper-smiths, four full teams of sheep-shearers, and five or six guys who took to soldiering because they’d lost their nerve for a weeding-team; folk whose livelihoods flat depend on delicacy of touch. For anything you can do in files or double files, a regular unit wouldn’t beat them.

Even by platoons they’re not bad; they do a lot of canal marching, it’s familiar and all the discussion got done in their great-great-grandparents’ time. The camp-ditching is fine, too; you’ll have a better-than-regulation ditch and a stone-faced wall in two hours if they have to make the stones. I’ve seen them go so far as to make great thick refractory tiles, glazed in regulation colours, when camped on a mass of old clay lakebed.

As a company they don’t coalesce. Every individual file has an opinion; the platoons form, and they hold pretty well, but they all want to argue, inside and between platoons. Getting the company as a whole to latch on to the standard — it is a standard; there’s a theoretical battalion, if things ever get that bad — is work, and it doesn’t hold well at all. Which is six kinds of frustrating, because there’s lots of kick; it’s not like anybody is trying to hold back out of conscious doubt or unwillingness to exert.

For some guy whose ancestors weren’t born here, or for a standard half of them think runs on necromancy, there just isn’t any reflex of trust.

So they want to argue, and do great canals and they’d be hopeless at fighting, when you must react without thought. Back at the end of the Bad Old Days, you’d get some sorcerer willing to pound at the focus to see if there was a way through; these days, they know there isn’t, not with anything they can do, and go for flash floods or a million hornets or worse, anything to get your attention off them long enough to get away. If they do get away, they come back by surprise; you can’t keep a company together all the time. Not a problem for a regular battalion, which can keep a guard company up in rotation. Pretty hopeless when one company is all you’ve got.

Demons are worse — demons are fast — and over the borders is still the Bad Old Days.

I can’t figure out how to explain what a fight is like without delivering the company to one, which wouldn’t do any good at all. Cannot — and I’ve tried, since I got here — get a Regular Line company out here for a shoving match, which is about the most harmless way to explain. Though you do it some place you figure isn’t presently flat enough, and which don’t have either anything built on it you want to keep nor useful agricultural properties.

You wouldn’t know any of this from watching the company parading; they all showed up, on a day still threatening more rain. The drill is fine, there’s even a drummer for the show of it, and they have the whole eyes front thing down cold.

To look at, it’s eyes front. Every single trooper has enough of a grip on the standard that the company, while by no means arrayed for war, is keeping a good eye all round. Really all round, which is, by long tradition, entirely acceptable, or half of entirely respectable, anyway; the other half is not having it show in the drill when something unusual happens.

They do that fine, even though today unusual is being led by a five-tonne sheep under a howdah.

I have Twitch march them off by platoons and dismiss them to their homes, which means out by the actual streets; the armory isn’t a fort and doesn’t have a wall. That won’t get them all to go away, but it makes it clear they’re not to stand around staring at the visitors. It also gets them loose from the standard until after the introductions have been made.

The gate guard are entirely proper and formal and polite about it, which is good. If the Independents are going to make a point of stopping and asking welcome, by all means let even the Territorial Line make a point of being polite. Plus it gives me some time to get over there without looking like I hurried.

We’ve got Rust, all right. Rust’s horse looks good and plain and honest, too, and it might have been. It might still be; Rust has been riding the ghost of that horse since there are records, and if anyone knows how that works, they’re not saying.

The sheep with the howdah has to be Halt. If you’re willing to call something six-horned and about five tonnes a sheep, anyway.

Smells like a sheep.

Rust looks almost amused as the great mass of wool kneels down in the road. Twitch looks appalled. The Creeks raise a lot of sheep; it’s probably harder to view an animal that size as a sheep, wool or no wool, if you’re used to the regular size. The wool isn’t quite the right colour; it’s an even grey with an odd dull shine.

The mix of horns — great, massive, you-could-hold-a-dinner-party-on-those curling ram’s horns, great back-curved goats’ horns with visibly faceted points and sharp edges on the inside curve, suitable for ripping the ribs out of most anything, and long, low, turned-up-at-the-tips horns running down its face until they turn up over the nostrils — can’t be helping. Even without the metallic undertone it would look unnatural; at the size, it looks like someone set out to cross malice with a sheep and got black iron and brass into the malice.

It breathes slow, which you’d expect, and fire, which you would not. Pale flames a metre long from each nostril on the exhale, which is giving Twitch pause. Might not show to strangers, but there’s no twitchiness in Twitch just now. By the third breath what was wet road has a patch of dry a metre across and the howdah door has opened and someone has kicked down some stairs.

Stairs means it’s time to stride forward and offer greetings. I get a threatening eye-roll from the sheep, and the fourth breath kicks up dust off the road bricks. A voice in the howdah says “Eustace!” in warning tones, and the ears go half-back and the muzzle dips; not repentance, but at least awareness of being watched.

I give Halt the short bow and the nod and offered arm with semi-pleasant “Madame” tradition or manners, if they can ever figure out which is which, require.

Not just Twitch looks rattled; everybody has heard of Halt. Everybody knows a lot of things about Halt, some of which are true. Hardly anyone seems to know Halt’s not a metre-fifty tall and looks like someone’s grandma. Maybe not your grandma, no-one in the Creeks is that delicate, even adjusting for scale, but someone’s.

Twitch manages a short bow; Halt looks, not indulgent, more as though that’s probably all that can be expected.

It won’t be helping that Twitch has enough of a grip on the standard that Twitch’s eyes are seeing what comes by plain old photons: knit shawl with beaded fringe, cane, wire framed glasses, could be anybody’s grandma, and the standard is showing something else.

Same with Rust, who can manage to look good materially. Plain and honest, yeah, right the way through, but even as an adjective, “good” sort of shudders away from the standard’s view of Rust.

Halt’s best benign look is an excellent effort, all the same.

“How may the Line be of service to those also in service?” More tradition.

Halt hands me a stick.

A piece of waxed wood; planed, smooth, neat. Five centimetres wide, seven millimetres thick, and seventeen centimetres long, token size. It’s a warrant as a Staff Thaumaturgist, First Class. It’s made out to Halt, and it’s real; the standard accepts it without doubt.

Looking up was a good idea, even if I did it because the way Halt was smiling wasn’t anything I wanted to look at. Rust, still mounted, is handing me down another stick, and yes, for real, Staff Thaumaturgist, First Class.

Staff Thaumaturgists get kept around to do things like straighten nails; anything too delicate to get the duty platoon to do. Anyone with enough active talent to consider seriously that someday, if they work hard, they could become a qualified assistant village sorcerer is drastically overqualified to be a Staff Thaumaturgist.

“Is there a third?”

What must be Blossom rides up, between Rust and Halt’s conveyance. Regulation armour, what is perhaps a real horse, if you stretch “horse” a bit, and really quite a respectable salute.

I salute back. Nothing to be done with token-sticks; the Standard is quite sure this is an officer of the Line, someone holding warrants of authority and commission. Nothing to be done with the shape of my face for a moment, either; the Standard is just as sure this is an Independent. Not outside the Law; Parliament doesn’t generally make laws forbidding impossibilities. Done very quietly, because I haven’t heard.

Blossom hands me a sheet of paper, folded in three lengthways, personal orders, unit orders is a stack of paper, and something that can only be called a scroll.

The standard reaches out and eats the scroll, which is I suppose what it is supposed to do when this kind of thing never happens. The orders…Part-Captain, detached half-battery, Blossom in formal and actual command, battery to be attached, specialisations, commendations, and a hand-written postscript from the Foundry-Master to the effect that if Blossom is not returned to artillery-making whole and intact said master shall have my tripes tanned and used for tompions.

Much joy I might wish the Foundry-Master of the attempt. That shows, there’s a thread of caution from Twitch.

Off the horse-thing when I look up, which is both neatly done and tact.

“Part-Captain Blossom.”

“Captain.” My appointment, rather than my rank. Which is right. So is the armor, really right, not just wearing it right. Takes the Line seriously.

“Park your battery at the east end of the square; quarter your gunners in the east barracks. Welcome to the Wapentake of the Creeks.”

I get a tenth-second flash of a grin that could bend metal, and another salute. I return it, and Blossom’s striding away and shouting for the Master Gunner. The horse-thing picks its dainty, cloven-hoofed way behind, its hide the colour of fresh blood.

I nod at Twitch, who strides off too. Twitch will be making introductions with the Master Gunner and getting the actual work done, even if Part-Captain Blossom cannot resist putting the artillery tubes to bed personally.

Handing back the warrant sticks gives me a moment to grab some focus, the personal kind that sends your sense of self high and quivering out of your body. There’s a vast gulf between “correct” and “safe”.

“Staff Thaumaturgists to report to the Captain at the seventh hour. Stabling for your conveyances” — I am still getting the eye from Eustace — “and quarters to be arranged by the Quartermaster.”

Neither of them look one narrow anything less amused.

Staffers are of the Line, not in the Line, and are not welcomed to units, which means there is another customary phrase.

“I am sure your service will be excellent and memorable.”

Not less amused at all.

Chapter 3

It’s been a long time since there was even a territorial battalion stationed in West Wetcreek; the opinion that nothing happens in the Creeks is not restricted to the folk who live there.

The armoury was built in the days when there was a full battalion, and the main drill and mess hall and two of the barracks are still there, now East and West instead of One and Two. Barracks Three through Six were taken down nearly two hundred years ago; the plan was to move the Captain’s House, Gate House, and Infirmary north to close off a smaller drill square and free up the space for civil uses. Then it turned out the Captain’s House and the Gate House had foundation bindings no one knew how to move. So now the west edge of the square has the township hospital, in place of the old Infirmary building and barracks Four and Six, and the asymmetry of it all makes Twitch complain.

Where barracks Three and Five were is grass, and gives a place to put the artillery; sometimes it gives a place to put extra sheep, building materials, or lost cattle.

The Captain’s House is about what you’d expect: a bit older than usual, sawn granite instead of fieldstone, one of less than a dozen standard-shrines that date from the time of the Foremost, but still the common-to-the-Line Captain’s House. One big main floor for meetings out of the rain, standard-shrine and a map room upstairs, quarters out the back for supernumaries.

Supernumeraries such as Staff Thaumaturgists.

There’s no kitchen — no point — but Creeks don’t do social well without this vile stuff they make from wood lettuce roots. The same stove-and-kettle setup will do for actual coffee, and since Creeks in general have the same view of coffee as I do of the lettuce roots, what would be scant supply for a company can stand to have a couple of Independents added to the Captain and Quartermaster.

Halt takes coffee black. Halt is also apparently incapable of sitting down for any length of time without knitting.

Rust has a small silver jug of chill table cream from somewhere, not going to ask, and is willing to share. Sheep’s milk in coffee can be argued either way for worth it, and sheep’s milk is what’s to be had in Westcreek Town.

“You’re not here to straighten nails.” Half a smile, and a raised eyebrow.

“Can either of you explain to me how Part-Captain Blossom can be both an Independent and in the Line? I had understood this to be impossible.” No one troubles to forbid the impossible.

The needles keep clicking away. Rust’s coffee gets set down, an oddly formal motion. “The Binding of the Standards works by creating a mind out of unformed talent for the Power. Fewer than eight modest talents and there is not enough mind to do anything; greater than a brigade, call it eight thousand, and the mind cannot focus on a task even when it can form.”

I nod; this part isn’t news.

“The talent of Independents is not in any respect unformed; the customary analogy is the utility of a substantial and ornate bronze gargolye used as a cobblestone. Blossom is very young and was trained differently.”

Halt snorts. The rapidly-growing knitting is at the end of a row, and the blunt end of a needle points. “You were ‘trained’ by not dying.”

Rust shouldn’t smile like that. “How heavy is a sword, Captain?”

I am halfway through saying “it depends on the sword” when I realize my forearm has lifted, without a coffee mug.

“Your arm knows.”

Spine, and there are Independents who would know that.

“What has been done with Blossom and another youngster was to keep their arms from knowing, much as when you direct the standard, you direct a thing outside yourself, for all that your strength participates in the standard.”

You can’t ask if an Independent is crazy. The same Independent won’t give you the same answer twice. And I’d be asking Halt and the guy who defeated the Archonate of Reems with alpine wildflowers.

But I can ask — “The Part-Captain can attach to the standard?”

“Yes.” Halt’s voice sounds about to be reedy with age, but it is not a frail age. “Blossom and one other.” The needles click on.

I finish my coffee. I can get away with a cup a day, usually, and this makes three for today. None tomorrow.

“That provides some understanding; thank you.” Because Foremost know the permissions and validation in that scroll didn’t include any explanations.

All of the Twelve are terrible. They were, in their time and their kingdoms of wrath, very nearly gods. So far as anyone knows, each of them faced the Foremost and preferred life, and for five hundred and seventy-one years they have abided by the laws of the Commonweal. So far as anyone can tell, and we hope at least one would betray the others if it were not so.

Nothing about those laws requires them to take a job for which an uneducated stripling of moderate strong talent can be overqualified.

“Does Eustace have an official reason for a sojourn in the Creeks?” There’s a voice for inquiring after much-loved lapdogs. Not quite the right thing for five tonnes of opinionated mutton, but perhaps close enough.

Halt might almost be favouring me with an approving expression. “Eustace’s breed is meant to eat weeds. Displaying a relish for whatever the Creeks want eaten shall prove Eustace’s breeding successful.”

It’s a secret. Halt is here, and Rust is here, and from what I can tell from the foundry-master, the best sorcerer who has ever worked on artillery is here. And no-one necessarily knows they are here, because a Part-Captain and two Staff Thaumaturgists with a side job for the Food-Gesith aren’t of much notice in the City of Peace, the orders didn’t involve names. Now they are here, while they are here, however considerable their notice, all the citizens are Creeks. Passing for a Creek just to look at is tough, and if you look like a Creek, being anywhere near here without being able to explain where the previous six generations of your ancestors lived and what they did is impossible.

Magical spies have to worry about Halt.

“Will you have other duties beyond those to the Wapentake?” A regular Staff Thaumaturgist wouldn’t, and even whatever the Food-Gesith might actually want would fit in around the company.

Not even a look between them.

“Not at all.” Rust must practice holding the coffee mug to make the steam rise sinister and face-wreathing like that.

“Two days to settle in” — we’ll call it settle in, and not fuss unless they ask for live creatures or dead people — “and then on day seven, the company will require your presence to referee a game of catch.”

The needles stop clicking.

“Four tubes, four platoons. It should be instructive.”

Halt lets the needles say “Oh, that kind of catch”.

Chapter 4

Split Creek is running blood. Not the burning kind; this just spreads a thick smell of fresh blood down five kilometres of river-flats.

Everybody looks at me in this disappointed way when I say “river”; the Creeks are certain that all their major watercourses are creeks. Split Creek’s sixty metres across and has an old stone bridge spanning it on five thick piers; calling it a creek sticks in my head. The running blood isn’t supposed to be anything you’d remark upon, but I can see the smell of it getting to everybody.

Good.

Halt’s got the artillery, and Rust has the company.

Me, Twitch, the standard, Part-Captain Blossom, the Master Gunner, four files of colour-party, and a couple of quartermaster’s clerks stay up on the bluff; it’s not much, maybe ten metres, but it helps. Back of us are medics, waggons, and the Quartermaster’s party with lunch. Down on the flat, it’s five hundred metres between platoon columns and artillery tubes. Blossom’s having to work at not visibly twitching, which, for an Independent, says a lot. Blossom don’t like this.

“Do your gunners know what they’re doing?” Quiet, pleasant, isn’t-this-lovely-weather officer voice; the Line makes you practice discussing hangings in these tones to its satisfaction before it’ll provide the warrant of commission. Not the only requirement, but not optional.

That metal-bending smile sprints across Blossom’s face. “I hate answering that with ‘yes’; it’s not like they have the least idea how to make a tube.” Does the voice well; there’s this little cheerful lift on “hate” to go with the happy face.

The Master Gunner, in keeping with the requirements for the type, has a face which looks certain to wear slower than boot leather. There’s some humour in the eyes, though. “Sir will recall the commissioning exercise.”

“Ten rounds per tube, black-black-black, all in a fifty-metre target at twenty kilometres range.” No forced cheer at all. “The target wasn’t eighty guys in a block.”

“If I could get a Regular company out here for a shoving match, it would be three hundred guys in a block trying to shove a different block of three hundred guys into a river of blood.”

“You’re here, Halt’s here, Rust is here. I’ve got a company of dutiful, honest Creeks with no belief in fighting. That needs fixing before why you’re here shows up.” Because it won’t necessarily bother to kill people before it eats them can go unspoken; I want the colour party to spread an idea of readiness, not assert that I’m crazy as well as undead.

I can feel the sergeants firming up their grip on the standard, and the platoons, as platoons, going solid. Halt is standing behind tube one; Eustace has wandered down into the creek and is slurping away at the blood. Belly wool’s going to stain something dire. The artillery’s upstream and upwind of the company, and the scorched blood smell as Eustace slurps and snorfles away is all to the good for the exercise.

Blossom’s first grip on the standard is, understandably, tentative; each standard is different, and it matters. Once Blossom gets latched, tentative isn’t remotely the right word. I can keep track of the second viewpoint as Blossom swoops it out behind tube one, just like I can feel the colour party closing its eyes to not puke as half the viewpoint flings itself off the bluff and the other appears behind First Platoon without the sensation of motion.

Tube one’s gunner doesn’t look happy, but, well, tough. Young Toby doesn’t look happy, either, being a bit new to the rank, but One Platoon has set up nicely. I slide my half of the view way up and back, so I’m looking down on the whole thing, but keep listening, so I hear, with the odd over-there effect one gets from the standard stuffing things in your ears, Toby’s long “Ready!” and the “short! short! black-black-black! black! black! black! slide! slide! four, four, toss at four! target in front, zero, zero, one left, one left, TOSS!” from the gunner. “Toss” is as gentle as it gets with artillery; you can see the streak headed pretty much straight for Toby’s nose. Which is just right; try to take out the commanders first if you have time and can tell who that is.

The streak is an iron — could be anything; black just means it’s nothing magical, but it’s usually iron — bar half a metre long and ten centimetres across. The other two “blacks” in the shot code mean it has nothing directing its flight nor any magical effects when it hits. Which makes it the lightest, least dangerous thing the tubes can throw.

Toby misses it, waiting to see it before reacting, which was just plain dumb.

Less than a metre from Toby’s nose the whole projectile turns into a cone of thick orange sparks like it hit the grindstone of the gods. Toby’s face is fine, eyes are fine; the edge of the grindstone was about the level of Toby’s chin, and the sparks spray down. Still ass-flat in the middle of a grass fire with a ripply cuirass dent that spells “optimist”, which is a nice touch from Rust. There’s half of two files in the grass fire with Toby, and there’s a moment when I think I’ll have to deal with it before Toby gets collected, finds some wits, grabs the platoon focus, stomps the fire, and stands up. Bruised ribs and scorched ears and folks are going to snicker at the state of Toby’s hair for awhile, but no real harm.

“Point to the artillery.” The clerk writes this down, dutifully blank of face. The colour party are a lot less blank-faced, but they’re getting it.

Before we marched out this morning, I pointed out that the right thing to do at this range is to pick the tubes up and beat their crews to death with them. Blossom radiated horrified just long enough for my next sentence, utterly forbidding any such thing, to sink in. This is a game of catch, not an actual fight, and when it comes to an actual fight we’re going to want that artillery. From the set of Toby’s face, having a few minutes to remember that fact will do no harm.

Halt walks with a cane, and seems content to let Eustace wander today — wandering out of the river and ambling back toward Halt just now — but Halt’s back of tube two before anyone thinks to look. Two Platoon could hardly have missed the fire and the shouting, and Radish is a small guy, for a Creek, a small guy named Radish, which is not your usual Creek name. So a good bit meaner than Toby. Radish does the simple thing and rams the platoon focus into the ground on the angle of a door wedge over twice the width of the platoon front. Tube two’s gunner gives the whole thing a nice long pause and then calls the shot with hand signals while saying “black-black-black” out loud, hoping that the focus, with no resistance, will have wavered.

Wavering isn’t much like Radish; the shot howls off the focus, nearly straight up, and tumbling end over end.

“Point to the company.” The clerk blots this one; the shot comes down long, over us, but hot enough you can see the glow with bare eyes. Blossom mutters something about fires and makes a swatting motion; there’s a vast crack sound overhead and the shot, even hotter, hits flowing blood and splashes up taller than the bluff. I nod, and slide over some approval through the standard. We can burn down the flats if we want but there are fields back of us up here.

I can feel Three getting settled in a bit tighter. This is going well; no lasting damage but lots of bad smells and a real sense of risk.

Dove takes “catch” literally: the focus reaches out, hard, and the shot gets about twice the force it had arriving smacking it back less than fifty metres from the muzzle. Halt doesn’t move or speak, but the spear of burning iron coming back at tube three vanishes a hands-breadth from the berm. The crew were diving for cover or grabbing for the tube-shield, trying to put enough focus in it to do some good. Neither would have worked in time. Shaky swearing from the gunner comes back faint through the standard.

I get the small notion of a question from Blossom, and pass permission. Blossom does the dispassionate voice well. “Two points to the company.” The clerk’s still working on composure, but gets that written down neatly.

Not many living people have been in a war. You get to expecting things to happen in an orderly way, even with the Line, and it gets you killed.

Don’t think orderly expectations will do for Part-Captain Blossom.

Hector gets clever with four; it feels like going for Dove’s trick, only the neat, quiet version with the shot caught hanging in the air. Which misses, three or four times, with increasing force; five or six pieces of shot spray out in a witch’s broom of flaming iron off the original shot track. Dove gets both chunks that would have sliced into Three, straight up, and Blossom does the slapping trick again, close sullen thunder. Hector’s cuirass gets “Braver than you” hammered into it, something Hector may not notice in the midst of a larger grass fire than Toby got.

There are a couple of snickers from the colour party behind me; no one is inclined to argue with Rust’s judgment of Hector.

“Two for the artillery.” The Master Gunner and Twitch are both nodding, so Blossom subsides. Probably worried I don’t want anybody to win this, when in truth I’d be delighted if the company got its collective ass kicked. It will make them think. Hector didn’t think about a brave try that would have distributed company casualties out of Four Platoon.

The Master Gunner and Twitch step closer to the edge of the bluff, into full view. The coin flip is ornate, and then Twitch points at the Company, and pushes a bit through the standard. Where we had the platoons One-Two-Three-Four out from the bluff, we get Four-Two-Three-One by some prompt and pretty marching. It’s an order arrived at with little slips of card and a hat last night, and Twitch has lots more.

Eustace stops well back of the artillery line, lies down, and starts chewing away on an eel-tree. Halt’s back up in the howdah, knitting away with apparent total unconcern for either the game of catch or the shrieking as Eustace toasts the fangy parts of the tree, which are trying to eat back. Various bits of notice of this slide through the standard while the platoons switch places, and there’s a thread of general approval coming back. Eustace’s kind will be welcome in the Creeks forever if they eat eel-tree.

Four hours later, the score is one hundred twenty-three, artillery, seventy-eight, company, Dove’s cuirass is the only sergeant’s undented, and the flats are looking worse for wear. Three twisted ankles, a case of the shakes, and one fainting town-dweller who wouldn’t drink in case of having to piss. Can’t blame anyone for the shakes — tough to make your spine believe the wall of fire didn’t get you when it goes away close enough to feel the heat on your eyelids — but I’ll have Twitch give the Word about drinking water.

The artillery crews are intact, but sagging. It’s been two files per tube doing the throwing, against nine files per platoon. The gunners were rotating the spares through as whole files, which left the other three files on each tube doing tube-shield work or filling and re-digging the berms when the tubes moved. Neither Part-Captain nor Master Gunner felt making the crews move stacked short shot appropriate to a first game of catch. The crews are not so good at digging or the tube-shields, which is no surprise; doctrine says you have a whole heavy battalion covering your battery, hopefully your artillery battalion, if you’re taking return fire.

Lots of pen-scratching as the company clerk completes a fair copy. Neater columns, full notes, and no blots.

“Those are strong platoons”, Blossom says, nearly silent. Whispers carry, speaking without force does not.

I nod. It’s one of the frustrations. Nothing the company regularly does taxes the individual platoons, motivation to more fully cohere the company is lacking in regular work.

“Three’s sergeant is unusually talented.” Blossom’s more quiet saying this.

“So is One’s.” A reason to promote Toby, despite youth. Talent for the Power matters to ease of acquiring skill with any focus, it’s not merely a substantial individual contribution.

“Three’s moreso than One’s”, Blossom says, voice strangely sorcerous while the Part-Captain’s face stays entirely the battery-commander’s, watching the caissons rumble up to the waiting artillery tubes.

The artillery hitches up; they get back up the road to the bluff-top and lunch first, having won. The company doesn’t feel over-grumbly, coming after, and the marching is still smart. I’ll make something of them yet.

Chapter 5

Marching back into town gets us some looks.

The artillery going first is just odd; five tonnes of sheep with blood drying in its underwool and eel-tree ichor splattered all over the rest of it is unexpected.

Rust has found a couple of horse-favouring town kids happy to earn some money by making much of the horse-ghost’s feeding and grooming. It’s essential to the ghost to have contact with some technical variety of innocence Rust is unable to provide. A delegation of matrons resulted; Blossom was able to reassure them with impeccable tact that the definition of innocence was on the order of “never summoned a demon”. Since good Creeks don’t do any such thing, and even more do not mark themselves as suitable for consumption should a demon arrive, all was well.

Halt’s comprehensive definition — never consumed a human soul, never slaked wrath by wide killing, and, oh yes, never coerced a bound demon into a shape empty of all but pain — was not provided to the matrons. Even more fortunately, Halt’s oddly wistful expression was not observed by any townsfolk at all.

The true list is longer, and gets into strange technical questions of removal of the will and self; it’s quite all right, apparently, to send someone quietly to sleep in the middle of attacking you. Overriding the will in lesser actual degree to make them more willing to obey is not.

Eustace has no such requirements; Halt’s wave sent Eustace into an inadequately fenced paddock shining clean by a mechanism no more apparently strenuous than the waving hand.

It’s only two days in ten for drill. So the sergeants and their dents are dismissed with their platoons, and the Quartermaster’s clerks make a point of letting the public houses know the company is being dismissed thirsty, and I get to figure out how to use the next four days.

Which is why the Captain’s House has a meeting room.

“Part-Captain; how is your battery for ammunition?”

“Expended fifty shot per tube, all short black-black-black. Full caissons have an even hundred per tube of that. Resupply is slow” — the Creeks have no canal or Hard Road connection to the rest of the Commonweal, there’s an inescapable slow haul with waggons for a hundred-odd straight-line kilometres and four days of decent but very twisty road over the Folded Hills, that were towering mountains once and are still tall enough for mountains now — “but it’s just iron. Get me the iron and we’ll make shot.”

Of course they will. Not quite straightening nails, but close enough.

“Is there any of your ammunition you could not make?”

It’s a small thing, but the Master Gunner looks alarmed. Blossom actually smiles, not the grin. “I can make all of it; I shouldn’t make the hot reds here. It’d be messy if I slipped.”

Blossom’s purely thoughtful.

“The materials for some of the red-red-reds aren’t local; there might be substitutions.”

“The Standard-Captain understands that any substitution is a complex question in both fabrication and effectiveness.” The Master-Gunner, excruciatingly formal. Halt is smirking. And, yes, Halt can doubtless substitute frogs where it says “turtle feathers”, but still. Hank’s right. We don’t want unpredictable shot, and we entirely don’t want to damage Blossom, tubes, or gunners.

“The Creeks don’t mine much iron.” Tin, historically, some copper, coal, but all the local iron comes out of small bog deposits. The smithing collectives with those in their keeping won’t be keen to sell the Line tonnes of the stuff. “How much iron to replace all your black-base shot?”

Blossom tips the question to the Master Gunner.

“Five tonnes finished per tube per caisson; we’ve got three caissons per tube. Sixty tonnes finished all told.”

“And one caisson of the scary stuff.” Blossom’s brief grin flits past. You can tell what part of the job Blossom really likes.

Twitch’s head shakes. “I doubt a hundred tonnes of new iron comes into the Creeks in a year, even if we count hobnailed boots.” All of it very much wanted by someone, and not available to be turned into long shot.

“You do have a river of blood.” Rust’s tones can be good and plain and honest, too. Can be.

Blossom’s eyes light up. “Half a gram per litre, two tonnes of blood per kilo, twelve thousand tonnes of blood, that’s only a third of a kilometre out of the middle of the river. And it’s right there.”

Twitch twitches, hard and sudden. Good Creeks don’t think about Split Creek much, and certainly not as an iron mine. “It’ll be venom and fire before it’s blood again.”

“When’s it blood next?”

The Quartermaster pulls out the astrological table that predicts Split Creek’s doings. “Next third day. But that’s the flaming kind. Next plain blood is fifth day, décade after next.” Chuckles’ tone has it that we’ll all be buried by then, which is why Chuckles.

“Flaming? What colour?” Halt and Rust are paying extra attention, too. Quietly.

“Like snot when you’re just catching a cold. Kinda greenish.”

Thank you, Chuckles.

“You have a river of dragon’s blood?” Blossom takes a careful breath, pauses, speaks very carefully like someone who believes what they’re saying, who isn’t trying to call anyone crazy. “Actual, thaumaturgically active, stays on fire if you take it out of the river, dragon’s blood?”

“It keeps burning in a bucket”, Twitch says. “Better be a glass bucket.” Which is why the stuff doesn’t get used for outdoor lighting; too easy to break the bucket and then things get exciting. Which is the explanation for certain facts concerning the pathway paving in the back garden of the Captain’s House.

“I have five days to get ready to mine dragon’s blood for iron to make into short shot…” Blossom trails off. There’s this three-beat pause while the pleasant young officer — Blossom looks maybe nineteen — act falters a little, and you can see the sorcerer much more clearly.

“Sir! Request permission to detach the battery for a logistical exercise!”

“I want the tubes, two files per tube, and at least three of the gunners kept well away from Split Creek.”

“It needs eighteen files to work.” No sir, but that’s fine. Blossom’s really asking.

Halt’s snort could stop rather more than this conversation. “Only if you’re all newfangled about it. I’ll make you some glass jars, Blossom dear, and” — the blunt end of a knitting needle jabs at Rust — “will handle the lift.”

Blossom nods, slowly. Rust looks sardonic.

“And you don’t need to bother with tidying up, the leftovers are going to be shy some iron and some vitriol” — and one or two other things, if Rust’s expression is anything to go by — “and there’s no reason not to put that right back in the river.”

Blossom blinks, blinks again, gaze tipping down from the ceiling, and says “Five files, for two days. No requirement to detach the battery.”

“Very well. Set up and do this.”

“How do we get the iron back from the creek?” Twitch would never come out and say that the Part-Captain, might, possibly, get a little excited and make a wee bit more iron than sixty tonnes.

“One waggon-load at a time?” Blossom knows Twitch has a reason for asking, but clearly no idea what it is.

Chuckles provides that. “No drayage; waggons for the battalion we ain’t, but no drayage.”

“How much copper do you mine here?” Sorcerer again.

Twitch shrugs, Chuckles grabs the almanac. “Two, three hundred tonnes a year.” Copper pots last pretty well, but not forever. Same with sheet-copper roofs. Not all there to melt down and make new.

“The main mine’s pretty big and really old.” Chuckles’ best attempt at a suggestive optimistic tone may explain why Chuckles does without much social life. Though I know Chuckles’d do worse than try to sound cheerful to get some regular drayage.

“The Line has gleaning rights on tailings.” There’s enough tailings that several of the hills support outright forest. A very old mine. So we could pull tonnes of copper out of just the bare tailings without setting any forest on fire. Maybe a couple hundred tonnes, once we get the hang of it.

“How many bronze bulls can you use?” This is very nearly pure Part-Captain. Twitch and Chuckles both get a little straighter, and Halt looks, ever so faintly, approving.

“No drovers. Territorial Line, drovers get hired.” Chuckles’ best “what do you expect? Less pain?” tone doesn’t get used often.

“So we’re nailed to Westcreek Town?” A bit of appalled leaks into Blossom’s tone.

“Yes, we are. I want that fixed.”

Even Halt looks like someone paying attention; maybe that came out a bit strong.

“Either the Line or Parliament thinks something is going to happen here.

“I don’t know, maybe nobody knows, if it’s something coming out of the eastern waste, out of the swamps to the southeast, or if they want us ready to hold the west edge when it turns out what the Eighth fought a few years back was just a probing attack and the real trouble comes out of the Paingyre.

“And, yeah, nothing is certain. So we can act like there’s a real risk, and be ready, and maybe we’ll look like idiots or maybe we’ll win, or we can get crushed because we were unprepared.

“Idiots is a good outcome; it means that there wasn’t really a threat. Winning is an outcome; we might manage to do it while there’s still peace behind us. The only good thing about getting crushed is we probably won’t see how everybody very slowly does not die.”

One or two deep breaths, and Twitch manages to say “Captain, we’re one short company.”

The look Blossom gives Twitch, I’m surprised nothing nearby catches fire.

Much to everyone’s surprise, Rust speaks up.

“At the end of the march that made the Hard Road, Sergeant-Major, there were perhaps one hundred ninety of the Foremost still active. I assure you they were effective in a way ‘one short company’ would not imply.”

Twitch looks croggled, Halt looks amused, and Chuckles like someone whose drawers contain ants undertaking renovations. The social convention that Independents are normal people with an unusual job works against your composure sometimes.

“We might do real well, yeah. But if the Captain’s right, where’s the regular battalion? Fire, where’s the brigade being moved up to Headwaters, just in case?”

Halt is looking at me almost gently; Rust produces, rather than a pitcher of table cream, a silver flask, and waves it interrogatively. I manage to wave “not now” back, and go on to answer Twitch. A pity the sergeants aren’t here for this. I’ll probably have to say it again.

“When the Iron Bridge over the Dread River collapsed and the Bad Old Days came north out of the Paingyre, the Third Heavy of the Eighth had the guard, and formed up to stop it.” It has another name, above the escarpment and before the Lily Swamps, but after you get to where you can feel the Paingyre, even over the horizon, it’s the Dread River.

“Sixty-two days later, the Second, Twelfth, and Sixteenth brigades got to where the Eighth as a whole had been pushed back and started shoving the incursion south again. When the brigade focus dropped, there were eleven living.”

The Master Gunner looks a good deal less shocked than Twitch does; better rumours. Blossom didn’t know the precise numbers. Rust and Halt look like they know more, but they would.

“They beat a brigade?” Twitch doesn’t believe it.

“No. We held them in that narrow stretch, between the Slow Hills and the Broad Swamps, about ten kilometres downstream of Wending, and they did a lot of dying. They just would not stop; it was like a dam breaking when whatever warding was on the bridge dropped into the water. Nearly all our dead were exhaustion. We spent the last thirty-odd days in continuous focus.”

Meaning the brigade made a conscious collective decision to die, rather than run or be bypassed. I can see that flowing over Twitch and the Master Gunner, and, rather differently, over Blossom, who’d have lasted, lasted while the artillery threw rocks and the dying crews bound to the iron.

“You were there?” Twitch isn’t twitching at all. Pity what it takes to stop the infernal tapping.

“Captain in command of the Second Company of the Third Heavy of the Eighth on the day the bridge went down.” If I get a tombstone, that’s going to be the first thing on it.

“So you believe in the Bad Old Days.” Rust’s smile is honest, I’ll say that for it.

All I can do for reply is nod.

“The standards of the Eighth Brigade are currently in retirement; there’s still a couple hundred lives bound to each of them, and the signa of the Brigade isn’t calm. So when I was made a Standard-Captain, I was sent here, because it’s very quiet in the Creeks.”

That gets a smile out of Twitch, and almost one out of Chuckles.

“The point is that where the Line used to garrison in the south with battalions, they’re using full brigades. Between the Iron Bridge creatures and the concern about Reems, there isn’t anything substantial to send. Which tells me no one knows for sure there’s going to be a problem here.”

Or that if they have to lose somewhere, the Creeks will hurt the least.

“It might tell me some cynical general figured that whatever it might be, they’d get a report back from at least one of Halt or Rust, or there wasn’t much point in worrying because we’d never stop it anyway.”

Halt stops knitting to give me this look.

“Nothing on feet gets over the Folded Hills” — the road goes over at the narrowest point, and that’s a hundred-twenty kilometres as a straight line on the map, a mess of thickly-treed green mountains and ridgeland along the west-south-west edge of the Creeks — “very fast, and there are any number of places where any decent Independent could close the road. I will bet you anything you like that there’s four or so Independents with geological interests coincidentally present along that road this summer. So the Commonweal as a whole is less threatened by what happens to the Creeks than the Creeks are by what happens to the Commonweal.” Which is the same as saying we’re a tripwire at best if there’s bad trouble. Everyone in the room is smart enough or experienced enough to hear it that way.

“You always been this cheerful, sir?”

“You want cheerful, Master Gunner, just think — either nothing happens, we’re all dead, or it gets written up and studied. Taught to young officers for as long as the Commonweal endures.”

That gets me an appropriately grim smile, and the mood shifting a bit.

“Part-Captain — you asked about copper because you can make bronze bulls as well as shot?”

“All the battery drayage. It’s experimental, same as the tubes.”

I need to ask about that, but not now. You’d think the assignment orders would be more specific about such things.

“And you’d need, besides copper?”

Blossom shrugs. “A bit of glass, a bit of iron, something to do engraving with, and an ox per. Preferably a nice steady old one.”

“Do you really need the ox?” Twitch asks, wincing in the knowledge that it’ll be the Creek Sergeant-Major who will have to explain this.

“Bunny rabbits work badly.” Blossom’s voice is dry.

“You cast the thing, and then you put the oxness in it so it moves; the meat ox drops dead when you do it, but anybody who worked with that ox’ll recognise it in the bronze one. It’s not absolutely required; you can get an animating principle elsewhere or you can spread one ox-worth of oxness across more than one construct but it’s better if it’s one ox per construct.”

“Twitch, you can’t tell me we can’t find a bunch of ox-drovers who wouldn’t really mind getting a team of bronze bulls from the Line and keeping the beef, just for showing up when the Captain calls and hauling supplies.”

“Put like that, sir, no, no I can’t.” Both of Twitch’s feet are trying to tap toes. Not looking forward to this. Creeks prefer magical doings to stay politely invisible. Not entirely against such doings, the Creeks as a people and an area use a lot of focus-tools, but that doesn’t count, socially. This would, will.

“Very well. Staff Thaumaturgists to assist the Part-Captain in obtaining iron for re-munitioning as soon as Split Creek co-operates by running blood. Part-Captain, keep the shot shop well separate from whatever casting pits you set up for the bronze bulls. We want the bulls to be public and the shot not.”

“Quartermaster, get a list from the Master Gunner of everything they’re going to need for the shot shop that isn’t iron. Get it, and get a roof over it. Usual extra pay terms for available members of the company. Use the space where Barracks Five used to be for stacking. Figure out where we can put the actual shop.” Certainly not in Westcreek Town.

“Sergeant-Major, put out the Word with respect to drinking water under field conditions. Let it be known that next drill day, the company assembled shall be engaged in public works.”

There. That’s a start.

Chapter 6

Blossom’s iron-mining was spectacular. There was a ground-shaking roar and a pillar of fire high enough and bright enough to give everyone in Westcreek Town a faint green second shadow for most of the day.

Gleaning copper from mine tailings was much less spectacular to do; I’m told it was less loud and more ominous to watch, a dark cloud filled with an irregular throb and a fitful dull carmine glow.

A thirty-five kilometre hastened-march with the whole company, and thirty-five kilometres hastened-march back, was no problem, but standing on the smoking hot ground gleaning copper means Chuckles is placing a lot of orders for boots. Since there’s a current glut of ox-hide, this is working out well. Nobody got really bad blisters — nothing that wore through and bled — and Rust has become, let’s say respected, by providing a salve Rust will formally attest is derived by non-magical means from the roots of garlic mustard. It works implausibly well; weeping skin to stable callus in six hours or so, and after the first spike of pain there’s only a warm feeling. Not fainting or screaming during that first spike has become a mark of distinction within the company. Even Hector’s eyes watered, so they can’t use that.

The bronze bulls are going well; Blossom’s new ritual is both simpler and faster than the old one, where you had to cast articulated parts. There was a bit of reassurance required over the casting in lateral halves, subsequently welded together. The general Creeks view is that the fewer pieces, the more sturdy, and why start with more than one? Inviting the most concerned to fail to find the weld line then pointing out that a solid bronze version would be much, much heavier, worked. Halt stepped in and saved things when an awareness that the ritual was new got around, by pointing out that Blossom had obviously been taught the ritual at the main Line foundry, and really, the Regular Line wouldn’t be using it if it didn’t work at least as well as the old way, now would they?

I can’t possibly describe Halt’s voice using every one of at least a thousand years of practice at being indirect with social cues, or Blossom’s expression on realising what was going on and why success required that Blossom had to smile.

We almost didn’t get Blossom because it was taking so long for another Independent, any other Independent, to learn this specific ritual. Blossom did every single one of the hundred-fifty-odd bronze bulls pulling the experimental battery around, and all four tubes. Nobody else has managed to make one of those; they’re mostly cobalt instead of iron, and the engraved runes are silver and samarium instead of copper and gold and whatever’s in the black enamel.

Cobalt’s dearer than iron by some distance and samarium is rare: it’s not a full six-tube battery because there wasn’t enough samarium for the next two tubes. Blossom remains peeved about the shortage.

The Foundry-Master really wants Blossom back, not because of the expense or the cold blue shine of the new tubes, but because the usual iron artillery tube, for the last couple hundred-odd years since some Independent figured out how to shove momentum into shot directly instead of using a spring, is a five-layer thing. Blossom’s expensive alternative has nine, and only so few as nine because after building two twelves and a ten they discovered that the momentum transfer mechanism breaks down past nine. Blossom knows why, and what to do about it, but had to melt all three of those first experiments back down to get four nines.

In the meantime, the strength of the momentum transfer is a function of the square of the number of layers. Those four experimental nine-layer tubes are better, in terms of throw, than two full regular batteries of fives.

Someone is being sneaky. It will sound very good indeed if there is an incursion and a territorial short company and an experimental half-battery sent off to test a new bronze bull enchantment stomps it. Things like that do wonders for the Line’s myth of invincibility.

I figure the first step in maintaining that oh-so-cherished myth is not to lose.

The first step in not losing is being able to move, and between the Part-Captain and the copper mine, we’re getting there.

The step after that is force. There’s always a little silver in a copper mine, and the runes don’t need much. Cobalt we could, in principle, order, but not samarium. The one known source is out of anything to send until they mine and refine more, and they do that in kilo lots. Which is why Rust is off prospecting. Rust has heard of samarium, not a given with old Independents, and has admiring things to say about Blossom’s enchantment design, which means Rust really wants to try it.

Rust swore, and Halt agreed, that Halt can summon Rust back in not more than a day. I suppose there are advantages to having a horse that’s already dead. From the Captain’s perspective, there’s advantage in having Rust wandering through the eastern waste. Ought to notice any other wanderers.

The rules for Independents have a lot to do with “as directed” and “noncombatants”. The Line doesn’t like using Independents as anything but support, and preferably distant support, doing things like making artillery and sorting out the logistics. Front-line Independents spend their time figuring out what that thing the battalion just squashed was, and if there are likely to be more.

Which is why I gave Rust written orders — 

Prospect for materials required for artillery tube fabrication. If you encounter an incursion, employ the least sufficient means necessary to return with useful warning to Westcreek Town. If you cannot return, do something certain to be noticed.

Rust gives me this look, looking up from the sheet of paper. Hands it to Halt, and Halt gives me a different one. Twitch is looking blank; Twitch’d really rather be somewhere else.

“That’s it?”

“Be back by the end of the second décade of Thermidor.”

Rust sketches a gesture that might have heard of a salute toward the plain and honest hat brim, and goes out.

Halt leans, both hands on the stick handle, nods once, and goes out, too. Halt went down to Split Creek for the iron mining with Eustace carrying two enormous glass jars that must have weighed a tonne each, empty. Aside from making it obvious that Eustace is a good deal stronger than a sheep that size ought to be, this let everybody in Westcreek Town hope that Halt knows how to make glass by some means that doesn’t involve tonnes and tonnes of charcoal. Halt’s turned that interest into a glass factory, turning out milk pitchers, mixing bowls, and canning jars in great profusion. It’s been giving the harsh-with-a-kind-heart grandma act a real workout, training Creeks with a decent slice of talent into glassmakers.

It’s also made canning jars less of an heirloom, and means we’re going to have more stored food available. That might be why the Binding of the Standards approves. Or it might just be that the Foremost were a radical bunch.

“What’s up, Sergeant-Major?” Twitch is twitching so much none of the individual twitches are managing to turn into anything other than a absence of holding still.

“Can you see yourself, sir?”

“Not without a mirror. Have I got dinner on my face?”

“You know how the standard shows” and Twitch’s chin lifts toward where Halt just went out.

I nod. Our immensely helpful Staff Thaumaturgists go right on looking like a visit from the end of the world if you see them through the standard.

“You’ve started looking a bit different yourself, sir.”

Which was the only thing I could get out of Twitch on the subject, and having managed to say that, Twitch got only regularly twitchy, so it can’t have been too bad. I figure it’s just the standard leaning out to hold me up a bit when I’m giving orders to our ancient terrors. One Standard-Captain wouldn’t be much, but the whole Line is back there and it might figure they need reminding.

Gleaning the mine tailings for copper might have done some good; we’ve done a couple of road-widenings and cleared one landslide in the approved Regular Line way, uphill into the pile. It works, so long as the focus holds solid. If it don’t, you get squashed.

Could wish to tell if the company’s getting to trust me or if it’s just a belief that I’m dangerously crazy.

Chapter 7

The eighth day of the second décade of Thermidor tries its best to do what is expected.

It’s hot; summer humid-hot that makes you very glad you’re up on a meadow with a bit of breeze off the hills, the snowy Northern Hills, rather than in some chunk of creekside land that might as well be swamp for humidity. The bronze bulls are too hot to touch with your bare hands, and just as completely desirous of having their faces scritched as the oxness in them ever was in life. Most of them are getting shiny patches between the eyes as the drovers resort to wire brushes; fingers don’t really get through.

Our Independent Part-Captain has explained three or four times now to various groups of worried drovers that the cud-chewing motion doesn’t mean the bronze bull wants to eat, or is hungry; eating isn’t a source of contentment to a cow. Cud-chewing, being certain to have eaten enough today, is, and that’s what was kept in the enchantment. It doesn’t do to have bronze bulls that aren’t content with their lot.

Blossom has absolutely no idea why this doesn’t reassure anybody.

Part-Captain Blossom’s watching the four gunners take turns going through push-hands with Twitch, while the battery as a whole does the full-body breathing exercises meant to improve focus. The four gunners are a varied lot, more or less the just run of the Commonweal, which means one is shorter than me, one is about my height, one’s a bit taller, and one’s a whole decimetre taller than I am. Even the shorter one is heavier.

Twitch is a typical Creek, which means two decimeters taller than the tall gunner and weighing, in armour, twice what I do in my socks. Creeks tend strong, too; bending horseshoes straight with your bare hands isn’t a party trick in the Creeks because it’s something you’re embarrassed if you can’t do, not proud if you can. And Twitch is, past the twitches and fits of Creek-ness, a fine Sergeant-Major and was a fine Sergeant in the Fourteenth before being sent on a territorial transfer as a chance to get less twitchy after the Fifth Company of the Second Heavy of the Fourteenth had a spectacularly bad day. So Twitch’s personal focus is really solid, and it’s not like any of the gunners could hope for a physical lift.

Part-Captain Blossom figures twenty metres is far enough away to smile, watching the gunners work very hard to generate enough focus to keep their balance. All four tubes are up to ten long shot in thirty seconds, once and even twice. The Part-Captain is trying for perfect readiness marks, doing that ten times over at two minute intervals. Trying hasn’t killed any of the battery yet, and no one has gone so far as to point out to the Part-Captain that the readiness standards apply to fives, not nines. The gunners are a bunch of volunteers, and they want the bragging rights if they can manage more than twice the throw involved in regular perfect readiness marks.

The battery are using the same sand-pit Halt’s glass factory digs out of as a backstop, and sifting the shot back out again. Since the sand needs to be sifted for the glass anyway, it’s making them friends. Sometimes more than friends; the usual social risk when you park a Regular Line unit in garrison anywhere. So far, only a couple of informal wrestling matches and no formal complaints.

All of that, the Part-Captain has handled very well. I was expecting the shot-making to go well; I wasn’t expecting an outright factory, full-time local workers, or series production black-red-black and black-red-red shot, nor for Blossom to start making sintered front caps so the shot can be thrown as hard as the nine-layer tubes can push without catching fire in the air. As Blossom pointed out, very formally, the Line hasn’t had nine-layer artillery before, and the shot-making will have to catch up. It usually seems like Blossom’s had all of this figured out for months and is relieved to get it built to clear the thinking room for the next thing.

It’s a contrast. The Part-Captain has single-handedly advanced artillery in the Commonweal some immense amount, and hasn’t figured out why there’s been so much trouble getting Creeks to really listen. Blossom’s about concluded that women in authority aren’t some sort of cultural problem — Dove is obeyed, with good will and forethought, and the Creeks are not like some of the odd corners of the Commonweal where people try to cling, despite the law, to odd old customs about work or property. I thought what happened when we tried a mixed-focus exercises day with the battery and company and the fit, determined gunners got squashed by sheer mass of part-timers might provide a hint, but I suppose that’s not something Blossom’s taken personally.

Even the amount of oddly respectful big-sister advice Dove seems compelled to give doesn’t provide the necessary clue.

Blossom’s maybe eighteen decimeters, and eighty kilos. Has a typical-of-the-Creeks substantial, muscular build, and, for completely different reasons, tends strong. Since the average Creek woman is a decimeter taller and at least ten kilos heavier, and Blossom only really looks as old as nineteen when consciously presenting the serious officer face, Blossom looks, to pretty much every adult Creek, like their kid sister.

Nobody in the Creeks has any belief, if they’ve even heard the facts, that Blossom looks so young in consequence of suceeding at a ritual that kills four of five who try it. Not that many of those who become Independents even seriously consider trying it, reputed material, organic perpetual youth, along with extra strength and toughness notwithstanding.

By actual count of years, Blossom’s over eighty; being thought of as anybody’s kid sister doesn’t occur naturally. Junior, yes; I think rocks feel junior around Halt, never mind young Independents.

“The Part-Captain is pleased with the status of the battery?”

“It’ll do for now.” Blossom sounds pleased. “We should drill more with the Company; maybe try catch with a platoon screening a tube and long shot.”

“Messy if you miss.” Halt’s tone is not more concerned than an observation that it’s warm today would be.

“Set up a kinetic dump ahead of time and don’t tell anybody it’s there. If I can do it, you can do it and go right on knitting.”

That gets Blossom an over-the-spectacles look from Halt, but Halt does indeed go right on knitting. Goes on talking, too, which is unusual.

“You want effective practice, Blossom dear, you should be trying to hit the whole company on the march. From a good long ways back, so there’s some surprise.”

Long shot kicked out of a nine-layer artillery tube moves fast enough the air burns. You can see it fine. Doing something about it is tougher, in the little time you’ve got. So further back helps, and Halt’s right that the startle’s something to work on.

“Soon as I think the company will hold, we try that.” I admit I don’t sound very happy saying this.

Blossom looks just as cheery as before, but it’s serious-discussion low-emotional-temperature cheery. “Why wouldn’t the company hold?”

“Half of them think the Captain’s dead, Blossom dear, and the other half think demonic.”

Blossom looks so totally flummoxed for a moment I hope someone’s watching. We can pick one of the rumoured explanations and make a drill out of it, on the theory that you should always train for what you’re afraid of.

“The mothers mostly go for dead, and the lovers go mostly for demonic. Couldn’t tell you why.” There’s a glint in Halt’s eye that suggests there might well be a theory.

Not staying flummoxed is an excellent trait in a young officer. I have to suppose that it’s also a necessary survival trait in Independents, because Blossom’s good at it.

“How long has it been since the Creeks had a Standard-Captain assigned?” That’s quick; I was expecting a remark about the impossibility of the standard accepting a demon.

“One hundred and eighteen years.” I’ve been here less than two, and it was close to a year before I figured out what the problem was.

“Totally out of living memory, too, dear, there have been six Independents come into the whole of the Creeks in that time, and none of them have stayed.” Halt sounds amused by this.

Blossom is clearly trying to find something tactful to say about what I look like when Blossom’s head comes up, nostrils flaring, and there’s much more sorcerer than officer. Halt looks approving.

It doesn’t take much to borrow a sentry’s eyes; they’re getting better about staying lightly attached even when they’re nearly ritual sentries around a conditioning exercise. There’s a single horseman coming along the road, not raising as much dust as you’d expect and not moving anything like as slowly as the steady lope of the horse would imply.

“Rust.”

I am getting to dread Halt’s benevolent smiles.

The horse doesn’t look tired; it never does. But it’s got enough dust on it for three days’ ride. Rust, too, who gets a moment to dismount and wind the face-scarf off, dust and breath-mud cascading. Twitch and the gunners head straight over; they would have anyway, but I let them know I want them to hear this. I can hear the Master Gunner telling the sentries to look outward with some emphasis, then Hank’s settled acknowledgement of remaining officer of the day.

“Is there a watch kept on the dry Westcreek?” Rust is dry of voice, surprising so for an Independent, and sketches a sort of this-would-be-a-bow-if-I-could-bend motion at Halt, taking the lemonade glass Halt passes. Something like Rust’s flask, the glass doesn’t seem to get empty.

It’s Twitch’s turn to look flummoxed. “Not much point; it’s not natural dry, it’s made dry. Anybody goes down into it’s got maybe five minutes before they’re fatally mummified.”

Rust nods. “These have some considerable sorcerous protection against that effect.”

“Where are they?” Westcreek is the dry bed of what would be a navigable river. Rust wears too much dust to gauge, the dry Westcreek’s not that far away.

“They’re lost.” Rust looks very oddly chagrined, saying this. “From Reems, and most extremely lost until I should permit them to be otherwise.” Rust hands Halt a single small five-mark gold coin, and Halt takes it while not saying “I told you you so” with such thoroughness that the small crawling things in the grass must hear it. “It would appear that the Archonate did not take the intended message from our last meeting.”

Two of the gunners look like they’d like to roll their eyes at that. The other two know enough about Rust to be with Twitch, looking worried. Twitch has been reading some extra history lately, and if you put Rust up against a substantial kingdom the historical good odds aren’t with the kingdom.

Not a drill day.

“Rust, where are they being lost?”

Two sweeps of Rust’s hands, muttering darkly, and there’s a falling-from-heaven sort of map, contours and all, and if you squint, and get the standard to help, it’s got little guys in Archonate armour being very, very lost up and down the dust of the dry bed of Westcreek.

“Sergeant-Major! Return to Westcreek town; sound the alarm, fall in the company in full field kit. March to — ” I have no idea what the road junction is called, so I point “ — by the quickest route. Expect messengers. Presume you may be attacked.” That’s going to take all of what’s left of today and a good chunk of tomorrow. “Get them there ready to fight.”

“Part-Captain! Consolidate your battery, proceed with the company. You’re in command until I rejoin at — ” pointing again “ — full field camp; assume Rust missed the plentiful heavy infantry and some nasty fire-priests the guys in the creek are scouting for.” Rust doesn’t even ruffle. I don’t think Rust missed them, either. Still not how you plan. The standard lets me slide avoid magical observation to Blossom without having to say it out loud. Blossom nods, thinking look solidly in place.

Magic can’t hide itself but it lies well enough.

“Rust; how long have these guys got before they drop?”

It’s an ornate shrug. “They’ll be pretty dry by the end of tomorrow.”

“Can you make them selectively less lost? So we can be there waiting when they emerge?”

Rust nods.

“All right. You’re already exposed, so we’re going to use you and keep Halt back if we can. Plan is to make these guys vanish, but we need to know what they think they’re doing, so we can’t just leave them lost until the dry gets them.”

“Colour party, Halt, we’re going to Headwaters to sound the general alarm. I’m going so the Gerefan can’t commit paperwork.”

That gets me a snort out of Twitch, but it’s all too true.

Chapter 8

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.

Chapter 9

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.

Chapter 10

I wind up leaving the logistics operation — getting supplies piled up at the roadhead, from as close as we can get them by barge — to a Creek with no previous connection to the Line who goes by the unfortunate appellation of “Tankard”. Somewhere well over twenty-one decimetres and looks like someone who can do the horseshoe trick with any two toes. None of the drovers have a problem taking Tank’s orders, honest, in the standard’s view, and from a regular trade that involves growing roses. Not much temptation to turn hardtack into compost. Chuckles is stuck back in Westcreek town, making sure there’s stuff showing up for this guy to manage.

Last thing I hear marching out is an arriving drover shouting “Hey, Tank!” in what are at least cheerful tones.

It takes a kilometre or so to get everything settled down; One and Three Platoons are leading, Two and Four are trailing, in between Blossom has tubes one and three on the right, the Master Gunner has two and four on the left, and there’s a clump of stores waggons between the tubes in the column. It’s not especially fast, it’s not especially good if we get jumped, but we can get the whole thing in a clump and move no matter what the terrain does to us, and we’ll eat OK for twelve days. As a movement, it’s a lot more like someone trying to move resupply than meet an invasion. Give me a regular battalion and I’ll follow doctrine.

There’s a general undercurrent of concern; most of the company know some guys from Reems got grabbed, and that’s about it. Blossom’s battery doesn’t generally even know that much. We’ve still got close to six hours of light, and we’re going to use them.

The march settles down well enough. I have to remind Dove that the new road needs to be cold before feet hit it, in preference to the lasting roadbed Dove just reflexively wants to put in, but that’s nothing much for an extemporised road march in haste. Rust’s right up front, between One and Three; can’t latch to the standard, can’t participate in the focus, can talk to it, and listen well enough. Same with Halt. It’s like a smell of smoke and having spiders on your eyelids, respectively.

Blossom’s battery isn’t officially a unit; they don’t have a battery banner, and they don’t have even a theoretical artillery battalion standard of their own. So the crews are latching to the tubes, and those are latching to Blossom, and Blossom’s latching to the standard. That shouldn’t work, but I’m giving up on “shouldn’t” this summer. The individual artillery teams can latch directly to the standard if they want to, we tested that, they’re just happier treating their commander idolatrously.

The drovers have no real idea what’s going on; there’s a blur going past and the world has filled up with the sound of marching boots and steel tires. Blossom’s new-model bronze-bull enchantment produces bronze bulls that recognise the standard much better than the usual mix of a hundred years or so of bronze bull makes and models you usually get, and they’re perfectly happy with the new road.

If Eustace is happy, there are jets of lavender fire in my peripheral vision that argue otherwise. Halt seems fine, though, and Blossom’s nearly gleeful. Not the sort of thing you get to practice much right in the middle of the Commonweal. People get mad when you run a road through their garden pavilions.

If there are any garden pavilions up in the Northern Hills, hopefully Rust will manage to direct us around them.

The thing Blossom insists is a horse has sparks coming up a metre high from where its cloven hooves hit the road. Whatever it is, it thinks this pace isn’t worth hitting a trot.

Listen up.

There’s this little ripple, not a bad one, but let’s not have anyone getting unfocused. Having a file come unstuck marching like this isn’t good.

Just keep marching. Your feet and your ears are far apart for a reason. Almost a chuckle back. So far, it’s a nice day, we haven’t hit anything tougher than a bit of dolostone sticking out of the sparse dirt, Toby’s stopped worrying about what One Platoon will think of their sergeant being just as careful as Dove moving turtles and ground-nesting birds’ nests out of the way, and I’ve got six whole files of artillerists pushing their awareness out as far as the standard can carry it. So this is the best time I’m going to get.

Those ten in Westcreek were members of the regular army of Reems. They had good magical support, to be down in Westcreek and not die. Making that support, finding Westcreek as a route, means they’ve been scouting for a substantial while. Reems tried an open invasion six years ago. It didn’t work. So the presumption is they’re a long way east and trying sneaky. Our job is to stop them before we’ve got the Iron Guard running loose in the Creeks.

There’s what would be muttering if it was out loud; the Master Gunner and Twitch both contribute images of the Iron Guard, and that settles. To Creeks, the Iron Guard are just bearded guys in heavy armour; they don’t seem particularly big. Maybe after generations of digging up eel-trees they don’t seem especially mean, either.

Staff Thaumaturgist Rust — definitely a chuckle — captured some of their fears from those guys in Westcreek. It’s a statistical process; it gives us an idea where their pass is, but it’s only an idea. To know for sure, Rust would need a thousand prisoners or so. By the time we’d know where to get those, we’re going to know where the pass is, so we are moving on what we’ve got.

When we run into guys from Reems, the company will screen; either the company stomps them fast, or holds them for the artillery. We keep doing that until the artillery can range on the pass, and make it unusable. Then we mop up anybody from Reems on this side of the Hills.

Mop up? floats up at me, pretty generally.

For every one of us here, there’s a thousand people behind us in the Creeks. Anybody from Reems left on this side gets one chance to surrender. If they take it, and we can send them home without opening the door to another invasion, we send them home. If they don’t, or we can’t, we kill them. We can’t get tied down fighting; even if we win the fight, another whole army from Reems could get past us while we’re doing it.

Regulars would know that, but, well. Regulars aren’t what I’ve got.

What happened last time? That’s somebody in Four. And it will give mop up time to settle a bit. Anything to create a presumption of victory.

I grab the memory and push with it, that tricky balance between making it easy to see and not having anybody trying to march onto terrain that’s very far from here.

Second Company of the Third Heavy of the Eighth meant I was on the left edge of the right half of the battalion front. The battalion colour party was just to my left, complete with Standard-Captain and standard. The focus was up for the whole brigade; we’d come up the long alpine valley in the expectation of a battle.

We didn’t get one; as we got closer, the standard showed us a great block of men. The Iron Guard of Reems, ten thousand strong and marching out to offer battle. They’d begun marching in better formation; they had flags and banners and kettle drums, when they started. They had shining steel armour inlaid with gold.

The meadow-flowers of that mountain valley chewed the armour off them.

Rustling grasses ate the flags, and the banners, and broke the banner-poles into dust. The great copper bowls of the kettle-drums crumbled into green dust wrapped in columbine. The ashwood spears of the Iron Guard took root, and swirled into a nothingness of dry golden ash leaves, while the spearheads flew up singing words for death on steel wings where every feather had the edges of a razor.

When we got up to maybe a hundred meters, the Iron Guard, mostly naked, was pressed into a tight ring only maybe sixty metres across by grass rustling all the dark names of famine, and starting to flinch, no matter what their pride could do, away from the pure light of angry shining out of the edges of the stems and the faces of meadow flowers.

Rust was standing there, in field boots and a surveyor’s hat and a sensible brown denim coat with some years of service on it. The idle gestures Rust was making only with the left hand, like someone trying to remember a word, those had something very visibly shining and sliding through Rust’s fingers. Every time Rust’s hand closed the circle of flowers shrank a little, and the light of angry grew brighter and bluer.

Not very many of the Iron Guard tried to run, maybe a hundred. They didn’t even scream.

The Archon surrendered.

I get a mass wave of No, really? back, company and battery and Blossom, too. A tiny waft of apple-wood smugness crosses Rust’s sensation of woodsmoke.

It won’t work again; none of the sorcerers with that army survived.

No one with that army remembered that there were any sorcerers with it, or any of those specific sorcerers ever existing. Nor does anyone but Rust know precisely what sudden silent invisible lethal thing happened to six mighty sorcerers, seventeen fire-priests, all their apprentices and acolytes, and the Archon’s soothsayer.

The current Archon won’t have tried this without believing there’s a way to avoid that fate.

Grudging agreement, and a few hopeful thoughts about eel-trees. I have to smile.

Much as it would please me to find such a helpful use for eel-trees, we must suppose that our good Staff Thaumaturgist will be occupied.

The company settles into a better temper. I can feel the platoons coalescing tighter; they do know each other well, and they’ve all thought about an actual fight. Which gives them some of the virtues of veterans. The battery are the kind of regular artillerists who volunteer to use experimental tubes to see if they work; the idea of getting to prove they work registers as a positive.

There’s that indescribable tapping sensation, and I get a single clear thought from Blossom. Reinforcements?

Let’s be very careful only the Part-Captain gets this bit. Not in time. Best case is a brigade relieves us where we’ve plugged the one pass.

The brigade we’re not getting? Blossom can do understated wry through the standard. Not everybody with a warrant of commission can.

The brigade we’re not getting.

If I didn’t get to die with the best company I could have had, I could have done worse than the company I look to get.

Halfway through sunset Rust guides us up onto a broad flat hilltop. There’s a “What, actual rocks?” from Radish, and the field camp goes up, the whole company together. The artillery sets up, just for drill, but what we’re really relying on just then is Halt, just in case anybody’s found us and thinks they can take Rust quick.

Toby and Dove flip for first watch — One and Three had the lead, they get first and last watches of four; we’re doing coalesced platoon watches, here, and one tube on duty in rotation.

Seventy-one kilometres today, and no further sign of anybody from Reems.

Chapter 11

Feed everybody, break camp, keeping a platoon up on guard the whole time. That’s tricky; you have to have a guard looking out and everybody else moving rocks looking in. Mess it up, and you demonstrate how not much benefits from being pelted with rocks.

The artillery, entirely unpelted, chivvies the drovers into line while they’re forming up. The drovers held up fine, got a solid breakfast down, proceeding in haste means the Line eats like famished wolverines in a pile of bacon, when all the drovers have to do is keep their bronze bulls from getting so lost in the happy stomping rush they start drifting off the line of march, they’re not extra hungry, but they have no idea what’s happening around them, no way to tell, not able to latch to the standard. So you have to watch they don’t drift off themselves and forget to eat.

This bunch are at least clear that walking into the maelstrom of reforming bedrock might hurt.

Another few days of proceeding in haste, maybe even just today, would finish coalescing this implausible third of a combined battalion into an active field formation.

We’ll hit something from Reems today. Maybe it’ll be small.

Eustace, looking not in the least put-upon, ate the empty stores barrels, hoops and all. After the second barrel, the reflexive wincing as Eustace crunched through various metal bits mostly stopped. There just wasn’t time.

Blossom’s alleged horse gets by on hardtack and a handful of nails. The nails are apparently a treat; lunging after the keg gets it biffed on the nose and a compensatory and apparently entirely acceptable carrot.

Blossom looks up, awareness floating through the battery, the Master Gunner takes it as thoroughness, not distrust, and Blossom gives me the thumbs up. Battery’s good. Twitch does the same thing for the company, without following it up with any flinging into the saddle.

Part-Captain Blossom swaps hats, battery commander for battalion second in command, and the floating awareness goes out wide, company and supports as well as the battery. Takes just long enough to justify the precise Ready.

I wave at Rust — get moving! — and we do, down off the empty open hilltop and turning back to nearly northwards. Two and Four lead today, which means I’ve got Radish and Hector closest to trouble. Their platoons have, for the first time in three centuries, been equipped with throwing sticks and six of what are either big darts or floppy javelins each. The Line gave up on those after artillery got away from weights and the neck-sinews of oxen; there was just no point. These, along with being a spike on a stick, are the practice pieces Blossom’s been having the shot-factory workers make. Safer and cheaper to practice on, and the artillery has got some rig where the tubes can toss bundles of twelve of them if the range gets really short.

I just hope they get thrown far enough; Blossom’s notion of anti-personnel is the kind of thing you want to be well away from. Back of a couple-six metres of firm dirt, say.

Radish, of all people, starts singing some song I don’t know about how miserable it is to be away from home because you have work to do.

The whole company apparently agrees about who should sing lead, and who should only come in on the choruses, and they all do. After waiting one whole chorus for politeness, all the drovers sing along on the next one. Apparently not an obscure song to a Creek. After a couple of verses, the battery is humming along, too, and I’ve shoved my awareness up as high and as far as the standard can let me push it.

There’s another sign in the entrance hall of the Officer’s School. It’s over the inside of the outer doors, so you see it every time you go back out into the world from inside the school.

Grant us strength to die.

Dying’s pretty easy.

Try going last.

Chapter 12

I don’t recommend going hiking with Rust.

Early afternoon we come down a dip-and-turn scree slope into a main valley.

Can’t manage scree when hastening; everything slows right down while the road foundation gets melded into the bedrock, switchback by switchback. Even if this wasn’t the hollow ground of the Northern Hills the road will be gone next spring. Rust might be doing that on purpose, or might just have trouble remembering that the rest of us have to worry about actual feet in contact with actual ground.

Rust stays on the second-to-last switchback and points, very proper, as I go by behind Two Platoon, but pointing’s hardly needful. Pretty much due north up the valley, maybe three kilometres, there’s a wall, clean across the little valley.

Maybe, just maybe, a wall would be somebody trying to get away from it all, and picking an area unfriendly to travelers in the hope that would help. A couple thousand guys in the armour of Reems, in four blocks around a fire-priest central standard? The only question is why they’re on this side of the wall.

Words make themselves out of smoke in my mind. The wall is the front edge of a heavily warded zone.

Zone? I can see the ward-edge fine.

Misty bits of map come into the standard, even Rust has trouble drawing with smoke, but lots of volume, probably the whole of the valley above the wall.

The road goes from done to not done about two kilometres in front of the wall. There’s a messy pile of tools and wheelbarrows on the edge of the hard surface, like someone was trying for a barricade before they grew a brain. Below that is a mess; dirt, gravel, rocks, no obvious pattern or shape. It looks like they’re digging out the roadbed with shovels, which can’t be efficient. Not that fire-priests are good for building. If the big ward isn’t clever enough to let their stuff out, they might be out here because they figure they can take us.

Or Rust; I wouldn’t want to get stuck behind a ward while giving Rust as long as needed to figure out how to break it.

Being on this side isn’t a hugely better option for them.

The road’s obviously connected to the wards, so we stay off it. Just because it’s not lit up now doesn’t mean they can’t. We do march up until we’re about even with the finished end, staying high on the valley while we do it. Grass, but no trees; this is probably not a very stable slope, and I’m worried about keeping anchors into our footing the whole way.

Captain, Battery.

Battery, Captain. Blossom sounds calm in drills. This has a lot of cheerful over the calm.

Set up. Pretend your tubes are five-layer if that works. If it doesn’t work, don’t walk up the stairs, go straight to nine. Targets are the fire-priests. If you get trouble from the wall, switch two tubes to it. Notice before firing.

Agreement comes back from Blossom and the Master Gunner, bright and solid.

Two, Four

Captain, twice, and you can tell it’s Radish and Hector. Don’t ask me how, but you can.

Get to — that bit, there — and do a short wall and a ditch. Careful with digging. Give the artillery as much slope as you can. Because once anybody’s inside artillery range they’re completely your problem.

The lead platoons just start moving; there’s a faint thread of acknowledgment but what I really get is flying dirt. I can get Twitch to talk to them about that if any of us live through this.

One.

Captain. Toby’s dead level best not to sound worried. Going up against six or seven companies worth of guys is supposed to be worrying, even when you’re pretty sure they have no equivalent to the standard. They’ve got something. It might just be craziness, but something.

You’re local reserve on Two and Four; you don’t let them get flanked and you don’t let anybody get between the artillery and them. Dig how you like but don’t make it harder to pull back on the tubes for you or for Two and Four.

Sir. Very thoughtful, from Toby. Good. That’s not an easy job.

Sergeant-Major.

Captain. Twitch isn’t twitching at all now.

You’re in command of the forward position. Position is a little strong, but the language insists you’re doing it right even when you’re trying to bail a swamp with a teaspoon.

Sir from Twitch, and fainter sirs from Hector and Radish and Toby.

Just to Twitch, Fall back on the artillery as required to avoid being overrun. The longer you can hold out there, the more time the artillery’s got.

Gotcha. Twitch is positively laconic; there’s a lot of people about to demonstrate murderous intent towards us all. Not quite as calming as going for Twitch specifically, but I suppose Twitch is confident that will happen in time.

Battery, Captain. Battery ready.

Captain, Battery. Range your targets.

SHOOT! Definitely happy over the calm. Whole battery, not just Blossom.

The first shot is a fling, at five; as much as a normal artillery tube can do for sustained fire. It makes some pretty lights. Doesn’t look like the fire-priests had to work for it, but they do get the two closest blocks of troops moving at us. Two and Four’s digging goes from brisk to downright hasty.

Under the circumstances, a kilometre just isn’t very far.

Three.

Captain. Dove’s calm’s nearly real.

Somewhere back in the focus is “long white-black-black”, sounding eager.

Cover the artillery and the train. DO NOT assume we can see all of them. There could be another battalion’s worth crawling through that scrub. Closer to the wall, the ground is better, and if you can’t call it trees it’s at least woody plants.

Sir.

Which is another reason coming down all that scree wasn’t a bad idea; slower, but it does a lot for our flanks provided we don’t get the lot of it dumped on us.

Watch the scree, too; someone playing avalanche would be annoying.

Sir. That one has a snort in it.

Battery, ten shot, ripple rate, SHOOT! Happy cheerful Part-Captain Blossom, happier than usual.

I hunch: everybody, bronze bulls and Eustace included, hunches. Halt pats Eustace’s reassurance-seeking nose, absently. Still got that shawl up. I am developing a suspicion that nobody from Reems has noticed Halt, which would be entirely fine if true.

Two-and-a-half tonnes of iron roars overhead in sufficient haste you can feel the air burning away from the tracks of it like sunburn, even if you’ve got the mother-wit to look down and not at the lines of burning iron scored through the sky. Sounds like a landslide. Scree’s still stable, thankfully. The switchbacks should encourage any slumping to happen out to the sides.

Use the focus, don’t shout. Everyone’s ears are ringing. Shouting starts to feel like panic.

Range extension. Certainly. By all means, let us be better able to fight at safe distances, instead of breathing air that reeks of burning iron.

Half a dozen fire-priests managed to survive. Most of the acolytes have splashed, not just died, there’s a bunch of holes in the road, and shattered road surface and blazing iron flew backwards and forwards through the blocks of troops. The two forward blocks have wheeled right and are breaking into a run, to get to us before the artillery can get to them.

I think it’s messed with their timing; fire-priests work in groups, and chewing the acolytes off ought to have slowed them down.

Captain, Battery, switch two tubes to the attacking troops.

Sir. Hank; Blossom’s paying attention to effectiveness.

Not quite ripple rate on the priests; fast rate, five shots in a minute. Won’t get through but it will make them think about stopping it, rather than cooking us.

Short black-black-red going out at the charging heavies; not the Iron Guard but the same sort of heavy partial plate, big shields, and spears. It’s not standard shot; standard red shot explodes, in fire or shards of iron.

This stuff turns into a great flailing transparent mass, and spins. From the look of the results, all of it is sharp. It rips strips four files wide clean through the charging blocks of heavy infantry. Maybe a third of them are going to make into the dead ground, anyway, but they’re not going to be in good order when they get there.

A big pulse of heat splashes across most of the front of the focus; it’s not well-directed and it’s not all that hot, and I can downshift it to a rumble in some ground none of us are standing on without using more than Three’s push to do it. Two and Four are going to be busy in a moment.

The ground shakes; Blossom put something nasty in the regular rain of long shot at the fire-priests. Very nasty, half the rear block on the enemy left is down from the concussion and there’s a hole in the road you could lose an eight-ox hitch in.

One of the fire-priests is still standing. Looking worse for wear, but standing. A cloud of butterflies with steel wings rise from the armour of the fallen and devour even the screams.

The two rear blocks of enemy infantry start pulling back toward the wall. The artillery stops firing at the charging infantry; they’re into the dead ground.

Captain, Battery, target the retreating.

More glass-tentacle short shot goes out, at steady rate from all four tubes. The rear blocks break, and sprint for the wall.

Twitch shouts Throw! and sixty of the pointy sticks with surprises arch out. It’s not a great throw, but half of them hit and nothing in the available magical protections seems to stop them from working. Two more throws thin the charge by a third, and breaks them up even more.

The charging heavies pile into the north corner, half of them into the ditch and half set to go round Two’s flank. Toby piles One Platoon into their flank. The focus isn’t grabbing them at all; plain guys in armour would just bounce.

Reems troops aren’t used to being smaller than the folks they’re attacking. I’d give odds they thought the warswords were the primary weapon, too, instead of the weights on a chain on a stick. Those were designed to give regular guys a good shot at cracking plate armour; the weight is a disk with the chain through the centre and a rim that’s an edge like an axe all the way around. Officially, “axe, detached, circular, infantry”; they say “add-see” in the Creeks, where most of the Line says just “ad”. It gets loud, and there are a few crashing noises followed by shouts about how stabbing with the special pointy sticks is a bad plan. Shouts through the focus, they’re getting the idea.

Twitch has things well in hand there; most of Four is contributing by chucking rocks by files. We’ve lost some down, but not two files out of three platoons, and what’s left of the Reems infantry isn’t going to last another thirty seconds.

They don’t run, and they don’t surrender, and they don’t stop trying, but it’s closer to twenty seconds, all the same. Medics start moving down from the waggons and the injured start getting moved back. Six dead. Two starts to get a bit growly, and Radish gets a grip on it.

Artillery’s stopped firing. The survivors of the other two blocks of heavies are hugging the wall, and the ward there sticks out far enough they’re covered.

Any active sorcery?

No, in the bitter scent of burning herbs; No, as a plain word from Blossom.

That was way too easy.

Chapter 13

Well done to Twitch, personally, and then Well done to the whole command.

That’s a good start. Hold in place, food’s coming.

You start taking casualties quick when you don’t feed them and keep doing heavy lifting with the focus. Missing lunch for a battle won’t help with that.

Twitch and the Master Gunner sort out where to put latrine trenches, and those get dug. Blossom’s gunners are sagging; they were throwing hard and fast, mostly above sustainable rate. Never mind having to leap around to put out the grass fires under the muzzles, seldom a relaxing experience.

Blossom starts unlocking things in the battery captain’s waggon, and hands a substantial silver container to the Master Gunner. Blossom’s emphatic, so I get the actual words about “twenty-five scruples in the second mug of water”.

What is that?

Vigour and cranberries.

Dilution does seem wise.

If you take it straight, it spoils your judgment. The lift feels a lot bigger than it is, it’s just replacement, not enhancement.

I send Good, carry on back. Enhancement is something you’re going to pay for later, usually just when your contribution to the focus is important. How Blossom got vitality in a can can wait for another, less busy, day.

Twitch has a couple guys from Four trotting up the hill to Rust, carrying a collection of amulets over a Reems spear haft. If there’s some big nasty the Reems guys back of that wall have one of, Rust is too far away for it to get Rust and the Line both, so keeping that far apart for now is a good plan. Or they haven’t got it active yet, because it’s more than nasty enough to devour us all, but I can’t do anything about that.

Focus is up firm, food and water are moving, the sergeants are getting the issue concentrated citrus into the water and into the troops, the gunners are going with the vigour and cranberries instead, and the remarks about the alleged cheese are staying mostly cheerful. Two gets its six bodies washed and wrapped and under the dirt before eating, as is entirely customary. Individual fused-scree sarcophagi are’t customary, but that’s fine. I want to take them home too, if we can. Two does eat, in large part because Radish is determined about it. Good. Best thing to do is keep moving.

Halt drifts through where the medics have the hurt lying down. Most of them get up. There’s a conversation much calmer on Halt’s side than the medics'. The three with head injuries go on a waggon; the dozen others still look a little stunned. I toss the image at Twitch, Twitch gets Dove to send a couple file closers from Three forward to get food and fluids into the suddenly-up injured. Then back into armour and into the line, soon as we can. A couple full files from Three show up and start de-renting the armor where the medics had it off the hurt.

It’s going to smell indescribably bad in an hour; it smells bad now. Four has the Reems infantry that are in any sort of manageable pieces between our front and the road under the turf, but there’s a lot of them on the road in various distributions and a lot of formerly human liquids all over the turf. Hector can’t figure out how to get just that off the grass, and that’s fine, because I can’t, either. I send Well done and Your turn to eat and hope playing catch by a river of blood is going to help some with handling the smell.

Blossom’s artillery teams have swapped light caissons back for full ones by the simple expedient of unhitching and re-hitching. The bronze bulls share with their ox progenitors a tendency to get confused if the line of march changes.

Nothing comes out of the wall, or over the wall. The…call it a short three companies of infantry keep on hugging the wall. There’s for sure a gate there. I don’t see anything coming down on ropes, even. Stupid. Double stupid if they can’t open the gate without dropping the ward.

Amateurs.

It’s not obviously a masonry wall; I think it’s stucco over timber, which is a strange thing to do unless you’re trying to keep the enemy guessing about just what is under there, materials and runes of power both. They might be moving a wall up to the point of completion, sticking the road out some new distance, and then moving the wall up to the new end of the road. Slow, but careful. Which only makes sense; we’re intact because we’re compact and moved fast, and also because Rust recognises most dangers and most dangers recognise Rust. I really don’t want to stay in the Northern Hills any length of time, all the same.

Especially not with all these guys from Reems, even if contemplating their presence is a real help with chewing the hardtack.

Steel-winged butterflies come and land around me, wings all the subtle blue and purples of sword-steel quenched in oil bordered in bright steel. The wings quiver and words that smell of oil smoke and scorched leather form in my mind.

The amulets are a simple avoidance of the Power; use of the focus slides off the wearer.

Spiders dance, but not into words. Halt could say things about that, but is staying hidden, I take that to be. If anybody from Reems can reach through the focus and pull threads of thought out, we’re doomed anyway.

I get diagrams in front of my eyes, a hemisphere fifty metres across forming over a spectral Reems infanteer and crushing inward, complete with indications of where you need to reinforce the focus to keep the air from igniting an escape path through soil or rock and the math for the change in air pressure and the implausible temperature achieved; the Reems infanteer isn’t survived by so much as sandal nails. There’s even a little note that says it’s more efficient though more difficult to use just the oxygen, not all the air.

Blossom’s hair has a handful of shining steel butterflies scattered across it, but the words come through the standard. That’s the dumb avoidance.

How many known shields against the Power are there?

Five, say the spiders.

That we know about, says Blossom. They might have a new one.

So very dubious, the spiders.

The sensation of quenched esoterica is better than the actual argument, I’ll say that much for it.

Old dust, burned up in candle flames. The wall is one anchor point for the road ward. A high, high view shows a road behind the wall, and the shimmer of the warding, substantially wider than the road itself, snaking back up the valley. There are others, stronger, further up the valley.

It’s not like they don’t know we’re here. Spider-chuckles, one of Blossom’s smiles, the smell of pine needles tossed on fire someplace where the air is cool and pure and clean. One grim vision of fire from the Master Gunner. Blossom wasn’t the only one who’d wanted to try that fast ripple for awhile.

Attention to orders. A ripple of more active listening comes back through the standard.

Two and Four keep the front. One back on the left in column; Three back on the right in column. Tuck the artillery up behind the front; supplies behind the artillery.

Half a question from a dozen places. Rust hasn’t spotted anybody from Reems except these guys at the wall. One problem at a time. They settle; Rust has earned some trust. If there’s any substantial Reems force behind us we’re in an entirely non-viable position, and I suppose it’s good the company is smart enough to know that.

Artillery loads for short-range infantry suppression. Everybody make sure you’re watching the lanes. “Or you’re going to be part of the suppressed infantry” floats around, in the way of ancient jokes. Pretty even float between the company and the artillery teams.

We’re going to march up toward the west corner of this wall and see what we can do with ground shock, so we’re not going to dig in. Collapsing trenches on yourself is embarrassing.

Once we start, that Reems infantry by the wall is going to pile back in. Ready on the pointy sticks, ready on making bad ground — there are a truly surprising number of quick ways to make the ground worse to run on or march over — and ready on the breath-sucker. Blossom’s immolating implosion aside, just taking the oxygen in the air away should drop these guys.

It takes maybe five minutes to get it all together; no rushing, good competent speed. Twitch, that thorough soul, grabs Two and Four to roll the latrine trenches back under the substrate, so you couldn’t tell they were there. Nothing quite like heading back this way in a hurry and winding up in your own trench.

One, tube one, Two, tube two, the colour party with the standard and the Standard-Captain, tube three, Four―can’t have it seem like I just started at one and counted — tube four, and Three. One and Three are refused already, since I can’t see how eight hundred guys aren’t going to try to wrap our front when they come back off the wall. If we’re not careful it might even do them some good.

Ready from Twitch, standing by Dove at the front of Three. Ready from Blossom, mounted by the caisson with the special cataclysms in it, back of tube two’s regular caissons.

The Line will advance.

Chapter 14

Don’t want to get too close; have to get close enough, or the ground shock is just a noise. The outwash down this valley’s pretty deep; the bedrock’s metres down. Which is good, in that the Reems guys probably didn’t build the temporary wall down to bedrock. It’s bad in that shaking the bedrock works better.

The tough call is just when those guys are going to come off the wall.

Halt. Amused spiders, which is fine; the whole half-square of a formation stops, as I meant it to.

About four hundred metres. Chewing-on-entrails range for nines, but still.

Captain, Battery. Two rounds, maximise flash. Let’s see if the heat pulse gets through that ward. A surprising number of outlander wards are protections against fire, rather than heat. There’s some sorcerous difference.

Tubes two and three pull their bundles of pointy sticks, and switch to long shot with white nosecaps. The teams hoist the trails and roll the tubes forward, to get the muzzles forward of everybody else. Throwing anything that hard is going to light the grass on fire. No sense having anybody lighting up at the same time.

Artillery to fire on a three count; everybody, duck and avert your eyes by the two.

I get a bit of appreciation from Blossom, who is in the process of turning the horse-thing around. Spare shirts, bags, in one case a hardtack box, are going over bronze bull heads. Halt closes the howdah curtains. Eustace’s eyes narrow, nothing more. I have no idea what kind of cud you get from eating the stores-barrels, but whatever it is, Eustace is chewing away at it.

The Master Gunner starts counting.

Ready on the one!

Ready on the two!

Twitch ducks last. Hold your faces down.

I turn my helmet around and hold my hands behind my back. The standard goes right on showing me the guys along the wall, visibly wondering what devilment we’re up to now.

Ready on the three!

Start shifting anything hitting the focus down, and start from the peak, so by the time it rolls down to shoulder-height it won’t interfere with the

HEAVE!

You can feel it, the tubes kicking back, hard — the momentum transfer hasn’t got any recoil, but air in the tube getting hammered out of the way of the shot surely does — and the great white bloom of heat, like opening a furnace door, just ahead of an awesome crash, like thunder when you’re under the lightning strike.

Pointy sticks going back in, a profane undertone and Hot! getting mixed, some of the Reems guys keeling over from what looks like heat stroke, grass fires under the muzzles and along a hundred metres of wall, maybe even a bit of backward tipping in the wall. No mass frying through the ward. Probably didn’t need to order eyes averted.

Kinetic dump’s getting most of it. Blossom doesn’t sound surprised. I could probably melt whatever they’re using as the dump if we shot it enough.

There are better ways to make lava. Ones which don’t waste ammunition.

It’s really a pity we’re downhill of that wall.

Everybody see the little dimple in the grass fire, where the scorch from the shot tracks crosses?

General agreement, in the midst of the grass fire right along our front being strangled. The breath-sucker started as a fire-suppression trick.

We’re hitting that on three. Sergeant-Major, count.

One.

Twitch has the great trick of all good Sergeant-Majors of sounding really, really calm, no matter what is happening.

Two. Really good latch, best I’ve ever had from this company. Blossom’s battery is all back of Blossom, pushing; the Part-Captain looks wreathed in slow white fire to the standard.

Three. One big push into the focus, and I grab a mass of gravel and scree that starts about two metres down and has an oval shape a metre thick and maybe four metres deep by forty wide and send it down and back towards the wall. You want a real wave, you need displacement.

Most of the Reems infantry go down; the wall-top visibly waves through a couple metres forward and back and comes to rest rippled. Timber stockade under there for sure, not good for much except ward-anchor.

Good!

Again, on three.

You could mistake this one for a battalion push; Blossom’s own magical back’s into it and the company has fully cohered. This one starts deeper, and goes back half-level and half driving right.

There’s a great noise as the gate-timbers snap, part of the whole wall toppling right and forward. There’s an appalling three-note twang, like cables coming taut in the otherworld, and the road to the gate comes apart in dust. It rises and rises, the whole surface turning into a single great pall.

The Reems guys, the most of them who got clear of the wall, come up running right at us. They’re foaming at the mouth.

Battery, suppress attacking infantry!

Steady rate; the pointy stick bundles won’t tolerate rough handling. And this is close, some of them will get to us.

The smoke of the grass fire twists into words. Their road is dust back to the permanent fortification, twelve kilometres up the valley. The entire ward has recoiled.

Prepare to receive nutcases. Twitch’s whole tone is perfectly laconic.

The focus runs like a wire, the loop of our whole front. It only needs to be about three metres high, and fifteen or so deep. Hit a zone with no oxygen and you go down fast. Fifteen metres is at least a couple of seconds for tired guys running in armour.

The first four bundles go out, tosses. The Reems guys are down to about two hundred metres, and they get chewed. Blossom seems to like variety in pointy-stick effects.

The focus staggers, staggers again, and collapses, all of Three Platoon drops out, then tube four, then Four Platoon and tube three. Concentrated oxygen spills across dull burnt grass, waking brief flames. You can hear the Reems guys howling. Didn’t think they were berserks on their own.

The light goes out of the world, dust and worse than dust.

I’ve been here before.

HOLD.

HOLD.

Flickers, the beginnings of latches to the standard. It’s not going to be in time.

The Captain gets a signaler’s wand, not a sword. It’s a metre of stick with a white end and a shiny end. And warswords are, quite properly, not really what you’d want. They’re meant for close fighting in ranks, there’s an edge and a point and a back edge and a pommel you can crack skulls with, but they’re also meant for cutting turf and clearing brush and prying ration boxes open, nobody really expects the Line to get down to swordwork this century. So I grab one from a couple of the colour party, those easiest to reach when they get the worst of a beard-on-fire frothing berserk, and I get in front of the standard and get to work.

It’s a complete mess, but they’re coming back. Even some of the dead.

Dove’s been here, Dove’s will is writing never stop fixed and certain across Three. Three’s in good order and fighting. Good order’s not a good situation runs through my mind, memory, as I feel Twitch go, fighting, not a part of Three but managing pretty well for the odds. Hector goes, stabbing spectacularly with a short-gripped pointy stick, a pile of Four is going, there’s not a lot of cohesion left there.

FOUR PLATOON, FORM ON TUBE FOUR. That gunner’s still up and whatever screaming the gunner’s doing isn’t in despair.

Blossom cycles tubes two and three by sheer force of will; staggers from the effort, that I would not have thought any one sorcerer could make. While Blossom’s staggering the horse-thing kicks a couple of Reems guys hard enough they spray, bites another’s helm and head through in a scream of jewel-teeth. The clouds of pointy sticks look like they clipped the last hundred off the charge.

Halt, very calm, is standing under Eustace’s head. Eustace has a spear through one ear and a snarl that’s stopped a howling block of Reems guys, paused at the apparent reach of the flames. Halt’s right hand moves with a knitting needle in it, the way you’d tap printed flowers on the tablecloth because you were bored.

I’ve never seen someone who has had a fencepost rammed through their skull, but that’s what comes to mind, watching that block of Reems guys go down.

Radish’s choice of profanity is repetitive, but Two is holding. They stagger forward a step, then another, starting to hit a rhythm.

About half the colour party’s still up; a couple of them drift right and start grabbing pointy sticks from Four’s dead and chucking them over the pile in front of me. I drift left; the pile’s getting too high to see over.

One’s about gone. Some guys from tube two run over with bundled up pointy sticks, and a gasped “Absolutely no stabbing”. I toss the right hand sword to my left, grab one, and try the toss past tube one where One’s going down and the Reems guys are starting to leak in at the baggage.

These are the little version of the whirling glass tentacle thing. Good. The ones leaking between tube three and where Four was are too close for that, so I get a file closer and what’s left of the colour party throwing at that leak past One and drift right.

Blossom and Halt are talking, hands waving and bits of dust sparkling between them.

The Reems guys mobbing tube one turn, screaming, into an awful red mist under the molten wings and implausible jaws of a vast steel cloud of butterflies.

They’re starting to thin out a bit to the right of tube three; I’ve got another pile started, but it’s only some past waist high.

Blossom says six presumably utterly improper words, because Halt’s eyebrows lift to the hairline. Something, briefly, smells of ugly and tastes of fire.

The light comes back, and the focus. There’s about sixty, seventy guys in the standard. Less than half, maybe.

Everything firms up, in fits and starts and staggery bits as the last of the Reems guys need killing. None of them run, none of them even look like they’re thinking in words any more as anybody still standing tries to fend them off and the butterflies flow over them like phase change.

Chapter 15

Radish’s brain is stuck. “Idiot, idiot, botched it, idiot…”

Sergeant.

Radish stops, in a staggery sort of way.

The dust was some kind of cogitoxin. Most of those are slow, they sneak up on you. This was more like stepping on a rake. Really don’t want to start talking out loud, I’ll be making blood-gargling noises getting my mouth clear. I’m getting something like attention, anyway. And there’s still plenty of shouting and screaming going on, so the standard works better.

Sergeants, report.

Dead, sir. Toby sounds abashed. One has nine up, twenty down, and fifty two dead, sir.

Thirty five up, eleven down, six and twenty nine dead, sir. Radish’s grip’s getting firmer.

Sixty seven up, five down, eight dead, sir. Dove’s take on calm might be real.

Solid silence, for a beat and another beat. The pointy stick seems to have convinced Hector’s shade it was dead in some thorough way. None of Four’s file closers come in, which isn’t good.

Blossom comes in: Tubes two and four are effective, tube three’s reduced, tube one’s ineffective. The battery’s lost eight files, sixty-odd guys out of two hundred some.

Radish, Two gets everybody who’s down, company and artillery, to the medics, start now. Don’t wait for the medics to do the carrying, they’re getting overwhelmed. Get a file checking where Four was soonest.

MEDICS! Back to the central point, triage as they get brought in. I get heads up and wild eyes and nods. Medics are of the Line, not in the Line, and these are all excellent medics and good Creeks. Treating those who have been half hacked apart by berserks is a new experience. Having to help friends in that state is new, too, but not those who’ve been mashed by timber or crushed by rocks, so I can hope the habits transfer.

Dove, Three hands their down to the medics, does a gear check, drinks up, forms up, and heads up the valley. Don’t get within five kilometers of the permanent fortifications; find a good rise for a camp, lay it out, picket it. We’ll be along. Everybody gets that.

Sir.

Just for Dove, Get water into them and get them chewing on the march. It’s going to hit hard when the fight wears off.

Teach Halt to scare demons, sir.

Rust?

Steel-winged butterflies rise off stripped corpses into an elegant curve of interrogation mark.

Go with Three. Keep them out of trouble. Trouble you can’t keep them out of they are to retreat from and rejoin, and you, too.

The butterflies do something that looks for all the world like a formal bow of acknowledgment. Dove’s eyes roll before all the sergeant’s attention turns back back to Three Platoon, starts detailing who carries the hurt, who lays out the dead of the Line, and who gets water. Dead Reems guys are our problem, cleanup, everybody in Three’s getting checked for what they haven’t noticed.

The shouting’s about stopped; still a few screams. Hardly ever helps but it’s hard not to when the spear through your foot wobbles.

Halt is sending me a couple of stunned looking drovers with buckets. It’s a very good thing that bronze bulls don’t really breathe, so they don’t have to smell this, and that they all had their eyes wrapped. A stampede reaction wouldn’t have helped.

Stunned, or terrified. I stick both swords into the turf, one on either side of the standard. It might help the terrified, and it will for sure help the picking up a bucket part.

I get my head doused; no matter how carefully you bend, it sluices down your collar and moves the blood further down your armour coat. Never mind the coat, this one’s going to rot out the cuirass straps. Hand, other hand, drink the last half bucket, hand it back. Still not looking too calm, either drover. See how much of the bloody hand prints on the first bucket will wipe off on the grass. Not as much as the drover wants, but they can hold it by the bail. Both of them head back.

The Master Gunner’s over at tube one. The other three tubes all have their gunners up and Radish’s guys are getting handed the non-walking down artillerists on stretchers. Not enough stretchers, the medics are putting pads down and sending the stretchers back.

Blossom is standing in the saddle to get the spear out of Eustace’s ear. Blossom gets a really heartfelt eyeroll, but Halt’s got Eustace by the nose. It takes more stupid than five tonnes of mutton can manage to try shaking Halt loose.

There’s a sparkle around the spearhead, and a wet pop like failing cartilage. Most of the shine goes off the spearhead. Blossom grabs the thing by the socket, and the shaft crumbles into dust. Halt lets go, and Eustace’s head gets a good shake, ears flapping like tent canvas, horns sweeping like death. There’s not much blood at all, and what there is shines a deep shade of purple.

Blossom drops into the saddle only long enough to dismount. Halt takes the spearhead and looks disapproving as Halt and Blossom start heading toward me. Eustace lies down, baas, something you can feel up through your boots, and starts cud-chewing again. Blossom’s horse-thing leans over, snorfles at the hurt ear, and then appears to go to sleep, one hind leg slack.

Down to the medics. Radish has gone grim round the edges. Seeing to carrying sixty-odd comrades who were hale and fine a quarter hour ago to where they might not die will do that.

Lay out our dead.

Stack theirs.

Sir.

Twitch, you in there?

Captain. Calmer, for sure.

Sort the colour party up and the up survivors of Four into a new colour party. Make sure they’re all clear on who’s a file closer and who’s senior and get them physically moved to around where I’m going to put the standard.

Sir.

Two files from Two show up, look at the waist-high stack and the above shoulder-high stack — over my head is doing well to get over shoulder-high on Creeks — and have a very visible “why move that?” reaction.

It’s not hard to check. “There are four of our dead and seven of our down under the main pile.” Nobody even curses, they just start lifting bodies with a fair show of briskness. “The smaller pile’s all them.” Four was pretty much gone by then. Radish heard that, and has realised all the down aren’t to the medics yet. Another file trots over, and then another with stretchers.

I take up the standard, and nod toward the gap between the baggage and three. No piles of dead Reems infantry there, and none of ours, either. Halt and Blossom follow along.

Quietly, now.

“What was that?” Since Blossom got rid of it, Blossom should at least have an idea.

Halt drops the spearhead point down in the turf, looks disapproving at it, taps it twice with the walking stick, frowns at the dust, finds a stable bit of grass so leaning on the stick works, and visibly discards the first three things Halt had considered to say. “The foundation of the road was despair.”

“Solid despair?” I can understand how you would want to get vigour in the cranberries, but making a strong emotion solid is only marginally less strange than going and making a road out of it.

“You know how there are different binding figures for enchantments? And the number of points matters?” Blossom’s quiet voice manages to be without the hope this is not a rhetorical “you know”.

I nod. You see enough of the things, that gets obvious.

“Minerals all have characteristic crystal shapes; you can get a bunch of different numbers of points that way, if you squint, and it looks like somebody had an empirical success in getting despair to bind to anything with a body-centred cubic structure. Because they were binding with individual atoms as the points, they could get an enormous amount of the stuff in there.”

“Hence the stepping on the rake.”

Blossom nods.

Halt looks troubled. “It was not synthetic despair.”

“How many people?” Even the amount of road we broke would be an implausible number.

“Millions.”

“Or hundreds of thousands, more than once. There’s no reason the drain is destructive.”

Blossom’s ears repeat those words back, and Blossom winces. “Fatal.”

Halt nods. “You could prevent crippling dread like this. The drained would be functional.”

I look directly at Halt. Gets easier with practice.

“It would unbalance the humours. Irrevocably, if repeated.”

Humours are arcane, not physical. People would get crazier and crazier in a slow, rot-of-sense way.

“Then why? An especially good road?”

Blossom’s head shakes. “It’s not a good road, as such, but it might be a better defensive ward than they can produce otherwise. It could be like having a layer of salt in the road, to keep plants from growing up through it; all that despair makes it tough for the Hills to shift it around, the motivation for the change would leak out.”

Deep breath. This is information.

“Reems is under such external pressure they’re turning their collective despair into the enchantment binding together the road they’re driving forward in the hope of escaping their doom?”

Halt looks up from knitting. Didn’t hear the needles clicking, don’t hear the needles clicking. “Can’t prove they’re not.”

“Captain.” One of One’s surviving file. Not that they were all in the same file when this started. Trooper’s shaking, leftover why aren’t we dead? from the flesh. Not the only trooper standing here, when I look around. I’ve got a reorganised colour party. Thanks goes to Twitch, and something like a smile and a salute comes back at me out of the standard.

“Radish says everybody’s laid out and all of theirs are stacked.” Visible deep breath. “There were two hundred and four of theirs dead of sword cuts in the big pile.”

That does have something to do with why I’m sticky and smell really bad, trooper.

Ain’t in here wafts out of the standard. Everybody pay up.

“The Captain’s not a demon any more than Eustace is a demon, goodness no.” Halt sounds really amused. Sounds like Halt might just laugh.

The live trooper doesn’t have the will or the spine to flat contradict Halt, that’s a list short as eyes, but it’s clear they don’t, any of them, have any belief in what Halt just said, either. The dead more doubtful than the living.

“Eustace is like that” — Halt waves at the five tonnes of wool and iron and malice — “because a wizard wished it so. Your Captain’s like that”―Halt’s chin lifts to point at me, much better than the blunt end of a knitting needle — “because a wizard wished it so a kind and species, the Captain’s grandsires all.”

Several missing greats in front of “grand”, but I suppose if you’re Halt you lose track of time.

“The Wizard Laurel”, says Rust in a voice of ghosts and burning grief out of the clear blue mountain afternoon, “was not known for shoddy work.” Rust’s riding along beside Dove, half a kilometre away.

There’s this absolutely stricken look on the trooper’s face, and I can feel the dead sort of curdle.

“Uh, Captain, you’re a graul?” Boggled might be the word for the expression. It’s not polite to notice that much embarrassment.

I nod, showing the best calm face I can manage with dilute blood drying in my hair.

There’s abashed looks all round, except for Blossom, who is at serious if subtle risk of a dignity failure, and Halt, who is grinning.

“Uh, sorry, Captain, I, uh, had no idea graul were short. Sir.”

I smile; I just about have to. I clap the trooper’s shoulder and say “Short is different outside the Creeks.”

Outside the Commonweal, where everyone gets fed.

The trooper practically scuttles aside, can’t go far, colour party, but can at least withdraw to the back of it, and Blossom takes a deep, deep breath, raises one finger at me, hold up, and then makes a broad both-hands gesture liquid and lengthy. The blood goes away, all of it, and I feel clean. Haven’t heard Blossom say anything to use the Power, no spoken spells, those six improper words might not count, but there’s still the “words or music?” Independent thing going on.

“Trick from Grue, Captain. Hope it helps.”

Chapter 16

Getting the blood off does help, and I say so. Blossom waves it off. Getting just the blood that’s not yours off you is a much harder trick than it sounds; what the medics use will get the blood, all your hair, and any silk or wool in your small clothes.

“Part-Captain; keep an eye on things. I’ll be in the standard.”

I can see understanding chase bafflement across Blossom’s face; the dead won’t necessarily hang on, and we need them. Blossom nods.

It’s not precisely difficult to get out of the part of the standard-binding meant for the living and over to the part meant as a refuge for the dead. It’s more like a door someone carefully put at the top of five flights of stairs, to make sure you don’t go through it casually.

There’s not much there, in there; maybe seventy of the company, five or so artillerists who must have tried to grab Blossom instead of their artillery tube when they were dying and wound up in the standard, all sort of standing around in a nothingness.

Twitch salutes, and I salute back. Toby’s looking younger than life, which was young enough.

“Harken up, you dead.” I get looks, at least, and like usual, they’re mostly not really sure they’re dead.

It’s not difficult to get the standard to make things look like a clearing, to put in a tent line, a couple stores waggons, and a brook. Only a bit more work to pull in the ghostly presence of the four artillery tubes and their attendant dead. From the standard’s point of view, the tubes are just like company banners in a heavy battalion. The five startled artillerists start walking over, looking either relieved or sheepish. The Company dead look a bit flustered. There aren’t supposed to be supply waggons in the otherworld, but then the standard binding isn’t the otherworld.

“The standard will let you go whenever you decide to let go; I can’t tell you what happens then.” If any necromancer has ever managed to make the dead describe anything beyond the process of death, they have left no record. The destinations of the dead are unknown.

“That said, the job’s not done, and your continued participation in the Line makes it much more likely that the job will get done.”

“And then what?” A trooper from One.

“You’re still dead. You can wait until the standard comes home to the Creeks and say your farewells as a part of letting go, you can let go when the job’s done, you can let go a hundred years from now, but the Line can’t make you alive again.”

“You’re the first dead in service the Second Heavy of the 70th Territorial has ever had; your memorial will go to the left of the monument, if and when.”

Twitch’s shade gets this strange light in the eyes. Twitch’ll be going off the rolls in the Creeks, not the Fourteenth, not the Regular Line. It might take Twitch until we get back to figure out how to feel about that.

“Anything going to be in there?” Five or six dead Creeks. I don’t get the sense the artillerists care what happens to their bodies, just the tubes.

“More than twenty-five files of dead is more bodies than we can take back in one trip. Finding any place in the Northern Hills twice isn’t something to plan on.”

Spectral nods, some outright sighing.

“Ashes or nothing, ain’t it?” A file closer from four.

I nod. “Ashes are the best odds.” Assuming getting back at all is reasonable odds. Which it isn’t.

There’s a bunch of muttering. Creeks have a thing about being buried in productive dirt.

“We get any say about the monument?” Toby, somewhat to my surprise.

“By tradition, a great deal of say about location; not so much about what gets put up.” Since the monument is mostly for the living, but it’s only polite to ask the dead where they’d rather be remembered.

“So we could ask for a garden down by the river, some place like the old Fuller mill?”

Twitch’s formal Sergeant-Major face comes down like a mask. Toby’s family and the Fullers don’t get along. That mill hasn’t been in use or maintained for a generation, but it’s holding a water right. I’m sure no one else gets that from Twitch, but then, the Creek shades probably don’t need to.

There’s a bunch of speculative faces, and then some grins. The Fuller family is not popular with One Platoon, and everyone else seems to think a garden by the river, right in town, is much better than what they might get.

There’s a moment of consensus, and then “Ashes it is”, from all of them.

“Thank you.”

“Since you’ve got a platoon sergeant, the company dead will form as One Platoon. The Sergeant-Major remains the Sergeant-Major.

“Any questions?”

“Can we get any beer in here? Sir?”

“Check the stores waggons.” Anything anyone ever bound to this standard had a memory of at the time of the binding, but one doesn’t generally announce that.

“Sergeant-Major; there is to be no drunkenness on duty.”

“Captain.” Twitch’d really like to grin. The standard can render them sober any time, and Twitch outranks the lot, which is all the standard cares about for purposes of requiring sobriety.

It took me a couple of months to learn how to reliably condense out of the standard so I was looking away from the sun. I can deal with daylight, but something about being in the standard means my eyes think it’s full dark when I come out, and that hurts.

Nothing like as much as telling the parents is going to.

Blossom’s right there. So is Radish, who wants to know what to do next.

“The dead acknowledge there’s no way we can get all the bodies back; they accept being returned as ashes as preferable to not being returned.”

Radish nods. Not happy and not surprised and I really don’t want Radish stopping and thinking today.

“Part-Captain, see to a couple of clean barrels, one for the battery and one for the company, and some permanent means of marking the names on the barrels.” Blossom nods. Sheets of paper get lost. It’s a natural law.

“Sergeant, the Reems dead go under the sod; all together or in groups, it doesn’t matter. Be neat, be polite, don’t fuss about it. Come get me when that’s done.” Radish nods, not really as a reply to me, and heads off. Blossom’s already headed off to arrange for the barrels.

I get the new standard-bearer to pick up the standard and follow me down to where the medics have set up. The colour party follows along, just as they ought.

We haven’t, surprisingly, lost any of the down yet. You almost always lose some, even with really good medics, and while these are good, they’re not used to close fighting sorts of injuries. Not that a Regular Line unit’s medics would be, either; it’s not something that usually happens. Burns, other nasty side effects of power concentrations or especially sneaky demons, but it’s rare to actually fight with swords and spears these days. Not even common for anybody to get knifed in a tavern fight.

Per the lead medic, we’re certainly going to start losing some if we move them. And we have to move them. This isn’t necessarily going to stay part of the same watershed once that ward goes down and the Hills get to expressing their opinions more fully; we’d never find anybody we left.

Halt’s howdah has climbed off of Eustace and is squatting on all eight…legs, I guess. It’s standing on them. Halt is taking a rake to Eustace’s back wool, and Eustace is making happy snorfly faces.

I leave the standard by the medics, and walk over.

I get a bit of a look from Halt, and much more of one from Eustace, and Halt goes right on raking. The sound of what looks like a steel garden rake being dragged through what is certainly not normal wool isn’t much like pleasant.

“Can the Staff Thaumaturgist do anything for the down, to permit them to be moved without worsening?”

“Just that?” Halt probably is exactly as unconcerned as this sounds.

“Anything you can do to make the down closer to hale than they now are, that does not weaken you against need, which we do not expect before dawn tomorrow.”

Halt hands me the rake. Eustace sighs, vastly.

“I’ll dose them, then.” Halt looks outright happy, which isn’t reassuring.

What Halt proposes to do will apparently have all the down better by dawn; they’ll wake hungry, they may wake rather angry or twitchy — the stuff gives bad dreams — but it’s effective, Halt has plenty of it, and can’t just hand it to the medics because judging the dosage is an art — “You kill half your first hundred patients.” Which is fine for Halt, well past the first thousand patients, but does explain why the stuff isn’t in wide use. That, and whatever it actually means when Halt feels compelled to volunteer that something tastes bad.

I wind up telling off a file of the colour party to carry stuff for Halt, and start heading back to where the dead are laid out.

The barrels are about done. Blossom, not just Blossom, is making the sort of eye-dabbing motions you don’t see. The half-dozen drovers who have been scrubbing and hoisting barrels for Blossom are being especially careful about that.

Blossom’s got forceful, legible handwriting, and can apparently pyrograph a hundred and seventy eight names on white oak with the handle of a spoon.

Twitch?

Captain.

Word is, the down are all coming up for dawn tomorrow. Dove gets Three’s down back, put Four’s down into Three; the rest go to Two. Should give us something like three functional platoons. Try to keep anybody from fussing about which platoon they’re in, but worry about solid files much more than sense-of-platoon.

I get a bunch of thoughtful back with the Sir.

Radish is done with the Reems guys just as the two files sent off to get the first six dead are coming back. They hurried.

Turning our dead into ashes is easy. What’s now One Platoon even manages not to think about what they’re doing until after. Both barrels, neatly pyrographed with “Year of The Peace Established 535”, and, respectively, “Range Extension Project — Experimental Battery” and “70th Territorial Brigade, Second Heavy Battalion (Wapentake of the Creeks), First Company” at the top of their lists of names, are loaded on tube one’s half-empty third caisson — caissons are about the last wheeled transport you abandon — with an awkward careful politeness, I get reports that Halt’s finished dosing everybody, and we’re ready to move.

I didn’t have to tell anybody to leave the barrel lids openable, which shows someone has sense. It’s bad for morale when the Captain has to point out you’re probably not done burning your dead just yet.

I keep the focus up, enough that we’re not going to be fumbling for it if we need it. We only think the Reems guys can’t get anything through that ward from their side.

We get a nice steady ten kilometre walk up an alpine valley on firm turf on a sunny day. It’s not even thinking about raining anywhere I can see. There are little bits of muttering from the dead, soon dying down. None of them let go.

Dove’s there, Rust is there, all of Three is there, and they’ve got the camp laid out to a nicety. Nobody from Reems has tried to do anything to them, either.

This camp goes up differently. Just as big, but this is the first one the company has done in one piece, instead of one-wall-per-platoon. We still need four walls.

It takes them about an hour; it would have been half that if Rust hadn’t had Twitch get them to hold while the walls were molten and done something that meant it needed to cool slower. Blossom’s explanation is that it keeps the avoidance-of-the-Power amulets from working against any work of the Power exercised from in camp.

The extra half-hour gives me time to talk with Halt and Blossom about what’s going on with Reems and the road enchantments. Halt’s hat has a selection of butterflies on it for this, but they don’t say anything.

Everybody marches or rolls in, the tubes go on the corner platforms, the outside entrance ramp turns back into ditch and the inside entrance ramp spreads itself along the inside of the wall, because we’re going to need it in the morning.

“Listen up.” They do; even the drovers do, and they’re just getting the sound of my voice. One Platoon can’t actually coalesce, but they sort of condense a bit; you can see them there, a little wavery, but it works well enough in the twilight to be sure who you’re talking to. The living go on working, because delaying dinner or getting tents up isn’t in the plan and I’m not the type of idiot who gets “listen up” and “attention to orders” confused.

“That wasn’t a good day.” Actual laughter.

“The job’s not done. The best guess we’ve got is that Reems — maybe all of it, maybe a lot of it — are coming through here to try to get away from something they think they can’t possibly beat.”

Mutters. It’s a thin guess, but it’s what we’ve got.

“We don’t want the Archon in the Creeks specifically or the Commonweal generally; we don’t want whatever has them scared coming through after them. So we have to stop them.”

A bronze bull, impatient, half-unyoked, shakes its head in a clatter of yoke-chain and a ringing of bronze ears.

“Not slow Reems down, not have them try again next year; between the Paingyre and keeping Reems or whatever Reems is afraid of out of Meadows Pass way out west, the Line might not have any spare brigades to come help out. We’ll get any help there is, but there might not be any.” A bit of a rumble, but not much. There aren’t quite half-a-million people in the Creeks, and just over seven million in the Commonweal as a whole. It’s not nice math, but Creeks as a group won’t argue with it. Especially since the rest of the Commonweal has effectively no internal defensive barriers, all the universities, and almost all the heavy industry. All the Independents.

“We don’t know how big Reems really is, and the things out of the Paingyre just keep coming. So we have to stop this ourselves.

“That means not leaving the road as a pointer that there’s something over the mountains worth getting to. For once, we’re lucky that the Northern Hills are such a cranky place; if we get rid of the enchantment, we can expect the Hills to get rid of the road.”

For some terrible and final value of “get rid”.

“The bad part is something’s creating the road, and we haven’t found it yet. If it’s just back of that wall over there, great. But it’s probably further up the road; to the extent that the Independents can say what’s normal for this kind of enchantment, if it is an enchantment, they think it’s at the peak of the pass. So we keep going until we find the enchantment and break it.”

Hoping all the while you can do that and survive; there’s a lot of the Power in something able to hold down a mountain range. Suspect, conscious, old-fashioned uncanny, it doesn’t especially matter to the amount of Power this has to take.

“Then we get home by a route that avoids this road completely; the Hills won’t be happy about it, and where the Hills are unhappy we don’t want to be.” A great deal of specific agreement comes back to me.

“Do we really need to kill all these Reems guys?” One of the team on tube two.

“Our goal is to break the road, enchantment or otherwise. If we can do that without killing anybody, we do that. Once that’s done, we withdraw. Nothing good is served by killing anybody we don’t have to kill to break the enchantment.”

Which isn’t really what the artillerist was asking.

“If Reems had sent an ambassador, or sent a herald out in front of the host coming down from Meadows Pass last time, or just generally indicated a willingness to talk, Parliament would have had to figure out what to do. It might not have involved fighting; there’s no shortage of land that still has to have the eel-trees or whatever” — whatever is a distressingly long list — “pried off of it.

“What’s happened is that we’ve seen a technical invasion, those guys in Westcreek, and we’ve come up into the Northern Hills to do something about it. It might have been one sorcerer and some guys trying desperately to escape internal politics in Reems.”

Rust describes Reem’s internal politics as vicious, “in the full artistic sense”.

“Instead it looks like the entire Archonate is making a road out of their own despair to get through the Northern Hills. When they realised someone was coming, they put a bunch of troops out front, which is only caution, and a bunch of fire-priests with militant banners, which for the entire hundred-odd years the Commonweal has been in contact with the Archonate has meant ‘no quarter’.”

Fire-priests have an uncomplicated theology; immolating people purifies them from sin, so the more people you burn to death the less sin there is in the world, and the more holy you are for doing it. They can sound quite pleasant to talk to, briefly, but as a practical matter they exist to immolate the Archon’s enemies, foreign and domestic.

“It’s entirely possible they didn’t know they were heading into the Commonweal when they started scouting down Westcreek. They may have though they’d found a way around what happened to them six years ago at Meadows Pass. We have no way to know. We can’t even say we know with complete certainty that were the Archonate to get through to the Creeks they wouldn’t wander about greeting everybody with glad cries, chocolate, and candied rose petals.”

You can get a shrug through the binding. Overdo it, and all your listeners will shrug, too. So far as I can see, only four. And some shoulder-twitches.

“I’m the only Standard-Captain in the Creeks.” It is unusual for there to be even one, and everyone knows that. If it turns out this wasn’t forethought but a chance to get me somewhere I was unlikely to do harm, I am going to have to find a remote hilltop and laugh and laugh.

“Which means that in law, it is my inescapable duty to respond to an invasion.”

Various nods, a tiny thread of relief from Blossom.

“The traditions of the Line do not look kindly on waiting and asking Parliament.” Another laugh, mostly from the battery. Do that, and it’s a tossup whether the Line or Parliament hangs you. One specific time, it was both, because neither was willing to not do it themselves.

“Doing the job by the least-sufficient-means, here and now, means I expect we’re going to kill thousands more people from Reems. Should we succeed, and they really are trying to get away from something overwhelmingly terrible, you could argue we’re going to kill all of them.”

Presuming.

“I don’t see any alternative way to stop the invasion that removes the road, and we have to remove the road.” Slow nods. Nobody has any doubt that there are worse things than Reems in the world; Reems could never have produced Split Creek, anything able to do that would eat the Fire-Priests, one way or another, and it’s an article of faith in the Creeks that the existence of Screaming Buttweed proves that there is indeed a single master devil, the cruel Adversary of Mankind.

“Our Staff Thaumaturgists have no alternative suggestions.” Rust is standing beside the ghost-horse, drinking coffee, the complete picture of a man with no words to offer. Halt has found a chair, a small table complete with stem glass and decanter, and a bemused trooper to hold the light. The clicking of Halt’s knitting needles is briefly very loud, and I can feel the ancient terror’s certainty that we must be sure to kill all those responsible for the road-enchantment with the same ease and clarity that I can feel my feet. The lake of faces all stay thoughtful, though, so, no, Blossom’s getting it, too, and Blossom doesn’t like it at all but agrees.

There’s this settling through the binding, as everyone, living and dead, agree they don’t have a better idea.

“Can we keep them out of the Creeks?” Sergeant Dove, asking it as a simple and practical question.

“Won’t know until we try.” That gets a ghostly grin from Twitch, and a live one from Blossom and most of the gunners, and some narrowed eyes from the Company. It’s the customary Line rhetorical response to questions about the future. The dead will feed that to the living, given a little time.

“Reems must have a lot of people here. The troops we’ve seen have been protected from direct use of the Power, and can apparently be sent berserk all at once. That sort of thing gets done for advantage in a close fight; once you’re closely engaged, your guys get more dangerous.”

“Kinda hard on the soldiers.” Someone from the company, and alive.

Rust’s actual voice is the quiet, considered thing you’d expect from the plain and honest exterior. The one steel butterfly could be a hat-band decoration, if you didn’t see it fly there. The smell of dim smoke, as from some vast burning of kingdoms far off, and the quiet voice filling the whole camp from edge to edge at the same volume, are not.

“God-King autocracies are a means to concentrate the Power, much as the battle-standards of the Commonweal are a means to concentrate the Power. Unlike the battle-standards, autocracies are inefficient; where the combined focus of a formation on its standard is greater than the sum of its parts, the power of the Archon is much less than the sum of the Archonate’s subjects.”

Rust’s voice stays good and plain and honest. Listening, I think about preserved specimens in jars, dim dead floating in formaldehyde, without ever anything that would let me tell you why.

“From this you may correctly deduce that nothing available to the Archonate of Reems permits any combined use of the power to greater effect. What is considered modest personal prosperity in the Commonweal is the mark of wealth and rank in Reems, and obtained through effort extracted from subordinates. The majority of this must in turn be passed upward, toward the Archon, who permits no rival hierarchy to divert effort away from the Archon’s purposes.”

“They put up with this?” Many sources, some of whom are dead.

“Any rival hierarchy begins weak, facing an Archon whose justification for holding power is victory.” I could have lived forever without hearing Rust say “weak” in just that way.

“Such a social organization exists to continue itself. There is little hope that it will ever value an individual.”

Rust knows, you can tell Rust knows, that a good Commonweal Independent really ought to disagree.

“It was my guess at Meadows Pass that comprehensive defeat without death would provide the possibility for an otherwise popular and powerful Archon to seize on success, instead of victory, as a substitute legitimacy.”

“Send a strong man home naked, and hope they find a way to call that success?” Sergeant Radish.

“When the alternative is some horrible death? When the success, through negotiation or simply asking, might well be easy? When anything that permits the Archon to live also permits the majority of their supporters to survive? When it is as clear as the second boot to the face that victory is not a possibility?” This builds, not in volume, but in smoke, the smell of burning iron, until there are sneezes. Eustace sneezes, a thoroughly apocalyptic effect, and Halt gives Rust a look, tone it down, exactly as one might look at the loud child at a party.

Every butterfly on the wall opens and closes its wings, ten thousand molten mirrors throwing the sunset sky across us.

“It was a guess. It was wrong.” I’ve never heard of anyone, anywhere, not even in legend or rumour, lighting grief on fire, but that’s what Rust’s voice smells like.

“You just heard one of the Twelve admit to guessing.” Blossom’s voice is a strange light thing. “You could live twice your life and not hear that again.”

Snickers.

Somewhere, from a Creek, living or dead, comes “So it ain’t the job we want. Anybody going to say it ain’t the job we got?”

No-one does, and the artillerists visibly straighten, as all the Creeks in the company go from a willingness to follow orders through an agreement that the thing needs doing to an unbending conviction that the thing shall be done. Ghostlight flickers around the standard, gold and green, and fades again.

The clink of Halt’s glass going back on the table is quiet, and perhaps no one else hears what I do not think Halt meant to say aloud. “Five hundred years since I felt that.”

“If you’re living, eat, wash, and then sleep. Tomorrow is another day. That don’t mean it’s a better day.” That’s practically a proverb in the Creeks, and it certainly is in the Line, so I get a nicely general grim chuckle back.

Now the hard part.

It takes me three tries to say the words. Everyone pretends not to notice.

“The dead have the watch.”

Chapter 17

Nothing comes to trouble the dead.

Not surprising. The Fire-priests were the maneuver force, there’s certainly another one somewhere but not here yet, maybe not certain what it ought to be fighting.

The down wake up ready to bite Eustace, and almost mad enough to do it.

Get breakfast into them, and four or five litres of water through each of them, and the only thing left of the dosing or their hurts is a mass complaint that even the air they breathe tastes of a demon’s dreams of bolted spinach, after it had rotted the second time. Nobody else has the direct problem but there are several strongly-phrased requests to quit it with the repeated vivid description during breakfast.

Halt can’t quite stop smiling.

There’s no rush; the newly-up get sorted into their new platoon structures, equipment gets checked, sometimes for efficacy of repairs, and the camp comes apart into marching order. The camp demolishes, and there’s the valley, and about five kilometres off, that same stone wall.

We stop about a kilometre from it. The standard gives plenty of detail, and this isn’t just a stone barrier wall; this looks like one face of a fortress, complete with subsidiary towers and an extended wall section masking the gate. Looks like it’s really three or four half-walls that interlock in the middle, with gate-castles over the inside and outside of each turn. The outer ends of the walls anchor into carved-back bare rock on the sides of the valley, backed by full-scale castles extending out from the wall.

That seems excessive.

There’s a brief feeling of vertigo while Twitch and Blossom sort out who has the main viewpoint. Bits of fortress briefly seem to shine, and there’s a thread of rapid discussion, mostly among Twitch, Blossom, and the gunners.

It’s more meant to stop something coming the other way.

We’re well below the peak of the pass; Rust thinks it could be another hundred kilometres of ground and two kilometres of elevation before we get there.

As a pile of rocks, it’s not very impressive. We could march through it, if there was no-one in it to object effectively. With the ward, it’s going to be more of a problem.

There are people, at least a thousand; the valley is about twelve hundred metres across here and it looks like they’ve got about one per two metres of wall and more in the towers.

Attention to orders.

Rust.

Captain? Cedar-wood smoke, and not too much of it. Rust is in a better frame of mind this morning.

Once the battery’s set up to get a good look at the ward as it goes fully active, I want you to do something that will get them to take it fully active and keep it fully active. If the ward breaks, great, but a good look is preferred to immediate breakage.

Since it’s very unlikely Reems piled up all those rocks and were total incompetents with the warding part.

Captain, Battery, deploy in line to range on the fortification.

Two has the left, Three has the right, One has overwatch. Don’t get distracted by the pretty lights, there have to be some actual sorcerers in there. Just enough to hold it, if they didn’t come try Rust in the dark.

Various versions of “Captain” come back. The artillery moves forward about fifty metres, and the two living platoons shift out to cover the flanks. I’m left with the colour party in front of me, well back from the battery. Halt and Eustace to my right, Rust to my left, and the drovers and stores waggons a little behind. The drovers are, rather philosophically, covering the heads of the bronze bulls and stuffing cotton and pitch in their own ears.

Three of four gunners are busy setting up instruments on heavy tripods; tube one’s dead gunner has to get someone from the shifted two files of living artillerists on tube one to do that. The Master Gunner and Blossom have an instrument each, between tubes two and three. They look like view cameras, only the lens in the front isn’t glass and don’t look transparent. The artillerists on the caissons are covering the heads of their bronze bulls, too, though with hoods made for the purpose instead of sacking.

Battery, Captain, ready from Blossom.

Everybody firm up on the focus and remember Rust’s on our side.

Rust, do it.

It comes, skipping down from mountain peak to mountain peak, then hill to hill, a great roaring vortex of dark fire a kilometre tall. There are sudden flashes of magenta light, a slowly growing golden glow in the centre of the vortex, and a disturbing sensation that the spell is a creature with stable, central, watchful eyes. The ground shakes and keeps shaking, the wind of its onset shredding all before it. The spell begins to lose height and gain width, and I have to put more attention into the focus to hold back the wind. There’s an inescapable sense of infinite malice, bearable because the focus stops most of it and we’re not the target.

You can see, bare-eyed, individual stone blocks in the face of the wall glowing as the ward comes up from standby to full strength, and various bright lines snaking along the mortar lines between them.

Rust’s spell hits the ward and slowly, slowly, grinds itself away on it. It must take close to ten minutes, and from the changing patterns in the ward it makes a good solid try at chewing its way through. The ward is so dense you can see the sharp line through the air over the wall, where the daylight hitting it is starting to refract into rainbows.

It looks like a few of the infantry on the wall fainted or collapsed; there are under-officers of some kind running around where the spell hit. There’s a little cluster of sorcerer-types on the west end of the nearest wall’s gate castle, looking relieved and triumphant and uncertain about either.

You can hear them talking, if you concentrate. I can’t make anything of it.

Anyone know what they’re saying?

Relief at their victory, follow by speculation on the profitability of selling such large women to a teahouse. Rust says this absently, with nothing like full attention. Only a few wisps of smoke, like a house over the next hill. A unit of the Regular Line would not be surprised; they would have encountered the Bad Old Days pressing on the marches or wandering over the border.

Women? Blossom says this in such a completely neutral tone of voice that even Rust looks suddenly cautious.

I do not believe they can clearly see that there are women with the column. The remarks appear speculative, and concern those expected to be found in our homes.

Rust pauses, and the butterflies fan, restless. A man at war between duty and tact, or honesty and caution. The word translated as ‘teahouse’ is entirely an euphemism.

Halt snorts, quietly. “The ham. Wants to see what Blossom’ll do.” That’s even quieter.

I get, Halt and Rust get, a sort of schematic view of the wall. It’s got various things marked on it but the important bit from the Captain’s perspective is that the ward is redundant in enchantments―it can lose a lot of those individual stone blocks — but not in terms of the connection between them; that’s one thing, and likely some physical thing. It’s also incapable of operating itself; it’s got to have a capable sorcerer directing it.

Are they dis-informing us?

The response was characteristic of active direction. Rust is completely certain of this, to the point where there’s more of the smell of a hot clean fire than smoke.

That spear-point in Eustace’s ear wasn’t much; there are modest talents with minimal formal training in the shot-shop back in Westcreek Town doing better enchantments for stuff we expend. And it was special; none of the others had one. The amulets are fussy, over-complicated, lapidary little things that don’t show much grasp of theory. Blossom is no less certain.

Another image, this one a graph of particle size versus distance. Larger particles stop much sooner; extremely fine particles may not stop at all.

We’d have to do it a few more times to be absolutely sure, but it looks like they’ve got the basic idea of a kinetic dump built in but haven’t figured out how to tune it so it reacts to kinetic energy directly. This looks precisely like the raw result, where all you get is size. The Master Gunner, sounding almost bored.

The next attempts to be made with carefully sieved sizes of coloured chalk? Rust is amused, and so is the Master Gunner.

Not that Rust couldn’t or wouldn’t do it. Or that the Reems guys might not think it’s a demon-summoning trick, and over-react, but I’d prefer something more direct.

Captain? Blossom, talking to just me and the other Independents.

I can break at least the first wall’s ward; we don’t know how connected it is across the walls. It will take an hour or so to set up and I’ll need the company to provide a lot of oxygen to a fire on the wall; just air molecules should go right through that ward.

Very good, Part-Captain. Carry on.

There’s a brief, esoteric discussion about aiming points, and Blossom asks for advice at the end.

“Aim a little low, Blossom dear; that way the air blast will be pushing the fire into the overhanging stone, it should hold it in place better.” Very watchful spiders.

Blossom grins, and nods, and turns back to the people actually standing around the battery commander.

“Get me a keg of salt, a keg of fluorspar, a fifty-litre metal bucket of mineral oil, and a regular fire bucket of sand. Put them over by tube one.” On the left of the line.

“When we get to it, tube one’s going to fire at the boss sorcerer; tube two’s going to fire at the wall.

“Tube three loads long black-red-red, optimise destruction, and aim where you think it will knock down the most of these layers of gate castle in the middle. Three takes the first shot you get that you think you can get it through a wobble or a stutter or anything. If you need to try another, try another. Fling is fast enough at this range you don’t need to heave.”

Blossom pauses, there are nods, no one looks away.

“Tube four loads long hot red-red-red, aims for the minimum safe distance, burst just off the ground, and does not fire until the ward is right down, not wobbling, not stuttering, DOWN. Got that?”

There’s a concerted, emphatic “Sir!” back, and much rushing about.

Captain, Sergeant-Major, keep them looking out, and up, and all round. The artillery is going to be doing lots of interesting things for a bit.

Rust dismounts, and starts going through the most amazing sequence of summoning preparations; coloured smokes, complex glowing figures with their lines crawling and waving so they pervade the grass, which waves teal and cyan in the breeze with strange characters no one could possibly read because of the waving. It just keeps getting larger and larger and more involved, and after awhile it’s built up so it’s got three-dimensional height and can’t decide which Platonic solid it wants to be. Sometimes it’s a nested series. Eventually Rust floats up and stands on the tip of the enclosing tetrahedron and starts carrying on in a theatrical way.

And Rust, too, comes from Twitch with a grin.

And Rust, too.

Neither Halt nor Blossom seem the least bit concerned, so I push out some generalised reassurance. Either Rust is doing it as a distraction or it’s not the complete end of the world.

The Reems guys are anything but reassured; there are telescopes showing up on the wall, and more junior sorcerers, some of whom are taking notes and arguing about what they see through the telescopes. There are various preparations among the troops, including what looks like an over-hasty amulet issue.

The Master Gunner is looking anything but reassured, too. But not because of Rust.

Blossom has produced what looks like an extra-shiny long shot, which is already loaded in tube two, and something that looks like a three-handled teacup.

A very tall three-handled teacup, very shiny and bluish. There’s a matching saucer, and the sand bucket is empty. So is the salt bucket, and there’s a major dent in the keg of fluorospar.

All of the artillerists are well away from Blossom’s work table with the cup and saucer on it. It looks like it’s good for about four, maybe five litres.

“We’ll get at least twenty seconds; we need less than ten of those for the toss. The dead can cycle the tube, so it’s just a question of loading it without dropping it.”

“Just.”

“Hank.” Blossom pauses, striving to be fair. “I know you hate the stuff, but think what it will look like to the guys on the wall.”

The Master Gunner visibly seizes upon all the will and courage to be found within with both metaphorical hands.

“Sir.” The Master Gunner’s in full-on lab gear, kinda shiny with bare eyes and glowing if you look through the standard. Blossom hasn’t bothered. Which can be the right thing; becoming a heat casualty in the middle of your complex wreaking is not a good outcome.

NOBODY joggles the Part-Captain’s elbow. Twitch’s best Sergeant-Major voice, and the various interested dead make a point of directing their interest elsewhere.

Whatever Blossom is doing, it involves the bucket of fluorspar and air and complexity.

“If anyone ever asks you, Standard-Captain, what the worth of the Commonweal is, look at that.”

Halt’s chin points at Blossom. Blossom’s wreathed in clouds of condensation and hard to see; whatever this wreaking is involves a lot of energy, and the use of the Power to manage it is bending the light.

“We’d have killed Blossom in the old days, just as soon as we realised how much talent the child had. It would have been that or accepting the dominion of a multi-millennial dark lord.”

“The Part-Captain is that talented?”

Halt snorts. “At least that talented. And smart enough. Grue is the other way around, and they’re good for each other, which is something else the Commonweal may count toward its worth. There was no friendship among sorcerers in the old days.”

What goes into the teacup is very cold, so cold Blossom’s enchantment is keeping the air off it, and — 

“The Part-Captain is doing that in a vacuum.”

“Massless pressure fields, in a vacuum.” Halt sounds nearly smug. “Look what Laurel did, as a natural enchanter of notable but not exceptional talent. The first standard-bindings, and your own species, Captain, before the Hard Road; five hundred years, and more to come. Blossom is seven times the enchanter Laurel was and Blossom is young, and much better educated.”

Stand by the big balloon.

Keeps me from thinking much about what Halt just said. They sent me a militant enchanter? A strong one?

The saucer just fits over the mouth of the teacup, sealing in place by some subtle means. Blossom keeps up the working that’s keeping the thing cold, and the Master Gunner, looking as though I may see a man outright die of fear, picks the teacup up in shot-tongs — all kinds of red shot you aren’t advised to touch with your hands — with great care just under the handles, sticking out evenly spaced from each other, there is only one working placement for the tongs, and walks it toward tube one. I guess you don’t want the teacup to spin randomly when you shoot it, so you use the handles like the fletching on an arrow.

Tube one’s muzzle is hunting, just a little; the dead gunners have it aimed at the bridge of the Reems boss sorcerer’s nose, who just took two steps to their own right, to look at something one of their junior sorcerers thinks wants showing to the boss. Tube two has been laid for the last fifteen minutes, ever since Blossom finished making that shot.

I grab the whole focus and reach half-a-kilometre across and just, lightly, start to squeeze. The company is a single adamantine thing in the focus, living and dead.

Tube one shoots, a three-layer toss, and you can see the teacup fly, looking slow, through the air. The boss sorcerer looks up, amused, and the cup shatters on the ward, maybe three metres above the top edge of the wall, two metres back from the boss sorcerer’s face, arcing down.

A cloud of rapidly thickening mist spears in from the ward, and the sorcerer, any flesh the mist touches, explodes. Bits of the stone battlements are burning, the glass lenses of a telescope, and maybe the air the mist passed through. The boss sorcerer pitches backward off the battlement, skull-bones fleshless and on fire.

Tube two fired as the teacup hit, a solid fling, and that shot ruptures on the ward and splashes something yellow-green as poison on the stone wall.

The stone burns. The great width of air shrinks in the focus’ grip, and the oxygen in it jets into the fire along the wall; the stone keeps burning, and the fire widens.

There’s something like a panic going on along the wall, and Rust spears both hands at the sky in triumph as a vast ring of darkness splits open and twirls in the summer sky. From it, immense and terrible masses of tentacles begin to reach for the wall, along with a hammering wave of hunger and madness. Most of our medics and drovers have hidden under something, even with all the attenuation from the focus.

Halt nods, judicious and approving. Rust must be using good technique.

The fire burns a little wider, and a little deeper, and the ward starts to stutter, just a bit. I keep the oxygen on it: too hard and you blow it out, too slow and it goes out, falling off the stone blocks, but this is digging well into the wall, and the stutters get deeper as the ward components stop having contact with all of each other all the time. There’s something enchanted coming apart in there, now. At the bottom of the next deep stutter something bad happens to it as Blossom spears power through the narrow time.

The stutter after that turns into a gap, and the wave of hunger and madness gets through the ward. Most of the Reems guys either crumple or run. Some of them jump; some, mostly around the surviving sorcerers, stay up and look functional.

More oxygen, upping the rate; the fire begins to feed on itself as the ward goes unstable and the connection’s physical substance starts to burn, green enough for copper.

Tube three shoots, a flash and a crash and a repeating hammering shock through your feet as the red enchantment unwinds in molten rock and slaps back and forth between the remaining bits of ward on the second and third walls. I shift the oxygen stream as close to that as I can, and lean hard; flaming rock shoots back in a fan across the faces of the third wall, and over it to the fourth.

The outer wall starts tipping outward as vast tentacles from the sky reach down and pull on it. Even the surviving sorcerers on it break and flee. The ward drops, stutters, drops hard.

Four shoots.

“TAKE A KNEE! HOLD FOR BLAST!” The Master Gunner.

Eustace makes a generally disgusted blatting sound.

There’s a terrible flash, well back from the inner wall; we’re safely in the shadow of the walls, but nobody on any of the battlements is. All of them smoke into nothingness.

Halt pats Eustace absently, making passes with the other hand which suggest Halt’s not totally confident the focus is going to hold against this wind.

The focus holds the wind and enough of the ground-shock; the focus holds the stone-blocks from the wall that come flying out as the bulging shock-wave splashes through the fortress-walls, too, and the cloud of dust. Dust sparks and fizzles as Rust unbinds all the despair out of it, making great passes through the dust cloud with increasingly spectral tentacles. There’s a prolonged roaring and some crashes and rumbles, the air crashing back into where the shock wave had shoved it out, lowering the pressure.

Report.

No down, no new dead comes back from Twitch.

Detonation a bit close, there, tube four from Blossom. No down, no new dead.

That was fun, in a smell of wet weeds burning.

Part-Captain, did that stuff in the teacup light the air on fire?

Blossom is unquestionably grinning.

Mostly not the air itself, Captain. The water vapour in the air.

Very good. It’s impossible to escape the sense I’ve just seen Blossom mildly peeved.

Battery, if any sorcerers pop out of that rubble, suppress them.

Sir. Blossom’s teams have already loaded white-black-black, ceramic-capped iron shot that can stand a full heave without immediately burning out of the air. Should at least get the attention of any surviving sorcerers with rash thoughts.

Company, keep an eye out. There’s still those edge castles. Which look only a little chewed. The main wall is flattened. Toppling a big chunk of the third and fourth walls into the lava lake caused by the black-red-red shot hasn’t cooled it down that much; the spell’s still running, lava’s still glowing a hot orange, hasn’t even skinned over.

Rust, inform anybody in the castles that they’ve got five minutes to get out of them.

Captain? from Twitch, quietly.

We’re not coming back this way and their road’s going away. They can take their chances with the Northern Hills.

There’s a vast spectral booming voice in Reemish, and various people do evacuate the castles.

Razing unprotected masonry with the focus is easy; you kick the bottom two courses out of the walls. Leaving them their well and their store-house is a bit trickier, but not a whole lot.

Rust, Halt, are there any active sorcerers over there? Certainly not any who have stuck their head up.

Halt is tapping a knitting needle against the front rail of the howdah, gauze curtains embroidered with flowers tied back on four sides. “No, Captain dear.” Don’t think about the smile.

“The Line will advance. AROUND the molten rock.”

And we do.

Chapter 18

Burning rock has a distinctive horrible smell. It’s a lot more horrible without the focus to thin it out, but enough leaks through that you notice.

A kilometre past the rubble of the wall, the smell is mostly gone. The flat, somewhat scooped-out, destroyed space looks a bit like longways through an egg. The wall stopped some of the blast, toppling, so the reach northward up the valley is longer, and the sides of the valley are only about a kilometre apart. The blast hit the valley sides and went up, crushing trees with rubble in a sort of reverse scree flow before the rubble cascaded back down.

If there were any reinforcements waiting behind the former wall, they’re not going to be a problem.

Once we get out of the destroyed space, it’s back to alpine meadow grass and a slightly narrowing, steadily rising valley with a ribbon of evaporating road-bed running down the middle of it.

Do we need to worry about despair coming off the road?

No from Blossom, and Even despair cannot despair and escape at one time from Rust.

So they’re losing years worth of despair harvesting?

Possibly. Rust’s voice has some of the breeze-over-burning rock in it, and something darker and more acrid.

Anybody — and this is to everybody, drovers and smiths and any of the bronze bulls who might feel like chiming in — see any Reems guys moving north at any time?

There’s a broad silence.

Thank you.

Gunners, Sergeants, Master Gunner, Sergeant-Major; start looking for a way out of this valley.

Sir comes back nine times. Toby still sounds like Toby; Twitch still sounds way calmer than the living man. All the gunners seem slightly baffled.

Radish sounds worried I’ve gone deeper into madness. Dove sounds afraid of not being pessimistic enough.

Nobody working on the road; nobody moving down to try to fix the road, unless they were all back of the permanent wall and got toasted. I’m betting they weren’t there. Both walls were up for awhile; Reems either isn’t in a hurry to extend the road or they can’t.

Lots of wheelbarrows. Blossom’s the best artillerist in the Commonweal. “Sneaky” is not a virtue in artillerists.

Seen any waggons? Draft animals? Stone-boats? Anything that looked like a chicken coop or a milk goat?

Anything that looked like there’d been grazing? The Master Gunner, sounding disgusted. Not like I didn’t miss that, too.

Rust, have you ever seen a bronze bull or something like one in use in Reems?

There are a small number, employed in ritual. Mostly horses. Most hauling tasks in Reems are horses or mules. Cold smoke, the kind you get when it’s foggy and the fire’s out and you can still smell there was burning.

That was a real wall. Blossom is entirely sure of this, and so am I.

It was a real wall, but it’s been up for more than a year. Probably more than two, the grass looked untouched. You can usually see where the heavy grazing was last year, even if there isn’t any this year.

Twitch and the dead gunner are having an argument about grades, and pointing at a little…more of an out-wash gully than an actual valley. What we’re in would be a hanging valley down into something larger if these weren’t the Northern Hills. As it is, Rust’s estimate of a hundred kilometres to go could be spent going round and round in a spiral, or we could go over a saddle and hit ninety kilometres of Altiplano full of creatures that think Eustace looks tasty.

What I do not want to do is run smack into the Archon.

We can make it. We can’t make it fast, and it might dead end. Twitch, sounding philosophical.

Left wheel and up the side valley. Fast as you can. One, you’re on track sweep; we don’t want to show a track.

Rust, anything you can do to make it look like we’re not here or are somewhere else, do it.

There’s a sudden large cloud of butterflies from wherever Rust stashes them. They all start flying up the main valley, next to the slowly sublimating road, and don’t get a hundred metres looking like butterflies. Company and battery shimmer out of butterflies, until there are no glints of wing and nothing missing in the mass of people and waggons and bronze bulls rolling forward beside the road.

I can see myself striding along beside the standard. Eustace seems very plausible, as does Blossom and the red horse-thing. The Halt-figure on Eustace is a little shrunken thing, scarcely able to hold its head up.

That is what anyone outside the standard-binding would see, Captain. The spiders are not so much pleased, as patient. Halt’s face is mostly in shadow; the howdah cover, the shawl worn like a hood, the great dark mass of the mountains as we turn left and start to climb. I can still seem the gleam of teeth, and of eyes, and the worn jet cane-handle.

Listen up.

Got too focused on kicking the door in, and didn’t check to see if Gunnar was home. None of the Creeks, and only two of the artillerists, get the reference, but they know what I mean.

We’re getting away from the road, and off our line of march. We’re going to head up this little valley until it gets too steep or we can hop the ridge going northward. If it gets too steep, we’re going to consider a little road-building or tunnelling of our own.

If we’re lucky, Reems stopped building the road toward the Creeks because they got too busy fighting whatever is pushing on them. If we’re not lucky, they figure they don’t need any more road to get to the Creeks and what we hit was a screening force in front of their main host.

We don’t want to fight the Archon head-on; if there are enough of them, we might lose a straight-up fight. Between a much better multiplier and recent dead, it would have to be truly a lot, but so far as we know, there are a lot. And just because it’s a clumsy ritual doesn’t mean its output is inflexible or difficult to handle.

Especially since all those direct-influence-of-the-Power amulets look like something meant to keep whatever Rust did at Meadows Pass from working, on the one hand, and Rust’s a little busy right now, on the other.

Rust looks like a man muttering in evil dreams and miraculously not falling off the ghost-horse. I suppose your bones know how to ride by the time you’re five hundred at the outside. Rust is at least eight hundred. The last glimpse I get from the height of the focus, round the chunk of mountain our gully heads up past, is of the battery and company rolling steadily upwards. One’s got a good grip on our back trail, and Toby’s made a point of reaching variable distances back beside the road to lift the waggon tracks slowly out of the sod. Even someone very good’s going to have trouble escaping the impression we just sort of took to the air.

Should help a lot if somebody from Reems recognises Rust’s deception, instead of just throwing a mountain at it.

Officer training involves repeated emphasis that learning behaviour, or even just character improvement, in the recent dead isn’t pointless; that it’s going to help you get the live ones home. Sometimes it’s more work to hang on to that than other times.

It’s a nice little gully; the stream is either seasonal or occasional, and it’s pretty much nothing right now. From the depth of the rock cuts it’s a torrent sometimes, but we’re getting the waggons up the bed in single file with only a little difficulty. We’d be in serious trouble if we had to do it without the focus but there’s not much about making a bunch of sand act like a good road the company doesn’t know. That keeps us off the steep sides and out of the trees, which are substantial. Conifers, and mostly over fifty metres high.

A large, very angry, and seriously puzzled boar bear goes over, bumping along twenty metres overhead on top of the focus. Looks like a running bear, and not full grown. Eustace gives it the eye, and the puzzlement gets worse. I get Didn’t see the point of killing it from Dove, halfway to expecting to be apologetic.

There’s a point to not killing it; dead bears draw vultures. If Reems has anybody good enough to read the memories out of all the animals to see where we’ve gone we’re in grim trouble anyway. I try to make that feel more actively approving than it sounds. Anybody can see vultures circling. Anybody with experience of armies will look.

I get the impression of a waved salute back from Dove, and we keep climbing.

We run out of gully in a little alpine meadow, maybe two hectares; it looks like there’s a basalt dike holding the flat in, above the stream, keeping it too wet for the big trees. There are plenty more big trees around it, but we’ve definitely run out of waggon-passable terrain.

Toby, how’s the back-trail?

Clean, Captain.

Rust is still muttering away. I most emphatically don’t want to stick the focus out there and mess with the deception.

Toby, One, you’re getting the watch. Eat by files and don’t stint the beer ration. Especially since Twitch’s got it set so it’s not going to do anything to your alertness.

Two, Three, we’re going to go dark on the focus; quiet, defensive, set to absorb. Nobody do anything active, we’re trying not to make any noise.

Not something the company is used to doing, and I get some very alert attention as the focus shifts into the Power equivalent of a deep, still, cold pond that somehow fails to reflect the sky. Since I don’t have to run it like that down to the ground — if there are Reems guys in these trees, well, something truly powerful actively hates us — anywhere but the side facing back down the valley, we can leave it like that until something makes us move.

Cold camp; eat by files. That goes out to the battery, too. They didn’t need to be told to site the tubes pointing back down our track. Between knocking the wall down and getting up this gully, they all need feeding.

Twitch, how are we for water?

Filled the tanks this morning. Humidity’s been good. Deserts can fool you bad; if you can’t get water out of the air and have a planning failure you can get stuck somewhere dry enough you should have brought more water. There are certainly alpine deserts, but so far, so good. The Northern Hills don’t feel like being one this décade.

We’re up five days on rations. Very wry indeed. The dead do eat, or at least you try to get them to, it keeps them from drifting away from an awareness of the living, but nothing you have to haul in a waggon.

Any bright ideas, Sergeant-Major?

Besides not standing up too soon? Twitch puts a lot more wry into that one. We’ve both seen ducking fail that way, someone coming back up before the whoosh past their head had happened.

I figure the main failure mode’s if they weren’t getting ready to roll down into the Creeks. If they’re holding the line up at the Reems end with everything they’ve got, it’s going to look like we stomped their rear and vanished into thin air. Even dead, Twitch will tap when thinking.

Or butterflies. Twitch sounds thoughtful.

Having the opposition dissolve into butterflies could throw you, yeah. Which tends to produce disproportionate, panicky responses. But…

Figure Reems has been suckered by something? Or just the Archon?

Kinda feels like that, don’t it? Or they got tangled up in something worse, trying to get help to fight the first thing off?

Hungry ghosts, demons, malignant shadows, fire and ice and malice, the list of ways summoning terrible things to smite your enemies with have gone wrong is a long one. The list of things that have come to people with what looked like a really good offer of help is nearly as long.

So we’ve got to get the main road enchantment, and do it without either letting the other thing know where we came from, or leaving the Archon in a position to keep trying to become a demon prince as an escape hatch or whatever they’re really trying?

Can’t let their host past us, at least not for long, either. Twitch sounds decidedly contemplative. Artillery ambush from here?

Hot red shot into the flank of an unsuspecting host would put a major dent in it.

Battery, how many of the hot reds have you got?

Hot black-red-red, twenty seven. Regular hot red-red-red, five. Two special hot red-red-red, and a half-dozen red-black-red. Those are door-knockers, they’re meant for punching holes in fortifications.

Special hot?

They’ll track on something moving. Meant for something big and mean. No extra boom.

Anti-demon shot.

Load up a couple regular hot red-red-red; if the Archon presents us with an ambush opportunity, let’s be prepared to take it.

Sir comes back, thoughtful.

If all else fails, that will give the host trying to climb up here after us some amount of pause. Might even be our best chance if we could be reasonably sure the Archon couldn’t hit us with a whole mountain.

Somebody comes by and hands me my mid-day kilo of hardtack, a mug of beer, a full canteen of water, and quarter kilo of jerky. The alleged cheese comes by a minute later, from where someone’s tried to slice it evenly on a ration-box top and done a credible job. The condensed citrus has gone in the beer, which is actually an improvement, flavour-wise.

Maybe food will let me figure out what I’m missing so I can get us out of this hole.

Chapter 19

There’s just something about thinking better when I’m chewing. One of the seldom-mentioned great things about the standard-binding is that you can go right on chewing while you talk.

Part-Captain.

Captain?

When you said the despair encapsulation looked like an empirical success, did you mean the make-despair-solid part, or the whole extract-and-bind-despair process?

Making it solid. You can feel the flare of understanding. Blossom doesn’t curse, I suppose you can’t when things are going to happen if you say it, but the whole command can feel Part-Captain Blossom get angry. There’d be fewer wild eyes if Blossom did curse. That’s at least an indication that someone right here isn’t going to eat the angry.

Blossom gets it tamped back down. Halt drifts over toward me. Eustace, with a sort of slobbery glee, is eating a big brambly berry bush of some kind. I can see Halt wanting to get clear of that; even those most enthusiastic about getting some of the berries are giving up. Even without the snorting fire to worry about, when Eustace slobbers it’s extensive.

Blossom carefully hands over formal control of the battery to the Master Gunner before heading over. Face isn’t angry, face is calm, but apparently Blossom can’t do much about the hair full of sparks.

It’s never clear if Halt’s camp chair follows Halt around or not. It always seems to be right there when Halt wants to sit down, but you’d think someone would notice a chair trotting along, and no one has.

Very polite of them, but now I have to talk out loud.

Or maybe just listen.

“Sorry, Captain. I should have caught that.” Blossom crouches down, no creak or clank of armour. That’s a trick. I hope that’s something else being tested for the armoury. “Despair, joy, love, vigour, anything like that, extracting it is ancient. There are written instructions tens of thousands of years old.”

Tens of thousands? Twitch, seriously startled.

Halt looks up from knitting. The simultaneous voice and spiders is a new experience. “Readable writing perhaps older than a hundred thousand years is known. Writing exists between twice and thrice that age.”

I get a lot of bogglement back from Twitch. I’m a little boggled myself. The oldest translatable writing I knew about was under ten thousand.

“It was a mighty feat of necromancy.” Not, I think, Halt’s feat, but still. A tone of voice you wish Halt wouldn’t use.

“The basic three-to-five-century cycle for a dark-lord style sorcerer to rise, fall, and be replaced has been going on for a long time.” Blossom’s tone goes scholarly, and Blossom as a whole starts losing the hair-sparks. Halt’s knitting has this contented clicking tone to it. Either I should be reassured that Halt knows what Halt’s doing or seriously concerned that Halt worries about Blossom having a loss of temper.

“Sometimes there is a thousand years or more of a single rule in absoluteness.” At least one of which was Halt’s, and you can tell the spiders think fondly of it. “But mostly things are the same; a sorcerer rules, falls, and another rises. Most are peasants, and try to avoid horrors and death.”

Twitch subsides into complete bogglement. Officer’s School, the scholarly qualification for a warrant of commission, tries hard to describe the Commonweal as a novel social organization; when you go out there and keep external enemies from breaking it, you had better understand how it works as a whole. You have to be a complete idiot not to pick up how fundamentally fragile the whole idea is, in terms of maintenance effort. It’s for-sure much better, but that doesn’t make it easy to keep the great and accidental run of luck going.

To a sergeant the Commonweal is pretty much eternal, something older than your grandmother’s grandmother.

Blossom has this look. “I didn’t do the math. Extraction’s ancient, but it’s slow and it’s fussy and it takes lot of practice. It’s fussy in large part because it’s easy to go too fast and kill the subject, so no one cares about making it work better.”

“So the road represents more work than could be done since Meadows Pass?” Which doesn’t really change anything in terms of what we have to do. It might change a lot about what we expect the Reems guys to have done, though.

“It could be a giant necromatic construct, if they had enough people to sacrifice. I have no idea how much is a whole person worth of despair.”

Commonweal experimental ethics boards are fine with making life, if you’re careful enough; Eustacen and alleged horses and new food crops are all fine, but fatally draining anybody of anything for experimental purposes most completely is not.

“More than the individual encapsulations, Blossom dear.” Halt goes right on knitting.

“So this is probably a long-term project, not a response to Meadows Pass.” Blossom still sounds intensely rueful.

Most Independents aren’t quite this distressed by making mistakes. I suppose enchanters have to worry more about getting it wrong; vast and terrible energies are one thing, stuffing hours worth of them into small physical objects quite another.

There’s a thump and a clang as Rust topples off the ghost-horse.

What clanged? Nothing came through the focus that I could tell.

I get a mass shrug, and a couple of guys from Two go help Rust up. Rust is apparently fine, if a little staggery. Rust’s hat is off, the single butterfly on the band surrounded by a globe of pulsing orange and green fire, and the hat itself is smoking.

Rust notices this reaching for it, hand almost on the fire, definitely staggers, does that word-or-noise thing Independents are so fond of, three liquid syllables, and there’s a distinct pop sound as the flames go out. The butterfly’s wings flick, once, twice, from closed to open and back to closed. It’s still shining and molten and apparently content.

Rust, even straighted up and back on balance, looks a bit haggard. The guys from Two are suggesting Rust ought to eat something. Presumably they didn’t get that in the old days, but the Independents, even the Twelve, have to be used to being surrounded by people who know from experience that using the Power makes you really hungry.

It’s a sign of social acceptance that they’re not asking “hungry for what?” in Rust’s case.

Got the illusion about five kilometres over the crest. Someone dropped a mountain top on it, damaging the road further. Not much smoke, last wisps or first.

Thank you. Go eat.

“Anyone figure they think we’re really under there?”

Halt makes a gesture at the air, and there’s a little image of a big, big pile of rock, still with a few trees on top of it, crackling and hissing and slumping oddly toward the middle, in a very credible imitation of an attempt to shield with the focus failing under sheer mass. Lack of air will get you eventually, too, but I figure Rust wanted the fakery to go quick; less work that way.

Blossom’s got an intent, note-taking look, and even Halt appears to be stuck with expressing grudging approval.

“So they more than half-believe it, but they’ll check? And then they’ll head down to the line of the wall, and see how bad things are, but not in any huge hurry?”

Blossom nods. Somewhere, spectrally, Twitch isn’t nodding, it’s a request for attention.

“Twitch, go ahead.” I pass that through the focus, too. Not enough rules for these mixed-mechanism conversations.

Take a look. Twitch swings the viewpoint through the full circle, low, because the focus is crouched looking innocuous and adding things up from everbody’s eyes isn’t helping yet. There’s a file headed out every cardinal direction but east, along with a couple artillerists with telescope cases per file. East, and the gully we came up, is being watched by the whole sited battery, which ought to do for eyes. Getting that organised is part of Twitch’s job, so I wonder what’s been noticed already.

It’s a very symmetric little meadow; nearly perfectly circular, food plants or at least berry bushes near the middle, grazing so excellent about a quarter of the bronze bulls are contemplatively chewing on a few grass stalks and Blossom’s horse-thing is stuffing itself, a stream in from the west, and implausibly steep and even rock walls all the way around. It doesn’t look like it’s what erosion did, somehow. And the rocks above the upwelling spring of the stream are bedded flat.

They really do look like rocks, too, not old bricks or ashlars; the thicknesses are uneven and the edges aren’t really parallel.

Not that a spring at the high edge of an alpine meadow, a big, constant, stream-feeding one, is an especially plausible natural occurrence.

“Has the battery got anything in the hot red range for destruction that could be adapted to trigger when somebody from Reems walks over it?”

Blossom gets the slow smile I’m coming to associate with finely divided aggregate. The metal-bending grin goes with looking maybe nineteen; this one goes with Halt looking uneasy.

“The Part-Captain is not going out to plant it; I want to send less than four files, two if that will work, one company, one battery.”

“It’ll take about an hour to set up, unless you want it to be ridiculously specific about when it goes off.” Blossom manages to keep the “why don’t I get to have fun?” out of voice or face, transitory irk notwithstanding.

“The centre of any group of more than a hundred that isn’t us.”

“Sir.”

Blossom starts to get up, and I wave to keep going. Will get the rest of this through the focus anyway.

Twitch, check the water; if it’s good, we refill. Then get a couple-four files working at the rock wall back of the spring; treat it like it’s an old stone wall and see if it comes down neatly.

Sir.

While that’s going on, detail one company file and one battery file to carry the Part-Captain’s device back down to the main valley; have them place it about half a kilometre downhill of where we turned.

Twitch doesn’t quite manage to form the question outright, but I answer it anyway.

As carefully and as sneakily as they can; check with the Part-Captain before they go out about how deep to bury it. The intent is to cause the host of Reems casualties, not to deter them.

Sir.

Attention to orders.

Heads go up all over the meadow.

It’s nap time, duty files and pickets and rock-moving detail excepted. Finish eating, get ready to move, and rack out. The plan is to wake up at dusk, get dinner, and move out in the dark. Rude strangers may alter that plan, so pickets look sharp.

Toby, One, you rack out too. You’ve been pulling extra watch. There’s faint surprise under the Sir but they do it. It helps keep the dead attached to living concerns if they keep acting like they’re alive. It doesn’t usually last, but all I really need is long enough to get them home in shape to say their goodbyes.

I get a surprisingly relaxed diffuse Sir back, and everybody does just that. Even Rust racks out; body safely far away or not, having a mountain dropped on an active complex construct like that can bruise you in the talent.

It takes Blossom forty minutes to set the thing up, and the two files Twitch detailed head off with it. It looks like a standard five litre metal jar, and it’s obviously fairly hefty.

“Copper’s medium dense, and it’s mostly copper.” Blossom takes a cup of tea from Halt with a smile and a sort of social bob-of-acknowledgement; I take one too, because, well. Prudence.

“It’s from parts, not a hot red shot, so inventory’s the same.”

“Parts, Blossom dear?” Halt does a matronly voice full of disbelief incredibly well.

“Most secure place I’ve got is the battery commander’s waggon. Wasn’t planning on doing any shot fabrication on the move, I couldn’t bring myself to leave some of the hotter supplies lying around without supervision.”

Halt nods over sipping, and makes it look graceful. Some of that stuff will try to get out of its jars, a subject covered in dreary detail in the field manual, mostly under putting out fires and restraining the suddenly struck mad.

It’s rather nice, for tea.

Halt’s shawl is still up; Eustace finished the berry bush and fell asleep in the ruins, as it were. The howdah, looking morose and splattered, has crept up to crouch behind Halt. Halt cocks an eyebrow at Blossom, who looks wry and waves meaning across the empty air. The howdah is suddenly shiny, and then not at all morose.

Can’t see how it could make any noise, never mind contented chirping, but it does.

“I’ll keep an eye on the sapping party; you get some rest as well, Part-Captain.” You, too, Twitch. No need to push it yet, so we don’t.

“How much sleep do you need, Captain?” I’ve never heard of an Independent who needed as much sleep as humans typically do. It’s either wanting to point that out or plain curiosity behind Blossom’s question, I can’t tell.

“Twelve hours, twice a month, is plenty. Go a season awake and I’ll sleep five days.”

Blossom looks outright startled.

“Laurel’s is one of the few examples of troop-improvement that worked.” Halt’s looking at the pouring, topping up only Halt’s cup of tea. Mine’s not far enough down to justify additions.

Blossom goes and lies down; Twitch gets the pickets set up to swap in three hours, which should be halfway through the down time, and pretty much everybody in camp racks out.

I sit there, and finish my tea, and my lunch, even the alleged cheese, and keep a fairly distant eye on the sappers; no sense having the focus right there and possibly alerting someone.

With the focus and the camp quiet, it’s mostly a chance to listen to the mountains.

Chapter 20

The four files on rock-moving duty aren’t sure whether to look pleased or worried.

They’ve done a good job; there’s a nice hole in the otherwise solid rock, and behind that there’s a long stretch of cave.

A little bit of bridging over the spring and the cave looks entirely fine for waggons. Eustace is going to have to mind horns and ceiling, but I expect will manage.

Quick work, too; the replacement files for the pickets are getting collected to head out.

“Good job. One file stays on watch, the other three rack out.” Doesn’t look like I’m going to have to be more specific than that; the file closers aren’t even looking like they’re going to resort to dice to decide.

About an hour before dusk, the two files sent off to be sappers comes back. So far as a distant over-watch can tell, nothing paid them any attention beyond a few birds; something like a crow, but with a lot of blue. Blossom left them some vigour and cranberries with the gunner in charge of the watch to the east. They drink it. A range of faces get made.

There might be a reason of art you have to leave the vigour and cranberries purely tart. Or maybe this Grue likes the faces.

Dinner, actually cooked, or at least boiled a little, and actual coffee. The company gets its great vat of much-boiled wood lettuce root stuff, and seems better for it. Rust is recovered enough that the pitcher-of-cream trick works fine, but obviously not entirely recovered. Blossom takes a slow squinty look at Rust and comes back from the battery commander’s waggon with a silver flask and a stern look. Rust takes a couple of good swallows from the flask, and doesn’t make faces. The grass for a metre around Rust’s feet goes from knee high to past a Creek waist, but Rust doesn’t make faces. Blossom tsks a little, taking the flask back, and Halt outright grins. Even Halt is eating something, instead of just drinking tea. I may someday get used to seeing pieces of hardtack balanced on the edge of Halt’s saucer like they’re sugar cookies.

The medics are moving around making sure that anybody bruised or battered has applied their diverse unguents, and that the variously lightly damaged have stayed patched. One or two of the medics seem sufficiently challenged by Halt’s dosing the badly hurt that they may go for Independents. Creeks don’t tend to leave, even to study; it’s not like the area is sparse in talent with the Power. The way the south frontier with the Paingyre is going, they might not be able to leave.

We can leave here, though, no problem. None of the pickets have seen anything, the buried surprise hasn’t gone off back in the valley, and there hasn’t been so much as a stray thought land on the focus.

It feels like Twitch is standing behind my left shoulder when Twitch is paying attention to the outside world. Not turning to look takes a bit of effort. It would be easier if it didn’t look like Halt and Rust can see Twitch standing there just fine. Blossom and the Master Gunner are to my right and there’s this sort of space off to the left for Eustace, who is maintaining a martyred look while the howdah, under stern injunction from Halt, climbs back down and puts on what I have to call shoes.

“The Northern Hills have been considered suspect terrain for longer than the Commonweal has existed; I think what we’ve seen today is an indication that it is in fact a conscious terrane. If that’s true, I believe it wants Reems’ attempts to colonise it stopped, and for whatever reason can’t do that itself.”

Probably wasn’t expecting bulk solid despair, either.

“If that’s not true, there’s at least a chance that this is an elaborate setup on the part of Reems to get us to bury ourselves.”

Elaborate goes with Reems. Subtle doesn’t, and this would be subtle, if that’s what it was.

“So far as I’m aware, the level of subtle control over the landscape we’re seeing is inconsistent with anything but a conscious terrane; that no matter what their best wizards know or how much power can be channelled through the Archon, there is no known mechanism whereby they could make subtle changes in the landscape in response to our presence.”

Rust looks at Halt, gets half a head shake, and looks back at me. “Not that I’ve ever heard of.”

Here goes.

“Attention to orders.”

“The battalion will proceed into the cave behind the spring. Two Platoon will lead, then tubes one and two, the colour party, the baggage, tubes three and four, Three Platoon trailing. One Platoon will attend on the standard.”

“I believe we are being assisted by the conscious terrane of the Northern Hills, which doesn’t like being colonised by Reems.” Since everyone knows the Hills are a lot less fussed about travellers or naturalists than anybody trying to log or mine, this gets taken calmly.

“Be polite; no graffiti, no trash, if you just have to take a crap use a bucket.”

“Two, Radish — there’s a fine line between haste and recklessness. I want to move just on the haste side of it, but I want to NOT fall in a hole even more. Got it?”

Radish’s “Sir” is clear out of the mass acknowledgement.

I do the thing with focus that would be looking at Twitch if Twitch were walking around, and get a surprise.

“Everybody remember their Granny’s stories about the Hollow Hills?” The ghost’s voice is strong, the focus shaking air, and even half of the artillerists are nodding. Every single Creek is nodding, Line and drover and medics. It makes me wonder just how their ancestors got to the place.

“Do this right, and you’ll get to tell your grandchildren you walked under the Hollow Hills yourself, with Halt and a graul Standard-Captain.”

There are weird grins, and some bashful eyes, and Twitch gives them half an inhale before “Advance in order of march!

“Two Platoon, march in haste, march!”

Which is just what they do; it’s a neat job of bridging, too, broad and arched and shifting the spring pool a little deeper and to one side. I can feel the Master Gunner sorting out with the still short-crewed tube one that it’s tube one, tube two, then all the spare caissons.

I’ve been in a line battalion where the lead company going into an open field battle didn’t have this mood.

Even an easy-going bunch of Creeks aren’t too fond of Reems after the last couple of days.

Blossom’s standing to my left with a sword on, to all appearances a Line issue cavalry sword, that rare item, and is leading the horse-thing. It’s pretty clearly convinced we’re all quite mad to be going in that hole, and it just as clearly knows in its bones arguing with Blossom never works.

Halt’s standing on my right with the howdah out front; I suppose that makes sense, it’s got lots of limbs and extra grip if the ground gets bad in there. Then Halt, then Eustace, who likes this less than Blossom’s horse-thing does. Can’t explain to Eustace that the caissons are heavier.

The ghost horse shows no sign of caring, nose at Rust’s left shoulder, both standing outside of Blossom.

The first bunch of spare caissons rumbles over the bridge, and then it’s the colour party’s turn. Two files ahead of the standard, two behind, and the Staff Thaumaturgists and the Captain and the Part-Captain all in the middle, along with the riding animals. Which is not a good plan if there’s a cave-in as we go by, but, well. It’s not different from the overall risk.

There’s really good footing in the cave, wet sand mixed with drip-lime that’s mostly concreted it; the caisson wheels aren’t leaving ruts, never mind the stores waggons.

We get round the first turn and start to head down, a nice, even, curving passage with just enough grade you can tell it’s for-sure down. Blossom’s left hand waves — reins in the right — and the driving lights on the caissons in front of us come on. It looks kinda like water erosion, but much too even, and regular, and there’s still that excellent footing.

“So what’s the plan?” Just spoken, quietly, from the Part-Captain. It doesn’t feel like walking all that quickly. We’re at a good hastening pace, somewhere between five and six metres per second, but it doesn’t feel like it. It’s hard enough to keep track of how fast you’re really moving when hastening when you can see landmarks. Without needing to build the road, though, we could be a hundred and twenty kilometres away in six hours. That puts Rust’s worst-case peak-of-pass distance well within range.

“When we emerge, we’re going to be extremely lost. If there’s a major Archonate fortification there, we reduce it, making sure we destroy any major enchantments in the process. If there isn’t, we skip straight to getting un-lost.

“Anything more specific waits until we see the terrain; for all we know now, we could have to bubble everything up from under a glacier.”

I get a flash of the metal bending-grin.

I can feel the moment the tail end of Three Platoon crosses into the cave; the rock wall slumps up and restores itself out of the bridge.

Looks like it kept the larger pond.

Chapter 21

It’s maybe an hour until effective dawn. We’re high, and it’s cold, and the air’s thinner, but not too thin.

I’ve marched over worse roads in the Commonweal.

There’s the major fortification, all right. Maybe two kilometres away.

How can we tell it’s Reems? Getting suckered into smashing somebody else wouldn’t be a good start to the day.

Halt points, cane, not a chin lift. Blossom gives some quiet orders through the standard, and the gunners pull out the instrumentation. The word comes back before all of Three is settled on the right flank. It’s the same road.

We’ve emerged on the west side of the north slope of the pass: we’re coming back at the fortress from the Reems side. The terrane has a sense of humour.

The pass isn’t dead straight; there’s a kink to it, the point of it pointing a bit south of east. We’re on the west side, inside and just a bit higher; somewhere between the outer and the inner battlements in height. From the look of the rock, and the vertical slope the cave opened in to emit us, we’re standing on where the folks who built that fortress quarried the stone.

Standard-Captain. The first quick crackle as the tinder catches and you get that whiff of pine-sap going up fast. The Archon of Reems resides in that fortress in this hour.

My eyebrows aren’t the only ones going up. Halt’s gone so far as a head-tilt.

By my name in The Shape of Peace. Like walking past a lime kiln.

The standard is utterly certain Rust is telling the truth.

Halt mouths a word; five square metres of rocks go slick with frost. Blossom gives Halt a prim look.

An artillerist with a telescope throws an image at me, the east tower of the north gatehouse and five guys wrapped in scarlet cloaks with gold-chased helms and serious spears. Iron Guard.

The first faint blush of dawn touches the top of the peaks to the east. From inside the main keep, a scream and a light build together into a flash and silence.

Fire-priests. Various concerned looks slide into disgust or disdain.

Attention to orders.

Rust, I want you to try to reduce the fortress. I don’t think it’ll work, we’re not going to wait to see if it works, but this is not a diversion.

Unless you derive an essential benefit from fighting from inside the focus — Rust demurs — I want you to attack from somewhere that won’t draw attention toward the battalion. Beyond that, I don’t care where, so long as you can get there before the valley floor hits functional twilight.

Rust flips back a coat lapel, and there’s the white thread and the black. I doubt Rust needs sunlight to distinguish them any more than I do, but at least I know Rust understands.

Once you start, One, Two, the colour party, and Halt will assault the western fortress face. Objective is the road enchantment. Three covers the battery and the baggage. Use the time where the assault is crossing the valley to dig in, there’s no telling what’s coming out of there. Make sure you’ve masked the baggage and the medics.

The assault will continue until the enchantment is destroyed or all of Rust, Halt, and the Standard have fallen.

There’s a settling through the company. The battery spreads out a bit, and starts shifting the caissons so the spares are up even with the primary. Some of the artillerists are looking a bit wild around the eyes, picketing bronze bulls.

All clear on the objectives?

Nods, a curl of brimstone, a toast with a teacup from a grandmotherly woman, head under a shawl drawn up like anyone would in the cold, something that feels like what would happen if you could make a bell out of the Power and get it to ring. A mass yes from the Line. It’s getting harder to tell the artillery and company voices apart, even the live ones.

Privately now, especially since I wouldn’t bet that bell thing means Blossom is happy.

Sergeant, Part-Captain; Dove’s got the cover force because Three’s got the best odds of keeping you alive if a ground force gets here. Blossom, you manage the door-knockers and then you leave the shooting to the gunners. You’re in command, not running an artillery tube. If Rust and Halt and the Standard go down, get out: you, personally, get word back to the Commonweal by whatever necessary means. That specifically includes abandoning anything or anyone that’s going to risk your return. That is a direct, specific, and binding order.

It’s important Dove knows that too; the standard knowing is normally the important thing, but if this order applies the standard’s not going to be available.

Three’ll handle any Archonate troops, you’re going to have to deal with everything else and it could be anything. Whatever it is, elegant buys no yams; overkill.

I can feel Dove nodding, Dove’s head isn’t moving. I can feel Three agreeing with Dove, too.

Overkill?

That is a technical question, and a good reminder. It gets a not-private answer.

Part-Captain, Staff Thaumaturgists, those serving in the Line, those of the Line; the Line is engaged in war beyond the borders to prevent invasion of the Commonweal. Do no harm to one another; by all other expedient means, achieve the objectives of your orders this day.

A Standard-Captain of the Line, I declare this the duty of the Line, necessary and unavoidable.

The standard swallows a memory of the words; there’s going to be a court, when we get home, and they’re going to want to hear them.

All three Independents look a little croggled. I don’t think Blossom knew the restrictions of the Shape of Peace on the exercise of the Power had an abeyance clause. The company heard it as “don’t worry about who might be behind the door, just kick it in” which is true, too. The battery is going to shoot what Blossom tells them to shoot, unless the Foremost show up and stand in front of the tubes, but that was true already. And maybe even then.

Rust, get going. Good luck.

A wry wave at Rust’s hat, and at least eight hundred years of not dying rides the silent ghost of a horse away into shadows.

Drop your marching kit with the baggage. DO NOT drop your water. I was expecting this arrangment back in the meadow, and so was Twitch, so there isn’t much in the way of moving pointy sticks around. We’re low, and the colour party has most of them.

Blossom hands me four; the tips are flaked glass, a dull dark cullet glass with unsettling colours in it. The other eight from the bundle go to individuals in the colour party. “Suitable for annoying demons.”

Quietly, Two, Halt, and the colour party move downhill and left, so we’re under the line of fire. Twitch, you’ve got tactical control once we’re through the wall. Up to the wall, we bubble up and move as fast as we can. We start running just as soon as Rust starts in on the fortress. Ten metres per second, two kilometres, a bit less; call it three minutes. Practically forever.

Blossom, we’re going to start running as soon as Rust starts in; if they start raising the wall-wards, start shooting. Otherwise start shooting whenever you’ll have the breach in the outer wall just before we get there.

Halt, once we’re through the wall, we’re there to keep you from being bothered while you destroy the road enchantment. Communicate wants.

Everybody, until Rust starts, we’re going to keep the focus obscuring us, and hunker down and not move.

It’s a long, long wait. Blossom passes three, four, two, six, one, five, the order to fire the door-knockers in, with such clarity that it’s stuck in my head. Which probably means everyone’s got this particular order forever, along with an awareness that doorknocker shot have flavours.

Next couple after that will be short black-red-red; don’t try to assail the breach until there’s been eight hits.

Got it. The Part-Captain is thorough; extra fiery death just in case the rock-shattering, ward-cutting rain of fiery death didn’t clear the space back of the wall.

It’s getting bright out, almost actual dawn for the valley floor; you can see the line of the sunlight sliding down the treed mountain slopes.

Can’t see what’s happening, but various Reems guys start running all over the battlements, striking gongs, and blowing horns. South-east corner, it looks like. No wards coming up; the fortress has them, but whatever Rust is doing hasn’t triggered them.

Everybody’s standing. Toby and Radish give Twitch the nod, one or two troopers who want to start drawing warswords or an adci get told not to be idiots, and Eustace heaves upright from lying with a huff. Doesn’t have to breathe fire, though you can tell Eustace prefers to.

At the run.

The Line will advance!

We’re running flat out in what’s left of the dark.

Chapter 22

It’s not especially physically tiring, not for the first twenty kilometres or so, and we’ve only got two. It takes a real effort of talent but we’re getting a lot of benefit from the dead. The standard isn’t any heavier for them in it, and the strength of the focus is greater than it would have been were they living.

Eustace, keeping the flames in, and keeping up easily, doesn’t look anywhere near top speed. I’d like to know what Halt meant to do, what intent got past the ethics board, creating Eustance’s kind.

Half a kilometre from the wall, it’s clear there really is no moat, not even a dry one. Keeping water, or flowing water, off the wards is often more of a concern than keeping siege engines away from the wall, but it still seems off.

Mind your line from Blossom.

Edge left.

Shot. I think it’s the ghost-gunner on tube one.

The first door-knocker goes in, a streak and a flash and clinging cyan fire; the focus lets me see a sentry, half-in and half-out of the flash. The outside half topples into the cyan fire, dissolving in its turn.

Second one hits, third one hits, and it’s getting very bright on the part of the wall Blossom’s targeting. Perfect five second intervals.

The shock’s wearing off the surviving sentries. There are shouts, gestures, none of them pointing at us, some more horns being blown and gongs rung, but the problem with that sort of general “attack! attack!” alarm system is that it’s worthless for telling you where the second attack is coming from, or even that there is one. It sounds just like the alarms, still going on, for the first attack.

Rust is still at it; the ground shakes, twice, and some high-pitched howling noise has started around to the south side of the fortress.

Four, five, some kind of horizontal vortex of darkness forming with the cyan fire outside it, pulses as someone in there tries to get the outer wards up and can’t, and we’re just crossing a hundred metres from the wall as six hits, fifty metres to our right.

Straight at the wall.

The acknowledgement has grins in it. Our timing isn’t perfect, but it’s not looking much like perfect is required.

A strip of molten rock five metres wide flies backward, out of the wall, from below ground level to clean through the crenellations. Another ten metres to either side of mostly intact stone blocks follows it, in a great dusty crash that’s just finishing as the first red shot screams through the gap. I have to bounce some of the back-blast up with the focus, and we still get some heat, like walking outside into full summer sun. That’s it for being hard to see with the focus going off sneaking and into offence/defence.

Short shot or not, it’s got some kick to it.

The second red shot goes through and goes off on the ground instead of at the height of the outer wall. Substantial stone blocks fly out of the breach, the ground shock mingles with another of whatever Rust is doing, and the flash out-lights the dawn.

GO.

Two Platoon sprints through the gap, dancing on the rubble and the focus.

It’s pretty much clear in the outer courtyard; the high red shot hit everybody on the wall with the flash and the blast. There will be more, as soon as someone gets a door open, but nothing much is active in there now. There are interior curtain walls, just lower than the outer walls, so the space inside the outer walls would be nine squares if the central keep wasn’t the middle one. Very geometrical.

Eustace rumbles through the breach surrounded by the colour party. Halt’s still under that shawl, but is looking very intently around.

Low in the keep, say the hungry spiders.

Twitch, we’re going to try to dig in. No room to drop the wall.

No room to drop the wall without being hip-deep in rocks, and that hurts.

Sir back, and the inevitable assignment of two to watch the walls around us and one to do the digging. Just like ploughing, only deep enough to plant Eustace.

The courtyard paving ripples up and turns over, the line of a deepening ditch angling at the inner wall. There’s a right angle turn and the spoil starts fusing into a roof. Wouldn’t have been able to fit the whole ramp into the courtyard in a straight line, and the bend is a good idea anyway in case of blast.

A door opens in the back of one of the towers anchoring the interior curtain wall, the one south of the breach. Radish grabs it, slams it full open, and does a full-platoon rock toss through the doorway.

Something vast and dark and angry spirals overhead, shuddering and falling on the south-west tower of the inner keep. Jets of white fire, inhumanly loud shouts, and a crackle of lightning bolts meet it. Reems has got wizards here; good thing they’re busy.

Nothing on the foundation. Twitch doesn’t believe that, and I don’t either.

Try to melt it anyway.

Halt, heads up for surprises.

Heat gusts out of the trench, and again as the stone that flowed into paving and shoring arches for the tunnel gets cooled. It’s neat work; there’s only a little smell of hot rock in the heat.

It’s one big open space in there.

Far from the best way to build your fortress. Could be ritual space, could be a requirement of whatever enchantment they’re using, could be a megalomaniac Archon’s personal quarters. Hard to tell from this end of the tunnel even what’s in there.

Somebody in Two expends a pointy stick on a doorway that’s spewing archers along the inner fortress battlement. It juices a couple of them but doesn’t stop them. Defending against arrows is easy but starts to fix the focus in place, we’ve only got so much attention for threats. Don’t want that. They’re certainly firing enthusiastically.

Captain, Company, fire support from Twitch.

Got it.

Twitch has to worry about catching the arrows, and anybody else from Reems who shows up.

Captain, Battery. Fire support. Three short black-red-black at fifteen second intervals, prep and hold one long white-red-black.

Battery, Captain. Hank the Master-Gunner. Call your shot.

Meaning doing intervals from two kilometres is insane and I’d better have the target picture really firm in the shot before it’s fired, so no, we’re not doing fifteen second intervals, we’re doing called shots.

Hank’s the expert.

Shoot.

Dead centre on the door. Since it went through a merlon to get there, it’s slowed down enough to bounce around inside the tower. I was expecting to just punch out through the far wall and maybe make any more archers nervous.

Shoot.

It isn’t kind to the tiny enchanted will-to-hit in the shot, but if you give it an impossible turn you can get it to hit sideways. It’s not perfectly sideways, but shooting at the side of one of the middle merlons means the shot hits the next one over almost flat, and a couple hundred kilos of high velocity gravel splashes down the battlement.

You’d have trouble doing that with a long-shot heave from a five-layer tube; I could get used to having nines around.

Let’s do that again.

Shoot.

There’s some flames from the tower, and about half the archers are down. No panic yet, they haven’t had time to realise what’s happening. The flames in the tower suggest there’s a lot of wood in there, maybe the floor, and if they were idiots enough to do that maybe the fighting platform is wood, too. I’ve got a nice two-merlon hole in the stone cover, so let’s try for the floor.

Shoot.

It’s wood. Idiots. There are flaming flinders everywhere, some of them stuck in archers, some of them rattling off the focus. Twitch is telling Radish not to worry about missing the door, you can’t look everywhere at one time and you have to catch them quick. I hope Twitch listens, still true when you’re the Sergeant-Major.

Not all the archers are down, but none of them are firing. Twitch uses the focus to put them all down by slamming a merlon left-right-left along the whole fighting platform.

Twitch has a couple of files moving down the tunnel; have to get somebody in there, or we’ll never see what’s around the tunnel mouth.

The flames behind the door the archers came out of go out, like dropping a pot lid on a grease fire.

Captain, Battery. Prep the hold.

Two files of the colour party toss pointy sticks up and back, toward the southern tower. From the patter of gravel on the focus, some missed. From the thuds, and screams and awful wet splurch sensation on the focus, it’s the razor glass tentacle thing again, and only some missed. Small some.

Battery, Captain. Live hold.

Green robes, no beard, mean eyes, starting in with the big wide staff gestures the instant the standard comes into sight, looks, in the focus, not as bad as Rust.

Shoot.

Ow. Holding the target means NOT using the focus to block the thermal bloom. Going to wind up with a peeling face burn from that one. That bunch of fire-priests could mostly stop rippled long shot; this is a heave, and I think it’s tube one’s vigorous ghosts again.

You generally want to burn the heads of serious wizards, any of the better sorcerers; anything else isn’t reliably going to kill them. There are historical examples of twenty-days-in-a-pressure-cooker levels of effort to do it, too.

This one is gone down to the short ribs, and there’s a roaring fire in the room behind again.

I’m going to suppose the shot did hit the wizard’s eyes.

Captain, Battery. Well done.

I can feel the chuckle come back from the Master Gunner at the image of the partial wizard toppling backward into the flames.

There isn’t room to drop the whole inner keep wall, but Twitch seems to have decided there’s plenty of room to drop the tower south of the breach, as long as it falls out.

It takes both breached sections of wall with it, and the air goes thick with dust outside the focus.

Inside’s not clear but there’s room to deploy. Twitch doesn’t like it.

Can’t say I like anything much since Rust found those guys in the dry Westcreek.

Move inside.

Chapter 23

Captain, Part-Captain. We’re headed under. Risk of wards. Anybody from Reems starts poking at this end of the tunnel, stomp them.

Sir. Advise some notice before emerging. There’s a ghost-grin with that.

Will do. Might be tricky if some ward forces the focus into separate nodes.

Even with the dust and the smoke and the fortress-shadow, it’s a bright day outside.

The tunnel is dim and even, a circle with a chord off for the floor. Excellent traction.

This huge space is uselessly dark.

Did we put any lights out?

Nope. Twitch has gone outright laconic.

Halt?

The enchantment lies below.

Halt’s losing the Granny-face in a rustle of spider-feet.

Step and pause advance. We can upshift body heat into enough light to see by.

Not a thing shows, either with eyes or the focus. It’s an artificial square cave thirty metres on a side and at least five high, and I can’t get anything at all through it, not Rust’s fight, not any sign of enchantment. We’d have lost the battery if it wasn’t for the hole in the wall.

Listen drifts through the standard-binding. Someone heard something, and everyone stops and tries to breathe quietly, even Eustace.

Shot. The Master-Gunner, sending an image of at least a company of Reems heavy infantry sprinting into the courtyard and headed for the hole.

There’s a flash through the hole, sudden full daylight. That’s around the dogleg. What kind of idiot is in charge of these Reems guys?

The walls and ceiling in here are a dull black. Really dull; soot has more shine than that.

Anybody still hear anything?

Nothing comes back. It’s eerie in here. Could be the ritual requires silence, could be a side effect of solid despair under the enchantment the Reems guys are using to hold the conscious terrane still, could be all sorts of things.

What it feels like is a trap.

Step, pause, step, and we’re near the middle of the room. No matter how keyed up you are, fifteen metres just isn’t that far. The floor doesn’t look like blocks, it looks like someone levelled living rock.

It’s clean, scrubbed clean, can’t feel any dust. Black and even and all about the same temperature. With the focus upshifting heat, Eustace is one big light, and there’s no detail at all.

Anybody see any writing or incisions or anything like that?

Nothing comes back from that, either.

Down shields.

They do, the half of them that have them. That’s a command for inspections, not the field, and I can feel the confusion.

I grab the focus and slam the shields overhead and hold them as the whole ceiling lets go and the focus can’t grip it at all.

The bit that’s still up, hung on the shields, isn’t all that heavy; I doubt it weighs as much as Eustace. Still completely not there to the focus, and draped down from the shields, so we’re packed in a little tighter than we were. Some of the guys along the outside got knocked down, but it doesn’t seem to have hurt them.

Shields hold it up, so it’s material, or at least tangible, not an idea of solidified darkness to go with the despair.

Has us pinned better than massed archery would.

Watch OUT. Watch UP. Twitch, so laconic it’s somewhere past conversational. It’s very, very dark in here with the focus all gone into holding up the heavy solid darkness.

Whatever this is, it bends; something might come through it.

Trying to slide the shields outward works fine, to get a bigger space.

There’s a crunch, and the thing pushes down. Down hard; we can’t hold it steady, and it presses very slowly downwards.

Toby’s chanting “Hold, Hold”, calm and steady, and it helps keep everyone focused on lifting and not what more force than we’ve got means, pressing down.

Outside, where we can’t see at all, there’s maybe words, and faint cruel laughter. The ring of shields is down even with the howdah-top, and Eustace’s face works to the accompaniment of small flames.

The soft sheep-face pulls back and gapes more than a sheep should, and another set of jaws slides forward past the ovine teeth, narrow and serrated and metallic.

LOOK AWAY FROM EUSTACE.

Probably not enough.

COVER YOUR EYES.

Toby’s chant doesn’t change, and the lift doesn’t falter.

I’m standing dead in front of Eustace; moving aside, moving the standard aside, can go with looking away.

Purple fire, Eustace’s full gape’s worth. It splashes off a far wall, something we can see dimly through the black thing over us, and does nothing at all to our covering except flow through it.

Even looking away, that was bright in the darkness, and it’s hotter in here.

LIFT.

The shields don’t budge, and we lose another couple decimetres to the next crunching heave. Another couple of those and we’re going to have a problem.

Eustace crouches, involuntarily. The focus-invisible stuff pressing down on the howdah is pushing Eustace down. The noise Eustace makes is halfway between a moan and bleat, and the laughter comes back louder.

There’s a ringing noise, like a light hammer on steel, rapidly over and over. The shields surge up; there’s a whirling object moving back and forth over us, with the line slowly widening into an oval, then almost a circle.

Eustace surges up, dim in the red glow of the whirling thing.

The howdah top folds up, like the complex umbrella it is. The corner pillars bend and twist, four long arms with five elbows each, stowing the folded top somewhere, and coming back up with four big curved swords.

The sword edges shine.

There’s at least another ten metres of open space above, that the thing that fell on us hid. Two levels of galleries. Cables gone slack, hooks and pulleys in the ceiling that held up whatever fell on us.

Both layers of galleries are lined solid with demons.

Explains the laughter, and the crushing.

Captain, Part-Captain. Fort’s full of demons.

I get a distant — someone’s back up the hillside enough to see away south — view of the valley that points back toward the Commonweal side of the divide. A substantial army is coming, in glory of array. Probably who dropped most of a mountain top on Rust’s illusion. Hope so; otherwise there’s two. Ten kilometres, call it a couple hours out.

Pretty much all of the power-invisible stuff is wound up on the spool that was whirling overhead, which must weigh somewhere over twenty tonnes now. It’s clattering to a stop behind us, two metres high and five across and glowing a hot red while it grinds into the floor.

A demon makes a long leap for the standard.

Twitch bunts it up with the focus, and one of the colour party gets it with a pointy stick.

Good throw.

It won’t stay hurt, and it certainly isn’t dead, but the fire and fragments flipped it back and away, and better, it’s holding still.

Same guy throws one of Blossom’s demon-specials, and that does the job.

The increased ghastly light of the demon eyes and the smell of the dying one are not improvements at all, but this many demons would be a hard job for an army.

Halt?

Halt stands up, between the sword edges, and the shawl slips back.

I’m told people hear because pressure waves in the air move tiny bones in their ears.

When Halt cares to, all your bones move.

Can’t tell what Halt said, wouldn’t understand even if my head wasn’t ringing from the second syllable.

About a third of the demons pitch out of the galleries and prostrate themselves, sometimes on each other.

One huge demon, eight-armed and shining-fanged, bounds down, hands full of swords and hooks.

Metres of fabric coil from Halt’s knitting bag and swathe the demon.

It screams, screams that start deafening, ringing back from the fortress walls in layers of agony, and get quieter as the cracking, crunching noises get louder and the volume wrapped in fabric shrinks and shrinks.

One of the prostrate demons is half across the remnant end of a cable; I can see the wisps of smoke rise, the staring light of the demon eyes is that bright. It doesn’t move, it’s not even shuddering where it burns.

The fabric uncoils, leaving a lump the size of a horse head rolling to a stop just under Eustace’s nose while the fabric rises shining to ripple over Halt’s head like a banner.

“Someone give that a good smack with a hammer.” Halt sounds cheerful.

I nod; Twitch passes it to Radish, Radish passes it to a file closer, and that worthy takes their own adci — if you leave the head hooked on the handle, you can drive tent pegs with the flat — and smites the lump briskly.

The lump shivers into fragments, some of them shining like opals.

There’s a wide collective moan from the demons. Maybe a third of them fling themselves off the galleries at us.

Backs to Eustace. HOLD THE STANDARD.

Halt laughs.

Not anything like your granny, Halt laughs.

The swords around Halt move, and demons fly apart.

Chapter 24

When it’s over I’ve still got two of Blossom’s anti-demon pointy sticks only because the colour party passed me theirs. They figured out pretty quick I was doing much better at guessing which way the demon was going to swerve.

Two dead, six down. Half a file from Two are holding belts and hands to lean out of the focus far enough to grab an arm that hasn’t dissolved yet.

Thanks, quiet and a bit stunned from the dead guy whose arm that is.

Can’t leave you out of the barrel. Toby, voice full of a mood you can’t explain to the living.

Halt is standing up very straight in the howdah, and the four swords go from having shining edges to blazing daylight light.

Not a place I want to see better.

There’s a hideous mix of fluids and deliquescing demon parts up the side of the focus, knee deep on a Creek. Bits of the prostrate demons stick out of it, and the huge spool of whatever that power-invisible stuff was, still glowing faintly in a mist of cooking demon ichor. Swathes of the floor are dissolving. Not all of it, probably depends on the demon.

Sergeant-Major, get Toby on the air quality.

Sir. It’s not like Twitch is going to notice air quality personally.

Sergeant Radish, armour check. Anything smoking, take it off, chuck it well out of the focus.

Sir.

Halt says one word at that same bone-shaking volume.

The level of mess starts to drop, and some of the prostrate demons start to swell.

Halt?

I told them to drink, Captain.

The demons still up on the galleries, maybe a sixth of the original total, are trying to turn their eyes away.

Some of them start visibly when a dozen or so armour bits splash into the slop.

Halt says something else, and the mass of jumpy demons looks back. Demons don’t have a standard body plan, never mind body language, but the ones that have half-familiar shapes all look scared.

Demons will have to find another way to say “Fed by Halt”.

If this is spiders, it’s spiders playing a web of triumph like a harp.

You’ve done this before?

This time, it is what I fed the demons. Last time, it was what I fed the demons to.

Some of the living and most of the dead are laughing. It’s that or sit and gibber.

Gone a little mad around the edges or not, Toby’s got the air quality under control. It isn’t great, but it doesn’t hurt to inhale.

My focus.

Sir.

Using the focus to push liquids only works if you’re dealing with something completely smooth and completely flat. This floor is neither, so I peel back the top few centimetres of floor, down to dry rock, shoving the focus out wider. Not as far as the prostate demons, but enough so the living can take a few steps away from Eustace and we can let the down sit or lie. Two of them look like dead waiting to happen.

There’s a wave in the wet stuff, back out to the walls. A bit slops up the entry tunnel, and flows right back down again. More ripples over the prostrate demons; not as high as the original high-ichor mark.

Any of the prostrate demons going to explode? Most are looking somewhere between swollen and bloated; a few have doubled in volume.

Not on their own.

There’s a wordless expression of disgust from the living as the level of slop gets low enough that they can hear the slurping.

Sergeant-Major, your focus. Avoid leaking.

Privately, Nobody’s very effective with their feet dissolved off.

Sir.

Captain, I need someone who can draw. Two would be better.

Radish — two guys who can draw, report to Halt.

Halt doesn’t move; Halt goes right on standing there in the howdah looking like a monument to other people’s bad ideas.

The howdah produces a pair of small arms, with only three joints, on each long side of its length. Those rummage around and hand down some sticks of luridly green chalk and a parchment rolled up with a matching luridly green ribbon.

Same long axis as Eustance. Eustace shuffles feet, changing that slightly.

Start just past the lump of slag. The slag with opalised insides that used to be a demon.

A couple of very deep breaths, and they get to it. I get Radish to note their names; getting right down to work when you’re handed to Halt to help with ritual magic deserves some recognition.

We go through green, blue, a hideous shade of yellow, white, and a shiny grey-red, one parchment per, while the demons in the galleries watch with shining eyes and the prostrate demons finish consuming the liquefied remnants of their fellows.

Most of the floor has stopped smoking. Don’t want to walk on it unless we must, but we might manage to get away with nothing more than needing a new issue of boots.

The guys with the chalk finish handing the grey-red chalk and the last sheet of parchment back to the howdah, and, sensibly enough, move back into their files.

Halt nods imperiously at the design, and Eustace, serrated metallic jaws still exposed, gapes.

LOOK AWAY FROM EUSTACE. Me, Twitch, Radish, a couple of guys in the colour party who are standing in front of Eustace’s jaws and diving backwards. Lots of looking away and arms over eyes. Lots of wincing among the demons.

The room doesn’t heat up as much this time; Halt’s bound the vast outpouring of violet fire into the design on the floor, and the rock bulges up into an arch like a bridge span.

The rock doesn’t look hot, it just looks…bendy.

Shot.

There’s a bit of shudder through the floor; it’s so bright in here the flash isn’t noticeable.

Couple files’ worth in the tunnel. The Master Gunner sounds harried.

Radish, Two, watch the tunnel. Stay inside the focus.

Twitch, if it’s a choice between spears through and scunge through, pick spears.

Sir.

The arch is big enough Eustace could walk under it, if it weren’t for the complete lack of floor. You can see down the sides of the bent rock, about as far as the thickness of the arch above, and then a narrowing view about that far down again beside a bar of complete darkness. Absolutely nothing from the focus. Just like the whatever on that big spool, now smoking faintly in a coating of baked scunge. Didn’t dissolve much if at all.

Battery, Captain. What have you got?

Demons, demons moving troops uphill of us. Still the Master Gunner. Position is stable.

Carry on.

Halt, Captain. What’s next?

We don’t have time to see if your previous experiments about demons dying of terror are repeatable.

I get a look which suggests Halt heard the whole thing.

The enchantment is in the pipe. The pipe is cold iron, all the way around. It could have been a tunnel with the cold iron only on top. Breaking the enchantment by hammering the cold iron into it will be violent.

Violent in a detached tone from the Independent who thinks nothing of putting us knee-deep in liquid demon.

Non-survivable?

For some tens of kilometres.

Halt gives me an utterly unreadable look.

Downward.

The road? someone says, I think they’re dead; the question comes with an image of the great soft clouds of hopelessness.

Halt’s reply is a complex diagram, steady, difficult to think about even with Halt keeping the thought whole. This thing isn’t an iron bucket of despair bound to sand, the cold iron’s keeping pure despair contained; there isn’t any matter in there, the despair’s compressed, extremely compressed, Halt’s saying irresponsible, the runes of the enchantment are standing waves of pressure. There’s a property of mystical smoothness involved, the despair’s rotating, cold iron’s not perfectly mystically opaque, only close, the effect gets out because it’s rotating. The whole thing only just barely holds together, just barely works, short term comes through from Halt clear and disapproving.

That’s where my comprehension stops.

Unsafe for the terrane to mess with? Toby says.

Anyone, until the mischief gets into it. Halt really doesn’t approve.

Is there an alternative means of destroying the enchantment?

With the cold iron closed? No. Halt’s very definite.

Captain, you’re not going to set it off? Somebody in One.

The job is to keep Reems out of the Creeks by the least sufficient means. If this thing — I wave at the bar of blackness in the hole — exists, Reems can invade the Creeks. If it doesn’t, they can’t. Either because the blast will have killed their power structure, or because the Northern Hills conscious terrane will be free to kill them all.

And all of us die?

If you aren’t willing to die, and they are, you lose, and then they kill you.

Every graul alive would look at you, and nod, and say “of course.”

A bunch of good honest Creeks, well, they’re much better farmers than graul.

We’re fighting an army from a state larger than the Commonweal as a whole. If they have enough people to hammer out tonnes of cold iron, it could be ten times larger. We’re a very short battalion. One company, one battery, and we got kicked hard finding out this thing is built out of despair. All of us dying is expected.

There’s a sort of ringing silence in the focus.

It’s not like they can’t do, haven’t done, the math. Five hundred dead protecting five hundred thousand is a clear win. Add in the other seven million for the Commonweal as a whole and it’s a great victory.

Expected isn’t the same thing as preferred. I try to say it gently.

Halt, how much margin have we got to bend that pipe?

Halt shrugs. This is new. Tentative spider-steps across the eyelids.

A completely different unreadable look. Do not dent it.

There’s a shudder in the floor again, but not from the west.

Rust, I presume? Not spreading the focus far enough to look myself.

Halt nods. Having fun.

Halt sighs. Do not heat it.

Drat. Cold iron, well, a spot going yellow-hot won’t be cold iron, and ought to release any physical pressure.

Halt’s head shake comes with diagramatic explanation, the smoothness, all the smoothness, will fail, Halt’s fairly sure, this is new, Halt’s never seen this before, someone making cold iron a better mirror for the Power.

The prostrate demons look like dying abruptly maybe wouldn’t be so bad. The ones in the galleries go right on watching. If they think Halt is going to let them go free without obeying, well. Never knew demons could be optimists.

No time to get anything from the baggage. I hand one of the two warswords I’ve been carrying to Radish, the pointy sticks to one of the colour guard. I hold the other warsword up, reversed. Eustace’s alternative jaws have continuous teeth, and they’re not entirely closed. I can just stick the pommel between some shearing teeth, holding the tip of the hilt and standing on tiptoe.

There’s a crunch, and I get the eye, and a couple metres of purple fire jetting up from all four visible nostrils. “Good lad!”

I swap swords with Radish, who is grinning. Getting the pommels off without either a vise and the correct wrench or some serious free time to use the focus very, very carefully is pretty much impossible. Which is good design, but inconvenient right now. If you can’t get the pommels off all the other furniture stays on.

Halt says something to Eustace, and the other pommel comes off with smaller, sulky fire jets and no attempts to shorten my arm.

Radish strips the first sword down to a bare blade, and I do the second one. A couple of the colour party hand me down into the hole, very carefully next to the pipe. It’s not all that far, but discovering that landing on it flexes the pipe enough to go boom would be a stupid way to die. It’s maybe fifty centimetres thick, and even with my face right up to it looks totally featureless. It’s not even really black; it just doesn’t reflect any light.

Radish hands me down the sword blades, one at a time.

It’s easier to get a foot on either side of the pipe than to twist around; I set the sword blades down, spines in, a couple handspans apart on the top of the pipe. It’s tough to get a feel for cold iron, but parallel to the pipe seems less bad than across it.

Colour party, you’re watching for physical threats. If you find any, you’re backup for Two.

Twitch, you’re on scunge barrier and tunnel watch. If the colour party finds anything else, deal with it. Two, Radish, you’re supporting Twitch. Little cat-feet through the focus as that gets sorted out. Those couple of files of Reems guys are still in the tunnel. Maybe they’re nerving themselves up, maybe they’re too scared to move, maybe one of them is a sorcerer who is busy sacrificing the infantry for terrible power.

Gotcha. Twitch thickens up the focus toward the tunnel, adding some depth and some layers without letting the low barrier to the scunge drop. It’s not very wet out there but it’s still wet, and nobody’s much good with their boots burning off. Never mind what Halt might do to the demons still on the galleries.

It’s surprisingly hard for even a competent sorcerer to kick in a prepared platoon barrier on the first try. Halt would laugh, and Blossom would get insulted and that would be terrible, but odds are the first thing will bounce.

Twitch, any screaming berserker charges — 

Breathe scunge.

Half of Two grimaces.

Carry on, Sergeant-Major.

One, Toby, you’re supporting me. My focus.

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.

Chapter 25

“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.

Chapter 26

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.

Chapter 27

Not dropping that anti-demon ward while passing people over it is tricky. It takes another half hour to get everyone back into the camp.

One of the down guys on stretchers died, coming back, and the other doesn’t last much more than an hour.

It makes the medics a bit crazy, but there’s a real limit to what skill or art can do when someone’s got that many demon claw holes clean through them.

Halt would have been able to help, but I have to keep that couple of thousand Reems infantry on the other side of the pass. The company’s done and the battery isn’t doing any better. None of the three serviceable tubes have more than three hale files left in their teams. So they can shoot, or run the gun shields, or contribute to the main focus through the standard, but it’s pick one.

A couple of drovers and the battery blacksmith have got some heaters set out, and food heating. The food might help all the guys in Three who got stuck with venomous spines. Haven’t lost any, they’re not getting worse, they can stand and walk if they weren’t spined in the legs or the lower back, all of them but the one who got a spine to the face can talk, but the medics aren’t optimistic about their prospects for a full recovery. They’re certainly not well now.

Blossom’s pyrographing new names on the barrels, a Part-Captain’s proper dignity doing fine until a quiet dead voice asked for its nickname instead of the much-disliked name on the rolls.

Three has two functional files; Two as reconstituted came back a file down, so eight. Four in the colour party. One long platoon fit for service, and they’re getting wobbly round the edges. We’re past where a tradition of canal marches will get you. Going to be something to build on if I can get them home sane.

The Master Gunner borrows two files from Radish, and sends them along with about half the remaining battery support guys to climb up and get dead and down from the observers on the ridge. They’ve got two alive up there, out of the original sixteen. The guy still relaying a view southward should be down; shy an arm and a foot and starting to rave. Very bitey demons these Reems sorcerers are fond of using.

The other live one isn’t hurt that you can see, beyond a tiny forehead burn, but is totally unresponsive. Something sorcerous.

They get them all back down, mostly with ropes; it’s a steep slope. Half a file of hale gunners stay up there with the two company files. Have to keep up the watch.

The battery goes through a big shot-shifting exercise; Blossom frowns a little at some of their storage choices, but they get five of the twelve regular caissons empty of shot. That gives a caisson to carry tube one — the carriage is gone, but Blossom doesn’t think there’s anything wrong with the tube itself, and even if there is, Blossom wants the quarter tonne of samarium — and four available to transport casualties.

At twelve stretchers per, and with what we’ve eaten, that gets us away from needing to dump food for waggon space. Since we’ve got, best case, a couple hundred kilometres of Northern Hills to get across, not dumping food is good.

The medics think anybody still breathing will keep on doing so, at least for today. Not necessarily with all their original limbs or eyes or integument, but alive.

Everybody eats by files, the watch gets rotated, and there’s not really anything to do but convert our dead to ashes.

The walking heave themselves upright to bear witness, everyone not on watch comes and stands and looks some mix of grim and shaky and solemn, and the lids go back on. Sliding through the focus there’s a joke about how many people it would take to actually fill the barrels, and the snickers come from the dead.

Chapter 28

The yellow-green cloud of despair over the Reems fortress is thinning out.

The battery’s got tube one off the wreck of its carriage and loaded on an emptied caisson; the carriage-wreck gets a battalion toss. Considering the battalion’s present state, the six hundred metre distance will do.

Strapping the tube down turns out to be something the battery practises; a tonne and a half of tube versus four tonnes of shot means the caisson is fine for the mass, but shot goes in racks. The tube, smooth except for its trunnions, apparently inherits from all its ancestors a vile tendency to slide out on a slope, and the few means certain to work at preventing this are preserved lore among artillerists.

Tube one’s dead gunners remain with us. They have a somewhat existential debate over the utility of flipping a coin while in the keeping of the standard, and rock-paper-scissors for which files go to which active tube. The newly dead gunners look at that, shrug, and sort themselves out to keep the numbers even.

The battery in as much like serviceable shape as it will get, Blossom stops indulging the Master Gunner. Hank’s off to the medics and down.

Tube three gets hitched to its caisson, and pulled out of the firing line. The battery hasn’t got enough live gunners left to use three tubes. The dead drive shot fine, but they can’t run it from the caissons.

Blossom puts tube four on the fortress and leaves tube two aimed over the ridge line.

Battery, Captain.

Captain, Battery. Concur with shot choice.

I get a tiny flash of that metal-bending grin, and a wave. It’s not like I can’t read the shot codes, or notice which caisson.

We’re in no shape to fight; anything we have to shoot at, might as well give it the hot long reds and hope we can handle the shock wave.

We might. We for-sure won’t handle another major attack.

All the glass jars of demon parts get picked up in tongs, checked for any damage to the glass, set back down, dripped on with neat alcohol by people holding damp rags in different tongs and leaning way back, and, in the cases that don’t go up with a whoosh and a roar, filled and lidded, carefully, and loaded, more carefully, into the battery commander’s waggon.

I don’t know what you preserve demon parts with, but Blossom brought fifty litre kegs of it.

It’s not much more than enough.

Tongs or no tongs, the line of gunners go off to wash; Blossom gets the small silver flask out, measures carefully, and does indeed make faces. Blossom’s not looking especially tired, but then again Blossom usually looks as though now might be a good time to go for a run.

Part-Captain; any sense in passing the vigour and cranberries around?

You can get a doubtful look through the standard, if you try.

Probably not enough left for two files.

Not enough to matter, just now. Things are getting done. Slowly, at a greater cost in effort, but done.

Adding vigour is a safe replacement for a first rest, when you’re starting fresh. It’ll expend anybody who is just too tired.

And I’ll just bet there’s only one way to tell who’s too tired.

Not a help.

Something rueful comes back through the focus from Blossom.

There’s a general settling. The medics keep getting the various spine-poisoned to get up and walk; the spine-poisoned keep trying to act like this is just fussing, then they stagger a bit.

There’s a mass grab at the focus when a demon lands on the hillside to the south, where the sorcerers Blossom was fighting were. It keeps a wary eye on us as it starts picking through the meadow.

Picking very, very slowly through a small part of the meadow.

After awhile, the consensus is that it’s trying to get at least one finely divided head back into a single location. Blossom gets nearly a fey look when two files of gunners float an empty ten-litre can out to it. Whatever remnant rhubarb preserves persist in the can are hardly going to contaminate a head picked, particle by particle, off meadow plants.

If the demon doesn’t hurry it’s going to have to recover most of the bits from inside ants.

Demons aren’t known to display gratitude floats out gently from Blossom, a point of information made available to the whole of the focus rather than a specific rebuke.

Doesn’t mean I want to watch it suffer floats back, with more than one value of “I”.

A lot of watching the demon do something takes place.

Twitch expresses worry that no example of the critters with the spines was preserved; the medics have some of the spines, but no one wanted to try getting a cross between a venomous porcupine and a wolverine into a biscuit box, however dead it seemed. I mostly agree with Twitch, but prefer “no new cases of being stuck with spines” as a risk management choice. At least three of the walking got stuck right clean through the vambrace; those spines are sharp.

Another round of eating by files, just after noon. The food’s still boiled, but a little more evenly and it’s certainly hot.

By mid-afternoon, the observers up on the ridge are feeding everybody a view of total howling chaos over the pass to the south. It had started pretty quiet; I had been worried about a visit from formed troops through much of the morning.

At a guess, most of the stronger Reems sorcerers were with the army, not in the fortress. I don’t think either Halt or Rust would be willing to interpret “avoid risk” as “see how much fun you can have terrifying these Reems guys to death”. So they’re having to work at it; it’s been nearly seven hours, now, and many of the Reems guys are still functional, but what started as a hastily assembled but cohesive block of troops around an ordered group of sorcerers sharing ward maintenance has come apart into small group or individual best effort.

The demons Halt commanded seem to be in on it, too, busy trying to collect heads. And it’s not clear that the Reems guys are totally out of demons of their own; the big enchantment breaking obviously freed most of them, but either the demons are having a bad case of “My head! mine!” over particular sorcerers or it’s multi-sided in there.

You can feel Blossom’s attention reaching out through the focus, for the better view of distance, and returning.

Maybe another hour. Most of the second tier are dead, and the first tier’s getting panicky.

Most of the walking are watching the fight, and a number of drovers and the battery support guys. Those in the Line not on watch, and sticking rigidly to their assigned arc, are racked right out.

There are lots of lights and colours showing over the ridge and you can unquestionably hear it, entirely without the focus.

With the focus, there’s one especially vivid bit, back down the mountain-slope from the battery guys with telescopes, of a Reems sorcerer going all-out to hold off three demons, and doing it well. All three demons fling themselves back, and there’s this half-second where you can see the sorcerer believe in victory when an arachnid shape about people-tall and apparently made out of the souls of angry knives shreds them.

Two of the demons grab substantial portions of the head; the third seems to be scrabbling for bits of spine, fitting vertebrae back together to count up toward the base of the skull and be sure it’s got the last bit of head.

It’s a lot more work if they don’t start to panic and go off on their own like that.

Blossom’s scholarly voice, empty of feeling. Talking to me and Twitch and the Master Gunner, not to the remnant battalion as a whole.

They’re not infinitely powerful, not even Halt. Blossom doesn’t usually do wry.

A one-on-one fight with most of these guys would be over before it started, but hammering through the mass of them wouldn’t work. It’s a problem of attention; you only have so much to spare when you have to be ready to deal with it when a bunch of them, or all of them, decide to chuck something at you to see what gets through.

But you’re always faster yourself than co-ordinating a group can be; get them trying to stay on balance and eventually — I get the feeling of Blossom’s chin lifting, pointing over the ridge.

Sorcery is just like any other fight.

Rust has been winning fights like that most of what recorded history we’ve got; Halt has been winning fights like that for much longer, and the terror of them will not be diminished if the Reems guys don’t know who they are fighting.

There’s a definite attempt at a face shape looking up out of that empty ten litre can. The demon is trying to reassemble the sorcerer’s eyes, tiny damp bit by tiny damp bit, and there’s about half of the right one left to go. Several gunners and a whole file of Two drop out of the focus to stop looking at that.

I go get a cup of coffee myself; there’s a big camp pot of it on, beside a fifty litre cauldron of lettuce root tea.

If there’s time to get coffee, things aren’t too bad. Just to the Part-Captain. Blossom’s walking over, and makes the traditional offering wave at me with the same small silver flask.

Why not.

I get maybe fifteen millilitres. Blossom gets about twice that, which is not at all in keeping with our relative degrees of talent.

Though if it were to be in keeping, Blossom’d need to drink a couple barrels. At least.

“What is it?”

“Talent equivalent of putting lemon juice and salt and mashed fruit and some extra sugar in barley water. Helps avoid cramps.”

Which is more what it does than what it is, but sometimes it’s best to rely on the Commonweal’s ethics rules. If any of it is made from woodchuck spleens, they’ll be humanely obtained woodchuck spleens.

Even massively outnumbered and surrounded by coffee, it tastes like being hurled into cold water with no warning.

We walk off a little to one side, and are given space. It would be unkind to suppose that the Creeks like standing downwind of the boiling lettuce-roots, and are happy to leave the inferior upwind places for captains and their awful foreign coffee.

“What’s next?” Blossom’s still got the officer face, smiling and calm and unconcerned, down cold. Can’t keep all the real concern out of the voice tone, but the inflection is fine, and the Part-Captain’s certainly being quiet.

“Halt and Rust are due back an hour before sunset.”

“Halt’s demons are to bring heads here by nightfall. Based on the one up in the meadow, the demons involved are determined to do that.”

Shouldn’t generalise from one demon.

“Starting a night march surrounded by demons and whatever scattered Reems infantry manage to get back over the pass seems like a bad plan. Not likely we’ll get a better defensive position than this.”

A slow nod, nearly reluctant. Saying “without the surprise” is something Senior School hammers out of you; what you had best be able to say is “it was good enough to hold”.

It was good enough to hold, despite venomous critters and a simultaneous attack by sorcerers, demons, and about seventy files of infantry. It needed to hold because the artillery sited there was an existential threat to an army, a threat it made good on during the active attack.

Halt thinks Blossom’s existence is an argument in the Commonweal’s favour.

I think Blossom’s substantial distress at not somehow being good enough to avoid casualties doing that job on no warning is the better argument.

“Presuming the host of demons go away, and presuming we don’t have a significant Reems force to deal with, come dawn we start marching for the Commonweal at our best sustained rate.” Getting a proper hastening march with baggage going while relying on the dead for push in the focus is different, and not something you practise.

“The drayage is intact.” Blossom has a thinking-out-loud voice.

“Two hundred kilometres is one long day at a hastening rate of advance.” Still thoughtful, but by no means convinced.

“In principle. The walking may not do well without actually walking, rather than lying; that might lower our rate of movement. So might getting lost.” Or just running into an inconvenient mountain range; there’s no guarantee of a pass where we need it.

Blossom makes a tiny, understated, perhaps-not wave. That gauntlet, both gauntlets, are several horrible colours from being doused with demon-ichor. “Getting Rust and Halt lost at the same time would be tricky. Plus the terrane has got the blood of what must be ten thousand Reems guys soaking into it or buried in it by now, even if we don’t count half because of how they died. It won’t be any kind of hungry.”

I nod. The terrane could well be happy with us.

“I would like to get home in one march. I need to get the remaining battalion home.”

Blossom nods in reply, whether in agreement or recognising that I’ve made a decision it’s hard to say.

“Battalion?”

My turn for the understated wave. “Scratch battalion. Time was, a battalion was one infantry company and four of artillery.”

Blossom’s head tips at me, expression entirely mild and entirely unreadable. “When artillery meant archers.”

For maybe thirty years in the first days of the Commonweal. If you can shoot out and they can’t shoot in and have no idea what the focus even is, archers were a bad thing for them to be dealing with.

“Doesn’t mean it’s a bad precedent.”

Blossom takes a moment to digest that. “Two and four?”

“One and three, I think. Run the infantry platoons at ten files.”

I get a head tip and a half a thinking sort of smile. “Nines could do with another file per tube.” The smile wavers and settles, stiffer.

Blossom started with extra; the eighteen files and two spare that go with six tubes, across four, and the battery’s down to a reconstituted six and change in the tube teams.

“Sustained ripple fire might argue for five.” I’d certainly hate to try to get the second ripple out of three files per tube with nines, because it wouldn’t happen.

Blossom’s looks goes complex, losing some of the mild.

“It’s well ahead, in capability terms per file.”

Blossom nods, face settling into the completely proper captains'-discussion mild expression. The Part-Captain’s next words are still unusually quiet.

“Thanks. I’m starting to believe I’ll get some of them out of this.”

So am I.

“It’s easier to do when you think it could be possible.”

Blossom nods, I do the hand tip — all done — and Blossom starts heading back toward the battery.

Ten is more than zero.

The Part-Captain has dozens yet; may the math be easier to remember.

Chapter 29

It is well and truly sunset, mountain sunset where the shadows lengthen and the light changes and then the mountain-teeth eat the sun out of the sky with suddenness, when a host with banners comes north over the pass.

HOLD FIRE.

I don’t know if I said it first, or Blossom did, but the battery does.

I killed them!, quite offended, from the Master Gunner, and They just marched out of that ground-level cloud from the observers up on the ridge line.

It’s not perfectly intact, that host; if you look closely you can see the odd bandage, dents in the cuirasses, and the guys, even in the front rank, who have lost their spears. A lot of the helmet plumes have been better, too, but it’s clearly an entire army, focused and determined and well able to impose its will. The guy riding in front, if you look for awhile, is sometimes wrapped in a small crackling of lightning, and the sorcerers and officers coming behind look just about as grimly determined.

It’s an amazing show; something like twenty thousand troops, marching to the voices of kettle drums and singing together.

They’re headed straight at the fortress’ battered south wall. None of it fell in, though parts of it caught fire, and most of it looks chewed.

The army is about three hundred metres from the south gate when the trumpets scream a halt, faint and clear in your ears, close and shrill through the focus. The guy with the crackles and fifty or sixty officers and wizards and sorcerers ride forward another fifty metres, and stop, and a banner unfurls, a long tube of silk back from a snarling beast-head of some kind. The trumpets scream again, differently.

You can feel the waiting coming off them, as a minute passes, and another. Five. Ten. There’s a little shuffling in the ranks, but not much.

Someone strides out of the front gate, bare-headed and robed in white over armour black as hammered iron. Sixty or so of the Iron Guard, in steel touched with gold, follow, overtake, form around the striding figure.

All the will in them to straighten their spines isn’t enough to throw off the hammer of despair; they’ve been a day in the fortress, breathing that cloud. It says something impressive about the will in them that they could stand up, never mind walk out of the fortress.

They come on, toward the army. The guy in the white robes stops maybe five metres from crackly guy on the horse, as close as one can get without obviously having to look up.

There’s a pause, maybe enough time to inhale, and the army melts into demons and nothing. Crackly guy melts into Rust, who is smiling the smile your nightmares smile when they see you know you shall never escape.

White-robes’ eyes go wide, and then the whole figure moves in the small aimless way of someone surprised out of knowledge of what to do, as does the Iron Guard all around. White-robes convulses into coughs, once and twice. With thrice, lungs come out, cinders and burning. White-robes topples forward, body landing with its face half in the puddle of burning lungs.

Rust climbs down off the ghost-horse, and, excellent symbolism, decapitates the body with a line-issue warsword.

It’s not like everybody we started with still needs theirs comes from Twitch, and the beginnings of muttering in the focus die away.

The Iron Guard do not move; they’re swaying in the way of those who cannot move, whose wills have been shut away from their flesh. Three or five of them fall.

Rust takes the head by the hair, and flourishes it to the four quarters, the one burning cheek flaring and smouldering as the head waves and is still. Rust is watched by the blank horror in the eyes of the Iron Guard and the hungry glitter in the eyes of crouching demons.

Rust flings the head high, very high, a hundred metres or more, and the demons rise in a screaming cloud to see which of them shall seize it, and bring the head of an Archon of Reems to Halt.

Chapter 30

Halt comes back quietly.

Sitting in the howdah, knitting away, the howdah’s got the swords put away, while Eustace rolls forward at a gait between a trot and a walk. We’re going to leave it aside that, focus or not, alert or not — Rust’s illusion of an army made a mighty contribution to the general alertness — five tons of trotting sheep got maybe three hundred metres from the focus-edge before anyone noticed.

Halt makes no attempt to cross the focus; Eustace stops and turns, at the tallest part of the cliff-palisade, and faces out.

Blossom makes a couple of waving motions, and Twitch gives some commands, both to make sure no one has themselves in a bad place, and then Blossom squats down and puts a bare left hand on the big copper strip of the anti-demon ward. The ward comes up strong enough that your eyes go out of focus for ten seconds or so until your brain can adjust.

Sergeant Dove and a couple of other volunteers head down the palisade stairs with one of the camp tables, a big balance — meant for making sure the five kilos of raisins in the platoon pudding is indeed five kilos — and a freshly preserved demon heart in its sealed glass jar.

Dove’s unmarked sword arm had got a slow look before Dove checked that the fresh warsword was all unmelted. Dove’s two steps over the demon-ward before the other two volunteers follow.

I pick up the whole of the focus. Everybody but three volunteers and two Independents is inside it; the observation point up on the ridge came back down while there was, just, enough light. Halt and Rust didn’t leave much moving over there.

Blossom’s horse-thing is trying to put its whole head under Blossom’s arm, and getting scritched back of the ears as a substitute for success. The bronze bulls went back into their hoods with perhaps not the best grace — these are obviously not well-organised humans, to be doing this again — but they went.

It’s going down for full dark, and the focus and the warding aren’t much for the awareness of how many shapes of demons the night’s full up with.

Halt goes right on knitting.

Halt has obtained from somewhere a completely shapeless round hat. It can’t make Halt look harmless — even if you have no idea who Halt is, sitting calmly on top of Eustace just won’t get in grabbing range of harmless — but it makes Halt look like someone who ought to be. Dove cracks a remarkably natural smile, seeing it.

The table’s set, and level, the balance gets set down on it, and the glass jar goes in one balance pan, chill and glittering and glowing a bit on its own.

All around me the living are nearly as quiet as the dead. The focus holds them, Line and of the Line together. Twenty nigh-hale files and another fourteen files of the indwelling dead, and they might argue with a battalion, for a little while.

This mass of demons would be an army job, if all the brigades were hale and fast and lucky.

One demon flows forward, moving like the biggest, fastest snail there ever was. Tongue or tentacle, a rather battered head with gold earrings and the sticky remnants of a cloth cap is held out. Visibly, rigidly blank volunteers on either side, Dove takes it on a plate held up in bare hands — Blossom’s proof gauntlets, offered, are unworkably too small — and sets it in the other balance pan.

The head sinks, but not to level; the light in the high stalky demon-eyes got darker, redder, and somehow a tiny fraction less tense, watching the pan come to rest.

The volunteer to Dove’s right carefully hoists the head up on its glass plate, holding it high and off to the right, the right looking out, toward Eustace. Eustace, in an obvious demonstration of best table manners, lips the head carefully off the plate and is even more careful those live hands are well clear before the crunching starts.

It goes on for awhile, head by head, or parts of head. The demons figure out pretty quickly that all of those with the parts of the same head have to come forward together. It takes them longer than that to figure out which fragments go together. One enterprising five-armed, five-legged demon like someone tried to make a hominid by stacking starfish has a head and a half in total, as parts of seven heads.

There’s jostling, but it stays orderly under the terrible weight of Halt’s complete indifference.

Three whole heads aren’t the right heads; the head-side of the balance sinks to the table, and Dove tosses the head forward. Not “back”, never “back”, something difficult to do — the human impulse is not to make the disappointed demon angry — and Dove does it well.

The distraught demons would be more sympathetic if it were not for the rapid, messy head consumption which follows.

The reconstructed head, still not quite whole of right eye, either ear, or upper lip, is presented, still in its preserves can. The balance likes it, can or no can, and it gets passed up. Eustace makes a martyred ear-flip, and very clearly remembers that moving any feet is entirely forbidden just right now, before there’s the strange clunking noise and the narrow metal jaws come out, to pick the can up as delicately as tweezers.

Sculpted head paté and tinned steel can might not be Eustace’s favourite treat — there’s a couple metres of faint purple fire from the flesh nostrils with the can-chewing — but the clanking, crunching sounds of shearing metal are steady.

There are a lot of heads, and a lot of demons. Demons never stop arriving, some well after dark, marks of haste and fighting on them. Those later-arriving bring some heads that look extremely surprised; from the half-braided, half-not-oiled look, one of them was having their hair done. Halt’s command didn’t say anything about where the people whose heads Halt wanted delivered were.

There are hundreds of heads. Reems the idea, Reems the thing with armies, this Reems so far east of Meadows Pass, has died, and the heads that held the idea of it are going down the gullet of a five-tonne sheep by the courtesy of demons.

Halt goes right on knitting, and Eustace goes right on eating heads.

Dove’s doing fine; the guy with the spare glass pan-plates for the balance is starting to shake. Only needed one spare pan-plate so far. I have no idea what that head had been dipped in or dragged through or if the demon carried the head somewhere in its digestive system, but raw brains aren’t that squooshy. Raw brains don’t have hair.

Eustace ate it, plate and all, and the trooper doing plate lifting changed gauntlets, leaving the old ones on top of the next head.

Eustace ate those, too, with a big rolling cud-chewing jaw motion.

The slope below the camp stops heaving and jostling with arriving demons; it settles, as a last few charred and bearded heads are presented. Full night came hours ago.

It’s not full dark; there’s a sky full of stars, and a field full of demon eyes, and the demon ward inside the focus leaking faint light.

One last demon strides forward; not very large, showing bite marks down one flank and claw wounds about the head, but it comes on so completely not showing what it must cost it to stride like that you know the cost is high.

The head of the Archon dangles from one hand.

The balance pan fails to dip at all.

Eustace gulps the head down whole, and the volunteer sets the plate back down in the balance pan.

Halt stops knitting.

With demons, you can’t count the eyes and divide by two, but there are truly a lot of them out there. Five-brigade job, the full army that the Commonweal’s never put in the field.

Halt sort of waves, a gesture that looks like trying to brush crumbs off a table.

All the demons that brought heads, that completed a service, are gone.

Five are left; three prostrate, two grimly defiant.

Behind them, behind the place the mass of demons was gathered, Rust is sitting the ghost-horse, a dimmer shape than demons.

Blossom’s helmet gets tossed off, Blossom stuffs something in both ears, moving fast; the teams on tubes two and four are turning to look, worried, or putting their hands over their own ears, when Halt says something.

The usual Independent “noise or words?” sounds liquid, fluid; this sounds like chips being hammered off the doom of all that lives, right behind you, close enough the chips should hit you. From behind and above, through the focus and major warding, it hurts to hear it with an ache like broken bones.

Halt tosses the broad half-twisted loop of knitting just now made, spinning.

The demons dive for it, vanishing through it.

One hesitates; Halt says something else, harsher.

That last demon leaps, and is gone. The loop lands on the grass of the meadow, spinning down in a smell of crushed flowers and warmth.

Ow says Toby, out of the focus. How could that hurt in here?

Not entirely a physical effect. It’s proportional to talent. Blossom, sounding sad.

You don’t always lose the ones you can spare.

You don’t always lose them all. Dove looks appalling, but is still up, somehow. There are five or six others looking wobbly.

Halt looks across at me, and a very little up, Eustace and the howdah about adding up to the palisade height.

“Captain. The re-making of the binding of despair is beyond the Archonate of Reems.”

“Thank you, Staff Thaumaturgist.” Polite, calm, voice that little bit absent, I think I got that just right.

It’s not like I’ll ever have another chance to say that to Halt, or that Halt isn’t grinning at me with a mad delight.

At me or the colour party trying to will themselves to start breathing again, it’s hard to say.

Rust starts riding forward, ghost-hooves on the demon-slick grass.

Rust’s smile is not good, or plain. But it is honest.

Chapter 31

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.”

I have parents, and grand-parents, and you can go back four greats. That’s it, all the history of graul there is in the world, because the wizard Laurel made our kind six hundred and sixteen years ago, if you count from the creation of the first one. The last made graul came out of Laurel’s vats after the Foremost marched.

“I do not think Halt can be faulted for telling people true odds.”

Blossom makes a broad gesture. The clear view of the stars blurs and shudders behind the moving hand.

“People didn’t start off with the Talent. It’s new to life, not all through the world like breathing and digestion and making food from sunlight. Someone made it.”

There’s a tiny whiff of ozone coming off Blossom.

“Either they did a bad job, or they didn’t understand what they were doing, or — ” Blossom gets stuck.

Or they had objectionable characters.

The spiders are much, much calmer about this than Blossom is managing to be.

The half-company of Reems guys are getting close, less than a kilometre. They’re not moving like people coming to a fight, but still.

Captain, Sergeant-Major. Turn out the duty platoon.

Sir. Twitch doesn’t make any of the jokes about waking the dead.

Neither does anybody in One, rolling awake in the standard. They’ve figured out they can will themselves into armour in there.

Blossom trots off. Five minutes later, Part-Captain Blossom trots up in armour. Battery’s alert. Don’t have anything that’d be both decisive and safe at this range.

More than a hundred dead guys behind a single focus node really ought to do.

Stand by to go old-fashioned on them as required, Part-Captain.

I get a grin and a wave and a knuckle-cracking gesture to go with my Sir. No salutes in the field, it’s the same wave the drovers use as an acknowledgement. Might be a Creek thing.

Oh, right. Captain, Rust. I am going to need you to translate if these Reems guys are here to talk.

Chapter 32

Rust comes awake like water falling up. You don’t see where the bedroll goes, and the hand that isn’t putting the hat on is a brief flicker of dark fire before Rust’s eyes focus.

Captain. Faint, the first wisps of the fire starting.

One of the Reems guys is coming forward, holding up a reversed spear.

Been roughed up a bit; there are scrapes and scratches, but it looks like everything’s functioning.

Dry, though. Can’t see a canteen. Hungry, after a night spent awake and moving in the cold.

Young and fit, so supposing they find potable water maybe good for a couple days of marching yet, even this far up the mountains.

Spear-guy stops, just about at bowshot, and flourishes the spear.

I head down the stairs with Rust. Halt is still knitting, and Eustace is still asleep.

You can see the ripple in the grass as the edge of the focus moves forward with me, an extra shine on the frost. I stop about seven metres from the guy with the spear, so the edge of the focus stops about at five. Maintaining composure pretty well. Not likely to recognise who Rust is, though what Rust is won’t tax the wits of anyone able to hold a spear. Rust’s hat has acquired another bunch of steel-winged butterflies, and the molten, languid, suddenly-bright wing-flapping is difficult to miss.

Whether Spear-guy thinks I’m the bodyguard or not is an open question. Unlikely to know more about what graul look like than the folk of the Creeks do, and in armour we sometimes fool each other. Being recognised as non-human usually tips the expectation from “important” to “bodyguard”.

Rust draws up, tall and formal, near enough aristocratic, takes a specific pose with both arms and a tip of the head. An invitation to speak comes through the focus in smoke of burning animal fat.

The guy with the spear looks back and forth, decides to speak to Rust.

Under Spear-guy’s words, I get a translation in smoke, half a beat behind.

“Lord! You are most great, and full mighty! The tale of your dead cannot be told!”

Rust’s arms move, head comes upright. Presumably Reems oratorical tradition for “do go on”.

There’s a pause, and the next bit comes out faster.

“The Archon is fallen, and the great lords of Reems. We would serve you, Lord, with sword and spear, for in the service of mightiness is glory and plunder!”

“Would you not rather return to Reems, and take up your estates?” Very odd, Rust’s alien voice in my ears and clear words through the focus.

“Doom still comes to Reems.” Spear-guy wasn’t looking like someone sure of life before saying that, and it still takes all the hope out of Spear-guy’s face to say it.

“Is not Reems yet mighty above its doom?” Rust conveys this in a way that comes through the focus with utter certainty that the question is rhetorical, that the might of Reems is certain and enduring. “Archons fall; Reems goes on.”

Spear-guy makes a strange little dip with the butt of the spear, and Rust makes a left-handed flat wave with a skipping pat motion to it. Spear-guy drops to the grass, sitting cross-legged, head tilted down, spear over thighs. It’s not easy to stand there holding a spear upside down with your arms at three-quarters extension.

Not necessarily easy to stand at all. Being stuck in a wizard-war takes it out of you, and then no food and a cold night.

“Lord, the might of Reems was great, and it grew, and conquered. The lamentation and grief of the conquered were bound, that the might of Reems should endure forever.”

The tears are obvious enough. There’s no weeping in Spear-guy’s voice at all; it seems flat, a bit shocky, but the cadences are even.

“It is not so, that Reems should endure forever. I heard the wails of the dead Reems had conquered crying in fear, as they passed from bondage into death.”

Spear-guy looks up, looks directly at Rust like a man expecting to die. “The sorcerers of Reems made chains of chains, that the bondage of the conquered should be the subjugation of the mighty from beyond the world.”

No word for demon in Reems, like bread catching fire.

“They are free, and many, more than did obeisance in the dark.”

The desperate gaze drops. “Reems is no more.”

That comes out ear-straining quiet. Even Rust’s translation is softer, a distant intimation of smoke.

“Yet you live.” Rust’s spoken voice doesn’t sound any harsher than the speech of Reems usually sounds. “Cannot you return to what was Reems, to the walled towns and the hillside groves, and be there of service to the people?”

Keeping the roving brigands away, I think Rust means, while whatever sorcery survives does what it can for the demons and the weeds. There will be some sorcerers left, possibly most of the sorcerers left; it won’t be Reems, but it could well be a lot of tolerably prosperous walled towns.

With a demon problem, for a generation or two, but clean farmland is worth fighting demons.

The bunch of Reems guys, further back, isn’t looking restive. Worried, yes. I suppose Rust’s formal oratorical poses aren’t going to be associated with the possibility of mercy.

“Lord, we are few, from many towns. Our fathers are dead, and our brothers, and our uncles, and our sons.”

Not this guy’s sons, not for at least ten years, but as a general truth it will do.

Standard poetic formula wisps through, in a satisfied smoke of cedar wood.

“If we join with victory, we are remade. If we return, we are handfuls in the fire.”

Spear-guy bends forward, and looks up, tear-streaked face the picture of entreaty.

“Lord, if we must pile bricks, or guard sheep, we will do it, and earn our women, not win them.”

Brimstone smoke, quick and startled. That offer is as desperate as they can get.

I start talking, as calmly as I can, and not all that loudly. Rust’s translation is what they’re going to be able to make sense of, anyway.

“I am a Standard-Captain of the Line of the Commonweal. I serve the Law of the Commonweal, and none living. It is not given to me in that law to admit armies, nor the soldiers of armies, nor the survivors of armies, who had sought to invade, into land of the Commonweal.”

“That law permits you to come without arms, and to petition for entry, but I tell you as surely as death comes to all living, if you believe women are given in trade or purchase you shall not be admitted nor could you prosper.”

A lot of harm, before we hanged them all.

Rust finishes repeating that in the speech of Reems; there are a few amazed shouts from the mass of Reems guys, and Rust adds a couple sentences of clarification. They start to get a rather desperate and wild look, and maybe it’s enough outside their experience to stop seeming like a parley.

One Platoon comes as close to condensing behind me as it can manage.

Toby looks willing to take Spear-guy’s spear away and use it for Spear-guy food, slowly; Twitch looks bored. Spear-guy looks wit-stuck, trying to take in the whole of One Platoon, that certainly has the shades of women in it.

The mass of Reems guys start looking less militant and more afraid of ghosts. Lots of warding signs and frightened looks.

“If you do not wish to return to Reems, you must make peace with the land here. It has wits, and wakes, and perhaps it has work for you.”

Perhaps it will devour you all. Or it could make you wives from shapes of birch and alder and you can be an old myth, but you are not coming into the Commonweal.

Rust translates the spoken part.

Spear-guy’s forehead touches the ground.

An obesiance to the Archon Rust says. It would have to be.

Spear-guy gets up, and turns, and walks away, everything in stance and manner

expressing indifference to incineration.

Chapter 33

The half-company of Reems guys is still there as we pull out half an hour later.

That’s quick, and no breakfast until the first rest, but my feet are itching.

We aren’t over the crest of the pass southward before the Reems fortress succumbs to a rippling in the ground, and the quarry-flat we had been camped on fills back in.

Hard to tell at the distance, but I don’t think the Reems guys were devoured. Knocked down, but not devoured.

Rust is route-finding, and trying to balance easy and rapid and south, all together; it mostly works.

Skirting yesterday’s battlefield wasn’t easy, the whole rise up to the south side of the pass is everywhere at least one of blasted, burnt, and fought over by demons. Lots of shredded horses and shredded Reems guys and bad footing. One notable stretch has a long drift of steel armour, ripped into strips and tangled up together like nesting razors. It moved when the focus-edge pushed it.

The mostly clear path took us through the blast zone where the Master Gunner got whoever was running the big Reems joint enchantment.

That one went off in the air, and there’s a couple kilometres of shallow crater. Halt noses Eustace over for a look right in the centre of it, and there’s a crackle and hiss of dissipating enchantments, followed by a leaping green and purple fire.

“Copper and gold”, Blossom says, looking over. Blossom’s been looking deeply pleased ever since we got a good view of the shape of the crater.

Eustace catches up. You’d never guess the howdah has the least volition; it sits there looking ornately inanimate. Still haven’t figured out what it uses for eyes. I’m only half-sure Halt is pleased; despite it being a busy three days, I’m not sure I know Halt well enough yet to be sure pleased is what’s showing, faintly, through Halt’s face.

The waggon-loads of wounded go in the middle column of waggons; if there’s no road, it’s not especially more work to manage a wider firm surface. No sense in irritating the conscious terrane by road-building, even the obviously temporary kind. We hit a lot of really firm turf and a couple of flat sections of sandstone, and even the two or three sections under trees never approach narrow enough terrain to risk trapping a waggon.

Whether this is a thank-you or the sensible decision that we’re not especially digestible, I’ll take it.

It wasn’t anywhere near as tough I had expected to get the guys from Three with the critter-spine problems to ride on stretchers. They’re keeping a brave face up, sometimes collectively, but I can tell they’re getting worried. Nothing would be wrong if their bodies would actually work. The medics keep trying to look hopeful, but it’s slipping.

I’m keeping my guesses back of what Laurel gave us for teeth. Get them home, first.

That’s not going to be today. I think the pass-peak and the big fortress was well east of the wall, and we’re heading nearly due south.

Over the saddle of a minor pass, there’s a steep descent into what I’m probably allowed to call a river valley. The river’s low with high summer; there’s braided water and heaped-up gravel, some of it three or four metres above the current water.

We set up camp in the middle of the gravel; there’s room, if we go more rectangular than square, and low river is not no river. Better than the usual ditch, and I’d rather not fuse any of the terrain into walls. Shifting some gravel around into something like flatness should be less objectionable.

Sliding ourselves through the night under concealment ought to do it. Out of anything except an heroic bowshot from the banks, and a vengeful sorcerer is more of a worry than troops. Extremely unlucky troops to have been in the right place; we’ve come more than a hundred kilometres today over a shape of mountains that wasn’t under the sun yesterday.

A sorcerer might just be able to find us. An active standard is detectable, and moving is haste is surely active.

I have Halt, Rust, and Blossom treat the possibility seriously; pretend you’re a One-of-the-Twelve level sorcerer from Reems, out for vengeance. Whatever you’d expect from that, keep it from happening, quietly.

It was an educational instruction.

Rust lay, apparently comfortable on smooth rocks, head on saddle, hat over face, and you’d have to be paying careful attention to realise that the mountain-jays and the blackbirds and after nightfall the owls all kept having short fits of looking for something. You’d need good eyes or the focus to realise it went out a long way.

Blossom sat down at a worktable that folds out of the side of the battery commander’s waggon with some copper rods and some silver wire and put a shiny thing together. Then the Part-Captain had a couple files of artillerists stick some engraved and inlaid steel tent stakes around the perimeter of the camp, evenly round an ellipse at all thirty-two compass points.

There was some fussing when it became apparent that Rust’s disembodied awareness was returning periodically to be bodied, and not quite in a way the shiny thing understood. Blossom adjusted something, Rust sat up, entered into a brief discussion of esoterica with Blossom, and then lay back down.

Pretty much what you’d expect.

The gentle, unthreatening darkness will talk to Halt, in entirely comprehensible words. They were still chatting amiably away when I condensed back out of the standard around midnight, having checked up on One Platoon and updated the battalion diary.

Some of the drovers may still be shuddering. I’m not sure I wouldn’t be, myself, if I ever let myself think about it for any length of time.

Morning is quiet; we do a proper cooked breakfast and a kit check. Throwing a wheel loses time and drops the injured.

One fewer injured to drop; lost one of the demon-bit injured in the night. They go in the ashes-barrel with due ceremony and into the standard to a rueful welcome.

The living are holding together pretty well. Can’t say they’re not as tired as I expected, but the Company is dealing with it better.

All of them will have put in a hard day’s work with something that grants a simple focus, a plow, a dredge, lumbering, making bricks, anything like that, and you put the day in and you’re tired and you wake up in the morning doing pretty well. Not a lot different from putting in a day’s work just with muscles.

Part of that, maybe most of that, is that the simple focus has a limit; you can’t get more than a fixed amount of the Power into it, and if you have, and try to use, more than that, you get an obvious overflow effect that keeps the simple focus from working.

Line standards will take everything you give them. There’s no limit; you can kill yourself with the drain. It happens from inattention much more often than from desperate circumstances.

Nobody did that. All that catch was good for something.

Living and dead crushed attacks by demons, sorcerers, toxic critters, and veteran infantry, spent an uneasy night, and then put in a day of hastened marching, pulled into focus without having time to notice they were still tired. Today, nothing will keep them from being woozy-tired in ways they don’t feel in their muscles.

Even the dead; the dead still think of themselves as having bodies, bodies with muscles that get tired.

You see various stretches, people rolling their shoulders or rotating their arms, and looking baffled because there’s no ache to it. It’s talent-tired. Something an Independent would know, or veterans, but new to the Creeks.

More than one unit of the Line, new from an actual battle, has had its morale crack from being talent-tired. It’s been described as all the bad bits of being drunk, or the early stages of being poisoned.

The artillerists, veterans all, make a point of explaining. Halt gives a good deal of implausibly grandmotherly advice. Rust points out, once, that it’s a much better feeling than losing.

Blossom has the good grace to look as much abashed as is consistent with a Part-Captain’s dignity when Dove — who looks like someone who got green wine, and is combining drunk and poisoned — asks outright if Blossom’s ever been talent-tired. Blossom certainly isn’t now, something as may trouble the shades of Reems sorcerers variously finely-divided.

The camp goes right on pulling itself together. Blossom’s wards haven’t gone off, Rust hasn’t found anything, and whatever Halt found to chat about with the enveloping darkness, Halt hasn’t felt it necessary to mention any of it.

That was a day.

A day indeed, Sergeant-Major.

Twitch has Toby running One through the same mend-and-maintain routine. It looks like it’s helping.

Coping with talent-tired and the ghosts of worn uniforms might keep them from thinking about what kinds of conversations they’ll have if I get them home.

Rust looks flatly annoyed, so much so that the ghost-horse noses Rust in worry. Rust is as talent-tired as the rest of them, with as good a reason, but has far too much practice with the state for that to be it.

Where are we, Captain? A nice hot hardwood fire, this one, a couple hundred metres upwind somewhere.

I take a chance, and run the viewpoint of the focus up about half a kilometre. From there, and the still-considerable height in the mountains, I’m fairly sure I can see the distant shadow of the Folded Hills and a faint shine from Westcreek’s headwaters marshes.

We’re at least a hundred kilometres west of where I thought we made camp.

Didn’t notice anything. Rust’s not at all happy. I’m just glad no one is likely to make an actual fire out of old wet boots.

Polite of the terrane.

It’s raining when we march into Headwaters.

Chapter 34

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.

Chapter 35

“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.

Chapter 36

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.”

Chapter 37

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.

Deal.

Crinoline heads off to make it a planning exercise for the Fourth’s company commanders, that consistent fate of Part-Captains.

I have to move.

The gerefan for Westcreek want the Standard for the Second Heavy of the Seventieth Territorial Brigade, that mostly hypothetical formation, to be part of the memorial. We’re going to need new standards once the second Shape of Peace exists, so it seems to the gerefan that there is no harm in this.

There isn’t, really, though a lot of people are likely to be upset if anything happens where I’d want to grab it out of the memorial between now and new standards showing up. Change the Shape of Peace, and it won’t work, the standards aren’t going to transfer.

Blossom appears after the armour stand gets shifted out of the standard onto some warehouse floor — always move that first, or you’ll knock it over trying to move past it — and offers to help. You can invite people into a standard, but it’s an every-time thing; they can leave on their own, but one invite is one entry for everybody but the Standard-Captains.

And Blossom, who is a standard.

It’s good to have the help; there’s half a tonne of books and maps in there. Even at company strength for the last three centuries, half a thousand years of battalion records adds up.

Any time there’s a change of quarters, there’s that point at the end when you’re checking to see if you missed anything. Nothing of mine, nothing in the map room or the records room but Blossom, gone completely sorcerer and looking at the ceiling frieze. It’s bronze, and full of runes I can’t read.

Better to say Blossom’s gone full enchanter; segments of the runes are lighting up, one at a time. Sometimes it’s parts of the border, asymmetric knotwork that looks like the snakes were too drunk.

“This is one of the original standards.” Blossom manages to sound certain and disbelieving at the same time, saying this.

There were twelve; the Foremost departed with three of them.

“It’s been in the Creeks since the Line first came through, same as the Captain’s House.”

Blossom nods.

“How optional is this Shape-of-Peace thing?”

“It gets you off the existential threat list.”

Blossom looks enormously sad, but goes right on looking up at the frieze.

“Those” — chunks of the frieze light up, gently, green and cyan and gold — “are there so a sorcerer can participate in the focus.”

Saying things gently isn’t my worst skill, but it’s nothing I’d ever try to make a living at. “Laurel didn’t intend the standard-binding to achieve independence. Every historical source agrees on that.”

Blossom, nodding, manages to look sadder still.

“Plug you into a signa like” — my chin comes up, to indicate the frieze. “You could make the signa. You’re going to make the signas, and the standards, for the Second Commonweal’s Line.”

Blossom looks startled, maybe halfway out of the full depth of sad.

“Best enchanter we’ve got.”

I get an eloquent “can’t very well argue with that” look.

“You could be the signa, yourself.”

No trace of surprised reaction. Of course Blossom’s thought about it.

“The only possibility of stopping you would be plugging a whole bunch of nothing-like-as-good sorcerers together, using some kind of modified standard binding, to try to get a brigade that could, maybe, stand up to yours. That’s the Bad Old Days returned, and with no real hope of getting rid of them again.”

Never mind what’d happen to the landscape, anywhere you had a fight like that.

“The Commonweal is made out of magic; the Shape of Peace, the Standards of the Line, the mechanisms of the geans, and the courts of law, it’s all a collective application of very complex spells. It works because the rules are the same for everyone.”

As nearly as we can manage, anyway.

“Those rules don’t apply to you. Not because you claim you’re important, not because you break the rules. They just don’t, any more than wood lettuce tea will make me sick.” It’ll kill most non-Creeks, but graul can eat anything.

A grin, brief and shallow, but still. At least the memory of bent metal.

“Getting the Commonweal into the future means making you into the rules. You, and Halt, and anybody else the rest of us can’t be sure couldn’t just take over the whole enchantment that makes the Commonweal possible at all.”

“How is that not slavery?”

“It doesn’t say anything about what you do, just who you are. Same as I can’t be someone who wanders about, killing people and taking their stuff.”

Blossom snorts. The Line runs exercises that are never called “suppressing graul bandits”; that would be tactless, since graul have never taken up banditry. Actual graul, usually graul who are Line veterans and suffer from a desire to exercise their sense of humour, are reliable about showing up to pretend to be bandits all the same. New junior officers are reliable about having several bad days.

“Being someone who does the job they’re given isn’t enough?” If you made me guess, that’s the foundation of the sadness.

“I might be that. You have the ghosts of your dead gunners pleased to accept the live ones pouring out beer for them so their shades will remember they were living long enough to train their replacements.”

Blossom looks away.

That happened when we camped on the gravel bar. Blossom teared up then, and maybe now.

“They’re not serving the Line; they’re serving you. It’d be a worry if you had the talent of a wheel of cheese.”

An actual smile.

“Point.”

“Once I turn over the standard in Westcreek Town, I’ll be carrying around the same transfer token I used to get here, so I don’t drop dead of having no assigned standard.” The token is in the Captain’s House, which is, after all, where it belongs.

“You know it works.” Blossom gestures. “I can read that, and know what I know that Laurel didn’t. I can even write it down, so maybe the Second” — there’s a small catch in Blossom’s even voice — “Commonweal’s standards will be more efficient, if I can get everybody to agree it wouldn’t damage the rest of the working.”

I turn, and start heading out of the records room. Blossom follows along. “Everybody survived the first Shape of Peace” — only one of them is known to be alive now, but the Shape of Peace isn’t what killed the rest of them — “and if Halt isn’t worried about the name transfer, you hardly need to be.” The number of things bound with Blossom’s name probably isn’t small, but Blossom just hasn’t had time to catch up with Halt.

It will be exciting if Halt’s name actually changes, switching Shapes of Peace, and many mighty things need to be bound anew. They’re supposed to go into the Shape of Peace, the knowledge of all the bindings, when an Independent dies, and the load sort of gets diffused across those Independents yet living. Can’t expect that to work, switching Shapes of Peace.

Every Commonweal citizen’s true name gets stuffed back of the Shape of Peace. You can ask if someone is really who they say they are without knowing their true name, and the Shape will answer. Try to fake who you are and it will kill you. Try to take any Commonweal citizen over through their true name, try to use their name to take or crush the power of a Commonweal sorcerer, any sorcerer, some guy who can do four charms reliably as much as one of the Twelve, and you have to overcome the Shape entirely to get the one name. Also the one time you want the Line to find you before the Independents do.

A second Commonweal means a different Shape of Peace, and, since there’s no time, presumably something like the original working, that bound names based on geography, rather than the present mechanism of descent.

“Do you think the current Shape of Peace won’t let go?”

Blossom makes the hand-rocking gesture of doubt. “Theory says it’s fine.”

“How much of the red shot you expended was theory before we marched up north?”

I get the metal-bending grin. “The short black-black-reds are close to regulation.”

Blossom goes out of the standard ahead of me; it would let the Part-Captain stay, if I left first, but that wouldn’t be polite.

I don’t have to give it up quite yet, but I pat the wood and iron frame of the thing that isn’t a door anyway.

I’m going to miss it.

Chapter 38

Dove and two files stay in Headwaters. There are more spine-stuck than the hospital can readily handle, and harvest is ramping up. Not a slow time for any hospital. Dove had just looked at Radish, when Radish had tried to suggest taking that detail, and Radish had nodded, and shut up.

The dead think they’ve had a rest. The hale living have had, and we march out of Headwaters in good time and good order. Breaking step for the bridges goes by without notice. I’ve got a veteran half-company of regulars now, along with orders to get the designation caught up.

Also an unburdened Eustace following Blossom, and therefore also Blossom’s horse-thing. Eustace isn’t doing much of the fire-breathing; there’s a faint glow over fleshy nostrils, but no jets. Eustace is acting like one false move will bring on wishing to be cutlets.

Blossom’s will, or attention, I can’t tell, has been unable to entirely tamp back into Blossom’s junior officer face. Doesn’t feel Shape-of-Peace related. Even the veteran artillerists were visibly careful of Blossom’s mood, loading up a barge in the pre-dawn near-dark. Artillery to cover the northern border is obvious critical supply, didn’t look like social embarrassment that they were getting water transport.

We’re a kilometre south of the causeway end, rolling along, Eustace and Blossom’s horse-thing on the grassy verge, the dead stirring no dust from the road behind me, when the lookout notes the presence of a riderless horse-thing on the east, left, wet, side of the roadway. There’s maybe thirty metres of mixed trees and swamp and the kind of grass that doesn’t mean this is a safe place to put your feet before the channel of the Wet Westcreek on the east side of the road, all the way along the first ten kilometres. The horse-thing is right at the point the road starts to curve because the Wet Westcreek does, too.

The horse-thing, visually identical to the one Blossom is riding until you get to the tack, is just off the verge, not in the damp stuff. It’s alert, it’s looking at something under the trees, and it’s flicking an ear. No sign of wanting to move.

The half kilometre up to where the horse-thing is goes quick, and I call a halt.

“Part-Captain?”

I remember the horse-thing Blossom rides kicking Reems guys into spray. Sending someone to grab the reins isn’t the first thing to try.

Blossom dismounts. Blossom’s horse-thing and this one whistle at each other, sounding like what you’d get if penny-whistles were a social species.

Blossom takes some slow steps from the side, clucking, and puts a hand on the other horse-thing’s neck. There’s an ear flick, but no other movement. One more step forward, even with the horse-thing’s head, and it shies; Blossom’s going metal-fire.

Someone with a large cat half on their head rises from behind the waist-high grass. The reflex reaction to Blossom going angry-sorcerer is for the focus to close up; nobody orders it, it just starts to happen, and then it stutters.

The cat looks up with hisses and tail-lashing, and the woman smiles.

If there’s a way to punch humans in the gut so they sigh, instead of folding up, that’s what happens. The dead do it.

“Spike!” says the woman, out of the astonishing smile. From what I’m getting back through the focus, human people will die for a chance to see that smile again.

Blossom takes six steps through the grass and hugs whoever this is.

Whoever it is reacts to Blossom’s advance by shifting the cat into a lower, away-from Blossom grip, and leans into Blossom’s approach. Whether the cat’s resulting ear-gnawing is affectionate or not, the woman takes no notice of it. Brief razor-fine lines, magenta and orange and a blazing teal, show everywhere teeth touch flesh. The tail-lashing is impressive; there are a couple of resolute bong noises from Blossom’s tassets.

Three dead guys, a couple of file closers back in two, and Radish, for half a step, start forward. Radish stops them all. Sir! That’s an ocelotter. It’s wild, not safe to pick up.

Ocelotters are considered lucky, much more calmly from Twitch. Mostly because any place they live has relatively few weeds species established.

The new horse-thing’s ears are staying back; the woman with the ocelotter stops, two steps into coming forward, scritches behind the ocelotter’s ears — I can hear the purr from ten metres, and there’s an ornate head-butting — and sets it down.

I get enough height out of the focus to watch it bound twice and vanish into swamp water. Something happens to the ears before it hits the water. The thick tail sculls, and it dives. There are…four more, watching from trees. Yearling group? And the brave one or the crazy one went to talk to the nice sorcerer?

Blossom looks happy, every bit as happy as looking out over the crater where the commander of the army of Reems had been.

“Captain, may I present the Independent Grue?”

“It’s short for Gruesome”, Grue says, smile intensity adjusting upward. I can feel the standard-bearer’s knees start to give before there’s a general mental retreat into the focus.

I give the standard short bow, thinking the other one while I do it.

It’s really Grew, but try to get someone who wound up two decimetres over average height to use that. Blossom can get a lot of fondness through the focus.

Grue’s about nineteen decimetres, a decimetre taller than Blossom. Typical female Creek height. More leg and less shoulder and an odd impression of a truly floating stride, feet not quite touching the ground.

“Was the Independent proceeding south or north?”

“The Independent was waiting to ambush your Part-Captain; I have Blossom’s luggage.” Vast gentle amusement.

One of the cases behind the saddle of Grue’s horse-thing is waxed leather with brass corners, not significantly different in design from what anybody with things that mustn’t be crushed uses instead of a saddlebag. The other one is…

Cruncher hide? I can’t tell if Twitch is appalled or astonished.

Killed it with a spoon. Only a very little bobbling to get first latch to the standard. Of the Line the Foremost’s worn boots.

Now Twitch is both appalled and astonished.

Sergeant-Major?

Twitch gets everybody informed and moving again. There’s a couple hundred other happy meetings coming up, as soon as we get the company home. It doesn’t seem necessary to ask if Grue is coming along, or if the new horse-thing can keep up.

The only other time I ever saw a riding dress, it was on some foreign dignitary really determined to stay in a particular style of long robe. Grue is wearing a pale blue frothy one over cavalry boots, the scout-cavalry over the knee kind that has marked those wildly more brave than sensible for the last four hundred years. Grue mounts by a process indistinguishable from levitation and rides well enough that Grue’s horse-thing backs and turns to flank Blossom’s on the east without Grue laying hand on the reins.

There’s a generally pleased-sounding set of quiet whistles from the horse-things.

Blossom hands Grue the letter tube from the back of Blossom’s sword belt; Grue produces a half-dozen, and hands them to Blossom. Grue’s letter gets read; Blossom, on duty and on the march, tucks the half-dozen away.

A quiet five kilometres or so later, proceeding at the full regular rate of advance, Twitch asks, privately, A spoon?

A high-velocity spoon. Blossom tries for repressive, doesn’t quite manage it, tone somewhere between the Part-Captain and the Independent.

The image is of an older-looking, and thus much younger, Blossom; the cruncher’s great triangular head and tree-snapping beak are reaching fast, Blossom’s hand is inside the gape, and there’s a flash and an awful mess. Crunchers are not easy to kill, but nothing does all that well with its brain blown out of the back of its head and what looks like all its extensor muscles locked.

Grue shouldn’t have heard the question, or been able to tell who it originated from.

The next bit of image comes directly from Blossom. There is muttering in it, and what are presumably the younger Blossom’s hands, picking up a spoon folded in half and crushed nearly into a cylinder around the long axis and proceeding to bend and squeeze it back into a proper spoon shape using thumb pressure, like a potter making a clay figurine.

The one spoon the Part-Captain had? Twitch is still appalled, but it’s the appalled that will stuff itself into the general category of Independents. I’m not sure if it says more about Twitch or Blossom that Twitch really wasn’t sure Blossom hadn’t beaten a cruncher to death with a spoon.

Wasn’t even an ensign then. Blossom reaches into a harness pouch, twists to reach into a saddlebag, straightens up holding a fan of five identical spoons, strangely shiny.

One Platoon, who can perfectly well see the spoons, start off perplexed and finish with smiles as Twitch explains. Blossom puts the spoons away with good humour.

I no longer believe in Independents randomly arrived.

Independent

Grue, for all love

Are you in the Creeks for some particular purpose?

I do medical stuff, some agricultural work — which could be anything, weeds, crop enhancement, encouraging birds to eat the bugs you want eaten — and Halt sent me a letter saying that there was no limit to the work to be done in the Creeks.

The smile and the cheerfulness fade, for a second. “By the pricking of my thumbs” isn’t something you want to read in a letter from Halt.

Blossom’s face goes bleak. I hear the next thing Blossom sends, Grue does, and it’s clear to me that the focus is forbidden to pass it more widely. It’s happening faster than Halt expected.

Grue reaches up, brings a butterfly that perched on the raised hand as though butterflies all do that down into the path of a wider smile, blows gently. The butterfly sails off; somewhere behind me, troopers fall out of step.

Differently, maybe. Halt called the auguries grim. Grue doesn’t get the smile into that.

Blossom inhales; Blossom’s horse-thing curvets. Halt’s understanding of grim is a bad thing to find yourself trying to imagine.

Grue looks, I think, wistful. Side-on and upward doesn’t help with subtle human expressions. The auguries and the news that the Eastern District had assigned the Standard-Captain to the Creeks crossed, getting to the Line-Gesith. Halt didn’t expect much support from the Line, and did expect to have trouble with Rust.

This one’s easy, it’s approval, slanting past Blossom who is looking oddly at Grue. When Halt says even Rust could see not to try your ruthlessness, Captain, that’s a rare compliment.

I suppose it must be.

Chapter 39

Getting back to Westcreek is bad.

That there are dead is not a surprise; that made it to Westcreek Town with the first barge down the river, days ahead of us. Various attempts at a rough count, likewise. No list of names.

No one in Westcreek expects the dead, or some of the dead, to be visible; the dead don’t expect their loved ones to pass right through them. Failed embraces have living friends standing in for the dead, who find themselves offering spectral patting motions. Sometimes there are no living friends, and the spectral patting has to suffice.

It takes an hour, the first time, to get through the shrieking and crying. There will be several other hours, as people arrive from progressively further away. Blossom discovers that the artillerists had more social success in Westcreek Town than Blossom realised, and that the battery’s list of dead is wanted with urgency.

No missing. They’re all known dead — all of whom are officially ashes in barrels and not demon digestions — in a Commonweal hospital with a known prognosis, or right here in shape to march. That’s a better thing than anyone else here realises, except maybe Twitch. Don’t think Twitch has ever had to tell someone that the Line has no idea what’s become of their child.

Four days later, there’s a memorial garden a hundred metres wide, centred on the sunny south end of the turning basin that joins the east canal and the Wet Westcreek and the public docks have moved from the south end of the turning basin to the north. Fuller’s Mill is still where it was; that relatively narrow plot of land might suit what Toby thought was appropriate, but one twenty-fifth of the Creeks’ population has had a year’s worth of deaths from causes other than age for the whole Creeks happen to it. Surviving parents have a lot of grief to work through, and it’s catching.

The flanking trees will go in come springtime; the argument about what species, and how many, and where, isn’t going to be settled this month.

The combined length of the mirror-flat memorial stones, each a metre high, is more than the hundred metres; they’re set at the top of an embankment, with turf above and dry stone wall below, and the two embankments angle out from the standard-shrine in the middle. It’s some hard, dark, crystalline rock; however skilled the teams with the rock-saw foci are, they’d have been the next six months getting the names written in with chisels. One of the dead asked Blossom, and another had a word with their uncles doing the bronze-work. The end-scroll on the left of the front of the roof of the standard-shrine hides a drawer, just big enough for the spoon.

The dead have mostly been wise enough to point out, when asked about the memorial, that’s it’s for the living, not them, not really, but there’s always that one small thing.

Blossom did use the spoon, and the handwriting on the dark granite matches the barrels, way out on the far end of the left arm. That was Toby; public memorials often start at the shrine, and alternate outward, but Toby knew the Line tradition, along with what had happened to the Eighth and the Eighteenth. No-one in Westcreek Town could cope with one of the shades of the dead asserting wouldn’t want anyone thinking we thought we were special, with all the other dead nodding along behind.

Grue is astonishingly good at dealing with a weeping, ranting, this-emotional-pain-is-unfamiliar Blossom. Losing people you’re responsible for hurts. If it didn’t, the Line wouldn’t give you a warrant of commission.

If it stops, they take the warrant away.

The barrels got sawn up with extreme care and went name by name into private memorials. The ashes of the dead, artillerists too, are in the pair of raised flower beds running north-south, on either side of the walkway from the water up to the standard-shrine. Those have been mulched over, waiting for spring. No-one wanted to plant those in haste, months to first frost or not.

Everybody in the Line fits along the wall-walkway; everybody who wants to witness from the Town wouldn’t fit on a bet, but the basin full of barges could hold two brigades, which for numbers is a bit short of what it does. Parents and siblings and orphans get the walkways beside the flowerbeds.

I read the roll. Two hundred and seventy-eight living, two hundred and ninety-seven dead. Not all of either group are here. Of all the Line who are here, all the living answer and all the dead condense into visibility.

There had been some half-objections to my part in the ceremony, that couldn’t quite make it into clear words, before Radish had stood up, looked around, and said “Captain’s as good a Creek as anybody” into the slow silence that had followed Radish standing. It wasn’t Radish’s sergeant’s voice; whatever it was, the argument stopped before it really started, and didn’t come back.

Three hundred names, fifteen hundred seconds, a scant half an hour. A brigade takes a whole day, and that doesn’t seem long enough.

I march the dead into the standard; I’ve got a minute or two to thank them. Most of them will be letting go; some of them go, misting into nothing, as they’re thanked. Nearly all of Blossom’s artillerists quietly head off to tube one and their self-appointed training role. Twitch is determined to stick until, in the immemorial tradition, the outgoing battalion Sergeant-Major might brief their successor.

Can’t say I’m surprised. “Shan’t haunt your signa, sir” is near enough to too much; all I can manage is to clap Twitch’s shade on the shoulder. “Good work, Sergeant-Major” moves through the shape of my face, but I can’t get it audible, even in here where audible is notional.

Twitch might manage it; the standard, as a standard, won’t last, there’s no way to transfer it from the First Commonweal to the Second. The welcome to the dead in this memorial could well be deep and wide enough.

I condense back out, with an armful of rolled farewell letters, neatly tied together by files and platoons. Then it’s another reading of names, and handing letters over.

The letters for a brigade are four trips. First time I was ever in a standard.

We march off in silence; the last foot is off the memorial well before the wail goes up.

Up, around, over the broad bridge, north a bit to the barracks. Most of the population of Westcreek Town is still at the turning basin, docking one careful barge at a time; “drowned at the memorial service” is nothing anyone wants to write on a tombstone.

“This is the last time I get to insist that you listen, so I’m going to use it.”

Half a chuckle.

“You’re alive. Your homes, your families, the people of the Creeks, are safer than if we hadn’t marched north. That’s the good.”

All the good we get.

“The bad, well, it was bad. Not the recommended introduction to demons, hostile armies, cogitoxins, combat critters, wizard-war field conditions, or appropriate offensive odds.” Fire-priests, now, that was the right introduction to fire-priests, but let’s not dilute the point. “A battalion of regulars would have found that a tough job, and you did it.”

Much to my surprise.

“Which means you’re over-strained in ways that don’t show, just like picking up something too heavy. This is your head, not your back, but it’s the same kind of thing. War sends you mad, and you return to the Peace, and then you doubt yourself in both.”

“What you need to do is talk. Talk to one another, who know, talk to the loved ones who are worried about you; they won’t understand where you’ve been or how there’s madness involved but they understand they care about you. If you need to, wander down to the memorial and talk to the Sergeant-Major.”

Some jobs you can’t get out of by dying.

“Talk to me, talk to the Part-Captain, if nothing else works talk to Halt” — a laugh, but some of them will — “but don’t keep it shut inside. You’re a social species, you’re not good at killing each other. It should bother you. Most of those guys from Reems didn’t have any better choices than to carry a spear for the Archon, and no, it wasn’t fair; just their rotten luck, much as it was your good luck that means you’re alive.”

Too kind to most of the army of Reems, and likely all of the Iron Guard. Better for the troops.

“Drink if it means you can talk; if you’re drinking so you don’t talk, that’s bad. Anybody notices somebody doing that, tell me, and I’ll see what can be done.”

Deep breath. I’m looking at a lot of surprised faces. There’s an extensive set of side-courses at Senior School for those of us who lack a natural understanding of the human condition. Which means we’re never afterwards sure if we got it right or not. Not getting any appalled from Blossom isn’t inherently reassuring.

“Once you’re dismissed, the Second Heavy Battalion of the Seventieth Territorial Brigade, Wapentake of the Creeks, ceases to exist. It belongs, as its standard belongs, to the Line of the First Commonweal. Presuming the vote carries, we’re going to be in the Second Commonweal by winter.”

“You’ll be of the Line, but not in the Line; retired reserve, and no-one will call you into the Line unless we’re retreating on Westcreek Town.” That gets me some grim looks. There are ways that could be a recoverable situation, but no-one in this company will have those as their first thought.

“General Chert wants the Fourth of the Twelfth back; I am tasked with raising a battalion in the Creeks.” Because going straight to a brigade wouldn’t work. “If it’s work you want to do, if you go home and talk and think and decide the Line is what you want to do, I want you back for that battalion.”

Even with all of them, cadre’s tight.

“If that’s not what you want, you can do nothing, and stay in the retired reserve. Or you can resign, as at any time not under arms in the field.”

You don’t ask if there are any questions, but there’s that pause, so you can spot the troubled faces and ask them what the problem is. There aren’t any. Not many of them thinking about the future today.

“It was an honour to serve with you.”

“First Company, Second Battalion, Seventieth Territorial Brigade, dismissed!”

They march off in good order. By the time I’m off the marching ground, the first little dribs and drabs are starting to come back, and before long it’s all of them. I get a couple of dinner invitations, questions about whether or not I will show up for the memorial dinner next déci, and then Radish.

“Here to resign, sir.”

Don’t think Radish planned the sir; that looks like nervousness.

“Resignation accepted. Sorry to lose you, Radish.” The formal forearm clasp is pure reflex on Radish’s side. Radish may have thought I missed all the talking-it-over-with-Dove. Losing both surviving sergeants — Dove’s going for sorcery training, unless there’s a way to out-argue good sense, Halt, and Blossom all together — will make things more difficult, but not half as difficult as no established Senior School is going to, by and by.

“Sarge?” One of Radish’s file closers; too surprised to swear.

Radish’s head shakes. “My dad always said I should figure out what I was good for, and do that. The Line ain’t it.”

There’s a sort of wordless objection.

“No, serious. If you can get the demons out of your head, great. It’s a job worth doing, but I’ll be the rest of my life forgetting what that was like. I doubt the Captain wants to have to deal with me going shrieking mad into the focus the next time.”

That can happen. It’s not a help.

I pitch my voice up. “The focus doesn’t work if you don’t have your heart in it. The standards can’t take what you don’t give. Which is why we’ve got the Commonweal, and not something even worse than the Bad Old Days.”

There are nods, and thinking looks, and Radish looks some combination of embarrassed and relieved.

“If you want to go forward with the Line, great. The Line’s going to need you. If you figure it’s time for another job, you did this job better than anybody had a right to expect.”

This next bit is a Sergeant-Major thing, but I’ll have to do.

“Sometimes, when it gets bad, you’ll hear the Part-Captain or the Sergeant-Major say that it’s time to fight so we do not shame the Foremost.”

Who didn’t have anything to do with the Line of the Commonweal, and, if they still exist, might not know we do, but never mind. Hardly anybody’s standing in the Line for the sake of facts.

“It got more than that bad.” Much more.

“In, or out, or just don’t know, you’ve all served the Line so the Foremost would call any of you comrades, and be proud. Remember that.”

Chapter 40

I go to most of the dinners. It’s a risk; Senior School table manners are acceptable by definition but human social politics are murky, and the Creeks are not descended from the same social tradition as anywhere else I’ve been. Nothing obviously dire happens.

Catching wasps out of the air and setting them outside might have achieved the status of a party trick; it hasn’t offended anyone.

The letters get written, the artillery ones first. Those need to make it back into the First Commonweal. Blossom rides them up to Headwaters; if you let them run, it takes the horse-things under an hour, one way. Grue’s been commuting between hospitals, growing people’s limbs and eyes and the occasional nose back on, and even if there had been an ordinance against going that fast on a public road, the first re-grown hand would have won Grue an exception.

Blossom sends a few other letters off while in Headwaters; the demon-bits in jars show up in Westcreek Town four days later. Those, packed with gibbering care, will have passed the barge-load of plain shot and standard-red shot going up the West Wetcreek. Blossom’s shot-factory has generally stood down for lack of iron, but can scrounge enough to send a set of forty of the hot reds back up the river by the end of Thermidor. The factory-folk are asking questions about other kinds of enchantment, and saying things like “beats canning time” in tones you may need to be a Creek to fully comprehend. Blossom comprehends well enough to recognise that the factory staff like making shot.

The hot reds go with detailed performance lists; four of them go with a note to Crinoline Blossom has me countersign, that if they’re used at a shorter range than the specified twenty-five kilometre minimum safe distance from anybody the Line is sworn to protect that Blossom will haul Crinoline’s shade back into the world and make it witness to the devastation.

Crinoline might know Blossom’s no kind of necromancer, doesn’t know Blossom, might not heed the warning at its proper weight. I sign in good conscience.

There’s a trickle of newly-intact troopers, all the rest of Thermidor and into Fructidor. Grue waves this off; it’s when one of the doctors Grue’s been teaching gets some toes back on a stevedore that Grue’s pleased. Grue’s muttering about how getting the maimed to grow new limbs isn’t all that difficult, really, would be much more convincing if anyone, including Blossom, could understand more than a third of the specific muttering at any given time.

Grue and Blossom’s individual saddle-cases have more than a household’s goods in each of them. It ought not to be surprising, having carried my half of a half-tonne of paper out of the Standard of the Creeks. They get offered one of the doctor’s houses across from the hospital, and turn it down; someone else would have to move, it’s too small for either, never mind both, laboratory spaces, and they’d much rather have stable-space for the horse-things.

The lab space wins the argument for them, and they wind up taking Fuller’s Mill; it’s been unused long enough to go at the tax price, too old to be in use, too new to really consider tearing down, no direct gean holding, no way to argue against someone better able to pay the taxes having it. Toby would have chortled.

Most of the town are embarrassed that they’re surprised two Independents can afford to take up the property. Grue has been getting other use out of the general inability to remember that they’re both much older than they look. Been somewhat more restrained about it than a starving weasel presented with fifty ducklings, if a tactful somewhat. Blossom says something indulgent about Grue’s appreciation for a population in which to be of average height.

Blossom agrees to make several milling concerns some complex gears, and gets tons of old, broken, some of it outright scrap, machinery in return, and turns that into a carding and spinning setup for wool off of Eustace. It was an impressive process, not very loud, but if you were close enough it shone through stone walls.

Halt appeared, settled right back into the same tiny cottage, before the end of Thermidor without anyone noticing the mechanism of Halt’s return. Eustace spent a day or so being pleased, and then a décade and a half being offended over being sheared. Halt’s sheep-shears look like they’d scarcely do as embroidery snips, but the wool comes off of Eustace in great rasping swathes.

Get the wool off most sheep, and they look leggy and fit. Get the wool off Eustace and the impression of sheep is much diminished. Eustace shows a basic hide colour a shade of purple like a bruise about to split and the great sinews of the neck bulk in an entirely unsheep-like way. Knowing, it gives away the inner jaws; if you don’t know, it looks unnatural.

Before the end of Thermidor is in time to vote; that is held on the last day of Thermidor, and Halt, very solemnly, enters the Westcreek Town voter roll with a date of birth of “the memory of man runneth not to the contrary”.

Joining the Second Commonweal passes easily; there isn’t much grumbling about the composition of the resulting new Parliament. Most of the talk is worry that the Food-Gesith will have a worse problem than anyone can solve.

Halfway through Fructidor, the apple picking has hit a frenzy; it’s an excellent crop year, and everyone’s determined to get all of it into the longest-term storage that can be arranged. Mostly that means canned; canned would normally mean running out of jars, but the glass-making collective Halt started back in the spring has fixed that. They ran night and day for a couple months, but they’ve fixed it. So now it means finding enough sugar, and no one planted extra beets this spring.

A traveller in Westcreek Town learns of this, sets down a battered satchel, and somewhere between demonstrates and teaches a six-kettle method for getting sugar out of river reeds. Halt, passing by with an Eustace-load of apples for the town cider press, reinforces some cautions but declares the method sound. A décade later, the technique has spread north and south and three creeks over. Grue spends some days rushing about teaching a simpler test for when the stuff has gone wrong; it’s very close to the test for blind drink, and there are already Creeks who know that.

At the start of Vendémiaire I find myself sharing a barge up to Headwaters with this same traveller. Remarkably phlegmatic, the kind of sorcerer who sits out in the rain out of philosophical indifference to the weather.

You can generally be sure sorcerers like that didn’t grow up farmers. Doesn’t keep this one from having a breadth of conversation.

The new Shape of Peace is going halfway between Headwaters and the actual start of the Folded Hills, up on a rise where a broad dike of hard dark rock has worn down slower than the land around it. There’s nothing but a road-house there as a fixed structure; there’s a lot of tents and a gang of Independents has been all over stretches of the rock with chalk lines.

I have no part in the ritual, other than to witness. And maybe to provide warning of disaster by dropping dead, right then and right there.

Thirty-two of the former Wapentake have come, armoured, calling themselves a colour party while the standard remains in its memorial shrine in Westcreek Town. I can’t begrudge them the desire to stand witness for their dead.

Chert and the three signas, one pennon, and fourteen standards of the Army of the Iron Bridge have not come. They need to stay right where they are, holding back the swarming creatures of the Paingyre or the risk of Reems.

All those who will be Independents in the second Commonweal can, and must, and have come. Short of two hundred, a third fewer than what the rough seventh of two thousands would give us. Departing from the Shape of Peace is just as deadly to Independents as Standard-Captains; I am surprised at so many taking the risk.

All the standards, the banners of companies, the individual tubes of artillery, anything associated with the Standard-Binding down to the warrant of a Staff Thaumaturgist, all are made so that they may not be pried away from the Shape of Peace. No-one wanted to deal with a battle-standard that had been taken over by an enemy, with the idea of a standard escaping into the understanding of the Commonweal’s enemies, and the best wits in the Commonweal have worked for five hundred years to make that impossible.

No one’s had the flash of brilliance to show the way around it; the allegiance of a standard cannot be changed.

What can be done is for the existing Shape of Peace to repudiate them, to cast them out. The date and time has been set with great precision, the vote taken in Parliament and the full ritual set to be followed in The City Of Peace.

It explains why the Independents doing the physical set up for the ritual have eleven clocks. It would be unusually embarrassing to be late.

There are six new standards; the signas can wait, the standard-captains of individual battalions can survive with transit tokens, the company banners can wait, the artillery tubes can be done without in the present pass. There’s some hope that the nine-layer tubes are really bound to Blossom, and will come over as Blossom does, but if they do, they will be the only artillery in the Second Commonweal at the moment of its first existence.

Those six new standards are sitting beside the bundled standards of the Eighteenth, outside where those will be emplaced, next to Chert’s pennon, Crinoline’s battalion standard, and the existing signas of what is about to become the Army of the Second Commonweal. Each of the other standards have the Standard-Captain’s possessions and certainly the Standard-Captain next to them. Everyone knows to stay outside.

Like the active battalion commanders, I have a replacement travel token. Mine is a ceramic cap for a long shot, only with — I am assured — different runes. This might be a compliment.

The ritual itself is short and quiet and looks like the most important thing is making sure everyone picks up their part of various lengths of chain in the right order. There’s a lot of paper, lists of Independents, sealed scrolls of names from the existing Shape of Peace, piles of contracts, lists and rolls of members of Parliament, township clerks and judges and anybody else oath-bound for a term of office. Blossom, Halt, the guy from the barge, the newly-elected Peace-Gesith, who is not a Creek, and the equally new Speaker of the Parliament, who is, stand at the points of the pentacle.

The Peace-Gesith and the Speaker are stand-ins, for the Law and the Peace; they don’t get personally bound into the Shape of Peace. Halt and Blossom and the fellow with the satchel will be, if it works.

I’m surrounded by worried faces; nothing feels broken, I’m not dizzy, everything moves. Sitting up isn’t happening just yet. It feels a lot like losing a shoving match with foci. My original travel-token is physically intact, but you can tell it’s dead. The new one’s live.

Hope the memorial holds its dead.

I get told, later, that there was one moment, just after the ritual had clearly worked, that Halt looked obviously relieved. I don’t see that. I get to my feet in time to see Blossom and Grue leaning on each other and talking about how they have to stop doing things like this.

One of the Independents says, loudly, “Wait, nobody died?” There’s a mass laugh, Independents, witnesses, new members of Parliament, everybody.

After that everything starts moving again.

Parliament swears itself in. Six or seven Independents run some tests, to be sure the Shape of Peace we’ve got is the one they expected. A member of Parliament obviously more brave than sensible utters a falsehood, and waits to recant until their trousers are obviously on fire. Putting out the fire, first aid, and a general outbreak of congratulatory glee follow.

I go right on feeling like I’ve been smacked with a plank, but I can move.

Parliament has gone straight into swearing-in judges, appointed clerks, and everybody else whose office ceased with the change.

Twenty or thirty of the Independents lapse into the shapes of swift things, and scatter. If the new standards worked, they can come back less swiftly than if they didn’t.

Most of the Independents head back down to the road. They aren’t going far, but long custom has Independents staying away from the business of Parliament. Parliament existing as chalk lines on bare rock is not seen as a reason for the custom to change. There’s a lot of fading hey-we’re-alive chatter that settles into a discussion about transport; the Creeks stayed distant in the first Commonweal because getting goods over the Folded Hills is hard, and that hasn’t changed. If it was obvious how to change it, it probably would have been by now.

I stay put. If the standards didn’t work, the plan calls for Blossom, who has made a working standard before, creating a new one in the presence of the now-existing Second Shape of Peace. I get to take that standard and head over the Folded Hills and try to hold the furthest possible ridge line.

There will be no shortage of volunteers.

Grue and Blossom come by. Grue hands me a turned maple-wood mug of something that smells like blackberries and anger.

“It’s good for you. Don’t eat the mug, there’s more.” I have to smile back at Grue, a careful social smile, and I do drink it. The last time I ate the mug just because I was hungry, I was eleven.

Whatever it is, it helps. Grue can’t have got actual rest in the blackberries, but whatever is in there is a good substitute.

I’m about at the bottom of the mug when Halt comes up with the fellow with the satchel. They are, I think they are, having a discussion about the transition of names, between the two Shapes of Peace. One of the things that makes a Commonweal a good arrangement for the Independents is having their true names safely behind the Shape of Peace. More secure than secrecy, though it still isn’t polite to ask a sorcerer what their name is.

“All secure?”

Halt produces an indescribable expression of contentment. “If my name had changed, or been lost, we would already know.” There’s a pause, and you get the impression Halt is tallying up memories. “It would have been quite spectacular.”

The list of mighty things bound by Halt’s name since the First Commonweal came into being is long enough. Having everything Halt has ever bound break loose at one time could be described as spectacular, though I’d describe it as other things.

Grue hands Halt a glass of something; it smells like pear brandy. Halt murmurs “thank you, Grue dear”, points, the usual Independent chin lift, at the guy with the satchel, and says “Oh, and Captain, this is Wake.”

The forearm clasp on introduction is automatic.

Wake. First of the Twelve to fall to the Foremost. Considered third in power, after Halt, who brooks no rivals, and Shimmer, who is mad with a terrible madness.

Wake, whose might as a necromancer is not equalled, is not provided with a peer known to history.

Guy goes right on looking like an itinerant bricklayer, complete with having a grip and a half.

Grue hands me a refill.

Chapter 41

The standards worked.

Even for the Eighteenth, the standards worked, and the dead abide together, waiting, before they are successfully emplaced.

It took the Independents a day to get there, and a day to set up, but those two days are entirely quiet; none of the creatures out of the Paingyre show the least interest in climbing the Folded Hills, and the Army of the Iron Bridge has nothing more to do than march toward the Eighteenth’s emplacements. Two of the seven Independents responsible for the ritual get subsumed into it — not part of the plan. The subsumed Independents stick around and go weirder than the dead of the Line, but Halt and Wake each proclaim the thing stable.

The combination of the wards on the Folded Hills and the escarpment back of the Lily Swamps cuts communication with the First Commonweal; we can’t tell much more than that the ward on the escarpment went up. Anything else would require a messenger, with the short way through the mass of creatures and the known long way over the Northern Hills and through Reems.

The pivot back to the Folded Hills works; Chert is sure enough that the Line got everybody out ahead of the creatures from the Paingyre to be sleeping.

The lack of battalion standards makes things difficult; once it gets behind the ward-line, the Line ought to be building roads or terracing fields, two of the three heavy battalions per brigade. Making a road with a whole brigade is like trying to stir your coffee with a shovel, and leveling fields is worse, you wind up cooking the soil. Chert keeps the colour party on the ridge, and sends the Tenth, Twelfth, and Twenty-Second into the Folded Hills whole and entire.

There are four valleys, all roughly parallel, all running north-northwest to south-southeast. The most distant from the Creeks, and the two closest, all drain away southeast; the second-most distant is higher, narrower, and doesn’t drain out of itself. The resulting long narrow lakes are deep and cold and full of large long-necked creatures, fangy-faced and hungry. Makes that valley less of a settlement priority.

Each brigade takes a valley and starts putting in a canal; big fused dams and canal-scale rock cuts is using a shovel as a shovel, something you want a whole brigade for in regular times.

Won’t do anything for transport between the Hills and the Creeks, but it’s a start.

Half the Creek weeding teams — they flipped coins — head into the Folded Hills. After harvest is usually their slow time, but anything they can do to get fields established in the Folded Hills is a help. Some of the displaced — we can hardly call them Foldies; the general hope is that the individual valleys will develop useful names — arrive in the Creeks with crated-up machinery and books.

The first group of standards work, but they can’t last, made with wood and ink instead of refractory metals. If it was plain iron, we wouldn’t have a problem; iron is short but not “can’t find fifty kilos” short. The list of metals and additives isn’t short, and Chert has every geologically inclined Independent available, plus a few hobbyist school teachers, out looking. Blossom gave the general a schedule in days from when the last ingredient arrives, and it’s a lot of days.

I get to feeling useless shifting paperwork, find a servicable spear thrower in the Captain’s House arms closet, make some javelins, and put my name down on the Troubling Critters list. People and sudden work in the Folded Hills have all manner of creatures moving, and the Creeks side of the hills is the long, gentle slope, with substantial stream valleys to follow straight into the West Wetcreek.

It might not have been a good idea. Eventually I go out with whole files of the self-designated colour party, it’s effective, we suffer no significant injuries despite the cruncher, my companions conduct themselves with due seriousness, and it is a clear material help to the Peace. The bad idea part is how ineffective it makes pretending to be human.

The next bit of immediately relevant paperwork to come through is a note from Chert. Chert’s got a Sergeant-Instructor volunteering to come into the Creeks and assist with raising the battalion. I’m to send the fellow straight back if I don’t think that will work out.

That’s a strange thing for a general to say, or to think needs saying. It makes sense when I see the guy; Prowess, who is an excellent arms instructor but who is also a deep traditionalist. Traditionalists don’t approve of my career path.

I make no effort to avoid the inevitable sparring match, or fuss much that it’s with spears. The Line’s notion of spears are simple two-metres-of-shaft things with a twenty centimetre blade you can slash with and a plain butt cap, no attempt at a mace or a spike. They’re mostly training weapons, and spikes aren’t worth the damaged feet.

We’ve got a bit of an audience, along the training ground wall; I get the feeling they can tell Prow’s not especially concerned to make this look like sparring. Between standards like this, the traditionalist notion of propriety won’t have a problem with killing me. That’ll correct the terrible error of any graul accepting a warrant of commission, and the traditionalists will all sleep better.

Should word of my death reach them someday.

Fighting another graul is interesting. Going carefully defensive and relying on stamina won’t work. Even if you get left alone the whole time, sometime in the next three days someone’s going to make a mistake. Given that you decided to be an idiot, it’s probably already you.

You can try to get inside their physical responses; get them out of position enough that yeah, they know it’s coming, but can’t actually move fast enough to avoid it. With weapons, this would work a lot better if there were substantial differences in reaction speed amoung hale graul. Mental speed differs plenty, and if you’re quicker-witted than another graul commander it’ll work fine, but not in a straight fight with spears.

You can get try to reach further into the future, and try to get a couple attacks and counters ahead. It’s never clear if this is going to help, because you eventually have to do something to gain advantage, and that will be only a little while in the future, and just as obvious as anything else a little while in the future.

If you’ve got a lot more practice than the other graul, if you spend most of your days working out with weapons and teaching fighting, and you’ve been doing that for about twice as long as the graul you’re fighting has been alive, you can just about guarantee that you’ve got a bit more depth on the future and less lag between your awareness and your response. Not enough to be showy about it, but enough that it’s overwhelming likely you won’t make the first mistake and that you’ll be able to exploit that mistake effectively.

From the way the first thirty seconds go, Prow gets less and less sure of that bet, much less sure than anybody ought to be to make a bet on a real fight. Everything’s that’s not the fight is falling away from Prow, one single murderous intention.

And there goes Prow doing the starfish, nerves locked and breath tight and spinning, back down, over the grass. Grass or no grass, you do that face down and your nose might never be the same. Prow’s spear doesn’t make it halfway to the wall.

Prow comes to a stop, and gets some focus back across the eyes, and makes a first attempt to sit up. Sitting up feels like a completely bad idea, because Prow stops and lies back down limp and looks — if you know what you’re seeing — panicked.

We don’t have ribs, strictly. If you ask a natural philosopher we don’t have bones. Straight up into the lung-box like that, hit right in the struts, is about the only way to disable a graul by hitting them. Letting all the ichor out, torso crushing, or tearing limbs off don’t properly count as disabled, besides being really tough to do in recoverable ways.

Prow’s breathing ok. Gotta watch for that. A metre-twenty of spear haft for lever back of the butt-cap is a hard hit.

I walk over, and Prow’s eyes are tracking me. Graul don’t concuss but that doesn’t mean landing on your head can’t hurt you.

“How?

“Sir?” Under the circumstances, not enough of a pause there to get started on the disappointed look.

Besides, Prow can just about inhale enough for one syllable at a time.

“The future is a surprising place, Sergeant-Instructor.”

Which is nearly certain, yes, I can see it move through Prow’s face, to be understood as I’ve got a way to lie, that I can make another graul see what isn’t going to happen. Which would be very difficult indeed. It’s a lot easier to change your mind in the past.

Meaning I can do the one, and not the other, but still, it’s surprisingly easy to do.

Really a pity you have to spend a continuous month in the focus and cursing your bad decisions to figure out how to do it. More of a pity that the reach back isn’t very deep.

I give Prow a hand up. Prow takes it out of pure need. Prow’ll be recovered in three days. Maybe five. Fit for duty at the end of travelling back to the Twelfth.

I make it clear to Prow that back to the Twelfth is precisely where the Sergeant-Instructor is going. I can see various traditionalist notions of propriety and the part of Prow’s spine that knows I’m a real Standard-Captain locking up as bad as Prow’s lungs just did, but Prow says “Sir” and means it before moving off.

Wouldn’t want Prow’s instruction style around Creeks even without the murder and mutiny issues.

Chert’s reply to my message about returning the Sergeant-Instructor includes the news that Prow returned fit for service. It also had the Twelfth’s betting pool results, probably to explain why I’m getting a thank-you note from a file closer in the Third of the Second of the Twelfth. That shows up a décade later.

One of the Creeks leaning on the stone wall along the south side of the practice lawn watches Prow shamble off, and looks at me. “Didn’t realise the Line did that.”

I shrug. “The Line don’t. Folks in the Line, it’s not unknown.”

I can see it running through the slow nod, the slow nods of the Creeks on either side of my questioner — since, well, folks in the Line remain folks.

The nodding fades out, and I get looked at with more thought. “Glad to see you don’t mess about with it.”

Might be the first real smile I’ve ever let a Creek see. “If it’s worth doing, do it.”

Real laughter, from all of them, by sorrow and despair.

Chapter 42

At the end of Frimaire, I find myself in the refectory kitchen next to Wake. I’m peeling parsnips; Wake’s grinding spices.

Creeks are a practical people; give the graul something sharp, figure out that the Independent is an entirely sound pharmacist, if no comfortable cook, and set the Independent to powdering spices, so there’s real work and no-one has to be troubled about what ancient power cooked dinner.

It’s not a feast, in the sense of extra food, but the Creeks tradition has it that the last décadi of the month is the day to combine dinner and conversation. People try to not be travelling, everyone plans for dinner to take longer, and there’s a big gap for tea between the food and the nibbles.

Very Creeks; social chatter is acceptable at planned times.

Enough people not from the Creeks have been coming through that there are signs beside the lettuce root tea, pointing out that if you’re not from the Creeks the stuff will kill you.

To a first approximation, anyway: Halt appears to like the stuff. Various Creeks, fully aware wood-lettuce is a cumulative toxin, have finally stopped worrying about it creeping up on Halt.

Which means our quiet corner table has a pot of the stuff, a pot of coffee, and a jug of something cold that tastes of joy and citrus. Grue swears there’s nothing in it but water, beets, time, and a “minor exercise of the Power”. Everybody in town has tried it; there have been some spectacular faces. About one in four like it. One in four in Westcreek Town is three-thousand some-odd; Grue is going through three tonnes of beets a décade, making the stuff.

Wake makes a sharp distinction between eating and talking; Halt seems determined to eat, when Halt eats, as quickly as possible because one must never knit and eat at the same time. Blossom eats with one hand, mostly, and scribbles things on a notepad with the other. Grue eats slowly, looks happy, and radiates contentment. By the end of the meal, there are usually three or four sleepy children piled up against Grue. Grue’s current record is eleven; seven of those were three-year-olds, and their mothers expressed effusive thanks for the quiet hour. Blossom asserts that better three-year-olds than the pile of ocelotters they get at home; the kids have already been fed.

At the pause, I get a child coming up to me; I’m at the head of the table, so it’s possible to come up to stand beside me. Kid looks nervous, and maybe twelve.

“Captain, why did you get into a real fight with the other graul?”

“Would no one tell you, or did they say they didn’t know?” Grue snorts, and the kid looks nervous and surprised, now.

“Didn’t know.”

“Do you know what heretic means?”

I get a head-shake.

“A heretic is someone who is wrong because they disagree with what everyone believes is right.”

The kid’s face twists up with thinking. “Really wrong?”

“Not testably wrong”, Blossom says. “It’s about what people believe, not what they can prove.”

That, well, it moved the confusion. Not the same as not helping.

There’s a worried parent about five metres back, but they’re not interfering.

“Laurel made us to fight, but we think, too. So graul can disagree.”

A nod. Not the nod of understanding, but the kid doesn’t see anything wrong with what I said.

“Am I a monster, or a weapon?”

That gets a look of total affront, and a “people!” response.

I nod. “If it can really talk, it’s people.” There are hundreds of special cases, it’s a continuum, there are things like Halt’s howdah, but that’s the rule you learn when you’re a child. “All the graul alive come from the graul Laurel made. All of them were made to fight, and not for themselves; to fight for the wizard who made us. We serve the Commonweal now, but what graul think they are still comes from Laurel’s time in the Bad Old Days, and a bit more than two-thirds think we’re monsters and the rest think we’re weapons.”

“Do you think you’re a monster?” A doubtful voice.

I shake my head. “I think I’m a weapon. Most graul who think they’re weapons leave it at that; their service belongs to the Commonweal, and the Commonweal gets to strike its enemies with them, the way you could strike an enemy with a sword.”

“But you don’t?”

“I think I’m a weapon in my own hand; serving the Commonweal is a choice I made, something I decided to do, rather than a law of nature for which I have no responsibility.”

“Really traditional graul think they are monsters, and don’t serve in the Line; they keep the forests and manage boats on the river. No-one gets through the graul townships off the roads, that’s what they think Laurel made them for. Less traditional graul and graul who think they are weapons often serve in the Line, but as troopers or sometimes in authority, if it isn’t too much; a Sergeant, but not a Sergeant-Major.”

Disbelief, and some spluttering.

“Old beliefs don’t have to make sense, they just have to not be a big problem. Changing beliefs is hard work, and there’s always all that other work you have to do right away.”

A heartfelt nod, then another and another.

“When the Line offered to send me to Officer’s School, I said yes. The Line were surprised; they always ask, if they think you could do well with a warrant of commission, even if no graul had ever said yes. I was a little surprised at myself, and all the other graul were some mix of surprised and angry.”

“Why say yes?” The parent almost moves forward then.

“I couldn’t have told you, back then, but mostly because if you’re going to serve something, you should do it as well as you can, not as well as someone else expects you shall.”

A thinking look. Brief thinking look, the kid comes out of it still looking curious, so I keep going.

“The other graul, Sergeant-Instructor Prowess, is deeply traditional, almost too traditional to serve in the Line. They think my accepting a warrant of commission was wrong, and a threat to all graul, because it meant graul didn’t always serve properly.”

“The only way a traditionalist could see to fix that would be to kill me; that would mean that graul as a whole would get rid of the…defective graul, so other people” — humans, who have the sorcerers — “could let graul go on existing.”

“Isn’t that crazy?”

“All graul have a belief that serving well is the only reason we exist, Laurel put that in us when we were made. It’s strong, like thinking your family is important.” Never mind how many ways humans define family.

“Prow’s view is extreme, most graul wouldn’t agree, but we’re not human. We’re people, but different things are important to graul. Even humans aren’t the same everywhere. I have to explain different things here in the Creeks than I did with the Eighth Brigade.”

A quick nod. “Why not kill them, when they were trying to kill you?”

“I didn’t have to, to keep Prow from killing me.” Plus Prow’s an able instructor who benefits the Line, but there’s a limit to how much argument-from-utility you give twelve year olds.

“Thanks.”

“You’re welcome.”

There’s a dash back to the parent, and a fast, quiet, and gesticulated explanation delivered moving away.

“How often have you explained that?” Wake sounds nothing more than honestly curious.

“In my head? To the dark?” I manage to smile. Wake isn’t asking about what happened to Prow.

I wave in the vague direction of over there, where the kid went. “That’s the first person who has asked.”

Wake produces a completely human smile. I have no idea how Wake does it. You take Wake for a bricklayer, or maybe a guy who does architectural pottery like roof tile and gutters. The Independent is effectively invisible.

“After five hundred years, I have an explanation for why, when the Foremost were nearly all graul, the Line has had so few for so long.”

Halt’s knitting needles only click when Halt wants them to. They’re quite silent now. “The standards, and the Hard Road, and the graul, were Laurel’s tools. The Line didn’t know what it was, but it knew it wasn’t Laurel’s.”

Wake looks rueful.

“I thought, well, what could Laurel know of necromancy? This new trick would be easy enough to get around if the low-talent soldiers using it were dead.” Centuries of practise can make art out of a “that was a stupid thing for me to conclude” look. “What Laurel did not know of necromancy made a short list, and here I am, in the Commonweal.”

“Are not we all in service of it?”

Wake looks at me; Halt looks at me. Thousand of years and millions of dead look at me.

Even so.

“Isn’t that like asking the hinge-pins in the lock gates if they serve the canal?” Since the Shape of Peace, Blossom wavers into pure enchanter, without any evident cause. There now, suddenly entirely eerie.

“You’re more like the geography. The water goes where the geography puts it, even with canal building.”

Blossom doesn’t argue the point, though Grue looks more amused than usual.

“The Standard-Captains are more like hinge-pins.”

In the old Commonweal, there were four Independents living for every Standard-Captain there had ever been. In the Second Commonweal, the ratio is over ten to one for the Independents, and it may not drop much.

“And the river?” Wake goes right on being completely canny.

I make a small gesture, meant to indicate the whole room. “Them. All of them, in their generations. Over time, the river determines the geography, just as in the present, the geography creates the river.”

The child on the far side of Grue turns over, makes a noise — young graul don’t do that — and subsides. Grue indulges in some hair-stroking.

Wake finishes a tumbler of the happy-beet-stuff, sets it down. “Someone here, a mother of several children, asked me if I would be able to fight in defence of Westcreek Town. They were updating the defence plan, after the Second Commonweal came into being.” Wake’s head shakes a little. “I said I would do as I could, if matters came to that pass.”

“Some of us are non-combatants.” Grue’s voice is quiet.

“That entirely new thing”, Wake says. Back in the Bad Old Days, Wake once fought Halt to a draw, if you define “draw” as both parties withdrawing in good order.

The nibbles come round.

The plate for our table has a little bundle of sections of rose stems on it, maybe fifteen centimetres long. Someone’s getting around to the flower garden pruning, or harvesting rose hips, but either way, it’s a kindness. One of the kids leaning on Grue isn’t quite asleep, and looks extremely puzzled at the crunching noise.

The parents of the children piled against Grue come collect them; Wake and I stack chairs. The happy-beet-stuff and some of the nibbles mean Grue cooked, so Grue wanders off to join the clump of people watching Blossom and Halt scour the kitchen with excessive force. Most of the watchers are holding a cast iron or copper pan or two safely away from the scouring. Scouring is mild; it looks like there’s an angry storm god trapped in there. Having Halt and Blossom on the same rotation means there are nights the dishes get done very abruptly, and with sterile thoroughness.

The Creeks consider the weather too cold for sitting outside, but there are little clumps of them out in the plaza to look at the stars. I think it’s a lovely night.

Radish wanders by. Radish hasn’t been in Westcreek Town much, been all over the Creeks for the Food-Gesith, toting up storage spaces and who’s still short of canning jars.

Turns out that was one of Radish’s neeves, asking the question. Wants to thank me for the thorough answer; I tell Radish it was a good question.

Halt drifts out, stick tapping, and I again miss how the persistent camp chair gets there. Wake drifts out of a clump of the builders Wake’s been teaching how to make fired clay houses, one big dome you fire all in one go. It’s a lot quicker than sawn stone blocks, and sturdy enough to suit the Creeks. They still have questions, and Wake looks happy to answer them.

Grue and Blossom arrive together, arm in arm. They’ve got stem-glasses and a glass decanter full of something pale and faintly shining.

Radish’s head shakes, rueful or astonished or something else, looking at the decanter. “I won’t tell you you’re crazy, but…” and Grue and Blossom chorus along with Radish, quietly, “but not before the kids are in bed!”

Radish laughs, and says “Thanks again, Captain” and wanders off. Radish has a lot of kin in Westcreek Town.

Someday soon I should get one of its senior members to explain to me precisely what this political cabal I’ve joined does.

Halt produces a small glass of black currant brandy, and a smaller jar of pickled demon heart. Blossom will eat that sometimes, but clearly not tonight; Blossom and Grue have got the Mead of Poetry, out of Split Creek three days past. Halt looks entirely calm at the prospect of a militant enchanter and whatever subtle thing Grue is drinking it, a confidence I envy Halt.

Wake has a big fired clay mug of beer, the same beer the Creeks all around are drinking.

I’ve got a glass mug with a lid, courtesy of Halt’s glass shop, one that can stand to be filled with dragon’s blood. That takes a little planning, and some glass kegs, but at least the stuff doesn’t go bad. The Captain’s House has plenty of cellar space.

Everybody clinks the rims of whatever they’re drinking out of; Halt’s chair gets quietly taller, to accommodate this. The townsfolk don’t watch, really don’t watch, not the not-watching that makes your eyes itch. No-one proposes a toast.

The Commonweal isn’t being attacked tonight.

I’ve survived worse.