A Mist of Grit and Splinters

by Graydon Saunders

  “This is not the only thing you must consider prior to the oath.”

  There’s a pause. “Sergeant-Major.”

  Meek says “Sir,” before stepping forward. Slow steps back.

  “When you take the oath, you’re in the Line.” Meek’s face is set; no smile, no grin, no anything. “In the Line is outside the Peace. No courts, and no law; you will be subject to authority.” There’s a pause. “In the Second, my authority.

  “You’re supposed to read about that. Doubt you have. Doubt you’ve thought about it much.” Meek’s face has an expression again. You could think it was kind, if you didn’t know Meek. “That won’t do.

  “Everybody does things they don’t particular want to do. Privy’s got to get scrubbed; weeds need killing; graves must be dug. Have to tell people who died.” There’s a small, wry, comradely pause. “Sometimes you get to go on living with less of yourself.” Back to the set face. “‘In the Line’ means doing things you haven’t formed an opinion about. There hasn’t been time. I make mistakes. Slow makes mistakes. Those in authority generally make mistakes. This does not mean you get to form your own opinions first. It does not mean you need not do the thing as you are ordered.”

  There’s a mutter. Meek lets it die away.

  “A battle-standard is a focus. No one can compel you to latch, no one can compel you to accept the Line’s authority. If you don’t, it don’t work.” There’s a distinct pause. “This is how we know General Hammer was a remarkable person; to persuade folk this was a way out of the Bad Old Days, from inside those days.

  “That it is necessarily voluntarily accepted authority does not diminish it.” Meek waits this mutter out, too. “I tell you that in the Second anyone in authority may not undertake any sexual act with anyone not their equal in authority.” Meek raises a hand. “Do not speak to me of adults securing consent outside of their mutual work, nor the possibility of existing involvements, nor of precedents in law. Those are things of the Peace, and none to the Line apply.

  “Those of you appointed file closers shall cease all congress with those not so appointed or surrender your appointment.” Meek doesn’t look like anything. You could break your soul on Meek’s certainty, and most of the recruits can feel it. Ginger and panic, neither material. “We consider the substance of authority, not its trappings.” Meek looks for a moment maternally kind. “What cannot be secured you cannot sustain. The substance of my authority asserts you may not secure consent between who may command your death and who may not, and it binds all in the Second.”

  There’s a silence.

  Slow steps forward. Regular lad for size. The recruits don’t know weapons-work well enough to see Slow move and understand. They’re being silent, and don’t know why. “Without the oath, you may not latch. The oath is not escaped if you cannot latch, should the focus reject you, if service in the Line should prove a duty you may not do. Other service may be found for you, yet you will go where you are sent and do as you are commanded.

  “The oaths of those wishing to undertake service in the Line shall be taken eleven days from today. What you have been given to consider, consider. No known thing releases those living from service to the Line.”

  Don’t lose as many as I thought I would.

  D-Day Minus 1136

  Year of Peace 543, Prairial, Seventh Day (Late Spring)

  Duckling

  “Sir, I don’t get the name custom.”

  “They happen. There’s got to be agreement, but yours don’t count.”

  That gets me a bunch of looks.

  “You’re maybe file closers.” Two of you might be sergeants. “You get what your file calls you, it ain’t subject to authority.”

  “Regular doings, we’d all have got a name before.” That’s Kenning, sounding considering.

  I nod as generally as I can. “Regular doings, you get your name after the oath. Takes longer when it’s everybody new.”

  “Can you change your name?” Strange-sounding thing to say. You can see it strange in their faces. Flinch don’t like being Flinch.

  “Consensus can, you can’t. Not the usual thing.”

  “It happens?”

  “Part-captain Puddle weren’t always called that.”

  Six of them make ‘and then?’ gestures at me.

  “More custom; you never explain your own name. You don’t explain someone else’s if you weren’t there. You’ll generally let the most senior of those who were there do the explaining.”

  Which is just polite, for custom. Which is me, altogether me, for explaining Puddle. Slow and Meek were in Three, they were pushed forward, not cleaning up.

  “On the March North, there was a fight where the focus went down because what we thought was road dust proved to be material despair. Can’t breathe that and keep your latch. The Captain picked up swords. After, there was a big pile of Reems corpses. Puddle’d gone over hurt in the Reems charge and wasn’t better for being under the pile. Somebody — ” they’re dead, it don’t matter — “said there was a live one in the pool of blood. Puddle was awake enough to mutter ‘more like a puddle’, and it stuck. If you’d been there, you could use Blood Puddle if you were feeling serious-formal and it were altogether a personal thing.”

  Wait just a bit. “Names ain’t all opposites.

  “If you’re trying to call me by appointment, it’s Signaller. You don’t say Signals; that’s asking for the Signals team. You can just say ”Sir“ if you want me to make a decision. If it’s a question, you can say Duckling.”

  It ain’t kind. The Line don’t try to be kind about social reticence.

  “How’re you different from the Signals team?”

  “Any time anybody asks for a team it means the senior member of the team who’s still up.” There’s a specific shrug for this kind of question. “I might be dead.” Well, dead and lost my latch. Leave that off today.

  Bunch of faces go ‘ew, dead’ because you don’t directly say dead. A few go ‘expletive, it could be me’ about senior, not dead. I tick their faces and the standard stores it. Don’t think about the totals, think about what you’re ticking for. The total’s there when you need to make a decision. Standard’ll sort it by whatever you ticked, too, or groups.

  Sometimes you have to say things.

  “People make the focus.” Lots of the ‘keep talking’ nod. “Battle-standard’s too big; battalion’s a gang of focuses. Can’t fight like that, everybody’s got to lift at once or the timber don’t move.”

  There’s a bunch of looks. Colour Party’s a platoon. Big platoon with specific duties and a direct latch, but a platoon. There’s been battalions run that way; all the warrants of authority, all the warrants of authority and commission, those are the Full-Captain’s platoon. Not doing that. A Wapentake Colour Party’s too big to pretend it’s just following the full-captain around.

  “We’re a little node.” Colour Party’s half a banner; figure that’s what this one means.

  “We’re a little node.” I ain’t got the same tone as the question.

  “Why don’t we get kicked?”

  “Sometimes.” Half a breath. “Colour Party’s only significant if you’re looking for understanding or information flow or reserves or something; demons get chucked at authority and command. Not what the Colour Party does.”

  A few slow nods. One of the hard parts comes when you realize everybody else has to be doing their job. You do yours, they do theirs, it works. It don’t work, you find out when the bubble fails.

  Nobody has their hand up. Send them all for dinner.

  Don’t know if the maybe-authority meeting is helping. Ain’t hurting. It’s a custom.

  ‘We’re something’ can come before knowing what you are.

  D-Day Minus 1099

  Year of Peace 544, Messidor, Ninth Day (Early Summer)

  Duckling

  This morning’s loud bang was a foreign sorcerer disturbing Fire and Shadow picnicking. Meek says all of it exa
ctly like a reminder there will be a boot inspection. Meek does follow it with a reminder that there will be a general kit inspection. Meek does not say ‘be sure to get finished early’; probationary sergeants are expected to figure that out from the inspection notice.

  Sergeant-Major? Do we know anything about the sorcerer? Don’t know who this is. They’re not standing at the back.

  Slow’s attention pulls itself out of the standard’s memory of yesterday to answer. Poor threat analysis. Slow’s kindly expression. Loud demise.

  Just about everyone latched, nigh-entirely everyone, tries not to snicker. Meek snickers amiably.

  The afternoon breaks out by platoons, which means I have the Colour Party.

  There’s doubtless a skillful way to get a bunch of witchy opinionated people who don’t know how to stop thinking to cohere into a Line unit. I lack whatever skill it is, so I drill them until they collapse.

  Meek asked me about that over an expanse of collapsed recruits. Nobody’d puked, which I thought was an improvement. There’s this voice the sergeants use, whether they’re plain sergeants or sergeant-majors, which is a sort of tactful inquiry as to whether or not you’ve forgotten that there’s nothing about having a warrant of commission that keeps you from doing something stupid. Though what Meek actually said was, “Hey, Duckling, you trying to kill this lot?”

  “If they get tired enough, maybe they’ll stop wanting to be the best or the smartest.” I could see that move faces.

  Meek grinned and said “They may. Try not to torch more than two.”

  “So few as may be,” sends Meek wandering off, still looking pleased.

  Creek permeativity to the Power and a battle-standard means you can torch yourself easy. You have to feed the focus while you move and fight. Think about your body, the focus, or the job as distinct things and you mess up. Any thinking goes to the job. Everything else must be collective reflex, reflex while the focus is giving you back more Power than you yourself put in. Why it’s worth bothering with. Basic old reflexive exercise-of-the-will comes back multiplied by only your platoon and it’s six times everybody instead of one times you.

  Mess that up and you burn from your bones out. We, meaning Slow and Meek and me being mostly quiet, figure there’s going to be five or six files go like that before we’re operational. Not making a point of it because thinking gets to dread then the Power gives you just exactly that.

  There’s two approaches to skill with the focus we know about.

  You can’t do strict and narrow like a wreaking team, but you can do the other kind of wreaking team and make everything with the Power external. The Experimental Battery does it this way; we’re medium-sure it’s easier and nobody expects the artillery to fight with weapons. They’d get more armour if we did. Having the battery be something you serve, that isn’t you, works as a way to think about what you’re doing with artillery. The battery being raised plans on the same approach.

  The First got exercises from the Independent Block. As a way to get a grip on your talent, they work. Better for the permeativity problem than anybody’d had. Fire tweaked on them some and that spread. Fire ain’t an experienced independent but did start off a Creek. It’s surprisingly much like swimming, or just sitting in the tub; you let the Power lift you up like water. You’re mostly water yourself, which everybody knows. Historical complaint with the method’s something Block called throw, you entirely pick yourself up by the talent and it don’t end well. There’s Creeks as float, but anybody in a heavy battalion knows they don’t. You believe in the lift and you believe the lift ain’t so much it’ll keep your head above deep water.

  You don’t get to be smarter or stronger or the best, but it works.

  Works if you practice.

  D-Day Minus 1079

  Year of Peace 544, Messidor, Twenty-ninth Day (Early Summer)

  Duckling

  Arranging focus-drills with the standard gets tricky.

  The banners march off somewhere; it limits who suffers the lapses. What, too.

  You wind up in the Colour Party if you’re especial witchy, unusual skilled with a javelin, or you’re a piper. Those last two are generally some kind of witchy you wouldn’t call that. They run cranky and opinionated.

  Slow ain’t separate from the standard. Slow’s got clerks, Slow’s pursued by paperwork, Slow’s got a need to talk to people. We’re on the roof of an armoury tower. Slow stays in the armoury, we can practice latching.

  They’ve done it. Still got a block of troops with doubtful faces. Latching before ain’t the same. Being folks as none wanted for their focus team at home ain’t the same. I ain’t got a choice about it; I get who the part-captains don’t want and who Meek wants to give me, part of the job.

  Colour Party alone ain’t doing anything to the obdurate blank black substance of the armoury. One fewer in the worry-tally.

  “There’s things we can’t tell you. Not for rules or preference; ain’t got the ability. Same as weeding, only different. It ain’t all physical.”

  One or two nods. This part ain’t formal.

  “You’ve taken the oath. You’ve been latched. Unless you’ve made it drop, it’s still there. That’s a passive latch. Doesn’t do anything.” Makes you easier to find. Makes it important-much faster to active-latch.

  “Practice gets you reliable with the active latch.” Inhale. “The focus ain’t you. It’s everybody, and it’s a mind itself. It ain’t you.

  “Every battalion’s got tradition. Tradition’s what worked, the first time and the next time and the time after. We ain’t got that yet.” Bit of ‘kill that first’ in my voice. “Colour Party builds its own, as a banner builds its own. You build it. I tell you what to do, not who you are.”

  Thinking. Little ripples of neck loosening and settling shoulders.

  “Latch!”

  Takes too long.

  We walked all the way to a pond-edge tower for a reason. South-west corner for reasons of prevailing wind.

  Evens have the bubble. Bubble up. The even-numbered files figure out Ninny is senior. We get a default bubble under direction.

  Time to sluice the rain gutters.

  Colour Party. Odd Files, hoist water from the pond into this roof’s gutters.

  Mass is mass. Drop five tonnes of water on someone, it’ll hurt. Better than five tonnes of sand.

  The odd files figure they don’t want to be clever. Flinch has a straight lift going. Don’t work. Water lifts, sure, into mist.

  Rummaging. The standard’ll give you what you want. Gotta know what you want.

  Bucket comes up, as tall as wide. Default shape.

  Straight up, stops. Steady. Flinch has figured out about ‘there’ instead of ‘this high’. Qualifiers wobble.

  Nest has a whole distinct second node up. They put a bit of drag on the bucket. It slides over. Hundred metres takes two-hundred-fifty seconds. Lots of closed eyes, careful breathing.

  Ain’t complaining. Five tonnes at a quarter-metre per second’s the same as three hundred-odd kilogrammes falling on you from a metre up. Not helpful to your bones.

  Nest lets go on the drag; node stays up, node’s ready to apply force. Tick for Nest.

  Flinch figures the bucket’s in about the right place and cancels it. Water everywhere, mostly not in the rain gutter.

  Odds, try that again.

  D-Day Minus 1041

  Year of Peace 544, Fructidor, Seventh Day (Late Summer)

  Duckling

  There’s a reliable latch, there’s exercise of the focus, the banners cohere: time for armour.

  The First had to wait; no way to make any. Old Line armour-making was all back in the First Commonweal. Roofs over heads before anyone worried about rolling mills for tassets. Fire got so fussed seeing the First drilling without armour they showed up with armour-making focuses and a stack of titanium ingots. The focuses make a suit to fit specific-you. Your file, several files, will be on the push for the armourers, but you keep your eyes ope
n you can see your armour form over illusion-you.

  Time was, I asked the Captain about the results. When the Wapentake was the Seventieth we’d been at the free end of a logistics chain that didn’t know from Creeks, and the armour’d got to be long in service. Didn’t think I had any sound basis to compare.

  “I know of none better,” the Captain had said. Looking back I could feel the tick.

  The Second ought not have armour-focuses. Last three tries at making more produced corpses; the Galdor-gesith forbade further attempts. Tankard brought four teams of armourers around to discuss the question. Ours or the First’s or the armoury’s armourers, no one said. Four of the First’s six armour-focuses are stored at the armoury. Tankard planned to use those. Slow’d have to unlock them.

  Slow slid a set of six armour-focuses out of our standard; new ones, not the First’s. Same black-and-clear jewel slab you can pick up in one hand. Everybody’d taken a moment to combobulate.

  Tankard had given Slow a long look. Slow’s expression refused to alter.

  Commonweal law about pay and prices don’t apply to transactions entirely internal to the Line. The consensus of the standard-captains could object, but the Line-gesith can’t. Judge can’t.

  The armourers picked four. Slow slid the other two back into the standard. The First does that; a specific focus is safe in the standard, the sorcerer you’re fighting can’t get to them. Need to do some refitting in the field you’ve got the armour-focus and a travelling team of armourers. Have to have armourers anyway for when hilts’re loose or the helmet-linings need fixing or a rivet pops. Tools and skills we don’t expect of soldiers.

  It’d been useful practice for the basic Colour Party task of keeping your face still. No matter what Slow does, you were expecting just that and everything’s going to plan.

  Our pile of titanium ingots arrived on a barge from the East Bank Refinery last décade, early or late depending. First shipment, but the fourth try; first three involved Fire or Dust talking with the refinery teams. It ain’t all titanium, and the mixing’s tricky. Shipment arrived later than Tankard wanted. Plenty before we were what you could call ready with the push.