Once we reached the West Wetcreek from the east, supplies were to be had from waiting barges. This was the first time I observed the Second to be pleased when the wheelbarrow loads got heavier.
Proceeding east again, we were presented with the problem of bridging the Lower Blue. If this was not, defensively, especially more sensible than bridging the West Wetcreek would have been, there is settlement on both sides of the Lower Blue. Those several towns expressed that they should be entirely pleased to have a bridge. The Lug-gesith sent us engineers on the grounds that the Line is accustomed to making bridges for brief service. The several engineers were a team come out of retirement together, matronly in manner and very patient with the plentitude of things the Second could not yet do. They were patient also with what we ought not to do; the Second dropped four deck slabs at various stages of formation, and to make four bridge piers required of us eleven tries and three files dead and seven variously down. Avoiding steam explosions asks that the bubble come up faster than we could then form it.
The second try at the western anchor pier for the western span was a success, and we had no further losses to exercising the focus.
D-Day Minus 1410
Year of Peace 543, Fructidor, Third Day (Late Summer)
Duckling
Reading about logistics leaves me wondering how anyone survives.
I don’t mean during Line operations; anyone at all. Take salt. No shortage of salt, you go dig it up some dire dry place in the Eastern Waste. Mustn’t get the kind with the little blue crystals.
So there you go, you’ve dug up some salt, you’ve checked for curses, you’ve convinced yourself that the eggs of various nasty ghastly organisms aren’t present, you’ve checked for the stuff that isn’t an organism, whether metaphysical or some purely chemical means of demise, and now all you have to do is to get it from the Eastern Waste to wherever you need it. Be thankful you don’t need very much these last two hundred years since bulk refrigeration got to be something that didn’t need a team of people to chant and mumble and allege to dance every hour of the day, but a lack of salted meat in the diet means you need to eat salt. It has to be at least a kilo a year to avoid death, and most Creeks would rather five. The livestock needs more, if less per kilogramme; livestock is just heavy. So now you need a container and a cart or a barge or probably both; barge traffic all the way to salt flats is a rare opportunity.
To get that you’ve got a blacksmith, a fair glass blower or a skilled cooper, some sort of draft animal, the people who make the harness and the cart and the barge, and they and the blacksmith and the glassblower and the cooper and the draft animals and the people who raise those have to live somewhere out of the rain and eat regular. You’ve got a compelling need for civilization.
The Line’s a complete productive loss to that same civilization. We take people at the age where they ought to be settling into a trade and kill them, maim them, or keep them long enough they’re never going to be properly skillful thereafter. Sometimes, like Slice, it’s a combination. We use up some of the best skill available to equip us; the effort that goes into one battle-standard could make every domestic focus and spell-binding for a more substantial town than the Second Commonweal has. Then there’s boots and bronze bulls and the stores of food. Battalion by battalion, the Line is expense.
Not as expensive as defeat, extirpated and enslaved.
Lots of emphasis on conservation of supply, conservation of troops, getting the most result at the least cost, substitutions and improvisation and wringing the greatest possible logistical value from the standard. This all comes with critiqued examples, which are on the whole remarkably harsh. The only times those are written by someone other than the standard-captain involved are when the standard-captain died and their shade didn’t last long enough to make a report. The set for the Eighth Brigade are exceptionally grim, written by Second Brigade’s relieving brigadier.
Fifty-one dead starts to feel different after reading a careful reasoned analysis of why ration provision should have been relaxed in the expectation of the brigade dying of exhaustion. If the troopers had been getting extra to eat while lack of sleep and sustained push killed them, it would have improved the chances of their shades being retained in their respective battalion standards. Only the standard-captains were just as exhausted and didn’t think of it. A court wouldn’t likely accept that, especially if you’re among the dead. Two of the Eighth’s standard-captains died early. The Line doesn’t consider anything an acceptable reason for failure.
I read all of this troubling stuff. Everybody who got warrants of commission when the First stood up did, and does. It’s a long list of books. Now I’ve got maybe not quite as serious doubt about knowing what I’m doing. Below the Edge mostly worked. We read all this troubling stuff at various individual rates. We’ve been reading through a long list of books for years now, ever since the Line settled on who got the irregular warrants of commission and company commands. They talk about it with the Captain, or sometimes the Captain talks about it with them. I talk about it with Slow, and sometimes I talk about it with Shadow.
Last year I finally just asked the Captain why the Captain treats Shadow as though they’ve got a warrant of commission. The Captain points out that the standards so regard Shadow, so regard the whole of that collective. The Captain says ‘collective’ as though they could be resoling boots. It might have something to do with having helped make the standards, but no one has any knowledge. Not only should the Captain prefer that the Line acknowledge and regularize this, Shadow is the Captain’s preference for adjutant for the proposed independent support company that Captain Blossom would command. That’s several kinds of political, most-all the standard-captains don’t hold with the idea, never mind what Parliament thinks, and the Captain nodded about that and said “Don’t lose.”
‘Don’t lose’ isn’t, of course it isn’t, simple. Even when your head’s not full of memories. Winning the battle doesn’t do it. You have to destroy an invader’s ability to invade, and you have to do it without lasting damage to the Commonweal either materially or socially, and you have to do it so there’s enough of you left the next threat can be destroyed, just in case the next threat is feeling opportunistic in its timing. So there’s as much ‘don’t lose’ in killing cleanly, in avoiding atrocity out of fear, as there is in the actual fight. It’s stressful to contemplate.
I write up the whole awkward half-month down below the Edge; I’m pretty harsh on myself over having been distracted by fish. The Captain’s letter back is very even in tone, and only actually says “a desire to do good” once, which is something. A notable dangerous habit, a desire to do good with a Line unit. First Battalion’s still down below the Edge. We think we got everything on the water, but that doesn’t mean someone wasn’t watching, that somebody sorcerous didn’t figure they were dead anyway and risk a message home. We don’t know how far away home might be, or what might be waiting there.
Meek gets semi-mobile without assistance after four and a half décades. I don’t think mobility does half as much for Meek’s outlook as having their don’t-fall-apart dose drop down to every four hours, and that isn’t the help getting the pin out of their left cheekbone was.
“Metal’s cold,” is all Meek says about the pin. The doctors say a couple more things, cheerful ones about how the bits of jugal arch have all knit back together and how fortunate it is that so-and-so figured out how to get curved metal pins back out without taking bone with them.
Timing-wise, some mobility for Meek is a useful thing. Slice is away to the possible new collective, going to put in a half-year and see how it goes before contemplating any gean-swapping. The lens-grinders are over on Slow Creek, which is a long way for Slice to be going with their whole family and history in Westcreek Town. Slice opines, on the outside of a quantity of beer, that it might be a better thing to not know anybody and have people still expecting who you were. Doesn’t say ‘before’, don’t much need to. I�
�ve stared at a few mirrors trying to figure out what people’ve started seeing, and I can’t.
Whatever it is, it’s got worse since below the Edge.
Meek growls at me about needless introspection. Meek’s not fond of introspection whatsoever, and then insists I talk. Points out I can go talk to Fire or Twitch as required, and that gets me into half the worry, which is the complete lack of Creek Line-traditions. Two hundred years of canal marches ain’t what you fight with, it’s not like there was structural-much of the Wapentake’s tradition left, not even as old stories, and now we’re making new ones, new ones the Old Line guys in the Folded Hills are obviously uncomfortable about.
The other half of the worry is that we don’t have a Senior School to send me to; I’m getting an apprenticeship, not an education. Everything seems like it’s going on in the regular way until something bad happens. Trauma changes you, but it’s not the only thing. I don’t feel changed. I feel regular. Same as entirely not knowing what happens the next time I have to say “Throw!” for real. I’d really like at least one of knowing who I am and knowing what I’m doing.
“Look, Slow thinks too much, too. You didn’t flub that battle.” Meek understands. Meek thinks I fuss too much for having done the job.
I have reviews back from three standard-captains, one per active signa. They take into account the new standards, immensely much better against demons than the older constructions courtesy of the Independent Blossom’s creativity and General Chert arriving in the Second Commonweal desperate enough to try anything plausibly helpful. The reviews still say it looks very much like there were more destroyed demons than dead troopers by twice purely on Thorn Company’s account, which amounts to an unprecedented accomplishment.
Slow had four files set to throw against demons, which was all that would fit. Only so much roof on a fort and you want to kill the sorcerers first so they don’t summon more demons or be otherwise unpleasant. On a roof that fit two whole platoons there just wasn’t room for more without assuming it’d be demons. For ward strength, less room would have been better but you’ve only got so much time with demons no matter how much ward. Two into the fort through the walls as it was, the second time, and we only just all fit where half of us could fight with something other than the focus. It wasn’t any too big for a fort where we had to plan on spending the whole season.
Second time, though, I should have guessed it would be demons again. Enough time to switch if we’d needed a big throw, it could have gone better.
“There weren’t more come the second time,” Meek says, and it’s factual. The first time worked with five through the ward and the cold ashes say it don’t matter.
D-Day Minus 1199
Year of Peace 543, Germinal, Fourth Day (Early Spring)
Archimedes the Surveyor
The work is urgent; careful planning made us early. We’ve been sitting in tents for a décade and a half wondering when the wet snow was going to stop falling. It does, but not for long; I don’t think more than two hours at once yet. You can hear the ice starting to pop and crack in the streams.
Sound tents, proper platforms. Nobody’s sleeping even a little damp. All the canoes are titanium, you could leave them out for fifty years of weather. Everybody’s got bug charms. Just enough stoves, but enough. Five trips, setting this camp up, and three of them were food.
The kitchen tent’s got a proper platform and with the sides down it’s not precisely warm but you can take your coat off to eat. The folks from the Third Valley don’t think so; most of them keep their gloves on. Typicals were made to live places warmer and dryer than these’ve found themselves.
Etch almost makes it convincing. Boots to the knee, coat past the knee, gloves, big hat, bigger scarf; you’d have to think this was someone who gets cold. Doesn’t always remember to make it look like their breath’s warmer than the winter air. Doesn’t always remember to breathe when they’re not talking.
“It is best if people may feel clever, for having identified the sorcerer by their own observation.” A complex shrug, and the quite human grin. I’m witchy enough to see the death’s head’s there with it, flesh and fleshless half a blink apart. Etch’s mug of soup isn’t quite a prop — Etch does drink it, and I’ve been quietly assured they get some nourishment from it, even if it’s not precisely food — but they do get dramatically gestural with it.
“The sorcerer could do with some explanation today.” Another wave of the mug. “Having expeditioned our way down this length of mountains, in terrain ever more southward and more chill, we are not so far above the sea.” Nice quiet kitchen-tent awning space. Tent’s closed, behind, and full of conversation and a couple of card games. One of the conversations is if there’s anything, anything at all, to put in with the dried peas that has some flavour. Not going to be much attention coming out here.
Out here, down Below the Edge with wheeled transport and no major road-making. Knowing there’s a place to do that hardly makes me happy. I can’t imagine any of the standard-captains will greet the news with joy. One forty-person team and the usual push-crush-lift excavation focus was plenty for waggon traffic. The slab bridges will last for years.
I didn’t ask what’s back up there now. Not nothing.
“When the City-Staters attacked the Cousins, the survivors were inside a sorcerer’s defensive radius or past the limit of advance.” Etch’s face shifts into seriousness, and I get a sharp nod. There wasn’t a census, before, but there’s no possibility our new fellow-citizens are as much as one part in ten of their former numbers. “Slow’s pretty sure there were non-water transport routes. None of the surviving Cousins know about them.”
Only one surviving sorcerer. Not the travelling kind.
A vague southwards gesture. “By the sea?” Etch’s spent their whole life with proper roads and a regular barge schedule.
“Things live in the sea.” Etch doesn’t look convinced. The Commonweal lacks experience of the sea. “Paddling upstream’s hard. Paddling up the River of Mists ain’t much happening. The Cousins never had enough cloth for sails.”
“You have brought a number of canoes.”
“And tow ropes, and driving foci.” Let us not discuss from whence the driving foci come, hunks of crystal in the shape of full-size spear points. One sharp rap and they’re gravel. “We have some need to discover the possibilities of navigation.”
That does get me a nod.
“You understand I cannot fight Sea People?” Etch’s voice has lost some ebullience. “The advantages of necromancy do not exceed the advantages of numbers.” ‘Or a considerable talent on the Sea People side’ hangs there unspoken.
Time to fish out the formal letter and hand it to Etch.
Etch opens it, doesn’t read it because the Parliamentary directive slides out of its heavy envelope and they have to catch it, and then Etch stops looking human at all.
“This is monstrous.” There’s a dramatic wave of the letter in one hand and the directive in the other and a highly visible inhale. I put up a hand.
Etch can’t be too distraught with the mug of soup hanging neatly in the air like that.
“The Commonweal can’t have the Sea People sifting our brains. So your job is to make sure that doesn’t happen. If you can’t do that, you have to go home and I have to get another necromancer.”
Etch looks, well, my gran said ‘haughty as a lord’ one time and I had to ask what both words meant. Not exactly that same look, Etch hasn’t got the height for it, but near.
“I asked Parliament for Dust.” No idea what this look is. Etch might not know. “Parliament said Dust was way ahead on their service years; General Chert said no without elaboration.”
Dust can make a focus. Figure that’s more than the Line wants risked.
“Do you expect to meet Sea People?” Etch’s back to thinking from dramatic. Letter and directive in one hand, mug in the other.
“No idea. Rather not. Want to stay close to some future la
cking death of Commonweal persons.”
One sharp smile. “Such a goal as that I might assist.”
I nod. Most of why Etch got asked. “If you may also provide the service Parliament requires.”
Twenty-some minutes of stomping around the camp, gesticulations, sotto-voce imprecations at the uncaring snow-clouded heavens, and a decorously mute chorus of swirling spectral death’s heads later, Etch comes back, composes themself, nods, sets the Parliamentary directive on the hand I’m holding out, and says “I do so attest by the Peace and my name within it.”
There’s even a little bit of a smile when I close the watch in my other hand, then a bit of a sharp look.
“Test piece.” Showed up one day, no kind of special day, with a note saying “Let us know if these break.” The whole note. Ten in the box, serial numbers twenty-three through thirty-two.
You have to wind them once a month. I don’t doubt the sledgehammer’d come off worse, if you tried it.
I put the directive away. There are four applying to this job. Etch takes their mug of soup off the bit of air it’s been sitting on and scowls it warm again.
“You do not intend a comprehensive survey.” Etch don’t ask it like a question.
“First thing is to identify any Sea People landings, habitations, or garrisons.”
“Which is why we’re starting — ” and Etch does a whole body expression of disgust at the cold wet gloom all around.
“There’s some of your colleagues over in the next two.” No survey, just checking for Sea People. More of the Line in the First Valley; nobody in the Second. Third and Fourth get surveys. “If there’s no landings, we’re looking for how the Cousins moved stuff around.”
A Mist of Grit and Splinters Page 17