The Eternal Front: A Lines of Thunder Novel (Lines of Thunder Universe)

by Walter Blaire

  The strength was melting out of Diggery’s arms. He’d have to stop soon and gasp some air into his lungs. Then, he knew, it would be impossible to start again. Cephas would counter-attack, or call for help, or someone would discover them. He squinted against the encroaching darkness and drove after the shadowy form.

  With a lucky overhand stab through Cepha’s windmilling arms, Diggery sank the tip of the dagger into his breast. The captain’s hands latched onto his, trying to push the blade out as Diggery drove it in. The man was strong, stronger than Diggery at that moment, but Diggery put his body weight against the pommel. The blade sank slowly in. The thrashing subsided.

  Only then did Diggery let himself breathe. He threw his head back and sucked air with a loud, creaking gasp.

  A long rattle emerged through Cephas’s open lips, and he scrabbled at the cobblestones. Diggery, watching, probed his feelings. It was like tonguing a dead tooth. He didn’t feel any different—he was no more a Tachba now than fifteen seconds ago, when he’d drawn his dagger.

  As a membership test, he thought, it’s a wash.

  He liked Cephas, the nasty old reptile. He was sad the man was dead: the sadness immediately washed from his mind. Diggery could feel, but the Pollution reached deep and he wouldn’t feel long. His internal voice barely changed its tone, not even when he rolled off and felt the unresisting flesh of Cephas’ body beneath him.

  Yes, he told himself, I could easily nap next to this corpse, just like a Southie on leave. This was hideous, being face-to-face with the drool-flecked cheeks, staring down at the clear, shining eyes with their shrinking light of intelligence. He felt it was hideous: the feeling quickly shrank to nothing. He told himself it was hideous again, and it certainly was hideous, but—nothing.

  Diggery plunged the blade in again, more precisely, and then gathered himself to his hands and knees. By the time he was able to kneel, Cephas was fully dead. Diggery heard a clatter against the door behind him. Someone leaving the club. He clambered to his feet and sheathed his dagger still dirty. When the door opened, Diggery was halfway back to Sell Street and walking steadily.

  “Oh, a deader! Where are we going for the meeting?”

  Diggery risked a glance back. Two forms in greatcoats were standing over Cephas, lighting cigars.

  “Don’t you see? That’s the fat captain. Colonel Trappia will want to hear about this, if we can find him again. It’s probably some interesting scheme.”

  “Leave Cephas for the next scrag. I’m more interested in hearing about this new would-be manleader. The one who’s supposed to save us all.”

  The other soldier let himself be pulled away. “The meetings change location every night. But I know where to start looking.”

  II

  The Spiderfish

  Travelogue: On Sorrell, the most famous Baxxaxx

  The most famous baxxaxx of all time was a lowback named Flowers, Chewchew, or Sorrell at various times in its storied life. More than once, its head or tail segment was hacked off in battle, and when these segments were left to their own devices—lost or overlooked—they budded and grew into new baxxaxx.

  Sorrell sired many other famous lowbacks this way, all of them with the peculiar budding ability. Finally, in its 800th year, eight times past the average span, Queen Szaff of Sessera put an end to Sorrell’s unnatural existence. She ordered it vivisected into hand-sized chunks and kept the remains in her family compound outside Ville Emsa, in what became known as the Sorrell building, until the pieces started to fill back in. Queen Szaff realized she might soon have hundreds of Sorrells, all of them infinitely productive.

  In a fit of terror, Queen Szaff burned down the building, and for good measure, her family compound too, but several of Sorrell’s buddlings went missing. The pieces were traded south into the Moon Kingdoms, where they are guessed to be the basis for the great meat caves that feed the Southie armies.

  To this day, buddable baxxaxx are still considered the offspring of Sorrell. They are conscientiously, publicly eradicated, with nearly religious fervor. But not before a few more baxxaxx are added to the herd.

  (The South: Predators)

  Jalamadon

  Jalam Jalamadon Of-Three stood at the peak of the hill, watching his unending lines of Tachba feed themselves into the glittering black smoke. The trench line stretched to the horizon on both sides like a gash in the landscape, an open wound in a black and gray landscape. The ridged and ragged edge of the Moon Kingdoms emitted smoke and sparks along its entire length, and the volcanic smell reached even his distant overlook.

  Just beyond the trench line, within reach but untouched by Jalamadon’s artillery, was the gray haze of pollution above Ville Emsa. Jalamadon could almost feel the city beckoning to him. He could see it in his mind’s eye, a city of rock, built on an expansive pavilion of granite between the two holy rivers, Granta, and Granta Too. He was a swamp rat himself and had never entered a dwelling higher than five feet, certainly not one that wasn’t held up by the thigh-bones of family. But somehow he could imagine Emsa’s lookout spires; he could imagine the stone townhouses leaning into each other like drunk old friends.

  The very curve of the trench seemed to yearn towards Emsa, bulging toward the city despite the shape of the land, like something invested with intent if not active life. In the same way, oar beetles will fill a corpse and slowly roll it into the shadows. Jalamadon knew he had no imagination, certainly nothing that could incorporate Emsa, yearning trenches, and oar beetles. So it was obviously a future self, calling back through the ancestors to gloat in his mind. He was ready to finally achieve that reality.

  Praej fidgeted near the listeners, itching his bad arm. When Jalamadon glanced his way, he said, “The listeners say em’s getting stiffer, Jala. Hapha’s getting backbone. We’re biting down on some real foot now.”

  “The Imperials want Ville Emsa as much as we do. We always knew this would be tough.”

  One of the listeners muttered, a gouged listener and quite reliable. Without eyes, the listener could not be considered a threat by the numberless passing Tachba who might compare themselves to him. Left unmolested, his talent had grown—theoretically. Jalamadon had his doubts.

  “Imps are unstocking their weapons,” Praej translated. “Some nice shiny stuff, like in the stories. We are to prepare for something desperate.”

  “Does the spirit say where? What kind of weapons? What tactics to use? Anything we don’t already know?”

  “Good question!” Praej gave the gouged listener an offended look. “You there, bukeweed-breath!” The blind man was slapped to alertness and interrogated closely. Eventually Praej reported, “Color me surprised, he has nothing useful to add. We’ll have to learn the regular way.”

  Jalamadon waved over a few friends from the nearby campfire. They dropped their bowls and ran up.

  “Do you boys remember our talk about old-style Impie weapons? The listeners say we are going to have some historical shit dropped on us. Tell Weemie to put his kingdom up in front, and he isn’t coming back. He marches north until his men are spent, or we trigger what the Happies have in store. I’m saying, I want a wall of dead this high.” He put his hand at hip level, but then raised it a judicious inch or five.

  Harta grinned. “Which is it? To the hip, or the waist?”

  They sensed the spirits’ excitement as well as he did. In the huge atmosphere between Jalamadon’s hill and the line, there might easily be a billion spirits floating, waiting to flood through a beachhead and drink the city’s fear—if you believed that sort of thing. In groups and lots, the Tachba were turning giddy. Victory was in the air. The Haphans and their enslaved Sesserans were this close to folding.

  Jalamadon hooked his handcap off the ground with his foot, kicked it into the air, and caught it. The hands had come from the pile of corpses used for bivouac, and he’d carefully joined them together at the open wounds and then interlaced the fingers. They fit over his head and shaded his eyes, and would last a good we
ek.

  “Weemie won’t like being spent in front of their repeaters like a coward,” he warned them.

  “He sees the log in the water, sunk as it is,” said Harta, who was swamp through-and-through. “He’ll go and he won’t complain. What’s more, he’ll want to drag us with him.”

  “I want you both coming back here,” Jalamadon said clearly. “I want you for Ville Emsa, in the flesh. Do you hear me, brothers? I need you for the next steps. I’m the last boss we have for this fight. It says so in the written orders. I have to see this through, and I need you for that.”

  His friends grew embarrassed and drifted back to their food. Jalamadon didn’t mind that, even though he’d just given them an assignment. Though he was the boss—and he was now the big boss, the third and last, with this engagement winding to its conclusion—there was no hurrying a right southern Tachba. They were indifferent to fear, to duty, to any qualm. It made Jalamadon feel warmly toward them. He had dominated these men from childhood, and they were his, but there was nothing machinelike in them. Unlike the Haphans across the line, or the enslaved Sesserans being made to fight, his men were free because they simply could not be told. They could only be led.

  Jalamadon stared at the front. The written message from his predecessor had been clear, scrawled with thick, wavering lines as the man fought his polluted compulsions to run into the artillery barrage that ultimately ended him.

  The conclusion was still sharp in Jalamadon’s mind. “Hapha: Take his victory and use it against him. Exhaust him and walk him into the mud.”

  Just one more layer of dead, thought Jalamadon. Just one more wall of meat. And then we will be in Ville Emsa.

  8

  Nana

  It was time for her next medical review at the Haphan hospital. Nana walked slowly along the railway track, and the other dashtas fell in around her. She didn’t worry about what that indicated—that they thought of her as their leader. She was well past the worrying stage.

  Her friend Mesma said, “I had to cut a throat last night, Nana.”

  Nana glanced over and then away. She studied the blank canvas of Mesma’s face in her mind. Dashtas were too secretive by half.

  “I’m sorry,” she said neutrally.

  “You better be. He was a young singleton boy from Sheflis who always missed his mother. He thought he would do a service to the empire and tell me a minor plot he had uncovered. Surprise, surprise: it was a part of your plot to antagonize the Haphans. So I drew him away from the hearth and killed him. Will you tell me I was correct?”

  What had seemed like blankness in Mesma was really a tightly controlled mien. The girl stared ahead with rimmed, glowing eyes.

  Nana longed to reach out to her, but the women around them were judging her more than any man could. They listened greedily, taking it in like carrion birds. Anything Nana said would spread through Ville Emsa’s dashta community before nightfall. “Mesma, a good man recently told me ‘we can do no wrong.’ Everything we do is for the right. We’ve always been that way.”

  Mesma shot her a bitter glance. “The Sands. Fat Culleyho. Bright Harbor. History shows that we can do wrong. Why pretend otherwise?”

  “I was called Culleyho,” Nana said loudly, for the whole group. Mesma glanced around and finally noticed their audience. “I was called Culleyho by a proven man, not a boy. I thought it was a compliment. But when I mentioned this to another officer that night, he said, ‘We hate Culleyho.’ I got an earful about a girl who walked up to the wall and was shot apart to save all the children. The problem was, she also left Ed-homse to fall under the Haphan foot.”

  “True enough,” said an older woman behind her. “If you know your histr’y. It was a dark time for Ed-homse, and then for Sessera.”

  “Yet I was called a Culleyho by a proven man. A good man. So is it a compliment or an insult?”

  The women grumbled.

  “Without Culleyho,” Nana told them, “Sessera would never have fallen to the Empire.”

  “Yes,” Mesma said.

  “Sessera would never have taken the damn leash,” said a less tractable woman behind them.

  “Without Culleyho, no hot water in Emsa for washing,” said Nana.

  The muttering fell silent.

  “No street sculls, paid by the city, to rake sewage off the sidewalks,” Nana continued.

  “No constables to complain to,” Mesma added.

  “No Rules of Order to bring food into Ville Emsa from the farms,” said the young dashta named Thorie.

  “No walking on the streets at all. We would be ripped to pieces by the boys. We’d sit in our rooms surrounded by guards.”

  Nana nodded. “Without Culleyho, there is no Sesseran civilization worth the name. The Haphans came in and made us different, didn’t they? With their paperwork and their thousand different offices of this and that, they shaped us into a culture in which we dashtas, at least, can thrive. Because of Culleyho, we Sesserans are different from the Moon Kingdoms in the South. Well, all of that is coming to an end. When the Tachba break through—and they will—we will lose all of that.”

  “Culleyho didn’t know what she was doing,” said the discontented dashta. “She was just a silly little bitch trying to save some children.”

  “Culleyho was sixteen, younger than me.” Nana glanced back. “She fought the Haphans to a standstill. This was when they used their lasers and their good landing-day artillery, and they still had flying cars that could shoot from the wing. She beat them with children dropping rocks off cliffs, with clapper-dance music to make men fight past death, with clanmen rising out of the moss with nothing but boot swords. Do we not completely believe that she knew what she was doing?”

  “She must have,” Mesma said.

  “And remember, the old queens ran the politics. They didn’t sneak around like we must today. Culleyho knew that Sessera’s Queen Baff was on the outs with her military. She saw how, in the Haphan provinces, orphaned children were being saved from slaughter. The Haphans, averting child-death in their captured lands! From all that, who wouldn’t see a better future for Ed-homse and Sessera?”

  “She saw it, perhaps, but she didn’t really know she was doing right.”

  Nana shook her head. “That’s just a saying. We never know we’re doing right. How could we? When we say that, we really mean we always try to do right. When we try, we don’t regret failure as much as when we don’t try, that’s how Pretty Polly works. We always try to do the right thing.”

  “If we even know what it is.”

  “I’m only saying we try to do right.” Nana listened to the receptive silence and wondered if she’d made her point. “Culleyho went to the wall and was shot to dishrags, but look at us now. The trick, with difficult decisions, is to think far enough past them.”

  Mesma strode on beside her, eyes on the railroad ties under their feet.

  “Mesma,” Nana said to her, “maybe your boy, as he waits in the fire, will someday tell you that you made the right choice. Not today, not tomorrow, but someday.”

  Mesma’s expression didn’t change, but Nana hoped her boy was smaller in her mind, or at least nodding to her. A nodding memory was easier to keep.

  9

  Gawarty

  The Haphan Quarter felt different to Gawarty. Slightly louder and faster, with more collisions on the sidewalks, as if the neighborhood had somehow accelerated. Pedestrians gave curt, hawkish apologies or merely nodded and turned away. The wagons on the street were driven with neither decorum nor safety. The occasional sanctioned Sesseran still popped up on the sidewalks, ambling at the normal pace but staring around with a furrowed, confused brow.

  The whole damn place feels hunted, Gawarty thought. He recognized the atmosphere from the front.

  Gawarty navigated to the building where Jephia had her Office of Native Affairs and ducked into the rear alley. The door handle turned under his hand—unlocked, enough in itself to unnerve any Tachba without the decency to knock. An unlo
cked door could be more secure than a locked door, when it came to the Tachba. The stairs were crowded with boxes overflowing with papers and cast-off Southie uniforms. At each landing, corridors stretched into the distance. Gaslights sputtered above each cell door: Jephia’s prison was full. In fact, based on the noise, she had it overflowing.

  “The brother,” said an armed Haphan soldier on the next landing. “Herself is in her office.”

  “Herself? You mean the colonel,” Gawarty said, a little sharply.

  The soldier took in Gawarty’s ragged front-line kit and whiskery face, and answered, “Yes, sir. The colonel.”

  Jephia was not immaculate either. He watched her through the open doorway as she stood by the fire, reading papers and muttering under her breath. She tossed most of the papers into the flames. Ash floated around the room unnoticed.

  “Warty,” she said eventually. “Come in or pay a gawking fee.”

  She looked ready to drop, with unusual lines around her mouth and bags under her eyes. Her hair was pulled up in a high, businesslike ponytail; her normally pristine white underblouse was wrinkled and not tucked in.

  “And you’re barefoot,” Gawarty concluded with amazement. She was like the Haphan Quarter, writ small.

  “My boots are out getting brushed,” she said absently. With a final curse she balled up a movement report and tossed it into the fire, where it flared and escaped up the chimney.

  “Messenger paper doesn’t have the breeding to just burn properly,” she mumbled. “It always has to go somewhere.”

  “It floats because it’s so light…”

  “I know that. Please don’t you be dull too.”

  Gawarty knew this mood. He shrugged and peeled out of his greatcoat. When he turned back, she had stopped to stare at him.