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.”
“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.”
The March North Page 9