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.
The March North Page 11