The March North

by Graydon Saunders

  Should help a lot if somebody from Reems recognises Rust’s deception, instead of just throwing a mountain at it.

  Officer training involves repeated emphasis that learning behaviour, or even just character improvement, in the recent dead isn’t pointless; that it’s going to help you get the live ones home. Sometimes it’s more work to hang on to that than other times.

  It’s a nice little gully; the stream is either seasonal or occasional, and it’s pretty much nothing right now. From the depth of the rock cuts it’s a torrent sometimes, but we’re getting the waggons up the bed in single file with only a little difficulty. We’d be in serious trouble if we had to do it without the focus but there’s not much about making a bunch of sand act like a good road the company doesn’t know. That keeps us off the steep sides and out of the trees, which are substantial. Conifers, and mostly over fifty metres high.

  A large, very angry, and seriously puzzled boar bear goes over, bumping along twenty metres overhead on top of the focus. Looks like a running bear, and not full grown. Eustace gives it the eye, and the puzzlement gets worse. I get Didn’t see the point of killing it from Dove, halfway to expecting to be apologetic.

  There’s a point to not killing it; dead bears draw vultures. If Reems has anybody good enough to read the memories out of all the animals to see where we’ve gone we’re in grim trouble anyway. I try to make that feel more actively approving than it sounds. Anybody can see vultures circling. Anybody with experience of armies will look.

  I get the impression of a waved salute back from Dove, and we keep climbing.

  We run out of gully in a little alpine meadow, maybe two hectares; it looks like there’s a basalt dike holding the flat in, above the stream, keeping it too wet for the big trees. There are plenty more big trees around it, but we’ve definitely run out of waggon-passable terrain.

  Toby, how’s the back-trail?

  Clean, Captain.

  Rust is still muttering away. I most emphatically don’t want to stick the focus out there and mess with the deception.

  Toby, One, you’re getting the watch. Eat by files and don’t stint the beer ration. Especially since Twitch’s got it set so it’s not going to do anything to your alertness.

  Two, Three, we’re going to go dark on the focus; quiet, defensive, set to absorb. Nobody do anything active, we’re trying not to make any noise.

  Not something the company is used to doing, and I get some very alert attention as the focus shifts into the Power equivalent of a deep, still, cold pond that somehow fails to reflect the sky. Since I don’t have to run it like that down to the ground — if there are Reems guys in these trees, well, something truly powerful actively hates us — anywhere but the side facing back down the valley, we can leave it like that until something makes us move.

  Cold camp; eat by files. That goes out to the battery, too. They didn’t need to be told to site the tubes pointing back down our track. Between knocking the wall down and getting up this gully, they all need feeding.

  Twitch, how are we for water?

  Filled the tanks this morning. Humidity’s been good. Deserts can fool you bad; if you can’t get water out of the air and have a planning failure you can get stuck somewhere dry enough you should have brought more water. There are certainly alpine deserts, but so far, so good. The Northern Hills don’t feel like being one this décade.

  We’re up five days on rations. Very wry indeed. The dead do eat, or at least you try to get them to, it keeps them from drifting away from an awareness of the living, but nothing you have to haul in a waggon.

  Any bright ideas, Sergeant-Major?

  Besides not standing up too soon? Twitch puts a lot more wry into that one. We’ve both seen ducking fail that way, someone coming back up before the whoosh past their head had happened.

  I figure the main failure mode’s if they weren’t getting ready to roll down into the Creeks. If they’re holding the line up at the Reems end with everything they’ve got, it’s going to look like we stomped their rear and vanished into thin air. Even dead, Twitch will tap when thinking.

  Or butterflies. Twitch sounds thoughtful.

  Having the opposition dissolve into butterflies could throw you, yeah. Which tends to produce disproportionate, panicky responses. But…

  Figure Reems has been suckered by something? Or just the Archon?

  Kinda feels like that, don’t it? Or they got tangled up in something worse, trying to get help to fight the first thing off?

  Hungry ghosts, demons, malignant shadows, fire and ice and malice, the list of ways summoning terrible things to smite your enemies with have gone wrong is a long one. The list of things that have come to people with what looked like a really good offer of help is nearly as long.

  So we’ve got to get the main road enchantment, and do it without either letting the other thing know where we came from, or leaving the Archon in a position to keep trying to become a demon prince as an escape hatch or whatever they’re really trying?

  Can’t let their host past us, at least not for long, either. Twitch sounds decidedly contemplative. Artillery ambush from here?

  Hot red shot into the flank of an unsuspecting host would put a major dent in it.

  Battery, how many of the hot reds have you got?

  Hot black-red-red, twenty seven. Regular hot red-red-red, five. Two special hot red-red-red, and a half-dozen red-black-red. Those are door-knockers, they’re meant for punching holes in fortifications.

  Special hot?

  They’ll track on something moving. Meant for something big and mean. No extra boom.

  Anti-demon shot.

  Load up a couple regular hot red-red-red; if the Archon presents us with an ambush opportunity, let’s be prepared to take it.

  Sir comes back, thoughtful.

  If all else fails, that will give the host trying to climb up here after us some amount of pause. Might even be our best chance if we could be reasonably sure the Archon couldn’t hit us with a whole mountain.

  Somebody comes by and hands me my mid-day kilo of hardtack, a mug of beer, a full canteen of water, and quarter kilo of jerky. The alleged cheese comes by a minute later, from where someone’s tried to slice it evenly on a ration-box top and done a credible job. The condensed citrus has gone in the beer, which is actually an improvement, flavour-wise.

  Maybe food will let me figure out what I’m missing so I can get us out of this hole.

  Chapter 19

  There’s just something about thinking better when I’m chewing. One of the seldom-mentioned great things about the standard-binding is that you can go right on chewing while you talk.

  Part-Captain.

  Captain?

  When you said the despair encapsulation looked like an empirical success, did you mean the make-despair-solid part, or the whole extract-and-bind-despair process?

  Making it solid. You can feel the flare of understanding. Blossom doesn’t curse, I suppose you can’t when things are going to happen if you say it, but the whole command can feel Part-Captain Blossom get angry. There’d be fewer wild eyes if Blossom did curse. That’s at least an indication that someone right here isn’t going to eat the angry.

  Blossom gets it tamped back down. Halt drifts over toward me. Eustace, with a sort of slobbery glee, is eating a big brambly berry bush of some kind. I can see Halt wanting to get clear of that; even those most enthusiastic about getting some of the berries are giving up. Even without the snorting fire to worry about, when Eustace slobbers it’s extensive.

  Blossom carefully hands over formal control of the battery to the Master Gunner before heading over. Face isn’t angry, face is calm, but apparently Blossom can’t do much about the hair full of sparks.

  It’s never clear if Halt’s camp chair follows Halt around or not. It always seems to be right there when Halt wants to sit down, but you’d think someone would notice a chair trotting along, and no one has.

  Very polite of them, but now I have to talk out
loud.

  Or maybe just listen.

  “Sorry, Captain. I should have caught that.” Blossom crouches down, no creak or clank of armour. That’s a trick. I hope that’s something else being tested for the armoury. “Despair, joy, love, vigour, anything like that, extracting it is ancient. There are written instructions tens of thousands of years old.”

  Tens of thousands? Twitch, seriously startled.

  Halt looks up from knitting. The simultaneous voice and spiders is a new experience. “Readable writing perhaps older than a hundred thousand years is known. Writing exists between twice and thrice that age.”

  I get a lot of bogglement back from Twitch. I’m a little boggled myself. The oldest translatable writing I knew about was under ten thousand.

  “It was a mighty feat of necromancy.” Not, I think, Halt’s feat, but still. A tone of voice you wish Halt wouldn’t use.

  “The basic three-to-five-century cycle for a dark-lord style sorcerer to rise, fall, and be replaced has been going on for a long time.” Blossom’s tone goes scholarly, and Blossom as a whole starts losing the hair-sparks. Halt’s knitting has this contented clicking tone to it. Either I should be reassured that Halt knows what Halt’s doing or seriously concerned that Halt worries about Blossom having a loss of temper.

  “Sometimes there is a thousand years or more of a single rule in absoluteness.” At least one of which was Halt’s, and you can tell the spiders think fondly of it. “But mostly things are the same; a sorcerer rules, falls, and another rises. Most are peasants, and try to avoid horrors and death.”

  Twitch subsides into complete bogglement. Officer’s School, the scholarly qualification for a warrant of commission, tries hard to describe the Commonweal as a novel social organization; when you go out there and keep external enemies from breaking it, you had better understand how it works as a whole. You have to be a complete idiot not to pick up how fundamentally fragile the whole idea is, in terms of maintenance effort. It’s for-sure much better, but that doesn’t make it easy to keep the great and accidental run of luck going.

  To a sergeant the Commonweal is pretty much eternal, something older than your grandmother’s grandmother.

  Blossom has this look. “I didn’t do the math. Extraction’s ancient, but it’s slow and it’s fussy and it takes lot of practice. It’s fussy in large part because it’s easy to go too fast and kill the subject, so no one cares about making it work better.”

  “So the road represents more work than could be done since Meadows Pass?” Which doesn’t really change anything in terms of what we have to do. It might change a lot about what we expect the Reems guys to have done, though.

  “It could be a giant necromatic construct, if they had enough people to sacrifice. I have no idea how much is a whole person worth of despair.”

  Commonweal experimental ethics boards are fine with making life, if you’re careful enough; Eustacen and alleged horses and new food crops are all fine, but fatally draining anybody of anything for experimental purposes most completely is not.

  “More than the individual encapsulations, Blossom dear.” Halt goes right on knitting.

  “So this is probably a long-term project, not a response to Meadows Pass.” Blossom still sounds intensely rueful.

  Most Independents aren’t quite this distressed by making mistakes. I suppose enchanters have to worry more about getting it wrong; vast and terrible energies are one thing, stuffing hours worth of them into small physical objects quite another.

  There’s a thump and a clang as Rust topples off the ghost-horse.

  What clanged? Nothing came through the focus that I could tell.

  I get a mass shrug, and a couple of guys from Two go help Rust up. Rust is apparently fine, if a little staggery. Rust’s hat is off, the single butterfly on the band surrounded by a globe of pulsing orange and green fire, and the hat itself is smoking.

  Rust notices this reaching for it, hand almost on the fire, definitely staggers, does that word-or-noise thing Independents are so fond of, three liquid syllables, and there’s a distinct pop sound as the flames go out. The butterfly’s wings flick, once, twice, from closed to open and back to closed. It’s still shining and molten and apparently content.

  Rust, even straighted up and back on balance, looks a bit haggard. The guys from Two are suggesting Rust ought to eat something. Presumably they didn’t get that in the old days, but the Independents, even the Twelve, have to be used to being surrounded by people who know from experience that using the Power makes you really hungry.

  It’s a sign of social acceptance that they’re not asking “hungry for what?” in Rust’s case.

  Got the illusion about five kilometres over the crest. Someone dropped a mountain top on it, damaging the road further. Not much smoke, last wisps or first.

  Thank you. Go eat.

  “Anyone figure they think we’re really under there?”

  Halt makes a gesture at the air, and there’s a little image of a big, big pile of rock, still with a few trees on top of it, crackling and hissing and slumping oddly toward the middle, in a very credible imitation of an attempt to shield with the focus failing under sheer mass. Lack of air will get you eventually, too, but I figure Rust wanted the fakery to go quick; less work that way.

  Blossom’s got an intent, note-taking look, and even Halt appears to be stuck with expressing grudging approval.

  “So they more than half-believe it, but they’ll check? And then they’ll head down to the line of the wall, and see how bad things are, but not in any huge hurry?”

  Blossom nods. Somewhere, spectrally, Twitch isn’t nodding, it’s a request for attention.

  “Twitch, go ahead.” I pass that through the focus, too. Not enough rules for these mixed-mechanism conversations.

  Take a look. Twitch swings the viewpoint through the full circle, low, because the focus is crouched looking innocuous and adding things up from everbody’s eyes isn’t helping yet. There’s a file headed out every cardinal direction but east, along with a couple artillerists with telescope cases per file. East, and the gully we came up, is being watched by the whole sited battery, which ought to do for eyes. Getting that organised is part of Twitch’s job, so I wonder what’s been noticed already.

  It’s a very symmetric little meadow; nearly perfectly circular, food plants or at least berry bushes near the middle, grazing so excellent about a quarter of the bronze bulls are contemplatively chewing on a few grass stalks and Blossom’s horse-thing is stuffing itself, a stream in from the west, and implausibly steep and even rock walls all the way around. It doesn’t look like it’s what erosion did, somehow. And the rocks above the upwelling spring of the stream are bedded flat.

  They really do look like rocks, too, not old bricks or ashlars; the thicknesses are uneven and the edges aren’t really parallel.

  Not that a spring at the high edge of an alpine meadow, a big, constant, stream-feeding one, is an especially plausible natural occurrence.

  “Has the battery got anything in the hot red range for destruction that could be adapted to trigger when somebody from Reems walks over it?”

  Blossom gets the slow smile I’m coming to associate with finely divided aggregate. The metal-bending grin goes with looking maybe nineteen; this one goes with Halt looking uneasy.

  “The Part-Captain is not going out to plant it; I want to send less than four files, two if that will work, one company, one battery.”

  “It’ll take about an hour to set up, unless you want it to be ridiculously specific about when it goes off.” Blossom manages to keep the “why don’t I get to have fun?” out of voice or face, transitory irk notwithstanding.

  “The centre of any group of more than a hundred that isn’t us.”

  “Sir.”

  Blossom starts to get up, and I wave to keep going. Will get the rest of this through the focus anyway.

  Twitch, check the water; if it’s good, we refill. Then get a couple-four files working at the rock
wall back of the spring; treat it like it’s an old stone wall and see if it comes down neatly.

  Sir.

  While that’s going on, detail one company file and one battery file to carry the Part-Captain’s device back down to the main valley; have them place it about half a kilometre downhill of where we turned.

  Twitch doesn’t quite manage to form the question outright, but I answer it anyway.

  As carefully and as sneakily as they can; check with the Part-Captain before they go out about how deep to bury it. The intent is to cause the host of Reems casualties, not to deter them.

  Sir.

  Attention to orders.

  Heads go up all over the meadow.

  It’s nap time, duty files and pickets and rock-moving detail excepted. Finish eating, get ready to move, and rack out. The plan is to wake up at dusk, get dinner, and move out in the dark. Rude strangers may alter that plan, so pickets look sharp.

  Toby, One, you rack out too. You’ve been pulling extra watch. There’s faint surprise under the Sir but they do it. It helps keep the dead attached to living concerns if they keep acting like they’re alive. It doesn’t usually last, but all I really need is long enough to get them home in shape to say their goodbyes.

  I get a surprisingly relaxed diffuse Sir back, and everybody does just that. Even Rust racks out; body safely far away or not, having a mountain dropped on an active complex construct like that can bruise you in the talent.

  It takes Blossom forty minutes to set the thing up, and the two files Twitch detailed head off with it. It looks like a standard five litre metal jar, and it’s obviously fairly hefty.

  “Copper’s medium dense, and it’s mostly copper.” Blossom takes a cup of tea from Halt with a smile and a sort of social bob-of-acknowledgement; I take one too, because, well. Prudence.