The March North

by Graydon Saunders

  Halt, once we’re through the wall, we’re there to keep you from being bothered while you destroy the road enchantment. Communicate wants.

  Everybody, until Rust starts, we’re going to keep the focus obscuring us, and hunker down and not move.

  It’s a long, long wait. Blossom passes three, four, two, six, one, five, the order to fire the door-knockers in, with such clarity that it’s stuck in my head. Which probably means everyone’s got this particular order forever, along with an awareness that doorknocker shot have flavours.

  Next couple after that will be short black-red-red; don’t try to assail the breach until there’s been eight hits.

  Got it. The Part-Captain is thorough; extra fiery death just in case the rock-shattering, ward-cutting rain of fiery death didn’t clear the space back of the wall.

  It’s getting bright out, almost actual dawn for the valley floor; you can see the line of the sunlight sliding down the treed mountain slopes.

  Can’t see what’s happening, but various Reems guys start running all over the battlements, striking gongs, and blowing horns. South-east corner, it looks like. No wards coming up; the fortress has them, but whatever Rust is doing hasn’t triggered them.

  Everybody’s standing. Toby and Radish give Twitch the nod, one or two troopers who want to start drawing warswords or an adci get told not to be idiots, and Eustace heaves upright from lying with a huff. Doesn’t have to breathe fire, though you can tell Eustace prefers to.

  At the run.

  The Line will advance!

  We’re running flat out in what’s left of the dark.

  Chapter 22

  It’s not especially physically tiring, not for the first twenty kilometres or so, and we’ve only got two. It takes a real effort of talent but we’re getting a lot of benefit from the dead. The standard isn’t any heavier for them in it, and the strength of the focus is greater than it would have been were they living.

  Eustace, keeping the flames in, and keeping up easily, doesn’t look anywhere near top speed. I’d like to know what Halt meant to do, what intent got past the ethics board, creating Eustance’s kind.

  Half a kilometre from the wall, it’s clear there really is no moat, not even a dry one. Keeping water, or flowing water, off the wards is often more of a concern than keeping siege engines away from the wall, but it still seems off.

  Mind your line from Blossom.

  Edge left.

  Shot. I think it’s the ghost-gunner on tube one.

  The first door-knocker goes in, a streak and a flash and clinging cyan fire; the focus lets me see a sentry, half-in and half-out of the flash. The outside half topples into the cyan fire, dissolving in its turn.

  Second one hits, third one hits, and it’s getting very bright on the part of the wall Blossom’s targeting. Perfect five second intervals.

  The shock’s wearing off the surviving sentries. There are shouts, gestures, none of them pointing at us, some more horns being blown and gongs rung, but the problem with that sort of general “attack! attack!” alarm system is that it’s worthless for telling you where the second attack is coming from, or even that there is one. It sounds just like the alarms, still going on, for the first attack.

  Rust is still at it; the ground shakes, twice, and some high-pitched howling noise has started around to the south side of the fortress.

  Four, five, some kind of horizontal vortex of darkness forming with the cyan fire outside it, pulses as someone in there tries to get the outer wards up and can’t, and we’re just crossing a hundred metres from the wall as six hits, fifty metres to our right.

  Straight at the wall.

  The acknowledgement has grins in it. Our timing isn’t perfect, but it’s not looking much like perfect is required.

  A strip of molten rock five metres wide flies backward, out of the wall, from below ground level to clean through the crenellations. Another ten metres to either side of mostly intact stone blocks follows it, in a great dusty crash that’s just finishing as the first red shot screams through the gap. I have to bounce some of the back-blast up with the focus, and we still get some heat, like walking outside into full summer sun. That’s it for being hard to see with the focus going off sneaking and into offence/defence.

  Short shot or not, it’s got some kick to it.

  The second red shot goes through and goes off on the ground instead of at the height of the outer wall. Substantial stone blocks fly out of the breach, the ground shock mingles with another of whatever Rust is doing, and the flash out-lights the dawn.

  GO.

  Two Platoon sprints through the gap, dancing on the rubble and the focus.

  It’s pretty much clear in the outer courtyard; the high red shot hit everybody on the wall with the flash and the blast. There will be more, as soon as someone gets a door open, but nothing much is active in there now. There are interior curtain walls, just lower than the outer walls, so the space inside the outer walls would be nine squares if the central keep wasn’t the middle one. Very geometrical.

  Eustace rumbles through the breach surrounded by the colour party. Halt’s still under that shawl, but is looking very intently around.

  Low in the keep, say the hungry spiders.

  Twitch, we’re going to try to dig in. No room to drop the wall.

  No room to drop the wall without being hip-deep in rocks, and that hurts.

  Sir back, and the inevitable assignment of two to watch the walls around us and one to do the digging. Just like ploughing, only deep enough to plant Eustace.

  The courtyard paving ripples up and turns over, the line of a deepening ditch angling at the inner wall. There’s a right angle turn and the spoil starts fusing into a roof. Wouldn’t have been able to fit the whole ramp into the courtyard in a straight line, and the bend is a good idea anyway in case of blast.

  A door opens in the back of one of the towers anchoring the interior curtain wall, the one south of the breach. Radish grabs it, slams it full open, and does a full-platoon rock toss through the doorway.

  Something vast and dark and angry spirals overhead, shuddering and falling on the south-west tower of the inner keep. Jets of white fire, inhumanly loud shouts, and a crackle of lightning bolts meet it. Reems has got wizards here; good thing they’re busy.

  Nothing on the foundation. Twitch doesn’t believe that, and I don’t either.

  Try to melt it anyway.

  Halt, heads up for surprises.

  Heat gusts out of the trench, and again as the stone that flowed into paving and shoring arches for the tunnel gets cooled. It’s neat work; there’s only a little smell of hot rock in the heat.

  It’s one big open space in there.

  Far from the best way to build your fortress. Could be ritual space, could be a requirement of whatever enchantment they’re using, could be a megalomaniac Archon’s personal quarters. Hard to tell from this end of the tunnel even what’s in there.

  Somebody in Two expends a pointy stick on a doorway that’s spewing archers along the inner fortress battlement. It juices a couple of them but doesn’t stop them. Defending against arrows is easy but starts to fix the focus in place, we’ve only got so much attention for threats. Don’t want that. They’re certainly firing enthusiastically.

  Captain, Company, fire support from Twitch.

  Got it.

  Twitch has to worry about catching the arrows, and anybody else from Reems who shows up.

  Captain, Battery. Fire support. Three short black-red-black at fifteen second intervals, prep and hold one long white-red-black.

  Battery, Captain. Hank the Master-Gunner. Call your shot.

  Meaning doing intervals from two kilometres is insane and I’d better have the target picture really firm in the shot before it’s fired, so no, we’re not doing fifteen second intervals, we’re doing called shots.

  Hank’s the expert.

  Shoot.

  Dead centre on the door. Since it went through a merlon to get there, it’s s
lowed down enough to bounce around inside the tower. I was expecting to just punch out through the far wall and maybe make any more archers nervous.

  Shoot.

  It isn’t kind to the tiny enchanted will-to-hit in the shot, but if you give it an impossible turn you can get it to hit sideways. It’s not perfectly sideways, but shooting at the side of one of the middle merlons means the shot hits the next one over almost flat, and a couple hundred kilos of high velocity gravel splashes down the battlement.

  You’d have trouble doing that with a long-shot heave from a five-layer tube; I could get used to having nines around.

  Let’s do that again.

  Shoot.

  There’s some flames from the tower, and about half the archers are down. No panic yet, they haven’t had time to realise what’s happening. The flames in the tower suggest there’s a lot of wood in there, maybe the floor, and if they were idiots enough to do that maybe the fighting platform is wood, too. I’ve got a nice two-merlon hole in the stone cover, so let’s try for the floor.

  Shoot.

  It’s wood. Idiots. There are flaming flinders everywhere, some of them stuck in archers, some of them rattling off the focus. Twitch is telling Radish not to worry about missing the door, you can’t look everywhere at one time and you have to catch them quick. I hope Twitch listens, still true when you’re the Sergeant-Major.

  Not all the archers are down, but none of them are firing. Twitch uses the focus to put them all down by slamming a merlon left-right-left along the whole fighting platform.

  Twitch has a couple of files moving down the tunnel; have to get somebody in there, or we’ll never see what’s around the tunnel mouth.

  The flames behind the door the archers came out of go out, like dropping a pot lid on a grease fire.

  Captain, Battery. Prep the hold.

  Two files of the colour party toss pointy sticks up and back, toward the southern tower. From the patter of gravel on the focus, some missed. From the thuds, and screams and awful wet splurch sensation on the focus, it’s the razor glass tentacle thing again, and only some missed. Small some.

  Battery, Captain. Live hold.

  Green robes, no beard, mean eyes, starting in with the big wide staff gestures the instant the standard comes into sight, looks, in the focus, not as bad as Rust.

  Shoot.

  Ow. Holding the target means NOT using the focus to block the thermal bloom. Going to wind up with a peeling face burn from that one. That bunch of fire-priests could mostly stop rippled long shot; this is a heave, and I think it’s tube one’s vigorous ghosts again.

  You generally want to burn the heads of serious wizards, any of the better sorcerers; anything else isn’t reliably going to kill them. There are historical examples of twenty-days-in-a-pressure-cooker levels of effort to do it, too.

  This one is gone down to the short ribs, and there’s a roaring fire in the room behind again.

  I’m going to suppose the shot did hit the wizard’s eyes.

  Captain, Battery. Well done.

  I can feel the chuckle come back from the Master Gunner at the image of the partial wizard toppling backward into the flames.

  There isn’t room to drop the whole inner keep wall, but Twitch seems to have decided there’s plenty of room to drop the tower south of the breach, as long as it falls out.

  It takes both breached sections of wall with it, and the air goes thick with dust outside the focus.

  Inside’s not clear but there’s room to deploy. Twitch doesn’t like it.

  Can’t say I like anything much since Rust found those guys in the dry Westcreek.

  Move inside.

  Chapter 23

  Captain, Part-Captain. We’re headed under. Risk of wards. Anybody from Reems starts poking at this end of the tunnel, stomp them.

  Sir. Advise some notice before emerging. There’s a ghost-grin with that.

  Will do. Might be tricky if some ward forces the focus into separate nodes.

  Even with the dust and the smoke and the fortress-shadow, it’s a bright day outside.

  The tunnel is dim and even, a circle with a chord off for the floor. Excellent traction.

  This huge space is uselessly dark.

  Did we put any lights out?

  Nope. Twitch has gone outright laconic.

  Halt?

  The enchantment lies below.

  Halt’s losing the Granny-face in a rustle of spider-feet.

  Step and pause advance. We can upshift body heat into enough light to see by.

  Not a thing shows, either with eyes or the focus. It’s an artificial square cave thirty metres on a side and at least five high, and I can’t get anything at all through it, not Rust’s fight, not any sign of enchantment. We’d have lost the battery if it wasn’t for the hole in the wall.

  Listen drifts through the standard-binding. Someone heard something, and everyone stops and tries to breathe quietly, even Eustace.

  Shot. The Master-Gunner, sending an image of at least a company of Reems heavy infantry sprinting into the courtyard and headed for the hole.

  There’s a flash through the hole, sudden full daylight. That’s around the dogleg. What kind of idiot is in charge of these Reems guys?

  The walls and ceiling in here are a dull black. Really dull; soot has more shine than that.

  Anybody still hear anything?

  Nothing comes back. It’s eerie in here. Could be the ritual requires silence, could be a side effect of solid despair under the enchantment the Reems guys are using to hold the conscious terrane still, could be all sorts of things.

  What it feels like is a trap.

  Step, pause, step, and we’re near the middle of the room. No matter how keyed up you are, fifteen metres just isn’t that far. The floor doesn’t look like blocks, it looks like someone levelled living rock.

  It’s clean, scrubbed clean, can’t feel any dust. Black and even and all about the same temperature. With the focus upshifting heat, Eustace is one big light, and there’s no detail at all.

  Anybody see any writing or incisions or anything like that?

  Nothing comes back from that, either.

  Down shields.

  They do, the half of them that have them. That’s a command for inspections, not the field, and I can feel the confusion.

  I grab the focus and slam the shields overhead and hold them as the whole ceiling lets go and the focus can’t grip it at all.

  The bit that’s still up, hung on the shields, isn’t all that heavy; I doubt it weighs as much as Eustace. Still completely not there to the focus, and draped down from the shields, so we’re packed in a little tighter than we were. Some of the guys along the outside got knocked down, but it doesn’t seem to have hurt them.

  Shields hold it up, so it’s material, or at least tangible, not an idea of solidified darkness to go with the despair.

  Has us pinned better than massed archery would.

  Watch OUT. Watch UP. Twitch, so laconic it’s somewhere past conversational. It’s very, very dark in here with the focus all gone into holding up the heavy solid darkness.

  Whatever this is, it bends; something might come through it.

  Trying to slide the shields outward works fine, to get a bigger space.

  There’s a crunch, and the thing pushes down. Down hard; we can’t hold it steady, and it presses very slowly downwards.

  Toby’s chanting “Hold, Hold”, calm and steady, and it helps keep everyone focused on lifting and not what more force than we’ve got means, pressing down.

  Outside, where we can’t see at all, there’s maybe words, and faint cruel laughter. The ring of shields is down even with the howdah-top, and Eustace’s face works to the accompaniment of small flames.

  The soft sheep-face pulls back and gapes more than a sheep should, and another set of jaws slides forward past the ovine teeth, narrow and serrated and metallic.

  LOOK AWAY FROM EUSTACE.

  Probably not enough.

 
; COVER YOUR EYES.

  Toby’s chant doesn’t change, and the lift doesn’t falter.

  I’m standing dead in front of Eustace; moving aside, moving the standard aside, can go with looking away.

  Purple fire, Eustace’s full gape’s worth. It splashes off a far wall, something we can see dimly through the black thing over us, and does nothing at all to our covering except flow through it.

  Even looking away, that was bright in the darkness, and it’s hotter in here.

  LIFT.

  The shields don’t budge, and we lose another couple decimetres to the next crunching heave. Another couple of those and we’re going to have a problem.

  Eustace crouches, involuntarily. The focus-invisible stuff pressing down on the howdah is pushing Eustace down. The noise Eustace makes is halfway between a moan and bleat, and the laughter comes back louder.

  There’s a ringing noise, like a light hammer on steel, rapidly over and over. The shields surge up; there’s a whirling object moving back and forth over us, with the line slowly widening into an oval, then almost a circle.

  Eustace surges up, dim in the red glow of the whirling thing.

  The howdah top folds up, like the complex umbrella it is. The corner pillars bend and twist, four long arms with five elbows each, stowing the folded top somewhere, and coming back up with four big curved swords.

  The sword edges shine.

  There’s at least another ten metres of open space above, that the thing that fell on us hid. Two levels of galleries. Cables gone slack, hooks and pulleys in the ceiling that held up whatever fell on us.

  Both layers of galleries are lined solid with demons.

  Explains the laughter, and the crushing.

  Captain, Part-Captain. Fort’s full of demons.

  I get a distant — someone’s back up the hillside enough to see away south — view of the valley that points back toward the Commonweal side of the divide. A substantial army is coming, in glory of array. Probably who dropped most of a mountain top on Rust’s illusion. Hope so; otherwise there’s two. Ten kilometres, call it a couple hours out.