The March North

by Graydon Saunders

  Sensible critter.

  Half an hour before dawn, a half-company, maybe twenty files, of Reems guys comes over the pass. They’re formed up, moving carefully; not marching, it’s hard to march in the dark when you can’t see in it. But it’s definitely a formation.

  No wards, no obvious use of the Power.

  Blossom’s up with the watch change. Three hours of collecting heads pushed things out; didn’t see any reason not to run the full four night watches, eight hours, and get everybody as rested as we could.

  Part-Captain. A moment of your expertise.

  Half-awake and out of armour, Blossom’s not maintaining the junior officer act. Sorcerer comes through clear enough to twist your neck as the Independent walks over.

  Any active Power with these guys?

  I pass the location of the Reems guys as apparent brightness in the focus. Halt knits intricate things in the black dark; Blossom’s making a tiny, red, down-pointing light to avoid putting a foot wrong, at the paling-eastern-sky end of a clear night full of stars.

  There’s an odd sensation of stretching in the focus, not quite like having two active viewpoints, like the current viewpoint getting sharper and better able to resolve detail.

  Specific detail to which I’m nearly blind. Not much different from Blossom’s light to walk.

  They had a worse day than we did. Blossom’s scholarly voice. No indication of active talent, any use of the Power, or any concealed entity.

  Looks like everyone left in that army who can walk. Still the scholarly voice, but the more interested one. A sensation of counting. Figure they’re closer to a tenth or a half percent?

  The expected range for survivors of a demon rampage. Surviving wounded are rare.

  A hundred fifty eight guys are half a percent of thirty-thousand something. It’s never going to be exact, the neat percentages mislead. A tenth is way too big, there weren’t a hundred and fifty thousand of them.

  Blossom sticks a hand out, rocks it back and forth. Eustace ate six hundred and sixty two heads.

  We don’t ask where even a five-tonne sheep puts a meal that’s got to be more than three tonnes of heads. Halt might tell us.

  Half the command structure, at most; not everyone would have been in on the despair binding, it would have been a secret of the ruling faction, not universal knowledge amoung every commander of a company or collector of taxes.

  Hard to get less than eighty brigade-equivalents out of that. Blossom nods. Neither of us have a clue what that says about Reem’s population; the Commonweal maintains sixteen brigades with seven and a half million, but could double that readily. In extremity, we could run eighty brigades for two years or so, before not doing anything else but fight wrecked the work of living.

  If the Reems guys are trying to get away from something utterly terrible, they could be functioning at that level of mobilization.

  Seems unlikely; the infantry we’ve seen have been too close to the prime age, too even in size. Reems is big.

  About of a third of the heads were whole, the rest arrived in parts. So a thousand demons showed up; more than that were involved, over the pass and scattered through Reems. They didn’t all start under that fortress; Halt’s offer must have…

  Halt, did you command the demons under the fortress to communicate your instructions to other demons in Reems service?

  The clicking of needles stays completely even. No, Captain. I gave the command in a way that addressed it to every demon subjugated by anyone who owed service by any chain of obligation to the individual in control of the despair enchantment.

  Demons don’t co-operate. Or we’d all have passed through demon guts long since. And the demons passed it on?

  If they hadn’t, I might have been angry. Spiders can’t have a neutral, oh, maybe I’ll wear the purple hat, tone, but these are trying.

  I take a quick little shudder break. Blossom looks sympathetic. “My grandmother was once a student of Halt’s, not the way I am, but enough Halt came to my birthday parties when I was an infant and child.” Blossom’s got a good grasp of the quiet voice that doesn’t carry.

  I can’t even imagine.

  Blossom’s head shakes, and smiles. “It was wonderful. Halt did illusions when I was six, whatever we asked for. There was a big room full of unicorns just the right size for a six year old to ride, and substantial enough to do it.”

  “Real unicorns?” Jewel-toothed, anthrophagic, sophont, wild drunk on poetry and the music of trumpets, unicorns….

  “Aside from the colours? They looked right. Halt explained that they could only be our friends for today, because it was a special day.” Blossom dimples suddenly. “They ran as fast as real ones, too. There are still people in town who get funny looks about that.”

  Blossom passes me an image; I got this from Grandma, much later.

  Twenty seven six year olds, riding an exploding rainbow of half-scale unicorns in no kind of order and, as Blossom said, as fast as real unicorns, which means the open canter has them going about twenty metres per second. They’re sticking to the turf section of the roadway, not really breaking any traffic rules unless there’s a local ordinance about shrieking in glee or the thunder of hooves.

  Blossom’s right out in front, on a unicorn the purples and blues of new-quenched steel. Beside Blossom is another girl on a unicorn uniformly the liquid scarlet of fresh blood.

  “Tell me your horse-thing isn’t.” I manage to keep it in the quiet voice. It’s hard.

  I get the real smile, not the grin. “Real unicorns are just as smart as people; that would be slavery, even if you made it from the dead dry dust.” Dead dry dust is the wording of a Commonweal judge, in a judgement almost five hundred years old. Blossom is quoting. Enforcing that judgement has something to do with why there aren’t many Independents in their fourth and fifth centuries.

  “So no, not really; if they’re not smart you dare not give them so much access to the Power. Stomp’s about as smart as a pig” — right at the legal limit — “and much better-tempered.”

  Which explains why, pig-temper or unicorn-temper, it hasn’t eaten a bronze bull or eight files of infantry on a whim.

  “Really, Captain; Grue wanted to go that fast again, not pass in terror.” Blossom’s voice is gentle.

  It’s a surprisingly convincing explanation.

  “If we meet a real unicorn?” The Northern Hills being the sort of place where you might.

  Blossom shrugs. “No horn. If it doesn’t have the horn, it’s not a unicorn.” Blossom trying to look tactful is cheering, even right now. “Grue did ask first.”

  Two hundred and…seventeen years ago, a Part-Captain got a detached company slaughtered by being impolite to a unicorn in a particularly incompetent way. It’s on the lengthy “these would not be novel errors” curriculum, so I know, and Blossom, graduate of the same school, knows I know, that the horn isn’t a material structure. If Stomp can’t be given extensive access to the Power, it can’t have a horn.

  How you’d even start to ask a unicorn if it minded the creation of artificial hornless unicorns as beasts of burden. You’d never come out and say what you wanted to do, not if you wanted to live.

  An image opens in my mind, carried there by spiders. Spiders on their ever-so-delicate best behaviour.

  You can tell the plan was for cake inside, and the combination of six year olds and unicorns moved the cake outside without much conscious thought. There’s enough cake, even with the unicorns being offered their own slices in an awkward combination of wild enthusiasm and solemn politeness. Parents around the edges look pale and troubled — unicorns smell like panicked tigers, and these are amazingly real unicorn illusions — and I can just see the bundle of the current project at the top of the knitting bag on the grass just to the viewpoint’s left.

  In the middle of the image, the purple-and-blue unicorn and the wet-red unicorn have lain down, right down, necks stretched out and chins on the grass. Two of the infant children,
girls, are sitting between them, fancy, festive-occasion hats back on, leaning on their respective unicorns’ shoulders, eating cake, petting unicorns, and talking with a steadily collapsing shyness.

  You got two of them. Just to Halt, and as lacking in accusation as I can make it.

  Social hints are mighty things. Spiders do smug very well.

  Social hints moved by honesty and good-will being something to which Commonweal law refuses to object. They’re not precisely fair, not when some of the hinters are centuries old, but the purpose of the law is not that sort of fairness.

  A mighty Commonweal means I am safer, Captain. It means I need spend less time maintaining the Peace and may spend more on sheep-breeding and the flower garden.

  Your human selective breeding project?

  I encourage traits that benefit the Commonweal as a whole, Captain. As is my plain duty.

  If you squint from Blossom. Halt hasn’t been especially quiet about Halt’s side of the conversation.

  Not very much, dear. A tiny amount of social selection so we get more high-talent people like you and Grue and fewer high-talent people like Shimmer.

  Shimmer is one of the Twelve. Shimmer isn’t anywhere sane can send messages.

  There’s a small sigh from Blossom. “I had a complete fit about this when I was twenty-three.”

  “Mother sat me down and ran me through the available evidence that there’s three different ways to get a high-talent person, and that one of them is certainly dire and one of them is deeply iffy and one of them is just somebody with a lot of talent for the Power.”

  “Halt’s been telling people the odds.”

  Blossom nods. “Halt’s been telling people the odds.”

  “Also how to do the tests and what to check and how to calculate the odds; it’s hardly something that works by Halt’s authority. There’s a whole field of study, and none of the active workers in it are Halt.”

  There’s a rather larger sigh from Blossom. “It’s also impossible to argue that, without that knowledge, high-talent people who are just people, instead of utterly paranoid or actively indifferent to the fate of anyone else, are not what you tend to get. Talented people get smitten with each other in completely unhelpful ways.”

  I have parents, and grand-parents, and you can go back four greats. That’s it, all the history of graul there is in the world, because the wizard Laurel made our kind six hundred and sixteen years ago, if you count from the creation of the first one. The last made graul came out of Laurel’s vats after the Foremost marched.

  “I do not think Halt can be faulted for telling people true odds.”

  Blossom makes a broad gesture. The clear view of the stars blurs and shudders behind the moving hand.

  “People didn’t start off with the Talent. It’s new to life, not all through the world like breathing and digestion and making food from sunlight. Someone made it.”

  There’s a tiny whiff of ozone coming off Blossom.

  “Either they did a bad job, or they didn’t understand what they were doing, or — ” Blossom gets stuck.

  Or they had objectionable characters.

  The spiders are much, much calmer about this than Blossom is managing to be.

  The half-company of Reems guys are getting close, less than a kilometre. They’re not moving like people coming to a fight, but still.

  Captain, Sergeant-Major. Turn out the duty platoon.

  Sir. Twitch doesn’t make any of the jokes about waking the dead.

  Neither does anybody in One, rolling awake in the standard. They’ve figured out they can will themselves into armour in there.

  Blossom trots off. Five minutes later, Part-Captain Blossom trots up in armour. Battery’s alert. Don’t have anything that’d be both decisive and safe at this range.

  More than a hundred dead guys behind a single focus node really ought to do.

  Stand by to go old-fashioned on them as required, Part-Captain.

  I get a grin and a wave and a knuckle-cracking gesture to go with my Sir. No salutes in the field, it’s the same wave the drovers use as an acknowledgement. Might be a Creek thing.

  Oh, right. Captain, Rust. I am going to need you to translate if these Reems guys are here to talk.

  Chapter 32

  Rust comes awake like water falling up. You don’t see where the bedroll goes, and the hand that isn’t putting the hat on is a brief flicker of dark fire before Rust’s eyes focus.

  Captain. Faint, the first wisps of the fire starting.

  One of the Reems guys is coming forward, holding up a reversed spear.

  Been roughed up a bit; there are scrapes and scratches, but it looks like everything’s functioning.

  Dry, though. Can’t see a canteen. Hungry, after a night spent awake and moving in the cold.

  Young and fit, so supposing they find potable water maybe good for a couple days of marching yet, even this far up the mountains.

  Spear-guy stops, just about at bowshot, and flourishes the spear.

  I head down the stairs with Rust. Halt is still knitting, and Eustace is still asleep.

  You can see the ripple in the grass as the edge of the focus moves forward with me, an extra shine on the frost. I stop about seven metres from the guy with the spear, so the edge of the focus stops about at five. Maintaining composure pretty well. Not likely to recognise who Rust is, though what Rust is won’t tax the wits of anyone able to hold a spear. Rust’s hat has acquired another bunch of steel-winged butterflies, and the molten, languid, suddenly-bright wing-flapping is difficult to miss.

  Whether Spear-guy thinks I’m the bodyguard or not is an open question. Unlikely to know more about what graul look like than the folk of the Creeks do, and in armour we sometimes fool each other. Being recognised as non-human usually tips the expectation from “important” to “bodyguard”.

  Rust draws up, tall and formal, near enough aristocratic, takes a specific pose with both arms and a tip of the head. An invitation to speak comes through the focus in smoke of burning animal fat.

  The guy with the spear looks back and forth, decides to speak to Rust.

  Under Spear-guy’s words, I get a translation in smoke, half a beat behind.

  “Lord! You are most great, and full mighty! The tale of your dead cannot be told!”

  Rust’s arms move, head comes upright. Presumably Reems oratorical tradition for “do go on”.

  There’s a pause, and the next bit comes out faster.

  “The Archon is fallen, and the great lords of Reems. We would serve you, Lord, with sword and spear, for in the service of mightiness is glory and plunder!”

  “Would you not rather return to Reems, and take up your estates?” Very odd, Rust’s alien voice in my ears and clear words through the focus.

  “Doom still comes to Reems.” Spear-guy wasn’t looking like someone sure of life before saying that, and it still takes all the hope out of Spear-guy’s face to say it.

  “Is not Reems yet mighty above its doom?” Rust conveys this in a way that comes through the focus with utter certainty that the question is rhetorical, that the might of Reems is certain and enduring. “Archons fall; Reems goes on.”

  Spear-guy makes a strange little dip with the butt of the spear, and Rust makes a left-handed flat wave with a skipping pat motion to it. Spear-guy drops to the grass, sitting cross-legged, head tilted down, spear over thighs. It’s not easy to stand there holding a spear upside down with your arms at three-quarters extension.

  Not necessarily easy to stand at all. Being stuck in a wizard-war takes it out of you, and then no food and a cold night.

  “Lord, the might of Reems was great, and it grew, and conquered. The lamentation and grief of the conquered were bound, that the might of Reems should endure forever.”

  The tears are obvious enough. There’s no weeping in Spear-guy’s voice at all; it seems flat, a bit shocky, but the cadences are even.

  “It is not so, that Reems should endure forever. I heard th
e wails of the dead Reems had conquered crying in fear, as they passed from bondage into death.”

  Spear-guy looks up, looks directly at Rust like a man expecting to die. “The sorcerers of Reems made chains of chains, that the bondage of the conquered should be the subjugation of the mighty from beyond the world.”

  No word for demon in Reems, like bread catching fire.

  “They are free, and many, more than did obeisance in the dark.”

  The desperate gaze drops. “Reems is no more.”

  That comes out ear-straining quiet. Even Rust’s translation is softer, a distant intimation of smoke.

  “Yet you live.” Rust’s spoken voice doesn’t sound any harsher than the speech of Reems usually sounds. “Cannot you return to what was Reems, to the walled towns and the hillside groves, and be there of service to the people?”

  Keeping the roving brigands away, I think Rust means, while whatever sorcery survives does what it can for the demons and the weeds. There will be some sorcerers left, possibly most of the sorcerers left; it won’t be Reems, but it could well be a lot of tolerably prosperous walled towns.

  With a demon problem, for a generation or two, but clean farmland is worth fighting demons.

  The bunch of Reems guys, further back, isn’t looking restive. Worried, yes. I suppose Rust’s formal oratorical poses aren’t going to be associated with the possibility of mercy.

  “Lord, we are few, from many towns. Our fathers are dead, and our brothers, and our uncles, and our sons.”

  Not this guy’s sons, not for at least ten years, but as a general truth it will do.

  Standard poetic formula wisps through, in a satisfied smoke of cedar wood.

  “If we join with victory, we are remade. If we return, we are handfuls in the fire.”

  Spear-guy bends forward, and looks up, tear-streaked face the picture of entreaty.

  “Lord, if we must pile bricks, or guard sheep, we will do it, and earn our women, not win them.”

  Brimstone smoke, quick and startled. That offer is as desperate as they can get.