The March North

by Graydon Saunders

  Having fifty-eight brothers, last you heard, is odd. Doesn’t keep some of them from being very obviously your older brothers.

  Chert nods, I nod, and we set out round the garden, doing the Officer’s Stroll and keeping our faces carefully pleasant.

  Your assessment of the operation?

  Success resting on luck, the best single battery of artillery the Commonweal has ever fielded, complete strategic surprise, overwhelming Independent support, and a company of territorial heavy infantry too inexperienced to recognise the level of risk agreeing that they were fighting for their homes and becoming immeasurably determined in consequence.

  The casualties?

  Surprisingly light. I expected and had accepted total destruction of my command.

  Chert has a really excellent mild and unconcerned face, but that cracks it. I get a hard look until the general recognises that this is not my notion of funny.

  On what grounds, Captain?

  This could be either “on what grounds did you expect them?” or “on what grounds did you accept them?” The “expect” part is obvious.

  Success. Sufficiently damaging Reems in a place where there was a reasonable expectation that the terrane actively opposed them meant there was a chance success could prevent an invasion the Commonweal lacked the resources to repulse directly.

  I didn’t know how bad it really was when we started marching up there, but.

  Trying to stop that mass of demons from eating everybody while repulsing the Iron Guard once the demons were spread out into the Creeks? We’d be trying to hold a communications corridor long enough to evacuate the recoverable survivors over the Folded Hills into otherwise reduced territorial holdings.

  I don’t say against whatever those things from the Paingyre are. I don’t need to. There’s absolutely no way the entire Line could have handled both fully active threats at once, not with the Foremost returned in glory.

  Stability of success?

  The amount of cold iron found puts the Reems population estimate up; if there are fifty million of them, killing twenty thousand is nothing, even with their authoritarian organization. Killing about a thousand sorcerers and eminent nobles might be more.

  Or we could have got rid of the politically dominant blinded-by-grandeur types, replacing them with able, ruthless pragmatists. Don’t need to say that, either.

  Personal best guess, half-life of the victory around ten years. Rising god-king empires usually last a hundred years or so, by which time most everybody making decisions grew up in the thing, believes they are invincible, and makes terrible decisions. The death throes aren’t pretty, but so far as we can tell, Reems is still headed up. Tipping them over would be a good, even if it likely reduces the half-life of the victory. Somebody trying to prove that the glories aren’t fallen by foreign military victory is typical early death throes.

  That gets me a nod, and a gesture at tasty-looking rose bush. Worth noticing; it’s blooming madly, and we are, technically, strolling through here to enjoy the garden.

  Utility of the nine-layer artillery tubes?

  It’s a real warm smile. Nobody but the general is going to be able to tell what caused it, so letting it show is fine.

  Excellent. Four tubes disabled a prepared block of fire-priests with three-black shot.

  A priests-and-acolytes block of fire-priests that size could have shrugged heaves from fives all day.

  No occasion arose to evaluate the greater range, and most decisive uses were with varieties of red shot. Increased shot velocity was generally advantageous by reducing the response time of the targets.

  First-shot overkill from outside the opposition’s volume of awareness is what you want; it’s tough to get, and it won’t last, as hostile sorcerers start maintaining more distant awareness, but right now it’s real. Chert produces a real smile, less wide and less warm.

  Your opinion of the battery commander?

  If the general wanted what that sounds like, I’d have been asked what I thought of Part-Captain Blossom. This is a formal request for my judgement of Blossom as a Line officer, two steps more formal than contributing to a quality of service report.

  The Part-Captain is personable, approachable, personally brave, inspires devotion, delegates well, and readily sustains an easy and absolute authority which subordinates are confident in accepting. The Part-Captain displayed no confusion concerning infantry capabilities when undertaking command of a mixed detachment in desperate circumstances. Despite no prior infantry command experience, but Chert knows that. The Part-Captain’s experimental artillery command functioned with impressive resilience and sustained effectiveness. The successful novel artillery tube design for which the Part-Captain’s Independent persona is responsible properly compels a re-examination of Line doctrine concerning the use of artillery. The Part-Captain’s willingness and ability to support the operations of the battery by establishing a logistical support apparatus for the composite battalion was exemplary, and directly contributed to the success of recent operations.

  The existence of a Line officer who is also an Independent is questionable policy; the existence of a Line officer who is also an Independent who is an exceptionably able militant enchanter, evidences great command potential, and is personally some form of a live example of the standard-binding is difficult to view as anything other than an existential threat to the Commonweal.

  While I expect that there is a policy purpose in having Halt present to ensure that the Part-Captain does not attempt to depart from the strictures of either the Line standards or the Shape of Peace, Halt does not believe Halt will necessarily be able to win in any confrontation between them. Certainly not for the indefinite future.

  I must recommend that Part-Captain Blossom be viewed as that existential threat by the Line.

  A very cool, considering look. We’re just about around the garden. Small pile of rocks.

  Your personal view of Part-Captain Blossom, Captain?

  It was an honour to serve with the Part-Captain and I would count it an honour to serve with Blossom again.

  Have to get the stresses exactly right when you say that, but I think I do. It’s trickier than the difference between “So-and-so is an able officer” and “So-and-so is an able officer” when a sergeant says it.

  Another pale smile.

  The Part-Captain will be one of the five persons performing the working that establishes the Shape of Peace for the Second Commonweal, Captain. Provided the Independent Blossom does so, and this working succeeds, I believe you may justly cease to be concerned for the existential threat.

  Deep breath. Another deep breath. Don’t think anything beyond a little mild surprise showed in my face.

  The Eighteenth is gone to ghosts. This avoided a breakthrough north of the containment zone — I ask the pennon’s maps, and that’s still about five kilometres north of where the actual bridge was, along some low hills — but this cannot be sustained.

  No, it certainly can’t.

  The Eighteenth remains in the Line, and has volunteered to be — I can feel a very careful word choice, here — emplaced along the south-western face of the Folded Hills.

  The other big ward goes in along that long rise above the Lily Swamps? That’s an old escarpment, not quite contiguous enough to have one customary name. All thus-and-such mountain or rise, two hundred kilometres of local names and local roads.

  The general nods. Preliminary’s done. Lottery for the anchors has been held.

  Which means about a dozen people have been picked by lot out of those who volunteered to die as part of the primary ward creation ritual.

  Final pool was nine hundred and eighty one. Chert sounds really, really tired, just for that sentence. General of the Army of the Iron Bridge, it’s Chert’s job to keep that from being necessary.

  We’re pulling the main force off Meadows Pass to backstop the Lily Swamps. Everybody below the Lily Swamps gets evacuated up above them or into the Folded Hills. Once both bi
g wardings are in, the Army of the Iron Bridge pivots up on to the Folded Hills. There’s some hope the creatures are sticking to the specific river valley, and won’t follow.

  I can feel both of us thinking hope is not a plan at the same time. Both of us produce some approximation of a natural smile.

  There’s that rosebush again. No trace of my appetite.

  I’m here to tell the folk of the Creeks they’re going to lose communication with the rest of the Commonweal in a lasting way.

  I guess I don’t get to be a general until I can say something like that and manage wry.

  Chapter 36

  Chert accompanies me to the hospital.

  Everybody who got stuck by critter-spines is off in one big room; two of the four doctors in there aren’t in smocks, and look rushed.

  Sprinted in. Not their shift comes from a file closer.

  For a decidedly sorcerous general, Chert’s good at having a quiet presence. Quiet doesn’t entirely save a general; two of the doctors trap Chert in a corner, and then, after the discussion starts to get arm-wavy, slide Chert out the door and down the hall.

  I get a quieter doctor; late middle age, printed spiral patterns on the hem and yoke of their smock, and a strip of sorcerous tattoos across the forehead. Not obviously less intense.

  I can confirm that we didn’t have anybody with more than two spines in them live; I can have someone trot over with the standard, so various of the spine-stuck dead can half-condense and talk to the doctor or the various hospital staff taking notes.

  In between, I do my best expression of interest. It seems to work. Getting back to the Commonweal and a hospital with interested doctors much better at hiding their bafflement has helped more, but I seem to be getting credit for the return.

  The standard goes back to the company, and I start going through the other floor, with the regular injuries. They are generally worse off than the spine-stuck, but there’s very little doubt about what to do for them. Only one of the doctors here has seen demon-bites before, but they’ve all studied that category of injury and the reference books are comprehensive. All the broken bones have been checked and a couple re-set, the staff are making up a surgery schedule and another list of who needs what grown back. That’s usually an Independent job, from a sparse list of Independents. It’s not doing morale any harm, as a prospect. Neither is getting to an established hospital’s ability to banish pain. I can see the injured relax as it really stops hurting.

  The general sends me on; the two doctors want to talk hospital readiness against serious casualties, which is theoretically present and fraught with practical concern. Chert’s going to be awhile, and I really ought to get to the company, which is hosting all the gerefan and some dozens of concerned citizens.

  The Creeks lose about three hundred in an average year to causes other than age and illness, a lot of it weeding and most of the rest plain accident; trees falling wrong, rocks moving, kicked by a cow, and the like. To lose three hundred dead in three days isn’t able to become a real thing, emotionally, not as one real thing with the news. It might work for their heads but not their hearts.

  It doesn’t help that I don’t think anyone born in the Creeks and stayed in the Creeks has seen a demon in five hundred years. I doubt any of them would claim demons don’t exist, but having to consider that they might exist here isn’t helping anybody believe the casualties. Nor is the idea that despair can kill you a natural one; that was a new thing to the Line and Halt both. We can excuse peaceful Creeks their doubts.

  So there’s a duty to listen and explain, to tell them why there are so many dead.

  By the time I get to the warehouse, Blossom catches me at the door.

  If you are come with the authority of Parliament or someone in the Line asks it to, a standard can show you what it remembers. We don’t use it, much simpler to just slide knowledge straight into your head, but there’s enough illusion-spinning in there to make pictures on the air. You don’t get the smells or the voices or the remembered terror, that way, but anybody can see it.

  Twitch, spectral but easily visible and naturally audible, is running through what happened for the gerefan. Half the dead are linked up and pushing, so the view is big, one whole wall of the warehouse, and clear. If it weren’t for the silence and the viewpoint shifts, it’d be standing there watching it happen the first time.

  The gerefan, and the various townsfolk, and even a few of the drovers, are looking bad. Twitch has got as far as the fortress fight, and the standard’s memory is creating a belief in demons.

  It was dark, and messy, and disturbing in there, especially if you don’t know that the standard was generally in front-right of Halt, and Eustace, and the howdah, and that this is why partial demons keep hurtling past, and sometimes through, the standard’s view. Twitch accedes to some imploring gestures, and cuts the view.

  A jump forward, and they get the great yellow-green cloud of despair, behind us, and then a jump back in time to what the standard got from Blossom, just like Blossom was a company banner, and the artillery tubes, which are at least supposed to work like that.

  They get the view, off to one side, tube one stayed trained on the advancing army, of half a thousand Reems infantry, the block of demons, the sorcerers, the awareness that it should have been more than enough.

  They don’t get Dove saying “You kill them one at a time”, or the laugh. The body language — armour or not — the mood comes through, but not the laugh.

  For the best; the laugh was mad.

  The critters with the spines get winces and scowls and some angry muttering, about why anyone would think they had to add something like that to the world. Tube one’s view of what Blossom did to the demon possessing its carriage gets wide eyes and stares. “In their kingdoms of wrath” is a standard phrase, about the pre-Commonweal existence of the Twelve specifically and the terrible sorcerous denizens of the old days generally. No one thinks about it, anymore than they think about wishing people good day.

  Blossom’s kingdom would have spanned a continent.

  Somebody from Headwaters, back of the shaky looking gerefan, points, and says “What’d that do?” Which is just plain rude, as a choice of phrasing.

  You get the tone a fair bit. It’s not as though we don’t, survivors don’t, keep ourselves awake at night wondering what we’re doing alive, so it’s hard to object to the viewpoint. The guy wasn’t there, but the Line didn’t raise the kid we didn’t bring back, either. It’s close enough to even.

  Thinking all that keeps me from thinking about how Twitch is likely to respond.

  Twitch drops them into the view from just behind me, when the Reems infantry piled in south of the first wall, and they get it in clock time, not perceptual. Half of the audience are ducking and covering their faces, like they expect blood splash to hit them.

  Twitch talks calmly over the view and the wordless unhappy noises.

  “Everybody talks about the politics, that the Line is run by Standard-Captains with their lives bound to the Shape of Peace through the standards, and we’ll never get a warlord or a Line takeover of government that way.”

  Twitch’s shade stares round the room.

  “The reason they’re Standard-Captains is so they can’t run. They can’t get more than about four kilometres from their standard. So the standard falls, they fall.” It’s the ancient and inflexible view of those in the Line with warrants of authority, I’ll give it that.

  Twitch’s spectral hand points at me. The big image has a wall of corpses, and a couple of artillery guys running up with bundles of pointy sticks. “Captain did a good job of not dying.”

  The form of the backhand cuts needs work.

  Embarrassingly true, despair or no despair, but it gets Twitch to stop talking.

  “Have they seen the army of Reems, Sergeant-Major?”

  “No sir.”

  This one is easy; the first view from the ridge top observation point, and then the seconds-for-minutes
step through as the great mass of the might of Reems comes closer and closer.

  “Honoured gerefan, this is the army that was scouting into the Creeks. It had something like a thousand demons under its control.”

  Twitch, aware that “a thousand demons” is a real quantity now, throws up the shadowed field emptying of demons at Halt’s gesture of dismissal.

  There’s a modest reduction in tension as that sequence completes, and even a few smiles at the last five demons diving, frantic, through the hoop — they can’t hear what Halt said — and I use that little gap to slide the last clear view the standard had of that dejected half-company of Reems survivors up into the big image, to replace the pride of onset. Twitch holds it there.

  “This is all that survived of that army.”

  It might be too much; even decent, peaceful Creeks know what broken people look like. Lose your family to some ancient disease, lose everything you worked on for thirty years to ill-luck and wrong judgement, you get to looking enough like the Reems survivors that everyone in the room can tell what they’re seeing.

  “I would rather have had a full battalion, or a brigade. I will die wishing we had known the road was built of solid despair before we broke it, and breathed it.”

  Deep breath, and ignore the general’s silent entry into the room. Try to pitch my voice so the company knows I’m talking to them, more than the gerefan and the Headwaters townsfolk. The battery are regulars, and I can feel them listening in that this-is-us way.

  “The living don’t win. They…fail to die. You have to remember, and you have to go on, and it’s a variable burden.”

  Which is about all there is to say, if I’m not going to talk for the next three months.

  “The Line can win, and the Line did.”

  Chert’s nodding beside me, but the general stays silent.

  “The Line won because you made it win. All of you. Those who aren’t here, and those we’ve still got, and those we can’t keep.”

  Chapter 37

  The enquiry happens the first full day back. It’s a full geans-gathering, a full provincial council, by co-incidence of the available moot-muster that was called in response to the invasion warning. It carefully follows all the rules. Every clerk and court in the Commonweal has the Whole Book, the Creeks not excepted, and if the Commonweal has rules for it, they’re in the Whole Book. I explain what the battalion had done and what I was trying to achieve by doing it five times from beginning to end.