“Good,” she said. “The next problem is that we need to train the gun crews to fire at very specific times. It cannot be off by more than a fraction of a second.”
“As for that . . .” The colonel paused and glanced at Shanter.
She waved a hand. “Don’t worry about my helpie, he can’t understand a thing. Pollution like you wouldn’t believe.”
“Then I will say in his presence—unadvisedly, I think—that I received a message myself from Falling Mountain, along with several technicians from the Imperial Residence. Our guns have been slaved to a central controller. Timing will not be an issue, and the gun crews need only to manage the clearing and reloading.”
Caulie wasn’t sure she’d heard that correctly. “Are you saying that our artillery guns have processing power?”
Colonel Sinha merely gazed at her, and it fell to Major Ramsawra to answer with a shrug. “To answer your very direct question, ma’am, it turns out they do. All of the guns have processors. It surprised us too. The technicians told us that the interface is inefficient and the nano-scale processors are weak, nearly rusted away in places where the metal surfaces are pitted. They assure me, however, that the guns will be able to coordinate their fire.”
The colonel resumed: “I must stress that this is a one-time event. If we resolve the crisis, this detail about the artillery must remain classified. We have neither the resources nor the expertise to make this commonplace.”
“Lips sealed,” Shanter promised.
Both of the Haphan officers turned toward him, and Major Ramsawra opened his mouth to speak. Caulie broke in quickly. “Since we have computer control, it will save a lot of time.”
She dug around in her satchel and pulled out the clipboard she had taken from Colonel Bessawra. “Can we slave the firing computer to this thing?”
Major Ramsawra lifted the clipboard from her hand and tapped it against the telegraph machine. “Done.”
“Thank you, major. Thank you, colonel.” Caulie tipped her head and the officers bowed again in return. “Now, I will find my haunted bunker and try to decide what to do.”
They let her take two steps before the major said, “Ah, ma’am? An officer might wonder when we’ll begin.”
“That is up to the other guy,” Caulie said over her shoulder. “We will begin when he begins, and I hope he’s busy for a while.”
Chapter 35
Caulie’s bunker was occupied by a Tachba artilleryman with crushed legs. He waved cheerfully from the corner his squad mates had tossed him in. One of the massive guns had rolled suddenly and crushed him against the rock, he said, and now he was waiting. Waiting for something. Whatever came next.
“Ye poor unlucky scrag,” Shanter said, briefly moved. “If your legs heal like that, tied in a knot, you’ll be shot first thing.”
But the scrag was with the Pollution, already past the pain and into the wonder. He admired Caulie through a sheen of sweat. “Unlucky-meh? Which I have met a pretty girl in a bunker! La, what part of that is unlucky?”
“The leg part,” Shanter said.
“Lift him up here.” Caulie indicated the bench where Shanter had recuperated from his broken neck. Together, the men of her squad laid the artilleryman on the hard wood. There was no tender way to do it, and the man yelped, then laughed, then cursed, the Pollution wreaking havoc on his mind.
Grampharic and Prodon each took one leg and Shanter held him by the shoulders. The unkinking of the broken bones was grisly, and in the dim bunker Caulie discovered they had a knee turned in the wrong direction. “Prodon, the toes should point the same direction.”
“Whoops!” He grinned. “Never had to remember that before.”
“Wait, wait! I know what you plan to do next!” the artilleryman cried. He gasped for breath and then indicated his coat, still wadded up in the corner. “Inside breast pocket. I have a trench knife. Can you please fetch it for me, so I can stab all of you?”
When the men vacillated, Caulie told them, “He can have his knife later. For now, pull his legs straight.”
They pulled until everything seemed to settle into place. The legs, however, were now disproportionately long.
“Was you a tall man?” Prodon asked, but the artilleryman could not hear over his gasping.
“Let go of the legs,” Shanter suggested. “Maybe they’ll snap back to size.”
But the man’s legs merely curled up again, almost like ribbons. The man sobbed aloud, cursed them, and begged for his knife.
“Shut up, ye scrag,” Grampharic snapped. “You’re seeing an important doctor at work.”
Caulie had them men straighten the legs again, this time to a more proper length. She wound a bandage around the legs and the seat of the bench, binding the artilleryman to the wood. When the Tachba released his legs, they kept their shape.
“We need some rope to make sure he doesn’t move,” Caulie said.
“Shanter,” Grampharic said, “did you see where the Happies stored it when they hanged you? Or did you use it all up?”
They left to scavenge, arguing back and forth, and Caulie felt the artilleryman’s cheeks. Hot, dripping with sweat. He was beyond speech, and lay shuddering and twitching—pain enough even to overwhelm the Pollution. It had nearly overwhelmed Caulie, and she’d only watched—listened to—the straightening of the legs.
Could she make a healing song? She could turn off his nerves—he would have one of those large nerve clusters near his tailbone. But no, deadening the nerves would slow the healing. And what if she wasn’t around to turn them back on if he recovered? She needed her song to turn something off but then turn it on again later. Something that worked like a timer.
In fact, she realized, she needed something like that for the wizard too.
She sat behind the artilleryman’s head so he wouldn’t see her nominally proscribed tablet and dug through technical manuals. The logic rings used in a control deck for water purification would work; they opened and closed valves between storage tanks, and worked continuously on a schedule. In fact, the logic for water management seemed to have originated from vascular physiology in the first place.
Caulie tapped out a song on the artilleryman’s forehead. This part still felt strange—who was she to tell another person how to think? Still, it grew easier each time, probably because each time was a situation full of “nobody else can do this” and “it will be worse if you do nothing.” When she finished her song, the artilleryman had relaxed so far that he had nearly melted into the bench.
“La, me!” he sighed. “You have a healing touch. What is your name, Haphan?”
“Caulie.”
“Just Caulie? Move over here, little miss, so I can watch while you work.”
She changed positions, sitting on the floor next to the coal fire and hiding the tablet behind her knees.
True to his word, he watched her steadily. Not long ago, she would have shied from the quiet, earnest gaze. Now she didn’t have the time or energy to care about it. After some fruitless starts and stops, she crossed her arms over the tablet and leaned forward.
“Soldier, what’s your name?”
“Nathatic Tejram, pretty girl.”
“A proper Ed-homse name,” she said, because everybody said that. “Tell me, what do the other boots call you?”
“Just Thattie. Call me Thattie and make us friends.”
She studied him. “Can I ask you a question, Thattie? Never mind—I’ll just ask it. Why are you people so familiar with me, but so formal with other Haphans? Is it because I’m female? Or is it because I’m tall for a Haphan and I seem like one of you?”
“‘You people’? I suppose you mean the Polluted.” His tone turned grave: “Has one of us been rude to you, Caulie?”
“Not that I could tell. If someone is rude to me, I’ll come to you for help.” She enjoyed how that made him smile a little proudly. “Anyhow, I don’t mean rude, but familiar. As if every Tacchie on the eternal front is a special friend, an
d I can walk up and chat with them. At first, I thought everybody was teasing me, but it just never stops.”
Thattie pondered, turning his eyes to the fire. “Good question, good question. There’s a thing my sister would say, when she-teaching her clutch of children. ‘Do you believe a woman shall lead a man?’ And the answer: ‘From the earliest days.’”
“But female Haphan officers don’t get special attention.”
“I assure you they reap lots of attention.” He shot her a saucy glance. “But in their case, it’s the distance. You Happies try to add distance between people, we Tacchies try to close it. Chase you around the room, neh? When I asked your name, miss, you gave me ‘Caulie.’ That’s a short, familiar name, not a full name you have to think long and hard to speak aloud. Frames things differently when you can throw out a girl’s familiar name without stumbling—it draws her closer in your heart, it closes the distance.”
She turned that over in her mind. Was that why the Tachba had such difficult names, but were such inveterate nicknamers? “I always have trouble remembering names.”
“Which that’s a known foible for many people.” He gave the slightest shrug. “Using your mind to take away people’s names? It’s a way to create more distance from them, perhaps you-making more peace and quiet. Do you often get distracted?”
“Yes. Like now. I know I should be worried about the South, but I’m talking to you instead. No, don’t fret. I want to talk.”
“I’ll confide that we Tachba can get distracted sometimes too . . .”
She grinned. “I was wondering if that was true, but didn’t want to say anything.”
“La, yes, distraction upon us! We-mixing what is urgent with what is important.”
“I know that one!” She cleared her throat and recited. “Some things are important but not urgent, some things are urgent but not important . . .”
“Precisely, little miss. Was you a Polluted wretch, you could use one of our little mental tricks to stay on task. What you do is this: hold a thought in your mind, the one you want to focus on, and then picture someone stabbing a knife through your eye and pinning that thought in place. ‘Let’s stab that eye first,’ we say.”
Caulie blanched. She wouldn’t soon forget that mental trick.
“But you’re a Haphan,” Thattie continued, “so maybe you should just make a note on some paper instead.”
He laughed at his joke, then groaned, then laughed again. These people! Caulie laughed with him.
“Another thing I just thought of, Caulie, with your short familiar name. Our manleaders from history, they are always ‘Queen This,’ ‘Queen That.’ Easy names, like Queen Mab. I know how Haphans hate to hear about the queens, but maybe you have a little bit of a queen in you and can make friends as easy as splashing water on them.”
“I’m no queen!”
“But think of it. You saw me, a servitor with bad legs, and you fixed me when no one else would. You ignored my wishes and my pain, but I’m better for it. I’ll be a servitor again in no time, killing people on the empire’s say-so. There’s a bit of Queen Culleyho in your style, you ask me.”
Caulie frowned. “Didn’t Queen Culleyho say something about a sharp knife making a garden grow?”
“That’s what I mean exactly! Sharp knives and pain—they don’t have to be bad news.” He glanced down at his legs. “Will I walk again, do you think?”
“Thattie, I don’t know.”
He seemed worried, then sad, and finally indifferent. “No matter. I hear your men returning—here they are! Why did they bring a hundredweight of rope? Separately, can I have my knife now?”
With Shanter, Grampharic, and Prodon back at the bunker, Caulie realized how much time she had spent on Thattie. She tried to focus on her tablet, but her attention kept being drawn by the astonishing progression of the men’s discussion as they bound Thattie to the bench. In the end, the artilleryman looked like a giant insect pupa, one that wriggled and joined conversations.
She asked the men for silence, but the confusing hand signs, mouthed words, and increasingly red-faced gesticulations were even more mesmerizing. She shook herself free and pulled her Fearan-stabbing coat over her head, making her own bubble of solitude.
When she awoke, the sky was full of thunder.
Chapter 36
“How long?” Caulie said as she climbed out of the bunker.
“Just started. Was-fetching you.” Prodon studied the dark sky and pointed. “The first incoming.”
Explosions lit the cliff faces surrounding the mountain terrace. Once, Caulie would have flinched away. Now she studied the impact pattern gravely. There was no song, not yet.
Major Ramsawra trotted up, a clipboard in one hand and, oddly, a Haphan dueling sword in the other. The officer was followed not by a cluster of Tachba helpies but by a squad of businesslike Haphans carrying repeater rifles.
Prodon bristled when he saw the armed Haphans. He barked a string of trench talk and the rest of Grampharic’s squad materialized around them.
Her men had been keeping watch! They had remained concealed in the shadows, in the cold, while she had dozed in the hotbox of the bunker.
Major Ramsawra wasn’t a slow man. He forced a smile onto his face. “These commandos are for me, boots. We need every Tacchie on a gun for the real work, and I couldn’t surround myself with helpies just because they make me feel safe. Not in good conscience.”
Though they knew they were being flattered, Caulie’s squad appeared to relax slightly.
“I’ve never seen commandos,” Shanter said. He had moved to shield Caulie from the Haphans, but now he stepped back to her side. “You are the most elite Haphan soldiers, la? You look like you spend time in the trenches with real boots.”
The leader of the Haphan squad swung his rifle onto his back and his fellows followed his lead. He rattled off a string of fluent trench talk.
“He says he will kill me with his weak hand,” Shanter translated for Caulie. “Which it is a cordial start. Only, now I have to kill him with something even worse.”
But there wasn’t killing, only more talking. Major Ramsawra rolled his eyes as the conversation and laughter between the two units spread. He guided Caulie a few steps to the side. “All this in the middle of a barrage, too.”
“Major, this barrage is turning into one of those attacks. The dangerous kind. Word-concepts are emerging from how the shells are exploding. The strange thing is that the thunder itself is also starting to speak.”
Major Ramsawra’s brow nearly furrowed. “I dearly hope I don’t need to understand.”
“The last time, it was one and then the other. First the sound of the barrage, then the rhythm of the landing shells. This time, it seems like both are happening at the same time. I wonder how he’s doing it.”
“He?”
“The enemy.”
They turned south. The far mountainscape flickered with the light of the enemy guns, and the brightness revealed a rising haze of smoke. It was so far away. She found it difficult to fully believe that the distant cataclysm had a manifest intent: to harm the people on her mountain.
Major Ramsawra indicated the sky above the valley. Though dark, it was the early-morning kind of dark and vague features could be discerned. Faint parabolas etched the heavens: shells moving through the air. Caulie found the moving tip of one of the arcs and fancied she could even see the shell itself.
“Those lines are from condensation along the flight path,” Major Ramsawra said. “When there’s turbulence in the sky, it will move the shells around and there’s no predicting how long the flight will last. It’s the same with the sound of the barrage, though to a lesser degree. Cold air carries sound better than warm air, and if you stir the air up, the sound gets garbled.”
“Do you think these attacks only happen on . . .”
“Yes, ma’am. Now that I think of it, the special attacks are only received on calm, clear nights.”
“Like tonight.�
��
The major nodded. “We’re in for a shellacking.”
* * *
Major Ramsawra and his Haphans continued on to the forward command post, and Caulie’s squad herded her to the bunker.
The shelling increased into the heaviest barrage she had yet experienced. She found words and ideas resonating through the thunder but they were muddy and unrecognizable. If she was unable to resolve the message, she would not know the nature of the wizard’s attack.
Most of her squad was outside of the bunker, nominally guarding it but probably watching the shells explode against the cliff face. Shanter reclined against a far wall like a proper docile helpie, and Thattie was still secured to his bench by the hundredweight of rope. Thankfully, they weren’t filling the air with chatter.
With the crashing thunderclaps of the barrage, her bunker was not quiet, but it was too still. Shanter and Hattie were almost too still for her to think. How predictable that the Tacchies would do the opposite of what she’d feared, and yet continue to distract her. At the very least, they could cough with her in the swirling dust.
Finally, Caulie sat up. The question had grown too big for her to overlook.
Why weren’t Shanter and Thattie talking?
Both men were nearly motionless, with only minor fidgets going. Their faces were thoughtful, and not the Tachba kind of thoughtful that indicated they had conceived of the next odd thing to say.
“Shanter,” she said aloud. She barely heard herself, but he had his Tachba hearing.
His eyes turned to her.
Hair rose on her neck. She had grown so used to the affection in his glances that she knew immediately when it was gone.
“I’m Caulie,” she told him, a quaver in her voice. “I am your dear friend.”
“Of course.” Shanter frowned slightly. “Of course you are, Caulie. What’s happening to me?”
The cadence was even more unlike him. His words were soft, as if he was very young. She only heard him at all because the barrage had shifted away from their bunker—and still no song emerged from its rage, at least none that she could hear.
What the Thunder Said Page 29