Sergeant-Major, Battalion. If it has wings, plasma or force. The Brisket value of sergeant-major.
Fire and necromancy ain’t working. Interesting choice of critter summons.
Bubble, Battalion. Look DOWN.
Puddle’s got someone running a multi-lobed plasma loop overhead, arcs across a rotating inner ward-layer. Can feel the static drag up my arms, sparks pop across the armour-joints.
The individual summons ain’t trouble. Enough arrived we were getting behind. Puddle’s got us ahead.
Whole Sea People formation’s sweeping in, they’ve figured out where we are.
Focus’ll measure time and distance, faint green lines on the image in my head.
Blink-blink-blink.
Signals, Bubble. Full surge on the bubble for tick. Time, and a timer.
Puddle taps acknowledged. There’s big simiform somethings walking up to the bubble and trying to wiggle through. Getting through the breath-sucker and they ain’t obvious magical. Puddle’s trying different layers. Liquid sticks work. Knives has the Close Front throwing quick rate.
Ten-second warning. Signals, All. Third wave inbound.
Four feet on all of these.
Necromancy works abrupt.
Eleven unicorns. Supposed to rampage through the remnant?
The winged thing waves were thousands.
Rot.
Meant to think we’re winning.
Those as know say repeated rituals ain’t easy to vary.
Double wave on the tick, to Slow, Meek, Brisket.
Signals, Battalion. Expect double wave. Send the timer.
The Sea People formation’s got us enveloped. Lots of corpses in the breath sucker. More of those simiform constructs on the bubble. Those’ve got sense. Ain’t detectable as life; count’s doubtful.
Sea People ain’t used to red shot or they’d’ve stopped more quicker.
Three waves?
Puddle, Duckling. Checked the shot code?
Duckling, Puddle. Each and every.
Formation outside the fog releases demons. Timing, Duckling.
Bubble, All. CLOSED BUBBLE. CLOSED BUBBLE. SURGE.
Puddle times it perfect.
Coal-mine dark with the fire mirror up. No external observations.
Six five-red in a hexagon.
Bubble, Battalion. Demons crossing the bubble.
Fire-mirror’s up, no getting clever with layers. Demon’s’ll come through hale.
Slow assigns targets. Witchlight across your eyes, personal: target priority, height, range. Easiest, not closest. Everybody holding an anti-demon stick sword-hand gets one, dynamic.
Thirty seconds. The weight of demons squirming through the bubble increases.
First wave demons between three- and four-fifths through.
Throw. Five hundred demons skilled at squirming.
Next six hit, wider hexagon.
Throw. Thousand.
Throw. Thousand.
Signals, Battalion. Banner colour-parties on the leakers. Speckles on the bubble through the focus, fifty-odd surviving demons. Not skilled at squirming.
Sixty seconds. No demons for forty-three.
Twelve in a ring.
Bubble, Battalion. Fire mirror will hold nine-zero seconds from the tick.
It’ll be warm out there. Still dislike’t’ve been hit with five-red.
Ten-second warning. Signals, All. Fourth wave inbound.
Many things with wings appear overhead.
Signals, Battalion. Close Front on the summons.
These’ve got wings and arms and feet. Swords. Less troubled by plasma.
Four layers of fire-mirror drop. Puddle dies, too many winged-things with swords. Two-Uniform’s Colour Party goes down entire. The bubble holds. Constructs got in with the bobble.
Dancer gets somebody important. Might have been surprise.
Organized clump going for Two-Uniform’s done.
Second pulse of winged things, early. No limbs, no ready count of wings, burning wheels of eyes.
Not much of that fourth wave left, but some. Focus gets rough, we’re losing officers.
The Piper starts playing Squinting Ariston with the push into it for serious.
Focus goes battalion.
Dancer’s shade taps a prepared schedule. blink-blink-blink.
Emulate Slow’s trick-for-demons generally.
Kill what’s indicated.
Bits of a burning-wheel-of-eyes splatter past with a whiff of Meek grinning. Battalion Colour Party’s solid.
Knives finds the fourth construct too much. Close Front holds, Clear’s kept their latch.
We’re winning. Feels worse than it is. Nothing’s much trying for troopers. Troops ain’t returning the favour. Auto-tick any file closer running more’n two files.
Timer.
Signals, Bubble. Shot in three-zero seconds; require six of layer one-seven-five outermost. Hold fifteen.
Bubble, Signals. Six layers of one-seven-five outermost.
Puddle gets the chronological displacement damper layers up. Dancer’s shot schedule activates. Conscious minds in that clump of Sea People get smeared across most of an hour and two thousand square kilometres.
I’m up, Slow’s up, Meek’s up, Brisket’s up.
Lolly’s up, Grim’s up, Weasel’s up.
Dancer, Clear, Puddle, and Pumpkin’ve kept their latch. Dancer’s shade’s still shivering from the shot schedule activating.
Ninny’s hurt. Lost Squish. Flinch’s fine, Wibble’s fine, none of the blood dripping off Flinch belongs to Flinch. Half as much on me.
The Piper finishes a last repeat of the ground of Squinting Ariston, lifts their arm off the bag. They take the chanter out of their pipes, and tuck the reed away. Surprising care for someone who’s been playing with focus-push this quarter-hour. The pipes go to a signaller, the Piper looking swaying-tired and the signaller taking the pipes to cradle carefully. The Piper’s flesh falls as ash.
The chanter don’t. That signaller hands the pipes back, polite, and the Piper’s shade takes them up, puts the chanter back, and starts playing. Sound; no air in a shade. The reed burned with their body. Pipes oughtn’t have more sound in them than a hiss.
Playing No More, surely a lament.
The dead hear as the living.
Kept most of the sergeants. Call the roll.
Lost three-ninety-one, less’n a banner. Sense and stubborn wrestle to conclude we’ve got forty down as the hurt admit it.
Slow?
Does one yet live?
Slow ain’t quoting.
Signals, Observer. Locate opposition. ‘Live’ were meant poetic.
Signals, (Movement, Distant Front). Hold in place, clear our reach.
Dancer don’t get fancy. Hundred-fifty kilometre reach and sweep with necromancy, twice around. Dynamic reach, mustn’t sweep over the Edge. Active defences’ll shrug it. Shrug and live or hide and die, pick one.
Observer, Signals. Closest opposition, and a vector. Back of the Sea People trying to force the edge. Fifty kilometres away. Working defences.
D-Day, H-Hour Plus 7.0
Year of Peace 547, Messidor, Twelfth Day (Early Summer)
Duckling
Thirty kilometres. The standards talk. Don’t want the Experimental Battery to embarrass themselves.
Twenty kilometres. Surviving elements of Sea People, falling back from the Edge. We remove their ‘surviving’.
High looks show Below the Edge burnt and burning. No view with photons. East-West, the River of Mists looks more mist and less river down its broken bed. Thunderstorms rained out and grumbling.
Hundred-thirty kilometres of track. Maybe forty there’s no hot bedrock or the fading wisps of former souls.
Three kilometres out, signals exchange, bridge of air and keep marching.
Ain’t air. Doctrine says you don’t march on lift. Now ain’t the time for rashness. Colour Party’s got the bridge. Two-Fierce’s second in the line of march,
they’ll hold for us.
Long three kilometres, rising a metre in twelve and don’t look down. Whatever ramp the Sea People were building’s scattered.
Four/Twelve’s got three banners up; the Pennon’s seven platoons. Near-all their dead are latched.
Sea People’re consistent about attacking rank. Pennon’s fort’s ruined; de-roofed and covered in dead things. Four/Twelve’s walls are up. Mostly under dead things, but up. Experimental Battery’s got two tubes functional.
Observer, Signals. It’s a locus fifteen kilometres east, right up on the Edge. Report’s got some visceral flinch in it.
Second, Observer. The Worker in Clay. No threat.
The feed keeps the image; the long staff, the definite motions, the ritual garments.
Sir?
Can’t have the Sea People summoning the shades of their dead home. The dead remember some things.
How they died, most times.
Crinoline’s given the all-clear, to get the Worker here.
They’ve come down from Parliament to look over the battlefield and kill the names of all the Sea People we left there dead or breathing.
Our living banners march off the Edge to the west bank of the West Wetcreek and halt. Wounded get to medics. Cackles trundles the barrow with Ninny themself.
Four barge-loads of pointy sticks. One barge-load of rations. Meek and Brisket get to resupplying.
Crinoline. Chert’s shade.
Somewhere uphill, voices.
Flinch puts the image in the battalion feed.
Rings of birds; crows, magpies, ravens. Each ring specific to a species. They’re all chanting in their own time across hundreds of circles.
shiny! shiny! shiny! Shiny! Shiny! SHINY!
DEAD.
Whatever the Sea People use for enchantments and bindings, anything materially magical. One by one, into some circle of chanting corvids, summoned up from the wrack behind us. Out of the deep water; from the way that one looks melted, down from the high air.
Summoned to come apart, smokes of strange burning and puddles of metal and the rings of chanting crows backlit by tall silver fire.
Hank’s dead and lost their latch.
Wasn’t paying attention. Getting scattered in the focus. Tap from Slow.
The Captain’ll be awake soon enough, Crinoline says. Three suffices consensus. No need to make me Brigadier. Best guess that’s extra-firm refusal of an appointment as General.
Chert’s shade nods, turns, floats higher instead of looking up. Standard-Captain.
Slow waits.
An effective plan, Chert says. Twenty-five hundred dead, as against a quarter-million. I cannot think to counsel you in your duty.
Slow salutes Chert’s shade, impressive graceful.
Chert’s shade returns the salute, fades to nothing in coloured sparkles.
Crinoline looks at Slow. “The Peace was in front of you this time.”
“Pincer movements parallel to an invader’s line of advance are unconventional.”
Don’t think Slow and Crinoline always get each other’s jokes. Together on this one.
“Signaller?”
“So we did them down to die.”
Ain’t the facing what matters.
Thread 8
Slow’s memoirs
It was not, by our numbers engaged, the largest battle fought since the founding of the Commonweal; that battle remains the retreat up the Dread River and the sustained engagement before the town of Wending in the opening stages of which the Eighth Brigade was destroyed.
None of the Sea People we could find to fight survived. We much and greatly doubt there were no sorcerous escapes between the first impact of the artillery bombardment and the time when the Wapentake completed the destruction of the Sea People present on the land of the Commonweal. I myself much doubt there were no swift vessels left far out to sea, to watch and report, which escaped our observation. As such, the Second Landing of the Sea People can be considered no more than a successful holding action.
It is surprisingly difficult to believe it successful, even as a holding action. An empire able to send a quarter-million troops anywhere, provisioned and supported, is not likely to make the mistake of attempting conquest again. They shall next endeavour our destruction.
Not, I expect, soon; I am reminded that anything summoned must be summoned forth by name for there to be any prospect of control. Destroyed summons take their names with them, and the processes of replacing the long lists of names will take the Sea People longer than it will take their population to recover from the loss of this expedition.
The Second Commonweal has, perhaps, a little time; we will have to use it well.
Geld-gesith regulation change order notice, Regulation 4 (Investment)
See the full text as published, Year of the Peace Established Five Hundred and Forty-Seven, Month of Vendémiaire, Thirteenth Day.
Highlights:
In Regulation 4, section 1, permissible scope and amounts of investment, section 1. A, geographic scope, for ‘township’ used in geographical extent, replace with ‘province’.
For ‘not more than eight entities’, read or replace ‘any entity located in the same province’.
Added 4. 2. C, ‘permissible categories of investment organization: provincial fund’; these are accessible to any financial entity in a province.
Extant 4. 8, ‘Cross-province investment prohibition’, delete. Replaced. Replacement provides ‘Cross-province investment is permitted up to fifteen percent of the total value of a provincial-scope fund, provided no more than five percent of the total value of the fund (one-third of its permissible extra-provincial investment) is placed in any one province not the province in which the fund is located.’
Added 4. 5. B. 16, ‘Public activities undertaken by collectives’. Various economically desirable activities exceed the plausible liability of an individual collective, the collective’s investing economic entities, or any plausible insurance mechanism.
Applications for collectives must be evaluated for permissibility on this basis. Those applications not permissible as collectives will be evaluated for utility by an appropriate larhaus. Be aware that the Peace-gesith has agreed that this is not an area of activity where asking for forgiveness can be considered.
Duckling
Two failed crop years: one pointless and one poor. Stores sufficient and crops decent since. The wild kine Below-the-Edge got fat, settling several bets.
The Captain woke hale. Their first dispatch said “Well Done,” and nothing else. They made Lolly the First’s signaller so Lolly and I got to pretend to be banner-captains for three and four banners each for awhile.
Crinoline sent Parliament notice of intent to promote; a formality of courtesy, officially impossible to be anything operant to Parliament. Parliament didn’t quite get to shouting before someone resurrected an ancient proverb concerning the equivalence of execution offences. Captain Eugenia got the Fifth. Joyeuse got Ochre. Captain Blossom kept Scarlet.
Five years before we saw Sea People scouts. They got into the Waste and ran into four files of Whistlers. All the Whistlers had moved to the Eastern Waste to live somewhere dry, then formed a territorial unit. I like Whistlers more when it ain’t me insisting they pick efficiency over enjoyment.
Somebody got Slow to put proper furniture in the Standard of the Second. Fire says it weren’t them.
General Hammer (attributed)
I desire that the enemies of the Commonweal should cease to oppose our polity, our comity, and our unity; that none should seek hereafter to make all joy and goodness arise from merciless obedience; that none should possess the might or strength to make rule of their preference.
I would it be that these things shall come to be by no harsher means, by no less mighty means, than the apprehension of facts and the disdain of fearfulness that is the best and greatest means by which anything might come to be in the world.
And yet these things shall come
to pass.
A Mist of Grit and Splinters Page 29
