Beyond the line of artillery were yet more flashes of black, sky-blue and grey, where other regiments marched through the Deepwoods in silence, whatever thoughts they were thinking locked up inside their heads. And there were probably more Hivers still, it occurred to Nate, marching beyond those he could see, and all in the same direction.
It was little wonder, he thought, that the streets of Hive were so empty.
‘Company halt!’
A sigh of relief went up as the company sergeant’s command echoed back along the line. Up ahead, he was standing in a small clearing, a phraxlamp illuminating him now as the last glimmers of the long day were snuffed out.
‘Recruits to sleep up there!’ He pointed behind him to a majestic lufwood, thick with dark foliage and broad sweeping branches. ‘Corporals to post guard beneath! Now, get the brazier up and working, and let’s roast that hog!’
Nate and Eudoxia pulled the backpacks from their shoulders and sat them down on the forest floor. They looked at one another, then at the surrounding trees, a questioning expression in both their eyes.
Should they try their luck, and sneak quietly away into the shadowy forest?
As if in answer, the company sergeant loomed up in front of them.
‘First I find you loitering outside the Gyle Palace,’ he snarled. ‘Now I catch you eyeing the forest.’ His voice became low and menacing. ‘I’ve seen fresh-faced recruits like you two before, looking out for any opportunity to scarper back to your mothers. Well, be warned …’ The sergeant stuck his willow cane under Eudoxia’s chin and raised her head. A strand of golden hair slipped free from under her copperwood helmet. ‘I’ll be watching you!’
He turned and strode back to where the brazier was being stoked and lit. Eudoxia kicked her backpack with frustration. Despite the buoyant sumpwood frame, the tilderleather and canvas pack was solid and felt heavy to the touch. Nate knelt down, undid the straps on his own pack and opened it.
It was stuffed with smooth sharp-tipped leadwood bullets, each one threaded to a cord, forming clusters of twenty. These were placed in pouches and attached to the hooks on their waistcoats, ready to be pulled off the cluster and loaded into the shiny new phraxmuskets each recruit carried. Then the musket could be aimed, the trigger at its phraxchamber squeezed, and the shard of phraxcrystal inside would create an explosion that would send the bevelled lump of leadwood flying from the barrel with deadly accuracy. Once, twice, a thousand thousand times the shard of phraxcrystal in the musket would do its work before needing to be replenished. And the backpack contained an ample supply of bullets to keep it busy.
‘You know what this means?’ Nate said.
Eudoxia nodded. ‘War,’ she said.
‘War,’ Nate repeated. ‘We’re heading off to war.’ He swallowed heavily. ‘Against …’
‘The free timbersmiths of the Midwood Decks and their friends, the Great Gladers,’ said a small treegoblin, placing his backpack next to Eudoxia’s. He looked up. ‘Twill’s the name,’ he said chirpily. ‘I was a barrel maker by trade before the call up.’
He stuck out his small long-fingered hand and shook Nate and Eudoxia’s hands.
‘I’m Nate, and this is … Dox … We’re apprentices,’ said Nate carefully.
‘From the Sumpwood Bridge Academy,’ Eudoxia added.
‘Ah, learned types!’ chuckled the treegoblin. ‘Well, welcome to the Second Low Town – the sorriest bunch of misfits in the Hive Militia. Not counting the First Low Town, that is!’ He laughed at his own joke, before picking up his musket and backpack again. ‘Come on,’ he said, ‘grab a leaf. Let’s get in line for supper before it’s all gone!’
He gave them each a broad barksorrel leaf he’d picked from a nearby bush, and Nate and Eudoxia followed Twill to the brazier, where a woodhog was being roasted and turned on a spit.
‘ ’Ere we go,’ said a red-faced mobgnome when they finally got to the head of the line, carving off a large hunk of dripping meat and dropping it onto Eudoxia’s outstretched leaf.
He wiped his hands on his greasy waistcoat, turned back to the smoking carcass and plunged the serrated blade through the hard glistening skin of the woodhog. Less than half the company had been fed, yet most of the hog was already gone.
‘Thanks,’ said Nate as a portion was dropped on his own leaf, and he and Eudoxia found themselves being jostled out of the way as the recruits behind them elbowed their own way forward.
‘Now, let’s find a comfortable branch before they’re all taken,’ said Twill, folding his supper up in the leaf and carefully placing it in the pocket of his waistcoat.
Following suit, their stomachs rumbling, Nate and Eudoxia stumbled after the little treegoblin and began to climb the majestic lufwood tree – under the ever-watchful eye of the company sergeant below.
• CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX •
‘Seven mouths to feed, you say,’ said the grey trog, nodding his head thoughtfully. He was lying on his side, strumming his spatula-like fingers on the helmet which lay next to him. ‘That’s a large family, Twill, so it is.’
The treegoblin nodded. ‘And they’re hungry little nestlings, Sky love ’em,’ he said, ‘and with only my wife to care for them now …’
Around them, in the branches of the lufwood tree, many similar conversations were taking place between the members of the Second Company of the Second Low Town Regiment. Nate, Eudoxia and Twill the treegoblin had joined a grey trog and a red-haired fourthling on a broad branch halfway up the tree’s massive trunk.
‘What … about … you, Gorlan?’ asked Nate as he licked the tips of his fingers clean of the woodpork juices.
‘Me?’ said the grey trog, his large brown eyes taking on a faraway look. ‘Oh, there’s just me and Merla.’
‘No young’uns, then?’ said the treegoblin.
Beside him, the fourthling reached out for the half-empty bottle of woodgrog that stood beside him on the branch. He pulled out the cork, raised the bottle to his lips and slurped the pungent liquid noisily.
‘No young’uns, Twill,’ said Gorlan in answer. ‘Merla and I haven’t yet been blessed. Mind you,’ he added, ‘I sometimes think that that’s a blessing in itself.’ He shook his head and lowered his voice to a hushed growl. ‘Hive’s no place to be raising young’uns these days.’
‘And what do you do?’ Nate asked him.
‘Do?’ said the grey trog, looking up at him, his brown eyes narrowing. ‘I march. But if you want to know what I did, well, I used to work in the caves. I was a cellar keeper.’
‘Best sapwine cellar in all the Edge,’ added Twill.
The grey trog nodded, his eyes twinkling. ‘I like to think so,’ he said. ‘I had barrels in my cellar that were filled in the Second Age of Flight,’ he told them, ‘when Hive was a tiny hamlet, sitting on the edge of the great gorge.’ He pulled himself up and sat looking round the group, his hands resting on the branch below him. ‘My father was a cellar keeper, and his father before him. At one time, all three of us were working the caves together, side by side. We’d be up before daybreak when the sapgrape harvest came in from the vineyards, and be pressing and barrelling till well after sunset.’ The grey trog’s small eyes glistened. ‘Like Twill says, best sapwine cellar in the Edge, it was,’ he concluded proudly. ‘Until they came and took it all away from me.’
‘Who?’ asked Eudoxia, peering out from beneath her helmet.
‘Why, young Dox,’ Gorlan smiled sadly, ‘the Bloody Blades, of course. “On the orders of the Clan Council”, they said, my barrels were needed for trade. They seized the lot of them.’
The red-haired fourthling gave a bitter laugh. His name was Oakshank and, judging from his name and his features, he had woodtroll and slaughterer forebears.
‘On the orders of Kulltuft Warhammer, more like!’ he scoffed. ‘Seizing your sapwine to trade for phraxcrystals most likely, and now seizing us to fight for him.’
He took a deep breath and sank his head into his hands. The others watched him uneasily.
‘The thing is, I blame myself,’ Oakshank said, taking another swig of woodgrog. His voice was slurred, but his words were coherent enough. ‘I was one of them who trusted Kulltuft Warhammer. I was there at his rallies, cheering him on and picking fights with any who disagreed with him. I believed what he had to say about dealing with Great Glade from a position of strength. I believed his lies about how they wanted to bring us Hivers to our knees …’
‘Shhh,’ Gorlan reminded him as, in his rising anger, Oakshank’s voice was beginning to grow louder.
‘I was one of the thousands who helped sweep him to power, replacing the old council with him and his bunch of clan chief cronies. And by the time we realized we’d all been misled, it was too late. Kulltuft Warhammer was safely ensconced in the Clan Hall, protected by those Bloody Blades of his.’
He looked round at the others on the branch, his eyes glittery and unfocused. His face hardened.
‘I used to be a shipbuilder,’ he said, ‘but when the Bloody Blades confiscated all the phraxcrystals, there was no more shipbuilding in Hive and I lost my job. I never found another. My wife, heavy with child, got sick with the sweating fever. I nursed her best I could, but I couldn’t afford the expensive medicines from the City of Night she needed – and she died in childbirth.’ He hung his head. ‘The young’un didn’t survive neither.’
Nate heard Eudoxia take a short intake of breath. The fourthling shook his head.
‘And it was my fault. All my fault.’ He snorted. ‘When the call up came, I welcomed it with open arms. I was being punished, and I deserved to be …’ He climbed slowly to his feet. ‘Not that I want to go to war,’ he said. ‘But then again, what else is there left for us Hivers to do? And at least we get fed.’ He looked down, and noticed the bottle of woodgrog and seized it in his shaking hand, ‘… and watered.’
He staggered off along the branch, almost falling, until he got to the trunk, where he slumped down and pulled his blanket over his head. Twill the treegoblin and Gorlan the grey trog watched him sadly.
‘He’ll be lucky to survive this march,’ said the grey trog, shaking his head before climbing to his feet. ‘I think I’ll turn in as well.’
‘And me,’ said Twill.
The two of them joined the fourthling on the widest part of the branch, their backs against the massive tree trunk and their blankets pulled around their shoulders. Alone, Eudoxia turned to Nate.
‘What are we going to do, Nate?’ she asked.
Nate looked down at the base of the huge tree, where the figure of the sergeant prowled in the flickering brazier light, woodwillow cane in hand.
‘There’s only one thing we can do, Eudoxia,’ he said, looking up and seeing in her eyes the despair of finding and then losing her father again. ‘And that is, to wait …’
• CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN •
And so they’d waited. For four long weeks, as the Second Low Town Regiment marched through the Deepwoods, Eudoxia and Nate had waited for the chance to escape. But under the vigilant eye of the company sergeant that chance never came.
Every day was the same. At dawn, they would be woken by the company sergeant, eat a meagre breakfast of boiled barley porridge and, if they were lucky, some Deepwoods fruits or roots that had been identified as edible, and washed down with tea made from whatever herbs or aromatic plants grew close by. Then they would march, for ten hours – or eleven or twelve if the company sergeant felt they hadn’t made enough progress – until, as evening fell, he finally called a halt.
There, in whatever clearing or thicket the company sergeant had selected, they would eat whatever had been caught that day under the company sergeant’s supervision, before retiring to the branch of whatever tree the hundred-strong regiment had been ordered to sleep in by the company sergeant. There, they would sleep fitfully, wrapped up in their musty blankets, with the company sergeant and his corporals keeping guard below.
The company sergeant! The company sergeant! The company sergeant!
By the fourth week of the march, Nate had begun to see the flathead sergeant with that woodwillow cane of his watching him in his dreams. There seemed no escape.
‘Here, I got you this,’ said Nate, handing Eudoxia an extra oatcake he’d managed to snatch from the skillet over the brazier and return with, unbroken, through the scrum of ravenous recruits.
‘Thank you, Nate.’ She nibbled at the corner of the tasteless biscuit. ‘Just what I needed,’ she said, her eyes dull and lifeless, tinged with dark rings beneath.
‘Company, prepare to move out!’
The company sergeant’s deep commanding voice echoed through the air, and the recruits fell into line. Nate helped Eudoxia on with her sumpwood backpack and then she returned the favour. Without a word being spoken, they found the places in the great column that they always took, with the same neighbours left and right, back and front.
‘Company, forward march!’
Nate turned to Eudoxia as the pair of them started forward.
‘Hair,’ he whispered, nodding towards a long golden tress that must have slipped free from the topknot inside her copperwood helmet and now dangled down limply over the wet shoulder of her topcoat.
Eudoxia frowned and pushed the telltale hair back into place as discreetly as she could.
‘That’s better,’ said Nate, glancing round a moment later.
‘Silence in the ranks!’ the company sergeant barked for the thousandth time.
Eudoxia looked around her, checking to see whether anyone had noticed the hair. No one had. The day’s march had begun and, with their heads down and bodies stooped forward, the goblins, fourthlings, trogs and trolls of the second company, Second Low Town Regiment, were marching with weary intent, oblivious to anything or anybody around them. Eudoxia’s gaze fell on a gap in the line, three ranks back. She frowned and turned to Nate.
‘Oakshank’s missing,’ she hissed.
‘Yes, I know,’ said Nate.
‘Did he … ?’ Eudoxia said, her face suddenly bright with hope.
Nate shook his head. ‘He fell out of the tree in the night,’ he told her, his voice hushed and low. ‘Broke his neck when he landed … Twill told me when I was getting the oatcakes.’
Eudoxia’s eyes filled with tears.
‘Silence in the ranks!’ the company sergeant barked angrily.
On this march, the days could prove just as hazardous as the nights, Nate knew. The company had lost several recruits to forest ague – a shivering fever that caused collapse and death in less than two days. Then, just the previous week, a hulking cloddertrog, his waterflask empty and throat parched, had reached out, plucked a juicy-looking fruit from an overhanging branch and sunk his teeth into its sweet flesh – only to drop dead on the spot. Perhaps strangest of all was the case of the flathead sergeant of the third company, which marched alongside them. He had disturbed a hover worm. Hissing furiously, the glistening snake-like creature had lunged at him, its tentacles sinking into his neck and pumping him full of venom. The hapless sergeant had blown up like a balloon and, mumbling incoherently, floated up into the air, through the forest canopy and away across the sky – though it has to be said, few tears were shed as the recruits saw him go.
Nate calculated that of the hundred recruits who had left Hive, only ninety-three remained in the second company. He glanced round at Eudoxia, her expression still crestfallen by the news that Oakshank the red-haired fourthling had died rather than escaped. He reached out and touched her arm. She turned and smiled bravely. Nate smiled back, but he understood only too well her feelings of hopelessness and frustration. If they didn’t find a chance to escape soon, it might be too late. A great battle was looming, and the whole regiment knew it.
As they’d marched on through the morning, the drizzle had turned to rain, which grew heavier and heavier as the time passed until now, a little shy of six hours after they’d set off from their last camp, it was torrential. It had soaked into their topcoats, making the thick
material heavy and stiff, and through to the jackets and waistcoats beneath. More rain sluiced down their necks, driven into the tiny gap between the tops of their raised collars and the backs of their copperwood helmets by gusting winds.
This torrential rain, warm and clammy, could mean only one thing, Nate realized. They must be approaching the forests around the Midwood Decks.
Underfoot, the ground had grown wetter and wetter, first turning the covering mattress of leaves and needles spongy, then – as the trees had begun to thin out – being churned up by the passing recruits so that, in their position far down the line, Eudoxia and Nate found themselves ploughing through thick sucking mud that made each step an effort.
Nate looked at the bare feet of the marching goblins and trolls all around him. ‘I envy them,’ he said.
Eudoxia shrugged. ‘They’ve got soles as hard as strips of leadwood,’ she said. ‘We wouldn’t last ten minutes barefoot.’
‘All the same …’ said Nate, hopping forward on his left leg, his right leg raised up behind him.
Eudoxia looked down to see muddy water gushing out of the top of his boot. She smiled – then, her attention drawn by a movement to her right, her brow furrowed and she pointed.
‘Look,’ she whispered.
Nate turned and saw a column of marching soldiers, some fifty strides to their right. Unlike the ramshackle recruits of the Second Low Town, this regiment was marching smartly, backs straight and shoulders back. They were each wearing long oilskin cloaks and their helmets had canvas covers to ensure that the gleaming silver beneath would not tarnish. Heavy phraxmuskets rested on their shoulders, while short-handled axes could just be glimpsed beneath the swinging folds of their cloaks, their razor-sharp blades glinting as they marched. A company sergeant, the long hair on his face spiked into tufts by the rain, glanced across at his opposite number at the head of the Low Towners and bared his fangs in a haughty grimace of contempt.
Nate saw his company sergeant flinch as if he’d been physically struck as the long-hair sergeant strode past.
Edge Chronicles 10: The Immortals Page 32
