The atmosphere above them thundered, layering dire messages beneath its tones. The wizard, Caulie suspected, was in the mountains behind her on the other side of the eternal front, standing on some peak of his own and working to destroy her people. She surveyed the artillery unit below her—the dark, looming guns pointing past her shoulder, the nearly two thousand upturned faces of the artillerymen—and spread her arms, lifting her staff.
It was time to do battle.
Chapter 26
Caulie swept her staff in a wide ring—the signal to start. The guns of the Forty-First Field Artillery spoke all at once, a roar of fire and flame leaping from the gunmetal fingers pointing south. There was no purpose to this other than to please the crews, who wanted to hear all the guns fire at the same instant.
The men cheered and Caulie smiled, buoyed by their spirits. Now the race began—rate of fire was a point of pride for the gunners. These cannons were Hommar 40s, Caulie had been told, and they required a crew of six to clear, load, and fire. The elite team, set off from rest, proved their skill by finishing nearly twenty seconds before the next fastest gun.
Caulie’s work was done—at least until the guns warmed up. The Tachba called this process the “clearing of the throat-geh.” At this elevation, the barrels had to carefully be relaxed, lest the metal lose its temper by expanding too quickly. On any typical night during a standard barrage, after the guns had warmed, the crews would shift smoothly into the endurance game of load, fire, clear, repeat. This time, it was a new protocol and, as each gun finished warming, the crew stood a man on the loading breach poised to signal readiness.
When the entire battalion fell silent, Caulie realized that the enemy barrage had broken off as well. When the next southern barrage began in earnest, it wouldn’t be telling her people to “pay attention,” it would be delivering a payload of death and destruction. She had no time to waste.
Caulie raised her staff again. She circled it above her head like a spinning blade until she was certain that the gun crews saw the tempo. Finally, she swung the glowing diadem down, and the first notes of her song of thunder exploded into the night.
At the same time, the crews broke into their timing songs. As they cleared and reloaded, the crew boss counted down the beats.
Their plan was simple enough—a brief song, easy for the gun crews to repeat, repeated ad nauseam. Anything her song lost in the din of conflict would be regained through brute repetition. Unlike the Southerners, the Haphan artillery had to fire live rounds. Their barrage therefore didn’t have the same insistent booming as that of the Southern artillery, but Caulie was confident that the enemy would still hear them. Moreover, the shells would still rain death and confusion on the enemy trenches.
Drilled to exhaustion and finally able to play for real, the Tachba gun crews reproduced her song perfectly. It rang clear and undeniable amid the barrage.
Good, she thought. Good start.
Through the roars of the Haphan guns, Caulie tried to follow the timbre of the southern artillery. She couldn’t hear it for long. The rhythms of the northern and Southern barrages collided and echoed through the cliffs, impossible for her to decipher, nearly too random for her dangling earrings to mute out. She could only tell that the wizard’s song was vastly different from her own.
Captain Nance waved at her from the bottom of the ladder. “Is it working?”
“You tell me. What do the Tacchies say?”
“They’re not sure. All they can hear are their guns going off.” She gestured south. “What is the thunder doing?”
Caulie shook her head.
“I’ll get a report from the trenches below,” Nance shouted, “and see if they’re acting strange. Stranger than normal, I mean.”
The Forty-First Field Artillery, elevated as it was, had the enemy trenches in its line of sight. In daylight, the valley between the mountains was unremarkable, just a gray pockmarked landscape with only the most general sketched-in outlines of the earthworks visible.
Now, in the falling dark, the far valley was a cloud of red and gold sparks as the shells from the Haphan barrage exploded among their trenches, and Caulie could tell precisely where the enemy soldiers were concentrated. In the light of the detonations, she thought she could even see tiny figures scurrying back and forth.
As the heat from the gun batteries rose, it drew cold air from lower down the mountain. Caulie’s glowing cape billowed behind her as if she was flying through the sky. If she were ever to be mistaken for a fairytale sorceress, this would be the time.
The louder the barrage, however, the less she cringed at being its strange figurehead. Certainly, she was out of her depth, improvising with no experience, guided by the frantic lonely scrawls of an alien who had died a millennium earlier, and yes, a sentence of treason hung over her head. Yes, her only friend was possibly using her as a pawn in a game she couldn’t fathom. But she had met this enemy in his growing power and found a way to thwart him. Watching the havoc far below, lifted by wind and cannon fire, she felt increased somehow . . . empowered.
“Alexandrian!” Captain Nance shouted. “Our trenches—it’s working! They’re losing their shit, but they’re losing it the way we want.”
Caulie sagged with relief. She didn’t know what she should say to the enemy, didn’t know if the wind would even carry her thunder, didn’t know if the exploding shells of the barrage would obscure her song, didn’t know so much of what she needed to know . . . so she had directed her message to her own side. It was a message she had used before: let the world go quiet.
It was the same set of step-down instructions she had first unleashed on Grampharic and his squad, only now adjusted for strength and calibrated for slower delivery. The gun crews might not be receiving the full impact of the message—maybe their own barrage was protecting them. The men in the trenches, however, would be feeling the effects.
The Haphan officers in the trench had not been warned ahead of time that their boots might go deaf. Colonel Bessawra had been willing to expend only so much credibility in case Caulie’s preposterous plan failed. Any confusion could be sorted out later, Caulie told herself. The important fact was this: whatever malignant message the wizard was shouting through the thunder, nobody was hearing it.
* * *
When the song flagged, Caulie circled her glowing staff above her head to bring the gun crews back on tempo. She shivered in the mountain air, thinking about hypothermia and frostbite. When she lost all feeling in her extremities, she started to enjoy herself again, but Captain Nance waved to her from the ground.
“Their barrage has lifted!”
Caulie listened for the thunder beneath her own artillery, realizing it had indeed stopped. The Forty-First Field Artillery was shouting into the silence.
She raised her glowing staff and waved it laterally over her head. It almost slipped out of her numb fingers. One by one, her guns disengaged. When the last gun ceased to speak, the mountains filled with expressive quiet.
Caulie’s dangling earrings had protected ears her from most of the barrage, and she was probably the first on that stony plain to hear the normal sounds of the mountain night: the howl of the wind through stony crags and the clinking and shuffling of two thousand artillerymen putting their great guns to rest.
She heard the weak smatterings of an exhausted cheer from the men. They couldn’t hear it themselves and it quickly died out. The faces she discerned through the distance and dark were cheerful, however. The Tachba might not fully know what they had done, but they knew they were alive and that they had stayed on task longer than anyone had expected.
Good service, Tacchies.
Caulie tottered to the ladder, feeling a thousand years old and stiffer than a shell-encrusted daggie. Captain Nance waved her back. “We don’t know if it’s over. We cannot stand down yet. It would take too long to get organized again.”
She understood the reasoning but the cold made her irritable. “So we have to wait forever in case they start again
?”
“Of course not.” The officer turned to give instructions to a cluster of runners waiting to the side. They sprinted off in every direction through the gun emplacements. “The enemy will have the same problems we do with stops and starts. If there’s more tonight, we will know it soon.”
Caulie nodded glumly and wrapped herself tighter in the flowing white robe, finding quickly that it lacked the heavy sturdiness of her Fearan-stabbing coat. The frigid wind pierced its folds and openings as if it sought to assassinate her. The next time Caulie stood up here to orchestrate a thundering tempest of sound and destruction, she would insist on a pocket heater. The next time?
Strictly speaking, the artillery battalion no longer needed Caulie’s help. Captain Nance and the colonel might be true believers now, and the gun crews knew the song—try getting the Tacchies to forget anything once they learned it. The rhythms of the “Caulie-ho Song” may well have already been institutionalized in the unit, and might well last a hundred years. If the rhythm spread through the front like one of the trenchers’ timing songs, the threat of the wizard was well and truly neutralized, no matter where he tried next.
Does this mean I’m done? Had Caulie, incredibly, accomplished the task that Lieutenant Luscetian had sent her to do? If so, she could leave the eternal front and know its people were safe. She couldn’t bring herself to believe the string of conditionals that ended with her back in her warm apartment in Falling Mountain. The thunder and the wizard—it didn’t feel like a closed case.
She turned south again and stared through the brightness of the spotlights that illuminated her robe. The sky was black now, unlit by moon or stars. The valley below was an even darker abyss. Smoke from the Southie artillery and dust from the Haphan shells rose from between the mountains. The swirling depths were visible only when the valley flickered like lightning from the trench fighting that continued even now.
Yes. She knew, she somehow knew. The wizard was not done.
As she still watched, the far mountains flashed. Caulie’s heart clenched. The thunder rolled behind.
Chapter 27
“See?” Captain Nance shouted from below. “I am never wrong.”
Caulie didn’t answer. With the guns at rest, she could hear the enemy artillery’s altered tenor. Something was different—only a few guns seemed to be firing now. The sound was not organizing itself to her ears.
The primitive chant of a timing song reached Caulie’s ears, faint in the steady wind. The gun crews of the Forty-First were using their own techniques to learn about the enemy’s new barrage.
Shortly, the gunners sent the call: “Brace for incoming!”
Great. Just great.
The incoming shells shook the cliffs above the artillery emplacements. An immediate, terrifying light show of splintering rocks and cliff faces that calved with majestic slowness at fault lines. She cried out, but her voice was drowned in the chaos.
Captain Nance had told her that the Southie batteries, lower on their opposite mountain, couldn’t elevate their guns to target the Haphan guns directly. She had neglected to mention that the South could rain stone upon them from above. Avalanches of dislodged rocks poured down the mountain, punctuated every now and then by boulders the size of supply carts. Caulie saw huge rocks deflect off the cliff face and shed their momentum by bouncing through the artillery emplacements like spent cannonballs.
Men were struck and crushed, or else hurled backward, their bones shattered. Caulie had a commanding view of the carnage from her signaling platform. Her throat clenched. It looked unreal—the flying men, the scattered limbs—as if someone had dashed the pieces from a game board. Men twitched in the wake of the boulders, dragging broken limbs or kicking the air.
The gun crews kept discipline. They moved wheel blocks and wound levers, remapping coordinates.
“What’s the thunder saying?” Captain Nance shouted up through cupped hands.
“Nothing.” Caulie was briefly perplexed. “Isn’t this just a regular barrage now?”
“No. Look at the Tacchies.”
Caulie looked, then looked again.
Something was wrong.
Having spent less than two weeks on the front and five days with the Forty-First Field Artillery, she was no artillery expert, but even she could see it. Compared to the brisk, efficient gun crews of just minutes earlier, these men moved like raw novices. Some of them seemed inebriated. Crucial steps in the clearing and loading process were forgotten. The crewman who cleared the breach would step back to make room for the loaders with the shell—but the loaders were absent. On other guns, it was the breach-closer who was missing, or the crew boss who shouted the reloading steps. The lines of men passing shells from protected ammunition bunkers were suddenly broken, and the shells stopped arriving.
Captain Nance’s ruthlessly trained artillery was degrading before Caulie’s eyes, and it wasn’t fatigue or fear; the men were still working—there were simply fewer of them at their posts.
Caulie shifted her gaze from the individual guns to take in the stony plain as a whole. The missing crewmen were nearby, but not in service. They were walking in circles, precisely as described in Caulie’s textbooks, with their faces turned to the ground. They scratched their heads with twitchy hands. They muttered into the air, though she couldn’t hear their words.
Caulie spun back to stare to the south. The thunder of the barrage? But this barrage was so small! If the earlier barrage had been a symphony orchestra, this barrage was a few instruments thrown down a stairwell. For all love, what is he doing?
For the briefest moment, the wind died. At the same time, there came a pause in the shelling. In the fleeting silence, Caulie heard Captain Nance mutter as if she were mere inches away: “The woman has no idea. This will not be good.”
Caulie was thinking too furiously to care what the captain thought—but how nice of the wind to die, and the shelling to pause, to let her hear the words. It was as if the universe wanted her to know what others thought of her. Another jab from the eternal front. She couldn’t disagree with Captain Nance. The woman has no idea.
She’d heard those words during a pause in the shelling.
Caulie knew that pause. She had grown used to that pause in her songs. She had nearly overlooked it, and her dangling earrings with their noise cancellation had further obscured it. The pause was the moment between when a song ended and when the song began again.
She understood in a flash.
“It’s not the thunder!” she shouted down. “The shells are hitting the mountains in time. It’s not the sound of the guns, it’s the sound of the explosions!”
Captain Nance stared blankly, then turned to the cliffs. She said, “Did we know they could—”
“We had no idea.”
Caulie raised her glowing staff and swung it to catch the attention of the gun crews. It took several long minutes before they assembled, their faces turned up. Again, she circled the staff above her head, showing them the cadence of the song.
Given a specific task, the gun crews resumed their work. They were slow, but the act of service itself seemed to knit them together and their speed gradually increased. Some of the circling crew members even noticed and returned to their guns.
While she waited and watched, Caulie took the opportunity to pile blame on herself. After all, she had accidentally let herself feel a moment’s pride and it had predictably blinded her and slowed her thinking. She knew that someone like her could never simply be right; she’d known that since she was a child. There were no final answers, only ever-more-precise questions. While she’d been imagining some kind of famous, all-preserving “Caulie-ho Song” playing throughout the eternal front, the wizard had been fighting the war.
She chopped the glowing staff through the air and the artillery burst back to life. It was the same deaf-song as earlier:
Let the world go quiet.
It had to be the same song; simple as it was, the crews had needed days of traini
ng. She couldn’t improvise something new now and, regardless, she didn’t need to. Simplicity and repetition.
The artillery’s performance was less than perfect but the crucial points remained. Each beat of the rhythm used multiple redundant guns, so one or even two could drop out and the song would continue. At the same time, however, she had weakened the song’s effect by conducting a slower tempo to compensate for the confusion in the battalion. She didn’t need it to be perfect; she just needed to restore order.
While she nursed the song along, Caulie listened to the impacts on the mountain cliffs. The meaningless sound of the enemy’s artillery made sense to her now. The enemy guns in different positions, their barrels at different angles, the varying flight times of the shells—all of it meant the individual guns had to fire in precise time to deliver a spell-song through the shells’ impacts. No wonder the wizard was using a smaller battery; it would increase his precision.
But wait, Caulie thought. That would be unfathomably difficult. No—it would be impossible.
Caulie had watched the Haphan gun crews train assiduously for days just to learn her brief deaf-song. Yet her adversary on the other side had rearranged his artillery’s firing order on the fly and had compensated for the hundred confounding variables that could change the travel time of each shell from each specific gun. How had he done that? The calculations, the measurements—all with primitive Southie tools?
Sick to her stomach, Caulie realized just how far she was outclassed. Her only available answer to the wizard’s breathtaking mastery was a tiny song with dimwitted phrasing. Moreover, her song wasn’t working.
Weak as it was, it should have caused some mitigating effect on the incoming barrage by now, but she saw none. Caulie watched with dread as more of her Tachba wandered away from their guns and the crews began to fragment. The artillery song faltered as guns fell silent. It was a new kind of attrition for the eternal front.
Captain Nance was shouting instructions to a continuum of messengers who seemed never to stop moving. She had time to share only a single terrified glance with Caulie.
What the Thunder Said Page 22
