The Heroes

‘Too old for this shit,’ muttered Craw, leaning down to grip at his sore knee, a cold cord of pain running through it from ankle to hip.

‘If it ain’t Curnden Craw, at last!’ Whirrun had been sitting against one of the Heroes and now he stood, brushing dirt from his arse. ‘I’d almost given up on waiting.’ He swung the Father of Swords up onto one shoulder, sheathed again, and pointed into the valley with it, the way they’d come. ‘Thought maybe you’d decided to settle down in one of those farms on the way over here.’

‘I wish I had.’

‘Aw, but then who’d show me my destiny?’

‘Did you fight?’

‘I did, yes, as it happens. Stuck into the midst of it. I’m quite a one for fighting, according to the songs. Lots of fighting here.’ Not that he had a scratch on him. Craw had never seen Whirrun come out of a fight with a single mark. He frowned around the circle of butchery, scrubbing at his hair, and the wind chose that moment to freshen, stirring the tattered clothes of the corpses. ‘Lot of dead men, ain’t there.’

‘Aye,’ said Craw.

‘Heaps and heaps.’

‘Aye.’

‘Union mostly, though.’

‘Aye.’

Whirrun shrugged his sword off his shoulder and stood it on its tip, hilt in both hands, leaning forward so his chin rested on the pommel. ‘Still, even when it’s enemies, a sight like this, well … makes you wonder whether war’s really such a good thing after all.’

‘You joking?’

Whirrun paused, turning the hilt round and round so the end of the stained scabbard twisted into the stained grass. ‘I don’t really know any more. Agrick’s dead.’ Craw looked up, mouth open. ‘He charged off right at the head. Got killed in the circle. Stabbed, I think, with a sword, just about here,’ and he poked at his side, ‘under the ribs and went right through, probably—’

‘Don’t matter exactly how, does it?’ snapped Craw.

‘I guess not. Mud is mud. He had the shadow over him since his brother died, though. You could see it on him. I could, anyway. The boy wasn’t going to last.’

Some consolation, that. ‘The rest?’

‘Jolly Yon got a nick or two. Brack’s leg’s still bothering him, though he won’t say so. Other than that, they’re all good. Good as before, leastways. Wonderful thought we could try and bury Agrick next to his brother.’

‘Aye.’

‘Let’s get a hole dug, then, shall we, ’fore someone else digs there?’

Craw took a long breath as he looked around them. ‘If you can find a spare shovel. I’ll come say the words.’ A fitting end to the day that’d be. Before he got more’n a couple of steps, though, he found Caul Shivers in his way.

‘Dow wants you,’ he said, and with his whisper, and his scar, and his careless frown, he might’ve been the Great Leveller his self.

‘Right.’ Craw fought the urge to start chewing his nails again. ‘Tell ’em I’ll be back soon. I’ll be back soon, will I?’

Shivers shrugged.

Craw might not much have cared for what they’d done with the place, but Black Dow looked happy enough with the day’s work, leaning against one of the stones with a mostly eaten apple in one hand. ‘Craw, you old bastard!’ As he turned, Craw saw one side of his grinning face was all dashed and speckled with blood. ‘Where the hell did you get to?’

‘All honesty, limping along at the back.’ Splitfoot and a few of his Carls were scattered about, swords drawn and eyes peeled. A lot of bare steel, considering they’d won a victory.

‘Thought maybe you got yourself killed,’ said Dow.

Craw winced as he worked his burning foot around, thinking there was still time. ‘I wish I could run fast enough to get myself killed. I’ll stand wherever you tell me, but this charging business is a young man’s game.’

‘I managed to keep up.’

‘Don’t all have your taste for blood, Chief.’

‘It’s been the making of me. Don’t reckon I’ve done a better day’s work than this, though.’ Dow put a hand on Craw’s shoulder and drew him out between the stones, out to the edge of the hill where they could get a look south across the valley. The very spot Craw had stood when they first saw the Union come. Things had changed a lot in a few hours.

The tumbledown wall bristled with weapons, shining dully in the fading light. Men on the slope below as well, digging pits, whittling stakes, making the Heroes a fortress. Below them the south side of the hill was littered with bodies, all the way down to the orchards. Scavengers flitted from one to another, first men then crows, feathered undertakers croaking a happy chorus. Thralls were starting to drag the stripped shapes into heaps for burying. Strange constructions in which one corpse couldn’t be told from another. When a man dies in peacetime it’s all tears and processions, friends and neighbours offering each other comfort. A man dies in war and he’s lucky to get enough mud on top to stop him stinking.

Dow crooked a finger. ‘Shivers.’

‘Chief.’

‘I hear tell they got a choice prisoner down in Osrung. A Union officer or some such. Why don’t you bring him up here, see if we can prick anything out of him worth hearing?’

Shivers’ eye twinkled orange with the setting sun each time he nodded. ‘Right.’ And he strode off, stepping over corpses as careless as autumn leaves.

Dow frowned after him. ‘Some men you have to keep busy, eh, Craw?’

‘I guess.’ Wondering what the hell Dow planned to keep him busy with.

‘Quite the day’s work.’ He tossed his apple core away and patted his stomach like a man who’d had the best meal of his life and a few hundred dead men were the leftovers.

‘Aye,’ muttered Craw. Probably he should’ve been celebrating himself. Doing a little jig. A one-legged one, anyway. Singing and clashing ale cups and all the rest. But he just felt sore. Sore and he wanted to go to sleep, and wake up in that house of his by the water, and never see another battlefield. Then he wouldn’t have to say the lies over Agrick’s mud.

‘Pushed ’em back to the river. All across the line.’ Dow waved at the valley, blood dried black into the skin around his fingernails. ‘Reachey got over the fence and kicked the Union out of Osrung. Scale got a hold o’ the Old Bridge. Golden drove this lot clean across the shallows. He got stopped there but … I’d worry if I started getting everything my way.’ Black Dow winked at him, and Craw wondered if he was about to get stabbed in the back. ‘Guess folk won’t be carping that I ain’t the fighter they thought I was, eh?’

‘Guess not.’ As if that was all that mattered. ‘Shivers said you needed me for something.’

‘Can’t a pair of old fighters have a chat after a battle?’

That gave Craw a much bigger surprise than the blade in the back might’ve. ‘I reckon they can. Just didn’t reckon you’d be one of ’em.’

Dow seemed to think about that for a moment. ‘Neither did I. Guess we’re both surprised.’

‘Aye,’ said Craw, no idea what else to say.

‘We can let the Union come to us tomorrow,’ said Dow. ‘Spare your old legs.’

‘You reckon they’ll come on? After this?’

Dow’s grin was wider’n ever. ‘We gave Jalenhorm a hell of a beating, but half his men never even got across the river. And that’s only one division out of three.’ He pointed over towards Adwein, lights starting to twinkle in the dusk, bright dots marking the path of the road as marching men got torches lit. ‘And Mitterick’s just bringing his men up over there. Fresh and ready. Meed on the other side, I hear.’ And his finger moved over to the left, towards the Ollensand Road. Craw picked out lights there too, further back, his heart sinking all the time. ‘There’s still heaps more work here, don’t worry about that.’ Dow leaned close, fingers squeezing at Craw’s shoulder. ‘We’re just getting started.’

The Defeated

Your August Majesty,

I regret to inform you that today your army and interests in the North suffered a most serious reverse. The foremost elements of General Jalenhorm’s division reached the town of Osrung this morning and took up a powerful position on a hill surmounted by a ring of ancient stones called the Heroes. Reinforcements were held up on the bad roads, however, and before they could move across the river the Northmen attacked in great numbers. Although they fought with the greatest courage, the Sixth and Rostod Regiments were overwhelmed. The standard of the Sixth was lost. Casualties may well be close to a thousand dead, perhaps the same number of wounded, and many more in the hands of the enemy.

It was only by a valiant action of your Majesty’s First Cavalry that further disaster was averted. The Northmen are now well entrenched around the Heroes. One can see the lights of their campfires on the slopes. One can almost hear their singing when the wind shifts northerly. But we yet hold the ground south of the river, and the divisions of General Mitterick on the western flank, and Lord Governor Meed on the eastern, have begun to arrive and are preparing to attack at first light.

Tomorrow, the Northmen will not be singing.

I remain your Majesty’s most faithful and unworthy servant,

Bremer dan Gorst, Royal Observer of the Northern War

The gathering darkness was full of shouts, clanks and squeals, sharp with the tang of woodsmoke, the even sharper sting of defeat. Fires rustled in the wind and torches sputtered in pale hands, illuminating faces haggard from a day of marching, waiting, worrying. And perhaps, in a few cases, even fighting.

The road up from Uffrith was an endless parade of overloaded wagons, mounted officers, marching men. Mitterick’s division grinding through, seeing the wounded and the beaten, catching the contagion of fear before they even caught a whiff of the enemy. Things that might have been just objects before the rout on the Heroes had assumed a crushing significance. A dead mule, lamplight shining in its goggling eyes. A cart with a broken axle tipped off the road and stripped down for firewood. An abandoned tent, blown from its moorings, the yellow sun of the Union stitched into the trampled canvas. All become emblems of doom.

Fear had been a rarity over the past few months, as Gorst took his morning runs through the camps of one regiment or another. Boredom, exhaustion, hunger, illness, hopelessness and homesickness, all commonplace. But not fear of the enemy. Now it was everywhere, and the stink of it only grew stronger as the clouds rolled steadily in and the sun sank below the fells.

If victory makes men brave, defeat renders them cowards.

Progress through the village of Adwein had been entirely stalled by several enormous wagons, each drawn by a team of eight horses. An officer was bellowing red-faced at an old man huddled on the seat of the foremost one.

‘I am Saurizin, Adeptus Chemical of the University of Adua!’ he shouted back, waving a document smudged by the first spots of rain. ‘This equipment must be allowed through, by order of Lord Bayaz!’

Gorst left them arguing, strode past a quartermaster hammering on doors, searching for billets. A Northern woman stood in the street with three children pressed against her legs, staring at a handful of coins as the drizzle grew heavier. Kicked out of their shack to make way for some sneering lieutenant, who’ll be elbowed off to make way for some preening captain, who’ll be shuffled on to make way for some bloated major. Where will this woman and her children be by then? Will they slumber peacefully in my tent while I doss heroically on the damp sod outside? I need only reach out my hand … Instead he put his head down and trudged by them in silence.

Most of the village’s mean buildings were already crowded with wounded, the less serious cases spilling out onto the doorsteps. They looked up at him, pain-twisted, dirt-smeared or bandaged faces slack, and Gorst looked back in silence. My skills are for making casualties, not comforting them. But he pulled the stopper from his canteen and offered it out, and each in turn they took a mouthful until it was empty. Apart from one who gripped his hand for a moment they did not thank him and he did not care.

A surgeon in a smeared apron appeared at a doorway, blowing out a long sigh. ‘General Jalenhorm?’ Gorst asked. He was pointed down a rutted side-track and after a few strides heard the voice. That same voice he’d heard blathering orders for the last few days. Its tone was different now.

‘Lay them down here, lay them here! Clear a space! You, bring bandages!’ Jalenhorm was kneeling in the mud, clasping the hand of a man on a stretcher. He seemed to have shaken off his huge staff, finally, if he had not left them dead on the hill. ‘Don’t worry, you’ll have the best of care. You’re a hero. You’re all heroes!’ His knees squelched into the muck beside the next man. ‘You did everything that could have been asked. Mine was the fault, my friends, mine were the mistakes.’ He squeezed the casualty’s shoulder then stood, slowly, staring down. ‘Mine is the guilt.’

Defeat, it seems, brings out the best in some men.

‘General Jalenhorm.’

He looked up, face tipping into the torchlight, looking suddenly very old for a man so young. ‘Colonel Gorst, how are you—’

‘Marshal Kroy is here.’ The general visibly deflated, like a pillow with half the stuffing pulled out.

‘Of course he is.’ He straightened his dirt-smudged jacket, twisted his sword-belt into the correct position. ‘How do I look?’ Gorst opened his mouth to speak, but Jalenhorm cut him off. ‘Don’t bother to humour me. I look defeated.’ True. ‘Please don’t deny it.’ I didn’t. ‘That’s what I am.’ It is.

Gorst led the way back down the crowded alleys, through the steam of the army’s kitchens and the glow from the stalls of enterprising pedlars, hoping for silence. He was disappointed. As so very often.

‘Colonel Gorst, I need to thank you. That charge of yours saved my division.’

Perhaps it will also have saved my career. Your division can all drown if I can be the king’s First Guard again. ‘My motives were not selfless.’

‘Whose are? It’s the results that go down in history. Our reasons are written in smoke. And the fact is I nearly destroyed my division. My division.’ Jalenhorm snorted bitterly. ‘The one the king had most foolishly lent me. I tried to turn it down, you know.’ It seems you did not try hard enough. ‘But you know the king.’ All too well. ‘He has romantic notions about his old friends.’ He has romantic notions about everything. ‘No doubt I will be laughed at when I return home. Humiliated. Shunned.’ Welcome to my life. ‘Probably I deserve it.’ Probably you do. I don’t.

And yet, as Gorst frowned sideways at Jalenhorm’s hanging head, hair plastered to his skull, a drop of rain clinging to the point of his nose, as thorough a picture of dejection as he could find without a mirror, he was swept up by a surprising wave of sympathy.

He found he had put his hand on the general’s shoulder. ‘You did what you could,’ he said. ‘You should not blame yourself.’ If my experience is anything to go by, there will soon be legions of self-righteous scum queuing up to do it for you. ‘You must not blame yourself.’

‘Who should I blame, then?’ Jalenhorm whispered into the rain. ‘Who?’

If Lord Marshal Kroy was infected by fear he showed no symptoms, and nor did anyone else in range of his iron frown. Within his sight soldiers marched in perfect step, officers spoke clearly but did not shout, and the wounded bit down on their howls and remained stoically silent. Within a circle perhaps fifty strides across, with Kroy bolt upright in his saddle at its centre, there was no lag in morale, there was no lapse in discipline, and there had certainly been no defeat.

Jalenhorm’s bearing noticeably stiffened as he strode up and gave a rigid salute. ‘Lord Marshal Kroy.’

‘General Jalenhorm.’ The marshal glared down from on high. ‘I understand there was an engagement.’

‘There was. The Northmen came in very great numbers. Very great, and very quickly. A well-coordinated assault. They made a feint for Osrung and I sent a regiment to reinforce the town. I went to find more but, by that time … it was too late to do anything but try to keep them on the far side of the river. Too late to—’

‘The condition of your division, General.’

Jalenhorm paused. In one sense the condition of his division was painfully obvious. ‘Two of my five regiments of foot were held up on the bad roads and have yet to see action. The Thirteenth were holding Osrung and withdrew in good order when the Northmen breached the gate. Some casualties.’ Jalenhorm recited the butcher’s bill in a dull monotone. ‘The majority of the Rostod Regiment, some nine companies, I believe, were caught in the open and routed. The Sixth were holding the hill when the Northmen attacked. They were comprehensively broken. Ridden down in the fields. The Sixth has …’ Jalenhorm’s mouth twitched silently. ‘Ceased to exist.’

‘Colonel Wetterlant?’

‘Presumed among the dead on the far side of the river. There are very many dead there. Many wounded we cannot reach. You can hear them crying for water. They always want water, for some reason.’ Jalenhorm gave a horrifically inappropriate snort of nervous laughter. ‘I’d have thought they might want … spirits, or something.’

Kroy kept his silence. Gorst was unlikely to break it.

Jalenhorm droned on, as if he could not bear the quiet. ‘One regiment of cavalry took losses near the Old Bridge and withdrew, but held the south bank. The First is split in two. One battalion made their way through the marshes to a position in the woods on our left flank.’

‘That could be useful. The other?’

‘Fought valiantly alongside Colonel Gorst in the shallows, and turned back the enemy at great cost on both sides. Our one truly successful action of the day.’

Kroy turned his frown on Gorst. ‘More heroics, eh, Colonel?’

Only the bare minimum of action necessary to prevent disaster turning into catastrophe. ‘Some action, sir. No heroics.’

‘I was mindful, Lord Marshal,’ cut in Jalenhorm, ‘of the urgency. You wrote to me of some urgency.’

‘I did.’

‘I was mindful that the king wished for quick results. And so I seized the chance to get at the enemy. Seized it … much too ardently. I made a terrible mistake. A most terrible mistake, and I alone bear the full responsibility.’

‘No.’ Kroy gave a heavy sigh. ‘You share it with me. And with others. The roads. The nature of the battlefield. The undue haste.’

‘Nonetheless, I have failed.’ Jalenhorm drew his sword and offered it up. ‘I humbly request that I be removed from command.’

‘The king would not hear of it. Neither will I.’

Jalenhorm’s sword drooped, the point scraping against the mud. ‘Of course, Lord Marshal. I should have scouted the trees more thoroughly—’

‘You should have. But your orders were to push north and find the enemy.’ Kroy looked slowly around the torchlit chaos of the village. ‘You found the enemy. This is a war. Mistakes happen, and when they do … the stakes are high. But we are not finished. We have barely even begun. You will spend tonight and tomorrow behind the shallows where Colonel Gorst fought his unheroic action this afternoon. Regrouping in the centre, re-equipping your division, looking to the welfare of the wounded, restoring morale and,’ glowering balefully around at the decidedly unmilitary state of the place, ‘imposing discipline.’

‘Yes, Lord Marshal.’

‘I will be making my headquarters on the slopes of Black Fell, where there should be a good view of the battlefield tomorrow. Defeat is always painful, but I have a feeling you will get another chance to be involved in this particular battle.’

Jalenhorm drew himself up, something of his old snap returning at being given a straightforward goal. ‘My division will be ready for action the day after tomorrow, you may depend upon it, Lord Marshal!’

‘Good.’ And Kroy rode off, his indomitable aura fading into the night along with his staff. Jalenhorm stood frozen in a parting salute as the marshal clattered away, but Gorst looked back, when he had made it a few steps further down the road.

The general still stood beside the track, alone, hunched over as the rain grew heavier, white streaks through the fizzing torchlight.

Fair Treatment

At a pace no faster’n Flood’s limping, which weren’t that fast at all, they made their way down the road towards Osrung, in the flitting rain. They’d only the light of Reft’s one guttering torch to see by, which showed just a few strides of rutted mud ahead, some flattened crops on either side, the scared little-boy faces of Brait and Colving and the clueless gawp of Stodder. All staring off towards the town, a cluster of lights up ahead in the black country, touching the weighty clouds above with the faintest glow. All holding tight to what passed for weapons in their little crew of beggars. As if they were going to be fighting now. Today’s fighting was all long done with, and they’d missed it.

‘Why the hell were we left at the back?’ grumbled Beck.

‘Because of my dodgy leg and your lack o’ practice, fool,’ snapped Flood over his shoulder.

‘How we going to get practice left at the back?’

‘You’ll get practice at not getting killed, which is a damn fine thing to have plenty o’ practice at, if you’re asking me.’

Beck hadn’t been asking. His respect for Flood was waning with every mile they marched together. All the old prick seemed to care about was keeping the lads he led out of the fight and set to idiot’s tasks like digging, and carrying, and lighting fires. That and keeping his leg warm. If Beck had wanted to do women’s work he could’ve stayed on the farm and spared his self a few nights out in the wind. He’d come to fight, and win a name, and do business fit for the singing of. He was about to say so too, when Brait tugged at his sleeve, pointing up ahead.

‘There’s someone there!’ he squeaked. Beck saw shapes moving in the dark, felt a stab of nerves, hand fumbling for his sword. The torchlight fell across three somethings hanging from a tree by chains. All blackened up by fire, branch creaking gently as they turned.

‘Deserters,’ said Flood, hardly breaking his limping stride. ‘Hanged and burned.’

Beck stared at ’em as he passed. Didn’t hardly look like men at all, just charred wood. The one in the middle might’ve had a sign hanging round his neck, but it was all scorched off and Beck couldn’t read anyway.

‘Why burn ’em?’ asked Stodder.

‘’Cause Black Dow got a taste for the smell o’ men cooking long time ago and it hasn’t worn off.’

‘It’s a warning,’ Reft whispered.

‘Warning what?’

‘Don’t desert,’ said Flood.

‘Y’idiot,’ added Beck, though mostly ’cause looking at those strange man-shaped ashes was making him all kinds of jumpy. ‘No better’n a coward deserves, if you’re asking—’ Another squeak, Colving this time, and Beck went for his sword again.

‘Just townsfolk.’ Reft lifted his torch higher and picked out a handful of worried faces.

‘We ain’t got nothing!’ An old man at the front, waving bony hands. ‘We ain’t got nothing!’

‘We don’t want nothing.’ Flood jerked his thumb over his shoulder. ‘Go your ways.’

They trudged on past. Mostly old men, a few women too, a couple of children. Children even younger than Brait, which meant barely talking yet. They were all weighed down by packs and gear, one or two pushing creaking barrows of junk. Bald furs and old tools and cookpots. Just like the stuff might’ve come out of Beck’s mother’s house.

‘Clearing out,’ piped Colving.

‘They know what’s coming,’ said Reft.

Osrung slunk out of the night, a fence of mossy logs whittled to points, a high stone tower looming up by the empty gateway with lights at slitted windows. Sullen men with spears kept watch, eyes narrowed against the rain. Some young lads were digging a big pit, working away in the light of a few guttering torches on poles, all streaked with mud in the drizzle.

‘Shit,’ whispered Colving.

‘By the dead,’ squeaked Brait.

‘They’s the dead all right.’ Stodder, his fat lip dangling.

Beck found he’d nothing to say. What he’d taken without thinking for some pile of pale clay or something was actually a pile of corpses. He’d seen Gelda from up the valley laid out waiting to be buried after he drowned in the river and not thought much about it, counted himself hard-blooded, but this was different. They looked all strange, stripped naked and thrown together, face up and face down, slippery with the rain. Men, these, he had to tell himself, and the thought made him dizzy. He could see faces in the mess, or bits of faces. Hands, arms, feet, mixed up like they was all one monstrous creature. He didn’t want to guess at how many were there. He saw a leg sticking out, a wound in the thigh yawning black like a big mouth. Didn’t look real. One of the lads doing the digging stopped a moment, shovel clutched in white hands as they trudged past. His mouth was all twisted like he was about to cry.

‘Come on,’ snapped Flood, leading them in through the archway, broken doors leaning against the fence inside. A great tree trunk lay near, branches hacked off to easily held lengths, the heavy end filed to a point and capped with rough-forged black iron, covered with shiny scratches.

‘You reckon that was the ram?’ whispered Colving.

‘I reckon,’ said Reft.

The town felt strange. Edgy. Some houses were shut up tight, others had windows and doorways wide and full of darkness. A set of bearded men sat in front of one, mean-eyed, passing round a flask. Some children hid in an alley mouth, eyes gleaming in the shadows as the torch passed ’em by. Odd sounds came from everywhere. Crashing and tinkling. Thumping and shouting. Groups of men darted between the buildings, torches in hands, blades glinting, all moving at a hungry half-jog.

‘What’s going on?’ asked Stodder, in that stodgy-stupid voice of his.

‘They’re at a bit of sacking.’

‘But … ain’t this our town?’

Flood shrugged. ‘They fought for it. Some of ’em died for it. They ain’t leaving empty-handed.’

A Carl with a long moustache sat under dripping eaves with a bottle in his hand, sneering as he watched ’em walk past. Beside him a corpse lay in the doorway, half-in, half-out, the back of its head a glistening mass. Beck couldn’t tell if it was someone who’d lived in the house or someone who’d been fighting in it. Whether it was a man or a woman, even.

‘You’re quiet all of a sudden,’ said Reft.

Beck wanted to think of something sharp, but all he could manage was, ‘Aye.’

‘Wait here.’ And Flood limped up to a man in a red cloak, pointing Carls off this way and that. Some figures sat slumped in an alleyway nearby, hands tied, shoulders hunched against the drizzle.

‘Prisoners,’ said Reft.

‘They don’t look much different than our lot,’ said Colving.

‘They ain’t.’ Reft frowned at ’em. ‘Some o’ the Dogman’s boys, I guess.’

‘Apart from him,’ said Beck. ‘That’s a Union man.’ He had a bandage round his head and a funny Union jacket, one red sleeve ripped and the skin underneath covered in grazes, the other with some kind of fancy gold thread all around the cuff.

‘Right,’ said Flood as he walked back over. ‘You’re going to look to these prisoners while I find out what the work’ll be tomorrow. Just make sure none o’ them, and none o’ you, end up dead!’ he shouted as he made off up the street.

‘Looking to prisoners,’ grumbled Beck, some of his bitterness bubbling back as he looked down at their hangdog faces.

‘Reckon you deserve better work, do you?’ The one who spoke had a crazy look to him, a big bandage around his belly, stained through brown with some fresh red in the middle, ankles tied as well as wrists. ‘Bunch o’ fucking boys, don’t even have their Names yet!’

‘Shut up, Crossfeet,’ grunted one of the other prisoners, not hardly looking up.

‘You shut up, y’arsehole!’ Crossfeet gave him a look like he might tear him with his teeth. ‘Whatever happens tonight, the Union’ll be here tomorrow. More o’ those bastards than ants in a hill. The Dogman too, and you know who the Dogman’s got with him?’ He grinned, eyes going huge as he whispered the name. ‘The Bloody-Nine.’ Beck felt his face go hot. The Bloody-Nine had killed his father. Killed him in a duel with his own sword. The one he had sheathed beside him now.

‘That’s a lie,’ squeaked Brait, looking scared to his bones even though they had weapons and the prisoners were trussed up tight. ‘Black Dow killed Ninefingers, years ago!’

Crossfeet kept giving him that crazy grin. ‘We’ll see. Tomorrow, you little bastard. We’ll—’

‘Let him alone,’ said Beck.

‘Oh aye? And what’s your name?’

Beck stepped up and booted Crossfeet in the fruits. ‘That’s my name!’ He kept on kicking him as he folded up, all his anger boiling out. ‘That’s my name! That’s my fucking name, you heard it enough?’

‘Hate to interrupt.’

‘What?’ snarled Beck, spinning round with his fists clenched.

A big man stood behind him, a half-head taller’n Beck, maybe, fur on his shoulders glistening with the rain. All across one side of his face, the biggest and most hideous scar Beck had ever seen, the eye on that side not an eye at all but a ball of dead metal.

‘Name’s Caul Shivers,’ voice a ground-down whisper.

‘Aye,’ croaked Beck. He’d heard stories. Everyone had. They said Shivers did tasks for Black Dow too black for his own hands. They said he’d fought at Black Well, and the Cumnur, and Dunbrec, and the High Places, fought beside old Rudd Threetrees, and the Dogman. The Bloody-Nine too. They said he’d gone south across the sea and learned sorcery. That he’d traded his eye willingly for that silver one, and that a witch had made it, and through it he could see what a man was thinking.

‘Black Dow sent me.’

‘Aye,’ whispered Beck, all his hairs standing up on end.

‘To get one o’ these. A Union officer.’

‘Reckon that’s this one.’ Colving used his toe to poke at the man with the tattered sleeve and made him grunt.

‘If it ain’t Black Dow’s bitch!’ Crossfeet was smiling up, teeth shining red, bandages round him reddened too. ‘Why don’t you bark, eh, Shivers? Bark, you bastard!’ Beck could hardly believe it. None of ’em could. Maybe he knew that wound in his gut was death, and it’d sent him mad.

‘Huh.’ Shivers jerked his trousers up so it was easy for him to squat down, boots grinding the dirt as he did it. When he got there he had a knife in his hand. Just a little one, blade no longer’n a man’s finger, glinting red and orange and yellow. ‘You know who I am, then?’

‘Caul Shivers, and I ain’t fucking scared of a dog!’

Shivers raised one brow, the one above his good eye. The one above his metal eye didn’t shift much. ‘Well, ain’t you the hero?’ And he poked Crossfeet in the calf with the blade. Not much weight behind it. Like Beck might’ve poked his brother with a finger to wake him up of a frosty morning. The knife stuck into his leg, silent, and back out, and Crossfeet snarled and wriggled.

‘Black Dow’s bitch, am I?’ Shivers poked him in the other leg, knife going deeper into his thigh. ‘It’s true I get some shitty jobs.’ Poked him again, somewhere around his hip. ‘Dog can’t hold a knife, though, can it?’ He didn’t sound angry. Didn’t look angry. Bored, almost. ‘I can.’ Poke, poke.

‘Gah!’ Crossfeet twisted and spat. ‘If I had a blade—’

‘If?’ Shivers poked him in the side, where his bandages were. ‘You don’t, so there’s the end o’ that.’ Crossfeet had twisted over, so Shivers poked him in the back. ‘I’ve got one, though. Look.’ Poke, poke, poke. ‘Look at that, hero.’ Poked him in the backs of his legs, poked him in the arse, poked him all over, blood spreading out into his trousers in dark rings.

Crossfeet moaned and shuddered, and Shivers puffed out his cheeks, and wiped his knife on the Union man’s sleeve, making the gold thread glint red. ‘Right, then.’ He made the Union man grunt as he jerked him to his feet, carefully sheathed his little knife somewhere at his belt. ‘I’ll take this one off.’

‘What should we do with him?’ Beck found he’d asked in a reedy little voice, pointing at Crossfeet, moaning softly in the mud, torn clothes all glistening sticky black.

Shivers looked straight at Beck, and it felt like he was looking into him. Right into his thoughts, like they said he could. ‘Do nothing. You can manage that, no?’ He shrugged as he turned to go. ‘Let him bleed.’

Tactics

The valley was spread out below them, a galaxy of twinkling points of orange light. The torches and campfires of both sides, occasionally smudged as a new curtain of drizzle swept across the hillside. One cluster must have been the village of Adwein, another the hill they called the Heroes, a third the town of Osrung.

Meed had made his headquarters at an abandoned inn south of the town and left his leading regiment digging in just out of bowshot of its fence, Hal with them, nobly wrestling to stamp some order on the darkness. More than half the division was still slogging up, ill-tempered and ill-disciplined, along a road that had begun the day as an uneven strip of dust and ended it churned to a river of mud. The rearmost elements would probably still not have arrived at first light tomorrow.

‘I wanted to thank you,’ said Colonel Brint, rain dripping from the peak of his hat.

‘Me?’ asked Finree, all innocence. ‘Whatever for?’

‘For looking after Aliz these past few days. I know she’s not terribly worldly—’

‘It’s been my pleasure,’ she lied. ‘You’ve been such a good friend to Hal, after all.’ Just a gentle reminder that she damn well expected him to carry on being one.

‘Hal’s an easy man to like.’

‘Isn’t he, though?’

They rode past a picket, four Union soldiers swaddled in sodden cloaks, spear-points glistening in the light of the lanterns of Meed’s officers. There were more men beyond, unloading rain-spoiled gear from packhorses, struggling to pitch tents, wet canvas flapping in their faces. An unhappy queue of them were hunched beside a dripping awning clutching an assortment of tins, cups and boxes while rations were weighed out.

‘There’s no bread?’ one was asking.

‘Regulations say flour’s an acceptable substitute,’ replied the quartermaster, measuring out a tiny quantity on his scales with frowning precision.

‘Acceptable to who? What are we going to bake it on?’

‘You can bake it on your fat arse far as I’m— Oh, begging your pardon, my lady,’ tugging his forelock as Finree rode past. As though seeing men go hungry for no good reason could cause no offence but the word ‘arse’ might overcome her delicate sensibilities.

What looked at first to be a hump in the steep hillside turned out to be an ancient building, covered with wind-lashed creeper, somewhere between a cottage and a barn and probably serving as both. Meed dismounted with all the pomp of a queen at her coronation and led his staff in file through the narrow doorway, leaving Colonel Brint to hold back the queue so Finree could slip through near the front.

The bare-raftered room beyond smelled of damp and wool, wet-haired officers squeezed in tight. The briefing had the charged air of a royal funeral, every man vying to look the most solemn while they wondered eagerly whether there might be anything for them in the will. General Mitterick stood against one rough stone wall, frowning mightily into his moustache with one hand thrust between two buttons of his uniform, thumb sticking up, as if he was posing for a portrait, and an insufferably pretentious one at that. Not far from him Finree picked out Bremer dan Gorst’s impassive slab of a face in the shadows, and smiled in acknowledgement. He scarcely tipped his head in return.

Finree’s father stood before a great map, pointing out positions with expressive movements of one hand. She felt the warm glow of pride she always did when she saw her father at work. He was the very definition of a commander. When he saw them enter, he came over to shake Meed’s hand, catching Finree’s eye and giving her the slightest smile.

‘Lord Governor Meed, I must thank you for moving north with such speed.’ Though if it had been left to his Grace to navigate they would still have been wondering which way was north.

‘Lord Marshal Kroy,’ grated the governor, with little enthusiasm. Their relationship was a prickly one. In his own province of Angland, Meed was pre-eminent, but as a lord marshal carrying the king’s commission, in time of war Finree’s father outranked him.

‘I realise it must have been a wrench to abandon Ollensand, but we need you here.’

‘So I see,’ said Meed, with characteristic bad grace. ‘I understand there was a serious—’

‘Gentlemen!’ The press of officers near the door parted to let someone through. ‘I must apologise for my late arrival, the roads are quite clogged.’ A stocky bald man emerged from the crowd, flapping the lapels of a travel-stained coat and heedlessly spraying water over everyone around him. He was attended by only one servant, a curly-haired fellow with a basket in one hand, but Finree had made it her business to know every person in his Majesty’s government, every member of the Open Council and the Closed and the exact degrees of their influence, and the lack of pomp did not fool her for a moment. Put simply, whether he was said to be retired or not, Bayaz, the First of the Magi, outranked everyone.

‘Lord Bayaz.’ Finree’s father made the introductions. ‘This is Lord Governor Meed, of Angland, commanding his Majesty’s third division.’

The First of the Magi somehow managed to press his hand and ignore him simultaneously. ‘I knew your brother. A good man, much missed.’ Meed attempted to speak but Bayaz was distracted by his servant, who at that moment produced a cup from his basket. ‘Ah! Tea! Nothing seems quite so terrible once there is a cup of tea in your hand, eh? Would anyone else care for some?’ There were no takers. Tea was generally considered an unpatriotic Gurkish fashion, synonymous with moustache-twiddling treachery. ‘Nobody?’

‘I would love a cup.’ Finree slipped smoothly in front of the lord governor, obliging him to take a spluttering step back. ‘The perfect thing in this weather.’ She despised tea, but would happily have drunk an ocean of it for the chance to exchange words with one of the most powerful men in the Union.

Bayaz’ eyes flickered briefly over her face like a pawnshop owner’s asked for an estimate on some gaudy heirloom. Finree’s father cleared his throat, somewhat reluctantly. ‘This is my daughter—’

‘Finree dan Brock, of course. My congratulations on your marriage.’

She smothered her surprise. ‘You are very well informed, Lord Bayaz. I would have thought myself beneath notice.’ She ignored a cough of agreement from Meed’s direction.

‘Nothing can be beneath the notice of a careful man,’ said the Magus. ‘Knowledge is the root of power, after all. Your husband must be a fine fellow indeed to outshine the shadow of his family’s treason.’

‘He is,’ she said, unabashed. ‘He in no way takes after his father.’

‘Good.’ Bayaz still smiled, but his eyes were hard as flints. ‘I would hate to bring you pain by seeing him hanged.’

An awkward silence. She glanced at Colonel Brint, then at Lord Governor Meed, wondering if either of them might offer some support for Hal in reward for his unstinting loyalty. Brint at least had the decency to look guilty. Meed looked positively delighted. ‘You will find no more loyal man in his Majesty’s whole army,’ she managed to grate out.

‘I am all delight. Loyalty is a fine thing in an army. Victory is another.’ Bayaz frowned about at the assembled officers. ‘Not the best of days, gentlemen. A long way from the best of days.’

‘General Jalenhorm overreached himself,’ said Mitterick, out of turn and with little empathy, behaviour entirely characteristic of the man. ‘He should never have been so damn spread out—’

‘General Jalenhorm acted under my orders,’ snapped Marshal Kroy, leaving Mitterick to subside into a grumpy silence. ‘We overreached, yes, and the Northmen surprised us …’

Your tea.’ A cup was insinuated into Finree’s hand and the eyes of Bayaz’ servant met hers. Odd-coloured eyes, one blue, one green. ‘I am sure your husband is as loyal, honest and hard-working as ever a man could be,’ he murmured, a most unservile curl to the corner of his mouth, as if they shared some private joke. She did not see what, but the man had already oozed back, pot in hand, to charge Bayaz’ cup. Finree wrinkled her lip, checked she was unobserved and furtively tossed the contents of hers down the wall.

‘…our choices were most limited,’ her father was saying, ‘given the great need for haste impressed upon us by the Closed Council—’

Bayaz cut him off. ‘The need for haste is a fact of our situation, Marshal Kroy, a fact no less compelling for being a political imperative rather than a physical.’ He slurped tea through pursed lips, but the room was held so silent for the duration one could have heard a flea jump. Finree wished she understood the trick, and could rely on her every facile utterance being given rapt attention, rather than endlessly chewing on her usual diet of sidelinings, humourings and brushings-off. ‘If a mason builds a wall upon a slope and it collapses, he can hardly complain that it would have stood a thousand years if only he had been given level ground to work with.’ Bayaz slurped again, again in utter silence. ‘In war, the ground is never level.’

Finree felt an almost physical pressure to jump to her father’s defence, as if there was a wasp down her back that had to be smashed, but she bit her tongue. Taunting Meed was one thing. Taunting the First of the Magi quite another.

‘It was not my intention to offer excuses,’ said her father stiffly. ‘For the failure I take all the responsibility, for the losses I take all the blame.’

‘Your willingness to shoulder the blame does you much credit but us little good.’ Bayaz sighed as if reproving a naughty grandson. ‘But let us learn the lessons, gentlemen. Let us put yesterday’s defeats behind us, and look to tomorrow’s victories.’ Everyone nodded as though they had never heard anything so profound, even Finree’s father. Here was power.

She could not remember ever coming to dislike anyone so much, or admire anyone so much, in so short a time.

Dow’s meet was held around a big fire-pit in the centre of the Heroes, shimmering with heat, hissing and fizzing with the drizzle. There was an edgy feel about the gathering, somewhere between a wedding and a hanging. Firelight and shadow make men look like devils, and Craw had seen ’em make men act like devils more’n once. They all were there – Reachey, Tenways, Scale and Calder, Ironhead, Splitfoot and a couple score Named Men besides. The biggest names and the hardest faces in the North, less a few up in the hills and a few more with the other side.

Looked like Glama Golden had got in the fight. Looked like someone had used his face for an anvil. His left cheek was one big welt, mouth split and bloated, blooms of bruise already spreading. Ironhead smirked across the ring of leering faces like he’d never seen a thing so pretty as Golden’s broken nose. They had bad blood between ’em, those two, so bad it poisoned everything around.

‘What the hell are you doing here, old man?’ murmured Calder as Craw jostled into place beside him.

‘Damned if I know. My eyes ain’t all they used to be.’ Craw took a hold on his belt buckle and squinted around. ‘Ain’t this where we go to shit?’

Calder snorted. ‘It’s where we go to talk it. Though if you want to drop your trousers and give Brodd Tenways some polish for his boots I won’t complain.’

Now Black Dow strolled out of the shadows, around the side of Skarling’s Chair, chewing at a bone. The chatter quieted then died altogether, leaving only the crackle and crunch of sagging embers, faint snatches of song floating from outside the circle. Dow stripped his bone to nothing and tossed it into the fire, licking his fingers one by one while he took in every shadow-pitted face. Drew out the silence. Made ’em all wait. Left no doubts who was the biggest bastard on the hill.

‘So,’ he said in the end. ‘Good day’s work, no?’ And a great clatter went up, men shaking their sword hilts, thumping shields with gauntlets, beating their armour with their fists. Scale joined in, banging his helmet on one scratched thigh-plate. Craw rattled his sword in its sheath, somewhat guiltily, since he hadn’t run fast enough to draw it. Calder stayed quiet, he noticed, just sourly sucked his teeth as the clamour of victory faded.

‘A good day!’ Tenways leered around the fire.

‘Aye, a good day,’ said Reachey.

‘Might’ve been better yet,’ said Ironhead, curling his lip at Golden, ‘if we’d only made it across the shallows.’

Golden’s eyes burned in their bruised sockets, jaw muscles squirming on the side of his head, but he kept his peace. Probably ’cause talking hurt too much.

‘Men are always telling me the world ain’t what it was.’ Dow held up his sword, grinning so the sharp point of his tongue stuck out between his teeth. ‘Some things don’t change, eh?’ Another clattering chorus of approval, so much steel thrust up it was a wonder no one got stabbed by accident. ‘For them who said the clans o’ the North can’t fight as one …’ Dow curled his tongue and blew spit hissing into the fire. ‘For them who said the Union are too many to beat …’ He sent another gob sailing neatly into the flames. Then he looked up, eyes shining orange. ‘And for them who say I’m not the man to do it …’ And he rammed his sword point-first into the fire with a snarl, sparks whirling up around the hilt.

A hammering of approval loud as a busy smithy, loud enough to make Craw wince. ‘Dow!’ shrieked Tenways, smashing the pommel of his sword with one scabby hand. ‘Black Dow!’

Others joined in, and found a rhythm with his name and with their fists on metal. ‘Black! Dow! Black! Dow!’ Ironhead with it, and Golden mumbling through his battered mouth, and Reachey too. Craw kept his silence. Take victory quiet and careful, Rudd Threetrees used to say, ’cause you might soon be called on to take defeat the same way. Across the fire, Craw caught the glint of Shivers’ eye in the shadows. He wasn’t chanting neither.

Dow settled back in Skarling’s Chair just the way Bethod used to, basking in the love like a lizard in the sun then halting it with a kingly wave. ‘All right. We’ve got all the best ground in the valley. They’ve got to back off or come at us, and there ain’t many places they can do it. So there’s no need for anything clever. Clever’d be wasted on the likes o’ you lot, anyway.’ A range of chuckles. ‘So I’ll take blood, and bones, and steel, like today.’ More cheering. ‘Reachey?’

‘Aye, Chief.’ The old warrior stepped into the firelight, mouth pressed into a hard line.

‘I want your boys to hold Osrung. They’ll come at you hard tomorrow, I reckon.’

Reachey shrugged. ‘Only fair. We came at ’em pretty damn hard today.’

‘Don’t let ’em get across that bridge, Reachey. Ironhead?’

‘Aye, Chief.’

‘I’m giving you the shallows to mind. I want men in the orchard, I want men holding the Children, I want men ready to die but happier to kill. It’s the one place they could come across in numbers, so if they try it we got to step on ’em hard.’

‘That’s what I do.’ Ironhead sent a mocking look across the fire. ‘Won’t nobody be turning me back.’

‘Whassat mean?’ snarled Golden.

‘You’ll all get a stab at glory,’ said Dow, bringing the pair of ’em to heel. ‘Golden, you fought hard today so you’ll be hanging back. Cover the ground between Ironhead and Reachey, ready to lend help to either one if they get pressed more’n they’re comfortable with.’

‘Aye.’ Licking at his bloated lip with the point of his bloated tongue.

‘Scale?’

‘Chief.’

‘You took the Old Bridge. Hold the Old Bridge.’

‘Done.’

‘If you have to fall back—’

‘I won’t,’ said Scale, with all the confidence of youth and limited brains.

‘—it’d be worth having a second line at that old wall. What do they call it?’

‘Clail’s Wall,’ said Splitfoot. ‘Some mad farmer built it.’

‘Might be a good thing for us he did,’ said Dow. ‘You won’t be able to use all you’ve got in the space behind that bridge anyway, so plant some further back.’

‘I will,’ said Scale.

‘Tenways?’

‘Made for glory, Chief!’

‘You’ve got the slope o’ the Heroes and Skarling’s Finger to look to, which means you shouldn’t get into any scrapes right off. Scale or Ironhead need your help, maybe you can find ’em some.’

Tenways sneered across the fire at Scale and Calder and, hopefully just ’cause he was standing with ’em, Craw. ‘I’ll see what I can root out.’

Dow leaned forward. ‘Splitfoot and me will be up here at the top, behind the drystone wall. Reckon I’ll lead from the back tomorrow, like our friends in the Union do.’ Another round of harsh laughter. ‘So there it is. Anyone got any better ideas?’ Dow slowly worked the gathering over with his grin. Craw had never felt less like speaking in his life, and it didn’t seem likely anyone else would want to make a spectacle of themselves—

‘I have.’ Calder held up a finger, always wanting to make a spectacle of himself.

Dow’s eyes narrowed. ‘What a surprise. And what’s your strategy, Prince Calder?’

‘Put our backs to the Union and run?’ asked Ironhead, a wave of chuckling following after.

‘Put our backs to the Union and bend over?’ asked Tenways, followed by another. Calder only smiled through it, and waited for the laughter to fade, and leave things silent.

‘Peace,’ he said.

Craw winced. It was like getting up on a table and calling for chastity in a brothel. He felt a strong urge to step away, like you might from a man doused in oil when there are a lot of naked flames about. But what kind of man steps away from a friend just ’cause he isn’t popular? Even if he is in danger of becoming a fireball. So Craw stayed shoulder to shoulder with him, wondering what the hell his game was, since sure as sure Calder always had some game in mind. The disbelieving silence stretched out long enough for a sudden gust to whip up, make cloaks flap and torch flames dance, throwing wild light across that circle of frowns.

‘Why, you bastard fucking coward!’ Brodd Tenways’ rashy face was so twisted up with scorn it looked like it might split.

‘Call my brother a coward?’ snarled Scale, eyes bulging. ‘I’ll twist your flaky fucking neck!’

‘Now, now,’ said Dow. ‘If any necks need twisting I’ll do the picking out. Prince Calder’s known to have a way with words. I brought him out here to hear what he has to say, didn’t I? So let’s hear it, Calder. Why peace?’

‘Careful, Calder,’ muttered Craw, trying not to move his lips. ‘Careful.’

If Calder heard the warning, he chose to piss all over it. ‘Because war’s a waste of men’s time, and money, and lives.’

‘Fucking coward!’ barked Tenways again, and this time even Scale didn’t disagree, just stood staring at his brother. There was a chorus of disgust, and cursing, and spitting, almost as loud as the chorus of approval for Dow. But the louder it got the more Calder smiled. Like he thrived on their hatred like a flower on shit.

‘War’s a way of getting things,’ he said. ‘If it gets you nothing, what’s the point? How long have we been marching around out here?’

‘You’ve had a trip back home, bastard,’ someone called.

‘Aye, and it was talk o’ peace landed you there,’ said Ironhead.

‘All right, how long have you been out here, then?’ Pointing right in Ironhead’s face. ‘Or you?’ At Golden. ‘Or him?’ Jerking a thumb sideways at Craw. Craw frowned, wishing he’d been left out of it. ‘Months? Years? Marching, and riding, and fearing, and lying out under the stars with your sickness and your wounds. In the wind, in the cold, while your fields, and your herds, and your workshops, and your wives go untended. For what? Eh? What plunder? What glory? If there are ten-score men in all this host who are richer because o’ this I’ll eat my own cock.’

‘Coward’s fucking talk!’ snarled Tenways, turning away,’ I won’t hear it!’

‘Cowards run away from things. Scared of words, are you, Tenways? What a hero.’ Calder even got a ragged scatter of laughter for that. Made Tenways stop and turn back, bristling. ‘We won a victory here today! Legends, every man!’ And Calder slapped at his sword hilt. ‘But it was just a little one.’ He jerked his head towards the south, where everyone knew the campfires of the enemy were lighting up the whole valley. ‘There’s plenty more Union. There’ll be harder fighting on the morrow, and heavier losses. Far heavier. And if we win it’s to end up in the same spot, just with more dead men for company. No?’ Some were still shaking their heads, but more were listening, thinking it over. ‘As for those who said the clans of the North can’t fight as one, or the Union are too many to beat, well, I don’t reckon those questions are quite settled yet.’ Calder curled his tongue, and sent a bit of his own spittle spinning into Dow’s fire. ‘And any man can spit.’

‘Peace,’ snorted Tenways, who’d stuck around to listen after all. ‘We all know what a lover o’ peace your father was! Didn’t he take us to war with the Union in the first place?’

Didn’t slow Calder down a step. ‘He did, and it was the end of him. Might be I learned from his mistake. Have you, is my question?’ Looking every man in the eye. ‘’Cause if you ask me, it’d be a damn fool who risked his life for what he could get just by the asking.’ There was silence for a while. A grudging, guilty silence. The wind flapped clothes some more, whipped sparks from the fire-pit in showers. Dow leaned forward, propping himself up on his sword.

‘Well, you’ve done quite the job o’ pissing on my cookfire, ain’t you, Prince Calder?’ Harsh chuckles all round, and the thoughtful moment was gone. ‘How about you, Scale? You want peace?’

The brothers eyed each other for a moment, while Craw tried to ease back gently from between the two. ‘No,’ said Scale. ‘I’m for fighting.’

Dow clicked his tongue. ‘There we go. Seems you didn’t even convince your own brother.’ More chuckling, and Calder laughed with the rest, if somewhat sickly. ‘Still, you’ve got quite the way with words, all right, Calder. Maybe the time’ll come we need to talk peace with the Union. Then I’ll be sure to give you the call.’ He showed his teeth. ‘Won’t be tonight, though.’

Calder swept out a fancy bow. ‘As you command, Protector of the North. You’re the Chief.’

‘That’s right,’ growled Dow, and most nodded along with him. ‘That’s right.’ But Craw noticed a few had more thoughtful looks on their faces as they started to drift away into the night. Pondering their untilled fields, maybe, or their untilled wives. Could be Calder weren’t so mad as he seemed. Northmen love battle, sure, but they love beer too. And like beer, there’s only so much battle most can stomach.

‘We suffered a reverse today. But tomorrow will be different.’ Marshal Kroy’s manner did not allow for the possibility of disagreement. It was stated as fact. ‘Tomorrow we will take the fight to our enemy, and we will be victorious.’ The room rustled, starched collars shifting as men nodded in unison.

‘Victory,’ someone murmured.

‘By tomorrow morning all three divisions will be in position.’ Though one is ruined and the others will have marched all night. ‘We have the weight of numbers.’ We will crush them under our corpses! ‘We have right on our side.’ Good for you. I have a huge bruise on mine. But the rest of the officers seemed cheered by the platitudes. As idiots often are.

Kroy turned to the map, pointing out the south bank of the shallows. The spot where Gorst had fought that very morning. ‘General Jalenhorm’s division needs time to regroup, so they will stay out of action in the centre, demonstrating towards the shallows but not crossing them. We will attack instead on both flanks.’ He strode purposefully to the right side of the map, pushing his hand up the Ollensand Road towards Osrung. ‘Lord Governor Meed, you are our right fist. Your division will attack Osrung at first light, carry the palisade, occupy the southern half of the town, then aim to take the bridge. The northern half is the more built up, and the Northmen have had time to strengthen their positions there.’

Meed’s gaunt face was blotchy with intensity, eyes bright at the prospect of grappling with his hated enemy at last. ‘We will flush them out and put every one of them to the sword.’

‘Good. Be cautious, though, the woods to the east have not been thoroughly scouted. General Mitterick, you are the left hook. Your objective is to force your way across the Old Bridge and establish a presence on the far side.’

‘Oh, my men will take the bridge, don’t concern yourself about that, Lord Marshal. We’ll take the bridge and drive them all the way to bloody Carleon—’

‘Taking the bridge will be adequate, for today.’

‘A battalion of the First Cavalry are being attached to your command.’ Felnigg glared down his beak of a nose as if he thought attaching anything to Mitterick deeply ill-advised. ‘They found a route through the marshes and a position in the woods beyond the enemy’s right flank.’

Mitterick did not deign even to look at Kroy’s chief of staff. ‘I’ve asked for volunteers to lead the assault on the bridge, and my men have already built a number of sturdy rafts.’

Felnigg’s glare intensified. ‘I understand the current is strong.’

‘It’s worth a try, isn’t it?’ snapped Mitterick. ‘They could hold us up all morning on that bridge!’

‘Very well, but remember we are seeking victory, not glory.’ Kroy looked sternly around the room. ‘I will be sending written orders to each one of you. Are there any questions?’

‘I have one, sir.’ Colonel Brint held up a finger. ‘Is it possible for Colonel Gorst to refrain from his heroics long enough for the rest of us to contribute?’ There was a scattering of chuckles, utterly disproportionate to the humour displayed, the soldiers seizing on a rare chance to laugh. Gorst had been entirely occupied staring across the room at Finree and pretending not to. Now he found to his extreme discomfort that everyone was grinning at him. Someone started to clap. Soon there was a modest round of applause. He would have vastly preferred it if they had jeered at him. That at least I could have joined in with.

‘I will observe,’ he grunted.

‘As will I,’ said Bayaz, ‘and perhaps conduct my little experiment on the south bank.’

The marshal bowed. ‘We stand entirely at your disposal, Lord Bayaz.’

The First of the Magi slapped his thighs as he rose, his servant leaning forward to whisper something in his ear and, as though that was a call for the advance, the room began quickly to empty, officers hurrying back to their units to make preparations for the morning’s attacks. Make sure to pack plenty of coffins, you—

‘I hear you saved the army today.’

He spun about with all the dignity of a startled baboon and found himself staring into Finree’s face at paralysingly close quarters. News of her marriage should have allowed him to finally bury his feelings for her as he had buried all the others worth having. But it seemed they were stronger than ever. A vice in his guts clamped down whenever he saw her, screwed tighter the longer they spoke. If you could call it speaking.

‘Er,’ he muttered. I floundered around in a stream and killed seven men that I am sure of, but without doubt maimed several more. I hacked them apart in the hope that our fickle monarch would hear of it, and commute my undeserved sentence of undeath. I made myself guilty of mass murder so I could be proclaimed innocent of incompetence. Sometimes they hang men for this type of thing, and sometimes they applaud. ‘I am … lucky to be alive.’

She came closer and he felt a dizzy rush of blood, a lightness in his head not unlike serious illness. ‘I have a feeling we are all lucky you are alive.’

I have a feeling in my trousers. If I was truly lucky you would put your hand down them. Is that too much to ask? After saving the army, and so on? ‘I…’ I’m so sorry. I love you. Why am I sorry? I didn’t say anything. Does a man need to feel sorry for what he thinks? Probably.

She had already walked off to speak to her father, and he could hardly blame her. If I was her, I wouldn’t even look at me, let alone listen to me squeak my halting way through half a line of insipid drivel. And yet it hurts. It hurts so much when she goes. He trudged for the door.

Fuck, I’m pathetic.

Calder slipped out of Dow’s meet before he had to explain himself to his brother and hurried away between the fires, ignoring grumbled curses from the men gathered around them. He found a path between two of the torchlit Heroes, saw gold glinting on the slope and caught up with its owner as he strode angrily downhill.

‘Golden! Golden, I need to talk to you!’

Glama Golden frowned over his shoulder. Perhaps the intention was fearsome fury, but the swellings on his cheek made him look like he was worried at the taste of something he was eating. Calder had to bite back a giggle. That smashed-up face was an opportunity for him, one he could ill afford to miss.

‘What would I have to thay to you, Calder?’ he snarled, three of his Named Men bristling behind him, hands tickling their many weapons.

‘Quietly, we’re watched!’ Calder came close, huddling as though he had secrets to share. An attitude he’d noticed tended to make men do the same, however little they were inclined to. ‘I thought we could help each other, since we find ourselves in the same position—’

‘The thame?’ Golden’s bloated, blotched and bloodied face loomed close. Calder shrank back, all fear and surprise, while on the inside he was a fisherman who feels the tug on his line. Talk was his battlefield, and most of these fools were as useless on it as he was on a real one. ‘How are we the thame, peathemaker?’

‘Black Dow has his favourites, doesn’t he? And the rest of us have to struggle over the scraps.’

‘Favourith?’ Golden’s battered mouth was giving him a trace of a lisp and every time he slurred a word he looked even more enraged.

‘You led the charge today, while others lagged at the back. You put your life in the balance, were wounded fighting Dow’s battle. And now others are getting the place of honour, in the front line, while you sit at the rear? Wait, in case you’re needed?’ He leaned even closer. ‘My father always admired you. Always told me you were a clever man, a righteous man, the kind who could be relied on.’ It’s amazing how well the most pathetic flattery can work. On enormously vain people especially. Calder knew that well enough. He used to be one.

‘He never told me,’ muttered Golden, though it was plain he wanted to believe it.

‘How could he?’ wheedled Calder. ‘He was King of the Northmen. He didn’t have the luxury of telling men what he really thought.’ Which was just as well, because he’d thought Golden was a puffed-up halfhead, just as Calder did. ‘But I can.’ He just chose not to. ‘There’s no reason you and I need to stand on different sides. That’s what Dow wants, to divide us. So he can share all the power, and the gold, and the glory with the likes of Splitfoot, and Tenways … and Ironhead.’ Golden twitched at the name as if it was a hook tugging at his battered face. Their feud was so big he couldn’t see around it, the idiot. ‘We don’t need to let that happen.’ Almost a lover’s whisper, and Calder risked slipping his hand gently onto Golden’s shoulder. ‘Together, you and I could do great things—’

‘Enough!’ mumbled Golden through his split lips, slapping away Calder’s hand. ‘Peddle your lieth elthewhere!’ But Calder could smell the doubt as Golden turned away, and a little doubt was all he was after. If you can’t make your enemies trust you, you can at least make them mistrust each other. Patience, his father would have told him, patience. He allowed himself a smirk as Golden and his men stomped off into the night. He was just sowing seeds. Time would bring the harvest. If he lived long enough to swing the scythe.

Lord Governor Meed gave Finree one last disapproving frown before leaving her alone with her father. He clearly could not stand anyone being in a position of power over him, especially a woman. But if he supposed she would give him a lacklustre report behind his back, he had profoundly underestimated her.

‘Meed is a primping dunce,’ she shot over her shoulder. ‘He’ll be as much use on a battlefield as a two-copper whore.’ She thought about it a moment. ‘Actually, I’m not being fair. The whore at least might improve morale. Meed is about as inspiring as a mouldy flannel. Just as well for him you called off the siege of Ollensand before it turned into a complete fiasco.’

She was surprised to see her father had dropped into a chair behind a travelling desk, head in his hands. He looked suddenly like a different man. Shrunken, and tired, and old. ‘I lost a thousand men today, Fin. And a thousand more wounded.’

‘Jalenhorm lost them.’

‘Every man in this army is my responsibility. I lost them. A thousand of them. A number, easily said. Now rank them up. Ten, by ten, by ten. See how many there are?’ He grimaced into the corner as though it was stacked high with bodies. ‘Every one a father, a husband, a brother, a son. Every life lost a hole I can never fill, a debt I can never repay.’ He stared through his spread fingers at her with red-rimmed eyes. ‘Finree, I lost a thousand men.’

She took a step or two closer to him. ‘Jalenhorm lost them.’

‘Jalenhorm is a good man.’

‘That’s not enough.’

‘It’s something.’

‘You should replace him.’

‘You have to put some trust in your officers, or they’ll never be worthy of it.’

‘Is it possible for that advice to be as lame as it sounds?’

They frowned at each other for a moment, then her father waved it away. ‘Jalenhorm is an old friend of the king, and the king is most particular about his old friends. Only the Closed Council can replace him.’

She was by no means out of suggestions. ‘Replace Meed, then. The man’s a danger to everyone in the army and a good few who aren’t. Leave him in charge for long and today’s disaster will soon be forgotten. Buried under one much worse.’

Her father sighed. ‘And who would I put in his place?’

‘I have the perfect man in mind. A very fine young officer.’

‘Good teeth?’

‘As it happens, and high born to a fault, and vigorous, brave, loyal and diligent.’

‘Such men often come with fearsomely ambitious wives.’

‘Especially this one.’

He rubbed his eyes. ‘Finree, Finree, I’ve already done everything possible in getting him the position he has. In case you’ve forgotten, his father—’

‘Hal is not his father. Some of us surpass our parents.’

He let that go, though it looked as if it took some effort. ‘Be realistic, Fin. The Closed Council don’t trust the nobility, and his family was the first among them, a heartbeat from the crown. Be patient.’

‘Huh,’ she snorted, at realism and patience both.

‘If you want a higher place for your husband—’ She opened her mouth but he raised his voice and talked over her. ‘—you’ll need a more powerful patron than me. But if you want my advice – I know you don’t, but still – you’ll do without. I’ve sat on the Closed Council, at the very heart of government, and I can tell you power is a bloody mirage. The closer you seem to get the further away it is. So many demands to balance. So many pressures to endure. All the consequences of every decision weighing on you … small wonder the king never makes any. I never thought I would look forward to retirement, but perhaps without any power I can actually get something done.’

She was not ready to retire. ‘Do we really have to wait for Meed to cause some catastrophe?’

He frowned up at her. ‘Yes. Really. And then for the Closed Council to write to me demanding his replacement and telling me who it will be. Providing they don’t replace me first, of course.’

‘Who would they find to replace you?’

‘I imagine General Mitterick would not turn down the appointment.’

‘Mitterick is a vainglorious backbiter with the loyalty of a cuckoo.’

‘He should suit the Closed Council perfectly, then.’

‘I don’t know how you can stand him.’

‘I used to think I had all the answers myself, in my younger days. I maintain a guilty sympathy with those who still labour under the illusion.’ He gave her a significant look. ‘They are not few in number.’

‘And I suppose it’s a woman’s place to simper on the sidelines and cheer as idiots rack up the casualties?’

‘We all find ourselves cheering for idiots from time to time, that’s a fact of life. There really is no point heaping scorn on my subordinates. If a person is worthy of contempt, they’ll bury themselves soon enough without help.’

‘Very well.’ She did not plan to wait that long, but it was plain she would do no more good here. Her father had enough to worry about, and she was supposed to be lifting his spirits rather than weighing them down. Her eye fell on the squares board, still set out in the midst of their last game.

‘You still have the board set?’

‘Of course.’

‘Then …’ She had been planning her move ever since she last saw him, but made it as if it had only just occurred to her, brushing the piece forward with a shrug.

Her father looked up in that indulgent way he used to when she was a girl. ‘Are you entirely sure about that?’

She sighed. ‘It’s as good as another.’

He reached for a piece, and paused. His eyes darted around the board, hand hovering. His smile faded. He slowly withdrew the hand, touched one finger to his bottom lip. Then he started to smile. ‘Why, you—’

‘Something to take your mind off the casualties.’

‘I have Black Dow for that. Not to mention the First of the Magi and his colleagues.’ He sourly shook his head. ‘Are you staying here tonight? I could find you a—’

‘I should be with Hal.’

‘Of course. Of course you should.’ She bent and kissed him on the forehead, and he closed his eyes, held her shoulder for a moment. ‘Be careful tomorrow. I’d sooner lose ten thousand than lose you.’

‘You won’t shake me off that easily.’ She headed for the door. ‘I mean to live to see you get out of that move!’

The rain had stopped for the time being and the officers had drifted back to their units. All except one.

It looked as if Bremer dan Gorst had been caught between leaning nonchalantly against the rail their horses were tied to or standing proudly straight, and had ended up posed awkwardly in no-man’s-land between the two.

Even so, Finree could not think of him as quite the harmless figure she once had, when they used to share brief and laughably formal conversations in the sunny gardens of the Agriont. Only a graze down the side of his face gave any indication that he had been in action at all that day, and yet she had it from Captain Hardrick that he had charged alone into a legion of Northmen and killed six. When she heard the story from Colonel Brint it had become ten. Who knew what story the enlisted men were telling by now? The pommel of his steel glinted faintly as he straightened, and she realised with an odd cold thrill that he had killed men with that sword, only a few hours before. Several men, whichever story you believed. It should not have raised him in her estimation in the least, and yet it did, very considerably. He had acquired the glamour of violence.

‘Bremer. Are you waiting for my father?’

‘I thought …’ in that strangely incongruous, piping voice of his, and then, slightly lower, ‘you might need an escort.’

She smiled. ‘So there are still some heroes left in the world? Lead the way.’

Calder sat in the damp darkness, a long spit from the shit-pits, listening to other men celebrate Black Dow’s victory. He didn’t like admitting it, but he missed Seff. He missed the warmth and safety of her bed. He certainly missed the scent of her as the breeze picked up and wafted the smell of dung under his nose. But in all this chaos of campfires, drunken singing, drunken boasting, drunken wrestling, there was only one place he could think of where you could be sure of catching a man alone. And treachery needs privacy.

He heard heavy footsteps thumping towards the pit. Their maker was no more than a black outline with orange firelight down the edges, the very faintest grey planes of a face, but even so Calder recognised him. There were few men, even in this company, who were quite so wide. Calder stood, stretching out his stiff legs, and walked up to the edge of the pit beside the newcomer, wrinkling his nose. Pits full of shit, and pits full of corpses. That’s all war left behind, as far as he could see.

‘Cairm Ironhead,’ he said quietly. ‘What are the chances?’

‘My, my.’ The sound of spittle sucked from the back of a mouth, then sent spinning into the hole. ‘Prince Calder, this is an honour. Thought you were camped over to the west with your brother.’

‘I am.’

‘My pits smell sweeter than his, do they?’

‘Not much.’

‘Come to measure cocks with me, then? It ain’t how much you’ve got, you know, but what you do with it.’

‘You could say the same about strength.’

‘Or guile.’ Nothing else but silence. Calder didn’t like a silent man. A boastful man like Golden, an angry man like Tenways, even a savage man like Black Dow, they give you something to work with. A quiet man like Ironhead gives nothing. Especially in the dark, where Calder couldn’t even guess at his thoughts.

‘I need your help,’ he tried.

‘Think of running water.’

‘Not with that.’

‘With what, then?’

‘I’ve heard it said Black Dow wants me dead.’

‘More’n I know. But if it’s true, what’s my interest? We don’t all love you as much as you love yourself, Calder.’

‘You’ll have need of allies of your own before too long, and you well know it.’

‘Do I?’

Calder snorted. ‘No fool gets where you are, Ironhead. Black Dow scarcely has more liking for you than me, I think.’

‘No liking? Has he not put me in the place of honour? Front and middle, boy!’

Calder got the unpleasant feeling there was a trace of mocking laughter in Ironhead’s voice. But it was some kind of opening and he had no choice but to charge in with his most scornful chuckle. ‘The place of honour? Black Dow? He turned on the man who spared his life, and stole my father’s chain for himself. The place of honour? He’s done what I’d do to the man I fear most. Put you where you’ll take the brunt of the enemy’s fury. My father always said you were the toughest fighter in the North, and Black Dow knows it. Knows you’ll never back down. He’s put you where your own strength will work against you. And who’s to benefit? Who’s been left out of the fight? Tenways and Golden.’ He’d been hoping for that name to work some magic, but Ironhead didn’t move so much as a hair. ‘They hang back while you, and my brother, and my wife’s father do the fighting. I hope your honour can stop a knife in the back, when it comes.’

There was a grunt. ‘Finally.’

‘Finally what?’

The sound of piss spattering below them. ‘That. You know, Calder, you said it yourself.’

‘Said what?’

‘No fool gets where I am. I’m a long way from convinced Black Dow’s set on my doom or even on yours. But if he is, what help can you offer me? Your father’s praise? That lost most of its worth when he got bested in the High Places, and all the rest when the Bloody-Nine smashed his skull to porridge. Oops.’ Calder felt piss spattering over his boots. ‘Sorry ’bout that. Guess we’re not all as nimble with our cocks as you are. Reckon I’ll stick with Dow, touched though I am by your offer of alliance.’

‘Black Dow’s got nothing to offer but war and the fear men have of him. If he dies there’s nothing left.’ Silence, while Calder wondered if he’d gone a step too far.

‘Huh.’ There was a jingling as Ironhead fastened his belt. ‘Kill him, then. But until you do, find other ears for your lies. Find another piss-pit too, you wouldn’t want to drown in this one.’ Calder was slapped on the back, hard enough to leave him teetering at the brink, waving his arms for balance. When he found it, Ironhead was gone.

Calder stood there for a moment. If talk sows seeds, he wasn’t sure at all what harvest he could expect from this. But that didn’t have to be a bad thing. He’d learned Cairm Ironhead was a subtler man than he appeared. That alone was worth some piss on his boots.

‘One day I’ll sit in Skarling’s Chair,’ Calder whispered into the darkness. ‘And I’ll make you eat my shit, and you’ll tell me nothing ever tasted so sweet.’ That made him feel a little better.

He shook the wet from his boots as best he could, and strutted off into the night.

Rest and Recreation

Finree did not make much noise. Neither did Gorst. But that suited him well enough. Knobs of backbone showed through pale skin, thin muscles in her hunched shoulders tensing and relaxing, an unsightly ripple going through her arse with every thrust of his hips. He closed his eyes. In his head it was prettier.

They were in her husband’s tent. Or no. That wasn’t working. My quarters in the palace. The ones he used to have when he was the king’s First Guard. Yes. That was better. Nice feel, they’d had. Airy. Or maybe her father’s headquarters? On his desk? In front of the other officers at a briefing? Hell, no. Urgh. His quarters in the palace were easiest, familiar from a thousand well-worn fantasies in which the Closed Council had never stripped him of his position.

I love you, I love you, I love you. It hardly felt like love, though. It hardly felt like much of anything. Certainly nothing beautiful. A mechanical action. Like winding a clock or peeling a carrot or milking a cow. How long had he been at it now? His hips were aching, his stomach was aching, his back and his shoulder were bruised as a trampled apple from the fight in the shallows. Slap, slap, slap, skin on skin. He bared his teeth, gripping hard at her hips, forcing himself back to his airy quarters at the palace …

Getting there, getting there, getting there—

‘Are you nearly done?’

Gorst stopped dead, snatched to reality with an icy shock. Nothing like Finree’s voice. The side of her face turned towards him, gleaming damply in the light of the one candle, the dimple of an old acne scar inadequately covered by thick powder. Nothing like Finree’s face. All his thrusting seemed to have made little impression. She might have been a baker asking his apprentice if the pies were done.

His rasping breath echoed back from the canvas. ‘I thought I told you not to talk.’

‘I’ve a queue.’

So much for nearly there. His cock was already wilting. He struggled to his feet, sore head brushing against the ceiling of the tent. She was one of the cleaner ones, but still the air had a cloying feel. Too much sweat and breath, and other things, inadequately smothered by cheap flower-water. He wondered how many other men had already been through here tonight, how many more would come through. He wondered if they pretended they were somewhere else, she was someone else. Does she pretend that we are someone else? Does she care? Does she hate us? Or are we a procession of clocks to be wound, carrots to be peeled, cows to be milked?

She had her back to him, shrugging her dress on so she could shrug it off again. He felt as if he was suffocating. He dragged his trousers up and fumbled his belt shut. He tossed coins on a wooden box without counting, tore his way out through the flap into the night and stood there, eyes closed, breathing the damp air and swearing never to do this again. Again.

One of the pimps stood outside, apparently unbothered by the water gently dripping from the brim of his hat, with that knowing and slightly threatening smile they have to wear like uniforms. ‘Everything to your liking?’

My liking? I seem unable even to come in the allotted time. Most men are capable of that level of social interaction, at least, if no other, are they not? What am I, that I must debase and ruin even the one decent emotion I have? If one can call an entirely unhealthy obsession with another man’s wife decent. I don’t suppose one can. Well, probably he could.

Gorst looked at the man. Really looked, right in his eyes. Through that empty smile to the greed, and ruthlessness, and limitless boredom behind.

My liking? Shall I guffaw, and hug you like a brother? Hug you and hug you and twist your head all the way around, and your stupid fucking hat with it? If I beat your face until it has no bones in it, if I crush your scrawny throat with my hands, will that be a loss to the world, do you think? Will anyone even notice? Would I even notice? Would it be an evil deed, or a good? One less worm to get fat burrowing through the shit of the king’s glorious army?

Gorst’s mask must have slipped for a moment, or perhaps the man was more attuned by years of practice to hints of violence in a face than the cultured members of Jalenhorm’s staff and Kroy’s headquarters. His eyes narrowed and he took a cautious step back, one hand straying towards his belt.

Gorst found himself hoping the man would pull out a blade, excitement flaring briefly at the thought of seeing steel. Is that all that excites me now? Death? Facing it and causing it? Did he even feel the slightest renewed stirring in his sore groin at the possibility of violence? But the pimp only stood there, watching.

‘Everything is fine.’ And Gorst trudged past, boots squelching in the muck, away between the tents and into the mad carnival that sprang up behind the lines, as if by magic, whenever the army stopped for more than a couple of hours together. As full of bustle and variety as any market of the Thousand Isles, as full of blinding colour and choking fragrance as any Dagoskan bazaar, every need, taste or whim catered for a dozen times over.

Fawning merchants held swatches of bright cloth against officers too drunk to stand. Armourers battered out a shattering anvil music while salesmen demonstrated the strength, sharpness or beauty of wares nimbly replaced with trash when the money was handed over. A major with a bristling moustache sat frozen in double-chinned belligerence while a painter dashed off a shoddy representation by candlelight. Joyless laughter and meaningless babble hammered at Gorst’s aching head. Everything the best, the finest, the bespoke and renowned.

‘The new self-sharpening sheath!’ someone roared. ‘Self-sharpening!’

‘Advances to officers! Loans at first-rate rates!’

‘Suljuk girls here! Best fuckery you’ll ever get!’

‘Flowers!’ in a voice somewhere between song and scream. ‘For your wife! For your daughter! For your lover! For your whore!’

‘For pet or pot!’ a woman shrieked, thrusting up a bemused puppy. ‘For pet or pot!’

Children old long before their time darted through the crowd offering polishing or prophecy, sharpening or shaving, grooming or gravedigging. Offering anything and everything that could be bought or paid for. A girl whose age could not be reckoned slipped all around Gorst in a capering dance, bare feet mud-caked to the knee. Suljuk, Gurkish, Styrian, who knew of what mongrel derivation. ‘Like this?’ she cooed, gesturing at a stick upon which samples of gold braid were stapled.

Gorst felt a sudden choking need to weep, and gave her a sad smile, and shook his head. She spat at his feet, and was gone. A pair of elderly ladies stood at the flap of a dripping tent, handing out printed papers extolling the virtues of temperance and sobriety to illiterate soldiers who had already left them trampled in the mud for a half-mile in every direction, worthy lessons gently erased by the rain.

A few more steps, each an unimaginable effort, and Gorst stopped in the track, alone in the midst of all that crowd. Cursing soldiers slopped through the mud around him, all stranded like him with their petty despairs, all shopping like him for what cannot be bought. He looked up, open-mouthed, rain tickling his tongue. Hoping for guidance, perhaps, but the stars were shrouded in cloud. They light the happy way for better men. Harod dan Brock, and his like. Shoulders and elbows knocked and jostled him. Someone help me, please.

But who?

‘You can’t say that civilisation don’t advance,

however, for in every war they kill you in a new way’

Will Rogers

Dawn

When Craw dragged himself from his bed, cold and clammy as a drowned man’s grave, the sun was no more’n a smear of mud-brown in the blackness of the eastern sky. He fumbled his sword through the clasp at his belt then stretched, creaked and grunted through his morning routine of working out exactly how much everything hurt. His aching jaw he could blame on Hardbread and his lads, his aching legs on a lengthy jog across some fields and up a hill followed by a night huddled in the wind, but the bastard of a headache he’d have to take the blame for himself. He’d had a drink or two or even a few more last night, softening the loss of the fallen, toasting the luck of the living.

Most of the dozen were already gathered about the pile of damp wood that on a happier day would’ve been a fire. Drofd was bent over it, cursing softly while he failed to get it lit. Cold breakfast, then.

‘Oh, for a roof,’ whispered Craw as he limped over.

‘I slice the bread thin, d’you see?’ Whirrun had the Father of Swords gripped between his knees with a hand’s length drawn, and now he was rubbing loaf against blade with ludicrous care, like a carpenter chiselling at a vital joint.

‘Sliced bread?’ Wonderful turned away from the black valley to watch him. ‘Can’t see it catching on, can you?’

Yon spat over his shoulder. ‘Either way, could you bloody get on with it? I’m hungry.’

Whirrun ignored ’em. ‘Then, when I’ve got two cut,’ and he dropped a pale slab of cheese on one slice then slapped the other on top like he was catching a fly, ‘I trap the cheese between them, and there you have it!’

‘Bread and cheese.’ Yon weighed the half-loaf in one hand and the cheese in the other. ‘Just the same as I’ve got.’ And he bit a lump off the cheese and tossed it to Scorry.

Whirrun sighed. ‘Have none of you no vision?’ He held up his masterpiece to such light as there was, which was almost none. ‘This is no more bread and cheese than a fine axe is wood and iron, or a live person is meat and hair.’

‘What is it, then?’ asked Drofd, rocking back from his wet wood and tossing the flint aside in disgust.

‘A whole new thing. A forging of the humble parts of bread and cheese into a greater whole. I call it … a cheese-trap.’ Whirrun took a dainty nibble from one corner. ‘Oh, yes, my friends. This tastes like … progress. Works with ham, too. Works with anything.’

‘You should try it with a turd,’ said Wonderful.

Drofd laughed up snot but Whirrun hardly seemed to notice. ‘This is the thing about war. Forces men to do new things with what they have. Forces them to think new ways. No war, no progress.’ He leaned back on one elbow. ‘War, d’you see, is like the plough that keeps the earth rich, like the fire that clears the fields, like—’

‘The shit that makes the flowers grow?’ asked Wonderful.

‘Exactly!’ Whirrun pointed at her sharply with his whole new thing and the cheese fell out into the unlit fire. Wonderful near fell over from laughing. Yon snorted so hard he blew bread out of his nose. Even Scorry stopped his singing to have a high chuckle. Craw laughed along, and it felt good. Felt like too long since the last time. Whirrun frowned at his two flapping slices of bread. ‘Don’t think I trapped it tight enough.’ And he shoved ’em in his mouth all at once and started rooting through the damp twigs for the cheese.

‘Union showed any sign of moving?’ asked Craw.

‘None that we’ve seen.’ Yon squinted up at the stains of brightness in the east. ‘Dawn’s on the march, though. Reckon we’ll see more soon.’

‘Best get Brack up,’ said Craw. ‘He’ll be pissy all day if he misses breakfast.’

‘Aye, Chief.’ And Drofd trotted off to where the hillman was sleeping.

Craw pointed down at the Father of Swords, short stretch of grey blade drawn. ‘Don’t it have to be blooded now?’

‘Maybe crumbs count,’ said Wonderful.

‘Alas, they don’t.’ Whirrun brushed the heel of his hand against its edge, then wiped it with his last bit of crust and slid the sword gently back into its scabbard. ‘Progress can be painful,’ he muttered, sucking the cut.

‘Chief?’ Far as Craw could tell in the gloom, and with Drofd’s hair blown across his face by the wind, the lad looked worried. ‘Don’t reckon Brack wants to get up.’

‘We’ll see.’ Craw strode over to him, a big shape swaddled up on his side, shadow pooling in the folds of his blanket. ‘Brack.’ He poked him with the toe of his boot. ‘Brack?’ The tattooed side of Brack’s face was all beaded with dew. Craw put his hand on it. Cold. Didn’t feel like a person at all. Meat and hair, like Whirrun said.

‘Up you get, Brack, you fat hog,’ snapped Wonderful. ‘Before Yon eats all your—’

‘Brack’s dead,’ said Craw.

*

Finree could not have said how long she had been awake, sitting on her travelling chest at the window with her arms resting on the cold sill and her chin resting on her wrists. Long enough to watch the ragged line of the fells to the north become distinct from the sky, for the quick-flowing river to emerge glittering from the mist, for the forests to the east to take on the faintest texture. Now, if she squinted, she could pick out the jagged top of the fence around Osrung, a light twinkling at the window of a single tower. In the few hundred strides of black farmland between her and the town a ragged curve of flickering torches marked out the Union positions.

A little more light in the sky, a little more detail in the world, and Lord Governor Meed’s men would be rushing from those trenches and towards the town. The strong right fist of her father’s army. She bit down on the tip of her tongue, so hard it was painful. Excited and afraid at once.

She stretched, looking over her shoulder into the cobwebby little room. She had made a desultory effort at cleaning but had to admit she was pathetic as a homemaker. She wondered what had become of the owners of the inn. Wondered what its name was, even. She thought she had seen a pole over the gate, but the sign was gone. That’s what war does. Strips people and places of their identities and turns them into enemies in a line, positions to be taken, resources to be foraged. Anonymous things that can be carelessly crushed, and stolen, and burned without guilt. War is hell, and all that. But full of opportunities.

She crossed to the bed, or the straw-filled mattress they were sharing, and leaned down over Hal, studying his face. He looked young, eyes closed and mouth open, cheek squashed against the sheet, breath whistling in his nose. Young, and innocent, and ever so slightly stupid.

‘Hal,’ she whispered, and sucked gently at his top lip. His eyelids fluttered open and he stretched back, arms above his head, craned up to kiss her, then saw the window and the glimmer of light in the sky.

‘Damn it!’ He threw the blankets back and scrambled out of bed. ‘You should’ve woken me sooner.’ He splashed water from the cracked bowl onto his face and rubbed it with a cloth, started pulling yesterday’s trousers on.

‘You’ll still be early,’ she said, leaning back on her elbows and watching him dress.

‘I have to be twice as early. You know I do.’

‘You looked so peaceful. I didn’t have the heart to wake you.’

‘I’m supposed to be helping coordinate the attack.’

‘I suppose someone has to.’

He froze for a moment with his shirt over his head, then pulled it down. ‘Perhaps … you should stay at your father’s headquarters today, up on the fell. Most of the other wives have already headed back to Uffrith.’

‘If we could only pack Meed off along with the rest of the clothes-obsessed old women, perhaps we’d have a chance of victory.’

Hal soldiered on. ‘There’s only you and Aliz dan Brint, now, and I worry about you—’

He was painfully transparent. ‘You worry that I’ll make a scene with your incompetent commanding officer, you mean.’

‘That too. Where’s my—’

She kicked his sword rattling across the boards and he had to stoop to retrieve it. ‘It’s a shame, that a man like you should have to take orders from a man like Meed.’

‘The world is full of shameful things. That’s a long way from the worst.’

‘Something really should be done about him.’

Hal was still busy fumbling with his sword-belt. ‘There’s nothing to be done but to make the best of it.’

‘Well … someone could mention the mess he’s making to the king.’

‘You may not be aware of this, but my father and the king had a minor falling out. I don’t stand very high in his Majesty’s favour.’

‘Your good friend Colonel Brint does.’

Hal looked up sharply. ‘Fin. That’s low.’

‘Who cares how high it is if it helps you get what you deserve?’

‘I care,’ he snapped, dragging the buckle closed. ‘You get on by doing the right thing. By hard work, and loyalty, and doing as you’re told. You don’t get on by … by …’

‘By what?’

‘Whatever it is you’re doing.’

She felt a sudden, powerful urge to hurt him. She wanted to say she could easily have married a man with a father who wasn’t the most infamous traitor of his generation. She wanted to point out he only had the place he had now through her father’s patronage and her constant wheedling, and that left to his own devices he’d have been demonstrating hard work and loyalty as a poor lieutenant in a provincial regiment. She wanted to tell him he was a good man, but the world was not the way good people thought it was. Fortunately, he got in first.

‘Fin, I’m sorry. I know you want what’s best for us. I know you’ve done a lot for me already. I don’t deserve you. Just … let me do things my way. Please. Just promise me you won’t do anything … rash.’

‘I promise.’ She’d make sure whatever she did was well thought out. That or she’d just break her promise. She didn’t take them terribly seriously.

He smiled, somewhat relieved, and bent to kiss her. She returned it halfheartedly, but then, when she felt his shoulders slump, remembered he’d be in danger today, and she pinched his cheek and shook it about. ‘I love you.’ That was why she had come up here, no? Why she was slogging through the mud along with the soldiers? To be with him. To support him. To steer him in the right direction. The Fates knew, he needed it.

‘I love you more,’ he said.

‘It’s not a competition.’

‘No?’ And he went out, pulling on his jacket. She loved Hal. Really she did. But if she waited for him to get what they deserved through honesty and good nature she’d be waiting until the sky fell in.

And she did not plan to live out her days as some colonel’s wife.

Corporal Tunny had long ago acquired a reputation as the fiercest sleeper in his Majesty’s army. He could sleep on anything, in any situation, and wake in an instant ready for action or, better still, to avoid it. He’d slept through the whole assault at Ulrioch in the lead trench fifty strides from the breach, then woken just in time to hop between the corpses as the fighting petered out and snatch as fine a share of the booty as anyone who actually drew steel that day.

So a patch of waterlogged forest in the midst of a spotty drizzle with nothing but a smelly oilskin over his head was good as a feather bed to him. His recruits weren’t anywhere near so tough in the eyelids, though. Tunny snapped awake in the chill gloom around dawn, back against a tree and the regimental standard in one fist, and nudged his oilskin up with one finger to see the two men he had left hunched over the damp ground.

‘Like this?’ Yolk was squeaking.

‘No,’ whispered Worth. ‘Tinder under there, then strike it like—’

Tunny was up in a flash, stomped down hard on their pile of slimy sticks and crushed it flat. ‘No fires, idiots, if the enemy miss the flames they’ll see the smoke for sure!’ Not that Yolk would’ve got that pitiable collection of soaked rot lit in ten years of trying. He wasn’t even holding the flint properly.

‘How we going to cook our bacon, though, Corporal?’ Worth held up his skillet, a pale and unappetising slice lying limp inside.

‘You’re not.’

‘We’ll eat it raw?’

‘Can’t advise it,’ said Tunny, ‘especially not to you, Worth, given the sensitivity of your intestines.’

‘My what?’

‘Your dodgy guts.’

His shoulders slumped. ‘What do we eat, then?’

‘What have you got?’

‘Nothing.’

‘That’s what you’re eating, then. Unless you can find something better.’ Even considering he’d been woken before dawn, Tunny was unusually grumpy. He had a lurking sense he had something to be very annoyed about, but wasn’t sure what. Until he remembered the dirty water closing over Klige’s face, and kicked Yolk’s embarrassment of a fire away into the dripping brush.

‘Colonel Vallimir came up a while ago,’ murmured Yolk, as though that was the very thing Tunny needed to lift his spirits.

‘Wonderful,’ he hissed. ‘Maybe we can eat him.’

‘Might be some food came up with him.’

Tunny snorted. ‘All officers ever bring up is trouble, and our boy Vallimir’s the worst kind.’

‘Stupid?’ muttered Worth.

‘Clever,’ said Tunny. ‘And ambitious. The kind of officer climbs to a promotion over the bodies of the common man.’

‘Are we the common man?’ asked Yolk.

Tunny stared at him. ‘You are the fucking definition.’ Yolk even looked pleased about it. ‘No sign of Latherliver yet?’

‘Lederlingen, Corporal Tunny.’

‘I know his name, Worth. I choose to mispronounce it because it amuses me.’ He puffed out his cheeks. His standard for amusement really had plummeted since this campaign got underway.

‘Haven’t seen him,’ said Yolk, gazing sadly at that forlorn slice of bacon.

‘That’s something, at least.’ Then, when the two lads looked blankly at him. ‘Leperlover went to tell the tin-soldier pushers where we are. Chances are he’ll be the one bringing the orders back.’

‘What orders?’ asked Yolk.

‘How the hell should I know what orders? But any orders is a bad thing.’ Tunny frowned off towards the treeline. He couldn’t see much through the thicket of trunk, branch, shadow and mist, but he could just hear the sound of the distant stream, swollen with half the drizzle that had fallen last night. The other half felt like it was in his underwear. ‘Might even be an order to attack. Cross that stream and hit the Northmen in the flank.’

Worth carefully set his pan down, pressing at his stomach. ‘Corporal, I think—’

‘Well, I don’t want you doing it here, do I?’

Worth dashed off into the shadowy brush, already fumbling with his belt. Tunny sat back against his trunk, slipped out Yolk’s flask and took the smallest nip.

Yolk licked his pale lips. ‘Could I—’

‘No.’ Tunny regarded the recruit through narrowed eyes as he took another. ‘Unless you’ve something to pay with.’ Silence. ‘There you go, then.’

‘A tent would be something,’ whispered Yolk in a voice almost too soft to hear.

‘It would, but they’re with the horses, and the king has seen fit to supply his loyal soldiers with a new and spectacularly inefficient type which leaks at every seam.’ Leading, as it happened, to a profitable market in the old type in which Tunny had already twice turned a handsome profit. ‘How would you pitch one here anyway?’ And he wriggled back against his tree so the bark scratched his itchy shoulder blades.

‘What should we do?’ asked Yolk.

‘Nothing whatsoever, trooper. Unless specifically and precisely instructed otherwise, a good soldier always does nothing.’ In a narrow triangle between black branches, the sky was starting to show the faintest sickly tinge of light. Tunny winced, and closed his eyes. ‘The thing folks at home never realise about war is just how bloody boring it is.’

And like that he was asleep again.

Calder’s dream was the same one as always.

Skarling’s Hall in Carleon, dim with shadows, sound of the river outside the tall windows. Years ago, when his father was King of the Northmen. He was watching his younger self, sitting in Skarling’s Chair and smirking. Smirking down at Forley the Weakest, all bound up, Bad-Enough standing over him with his axe out.

Calder knew it for a dream, but he felt the same freezing dread as ever. He was trying to shout, but his mouth was all stopped up. He was trying to move, but he was bound as tight as Forley. Bound by what he’d done, and what he hadn’t.

‘What shall we do?’ asked Bad-Enough.

And Calder said, ‘Kill him.’

He woke with a jolt as the axe came down, floundering with his blankets. The room was fizzing black. There was none of that warm wash of relief you get when you wake from a nightmare. It had happened. Calder swung from his bed, rubbing at his sweaty temples. He’d given up on being a good man long ago, hadn’t he?

Then why did he still dream like one?

‘Peace?’ Calder looked up with a start, heart jumping at his ribs. There was a great shape in the chair in the corner. A blacker shape than the darkness. ‘It was talk of peace got you banished in the first place.’

Calder breathed out. ‘And a good morning to you, brother.’ Scale was wearing his armour, but that was no surprise. Calder was starting to think he slept in it.

‘I thought you were the clever one? At this rate you’ll clever yourself right back into the mud, and me along with you, and so much for our father’s legacy then. Peace? On a day of victory?’

‘Did you see their faces, though? Plenty even at that meet are ready to stop fighting, day of victory or not. There’ll be harder days coming, and when they come more and more will see it our way—’

‘Your way,’ snapped Scale, ‘I’ve a battle to fight. A man doesn’t get to be reckoned a hero by talking.’

Calder could hardly keep the contempt out of his voice. ‘Maybe what the North needs is fewer heroes and more thinkers. More builders. Maybe our father’s remembered for his battles, but his legacy is the roads he laid, the fields he cleared, the towns, and the forges, and the docks, and the—’

‘He built the roads to march his armies on. He cleared the fields to feed them. The towns bred soldiers, the forges made swords, the docks brought in weapons.’

‘Our father fought because he had to, not because he—’

‘This is the North!’ bellowed Scale, voice making the little room ring. ‘Everyone has to fight!’ Calder swallowed, suddenly unsure of himself and ever so slightly scared. ‘Whether they want to or not. Sooner or later, everyone has to fight.’

Calder licked his lips, not ready to admit defeat. ‘Our father preferred to get what he wanted with words. Men listened to—’

‘Men listened because they knew he had iron in him!’ Scale smashed the arm of his chair with his fist, wood cracking, struck it again and broke it off, sent it clattering across the boards. ‘Do you know what I remember him telling me? “Get what you can with words, because words are free, but the words of an armed man ring that much sweeter. So when you talk, bring your sword.”’ He stood, and tossed something across the room. Calder squeaked, half-caught it, half-hit painfully in the chest by it. Heavy and hard, metal gleaming faintly. His sheathed sword. ‘Come outside.’ Scale loomed over him. ‘And bring your sword.’

It was hardly any lighter outside the ramshackle farmhouse. Just the first smear of dawn in the heavy eastern sky, picking out the Heroes on their hilltop in solemn black. The wind was coming up keen, whipping drizzle in Calder’s eyes, sweeping waves through the barley and making him hug himself tight. A scarecrow danced a mad jig on a pole near the house, torn gloves endlessly beckoning for a partner. Clail’s Wall was a chest-high heap of moss running through the fields from beyond a rise on their right to a good way up the steep flank of the Heroes. Scale’s men were huddled in its lee, most still swaddled in blankets, exactly where Calder wished he was. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen the world this early and it was an even uglier place than usual.

Scale pointed south, through a gap in the wall and down a rough track scarred with puddles. ‘Half the men are hidden in sight of the Old Bridge. When the Union try to cross, we’ll stop the bastards.’

Calder didn’t want to deny it, of course, but he had to ask. ‘How many Union on the other side of the river now?’

‘A lot.’ Scale looked at him as if daring him to say something. Calder only scratched his head. ‘You’re staying back here, with Pale-as-Snow and the rest of the men, behind Clail’s Wall.’ Calder nodded. Staying behind a wall sounded like his kind of job. ‘Sooner or later, though, chances are I’ll need your help. When I send for it, come forward. We’ll fight together.’ Calder winced into the wind. That sounded less like his kind of job. ‘I can trust you to do that, right?’

Calder frowned sideways. ‘Of course.’ Prince Calder, a byword for trustiness. ‘I won’t let you down.’ Brave, bold, good Prince Calder.

‘Whatever we’ve lost, we’ve got each other still.’ Scale put his big hand on Calder’s shoulder. ‘It’s not easy, is it? Being a great man’s son. You’d have thought it would come with all kinds of advantages – with borrowed admiration, and respect. But it’s only as easy as it is for the seeds of a great tree, trying to grow in its choking shadow. Not many make it to the sunlight for themselves.’

‘Aye.’ Calder didn’t mention that being a great man’s younger son was twice the trial. Then you’ve two trees to take the axe to before you can spread your leaves in the sunshine.

Scale nodded up towards Skarling’s Finger. A few fires still twinkled on the flanks of the hill where Tenways’ men had their camps. ‘If we can’t hold up, Brodd Tenways is meant to be helping.’

Calder raised his brows. ‘I’ll expect Skarling himself to ride to my aid before I count on that old bastard.’

‘Then it’s you and me. We might not always agree, but we’re family.’ Scale held out his hand, and Calder took it.

‘Family.’ Half-family, anyway.

‘Good luck, brother.’

‘And to you.’ Half-brother. Calder watched Scale swing up onto his horse and spur off sharply down that track towards the Old Bridge.

‘Got a feeling you’ll need more’n luck today, your Highness.’ Foss Deep was under the dripping ruins of a porch beside the house, his weathered clothes and his weathered face fading into the weathered wall behind.

‘I don’t know.’ Shallow sat wrapped in a grey blanket so only his grinning head showed, disembodied. ‘The biggest mountain of best luck ever might do it.’

Calder turned away from them in sulky silence, frowning across the fields to the south. He’d a feeling they might have the truth of it.

Theirs wasn’t the only bit of earth being turned over. Few other wounded men must’ve died in the night. You could see the little groups, hunched in the drizzle with sorrow, or more likely self-pity, which looks about the same and serves just as well at a funeral. You could hear the Chiefs trotting out their empty babble, all aiming at that same sorry tone. Splitfoot was one, standing over the grave of one of Dow’s Named Men not twenty paces distant, giving it the moist eye. No sign of Dow himself, mind you. Moist eyes weren’t really his style.

Meanwhile the ordinary business of the day got started like the burial parties were ghosts themselves, invisible. Men grumbling as they crawled from wet beds, cursing at damp clothes, rubbing down damp weapons and armour, searching out food, pissing, scratching, sucking the last drops from last night’s bottles, comparing trophies stole from the Union, chuckling over one joke or another. Chuckling too loud because they all knew there’d be more dark work today and chuckles had to be grabbed where they could be.

Craw looked at the others, all with heads bowed. All except Whirrun, who was arching back, hugging the Father of Swords in his folded arms, letting the rain patter on his tongue. Craw was a little annoyed by that, and a little jealous of it. He wished he was known as a madman and didn’t have to go through the empty routines. But there’s a right way of doing things, and for him there was no dodging it.

‘What makes a man a hero?’ he asked the wet air. ‘Big deeds? Big name? Tall glory and tall songs? No. Standing by your crew, I reckon.’ Whirrun grunted his agreement, then stuck his tongue out again. ‘Brack-i-Dayn, come down from the hills fifteen years ago, fought beside me fourteen of ’em, and always thought of his crew ’fore himself. Lost count on the number o’ times that big bastard saved my life. Always had a kind word, or a funny one. Think he even made Yon laugh one time.’

‘Twice,’ said Yon, face harder’n ever. Got any harder he’d be knocking lumps from the Heroes with it.

‘He made no complaints. Except not enough to eat.’ Craw’s voice went for a moment and he gave a kind of squeaky croak. Stupid bloody noise for a Chief to make, ’specially at a time like this. He cleared his throat and hammered on. ‘Never enough for Brack to eat. He died … peaceful. Reckon he’d have liked that, even if he loved a good fight. Dying in your sleep is a long stretch better’n dying with steel in your guts, whatever the songs say.’

‘Fuck the songs,’ said Wonderful.

‘Aye. Fuck ’em. Don’t know who’s buried under here, really. But if it’s Skarling his self he should be proud to share some earth with Brack-i-Dayn.’ Craw curled his lips back. ‘And if not, fuck him too. Back to the mud, Brack.’ He knelt, not having to try too hard to look in pain since his kneecap felt like it was going to pop off, clawed up a fistful of damp black soil and shook it out again over the rest.

‘Back to the mud,’ muttered Yon.

‘Back to the mud,’ came Wonderful’s echo.

‘Looking on the sunny side,’ said Whirrun, ‘it’s where we’re all headed, one way or another. No?’ He looked about as though expecting that to lift spirits, and when it didn’t, shrugged and turned away.

‘Old Brack’s all done.’ Scorry squatted by the grave, one hand on the wet ground, brow furrowed like at a puzzle he couldn’t work out. ‘Can’t believe it. Good words, though, Chief.’

‘You reckon?’ Craw winced as he stood, slapping the dirt from his hands. ‘I’m not sure how many more o’ these I can stand.’

‘Aye,’ murmured Scorry.

‘I guess those are the times.’

Opening Remarks

‘Get up.’

Beck shoved the foot away, scowling. He didn’t care for a boot in the ribs at any time, but ’specially not from Reft, and ’specially not when it felt like he only just got off to sleep. He’d lain awake in the darkness a long time, thinking on Caul Shivers stabbing that man, turning it over and over as he twisted about under his blanket. Not able to get comfortable. Not with his blanket or with the thought of that little knife poking away. ‘What?’

‘The Union are coming, that’s what.’

Beck tore his blanket back and strode across the garret room, ducking under the low beam, sleep and anger forgotten both at once. He kicked the creaking door of the big cupboard closed, shouldered Brait and Stodder out of the way and stared through one of the narrow windows.

He’d half-expected to see men slaughtering each other outside in the lanes of Osrung, blood flying and flags waving and songs being sung right under his window. But the town was quiet at a first glance. Weren’t much beyond dawn and the rain was flitting down, drawing a greasy haze over the huddled buildings.

Maybe forty strides away across a cobbled square the brown river was churning past, swollen with rain off the fells. The bridge didn’t look much for all the fuss being made of it – a worn stone span barely wide enough for two riders to pass each other. A mill house stood on its right, a row of low houses on its left, shutters open with a few nervy faces at the windows, most looking off to the south, just like Beck. Beyond the bridge a rutted lane led between wattle shacks and up to the fence on the south side of town. He thought he could see men moving there on the walkways, dim through the drizzle. Maybe a couple with flatbows already shooting.

While he was looking, men started hurrying from an alley and into the square below, forming up a shield wall at the north end of the bridge while a man in a fine cloak bellowed at ’em. Carls to the front, ready to lock their painted shields together. Thralls behind, spears ready to bring down.

There was a battle on the way, all right.

‘You should’ve told me sooner,’ he snapped, hurrying back to his blanket and dragging on his boots.

‘Didn’t know sooner,’ said Reft.

‘Here.’ Colving offered Beck a hunk of black bread, his eyes scared circles in his chubby face.

Even the thought of eating made Beck feel sick. He snatched up his sword, then realised he’d nowhere to take it to. Weren’t like he had a place at the fence, or in the shield wall, or anywhere else in particular. He looked towards the stairs, then towards the window, free hand opening and closing. ‘What do we do?’

‘We wait.’ Flood dragged his stiff leg up the steps and into the attic. He’d got his mail on, glistening with drizzle across the shoulders. ‘Reachey’s given us two houses to hold, this and one just across the street. I’ll be in there.’

‘You will?’ Beck realised he’d made himself sound scared, like a child asking his mummy if she was really going to leave him in the dark. ‘You know, some o’ these boys could do with a man to look to—’

‘That’ll have to be you and Reft. You might not believe it, but the lads in the other house are even greener’n you lot.’

‘Right. ’Course.’ Beck had spent the past week chafing at Flood being always around, keeping him back. Now the thought of the old boy going only made him feel more jittery.

‘There’ll be you five and five more in this house. Some other lads from the weapontake. For the time being just set tight. Block up the windows downstairs best you can. Who’s got a bow?’

‘I have,’ said Beck.

‘And me.’ Reft held his up.

‘I’ve got my sling,’ said Colving, hopefully.

‘You any good with it?’ asked Reft.

The boy shook his head sadly. ‘Couldn’t use it at a window, anyway.’

‘Why bring it up, then?’ snapped Beck, fingering his own bow. His palm was all sweaty.

Flood walked to the two narrow windows and pointed towards the river. ‘Maybe we’ll hold ’em at the fence, but if not we’re forming up a shield wall at the bridge. If we don’t hold ’em there, well, anyone with a bow start shooting. Careful, though, don’t go hitting any of our boys in the back, eh? Better not to shoot at all than risk killing our own, and when the blood’s up it can get hard to make out the difference. The rest of you downstairs, ready to keep ’em out of the house if they make it across.’ Stodder chewed at his big bottom lip. ‘Don’t worry. They won’t make it across, and even if they do they’ll be in a right mess. Reachey’ll be getting ready to hit back by then, you can bet on that. So if they try to get in, just keep ’em out ’til help gets here.’

‘Keep ’em out,’ piped Brait, jabbing happily at nothing with his twig of a spear. He didn’t look like he could’ve kept a cat out of a chicken coop with that.

‘Any questions?’ Beck didn’t feel he had a clue what to do, but it hardly seemed one question would plug the gap, so he kept quiet. ‘Right, then. I’ll check back if I can.’ Flood limped to the stairway and was gone. They were on their own. Beck strode to a window again, thinking it was better’n doing nothing, but naught had changed that he could see.

‘They over the fence yet?’ Brait was up on tiptoe, trying to look over Beck’s shoulder. He sounded all excited, eyes bright like a boy on his birthday, waiting to see what his present might be. He sounded a little bit like Beck always thought he’d feel facing battle. But he didn’t feel that way. He felt sick and hot in spite of the damp breeze on his face.

‘No. And ain’t you supposed to be downstairs?’

‘Not ’til they come, I’m not. Don’t get to see this every day, do you?’

Beck brushed him off with an elbow. ‘Just get out of it! Your stink’s making me sick!’

‘All right, all right.’ Brait shambled away, looking hurt, but Beck couldn’t bring up much sympathy. It was the best he could do not to bring up the breakfast he hadn’t had.

Reft was stood at the other window, bow over his shoulder. ‘Thought you’d be happy. Looks like you’ll get your chance to be a hero.’

‘I am happy,’ snapped Beck. And not shitting himself at all.

Meed had established his headquarters in the inn’s common hall, which by the standards of the North was a palatial space, double height and with a gallery at first-floor level. Overnight it had been decorated like a palace too with gaudy hangings, inlaid cupboards, gilded candlesticks and all the pompous trappings one would expect in a lord governor’s own residence, presumably carted half way across the North at monstrous expense. A pair of violinists had set up in the corner and were grinning smugly at each other as they sawed out jaunty chamber music. Three huge oil paintings had even been hoisted into position by Meed’s industrious servants: two renderings of great battles from the Union’s history and, incredibly, a portrait of Meed himself, glowering from on high in antique armour. Finree gaped at it for a moment, hardly knowing whether to laugh or cry.

Large windows faced south into the inn’s weed-colonised courtyard, east across fields dotted with trees towards brooding woods, and north towards the town of Osrung. With all the shutters wide open a chilly breeze drifted through the room, ruffling hair and snatching at papers. Officers clustered about the northern windows, eager to catch a glimpse of the assault, Meed in their midst in a uniform of eye-searing crimson. He glanced sideways as Finree slipped up beside him and gave the slightest sneer of distaste, like a fastidious eater who has spied an insect in his salad. She returned it with a beaming smile.

‘Might I borrow your eyeglass, your Grace?’

He worked his mouth sourly for a moment but was held prisoner by etiquette, and handed it stiffly over. ‘Of course.’

The road curved off to the north, a muddy stripe through muddy fields overflowing with the sprawling camp, tents haphazardly scattered like monstrous fungi sprouted in the night. Beyond them were the earthworks Meed’s men had thrown up in the darkness. Beyond them, through the haze of mist and drizzle, she could just make out the fence around Osrung, perhaps even the suggestion of scaling ladders against it.

Her imagination filled in the blanks. Ranks of marching men ordered forward to the palisade, grim-faced and determined as arrows showered down. The wounded dragged for the rear or left screaming where they lay. Rocks tumbling, ladders shoved from the fence, men butchered as they tried to climb over onto the walkways, thrust screaming back to be dashed on the ground below.

She wondered whether Hal was in the midst of that, playing the hero. For the first time she felt a stab of worry for him, a cold shiver through her shoulders. This was no game. She lowered Meed’s eyeglass, chewing at her lip.

‘Where the hell is the Dogman and his rabble?’ the lord governor was demanding of Captain Hardrick.

‘I believe they were behind us on the road, your Grace. His scouts came upon a burned-out village and the lord marshal gave him leave to investigate. They should be here within an hour or two—’

‘Typical. You can rely on him for a knowing shrug but when the battle begins he is nowhere to be seen.’

‘Northmen are treacherous by nature,’ someone tossed out.

‘Cowardly.’

‘Their presence would only slow us down, your Grace.’

‘That much is true,’ snorted Meed. ‘Order every unit into the attack. I want them overwhelmed. I want that town crushed into the dust and every Northman in it dead or running.’

Finree could not help herself. ‘Surely it would be wise to leave at least one regiment behind? As I understand it, the woods to the east have not been thoroughly—’

‘Do you seriously suppose you will hit upon some scheme by which you will replace me with your husband?’

There was a pause that seemed impossibly long, while Finree wondered if she might be dreaming. ‘I beg your—’

‘He is a pleasant enough man, of course. Brave and honest and all those things housewives like to coo about. But he is a fool and, what is worse, the son of a notorious traitor and the husband of a shrew to boot. His only significant friend is your father, and your father’s days in the sun are numbered in small digits.’ Meed spoke softly, but not so softly that he could not easily be overheard. One young captain’s mouth fell open with surprise. It seemed Meed was not held quite so tightly by the bonds of etiquette as she had supposed.

‘I frustrated an attempt by the Closed Council to prevent me taking my brother’s place as lord governor, did you know that? The Closed Council. Do you really suppose some soldier’s daughter might succeed where they failed? Address me only once again without the proper respect and I will crush you and your husband like the pretty, ambitious, irrelevant lice you are.’ He calmly plucked his eyeglass from her limp hand and looked through it towards Osrung, precisely as if he had never spoken and she did not exist.

Finree should have whipped out some acid rejoinder, but the only thing in her mind was an overpowering urge to smash the front of Meed’s eyeglass with her fist and drive the other end into his skull. The room seemed uncomfortably bright. The violins ripped at her ears. Her face burned as if she had been slapped. All she could do was blink, and meekly retreat. It was as if she floated to the other side of the room without moving her feet. A couple of the officers watched her get there, muttering among themselves, evidently party to her one-sided humiliation and no doubt relishing it too.

‘Are you all right?’ asked Aliz. ‘You look pale.’

‘I am perfectly well.’ Or, in fact, seething with fury. Insulting her was one thing, no doubt she deserved it. Insulting her husband and her father were other things entirely. That she would make the old bastard pay for, she swore it.

Aliz leaned close. ‘What do we do now?’

‘Now? We sit here like good little girls and applaud while idiots stack up the coffins.’

‘Oh.’

‘Don’t worry. Later on they might let you weep over a wound or two and, if the mood takes you, you can flutter your eyelashes at the awful futility of it all.’

Aliz swallowed, and looked away. ‘Oh.’

‘That’s right. Oh.’

So this was battle. Beck and Reft had never had too much to say to each other, but since the Union first started fighting their way over the fence they hadn’t said a word. Just stood silent at the windows. Beck wished he’d got friends beside him. Or wished he’d tried harder to make friends of the lads he’d found beside him. But it was too late now.

His bow was in his hand, an arrow nocked and the string ready to draw. He’d had it ready the best part of an hour, but there was no one he could shoot at. Nothing he could do but watch, and sweat, and lick his lips, and watch. He’d started off wishing he could see more, but now the rain had slacked off, and the sun was getting up, and Beck found he was seeing far more than he wanted to.

The Union were over the fence in three or four places, into the town in numbers. There was fighting all over, everything broken up into separate little scraps facing every which way. No lines, just a mass of confusion and mad noise. Shouts and howls mashed together, din of clashing metal and breaking wood.

Beck was no expert. He didn’t know how anyone could be at this. But he could feel the balance shifting over there on the south side of the river. More and more Northmen were scurrying back across the bridge, some limping or holding wounds, some shouting and pointing off south, threading their way through the shield wall at the north end of the span and into the square under Beck’s window. Safety. He hoped. Felt a long bloody way from safe, though. Felt about as far from safe as Beck had in his whole life.

‘I want to see!’ Brait was dragging at Beck’s shirt, trying to get a peek through the window. ‘What’s going on?’

Beck didn’t know what to say. Didn’t know if he could find his voice, even. Right under them some wounded man was screaming. Gurgling, retching screams. Beck wished he’d stop. He felt dizzy with it.

The fence was mostly lost. He could see one tall Union man on the walkway, pointing towards the bridge with a sword, clapping men on their backs as they flooded off the ladders to either side of him. There were still a few dozen Carls at the gate, clustered around a tattered standard, painted shields facing out in a half-circle but they were surrounded and well outnumbered, shafts hissing down into ’em from the walkways.

Some of the bigger buildings were still in Northern hands. Beck could see men at the windows, shooting arrows out, ducking back in. Doors nailed shut and barricaded, but Union men swarming around ’em like bees around a hive. They’d managed to set fires for a couple of the most stubborn holdouts, in spite of the damp. Now brown smoke billowed out and was carried off east by the wind, lit by the dull orange of flames flickering.

A Northman came charging from a burning building, swinging an axe around his head in both hands. Beck couldn’t hear him shouting, could see he was, though. In the songs he’d have taken a load down with him and joined the dead proud. Couple of Union men scattered away before some others herded him back against the wall with spears. One stuck him in the arm and he dropped his axe, held his other hand up, shouting more. Giving up, maybe, or insults, didn’t make much difference. They stuck him in the chest and he slumped down. Stuck him on the ground, spear shafts going up and down like a couple of men digging in the fields.

Beck’s wide-open, watery eyes kept on darting across the buildings, murder in plain view all along the riverbank not a hundred strides from where he stood. They dragged someone struggling out from a hovel and bent him over. There was the twinkle of a knife, then they shoved him into the water and he floated away on his face while they wandered back inside the house. Cut his throat, Beck reckoned. Cut his throat, just like that.

‘They’ve got the gate.’ Reft’s voice sounded strangled. Like he’d never spoken before. Beck saw he was right, though. They’d cut down the last defenders, and were dragging the bars clear, and pulling the gates open, and daylight showed through the square archway.

‘By the dead,’ whispered Beck, but it came out just a breath. Hundreds of the bastards started flowing into Osrung, pouring out into the smoke and the scattered buildings, flooding down the lane towards the bridge. The triple row of Northmen at its north end looked a pitiful barrier all of a sudden. A sand wall to hold back the ocean. Beck could see them stirring. Wilting, almost. Could feel their deep desire to join the men who were scattering back across the bridge and through their ranks, trying to escape the slaughter on the far bank.

Beck felt it too, that tickling need to run. To do something, and run was all he could think of. His eyes flickered over the burning buildings on the south side of the river, flames reaching higher now, smoke spreading over the town.

Beck wondered what it was like inside those houses. No way out. Thousands of Union bastards beating at the doors, at the walls, shooting arrows in. Low rooms filling up with smoke. Wounded men with small hopes of mercy. Counting their last shafts. Counting their dead friends. No way out. Time was Beck’s blood would’ve run hot at thoughts like that. It was on the chilly side now, though. Those weren’t no fortresses built for defending on the other side of the river, they were little wooden shacks.

Just like the one he was in.

The Infernal Contraptions

Your August Majesty,

Morning on the second day of battle, and the Northmen occupy strong positions on the north side of the river. They hold the Old Bridge, they hold Osrung, and they hold the Heroes. They hold the crossings and invite us to take them. The ground is theirs, but they have handed the initiative to Lord Marshal Kroy and, now that all our forces have reached the battlefield, he will not be slow to seize it.

On the eastern wing, Lord Governor Meed has already begun an attack in overwhelming force upon the town of Osrung. I find myself upon the western, observing General Mitterick’s assault upon the Old Bridge.

The general delivered a rousing speech this morning as the first light touched the sky. When he asked for volunteers to lead the attack every man put up his hand without hesitation. Your Majesty would be most proud of the bravery, the honour, and the dedication of your soldiers. Truly, every man of them is a hero.

I remain your Majesty’s most faithful and unworthy servant,

Bremer dan Gorst, Royal Observer of the Northern War

Gorst blotted the letter, folded it and passed it to Younger, who sealed it with a blob of red wax and slid it into a courier’s satchel with the golden sun of the Union worked into the leather in elaborate gilt.

‘It will be on its way south within the hour,’ said the servant, turning to go.

‘Excellent,’ said Gorst.

But is it? Does it truly matter whether it goes sooner, or later, or if Younger tosses it into the latrine pits along with the rest of the camp’s ordure? Does it matter whether the king ever reads my pompous platitudes about General Mitterick’s pompous platitudes as the first light touched up the sky? When did I last get a letter back? A month ago? Two? Is just a note too much to ask? Thanks for the patriotic garbage, hope you‘re keeping well in ignominious exile?

He picked absently at the scabs on the back of his right hand, wanting to see if he could make them hurt. He winced as he made them hurt more than he had intended to. Ever a fine line. He was covered with grazes, cuts and bruises he could not even recall the causes of, but the worst pain came from the loss of his Calvez-made short steel, drowned somewhere in the shallows. One of the few relics remaining of a time when he was the king’s exalted First Guard rather than an author of contemptible fantasies. I am like a jilted lover too cowardly to move on, clinging tremble-lipped to the last feeble mementoes of the cad who abandoned her. Except sadder, and uglier, and with a higher voice. And I kill people for a hobby.

He stepped from under the dripping awning outside his tent. The rain had slackened to a few flitting specks, and there was even some blue sky torn from the pall of cloud that smothered the valley. He surely should have felt some flicker of optimism at the simple pleasure of the sun on his face. But there was only the unbearable weight of his disgrace. The fool’s tasks lined up in crushingly tedious procession. Run. Practice. Shit a turd. Write a letter. Eat. Watch. Write a turd. Shit a letter. Eat. Bed. Pretend to sleep but actually lie awake all night trying to wank. Up. Run. Letter …

Mitterick had already presided over one failed attempt on the bridge: a bold, rash effort by the Tenth Foot which had crossed unresisted to a lot of victorious whooping. The Northmen had met them with a hail of arrows as they attempted to find their order on the far side, then sprang from hidden trenches in the barley and charged with a blood-freezing wail. Whoever was in command of them knew his business. The Union soldiers fought hard but were surrounded on three sides and quickly cut down, forced back into the river to flounder helplessly in the water, or crushed into a hellish confusion on the bridge itself, mingled with those still striving mindlessly to cross from behind.

A great line of Mitterick’s flatbowmen had then appeared from behind a hedgerow on the south bank and raked the Northmen with a savage volley, forcing them into a disorganised retreat back to their trenches, leaving the dead scattered in the trampled crops on their side of the bridge. The Tenth had been too mauled to take advantage of the opening, though, and now archers on both sides were busy with a desultory exchange of ammunition across the water while Mitterick and his officers marshalled their next wave. And, one imagines, their next batch of coffins too.

Gorst watched the whirling clouds of gnats that haunted the bank, and the corpses that floated past beneath them. The bravery. Turning with the current. The honour. Face up and face down. The dedication of the soldiers. One sodden Union hero wallowed to a halt in some rushes, bobbing for a moment on his side. A Northman drifted up, bumped gently into him and carried him from the bank and through a patch of frothy yellow scum in an awkward embrace. Ah, young love. Perhaps someone will hug me after my death. I certainly haven’t had many before. Gorst had to stop himself snorting with spectacularly inappropriate laughter.

‘Why, Colonel Gorst!’ The First of the Magi strolled up with staff in one hand and teacup in the other. He took in the river and its floating cargo, heaved a long breath through his nose and exhaled satisfaction. ‘Well, you couldn’t say they aren’t giving it a good try, anyway. Successes are all very well, but there’s something grand about a glorious failure, isn’t there?’

I can’t see what, and I should know.

‘Lord Bayaz.’ The Magus’ curly-headed servant snapped open a folding chair, brushed an imaginary speck of dust from its canvas seat and bowed low.

Bayaz tossed his staff on the wet grass without ceremony and sat, eyes closed, tipping his smiling face towards the strengthening sun. ‘Wonderful thing, a war. Done in the right way, of course, for the right reasons. Separates the fruit from the chaff. Cleans things up.’ He snapped his fingers with an almost impossibly loud crack. ‘Without them societies are apt to become soft. Flabby. Like a man who eats only cake.’ He reached up and punched Gorst playfully on the arm, then shook out his limp fingers in fake pain. ‘Ouch! I bet you don’t eat only cake, do you?’

‘No.’

Like virtually everyone Gorst ever spoke to, Bayaz was hardly listening. ‘Things don’t change just by the asking. You have to give them a damn good shake. Whoever said war never changes anything, well … they just haven’t fought enough wars, have they? Glad to see this rain’s clearing up, though. It’s been playing hell with my experiment.’

The experiment consisted of three giant tubes of dull, grey-black metal, seated upon huge wooden cradles, each closed at one end with the other pointed across the river in the vague direction of the Heroes. They had been set up with immense care and effort on a hump of ground a hundred strides from Gorst’s tent. The ceaseless din of men, horses and tackle would have kept him awake all night had he not been half-awake anyway, as he always was. Lost in the smoke of Cardotti’s House of Leisure, searching desperately for the king. Seeing a masked face in the gloom, at the stairway. Before the Closed Council as they stripped him of his position, the bottom dropping out of the world all over again. Twisted up with Finree, holding her. Holding smoke. Coughing smoke, as he stumbled through the twisted corridors of Cardotti’s House of—

‘Pitiful, isn’t it?’ asked Bayaz.

For a moment, Gorst wondered if the Magus had read his thoughts. And yes, it certainly fucking is. ‘Pardon?’

Bayaz spread his arms to encompass the scene of crawling activity. ‘All the doings of men, still at the mercy of the fickle skies. And war most of all.’ He sipped from his cup again, grimaced and flung the dregs out across the grass. ‘Once we can kill people at any time of day, in any season, in any weather, why, then we’ll be civilised, eh?’ And he chuckled away to himself.

The two old Adepti from the University of Adua scraped up like a pair of priests given a personal audience with God. The one called Denka was ghoul-pale and trembling. The one called Saurizin had a sheen of sweat across his wrinkled forehead which sprang back as fast as he could wipe it off.

‘Lord Bayaz.’ He tried to bow and grin at once and couldn’t manage either with any conviction. ‘I believe the weather has improved to the point where the devices can be tested.’

‘At last,’ snapped the Magus. ‘Then what are you waiting for, the Midwinter Festival?’

The two old men fled, Saurizin snarling fiercely at his colleague. They had an ill-tempered discussion with the dozen aproned engineers about the nearest tube, including a deal of arm-waving, pointing at the skies and reference to some brass instruments. Finally one produced a long torch, flames licking at the tarred end. The Adepti and their minions hurried away, squatting behind boxes and barrels, covering their ears. The torch-bearer advanced with all the enthusiasm of a condemned man to the scaffold, touched the brand at arm’s length to the top of the tube. A few sparks flew, a lick of smoke curled up, a faint pop and fizzle were heard.

Gorst frowned. ‘What is—’

There was a colossal explosion and he shrank to the ground, hands clasped over his head. He had heard nothing like it since the Siege of Adua, when the Gurkish put fire to a mine and blew a hundred strides of the walls to gravel. Guardsmen peeped terrified from behind their shields. Exhausted labourers scrambled gaping from their fires. Others struggled to control terrified horses, two of which had torn a rail free and were galloping away with it clattering behind them.

Gorst slowly, suspiciously, stood. Smoke was issuing gently from the end of one of the pipes, engineers swarming around it. Denka and Saurizin were arguing furiously with each other. What had been the effect of the device beyond the noise, Gorst had not the slightest idea.

‘Well.’ Bayaz stuck a finger in one ear and waggled it around. ‘They’re certainly loud enough.’

A faint rumble echoed over the valley. Something like thunder, though it seemed to Craw the weather was just clearing up.

‘You hear that?’ asked Splitfoot.

Craw could only shrug up at the sky. Plenty of cloud still, even if there were a few blue patches showing. ‘More rain, maybe.’

Dow had other things on his mind. ‘How are we doing at the Old Bridge?’

‘They came just after first light but Scale held ’em,’ said Splitfoot. ‘Drove ’em back across.’

‘They’ll be coming again, ’fore too long.’

‘Doubtless. Reckon he’ll hold?’

‘If he don’t we got a problem.’

‘Half his men are across the valley with Calder.’

Dow snorted. ‘Just the man I’d want at my back if I was fighting for my life.’

Splitfoot and a couple of the others chuckled.

There was a right way of doing things, far as Craw was concerned, and it didn’t include letting men laugh at your friends behind their backs, however laughable they may be. ‘That lad might surprise you,’ he said.

Splitfoot smirked wider. ‘Forgot you and him were tight.’

‘Practically raised the boy,’ said Craw, squaring up and giving him the eye.

‘Explains a lot.’

‘Of what?’

Dow spoke over ’em, an edge to his voice. ‘The pair o’ you can wank Calder off once the light’s gone. In case you hadn’t noticed we’ve got bigger business. What about Osrung?’

Splitfoot gave Craw a parting look, then turned back to his Chief. ‘Union are over the fence, fighting on the south side of town. Reachey’ll hold ’em, though.’

‘He better,’ grunted Dow. ‘And the middle? Any sign of ’em crossing the shallows?’

‘They keep marching around down there, but no—’

Splitfoot’s head vanished and something went in Craw’s eye.

There was a cracking sound then all he could hear was a long, shrill whine.

He got knocked in the back hard and he fell, rolled, scrambled up, bent over like a drunken man, the ground weaving.

Dow had his axe out, waving it at something, shouting, but Craw couldn’t hear him. Just that mad ringing. There was dust everywhere. Choking clouds, like fog.

He nearly tripped over Splitfoot’s headless corpse, blood welling out of it. Knew it was his from the collar of his mail coat. He was missing an arm as well. Splitfoot was. Not Craw. He had both his. He checked. Blood on his hands, though, not sure whose.

Probably he should’ve drawn his sword. He waved at the hilt but couldn’t work out how far away it was. People ran about, shapes in the murk.

Craw rubbed at his ears. Still nothing but that whine.

A Carl was sitting on the ground, screaming silently, tearing at his bloody chain mail. Something was sticking out of it. Too fat to be an arrow. A splinter of stone.

Were they attacked? Where from? The dust was settling. People shambling about, knocking into each other, kneeling over wounded men, pointing every which way, cowering on their faces.

The top half of one of the Heroes was missing, the old stone sheared off jagged in a fresh, shiny edge. Dead men were scattered around its base. More’n dead. Smashed apart. Folded and twisted. Split open and gutted. Ruined like Craw had never seen before. Even after the Bloody-Nine did his black work up in the High Places.

A boy sat alive in the midst of the bodies and the chunks of rock, blood-sprayed, blinking at a drawn sword on his knees, a whetstone held frozen in one hand. No sign how he’d been saved, if he had been.

Whirrun’s face loomed up. His mouth moved like he was talking but Craw could only hear a crackle.

‘What? What?’ Even his own words made no sound. Thumbs poked at his cheek. It hurt. A lot. Craw touched his face and his fingers were bloody. But his hands were bloody anyway. Everything was.

He tried to push Whirrun away, tripped over something and sat down heavily on the grass.

Probably best all round if he stayed there a bit.

‘A hit!’ cackled Saurizin, shaking a mystifying arrangement of brass screws, rods and lenses at the sky like a geriatric warrior brandishing a sword in victory.

‘A palpable hit with the second discharge, Lord Bayaz!’ Denka could barely contain his delight. ‘One of the stones on the hill was struck directly and destroyed!’

The First of the Magi raised an eyebrow. ‘You talk as if destroying stones was the point of the exercise.’

‘I am sure considerable injury and confusion were inflicted upon the Northmen at the summit as well!’

‘Considerable injury and confusion!’ echoed Saurizin.

‘Fine things to visit upon an enemy,’ said Bayaz. ‘Continue.’

The mood of the two old Adepti sagged. Denka licked his lips. ‘It would be prudent to check the devices for evidence of damage. No one knows what the consequences of discharging them frequently might be—’

‘Then let us find out,’ said Bayaz. ‘Continue.’

The two old men clearly feared carrying on. But a great deal less than they fear the First of the Magi. They scraped their way back towards the tubes where they began to bully their helpless engineers as they themselves had been bullied. And the engineers no doubt will harangue the labourers, and the labourers will whip the mules, and the mules will kick at the dogs, and the dogs will snap at the wasps, and with any luck one of the wasps will sting Bayaz on his fat arse, and thus the righteous wheel of life will be ready to turn once again …

Away to the west a second attempt on the Old Bridge was just petering out, having achieved no more than the first. This time an ill-advised effort had been made to cross the river on rafts. A couple had broken up not long after pushing off, leaving their passengers floundering in the shallows or dragged under by their armour in deeper water. Others were swept off merrily downstream while the men on board flailed pointlessly with their paddles or their hands, arrows plopping around them.

‘Rafts,’ murmured Bayaz, sticking out his chin and scratching absently at his short beard.

‘Rafts,’ murmured Gorst, watching an officer on one furiously brandish his sword at the far bank, about as likely ever to reach it as he was the moon.

There was another thunderous explosion, followed almost immediately by a chorus of gasps, sighs and cheers of wonder from the swelling audience, gathered at the top of the rise in a curious crescent. This time Gorst scarcely flinched. Amazing how quickly the unbearable becomes banal. More smoke issued from the nearest tube, wandering gently up to join the acrid pall already hanging over the experiment.

That weird rumble rolled out again, smoke rising from somewhere across the river to the south. ‘What the hell are they up to?’ muttered Calder. Even standing on the wall, he couldn’t see a thing.

He’d been there all morning, waiting. Pacing up and down, in the drizzle, then the dry. Waiting, every minute an age, with his thoughts darting round and round like a lizard in a jar. Peering to the south and not being able to see a thing, the sounds of combat drifting across the fields in waves, sometimes sounding distant, sometimes worryingly near. But no call for help. Nothing but a few wounded carried past, scant reinforcement for Calder’s wavering nerve.

‘Here’s news,’ said Pale-as-Snow.

Calder stretched up, shading his eyes. It was White-Eye Hansul, riding up hard from the Old Bridge. He had a smile on his wrinkled face as he reined in, though, which gave Calder a trace of hope. Right then putting off the fighting seemed almost as good as not doing it at all.

He wedged a boot up on the gate in what he hoped was a manly style, trying to sound cool as snow while his heart was burning. ‘Scale got himself in a pickle, has he?’

‘It’s the Southerners pickled so far, the stupid bastards.’ White-Eye pulled his helmet off and wiped his forehead on the back of his sleeve. ‘Twice Scale’s driven them back. First time they came strolling across like they thought we’d just give the bridge over. Your brother soon cured them of that notion.’ He chuckled to himself and Pale-as-Snow joined him. Calder offered up his own, though it tasted somewhat sour. Everything did today.

‘Second time they tried rafts as well.’ White-Eye turned his head and spat into the barley. ‘Could’ve told them the current’s way too strong for that.’

‘Good thing they never asked you,’ said Pale-as-Snow.

‘That it is. I reckon you lot can sit back here and take your boots off. We’ll hold ’em all day at this rate.’

‘There’s a lot of day still,’ Calder muttered. Something flashed by. His first thought was that it was a bird skimming the barley, but it was too fast and too big. It bounced once in the fields, sending up a puff of stalk and dust and leaving a long scar through the crop. A couple of hundred strides to the east, down at the grassy foot of the Heroes, it hit Clail’s Wall.

Broken stones went spinning high, high into the air, showering out in a great cloud of dust and bits. Bits of tents. Bits of gear. Bits of men, Calder realised, because there were men camped behind the whole length of the wall.

‘By—’ said Hansul, gaping at the flying wreckage.

There was a sound like a whip cracking but a thousand times louder. White-Eye’s horse reared up and he went sliding off the back, tumbling down into the barley, arms flailing. All around men gawped and shouted, drew weapons or flung themselves on the ground.

That last looked a good idea.

‘Shit!’ hissed Calder, scrambling from the gate and throwing himself in a ditch, his desire to look manly greatly outweighed by his desire to stay alive. Earth and stones rattled down around them like unseasonal hail, pinging from armour, bouncing in the track.

‘Sticking to the sunny side,’ said Pale-as-Snow, utterly unmoved, ‘that’s Tenways’ stretch of wall.’

Bayaz’ servant lowered an eyeglass with a curl of mild disappointment to his mouth. ‘Wayward,’ he said.

A towering understatement. The devices had been discharged perhaps two dozen times and their ammunition, which appeared to be large balls of metal or stone, scattered variously across the slope of the hill ahead, the fields to each side, the orchard at the foot, the sky above and on one occasion straight into the river sending up an immense fountain of spray.

How much the cost of this little aside, so we could dig a few holes in the Northern landscape? How many hospitals could have been built with the money? How many alms-houses? Anything worthier? Burials for dead pauper children? Gorst struggled to care, but could not quite get there. We probably could have paid the Northmen to kill Black Dow themselves and go home. But then what would I find to fill the blasted desert between getting out of bed and—

There was an orange flash, and the vague perception of things flying. He thought he saw Bayaz’ servant punch at nothing beside his master, his arm an impossible blur. A moment later Gorst’s skull was set ringing by an explosion even more colossal than usual, accompanied by a note something like the tolling of a great bell. He felt the blast ripping at his hair, stumbled to keep his balance. The servant had a ragged chunk of curved metal the size of a dinner plate in his hand. He tossed it onto the ground where it smoked gently in the grass.

Bayaz raised his brows at it. ‘A malfunction.’

The servant rubbed black dirt from his fingers. ‘The path of progress is ever a crooked one.’

Pieces of metal had been flung in all directions. A particularly large one had bounced straight through a group of labourers leaving several dead and the rest spotted with blood. Other fragments had knocked little gaps in the stunned audience, or flicked over guardsmen like skittles. A great cloud of smoke was billowing from where one of the tubes had been. A blood and dirt-streaked engineer wandered out of it, his hair on fire, walking unsteadily at a diagonal. He didn’t have any arms, and soon toppled over.

‘Ever,’ as Bayaz sank unhappily into his folding chair, ‘a crooked one.’

Some people sat blinking. Others screamed. Yet more rushed about, trying to help the many wounded. Gorst wondered whether he should do the same. But what good could I do? Boost morale with jokes? Have you heard the one about the big idiot with the stupid voice whose life was ruined in Sipani?

Denka and Saurizin were sidling towards them, black robes smudged with soot. ‘And here, the penitents,’ murmured Bayaz’ servant. ‘With your leave, I should attend to some of our business on the other side of the river. I have a feeling the Prophet’s little disciples are not idle over there.’

‘Then we cannot be idle either.’ The Magus waved his servant away with a careless hand. ‘There are more important things than pouring my tea.’

‘A very few.’ The servant gave Gorst a faint smile as he slipped away. ‘Truly, as the Kantic scriptures say, the righteous can afford no rest …’

‘Lord Bayaz, er …’ Denka looked across at Saurizin, who made a frantic get-on-with-it motion. ‘I regret to inform you that … one of the devices has exploded.’

The Magus let them stand for a moment while, out of sight, a woman shrieked like a boiling kettle. ‘Do you suppose I missed that?’

‘Another jumped from its carriage upon the last discharge, and I fear will take some considerable time to realign.’

‘The third,’ wheedled Denka, ‘is displaying a tiny crack which requires some attention. I am …’ his face crumpling up as though he feared someone was going to stick a sword in it, ‘reluctant to risk charging it again.’

‘Reluctant?’ Bayaz’ displeasure was as a mighty weight. Even standing beside him Gorst felt a powerful urge to kneel.

‘A defect in the casting of the metal,’ Saurizin managed to gasp, sending a poisonous glance at his colleague.

‘My alloys are perfect,’ whined Denka, ‘it was an inconsistency in the explosive powders that was to—’

‘Blame?’ The voice of the Magus was almost as fearsome as the explosion had been. Believe me, gentlemen, there is always plenty of that left over after a battle. Even on the winning side.’ The two old men positively grovelled. Then Bayaz waved a hand and the menace was gone. ‘But these things happen. Overall it has been … a most interesting demonstration.’

‘Why, Lord Bayaz, you are far too kind …’

Their servile mutterings faded as Gorst picked his way to where a guard had been standing a few moments before. He was lying in the long grass, arms out wide, a ragged chunk of curved metal embedded in his helmet. One eye could still be seen through the twisted visor, staring at the sky in a last moment of profound surprise. Truly, every man of them is a hero.

The guard’s shield lay nearby, the golden sun on the face gleaming as its counterpart showed through the clouds. Gorst picked it up, slid his left hand into the straps and trudged off, upstream, towards the Old Bridge. As he passed, Bayaz was sitting back in his folding chair with one boot crossed over the other, his staff forgotten in the wet grass beside him.

‘What should they be called? They are engines that produce fire, so … fire engines? No, silly. Death tubes? Names are so important, and I’ve never had the trick of them. Have you two any ideas?’

‘I liked death tubes …’ muttered Denka.

Bayaz was not listening. I daresay someone will think up something suitable in due course. Something simple. I’ve a feeling we’ll be seeing a great deal more of these devices …’

Reasoned Debate

Far as Beck could tell, things were coming apart.

The Union had a double row of archers on the south bank of the river. Squatting down behind a fence to load their evil little bows. Popping up every now and then to loose a clattering hail of bolts at the north end of the bridge. The Carls there were hunched behind their arrow-prickled shield wall, the Thralls huddling tight behind them, spears in a thoughtless tangle. A couple of men had ended up arrow-prickled too, been dragged squealing back through the ranks, doing nothing for the courage of the rest. Or for Beck’s courage either. What there was of it left.

He was almost saying the words with every breath. Let’s run. Plenty of others had. Grown men with names and everything, running for their lives from the fight across the river. Why the hell were Beck and the rest staying? Why should they care a shit whether Caul Reachey got to hold some town, or Black Dow got to keep wearing Bethod’s old chain?

South of the river the fighting was done. The Union had broken into the last houses and slaughtered the defenders or burned ’em out with about the same results, the smoke of it still drifting across the water. Now they were getting ready to try the bridge, a wedge of soldiers coming together on the far side. Beck had never seen men so heavy armoured, cased head to toe in metal so they looked more like something forged than born. He thought of the lame weapons his half-arsed crew had. Dull knives and bent spears. It’d be like trying to bring down a bull with a pin.

Another hail of little arrows came hissing across the water and a great big Thrall leaped up, making a mad shriek, shoving men out of his way then toppling off the bridge and into the water. The shield wall loosened where he’d passed, the back rank drifting apart, going ragged. None of ’em wanted to just squat there and get peppered, and they wanted to face those armoured bastards close up even less. Maybe Black Dow liked the smell of burning cowards, but Black Dow was far away. The Union were awful near and fixing to get nearer. Beck could almost see the bones going out of ’em, all edging back together, shields coming unlocked, spears wobbling.

The Named Man who led the shield wall turned to shout, waving his axe, then fell on his knees, trying to reach over his back at something. He keeled over on his face, a bolt poking out of his fine cloak. Then someone gave a long shout on the other side of the bridge and the Union came on. All that polished metal tramping up together like some single angry beast. Not the wild charge of a crowd of Carls but a steady jog, full of purpose. Like that, without even a blow given, the shield wall broke apart and men ran. The next hail of arrows dropped a dozen or more as they showed their backs and scattered the rest across the square like Beck used to scatter starlings with a clap.

Beck watched a man drag himself over the cobbles with three bolts in him. Watched him wide-eyed, breath slithering in his throat. What did it feel like when the arrow went in you? Deep into your flesh? In your neck. In your chest. In your fruits. Or a blade? All that sharp metal, and a body so soft. What did it feel like to have a leg cut off? How much could something hurt? All the time he’d spent dreaming of battle, but somehow he’d never thought of it before.

Let’s run. He turned to Reft to say it but he was letting an arrow fly, cursing and reaching for another. Beck should’ve been doing the same, like Flood told him, but his bow seemed to weigh a ton, his hand so weak he could hardly grip it. By the dead he was sick. They had to run, but he was too coward even to say it. Too coward to show his shitting, screaming, trembling fear to the lads downstairs. All he could do was stand there, with his bow out the window but the string not even drawn like a lad who’s got his prick out to piss but found he couldn’t manage it with someone watching.

He heard Reft’s bow string go again. Heard him shout, ‘I’m going down!’ Pulling out his long knife in one hand, his hatchet in the other and heading for the stairs. Beck watched him with his mouth half open but nothing to say. Trapped between his fear of staying here alone and his fear of going downstairs.

He had to force himself to look out of the window. Union men flooding across the square, the heavy armoured ones and more behind. Dozens. Hundreds. Arrows flitting from the buildings and down into them. Corpses all over. A rock came from the roof of the mill and stove in a Union helmet, sent the man toppling. But they were everywhere, charging through the streets, beating at the doors, hacking down the wounded as they tried to limp away. A Union officer stood near the bridge, waving his sword towards the buildings, dressed in a fancy jacket with gold thread like the prisoner Shivers had taken. Beck raised his bow, found his mark, finally drew the string back.

Couldn’t do it. His ears were full of mad din, he couldn’t think. He started trembling so bad he could hardly see, and in the end he squeezed his eyes shut and shot the arrow off at nothing. The only one he’d shot. Too late to run. They were all around the house. Trapped. He’d had his chance and now the Union was everywhere. Splinters flew in his face and he tumbled back inside the attic, slipped and fell on his arse, heels scraping at the boards. A flatbow bolt was buried in the window frame, splitting the timber, its gleaming point coming through into the room. He lay, propped on his elbows, staring at it.

He wanted his mother. By the dead, he wanted his mother. What kind of a thing was that for a man to want?

Beck scrambled up, could hear crashes and bangs everywhere, wails and roars sounding hardly human, downstairs, outside, inside, his head snapping round at every hint of a noise. Were they in the house already? Were they coming for him? All he could do was stand there and sweat. His legs were wet with it. Too wet. He’d pissed himself. Pissed himself like a child and hardly even known ’til it started going cold.

He drew his father’s sword. Felt the weight of it. Should’ve made him feel strong, the way it always had before. But instead it made him feel homesick. Sick for the smelly little room he’d always drawn it in, the brave dreams that had hissed out of the sheath along with it. He could hardly believe he’d wished for this. He edged to the stairs, head turned away, looking out of the corner of one narrowed eye as if not seeing clearly might somehow keep him safe.

The room at the bottom was full of mad movement, shadows and darker shadows and splashes of light through broken shutters, furniture scattered, blades glinting. A regular splintering of wood, someone trying to break their way in. Voices, mangled up and saying nothing, Union words or no words at all. Screams and whimpers.

Two of Flood’s Northern lads were lying on the floor. One was leaking blood everywhere. The other was saying, ‘No, no, no,’ over and over. Colving had this wild, mad look on his chubby face, jabbing at a Union man who’d squeezed in through the door. Reft came out of the shadows and hit him in the back of the helmet with his hatchet, knocked him sprawling on top of Colving, hacked away at his back-plate as he tried to get up, finally found the gap between plate and helmet and put him down with his head hanging off.

‘Keep ’em out!’ Reft screamed, jumping back to the door and heaving it shut with his shoulder.

A Union man burst through the shutters not far from the bottom of the steps. Beck could’ve stabbed him in the back. Probably without even being seen. But he couldn’t help thinking about what would happen if it went wrong. What would happen after he did it. So he didn’t do anything. Brait squealed, spun around to poke at the Union man with his spear, but before he could do it the soldier’s sword thudded into Brait’s shoulder and split him open to his chest. He gave this breathy shriek, waving his spear about while the Union man struggled to rip his sword out of him, blood squirting out black over the pair of ’em.

‘Help!’ roared Stodder at no one, pressed against the wall with a cleaver dangling from one hand. ‘Help!’

Beck didn’t turn and run. He just backed softly up the stairs the way he came, and he hurried to the open cupboard, ripped its single shelf out then ducked into the cobwebby shadows inside. He worked his fingertips into a gap between two planks of the door and he dragged it shut, bent over with his back against the rafters. Pressed into the darkness, in a child’s bad hiding place. Alone with his father’s sword, and his own whimpering breath, and the sounds of his crew being slaughtered downstairs.

Lord Governor Meed gazed imperiously out of the northern window of the common hall with hands clasped behind his back, nodding knowingly at scraps of information as if he understood them, his officers crowding about him and gabbling away like eager goslings around their mother. An apt metaphor, as the man had all the military expertise of a mother goose. Finree lurked at the back of the room, an ugly secret, desperately wanting to know what was going on but desperately not wanting to give anyone the satisfaction of asking, chewing at her nails, silently stewing and turning over various unlikely scenarios for her revenge.

Mostly, though, she was forced to admit, she was annoyed at herself. She saw now it would have been much better if she had pretended to be patient, and charming, and humble just as Hal had wanted, clapped her hands at Meed’s pitiful soldiering and slid into his confidence like a cuckoo into an old pigeon’s nest.

Still, the man was vain enough to haul an overblown portrait of himself around on campaign. It might not be too late to play the wayward lamb, and worm her way into his good graces through simpering contrition. Then, when the opportunity presented, she could stab him in the back from a nice, short distance. She’d stab him one way or another, that was a promise. She could hardly wait to see the look on Meed’s papery old face when she finally—

Aliz let go a snort of laughter. ‘Why, who’s that?’

‘Who’s what?’ Finree glanced out of the eastern window, entirely ignored since the battle was happening to the north. A ragged man had emerged from the woods and was standing on a small outcropping of rock, staring towards the inn, long black hair twitched by the wind. Clearly, he was by no stretch of the imagination a Union soldier.

Finree frowned. Most of the Dogman’s men were supposed to be well behind them, and in any case there was something about this lonely figure that just looked … wrong.

‘Captain Hardrick!’ she called. ‘Is he one of the Dogman’s men?’

‘Who?’ Hardrick strolled up beside them. ‘All honesty I couldn’t say …’

The man on the rock lifted something to his mouth and bent his head back. A moment later a long, mournful note echoed out over the empty fields.

Aliz laughed. ‘A horn!’

Finree felt that note right in her stomach, and straight away she knew. She grabbed Hardrick’s arm. ‘Captain, you need to ride to General Jalenhorm and tell him we are under attack.’

‘What? But there’s …’ His gormless grin slowly faded as he looked towards the east.

‘Oh,’ said Aliz. The whole treeline was suddenly alive with men. Wild, they looked, even at this distance. Long-haired, rag-clothed, many half-naked. Now that he stood in the midst of hundreds of others and there was some sense of scale, Finree realised what had puzzled her about the man with the horn. He was a giant, in the truest sense of the word.

Hardrick stared, his mouth hanging open, and Finree dug her fingers into his arm and dragged him towards the door. ‘Now! Find General Jalenhorm. Find my father. Now!’

‘I should have orders—’ His eyes flickered over to Meed, still blithely observing his attack on Osrung, along with all the other officers except for a couple who had drifted over without much urgency to investigate the sound of the horn.

‘Who are they?’ one asked.

Finree had no time to argue her case. She gave vent to the shrillest, longest, most blood-curdling girlish scream she could manage. One of the musicians issued a screeching wrong note, the other played on for a moment before leaving the room in silence, every head snapping towards Finree, except Hardrick’s. She was relieved to see she had shocked him into running for the door.

‘What the hell—’ Meed began.

‘Northmen!’ somebody wailed. ‘To the east!’

‘What Northmen? Whatever are you—’

‘Then everyone was shouting. ‘There! There!’

‘Bloody hell!’

‘Man the walls!’

‘Do we have walls?’

Men out in the fields – drivers, servants, smiths and cooks – were scattering wildly from tents and wagons, back towards the inn. There were already horsemen among them, mounted on shaggy ponies, without stirrups, even, but moving quickly nonetheless. She thought they might have bows, and a moment later arrows clattered against the north wall of the inn. One looped through a window and skittered across the floor. A black, jagged, ill-formed thing, but no less dangerous for that. Someone drew their sword with a faint ring of metal, and soon there were blades flashing out all around the hall.

‘Get some archers on the roof!’

‘Do we have archers?’

‘Get the shutters!’

‘Where is Colonel Brint?’

A folding table squealed in protest as it was dragged in front of one of the windows, papers sliding across the floor.

Finree snatched a look out as two officers struggled to get the rotten shutters closed. A great line of men was surging through the fields towards them, already half way between the trees and the inn and closing rapidly, spreading out as they charged. Torn standards flapped behind them, adorned with bones. At her first rough estimate there were at least two thousand, and no more than a hundred in the inn, most lightly armed. She swallowed at the simple horror of the arithmetic.

‘Are the gates closed?’

‘Prop them!’

‘Recall the Fifteenth!’

‘Is it too late to take—’

‘By the Fates.’ Aliz’ eyes had gone wide, white showing all the way around, darting about as if looking for some means of escape. There was none. ‘We’re trapped!’

‘Help will be coming,’ said Finree, trying to sound as calm as she could with her heart threatening to burst her ribs.

‘From who?’

‘From the Dogman,’ who had very reasonably made every effort to put as much ground between himself and Meed as possible, ‘or General Jalenhorm,’ whose men were in such a disorganised shambles after yesterday’s disaster they were no help to themselves let alone anyone else, ‘or from our husbands,’ who were both thoroughly entangled with the attack on Osrung and probably had not the slightest idea that a new threat had emerged right behind them. ‘Help will be coming.’ It sounded pathetically unconvincing even to her.

Officers dashed to nowhere, pointed everywhere, screeched contradictory orders at each other, the room growing steadily darker and more confused as the windows were barricaded with whatever gaudy junk was to hand. Meed stood in the midst, suddenly ignored and alone, staring uncertainly about with his gilded sword in one hand and the other opening and closing powerlessly. Like a nervous father at a great wedding so carefully planned that he found himself entirely unwanted on the big day. Above him, his masterful portrait frowned scornfully down.

‘What should we do?’ he asked of no one in particular. His desperately wandering eyes lighted on Finree. ‘What should we do?’

It wasn’t until she opened her mouth that she realised she had no answer.

Chains of Command

After a brief spell of fair weather the clouds had rolled back in and rain had begun to fall again, gently administering Marshal Kroy and his staff another dose of clammy misery and entirely obscuring both flanks of the battlefield.

‘Damn this drizzle!’ he snapped. ‘I might as well have a bucket on my head.’

People often supposed that a lord marshal wielded supreme power on the battlefield, even beyond an emperor in his throne room. They did not appreciate the infinite constraints on his authority. The weather, in particular, was prone to ignore orders. Then there was the balance of politics to consider: the whims of the monarch, the mood of the public. There were a galaxy of logistical concerns: difficulties of supply and transport and signalling and discipline, and the larger the army the more staggeringly cumbersome it became. If one managed, by some miracle, to prod this unwieldy mass into a position to actually fight, a headquarters had to be well behind the lines and even with the opportunity to choose a good vantage point a commander could never see everything, if anything. Orders might take half an hour or longer to reach their intended recipients and so were often useless or positively dangerous by the time they got there, if they ever got there.

The higher you climbed up the chain of command, the more links between you and the naked steel, the more imperfect the communication became. The more men’s cowardice, rashness, incompetence or, worst of all, good intentions might twist your purposes. The more chance could play a hand, and chance rarely played well. With every promotion, Marshal Kroy had looked forward to finally slipping the shackles and standing all powerful. And with every promotion he had found himself more helpless than before.

‘I’m like a blind old idiot who’s got himself into a duel,’ he murmured. Except there were thousands of lives hanging on his clueless flailing, rather than just his own.

‘Would you care for your brandy and water, Lord—’

‘No I would not bloody care for it!’ he snapped at his orderly, then winced as the man backed nervously away with the bottle. How could he explain that he had been drinking it yesterday when he heard that he was responsible for the deaths of hundreds of his men, and now the very idea of brandy and water utterly sickened him?

It was no help that his daughter had placed herself so close to the front lines. He kept finding his eyeglass drawn towards the eastern side of the battle, trying to pick out the inn Meed was using as his headquarters through the drizzle. He scratched unhappily at his cheek. He had been interrupted while shaving by a worrying report sent from the Dogman, signs of savages from beyond the Crinna loose in the countryside to their east. Men the Dogman reckoned savage were savage indeed. Now Kroy was deeply distracted and, what was more, one side of his face was smooth and the other stubbly. Those sorts of details had always upset him. An army is made of details the way a house is made of bricks. One brick carelessly laid and the whole is compromised. But attend to the perfect mortaring of every—

‘Huh,’ he muttered to himself. ‘I am a bloody mason.’

‘Latest report from Meed says things are going well on the right,’ said Felnigg, no doubt trying to allay his fears. His chief of staff knew him too well. ‘They’ve got most of southern Osrung occupied and are making an effort on the bridge.’

‘So things were going well half an hour ago?’

‘Best one could say for them, sir.’

‘True.’ He looked for a moment longer, but could scarcely make out the inn, let alone Osrung itself. There was nothing to be gained by worrying. If his entire army had been as brave and resourceful as his daughter they would already have won and been on their way home. He almost pitied the Northman who ran across her in a bad mood. He turned to the west, following the line of the river with his eyeglass until he came to the Old Bridge.

Or thought he did. A faint, straight, light line across the faint, curved, dark line which he assumed was the water, all of it drifting in and out of existence as the rain thickened or slackened in the mile or two between him and the object. In truth he could have been looking at anything.

‘Damn this drizzle! What about the left?’

‘Last word from Mitterick was that his second assault had, how did he put it? Been blunted.’

‘By now it will have failed, then. Still, tough work, carrying a bridge against determined resistance.’

‘Huh,’ grunted Felnigg.

‘Mitterick may lack many things—’

‘Huh,’ grunted Felnigg.

‘—but persistence is not one of them.’

‘No, sir, he is persistently an arse.’

‘Now, now, let us be generous.’ And then, under his breath, ‘Every man needs an arse, if only to sit on.’ If Mitterick’s second assault had recently failed he would be preparing another. The Northmen facing him would be off balance. Kroy snapped his eyeglass closed and tapped it against his palm.

The general who waited to make a decision until he knew everything he needed to would never make one, and if he did it would be far too late. He had to feel out the moment. Anticipate the ebb and flow of battle. The shifting of morale, of pressure, of advantage. One had to trust one’s instincts. And Marshal Kroy’s instincts told him the crucial moment on the left wing was soon coming.

He strode through the door of his barn-cum-headquarters, making sure he ducked this time, as he had no need of another painful bruise on the crown of his head, and went straight to his desk. He dipped pen in ink without even sitting and wrote upon the nearest of several dozen slips of paper prepared for the purpose:

Colonel Vallimir

General Mitterick’s troops are heavily engaged at the Old Bridge. Soon he will force the enemy to commit all his reserves. I wish you to begin your attack immediately, therefore, as discussed, and with every man at your disposal. Good luck.

Kroy

He signed it with a flourish. ‘Felnigg, I want you to take this to General Mitterick.’

‘He might take it better from a messenger.’

‘He can take it however he damn well pleases, but I don’t want him to have any excuse to ignore it.’

Felnigg was an officer of the old school and rarely betrayed his feelings; it was one of the things Kroy had always admired about the man. But his distaste for Mitterick was evidently more than he could suppress. ‘If I must, Lord Marshal.’ And he plucked the order sourly from Kroy’s hand.

Colonel Felnigg stalked from the headquarters, nearly clubbing himself on the low lintel and only just managing to disguise his upset. He thrust the order inside his jacket pocket, checked that no one was looking and took a quick nip from his flask, then checked again and took another, pulled himself into the saddle and whipped his horse away down the narrow path, sending servants, guardsmen and junior officers scattering.

If it had been Felnigg put in command of the Siege of Ulrioch all those years ago and Kroy sent off on a fruitless ride to dusty nowhere, Felnigg who had reaped the glory and Kroy who had ridden thirsty back with his twenty captured wagons to find himself a forgotten man, things could so easily have been different. Felnigg might have been the lord marshal now, and Kroy his glorified messenger boy.

He clattered down from the hillside, spurring west towards Adwein along the puddle-pocked track. The ground sloping down to the river crawled with Jalenhorm’s men, still struggling to find some semblance of organisation. Seeing things done in so slovenly a manner caused Felnigg something close to physical pain. It was the very most he could do not to pull up his horse, start screaming orders at all and sundry and put some damn purpose into them. Purpose – was that too much to ask in an army?

‘Bloody Jalenhorm,’ Felnigg hissed. The man was a joke, and not even a funny one. He had neither the wit nor experience for a sergeant’s place, let alone a general’s, but apparently having been the king’s old drinking partner was better qualification than years of competent and dedicated service. It would have been enough to make a lesser man quite bitter, but Felnigg it only drove to greater heights of excellence. He slowed for a moment to take another nip from his flask.

On the grassy slope to his right there had been some manner of accident. Aproned engineers fussed around two huge tubes of dark metal and a large patch of blackened grass. Bodies were laid out by the road, bloody sheets for shrouds. No doubt the First of the Magi’s damn fool experiment blown up in everyone’s faces. Whenever the Closed Council became directly involved in warfare there was sure to be some heavy loss of life and, in Felnigg’s experience, rarely on the enemy’s side.

‘Out of the way!’ he roared, forcing a path through a herd of foraged cattle that should never have been allowed on the road and making one of its handlers dive for the verge. He cantered through Adwein, as miserable a village as he had ever seen and packed today with miserable faces, injured men and filthy remnants of who-knew-what units. The useless, self-pitying flotsam of Mitterick’s failed assaults, swept out the back of his division like dung from a stables.

At least Jalenhorm, fool that he was, could obey an order. Mitterick was forever squirming out from under his to do things his own way. Incompetence was unforgivable, but disobedience was … still less forgivable, damn it. If everyone simply did as they pleased, there would be no coordination, no command, no purpose. No army at all, just a great crowd of men indulging their own petty vanities. The very idea made him—

A servant carrying a bucket stepped suddenly from a doorway and right into Felnigg’s path. His horse skittered to a stop, rearing up and nearly throwing him from the saddle.

‘Out of the way!’ Without thinking, Felnigg struck the man across the face with his riding crop. The servant cried out and went sprawling in the gutter, his bucket spraying water across the wall. Felnigg gave his horse the spurs and rode on, the heat of spirits in his stomach turned suddenly cold. He should not have done that. He had let anger get the better of him and the realisation only made him angrier than ever.

Mitterick’s headquarters was the most unruly place in his unruly division. Officers dashed about, spraying mud and shouting over one another, the loudest voice obeyed and the finest ideas ignored. A commander set the tone for his entire command. A captain for his company, a major for his battalion, a colonel for his regiment and Mitterick for his entire division. Sloppy officers meant sloppy men, and sloppy soldiering meant defeat. Rules saved lives at times like these. What kind of officer allowed things to degenerate into chaos in his own headquarters? Felnigg reined his horse up and made a direct line for the flap of Mitterick’s great tent, clearing excitable young adjutants from his path by sheer force of disapproval.

Inside the confusion was redoubled. Mitterick was leaning over a table in the midst of a clamouring press of crimson uniforms, an improvised map of the valley spread out upon it, holding forth at tremendous volume. Felnigg felt his revulsion for the man almost like a headwind. He was the worst kind of soldier, the kind that dresses his incompetence up as flair and, to make matters worse, he fooled people more often than not. But he did not fool Felnigg.

Felnigg stepped up and gave an impeccable salute. Mitterick gave the most peremptory movement of his hand, barely looking up from his map.

‘I have an order for the King’s Own First Regiment from Lord Marshal Kroy. I would be gratified if you could despatch it at once.’ He could not entirely keep the contempt out of his voice, and Mitterick evidently noticed.

‘We’re a little busy soldiering here, perhaps you could leave it—’

‘I am afraid that will not be good enough, General.’ Felnigg only just prevented himself from slapping Mitterick across the face with his gloves. ‘The lord marshal was most specific, and I must insist on haste.’

Mitterick straightened, the jaw muscles working on the side of his out-sized head. ‘Must you?’

‘Yes. I absolutely must.’ And Felnigg thrust the order at him as if he would throw it in his face, only by a last shred of restraint keeping it in his fingertips.

Mitterick snatched the paper from Felnigg’s hand, only just preventing himself from punching him in the face with his other fist, and tore it open.

Felnigg. What an arse. What an arrogant, pedantic fool. A prickly stickler with no imagination, no initiative, none of what the Northmen called, with their gift for simplicity, ‘bones’. He was lucky he had Marshal Kroy for a friend, lucky Kroy had dragged him up through the ranks behind him or he would most likely have remained all his career a tight-buttoned captain.

Felnigg. What an arse. Mitterick remembered him bringing in those six wretched wagons after Kroy won his great victory at Ulrioch. Remembered him demanding to have his contribution noted. His battalion ground down to a dusty stub for the sake of six bloody wagons. His contribution had been noted, all right. Mitterick had thought then, what an arse, and his opinion had not changed in all the years between.

Felnigg. What a suppurating arse. Look at him. Arse. Probably he thought he was better than everyone else, still, even though Mitterick knew for a fact he could barely get up without a drink. Probably he thought he could have done Mitterick’s job better. Probably he thought he should have had Kroy’s. Bloody arse. He was the worst kind of soldier, the kind that dresses his stupidity up as discipline, and to make matters worse he fooled people more often than not. But he did not fool Mitterick.

Already two of his assaults on the bridge had failed, he had a third to prepare and no time to waste on this pompous streak of bureaucracy. He turned to Opker, his own chief of staff, stabbing at the map with the crumpled order. ‘Tell them to get the Seventh ready, and I want the Second in place right behind. I want cavalry across that bridge as soon as we get a foothold, damn it, these fields are made for a charge! Get the Keln Regiment out of the way, clear out the wounded. Dump ’em in the river if we have to, we’re giving the bloody Northmen time to get set. Time to have a bloody bath if they bloody want one! Tell them to get it done now or I’ll go down there myself and lead the charge, whether I can fit my fat arse into my armour or not. Tell them to—’

A finger jabbed at his shoulder. ‘This order must be attended to at once, General Mitterick. At once!’ Felnigg nearly shrieked the last words, blasting Mitterick with spit. He could hardly believe the man’s obsession with proper form. Rules cost lives at times like these. What kind of an officer insisted on them in a headquarters while outside men were fighting? Dying? He ran a furious eye over the order:

Colonel Vallimir

General Mitterick’s troops are heavily engaged at the Old Bridge. Soon he will force the enemy to commit all his reserves. I wish you to begin your attack immediately, therefore, as discussed, and with every man at your disposal. Good luck.

Kroy

The First had been attached to Mitterick’s division and so, as their commander, it was his responsibility to clarify their instructions. Kroy’s order was lean and efficient as the marshal himself, as always, and the timing was apt. But Mitterick was damned if he was going to miss an opportunity to frustrate the marshal’s chinless stick-insect of a right hand man. If he wanted it by the book, he could have it by the book and bloody choke on it. So he spread the paper out on top of his map, snapped his fingers until someone thrust a pen into them, and added a scratchy line of his own at the bottom almost without considering the content.

Ensure that the enemy are fully engaged before crossing the stream, and in the meantime take care not to give away your position on their flank. My men and I are giving our all. I will not have them let down.

General Mitterick, Second Division

He took a route to his tent flap that enabled him to shoulder Felnigg rudely out of the way. ‘Where the hell is that boy from Vallimir’s regiment?’ he bellowed into the thinning drizzle. ‘What was his name? Leperlisper?’

‘Lederlingen, sir!’ A tall, pale, nervous-looking young man stepped forward, gave an uncertain salute and finished it off with an even more uncertain, ‘General Mitterick, sir.’ Mitterick would not have trusted him to convey his chamber pot safely to the stream, let alone to carry a vital order, but he supposed, as Bialoveld once said, ‘In battle one must often make the best of contrary conditions.’