Tomorrow, the Killing

10

The first time I had met Roland Montgomery he had come very close to killing me.

It was a year after the disaster at Beneharnum had proved the futility of waging warfare in ranked formation even to the most hidebound traditionalist. Tactics had developed accordingly – trenches were miserable, cramped and cold, but they kept you out of sight of any practitioners that might be waiting, and they were moderately effective against cannon. We’d long settled into the steady attritional warfare that had come to characterize the conflict, an endless succession of raids and counter-raids, of static lines and fighting rats for food.

Those of us in the ranks, that is – the brass still dreamed of a break out, of a sudden puncture to the Dren lines that would allow us to roll them back all the way to Donknacht. It was a fantasy which would take a long time to die, and would carry a hell of a lot of men with it.

My hopes of advancement had proved prescient, though I attributed that less to any particular genius on my part than to the decimation of the officer class during the opening phase of the conflict. If things continued at this rate they’d be making drummer boys into brigadier generals inside of six months. Even with my rapid rise through the ranks, my presence at the meeting was out of the ordinary. Calling a meeting of officers before committing troops to battle was a common enough activity, including anyone so far down the pole as myself was most certainly not.

But then, Roland Montgomery was no ordinary officer.

This was early on in his career, before his glorious charge at Gravotte carried the field, before he withstood seven weeks besieged in the Matz salient absent of outside support. The legend was in its infancy, but it was easy enough to see the seed. He was, first and foremost, strikingly handsome. It was the worst kept secret in the Thirteen Lands that the brass was thick with buggerers, and looking around at my fellow officers, there were no fair few gazing at the colonel with something more akin to adoration than respect. But even amongst those of us for whom a well-toned buttock was no particular object of affection, it was hard to miss the fact that Roland Montgomery seemed to have been hewn from marble rather than pushed out a womb. He radiated health and good cheer, no small feat given that he was effectively in the midst of an inconceivably vast infirmary, and we lost a hundred men a day to the flux. Added to that was his heritage, that he was the latest in a long line of Montgomerys that had pursued the Crown’s enemies in foreign lands, that his father even then was held with something resembling reverence by large swathes of the ranks.

All of these were secondary, however, to the indefinable aura of certainty that he carried with him like a heavy winter cloak. Every motion he made and every word he uttered seemed to carry with it a sense of profound meaning, as if the Firstborn himself had decreed that, at this exact moment, Roland was to smile or shake his head or greet you. He was, in short, a man of destiny. You strained to listen when he spoke, pushed past friends to approach him, found yourself held captive by the deep blue of his eyes and the unshaken strength of his convictions.

So contradicting the plan he had just put forth – suggesting that it might even be possible to contradict it, that he was capable of error even in theory – took a bit of firmness on my part. ‘I’m afraid I have a concern, sir.’

It was also not an activity likely to gain me any friends. As befit my relatively lowly rank, I was in the back of the twenty or so soldiers clustered about the colonel. The front row was made up of men most similar to Montgomery, in background, position and pedigree. The terrible casualties we’d suffered had allowed a few of us to ascend to the middle rungs of the military hierarchy, but the upper echelons were still composed exclusively of aristocrats.

I tried not to hate them. That they were in Nestria at all meant something, when so many of their fellows had found convenient excuses for remaining at home – sudden injuries, unexpected nuptials. And I didn’t imagine Roland would keep around him anyone whose courage or fortitude was suspect. But then, impartiality is not my strong suit, and I had to swallow down hard on my contempt to keep it from showing on my face.

They seemed in no hurry to extend me a similar courtesy. The man whom I would later come to know as Joachim Pretories swiveled an eye off the colonel, turned it nasty, and aimed it at me. The rest of his pack joined suit. If I had been operating under any illusion that my opinion was wanted, the black looks I got from Roland’s inner circle were enough to convince me otherwise. I was not there to speak; I was there as a demonstration of Roland Montgomery’s populist leanings, of the affection and love he had for his men, even for the lowliest of us.

By contrast, Roland himself seemed almost pleasantly surprised at my interruption. ‘Of course, Lieutenant,’ Roland said. ‘Speak your mind.’

I cleared my throat uncomfortably. Back then I was still concerned with my thick Low Town patois, widely considered by the rest of the Empire to be somewhere between repulsive and incomprehensible. In later years I would come to recognize it as an asset, lulling my audience into a false sense of superiority. Most folk born north of the river Andel dismissed me after my first sentence, assumed I wasn’t anything more than a thug, didn’t learn otherwise till it was too late. But at that moment, surrounded by baronets and princelings, I was conscious of every dropped syllable and swallowed consonant.

I brushed towards the front, through a mass of men wishing me ill, toward the board and the map that Roland had been using to indicate our plan of attack. ‘These six inches,’ I said, pointing to a corresponding spot, ‘are three hundred yards of muck, utterly without cover of any kind. This light brown shading,’ I moved my finger a tick, ‘an uphill slog that narrows the front to the point where our forces can be massacred in detail. And these markers here,’ again shifting my aim to the blue pins meant to indicate the enemy forces, ‘are at least three battalions of the most vicious, competent, battle-hardened souls the Firstborn ever saw fit to inflict upon our benighted world. A simple statement of the facts at hand should be sufficient to show that what you propose is, in short, impossible.’

No one said anything for a while. Most of them seemed to take the criticism as the product of sheer gutlessness. For a bare handful, perhaps, my words served reminder that their bodies were composed of flesh and sinew, as were the men in their command. Roland remained absolutely passive, his faint smile unaffected by my arguments.

It was up to his leader of cavalry, a major with the exhausting name of Conrad Baldwin de Camville, to take the offensive. By this point in the war it was long since clear that the continued existence of the cavalry arm was an anachronism – the best pedigreed stud in the Empire was useful only as a pack animal or fresh meat. For that substantial portion of the gentry who had grown up with a saber in hand and dreams of valiant charges in mind, this was a hard truth to accept. Conrad was very much one of those. He still wore the full kit, six-inch silver spurs on boots of freshly shined black leather. His jacket and pants were bright crimson, fringed with gold, and his sword had a pearl the size of a bull’s eye set in the pommel.

‘No one is suggesting that our objective will be gained without cost, Lieutenant,’ he said, stressing the three syllables in my rank in a fashion more reserved for other, less flattering epithets. Traitor, for instance. Or child molester. ‘But the ridge is the lynchpin of the entire area. Any hope of our regaining northern Nestria relies on taking it.’

‘It is indeed, sir – and they hold it. They’ve held it for the last two months, and they’ve been strengthening it the entire time.’

Another one of Roland’s cronies jumped in. ‘What is this man even doing here? This meeting is for captains and higher.’

‘Our captains keep dying in suicidal charges,’ I said. ‘I’ve been in operational command of “A” company for two months.’

‘All our information is that the Dren have denuded their forces in that sector,’ Baldwin continued without pause. I suppose it was the calvaryman’s mentality, attack, attack, attack. It was more effective in conversation than in combat.

‘I am that sector, Major,’ I said. ‘I sleep in its mud and get wet in its run off. I’ve watched it day and night, and if the Dren are going weak-kneed on us, I’ve yet to see any proof.’

‘Perhaps your eye isn’t sufficiently trained to recognize the weaknesses in their positions.’

‘Your own must be exceptionally keen, to make them out a mile and a half behind our lines.’

Baldwin bristled like he’d been spat on. I had gone too far, all but accused him of outright cowardice. The nobility’s attachment to the duel had survived a year of mass murder that dwarfed anything the Thirteen Lands had seen in two millennia of recorded warfare. One would think that the sacrifice of a quarter of the nation’s menfolk would have been enough to satisfy anyone’s taste for bloodshed, but one would have reckoned without the bewildering stupidity of the aristocracy. Barely a week went by without two blue bloods squaring off against each other over some real or imagined insult. It seemed a great deal of trouble to take for little enough reason – if you were so desperate for oblivion, all you needed to do was step ten feet outside of the forward trenches and wait for a Dren bowman to notice you.

Roland put one hand on my would-be killer’s shoulder, and brought him back down into his chair. ‘Peace, Major, peace. The lieutenant is simply doing what we’ve asked of him.’ Like a weeping child at a mother’s touch, Baldwin slipped swiftly from furious to pacified. ‘Please continue with your assessment of the situation, Lieutenant,’ Roland said, turning back to me.

‘I’ve made it, sir. They’ll have the high ground, and they’ll be waiting for us.’

‘We’ll have the numbers!’ Baldwin insisted.

‘But we won’t be able to use them – we’ll get funneled through the defile, and their cannon and missilists will pick us apart. That’s the best-case scenario. Worst case, they’ve got a practitioner or two stashed away, just waiting for a chance to erase us en masse.’

For a brief moment the assemblage put aside their desperate desire for glory and considered the grim possibility I’d put before them. The war had begun with the Throne calling for twenty thousand volunteers. After Beneharnum they’d called for another fifty. Seventy thousand proved to be the total number of suicidally foolish men living in the empire proper, so they moved comfortably into conscription. After six months we had a quarter of a million men beneath the colors. The Dren followed suit, and by the end of the first winter our respective forces had spread across the continent, choking the hills with trenches and blockhouses.

But while you could always cull up another ten thousand warm bodies to press into service, bog farmers and penny tailors, supporting them with fully trained practitioners was another story altogether. The Academy was a partial answer, funneling through anyone with a spark of talent, going in children and coming out weapons. But even so, there were never enough to adequately support the vast forces, and you never knew whether the ranks across from you were stiffened by a man with the ability to call down fire at will. It was a rather terrifying coin toss, as a small team of practitioners on a well-sighted spot were enough to turn the best-planned offensive into suicidal folly.

Roland remained unfazed by the picture I’d painted. He pretty much remained unfazed regardless of what you put in front of him. I wasn’t at all sure this was a virtue. Steady nerves are critical on the battlefield, but the world is a terrible and shocking place, and past a certain point equanimity seems indistinguishable from idiocy. ‘All of our reports say that the Dren have been massing their practitioners further south, preparing for their own offensive operations.’

‘Our reports serve excellently as bathroom tissue. Beyond that, I’ve yet to be convinced of their value.’

One of the other officers, a captain, began to chuckle, but he turned it quickly into a nervous cough. Colonel Montgomery kept smiling, but to tell by his eyes he was starting to find my objections less than amusing. ‘Headquarters has determined that the breakout should begin in sector three.’

Speechifying was never my forte – one on one I can generally figure out what I need to do to get someone moving in my direction, but pool enough of them together and the sheer mass of idiocy becomes immobile. It would have been better to have kept my mouth shut. But I was even worse at that than I was at oratory. ‘Unfortunately, the Dren have some say in that decision as well – and by all evidence, they seem to be of the opinion that sector three would be of better use as an abattoir.’

Roland leaned back against the table and brought his fist up beneath his chin. At any given moment you could have frozen him in time and painted him into a portrait – Hero Making The Hard Decisions, this one would have been called. The pause lasted long enough for us all to appreciate it, and then he pushed himself up and came towards me at a rapid clip. I managed not to flinch.

‘This man,’ Roland said, slapping one hand onto my shoulder and staring at me with an intensity I found at once disturbing and enthralling, ‘is the reason we’re going to win the war.’ He locked eyes with me for a moment, then turned about quickly to address the rest of the crowd. ‘There is no finer man alive than the Rigun soldier, no truer patriot, no more honorable and dedicated warrior. And before us stands his very ideal!’

That I in no way agreed with this sentiment – neither in reference to me particularly nor as a broader commentary on the state of our population – did nothing to lessen the pride I felt at that moment. I stood up straighter, puffed out my chest, felt my heartbeat quicken.

‘And it’s because of men like you that the Empire will be victorious, whatever the numberless hordes the Dren throw against us, whatever the obstacles to overcome.’ He turned his attention back on me, once again the lone holdout against his insanity, if the swell of enthusiastic faces surrounding me were any indication. ‘You said the task before us is impossible – with men like you leading our forces, I have no doubt we can achieve it.’

The meeting broke with a hearty cheer of excitement. Never did a group of people sprint so enthusiastically towards their own demise. I didn’t blame Roland for what he was – enough people tell you you’re special, you can’t help but come to believe it.

Things went pretty much the way I expected they would. The Dren cut us down with their usual brutal competence. Our men died in waves on the flat terrain, till the mounds of corpses themselves became our cover. After three hours of massacre came the order to retreat. I spent that night huddled around a bonfire with the skeletal remnants of my company, hoping the burn wounds running along most of my right arm didn’t fester.

Above a certain position of prominence, the only reward for failure is promotion. And in fairness, the blame could be apportioned up and down the chain. Rather than do so, they just decided to call it a victory. The broadsheets wrote our stalled charge up as a heroic defense, and they promoted Roland from colonel to general.

I learned two things about Montgomery that day, two things that stuck with me throughout the remainder of the war and into the dark days beyond. The first was that his men would follow him off a cliff. The second was that he would lead them there.