Free The March North by Graydon Saunders

a surveyor’s hat and a sensible brown denim coat with some years of service on it. The idle gestures Rust was making only with the left hand, like someone trying to remember a word, those had something very visibly shining and sliding through Rust’s fingers. Every time Rust’s hand closed thecircle of flowers shrank a little, and the light of angry grew brighter and bluer.
    Not very many of the Iron Guard tried to run, maybe a hundred. They didn’t even scream.
    The Archon surrendered.
    I get a mass wave of
No, really?
back, company and battery and Blossom, too. A tiny waft of apple-wood smugness crosses Rust’s sensation of woodsmoke.
    It won’t work again; none of the sorcerers with thatarmy survived.
    No one with that army remembered that there were any sorcerers with it, or any of those specific sorcerers ever existing. Nor does anyone but Rust know precisely what sudden silent invisible lethal thing happened to six mighty sorcerers, seventeen fire-priests, all their apprentices and acolytes, and the Archon’s soothsayer.
    The current Archon won’t have tried this without believingthere’s a way to avoid that fate
.
    Grudging agreement, and a few hopeful thoughts about eel-trees. I have to smile.
    Much as it would please me to find such a helpful use for eel-trees, we must suppose that our good Staff Thaumaturgist will be occupied.
    The company settles into a better temper. I can feel the platoons coalescing tighter; they do know each other well, and they’ve all thought aboutan actual fight. Which gives them some of the virtues of veterans. The battery are the kind of regular artillerists who volunteer to use experimental tubes to see if they work; the idea of getting to prove they work registers as a positive.
    There’s that indescribable tapping sensation, and I get a single clear thought from Blossom.
Reinforcements
?
    Let’s be very careful only the Part-Captain getsthis bit.
Not in time. Best case is a brigade relieves us where we’ve plugged the one pass.
    The brigade we’re not getting?
Blossom can do understated wry through the standard. Not everybody with a warrant of commission can.
    The brigade we’re not getting
.
    If I didn’t get to die with the best company I could have had, I could have done worse than the company I look to get.
    Halfway through sunsetRust guides us up onto a broad flat hilltop. There’s a “What, actual
rocks
?” from Radish, and the field camp goes up, the whole company together. The artillery sets up, just for drill, but what we’re really relying on just then is Halt, just in case anybody’s found us and thinks they can take Rust quick.
    Toby and Dove flip for first watch — One and Three had the lead, they get first and last watchesof four; we’re doing coalesced platoon watches, here, and one tube on duty in rotation.
    Seventy-one kilometres today, and no further sign of anybody from Reems.

Chapter 11
    Feed everybody, break camp, keeping a platoon up on guard the whole time. That’s tricky; you have to have a guard looking out and everybody else moving rocks looking in. Mess it up, and you demonstrate how not much benefits from being pelted with rocks.
    The artillery, entirely unpelted, chivvies the drovers into line while they’re forming up. The drovers held up fine, got a solid breakfastdown, proceeding in haste means the Line eats like famished wolverines in a pile of bacon, when all the drovers have to do is keep their bronze bulls from getting so lost in the happy stomping rush they start drifting off the line of march, they’re not extra hungry, but they have no idea what’s happening around them, no way to tell, not able to latch to the standard. So you have to watch theydon’t drift off themselves and forget to eat.
    This bunch are at least clear that walking into the maelstrom of reforming bedrock might hurt.
    Another few days of proceeding in haste, maybe even just today, would finish coalescing this implausible third of a combined