Free The March North by Graydon Saunders Page A

battalion into an active field formation.
    We’ll hit something from Reems today. Maybe it’ll be small.
    Eustace, looking not in theleast put-upon, ate the empty stores barrels, hoops and all. After the second barrel, the reflexive wincing as Eustace crunched through various metal bits mostly stopped. There just wasn’t time.
    Blossom’s alleged horse gets by on hardtack and a handful of nails. The nails are apparently a treat; lunging after the keg gets it biffed on the nose and a compensatory and apparently entirely acceptablecarrot.
    Blossom looks up, awareness floating through the battery, the Master Gunner takes it as thoroughness, not distrust, and Blossom gives me the thumbs up. Battery’s good. Twitch does the same thing for the company, without following it up with any flinging into the saddle.
    Part-Captain Blossom swaps hats, battery commander for battalion second in command, and the floating awareness goes outwide, company and supports as well as the battery. Takes just long enough to justify the precise
Ready
.
    I wave at Rust — get moving! — and we do, down off the empty open hilltop and turning back to nearly northwards. Two and Four lead today, which means I’ve got Radish and Hector closest to trouble. Their platoons have, for the first time in three centuries, been equipped with throwing sticksand six of what are either big darts or floppy javelins each. The Line gave up on those after artillery got away from weights and the neck-sinews of oxen; there was just no point. These, along with being a spike on a stick, are the practice pieces Blossom’s been having the shot-factory workers make. Safer and cheaper to practice on, and the artillery has got some rig where the tubes can toss bundlesof twelve of them if the range gets really short.
    I just hope they get thrown far enough; Blossom’s notion of anti-personnel is the kind of thing you want to be well away from. Back of a couple-six metres of firm dirt, say.
    Radish, of all people, starts singing some song I don’t know about how miserable it is to be away from home because you have work to do.
    The whole company apparently agreesabout who should sing lead, and who should only come in on the choruses, and they all do. After waiting one whole chorus for politeness, all the drovers sing along on the next one. Apparently not an obscure song to a Creek. After a couple of verses, the battery is humming along, too, and I’ve shoved my awareness up as high and as far as the standard can let me push it.
    There’s another sign inthe entrance hall of the Officer’s School. It’s over the inside of the outer doors, so you see it every time you go back out into the world from inside the school.
    Grant us strength to die
.
    Dying’s pretty easy.
    Try going last.

Chapter 12
    I don’t recommend going hiking with Rust.
    Early afternoon we come down a dip-and-turn scree slope into a main valley.
    Can’t manage scree when hastening; everything slows right down while the road foundation gets melded into the bedrock, switchback by switchback. Even if this wasn’t the hollow ground of the Northern Hills the road will be gone next spring. Rust might be doing that on purpose,or might just have trouble remembering that the rest of us have to worry about actual feet in contact with actual ground.
    Rust stays on the second-to-last switchback and points, very proper, as I go by behind Two Platoon, but pointing’s hardly needful. Pretty much due north up the valley, maybe three kilometres, there’s a wall, clean across the little valley.
    Maybe, just maybe, a wall would besomebody trying to get away from it all, and picking an area unfriendly to travelers in the hope that would help. A couple thousand guys in the armour of Reems, in four blocks around a fire-priest central standard? The only question is why they’re on this side of the wall.
    Words make themselves out of smoke in my mind.
The wall is the front edge of a heavily warded zone.
    Zone
? I can