Free Timepiece by Heather Albano Page B

remember saying that, General?”
     
    Brown remembered quite well. “Yes,” he growled.
     
    “Yes,” the man in gray repeated. “So which of us would you say had the right of it?”
     
    Brown glared at him.
     
    “I’m here bearing more advice, General,” the man in gray said. “Do you think you might like to heed it this time?”
     
    The fire in the brazier snapped and popped. Outside, a swell of voices grew momentarily loud enough to be comprehensible, then subsided. Brown unclenched his fingers from the arms of his chair and swallowed the desire to shout for guards to come and drag this man away in chains.
     
    “Tell me,” he managed.
     
    The man in gray crossed to the desk in one stride, whipping a map from his pocket. “You’re here,” he said, pointing. “They’re there. Your scouts have reported to you that the monsters hold the high ground across the valley, is that not so? So you are planning accordingly. But they’re wrong, General.”
     
    “The monsters do not hold the high ground?”
     
    “They do not hold it securely. There are fewer of them on that hill than it seems, and their reinforcements will not arrive until mid-morning tomorrow. You have men enough to roll right over them if you attack at first light. And then you will hold the hill when the reinforcements arrive. You will crush two small waves of monsters, one after the other. But wait any longer than dawn, and the ground is theirs. You’ll spend three days throwing yourself against them, uphill. Then you will be forced to retreat, and then the war is lost.”
     
    Brown looked from the map to the man’s face. The bruise gleamed in the firelight—definitely, though impossibly, the same bruise. “Winning this battle will win us the war, is that what you just said?”
     
    “If you lose this battle,” the man in gray said, “you lose the war. The lines run straight from this moment to the building of Brown’s Wall. Yes, like Hadrian’s, named for you—not a pleasant way to be remembered in the history books, is it? But if you win this battle...then you might win the war. Then we’re off the charted regions of the map, where anything might happen.”
     
    “If we win the battle, you don’t know what might happen.”
     
    “Exactly.”
     
    “But you know what will happen if we lose.”
     
    “Yes.”
     
     “Who the hell are you?”
     
    The man in gray smiled faintly, straightening from the map. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”
     
    Brown turned it all over in his mind—then bellowed for his aide. The boy’s pale face appeared in the tent flap, and Brown sent him running to summon his generals from their campfires and out of their beds.
     
     
     
    A scant few hours later, he stood with the man in gray on the hillock that commanded the best view possible of the valley and the opposite hill, squinting at said hill through a remarkably fine spyglass. The man in gray had offered it to him, and Brown hadn’t asked where he had acquired such a thing any more than he had pressed for the origin of the man’s battlefield intelligence. The intelligence had better prove to be of comparable quality to the glass, Brown thought, or he would strangle the man in gray and enjoy the job. 
     
    He watched the rippling red line of infantrymen cross the valley, start the climb. A cannonball whistled through the air and crashed through the ranks. Then another. Then they flew in earnest. The line shuddered, but did not pause in its advance. Brown nodded to himself. Russell could bleat about “harsh discipline” all he liked. Russell was an idiot. Harsh discipline was what made men unafraid of cannonballs.
     
    Before very long, the monsters had spent all the cannonballs in their possession, and the line moved faster, impeded now only by small-arms fire from behind rocks. Brown saw each shot as a pin-prick of flame against the gray-green hill. He heard each sharp pop a disconcerting few seconds later. The infantry