It was six weeks since Corbie and his troops had left the Boundary Fort. That was in Nithling hands now. Though Colonel Nage had been killed with his entire garrison, he had managed to hold the switch room for twelve hours, and the gates had been closed. But not before four to five hundred thousand Nithlings had come through. And then, a month later, the gates had somehow been opened again, even though this was supposed to be impossible. Tens of thousands more Nithlings had marched in.
Still, as Corbie had reassured the sergeant, the time-honoured tectonic strategy was working. With the tiles moving every sundown and the enemy unable to concentrate its forces, the Army was able to battle the Nithlings piecemeal, winning most of its direct confrontations.
Not that this was enough for Sir Thursday, Corbie had heard. Never even-tempered at the best of times, Sir Thursday was supposed to have become angrier than usual.
Apparently he had even lost his temper with Marshal Dawn and had seriously injured her, after Dawn had questioned some aspect of the Army’s response to this unprecedented invasion and the wisdom of changing the campaign in the first place, so radically and so late.
Corbie reflected that Dawn had been right, of course. It was very strange that the plan had been changed only hours before it commenced. Major Pravuil had been an odd messenger too. He hadn’t seemed quite right to Corbie, like he held some kind of special commission and wasn’t a regular officer at all. It all stank of politics and interference from higher up.
Corbie hated politics.
‘More movement near the tile border,’ called one of the Borderers. ‘And I reckon we’ve been spotted. There’s an officer … superior Nithling, or whatever we’re supposed to call it … directing a squad our way.’
Corbie peered down from the hill. He and his fellow Borderers were concealed among the tumbled rocks at the top, but some movement might have given them away. Or the reflection from his own perspective glass.
Instinctively he looked to the sun. It was near the horizon, making its rickety way down, but there was still half an hour at least till sundown. The tile border, visible to his trained eye as a slightly different tone of colour in the earth, was a hundred yards below them. If the Nithlings did attack, they’d have to make it past that border before dusk, when the tiles moved. Which was possible, Corbie estimated.
He wasn’t that troubled, though. His forces were in the corner of their current tile, and a quick sprint in any one of two directions would get them on tiles that were moving to fairly safe areas.
‘Something strange about that column,’ muttered the sergeant. ‘Looks like they’re transporting something. They’ve got a whole chain of Not-Horses.’
Corbie raised his perspective glass. Not-Horses were valuable livestock, creatures that had been copied from Earth horses and then half-bred and half-manufactured in the Pit by Grim Tuesday. Since Grim Tuesday’s fall, there had been no new supplies of Not-Horses, much to the annoyance of the Moderately Honourable Artillery Company and the Horde.
But down below, the Nithlings had more than two hundred Not-Horses harnessed up to a giant twenty-wheeled wagon that was at least sixty feet long. On the wagon was … Corbie lowered his glass, rubbed his eye again, and took another look.
‘What is it?’ asked the sergeant.
‘It looks like a giant spike,’ said Corbie. ‘A sixty-foot-long spike made out of something very strange. It’s dark, and it doesn’t reflect light at all. It must be some kind of –’
‘Nothing?’
‘Yes, I think so. Sorcerously fixed Nothing. But why transport it into the Maze? What would be the point, since they’re never going to know where it will end up –’
Corbie stopped talking, put the telescope on a rock, and quickly opened his Ephemeris, flicking through the pages till he found the appropriate table, cross-indexing the day with the tile the Nithling Not-Horse train was on.
‘That tile moves right to the centre of the Maze tonight,’ said Corbie. ‘Grid five hundred/five hundred.’
‘There’s nothing special there,’ commented the sergeant.
‘Not that we know of. But I’ve heard mention of a famous problem they set at Staff College called ‘The Five Hundred/Five Hundred’ … the Nithlings must know where that tile is going. And they must have known where all the other tiles have been going, to get that thing this far.’
‘But they couldn’t get hold of an Ephemeris without it exploding,’ said the sergeant. ‘Could they?’
‘We never thought they could be organised either,’ said Corbie. ‘But they are, and they’re being led by someone who knows the business. Here, take this and see if you can see anything else.’
He handed the perspective glass to the sergeant and took out a small ivory stand and a lead soldier from the pocket of his quiver. The figure was of a colonel in the Regiment, all scarlet and gold. As Corbie put the model colonel in position on the stand, its colours grew brighter and lines sharper and then it was like a tiny living version of the real officer, far away at GHQ.
‘Colonel Repton!’
‘Hello, Corbie! Another informal report?’
‘Yes, sir. I’ll be reporting to Captain Ferouk, but it’ll take time for this news to get from him through channels, so I thought you’d better hear this and try to get it to Sir Thursday directly –’
The little model colonel grimaced when he heard this but nodded for Corbie to continue.
‘We’ve spotted a major Nithling column at tile seventy two/eight hundred and ninety nine, which is escorting an enormous wagon drawn by over a hundred Not-Horses. On the wagon is a sixty-foot-long, ten-foot diameter object pointed at one end that appears to be made from Nothing, though its shape is consistent. I can only describe it as a giant spike, sir. The thing is, that tile will move at sundown to tile five hundred/five hundred, and I –’
‘Did you say tile five hundred/five hundred?’ Colonel Repton sounded alarmed. ‘Would you describe the spike as obviously sorcerous?’
‘Yes, sir!’
The figurine visibly paled.
‘I must inform Sir Thursday at once! Wish me luck, Corbie!’
The figure stiffened and was once more merely lead.
‘Better wish ourselves luck,’ said the sergeant, handing the glass back to Corbie and picking up his bow. ‘There are another three squads moving out towards us. They’re definitely going to attack.’
Fourteen
‘ I THINK I just remembered something,’ said Fred. ‘About my old job. I remember separating the flakes of gold!’
‘That’s good,’ said his friend Ray Green. ‘I still don’t remember much. I dream about it, though, and it’s on the edge of my mind as I wake up. Then I open my eyes and it’s gone.’
‘It’ll come back,’ said Fred. ‘It usually does eventually. Most of it.’
Ray frowned. ‘The thing is, I have this feeling that I need to remember quickly. That there’s something really important I have to do.’
‘It’ll come back,’ said Fred. ‘It can’t be that important anyway. Not when we’re stuck here for the rest of the year. Not to mention the other ninety-nine years stuck in the Army.’
‘You wanted to be a general,’ said Ray suddenly. ‘I remember you telling me that sometime.’
‘Did I?’ asked Fred. ‘Really? Hmmm. That’s not such a bad idea.’
It was six weeks since Ray and Fred had been washed between the ears. They’d each woken later that same day, on their beds, with pieces of paper pinned to their tunics. The pieces of paper had their names on them and nothing else. When they first woke they couldn’t even read, but fortunately their reading and writing abilities had come quickly back to them, along with various skills and background knowledge.
But very few specifics about their previous lives had returned. They’d found their notebooks, but those hadn’t helped much. Fred had relearned his favourite colour and how he took his tea, but Ray found his own notes very cryptic. After reading them, he did feel that Ray probably wasn’t his real name, but he didn’t know what his real name was. Or the significance of the Trustees’ names.
Ray couldn’t even remember anything about being an Ink Filler. Fred had remembered quite a lot about his civilian life in the Middle House. Ray’s was a mystery. Try and try as he might, he could not summon up any memories. Sometimes he would feel as if there was an important memory on the very edge of his consciousness, but whenever he reached for it, it would be gone. It felt almost like a physical pain, a dull ache of lost life.
Fred told Ray at least some of his memories would come back in time, but that was small comfort. When the platoon got together in their rare time off, conversation would invariably come around to everyone’s previous lives. Ray would sit there, silent and still, but listening intently, in the hope that a detail from someone else’s life might spark some memory of his own.
The pain of listening to the others reminisce was lessened as their time off got scarcer and scarcer every day. For some reason, soon after they’d been washed between the ears, the normal training schedule had been accelerated, and it got accelerated again. In the beginning, the recruits were given six hours off a night, and two hours free during the day. That had been cut back to a mere five hours a night and then four, and even that was prone to interruption.
The training had been intense. Ray and Fred now knew how to march moderately well by themselves, with their platoon or with larger formations. They could march unarmed, or march and do basic drills with a variety of weapons, including clockwork-action poleaxes, Nothing-powder muskets, explosive pikes, muscle-fibre longbows, savage-sword and buckler, power-spears, and lightning-charged tulwars. They knew the seventeen forms of salute and the thirty-eight honorifics used in the Army.
They could also use the weapons they drilled with and look after them without injuring their companions. They could manage to present themselves in the basic uniforms of the Army’s main units, though never completely to the satisfaction of Sergeant Helve. They had learned to follow orders first and think about them afterwards.
They were becoming soldiers.
‘You should have remembered more straightaway,’ said Fred. ‘With that silver ring and all.’
Ray dug the ring out of his pocket and looked at it again. He’d woken with it under his tongue and asked Fred about it. But Fred couldn’t remember ever seeing it before, and it was a week before he recalled that a silver coin under the tongue was meant to prevent against washing between the ears.
‘It’s not all silver,’ said Ray. ‘Part of it has turned gold. I think that means something … but –’ ‘I can’t remember,’ finished Fred. He looked over at the scrubby desert to the west. ‘Almost sunset. Maybe Helve’ll let us off when it gets dark.’
‘I doubt it,’ said Ray. He didn’t want time off. Time off meant time trying to remember. He preferred to be busy, to have no time to think at all.
The section was on clean-up detail. The tiles to the southwest, west, and northwest had changed a lot in the last week, and the wind had been westerly, blowing bits of vegetation into the camp. Unsightly leaves had lodged themselves under the buildings and in various corners, upsetting the cadre staff. So the recruits had been unleashed and ordered to clean everything up, the penalty for the survival of a single leaf or whirly-thorn being a fourteen-mile-route march that night in Horde armour (good when riding Not-Horses, but terrible for marching) with Legion weapons and Borderer boots (as Horde boots would render the whole recruit battalion lame if they marched fourteen miles in them).
‘What’s that over in the desert?’ asked Fred. ‘Is one of the other recruit companies doing an assault exercise?’
Ray looked where Fred was pointing. A line of figures was marching across the desert, less than a mile away. The late afternoon sun glistened on the points of their long spears and their helmets, and reflected very brightly from the metallic thread of the banner that flew above the knot of four or five Denizens on the left flank who were riding Not-Horses.
‘They aren’t recruits,’ said Ray. ‘Or any unit I’ve ever read about.’
To try and make up for not remembering his earlier life, Ray had read all the way through The Recruit’s Companion and had memorised large sections of it.
‘Maybe we should tell Sergeant Helve,’ said Ray thoughtfully. He turned around to march to the orderly office but jerked to attention instead. Sergeant Helve was right there, staring at the desert. He was panting very slightly, which surprised Ray and Fred. They’d never seen Helve out of breath.
‘Stand to!’ shouted Helve, at a volume they’d also never heard before, despite some truly stupendous vocal performances when they’d inadequately polished their brass or whitened their belts. ‘All recruits, Legion dress, savage-swords, and power-spears, on the double! This is not a drill! We are under attack!’
‘Who are they?’ asked Fred as he and Ray sprinted to the barracks, without any NCOs telling them off. There was a torrent of corporals and sergeants going the other way, but they were not concerned with petty infringements like sprinting instead of marching today. ‘Can’t be Nithlings.’
‘Why not?’ asked Ray as they burst inside and rushed to their lockers.
‘That lot out there are organised. Disciplined. Uniforms and banners and the same kind of weapon and everything,’ said Fred a minute later. ‘Here, help tie this up, will you?’
Ray tied the leather laces on Fred’s segmented armour and stood still while Fred returned the favour. They strapped on their savage-swords, with the blades that twirled when you twisted the hilt, swung on their rectangular shields, and picked up their power-spears. The long metal points of these spears started to glow as they were lifted up, and wisps of black smoke coiled towards the ceiling. Many a roof or a companion’s uniform had been set alight by recruits with power-spears.