Shadows in the Smoke - Chapter 41 - The Sound of Marching

  “Ideology binds nations together. It is a shared consciousness which allows diverse groups of individuals to achieve more than the sum of their parts. That is why the Republic’s ideological unity is such a strength.”

  The Struggle for Freedom by Bjarne Midthun

  =====

  As she stalked along the walls, Ester was still fuming at Captain Lovas’ insinuation that she was having some kind of tryst with Vegard. A Republican! One who'd tried to kill her! She shook her head angrily. She needed to focus. This was a war, not a time for her to sulk over some stupid Republican’s insult.

  Outside the fort’s tunnels, the clanging of the alarm bells was only barely audible and there wasn’t much to hear on the walls themselves. The shuffling of feet, occasional mutters from the soldiers and the whisper of the wind through the crenelations. It felt like the world was holding its breath, waiting for something to happen.

  Lindholm had said that scouts had reported the forces of the undead massing, but nothing seemed to be happening. Ester narrowed her eyes as she peered out into the darkness, trying to penetrate the gloom and see whether there was a monstrous horde approaching them or just empty land. She didn’t envy anyone sent out into the cold, dark night looking for them. It was bad enough being there on the walls without having to try to sneak through mud and snow, knowing that you might be spotted at any moment.

  As the minutes dragged on, with nothing happening, her frustration grew and grew. It got to the point where she was shifting from foot to foot and on the edge of overcoming her reluctance to speak to Vegard before something changed.

  At first it was just a low, faint sound echoing through the dark. Ester couldn’t work out what it was. Just that it was slowly but surely growing louder.

  She glanced at Vegard, who was looking outwards with the intensity of someone whose life depended on it. She supposed it did.

  Did he know what was going on? She really didn’t want to ask him, but this wasn’t a time for stubbornness. Just as Ester was about to say something, magic flashed into the sky above the fort. A simple spell, but with a decent amount of power behind it.

  Light burst into being far above them all, bathing the ground outside the fort in its harsh, white glow.

  Ester had to blink a couple of times before her eyes adjusted, but when they did ice ran through her veins as she realised what that sound had been.

  Hordes of figures were out there in the snow, illuminated by the magic, marching towards the fort. They were silent other than their footsteps. The sound must have been muffled by the snow, but with thousands of feet moving, it wasn’t enough to bring silence.

  Ester tried to count them and quickly gave up. It was a lot. Were they human? Undead? How powerful were they? Ordinary humans without the Talent would just break against the fort’s walls. She hoped so anyway. If there were more powerful undead or witches with them, that was different. She nervously licked her lips and glanced at Vegard for reassurance, only to see him looking as frightened as she felt.

  The light abruptly vanished as someone among the undead cast disjunction and she was left staring into darkness again. It was almost worse than being able to see the oncoming horde. She still knew they were there; she could hear them getting closer, but now she didn’t even have the reassurance of knowing where they were.

  In the face of that, Ester’s resolve not to speak to Vegard cracked.

  “What should I do now?” She asked him without taking her eyes off the darkness in front of them. “Should I make light, or attack them?” She resisted the urge to point at the approaching enemy.

  “No,” he shook his head. “Hold off. Wait for the other Arcanists to strike and take that as your signal.”

  Ester shot him an irritated glance. “But why are we just letting them get closer without doing anything to stop them? We could be killing them already.”

  “They’re out of range of any reasonable attack, trying to hit them is just a waste of energy.” Vegard didn’t take his eyes off the enemy.

  “I could hit them from here.” Ester knew she sounded petulant, but it was true.

  “Perhaps you could at that. So could Arcanist-Colonel Lindholm. That doesn’t mean it’s a good idea. There’ll be witches among them and if you’re the only one attacking them, they’ll easily disrupt your spells however good you are and then you’ll have wasted a load of energy for nothing. Best to wait until they’re in range of most of the Arcanists before you let loose.”

  Ester huffed at his words, but they made an annoying amount of sense. She’d just stand there, listening to a horrifying horde that wanted nothing more than to kill her, or worse, getting closer and closer. This wasn’t like facing up to a single necromancer, there were so many people and not-people down there. She forced herself to stop going down that line of thought as she clutched at her skirts to stop her hands from trembling. She wasn’t going to show how scared she was. Not in front of Republicans and particularly not in front of these ones.

  They stood in grim silence for a few minutes, punctuated by occasional brief flares of magic that illuminated the approaching army. She could hardly contain herself, only years of self-discipline allowed her to stay still. Surely they must be getting into range by now. How could the Republicans stand this waiting?

  How could they even fight with so little light? Would they just have an Arcanist assigned to lighting up the battlefield? Would there be witches assigned whose job it was to extinguish the light? Did darkness get in the way of the undead too? Could they still see in the dark? Would she be looking around her, unable to see anything, while vampires honed in on the sound of her heartbeat or something? Ester shuddered at the thought, half expecting to feel teeth closing on her flesh.

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  “Cantrist-Sergeant, what do you normally do about the light? Do the undead need to be able to see?”

  “Huh?” He seemed to have been locked away in his own thoughts and it took him a moment to reply. “No, the undead don’t need light, fucking creatures. But a lot of the army down there will be humans. Traitors or slaves, it doesn’t matter, they need to die.” He spat off the side of the wall.

  “What about the undead then? How do we deal with them if we cannot even see them? Do you just have an Arcanist spending all their time producing light? What if they are killed?”

  “Oh, don’t worry, we have our ways in the Republic.” His smirk evaporated under Ester’s scowl. “I can’t tell you, it’s classified, but trust me we’ll be able to see. At first, anyway.” He said the last part more quietly.

  Classified? She was going to see it anyway, what was the point of the secrecy? If it wasn’t Arcanists, then what was it? Actually, maybe… Ester forced herself to think rather than wallow in her irritation. The Republicans had been incredibly cagey every time they mentioned their special ammunition. As if it wasn’t obvious what it was.

  A Schema shot out of a cannon might be able to provide light for a while. It wasn’t something she’d thought of before, she’d assumed they just made bigger explosions, but why not? It would avoid using an Arcanist and there was no reason why it wasn’t possible, although she wasn’t quite sure how it would be done.

  Presumably they would put something onto the ball that they shot out of their cannon. That was the ammunition after all. That would be easy enough, she could put a light-producing Schema onto a stone or metal ball in a couple of minutes, if not faster.

  The real question was: how did they actually make it useful? It would have to be bright enough to illuminate a whole battlefield, which would take a reasonable amount of power. That wasn’t a problem in itself, but the difficulty was making the Schema stay intact for any length of time. Trying to route a reasonably powerful effect through a crude Schema on poor materials was a fool’s errand, it would burn itself out in seconds and that was without the strain of shooting it out of a cannon. Were they using better materials for their special ammunition? Maybe that was why it was such a secret.

  The other problem was, in a way, a simpler one. How would they keep the light in the air? There was no point in making your light last longer if it just fell out of the sky within a couple of seconds.

  It was easy enough to make something that would hover, or at least fall slowly, but again it ran into the problem of how to stop the Schema from burning itself out too quickly on poor materials. There was no way they were shooting balls of gold out of their cannons. Also, it would make things much harder if they had to combine the two effects into a single Schema. Perhaps the Republicans weren’t as bad at magic as they seemed. Or was there something obvious she was missing? It wasn’t like the Empire couldn’t do that. There were rooms in the Academy lit entirely by floating lights, but those were on top quality materials that no one, not even Her Eternal Majesty, could afford to fire out of a gun in large numbers.

  Hopefully she’d find out soon. The special ammunition had suddenly become a lot more interesting than simply making big explosions. Although big explosions did have more than a little appeal right now. Did the Republicans do other exciting things with it too? Her imagination raced, whisking her away from the oncoming army of undead, as she thought about what kind of devastating things soldiers could do with Schemas they fired out of their guns.

  Ester chewed on her bottom lip as she tried to decide how she’d adapt a standard Schema for making floating lights to make it both brighter and more efficient when magic flared outside the fort. A huge amount of it, all coming together into a single spell of pure force.

  Disjunction sprang to her lips, but she didn’t think she could even dent something like that, let alone unravel it. Bands of colour bound themselves together, with flickering runes holding swirling around them. Was it the Sovereign that Lindholm didn’t think existed? Or a lot of witches lending each other their power for a ritual?

  Ester glanced frantically around her, but the Republicans didn’t seem to be reacting. Most of them couldn’t even see it, but even Vegard didn’t seem to be too worried. What was wrong with them?

  The moment the spell completed its slow formation, it blasted straight towards the fort. Another section of the walls, not Ester’s, but she still threw herself down behind the battlements with a shriek. If something that powerful hit straight on, the walls would simply cease to exist, but it might be survivable at a distance.

  The spell struck with a deafening clang that echoed through Ester’s ears. Even Vegard ducked at the impact.

  It felt like the whole fort shuddered, but as Ester slowly picked herself up off the floor refusing to meet Vegard’s eyes, there were none of the screams or sounds of collapse that she’d have expected. Instead, veins of purple light were arcing across a dome of magic surrounding the fort. Flashes of lightning discharged off it, spearing away into the snow outside the fort with such intense bursts of magic that it made her head ache to even look at them. As the veins crawled their way down the dome, its faint silvery light faded back into invisibility.

  It took her a couple of seconds to process what had happened as she tried to clear the magical overload from her senses.

  The fort’s wards. It must have been. She’d thought they hadn’t been all that impressive in their passive state, just simple mechanisms to keep danger out. She’d clearly been wrong. These were different to what she’d originally sensed. Built off the same foundations, she was sure, but working at a whole other level. They were already disappearing from her senses as they went back into a passive state. They weren’t at all subtle, but it seemed they were effective for blocking brute force attacks.

  Ester looked back towards the undead army. She could feel the magic building again among them. Right at the edge of her range, with the amount of magic they were feeding into their slowly building spell, she could have pointed straight at them with her eyes shut.

  The wards had been far more impressive than she’d expected, but how many hits like the first could they take before they failed? She didn’t want to find out, particularly not if the undead targeted wherever she happened to be standing.

  Ester closed her eyes, feeling the building spell without looking. She could hit them from here, she was sure. They couldn’t be allowed to just keep bombarding the fort. Without thinking, she took a small step forward and started to marshal her thoughts.

  Just before she could bring them together and start speaking a spell, she felt a hand on her shoulder.

  She spun, the spell vanishing as she brought a hand up, fire already sparking to life above her palm. Was this when they tried to get rid of her?

  “Stop!” Vegard leaped backwards, holding his hands up.

  It was the look of terror on his face that made Ester hesitate just long enough for her mind to catch up. With an embarrassed grimace, she let the fire fade away.

  “Please do not touch me again, Cantrist-Sergeant.” She’d nearly killed him! For putting his hand on her shoulder. What was wrong with her? What was wrong with him for doing something so stupid?

  “I’m sorry, Mage Mazar, I didn’t mean to scare you!” At least he sounded like he meant it. “I was just trying to stop you from attacking the undead.”

  “Why? We can’t just sit here and let them bombard us with impunity, your wards won’t last forever.”

  He seemed to fight with himself for words for a moment and then sighed. “You’ll see, Mage Mazar. Please, just hold off a little longer.”

  Ester gave him a long look and eventually a short, sharp nod. She wasn’t going to be the trouble-maker here. Vegard would die too if the undead won. Unless he was a traitor. She dismissed that thought, there was nothing she could do about it. She would be sensible and listen to the expert, not blunder into a dangerous situation without thinking.

  “Very well, Cantrist-Sergeant. I will do as you ask.”

  “Thank you, Mage Mazar.” He sagged slightly. “If you watch to your left, hopefully you’ll see why I’m not worried. The Republic has its own ways of dealing with these kinds of things.”

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  Stubbing warning

  Dramatis personae:

  Ester Mazar - Chartered Mage, let me hit them. I wanna hit them. Can I hit them yet?

  Vegard - Cantrist-Sergeant in the garrison troops, do not touch the Mage.