Under One Banner, page 8
part #4 of Commonweal Series
“There’s a lot of background worry about economic limits. Artillery can be less expensive.” Eugenia has been wondering how sensible that evaluation is. A battery is more people than a company and the effort to make the artillery is large.
Interesting, but certainly large.
“Know any military theory?” Captain Blossom asks this as any other question might be asked.
“No.” Eugenia wonders how much a Line captain would know, considers the Hills High Road, and feels they must explain. “I was considered militant, but Order — ” and Eugenia stops. Militant gets misunderstood; it doesn’t mean you want to fight another sorcerous entity with the Power. It doesn’t imply any developed skill, either; it’s a measure of capacity. The militant are able to use the Power swiftly and fluidly enough that they might fight by means of the Power, if they chose to create the skill in themselves. Those not militant cannot create such skill; their imagination of the Power will not encompass it.
Their imagination of the Power might forbid it, with all the risks of haste and suddenness.
The Independent Order’s views on sorcerers fighting with magic are both nuanced and absolute. It’s a notably long and carefully reasoned argument that expands the specifics of why sorcerers fighting is bad every time it is iterated, and Order has been iterating it for centuries. Eugenia despairs of summarizing it. Military theory did not get close enough to Order’s curriculum to be overtly disdained.
Captain Blossom nods. “Willing to learn some? You did a good job of the field manual, but that’s how, not why. We could do with something for those with a warrant of commission.”
Eugenia tries not to look shocked. “I could get the gunners to explain why they wanted to do things a particular way, and have them come to agreement.” Eugenia doesn’t think they had anything to do with deciding what was correct. Getting the arguments to happen and resolve, yes. Sometimes by getting a stopwatch and timing an evolution done one way, and then the other. Getting arguments to resolve is its own skill, and one they needed in their class of sorcery students. “I don’t think there are a group of artillery officers?” Eugenia tries to keep their mental shift from here to at all out of their voice. It nearly works.
“Just two.” Captain Blossom’s looking pleased. “I have to make sure a bunch of new and novice gunners get the files to come out right and everyone’s maintaining their latch to the banner as habit, rather than decision. The other one gets to make sure the gear is ready.”
Captain Blossom makes a general gesture of inclusion at the chalkboard. “So I don’t have time, but there is a library and it’s always easier to amend an existing text than to write one.”
Eugenia nods, slowly. “It would take some time.” Eugenia doesn’t suppose they’ve got enough.
“Not your main job,” Captain Blossom says. “I still want you to get what Tiggy’s bunch does written down. You’re officially all integrated again, so you’re not any more risk than anyone else.”
“Not necessarily any more use than anyone else.” Eugenia tries to sound factual, rather than bitter. “Sorcery is not inherently subtle but the Shot Team’s rather much so.”
“To the great good fortune of us all.” Captain Blossom means it, but it’s not all they mean. Eugenia finds themself waiting for the next thing to be said.
“I’d like to make an experiment, but it requires you to take an oath ahead of time, and the oath would hold whether or not the experiment worked.” Captain Blossom’s looking straight at Eugenia to say this.
Eugenia sits up straighter in their chair. This is not at all what they were expecting. They were expecting something about deadlines.
“Experiment about?”
“Artillery includes metaphysical senses. The traditional inclusion in the tube isn’t being used, there was some discussion about what to do instead, and there were test pieces made. It’s possible you could use a test piece, but they won’t work for someone not at least of the Line.”
Eugenia loses a little time. It’s the same pleasant small office with logistics notes written over all four of its slate walls when it registers again. Captain Blossom is looking patient, patient and a little kind.
“Is of the Line subject to orders?”
“In the field, which this is not.”
There’s a modest pause. “And not regular Line sorts of orders, ‘of’ is for medics and quartermasters, people who need to be able to latch to the standard so they know what’s going on.”
Eugenia nods. Not people who are expected to integrate with the focus and add to the push. Not people who are expected to kill anyone.
“I did seek advice.” Captain Blossom’s voice is carefully neutral. “The test piece is an enchantment, but not a focus. It lacks any capacity for executive.”
It can’t do anything, Eugenia thinks. No ability to alter anything material or immaterial.
“It would need some kind of skin contact.” Eugenia remembers the diagnostic images and the sharply defined loops around their head and thinks an irreverent maybe a hat. Close might be enough.
Captain Blossom nods. “Yes. And it might not work at all.”
“Of the Line isn’t permanent?”
“No.” Captain Blossom’s capable of a thoroughly friendly smile. “Never get enough drovers if it were.”
Eugenia thinks will it interfere with the Shape? and I still can’t pass, in quick succession.
“Does this require witnesses?”
There’s a nod.
“Can we get some?”
People show up; one of them is Tiggy. It’s straightforward. No thumb-printing drops of blood.
“Ready?”
Eugenia nods. They never expected they would ever meet anyone as implacable as Order, but they’re starting to wonder about Captain Blossom. It was an entirely friendly tone of voice. It was a real question by any social measure. Eugenia still feels like they’re going to go fight an onset of cruncher with a cracked stick.
It’s in the sort of neat wooden box you keep machine parts in, padded with some bits of old towel. Twelve flat square metal plates connected with wires. Some sort of alloy, Eugenia thinks, unable to place the specific silvery colour.
There are so many silvery colours is a distracted thought before Eugenia reaches out a hand to take the experiment they’re being offered.
Chapter 12
Year of the Peace Established Five Hundred Forty-Four, Month of Germinal, Twenty-sixth Day
It takes Eugenia three whole days to stop randomly bursting into tears.
Everyone was extremely understanding; the second night, Tiggy, Delph, and Lily carefully fed Eugenia respectable whisky out of what for a Creek was an infant dosing cup and listened as they babbled and made sweeping hopeful gestures.
Eugenia’s relief and joy are such mighty things they’re not even embarrassed.
Sometime around day four Eugenia’s recovered enough to ask whose work they’re wearing. On a hat; shaken out, the plaques make a circle just slightly too large for Eugenia’s head. Making it into a necklace able to lie flat presents the problem of alterations to the spacing between the plaques; that will nearly certainly break its function, even if adding a clasp didn’t. They’ve acquired a light skullcap for indoors and a broad-brimmed canvas outside hat. The thought of stepping outside, to a lovely lake view and a hundred-metre drop to what is certainly deep water, paralyses Eugenia in a way that could only be more thorough if nerve damage were involved.
“If it falls in the water, we’ll get it back. We’ll get it back if I have to use up a neighbour-favour,” Tiggy says, voice and face and stance completely serious. “If something crawls out of the otherworld and eats it, we will make you another one. I promise.”
Eugenia had nodded and taken several willed deep breaths at a slow deliberate pace before they ignored their tears and not being able to see anything but a bright patch and walked through the door.
“The short answer,” Tiggy says, “is we don’t know who made that one. It tested best but we weren’t checking who made which one, you don’t want expectation bias in the tests.”
Eugenia’s looking outward and trying to hold their head completely still. There’s a boat with a driving focus moving southward. The sharp crisp swirl of the power circulation goes blurry and then away across a couple of seconds.
“About half a kilometre,” Eugenia says, wondering. A clear half-kilometre, and they couldn’t sense clearly past fifty metres before.
“The actual artillery pieces get more reach,” Mel says. “That’s a proof-of-concept test for a particular design choice. There wasn’t any reason to put in the full area or the high-energy filters.”
Even considered as a passive awareness, the amount of Power matters. The device builds a receptive structure, but it’s Eugenia’s metaphysical self that provides the Power to do the building. A live artillery tube would involve much more Power than Eugenia ever had.
“It’s notable work.” Eugenia’s quivering all over. “I had no idea this was possible.”
“Some of it’s new theory.” Tiggy’s considering how much to explain, and Eugenia can just tell. Not well enough to get words out of Tiggy’s cognitive penumbra, something a sorcerer of modest talent can never expect to do, but enough to have a feeling for intent.
“It’s still notable work.” Eugenia takes a couple of steps like dancing. “I hope you’ve got who made it in the files somewhere.”
“We’ll be evaluating the next batch,” Tiggy says, grinning, and Eugenia nods. Evaluators who don’t know who did what is something worth maintaining. Anything involving the Power is an inescapable haze of personal biases, the Power works by personal biases, but ritual behaviour to eschew bias has measurable effect.
The boat trip starts after lunch. Eugenia takes their luggage — ’plan for a few days’ Tiggy had said — down to the refectory with them.
Seeing everybody together leaves Eugenia fighting down giggles. The third time, someone asks.
Eugenia gets their glee under control. “I’m sorry, it’s not polite, I know it’s not polite, but I would never have expected Lily was a necromancer.” Lily might be the friendliest person Eugenia has ever met; they’re even more consistently cheerful than Tiggy and not abashed about it.
Lily leans over the middle of the boat and pats Eugenia on the shoulder, smiling the whole time. “Nobody does.”
If they weren’t on a boat Eugenia’s pretty sure they would have been hugged.
It’s extremely uncomplicated water. It’s a beautiful day. It’s a remarkably secure feeling to be able to just know people are there, whatever direction Eugenia’s eyes are pointing. It’s not Eugenia’s class but it’s clearly someone’s independent class and an amazingly cohesive one; these are people who work together exceeding well. Eugenia knew that from the results. Results aren’t the same as knowing with certainty the results aren’t luck.
The Power will have its little jokes with luck.
It’s still hard to sit still and be quiet for three hours. Eugenia doesn’t think anyone’s talking silently, Try is obviously asleep, and Eugenia stares over the bow and doesn’t marvel out loud at the tiny patterns of life in the water. ‘Try’ is short for Tryphosa, which Eugenia looked up. There is absolutely no way to ask if Try’s mother feels they made a mistake, having named their child ‘delicate’. Try came to stuff-wreaking and general sorcery from being an impossibly competent blacksmith. ‘Impossibly’ for just a hammer, though the subsequent awareness of their talent hasn’t altered Try’s metaphors.
After another little while, Eugenia says “I really appreciate it, but why is there coffee?”
“Rose didn’t want the Captain to run out.” Xenia sounds like they’re half asleep. Stay below the sides of the boat and the sun is warm.
“There’s fifty-some thousand folk not of the ilk of the Creeks in the four provinces these days. All the Regulars and Typicals like coffee.” Mel doesn’t sound sleepy, or like they’re disagreeing with Xenia.
“What we really need,” Tiggy says, “is a social drink everybody likes.”
Regulars can’t metabolize methanol. Typicals find a little methanol improves the taste. Creeks don’t like methanol, usually, but should always avoid caffeine. Theobromine beyond minuscule amounts is a hallucinogen for Creeks and Amazons. There are ilks of Elegants who really shouldn’t drink all that much water in their ethanol. There are six ilks of people poisoned by ethanol. By the time you do the big chart with everybody, you’re making some sort of thick vegetable broth that’s been salted with exacting precision and it just doesn’t feel festive or even quite manage to be entirely safe for everyone.
“Not involving beets.” Thistle sounds a little irked, but Thistle usually does.
“Not involving beets.” Aella doesn’t sound irked at all. They both turn their heads enough to say “And we know you like the stuff,” directly to Tiggy.
“Be that as it may,” Tiggy says, “the only universally acceptable solvent besides water would be vegetable oil derived from some kinds of squash.”
“Which already mostly goes to medical uses.” Delph’s amused. Eugenia’s entirely happy to be sure it’s amused, and not arch. “And it’s been carefully bred to be innocuous and nearly flavourless for five hundred years.”
“You still made cake topping out of it.” Thistle continues to suffer from disbelief.
“Which you liked.” Nothing shows in Delph’s face, but Eugenia can feel Delph’s amusement and smiles themself. It isn’t a wise idea to bet Delph they can’t do things, Eugenia thinks.
Eugenia tries not to think about why a combined life-mage and life-tweaker talent, even a modest one, has a place on a wreaking team making artillery shot.
“This place wasn’t on the maps we had in the first valley,” Eugenia says. It might not be a wise change of subject.
Only a little ripple, though, so not problematic.
“The province of Westcreek,” Mel says, “is organized around the West Wetcreek. Which is as far west as you could put a significant watercourse, there are tall bluffs some places where it’s eroded into the edge of the clastic wedge off the Folded Hills. The original watercourse was Westcreek, which is dry now, and all its tributaries drain into the West Wetcreek through some sort of gate no-one understands. That’s about as far east as it’s possible to get before you’re into the Blue Creek’s valley, the original drainage all went east away from the Hills.”
Eugenia nods. Mel’s producing a schematic illusion.
The illusion draws in the line of a canal, running almost due east from Westcreek Town to Lockpoint on Blue Creek. “West West-East Canal” Mel says. The whole thing tips and goes even more schematic, an elevation cross-section.
“This is cheating,” Mel says. “The land is flat through there, so I can just pretend I know the elevations.”
“Anything’s more than I know now,” Eugenia says.
Mel smiles and the whole cross-section falls to where the bed of the Westcreek runs with a short steep rise to the east and the western edge of Blue Creek’s valley. “We think it looked like this when the Westcreek was a watercourse. It couldn’t be one now, the bed is at a jumble of different elevations. Someone moved everything around to make Lost Creek the main watercourse.” The dent shifts west, so there’s a broad shallow chevron shape of a valley. Not apparently old enough to have steep sides and a flat bottom.
“A fair while after that, someone else made a mess of the drainage to put in Split Creek, which got installed in a course as though it was on nearly flat land.” The cross-section rises to the modern slope, with markers going west to east noting the West Wetcreek, Split Creek, Westcreek, and Lost Creek. “Split Creek winds up in Awkward Lake.” Mel’s voice becomes entirely definite. “Do not go there.”
Eugenia says “I won’t.” There’s probably something subtle somewhere in how Creeks name things, but Eugenia’s been exposed to enough understatement in Creek naming practices that any place named ‘Awkward Lake’ would have to have a truly excellent funny story explaining the name before Eugenia would even consider going there.
“So now we’ve got a lot of swamp because there’s a lot of undrained sinks and the old watercourses have been jumbled up. You can still trace the former course of Lost Creek. Split Creek would be a proper watercourse if it had water, and run sort of opposite where Lost Creek used to.”
The illusion goes back to the plan view, looking down. Eugenia can see the West Wetcreek, running north-south, Westcreek Town, the West West-East canal running due east away from Westcreek Town, the wide loop of Split Creek that comes close to Westcreek Town before swooping away to the east and back, the trend is east of south or maybe south of southeast, with the last loop headed southwest and then west and there’s the lake. Mel gives it the map symbol for ‘no search will be attempted’.
There’s another line, this one dashed instead of the red-blue-red of the margins of dangerous water. It goes almost as the inverse of Split Creek, defining a trend of ovals on the map.
“That’s roughly the old course of Lost Creek. It hasn’t flowed since Split Creek was there, everywhere Split Creek came in restructured the land so there was no route for the water, it wasn’t just changes in elevation affecting the drainage.” Mel looks straight at Eugenia. “Deep swamp, lots of weeds, not places anyone wanted to go.”
Eugenia nods.
“Parliament had agreed to the idea of a larhaus,” Tiggy says, “but not created any. There was a bunch of fussing about just right and just where and nobody really wants to be the first to administer something new in the law.”
Eugenia nods again and wonders why the delay annoys Tiggy.
“The Fight Below the Edge,” Tiggy says and stops.
“Intent on conquest,” Eugenia says, because that much understanding of the destroyed force, come for the Cousins’ damp dark woods and sea fogs below the Edge, has become general.
“Yeah,” Tiggy says, and does not remark on auspices warning Parliament to be concerned for the southern border, nor just how freely the attackers made use of demons. “Getting things wrong moved.”
