Chapter 4
The March North said:
Split Creek is running blood. Not the burning kind; this just spreads a thick smell of fresh blood down five kilometres of river-flats.
In case you haven't noticed yet, the setting for these books is weird. Even for the March North and the Commonweal series more generally, Split Creek is unusual. Among other things, this so-called "Creek" is actually "sixty metres across and has an old stone bridge spanning it on five thick piers." For those accustomed to imperial units, that's about 200 feet. In fewer words than I'm taking to describe it, the author tells us that the locals call all their watercourses creeks. No matter how large or small. This will be a running joke, so anytime you see the word creek, take a minute to remind yourself it can be anything up to and including a monstrous river large enough to handle the widest container ships in our world.
If you're wondering why a town was built on a river of blood; that's a great question. Hold on to it. It gets explained later. Sort of. As does how they're not all dead from a lack of clean water. Also, in this world there are at least two types of blood, the burning kind, and the normal kind. This is a river of the latter, "normal," non-burning kind. I love how full of tiny sidenotes like this the series is. It gives the writing a real sense of place. A strange, magical place.
As promised in the last chapter, the Captain has lined up the Wapentake on one side, and the newly arrived gunners with their artillery tubes on the other side of a large flat area beside the river. There's about half a kilometer between the two sides. I don't know about you, but I have a hard time making out details of anything that far out. I certainly can't throw anything like that far. For that matter, it's further away than most rifles are accurate out to.
There's some back and forth talk between the officers, including the Captain asking Part-Captain/Independent Blossom:
The March North said:
"Do your gunners know what they're doing?" Quiet, pleasant, isn't-this-lovely-weather officer voice; the Line makes you practice discussing hangings in these tones to its satisfaction before it'll provide the warrant of commission. Not the only requirement, but not optional.
This is a relatively mild example of something that's a staple of the military fiction genre. Soldiers, and especially officers, are held to very high standards which they meet. This'll be something the book does a lot with the Captain. He was trained in a very tough school even before getting real world experience. I'll call out more examples when we get to them. The school sounds pretty inspiring.
Eliding over some more character building and world-building Blossom gives us the operational specifications of the artillery tubes.
The March North said:
"Ten rounds per tube, black-black-black, all in a fifty-metre target at twenty kilometres range." No forced cheer at all. "The target wasn't eighty guys in a block."
20 kilometres is well over the horizon. For an observer of average height standing on the ground, the distance to the horizon is 4.7 kilometres. That's assuming no obstacles, and there usually are obstacles. So these artillery tubes can shoot well over the horizon. Not bad, not bad at all. Certainly worlds better than most swords and sorcery settings manage.
The Captain then explains why he has everyone out here to play "catch."
The March North said:
"You're here, Halt's here, Rust is here. I've got a company of dutiful, honest Creeks with no belief in fighting. That needs fixing before why you're here shows up." Because it won't necessarily bother to kill people before it eats them can go unspoken; I want the colour party to spread an idea of readiness, not assert that I'm crazy as well as undead.
This is an awesomely metal paragraph. Full of determination, incipient violence, and potential heroism. It's also a difficult paragraph to parse. I stumble over it every time I read this book. It starts by noting Blossom, Halt, and Rust are here. Then it segues to something seemingly unrelated. Then the next sentence refers back to the first, so you can't just chop it out and still have the mini-speech make sense. It feels more convoluted than necessary, which is typical of most of Saunders' dialogue.
The house-sized murder sheep, Eustace, provides a bit of comic relief to lighten up the tension.
The March North said:
Eustace has wandered down into the creek and is slurping away at the blood. Belly wool's going to stain something dire.
It says a lot about the book that the terrifying, fire-breathing sheep is the comic relief. Mostly that everyone else is scarier.
Meanwhile, everything else over the next couple of paragraphs serves to ratchet up the tension.
Blossom is pretty good with the standard and demonstrates the first bit of magic we see from the standard, unless you count eating paperwork as magic. Blossom splits the standard's viewpoint and positions one viewpoint roughly in the center of the field and the other behind the first platoon. The captain creates a third viewpoint and moves it
The March North said:
.., way up and back, so I'm looking down on the whole thing, but keep listening, so I hear, with the odd over-there effect one gets from the standard stuffing things in your ears Toby's long "Ready!"
In addition to hearing Toby, platoon sergeant for first platoon, the standard also lets them clearly hear the gunners of tube one. Remember, these two groups are half a kilometer apart, yet the standard lets the officers hear both groups clearly. That sort of clear communication is incredibly valuable. Especially when paired with viewpoint controls that are suspiciously similar to camera controls in games like Total War.
The book provides both in-universe military jargon and a translation for it. The important bit is the description of what the artillery tubes are about to shoot.
The March North said:
usually iron — bar half a metre long and ten centimetres across. The other two "blacks" in the shot code mean it has nothing directing its flight nor any magical effects when it hits. Which makes it the lightest, least dangerous thing the tubes can throw.
Magical artillery "shooting" potentially magical bars with optional magic guidance and optional magic explosions or more lethal effects when it hits. Awesome.
Less awesome is Toby's reaction.
The March North said:
Toby misses it, waiting to see it before reacting, which was just plain dumb.
Less than a metre from Toby's nose the whole projectile turns into a cone of thick orange sparks like it hit the grindstone of the gods. Toby's face is fine, eyes are fine; the edge of the grindstone was about the level of Toby's chin, and the sparks spray down. Still ass-flat in the middle of a grass fire with a ripply cuirass dent that spells "optimist", which is a nice touch from Rust.
This would have killed Toby and most of his whole platoon if they'd been fighting for real. Which isn't good, but isn't a problem either. This is about the level of incompetence you'd expect from green, inexperienced reservists. Which is what has had the Captain so worried, but also why they're out playing catch.
Also, this seems like a good time to discuss that "catch" in this case, involves magic artillery shooting at the Wapentake, one tube per platoon of the 4 (should be 5) platoon company. Previously I thought half a kilometre was a long way to stand apart. But it's basically nothing compared to the 20 kilometre range of the artillery. There's almost no time to react, even with the artillery shooting at the slowest, "safest" speeds they can.
Fortunately, Toby manages to recover from being virtually "killed" and sprayed with sparks from Rust stopping the artillery shot. He "grabs the platoon focus," and puts the fire out. So the standard/focus (the terms are used largely interchangeably) can provide remote viewing, remote hearing, presumably catch artillery shot, and also put out fires. That's a versatile magic item.
The Captain calmly comments that the point for that round of catch goes to the artillery.
The Captain, demonstrating a level of ruthlessness horrifying during peacetime and generally considered desirable in war, narrates their thoughts.
The March North said:
Before we marched out this morning, I pointed out that the right thing to do at this range is to pick the tubes up and beat their crews to death with them. Blossom radiated horrified just long enough for my next sentence, utterly forbidding any such thing, to sink in. This is a game of catch …
Obviously beating your opponents to death during a war game would leave you without any allies in a real war, so they're not going to do that. What's easy to miss here, is that the Captain thinks that it should be trivial for the focus to pick up a multi-ton artillery tube half a kilometer away and swing it around like a twig. That's a lot of power there, and yet another thing the focus can do.
Next up, platoon two, and their sargeant, Radish, gets to try catching a shot from tube two. I'll probably be saying some variation of this every chapter, but you really have to read between the lines with this book. Saunders never comes straight out and tells us that Radish the platoon sergeant for second platoon, but he is.
The March North said:
Radish is a small guy, for a Creek, a small guy named Radish, which is not your usual Creek name. So a good bit meaner than Toby. Radish does the simple thing and rams the platoon focus into the ground on the angle of a door wedge over twice the width of the platoon front. Tube two's gunner gives the whole thing a nice long pause and then calls the shot with hand signals while saying "black-black-black" out loud, hoping that the focus, with no resistance, will have wavered.
Wavering isn't much like Radish; the shot howls off the focus, nearly straight up, and tumbling end over end.
Curiously this is also one of the few characters whose gender is clearly established. Saunders rarely tells us someone's gender unless it is story relevant. Radish is a rare example of a gendered noun being used when it isn't critical. I didn't even notice the lack of gender pronouns until I was a few books in.
This time the point goes to the company, as Radish demonstrates another magical effect the focus can make. Shields! Or at least inclined planes of invisible force. Suddenly, catch seems a lot fairer and less a form of elaborate suicide.
Blossom catches the rebounding shot and redirects it into the river. The Captain approves entirely, and, like a good supervisor, lets Blossom know they do approve.
The March North said:
This is going well; no lasting damage but lots of bad smells and a real sense of risk.
Dove takes "catch" literally: the focus reaches out, hard, and the shot gets about twice the force it had arriving smacking it back less than fifty metres from the muzzle. Halt doesn't move or speak, but the spear of burning iron coming back at tube three vanishes a hands-breadth from the berm.
I never noticed this before, but in three shots, we've seen what the focus can do, what the artillery can do, and all three of the sorcerers have demonstrated that as powerful as the focus and artillery are - still the sorcerers are greater. Neatly economical writing to pack all that detail into just three exchanges.
Blossom notes two points to the company. Or maybe one more point added to the previous point for a total of two? It's not clear to me. Meanwhile, the gunners for tube 3 are only just realizing they're not all going to be killed with their own shot and shakily pulling themselves back together. The next few paragraphs are short. A little bit of world and character building that I'll skip over summarizing.
The March North said:
Hector gets clever with four; it feels like going for Dove's trick, only the neat, quiet version with the shot caught hanging in the air. Which misses, three or four times, with increasing force; five or six pieces of shot spray out in a witch's broom of flaming iron off the original shot track. Dove gets both chunks that would have sliced into Three, straight up, and Blossom does the slapping trick again, close sullen thunder. Hector's cuirass gets "Braver than you" hammered into it, something Hector may not notice in the midst of a larger grass fire than Toby got.
There are a couple of snickers from the colour party behind me; no one is inclined to argue with Rust's judgment of Hector.
I appreciate the colorful commentary from Rust. Both for the commentary itself and how Rust is the only one of the sorcerers who snarks like this.
Also, 4 platoons try 4 different magical ways to avoid getting shot and killed. I said it before; that's a very versatile tool. Possibly too versatile. Whatever the standard is, it's doing an impressive imitation of a battle wizard. The trouble with that is, it takes a lot more training and practice to get used to using something with that many options. In my 8-5 life I design user interfaces, and one of the things we always look for is ways to make them simpler. Simpler tools are safer because they have fewer ways to mess up. The incredible versatility of the standard is yet another reason for the Captain to want to make sure they get plenty of practice with it in circumstances as close to real as possible.
A coin flip rearranges which tubes are shooting at which companies, and the game of catch continues.
There's a bit more comedic relief from Eustace the house-sized murder sheep. Interestingly it comes in the form of the terrifying sheep eating even more horrifying weeds. This is the reason Halt gave for bringing Eustace instead of explaining what she's really doing here in the last chapter. It's a fantastic callback to a detail that's very easy to overlook.
There's some more fairly standard military commentary. Including a note on the importance of drinking water and how hard it is to remember to drink enough. This is entirely sensible but the sort of small but critical detail a lot of military fiction authors forget to include.
The March North said:
Four hours later, the score is one hundred twenty-three, artillery, seventy-eight, company, Dove's cuirass is the only sergeant's undented…
The artillery wins the game of catch, almost 2:1. Which is pretty much what you'd expect from the sort of cream-of-the-crop veterans used to field test experimental artillery tubes versus a bunch of green recruits. If anything, the recruits are doing better than expected here.
It's also worth remembering the Dove is the only platoon sergeant who didn't screw up once. Dove did the right thing in the right way, faster than you can blink, for 4 hours in a row without a single mistake. Which is probably most of the reason the score isn't more lopsided. Dove's performance here is extraordinary.
The March North said:
"Three's sergeant is unusually talented." Blossom's more quiet saying this.
