Art Pact 34

The company stalked through the ruins, every eye among them searching the jagged outlines of the fallen palace. Commander Falcris, in the head of the column, felt the psychic pressure of the troops behind urging him on, wanting to run through the remains of the building and away into the unknown plains on the other side. The impetus was so strong that he let his sword slide a hand's width out of its scabbard so that he could grasp the blade directly, focusing on the unpleasant sharpness of the steel to keep his mind strong. He deliberately began to step more slowly, braking the others. He considered calling for help, but the sky-box had been pulsing red since mid-day, the sign the machine gave when it was hungry. Davin, his third in command, had all of the machine-water, and his lance were all the way at the back of the group. Falcris did not want to leave his position to Lieutenant Lemma. The troops would be sprinting out of the ruins before he'd got halfway back to the carriage.

"This is wrong," she said. Falcris nodded. "We should hurry."

"No."

"The longer we take, the more spooked the rest will be."

"No doubt," he said. "But if there's a genuine reason to be concerned here, it's not spirits or ghouls, it's the Soromatae. If we run from shadows it might be the last thing we ever do."

"It's a good place for an ambush," Lemma agreed. "But we're a long way from the line. There can't be a Soroma squad a tenth our size out here."

Falcris prevailing, it was another full watch before the column emerged, thankfully uneventfully, from the other end of the ruins. The division line was marked by the old palace walls, half-fallen but still so strong that two armies fifty times the size of the Falcris's company could have camped on either side of it and remained not only entirely safe from each other, but possibly even oblivious to each other's presence. The company scaled the wall at its most ruined point, Vallas Pass as it was marked on Lemma's map, over the course of an hour. It was easy climbing, the bricks of the wall huge and conveniently shaped, but once at the top it took a hundred men on the ropes to haul up the carriage and let it down the other side. Before it was set down again though they camped - an hour's rest atop the wall to feed the men and water the officer's machines. and time for Lemma's adjutant to indulge his curiosity regarding the air-dampers, thousands of which were still functioning.

"They take no machine-water," he explained to the officers, excitedly crouching near one of the blooms. "I believe they collect the dew on these flat plates."

"That's why they look like flowers?" Falcris asked.

"Perhaps. But I suppose one flat plate might be as good as any other. Dew forms on a glass window as easily as on a plant's leaf, after all. Perhaps they're just built this way as ornaments."

The adjutant's enthusiasm for details was one of the things that Falcris found irritating about the man, and obviously the reason why Lemma had promoted him. Lemma's own meticulous examination of minutiae he found a laudable quality, so it confused and annoyed him that essentially the same trait expressed in one soldier he found annoying, in another invaluable. It was something about Corporal Prien's demeanour, a sort of breathless engagement with his subject, as though it were the most important thing on earth. Lemma, by distinction, evaluated facts with a cool detachment that left one in no doubt that she understood the matter in question entirely but made no value judgement on it past its immediate impact on the company.

Falcris wondered whether her assessment of the Soromatae units in the region was accurate. No doubt she believed it to be so, or she would not have said it. But something about the last few days of marching felt... off, like the moments before an ambush more than the routine boredom of most campaigns. He kept expecting the hammer to fall on them, and with every watch that it did not he just grew more uneasy. There was no reason or rhyme to the feeling, nothing he could put his finger on, but something in him was warning him about trouble ahead. He considered setting up camp for the night in their temporary position atop the wall, but the danger of high winds seemed too much to risk, so he gave the order to proceed downwards and bivouac in the lee of the ancient structure.