Chapter 274 -267: The Cold Ground
The high moor, north Valdris, two days above the Corran holding
They lay on the cold ground the better part of a day before Arven would let anyone touch it.
Cray had driven them to within a mile before stopping, trembling, and refusing to go any closer. Arven didn’t press him. They left the drover with a flask and a guard at a safe distance back on the moor, while the rest crawled forward on their bellies through the damp heather to the final rise, where they halted, looked ahead, and fell silent.
"That is not a barn," Varro said, after a while.
The drying-house sat in a shallow dip with its back to a rock face—a long, weathered stone building with a roof newly covered in slate that caught the grey light awkwardly. Around it, signs of recent work were everywhere: a timber palisade forming a rough square, earth piled against its inner side, and firing steps cut at intervals. Nearby stood two outbuildings, a well, and lines for horses. Behind the main structure, neat rows of tents stretched out—far more than any workshop would ever need.
And men. A great many men.
"Count," Arven said.
Daren had the long rifle’s glass to his eye and counted — not the men, which move, but the fixed things that imply them. "Firing steps cut for the whole perimeter. Cook-smoke off six fires, not four. Tents in blocks,." A pause, and when he spoke again there was something careful in it. "That’s five hundred men down there. Might be six."
Nobody said anything for a moment. Five hundred was not a workshop guard. Five hundred was a garrison, and a garrison meant the Church had decided this place was worth holding.
"Knights?"
"Counting the good tents" Daren shifted the glass a fraction. "From what i can see maybe twenty" He held on it a moment longer. "But they’re not all the same. There’s four — five — that the rest give room to. Bigger tents, servants. The way soldiers are giving them way." He lowered the glass. "Those five are the fight. The other fifteen are just men who happen to be knights."
"Grand-tier?"
"What do you think i am,I can’t read a rank through a tent wall. But what i can see is who a camp is afraid of, and that camp is afraid of five men." Daren looked at him. "After Anley, I’d not want to bet those five are anything less than what the cleaner was."
He found the caster on the second sweep.
There was a figure the soldiers moved around — not saluting or attending, only leaving space, — who walked the inside of the palisade at dawn with two others trailing a respectful distance behind him.
"There’s your ward," Daren said. "The one in front. The two behind copy how he holds his hands. Learners. Greenhorns"
"One strong, two green." Arven watched the lead figure stop at the drying-house door, lay a palm flat to the frame, and stand a moment as if listening to it. "And he’s warded the building. See — he touches the door and the door answers him. That’s not a lock we pick."
"That’s not a lock we touch," Varro said.
"No. We can’t lift it." Arven was quiet a beat. "But we can break it."
Varro turned his helm toward him.
"Ironbreaker didn’t send us up here with only the standard load." Arven said it low. "Cedric’s doing, after the council. There are ward-breaker rounds in every one of our rings — bolter rounds built to punch a prepared ward instead of skidding off it. We can’t feel that door. But we can absolutely put a round through it, the wall and probably any unlucky guy on the other side" He watched the caster finish his round.
They came up in the dark, twenty-five of them, and lay along the rise, and Arven laid it out with the drying-house lit below by its own six fires.
"The shape first. They are five hundred and more soldiers, with twenty knights, five of whom are the real deal, and one strong caster and two greenhorns. We are twenty-five. That is the wrong way round, and they do not know it yet, and everything tonight is built on them not learning it until it’s far too late to matter." He set stones on the flat ground, one cluster to a squad. "The first minute is worth the next ten. When it starts, it starts everywhere at once, and it starts loud,— we want five hundred men awake and frightened and firing into the dark, Frightened men waste things and die faster"
He touched the stones on the high ground.
"Daren’s snipers open it,from this rise and the rock shoulder east. Before one soldier down they knows there’s a fight, I want those five dangerous knights to be fewer. They’re the only thing on that field that can genuinely hurt us in a hurry, so we take them the cheap way — asleep, walking a watch, standing at a fire — one at a time, for as long as the quiet lasts. When the quiet breaks, you keep firing, but now you’re killing whoever’s brave enough to give orders. A garrison that size is only dangerous if someone organises it. Don’t let anyone organise it."
"Varro’s fire support hold the nearest wall — two squads of Heavy on the north palisade. Machine guns, exploding rounds, and your first minute has one purpose above every other: the caster. When the shooting wakes him he’ll come out and start doing the thing we can’t answer, and there is one answer and it’s that you and Brant put anti-armor launchers into him before he finishes his first spell. Not the soldiers. Not the wall. Him. If he lives past the first minute, men who should walk off this moor won’t. So he doesn’t."
"And once he’s down?" Brant asked.
"Then the machine guns earn their keep. Five hundred men in a timber square, and you’re on the high side of the north wall with exploding rounds and a full drum each." Arven let that sit. "You are going to do a terrible thing to a great many people tonight, and you are going to do it from a place where nothing they own can reach you, and I need you to be all right with that before it starts, because the alternative is we fight five hundred men fair, and I don’t fight fair, I fight finished."
"Shields go through the gap Varro tears — my squad and Pell’s. Once the launchers have taken the caster and opened the palisade, we’re inside the square before they’ve made a line, and we go straight for the drying-house, because that’s probably where the machines and the drawings are, and everything else on that field is noise we walk through. When we reach the door, it’s warded, so don’t touch it — put a ward-breaker through it and go in over the wreckage. Inside are the four scholars and whatever sleeps close. Scholars alive — that’s an order. The rest, not."
"The machines?" Pell asked.
"Into the rings, whole, the moment the room’s ours. Warhound and gun both. We don’t burn them and we don’t leave them — they come home, an empty workshop is a mystery Valdris chases for a year, and a burnt one is a story that points somewhere it shouldn’t." Arven set the last stone. "And when the machines and the scholars and the drawings are ours, the very last thing we do is make this a wreckers’ quarrel. Bodies where they lie, the Church’s own coin thrown about, the buildings fired. Valdris rides up in a week and finds a free company that fell out over stolen loot and butchered itself. That’s the story every dead man here helps us tell."
Rellan, from the flank, asked the medic’s question.
"You’ve planned all of theirs. Plan ours."
"I’ve planned for none, and I mean it as doctrine, not comfort." Arven looked round the ring of helms. "Every man here is sealed in the most expensive thing Elarion has ever built. Starforged adamant over the heart, the helm crown, the joints — the places a blade or an arrow goes looking. Dragonbone under the plate to eat a blow that gets through. They have swords and bows and five knights and a curse. The swords skid. The arrows find nothing to bite. The curse we delete in the first minute. And the five knights are Daren’s, before they ever wake." He held Rellan’s eye. "If we do this right, five hundred men spend the whole night discovering, one at a time, that they cannot hurt us — and by the time they truly believe it, it’s over. But you’ll stage close behind the shields anyway, because ’can’t be hurt’ is a thing men believe right up until a night proves them a fool, and I’d rather have you idle than late."
"Idle it is."
"One more, then we move." Arven looked down at the frost — a hard white ring on the ground around the drying-house, though the moor about it was only wet. "Cray didn’t lie about the cold. It’s in the ground down there, out of season, in a circle, and I don’t know what it means, and I don’t like standing over a thing I don’t understand. So we’re fast. We take what we came for, we leave the story we came to leave, and we’re off this moor before dawn and before I have to learn what freezes a place that has no business freezing." He stood, and twenty-five shapes rose out of the heather around him.
"Snipers to your ground. Everyone else on me. It starts when Daren tells me it’s quiet enough to start it."
Daren was already moving for best spot, the long rifle in his hands
"Give me twenty minutes," he said, "and five knights won’t wake up."