Cinders of Magic

Chapter 4-1

Chapter 4

Dawn was announced by a booming bloom landing three miles north, crashing to the earth, and spinning deadly shards of metal hardly bigger than the nail of a man’s thumb through the air. Where the shells landed, they left craterous ruin in the earth, often as not failing to detonate, thereby creating a mine ready to take a man’s leg off if he failed to notice metal tail sticking out of the mud in time as he moved by. The guns aimed for the enemy, but they had been fired for a long time, some as long as the war itself, and whatever skill their firing teams purported to possess was bent by burned barrels. Shells made their distance most of the time, but seldom did they manage to fall into the trenches the Sloanish held just at the edge of the Fiorian forces. Faulty aim did little to disturb the timber of deep echoes through a sky that burned with the orange of dawn. The booming had not stopped all night, but with the assistance of the vision which the dawn offered, it picked up its pace like a demonic war drum summoning dozing soldiers from their sleep.

Captain Eladrine had been off at some time in the night, and in his place, the true commander of the six-seventy had returned. The man, round despite the scarcity of good food in the mud trenches and mouth so hidden in a salt and pepper mustache that Elias might have thought he had no mouth, took a look at the twenty or so men and women that remained to the six-seventy; he seemed more disappointed that any remained than glad so few had survived. “I’ll have you for malingering!” he swore even as he came down the ladder. “Where’s Penigast?”

The captain was taken to the man’s body--covered beneath a gray sheet--but now with an additional layer of dirt shaken from the walls by the hammering of the guns. The captain twitched his mustache in irritation, found the new commanding enlisted man, Elias, and took him by the arm. “We have men in the fight where you ought to be. Good men. Gather your convicts and relieve some of the fellows. You’ve four hours before the next break, and if you’re not at the lead of it, I’ll have every man here sentenced once over.”

The man never once looked to find the changed rank on Elias’s jacket. Elias doubted the man knew him as anything other than a ranking man, but being beneath the notice of men such as the captain was nothing newsworthy. The troops were already moving before Elias could relay an order; the men and women of the six-seventy were long used to the order forwards. Only half of the squad had landed the Orailse front as penance for conviction. The other half were merely shaggy-haired Renno with big green eyes. To most Fiorians, there was little difference. Until Elias had landed himself in the six-seventy, he had seen a small difference as well.

They ran from the top of the wall beneath the cover of metal hurtling too fast to be seen by the eye. The lines had moved during the night, but with a good eye, it could still be seen not quite the distance off that the captain had said. Bridges lead over the trenches where half-collapsed slices through the earth housed tired and dirty men enjoying whatever rest they could achieve. In one of the artillery holes Elias lead his soldiers past, a pig was turning on a spit over a flame. The fire was small, snaking from a can that had been once full of a paste handed out to the troops that would catch light and burn for hours at a time. That can was almost empty as they passed, and the men that roasted their pig watched the passing soldiers with hard, miserly eyes. Elias steered the squad clear of the men and their catch.

Soldiers were about, digging up unexploded shells in the dirt with spade and shaking hands. A month or two of “recovery duty” could earn a man a good six months somewhere else that never heard a shot fired from a rifle. Still, not many volunteered to go digging in the earth for shells that might be pulled out before a man stepped on them and blew himself to the other side of the shadow; more often than not, it was given as punitive duty.

Three walls ahead, Elias lead the squad down a ladder to rest a while and have breakfast. Quartermasters had outfitted the six-seventy with food and supplies enough for sixty men ten days before when they had last been in the camp proper. With just under twenty remaining, the squad could afford to eat to contentment given how overladen with supplies they were. Men pointed out the squad’s good fortune, not to bring trouble, but as an opening gambit for trade.

Biddy was the best for trading. The man turned three wheels of cheese and four portions of dried meat into four full bottles of whiskey and enough tobacco to last the squad through the five more days until their time on the line was over. If their luck held, the tobacco would last a mile longer than that. As his squadmates swapped food and medical supplies with the men of the twelfth wall, so named by the red twelves that were stretched along its length at close intervals on the south-facing side, Elias managed to ferret out a deck of cards. It cost him the one loaf of bread he managed to find earlier in the day.

Breakfast finished, Elias lead the squad over the twelfth wall and closer to the sound of explosions. In the air of the day, the falling of shells was easy to hear from miles off, easier somehow when a man was beneath the earth in the trenches. As close as they were coming to the leading edge of the front, the squad felt the explosions in the earth when they hit and smelled the burning on the air when an errant gust swam their way. The edge was still two walls distant, but the craters were numerous enough to make finding a path through an effort without bothering to climb in and out of the holes.

Wood bridges stopped being a constant. The bringing forwards of the bridges to make quick movement atop the trench lines would wait until commanders were certain the armies would hold their newly captured lines. The matter of constant failing to predict the ferocity of the Sloanish charge had left the commanders hesitant to send support forwards, which in turn left the forward arm bare of the support it needed.

Approaching the thirteenth wall, Elias pushed the squad through closely spaced artillery holes, not daring to take the trick of the trenches and their promise of even footing. Men worked down there with spades to clear away the dirt mounds the Sloanish had left in their retreat, collapsing the stolen trench walls down on the heads of the soldiers that had likely helped build them in the first place. Then and again, the digging soldiers struck something not so solid as earth with their spade and pulled the body of a dead man from beneath the dirt, mouth full of the dirt those buried men tried to breathe through in their final desperate moments.

At the wall, Elias had to turn west and run along the trench line itself to find a good crossing over the other side. Hlia hauled with her a wooden platform to lay across the more narrow spaces they could find to cross, and as soon as the last was across, she’d pick it back up and run to the front again. The woman never complained about the job, and no one tried to take a share of her load.

They came upon a gathering of soldiers, the largest they had seen since the start of their run, standing around a man in priest’s robes down in the trench near the wall. The man called out his sermon over the booming of the guns, and those gathered watched him with numb, pleading eyes. Elias realized that it must have been a day ending in five, though when he thought on it, he could not recall the current month.

Some of his squadmates slowed as they passed over the gathering. High up, the pounding of the guns on the wind carried off the pastor’s words before they could reach the squad, but still, they stopped. The Renno in the squad, Hlia lead among them, clenched metal talismans shaped like swords where they had them about their person and mumbled a familiar prayer under their breaths. Elias recognized the litany of the Lowlord that rumbled on dry lips around him. He spat into the trench at his side. Whatever his feelings, beyond even his understanding, he let the squad have another break to make their worship before pushing on.

The guns were firing faster when they left the huddle of men pressing around the blue-cloaked pastor, and as the squad vaulted the thirteenth wall, their footfalls were matched by detonations.

On the other side of the wall, there were still bodies. The ones responsible for clearing the field of the dead and the deadly pieces of metal that were the Sloanish flying knives had not managed to make it past the thirteenth wall. The going became as much an effort to avoid stepping on the knives as it was to find a way through the ever-multiplying holes blasted into the earth. Each time that Elias had to lead the squad down into a hole they came out the other side with a few more of the knives tucked into their packs to sell off whenever they returned to the city. Flying knives sold well if you found the right people that would carry them back south to then, in turn, sell to those that wanted a trinket from the war. Many people cared enough to pay a piece of the bloody history, but not quite enough to come themselves and get the memento without charge.

The knives were not content with being scattered about on the ground but also fell from the sky with a frightening infrequency. When the Sloanish were pounded by the firing of Fiorian long guns and forced to hole up in the trenches they’d stolen, some took to firing their knives into the air in the vain hope that they’d hit a Fiorian soldier. As crowded about as the Fiorian forces were to the front, that hope sometimes bore fruit.

A knife landed an inch from Elias’s hand as he pulled himself along the upslope edge of an artillery hole, its wicked barb almost taking his longest fingers as it fell into the dirt and stuck standing up. He took that knife, the only one he had bothered with. Something whispered to him that it was lucky.

What had started as the procession of Sloanish razorback bodies, broken by shells and gunfire, turned into a mad mixture of the two armies as the squad ran on. The assault the night before had left almost as many dead Fiorian soldiers as the enemy scattered in the muck of the battlefield. No one looked for faces among the dead. None stopped to search a man, friend or foe, for things they wouldn’t need any longer. None so much as slowed in their run as the frequency of uniform scattered in the dirt slowly bled towards Fiorian gray and away from Sloanish greens and yellow.

The knives fell almost as frequently as the shells by the time the fourteenth wall came into view. Men crowded the wall here, up out of the safety of their plank-covered trenches, muscles tense and waiting for the break in the artillery that would announce the charge. They watched Elias come on, flanked and followed by his squad, with much the same morbid fascination as he’d had watching Captain Eladrine race through the falling of flying daggers the day before.