B3Ch57-Hale reports (Patreon)

Harold walked in through the gate with Hale a step behind him, and the century on watch came to attention. Every man saluted with a sharp fist to the chest and eyes front, and not one let his gaze drift to the Count. It was obvious Hale had been stamping the same iron discipline into them.

They had a real wall around the camp, a ditch cut the whole way around it, the soil thrown up into a rampart behind, and the rampart topped with a palisade of sharpened logs. Timber towers stood at the corners and over the gate, and it all sat square to the compass. A man dropped blind into any legion camp on the continent could still find what they were looking for because they were all made the same way. The legion's fortification crews and earth-crafters had sped the work, and it showed. It was a small wooden city, one that could be abandoned in a morning and rebuilt by nightfall fifty or sixty miles on.

"You've been busy," Harold said.

"They have. It was a slog getting the Legion through the pass; monsters kept attacking various points, and throwing more bodies into it wasn't always a good option." Hale started him down the main avenue between the tent lines. "Try to look impressed. It's good for them."

He was, and let it show. What got him wasn't the wall or the towers — it was that every man had a tent over his head. Last campaign they'd slept next to open fires and called themselves lucky for the warmth.

"They've all got tents," Harold said.

"Revolutionary," Hale said. "A roof over a soldier. Amazing nobody thought of it before."

"You telling them it built character last time." He accused.

"It did that time; now they need a tent." Hale groused back.

The cohorts were laid out in blocks off the avenue, each one its own small neighborhood of tents and cook-fires and stacked shields, and Hale named them as they passed, one after another, proud of every block of them. "First's Ayen's, since Ferro took the wound at the second circle during the trial and transferred to the civil legion. Good pick. The men would have followed her anyway, so I made it official." He tipped his chin at the next block, where a squat woman was walking a line of legionaries through a shield drill in the cold. "Second is Okoro's. Do not play cards with her."

They passed a stretch of ground given over to Tatanka lines, and Hale nodded at the empty pickets beyond them. "Your lords aren't all here yet. Won't be until we move. Fitch and Maren are still north — a week of hard marching to their towns, and Fitch links up with the cavalry. Renna's bringing engineers and her surveying people, which will help a lot in the mountains." He said the names without ceremony, glad of the help. "Caswell and Brennig will be catching up with us at the summit. I know Arjun petitioned to come. I'm surprised you said no."

Harold nodded. "Margaret has a plan for him, and I've got a job that needs him. And he's worth more finishing the Basin's infrastructure than freezing up here watching me work." A pause. "Don't tell him I said he was worth anything. He’s been asking for more resources."

A shadow crossed the avenue, and Harold looked up.

The eagle came over low enough that the wind of it stirred the tent canvas, and a grown man sat astride its back between the wings. It was enormous. Kess's birds had been ugly, hungry things the size of large dogs the last time Harold had stood in the roost with Max. This one was seven times that, big enough to carry the man on its back like he weighed nothing, and it climbed off the far palisade and banked north on wings that threw a wind of their own.

"Goddamn, they grew," Harold said.

"I watched one run down some other winged thing out of the mountains and put it into the dirt. Those birds are killers." Hale watched it go until it was a speck. "Two of them and their riders map more country in a morning than Garrick's whole cohort walks in a week. Kess says they've still got growing to do."

Past the horse lines, the camp changed. The tents gave way to worktents with their sides rolled up despite the cold, and the ground between them churned with half-finished work — a stack of ballista frames, a long trench of banked charcoal, a wagon up on blocks with three people arguing under it. Most of the men and women here wore the brown of the crafter company, and by the callused, dust-gray look of them, most were earth-crafters.

Harold slowed without deciding to. He'd caught the charcoal trench — hardwood, banked low and burning clean and even down its whole length — and his eyes ran it looking for what else they had cooking. "That's good char," he said, mostly to himself, and found his hands rubbing together. "Somebody here knows what they're doing. That's decent enough it can be used in a couple potions."

"Told you." Hale didn't slow. "Try to look at the siege engines that way and not the firewood."

"Marshal commands the legion crafter company," Hale went on. "He'll want an hour of your time. Having them changed everything — this camp went up in three times quicker with their help."

Harold nodded. He remembered Marshal — the fire-crafter who'd come up out of the refugee columns with a fire perk and a habit of being wherever he was needed. And there, at the end of the crafter lines, behind a rope and a pair of bored-looking guards, were the alchemists.

Finn ran them. Harold saw him before the rest, bent over a folding bench with his sleeves pinned back, walking two younger students through something with his hands while a third took notes. He was thinner than he'd been in the autumn, and the gray had come into his hair early. Harold slowed. Finn was too young to be carrying this.

"He's been good," Hale said, not looking over. "Better than he was. He's got his hands on every alchemist in the company and teaches them what he knows. Keeps him out of his own head."

The last quarter before the command works belonged to the camp followers, and it was the loudest part of the whole camp. Someone had a laundry going in great steaming vats, and someone else was mending boots at a booth with a hand-lettered sign, and there were children chasing each other between the tent ropes and being roared at half-heartedly by a woman with an armful of wet wool. Wives had come north with husbands. Merchants had come north with everything, and the legion paid them honest coin to wash and mend and carry and cook.

"I'm surprised you let them within the walls," Harold said.

"I let the useful ones close, keep a real wall between them and the fighting, and I'd rather have them where I can feed and count them than trailing us in the open getting picked off." Hale drank. "Men fight better with someone to fight for three hundred yards back."

He leaned in and lowered his voice. "I've got a section of the Templars and one of Margaret's sections embedded in them. They're assessing all of these people for me, so we know of any threats."

They came up on the command works at the center of the camp, where the earth-crafters had done their best work. The praetorium had started as a tent and then been dug down into the ground, roofed, and reinforced until it was half bunker. The crafters had reached down and pulled stone up out of the earth for the walls, raised and hardened. A stray bolt or a bad night's fire wouldn't reach what happened inside. Harold ducked through the low entrance out of the wind and into lamplight and the smell of hot iron and, thankfully, coffee.

Adeline came in a step behind them, grabbed his pack from his back, and walked into the room that was clearly set aside for his and set both their bags down inside it.

"I'll start pulling the reports together for you," she said, eyes on Harold. "Then I need to gather the clerks together."

Then she looked at him. She meant it professionally, with Hale a step away, but it didn’t last — the few days locked in a simple cave in the mountains had been some of the favorite days on Gravesend. The simplicity of the time made it thoroughly enjoyable. Well. That and having Adeline next to him.

She took the pot off the brazier and poured for the room on her way back to the travel desk, filling Hale's mug and Harold's last. By the time she sat, the glaze had come over her eyes. Three threads deep, stylus already moving, she was pulling some coded post apart into what it actually meant.

Hale looked at the side room, at the two packs sitting side by side inside it, and then at Harold, and raised one eyebrow.

Harold smiled at him, and felt it come out sheepish, and couldn't do a thing about it.

Hale looked at the packs a moment longer. "Good you sorted the sleeping arrangements before the war," he said. "Priorities." And he let it go with a smirk.

“Like you’d be any better if Margaret were here,” Harold muttered at him.

The entrance flap slapped back and let in cold air, a big man, and a bow nearly as tall as he was.

"Well." Garrick crossed the room in three strides, set the bow against the wall, and pulled Harold into a rough, hard embrace that took him half off the floor. Then he stepped back and looked him over. "You're not dead. You came over the top in that storm, didn't you?"

"Missed your ugly face," Harold said. "Good to see you, Garrick."

"Someone has to be here to name the body when the mountain kills you. It’s rough terrain in there." Garrick dropped onto a stool. "You made good time, though. Better than I told my scouts to expect."

Hale pulled the first stack of slate across the table and squared it under his hand.

"All right," he said. "While you were being romantic in the mountains, here's where the war stands."

He set the first slate flat, took a pull from his own mug, and turned it so Harold could read the tally.

"Supply. Sixty days of hard rations for the full column in the deep magazine. Grain, salt meat, oil, charcoal. Foraging up here is close to nothing, so that number is what we have with us. Enough to fight a short spring campaign."

"It won't be short," Harold said.

"No. Which is why the sixty days shouldn't worry you. We have stockpiles from friendly lords prepared for us, and Caldwell has been staging supplies with Dalen all winter. But the road should worry you." Hale ran his finger off the edge of the slate and past the table, south, toward a basin behind them. "Everything you're standing in came up that road in winter, over ground that wants them dead. We lost one convoy to a slide in the second week. Twelve Tatanka, six men, forty barrels dead under the snow before anyone got a rope on them. This camp is the end of the line. If the basin can't keep pushing barrels up that road behind us, we don't fight a campaign."

Harold's eyes stopped on the four men, and he was quiet a moment. Then he read the tally again. "How's Renna holding it together?"

"Tran runs the count, she runs the routes, and between them we've lost less than I budgeted for." Hale shifted his armor off a sore spot and drank. "She found two shelves on the climb that cut a day off each leg. I've stopped arguing with her about anything."

"She walked my scouts into the ground doing it," Garrick said. "Didn't notice she'd done it until they were the ones begging her to slow down. Never met a surveyor I had to jog to keep up with before. Strange woman though, kept slowing down around sunsets and was always up for the sunrise."

Hale pulled the next slate up. "Our forces. Bigger number than it was." He set it flat. "The Legion's near ten thousand now. Heavy foot and organized into cohorts and two different legions.

"Ten thousand." Harold took the mug Adeline held out at his elbow without looking, the way he'd taken a hundred of them from her. "That's good. We'll need every one of them."

"I've drilled them the whole way. Only about half are actually fully trained, but we have time to get them there before we engage." He moved a finger down the slate. "Parker's got the knight cohort. All of them at least tier two. Garrick's got the scouts. Marshal runs the crafter quarter you already saw, earth-crafters plus Finn's alchemists."

"And the ballista frames I walked past."

"Now those weren't made by us. The dwarves built us a proper siege train over the winter — heavier and better by a long way. We can actually siege a wall now." He tapped the corner of the slate. "On top of that, you've got the better part of a thousand adventurers hung off the force."

Harold drank, and stopped. She'd put something in the coffee — a little sweet, not what he typically drank, but right now it was phenomenal. He glanced at Adeline. She didn't look up from her slate, but the corner of her mouth lifted. He could get used to this.

"When do the rest come in?" he asked.

"We'll meet them on the march. Fitch and Maren are a week north. They fold into the column when we reach their towns, along with the new cavalry for the Legion. Apparently he's already completed the Heavy Tarantine Path. Your other banner lords will arrive as we march." Hale set the slate down. "We've got maps of our route, but the one actually clearing it is all Garrick."

He tapped the center of the sheet. "Here's us. Dalen's walls are here, and come spring the whole campaign stages here for the goblin city. The summit's here." His finger slid west, down off the worst of the high country. "Margaret has confirmed over two hundred lords will be there, and she's expecting that number closer to three hundred."

Adeline spoke without lifting her eyes from her slate. "Lord Vesk. Two hundred tons of food supply, confirmed this morning under a trade cipher." She underlined it. "Your sister's been working these lords for months. Half of them think signing on was their own idea. That's the part that should reassure you." She moved down the page. "Supplies staged along the route for us to collect as we march."

"I've had conflicting reports about her progress up here," Harold said. "Which means she's either doing better than she's telling me, or worse. With Sarah it's hard to know."

Garrick pulled a separate slip out of the stack. "Mostly she marked things to kill. Probably that perk drift of hers pointing her at strong monsters. One she flagged three times and underlined. Surprised she didn't try to kill it herself." He read it off. "A dryad grove. North slope, half a day off your route. She says neutral. She says maybe. Then she's confirmed multiple ruins that she has explored and the items you wanted collected from them. But she's stuck at Dalens village as he is under almost constant siege from the goblins."

Harold sat forward and rubbed his hands once without noticing he'd done it.

"Dryads? That's worth half a day." He caught Hale's look and didn't care. "Dryads can reason. Like the naiads. Most of what's out here you can only kill — dryads are among the few exceptions. Though they mostly fall under the Fae court."

"Talk to?" Hale said.

"Bargain with. A neutral grove, anyway. Plenty of them would put a root through you for standing too close to their trees, and some just don't like the smell of us." He shrugged. "If Sarah says its neutral, it’s something I want to check out."

"Bargain for what," Hale said. "We're not short of trees."

"Guardians. And better herbs." Harold laid two fingers on the road running south, back toward home. "A grove that can be talked into pulling up and relocating to our herb fields raises the potency of everything that grows there. If they've come far enough to have a matriarch, I'll pay near anything to recruit them."

"Ask nicely." Garrick turned the slip over in his fingers. "The Count of the Landing, hat in hand to a tree."

"The rumors about dryads are true, by the way." Harold grinned at him. "All of them. Give it a week and you'll be the one hat in hand, and hoping your niece never hears her uncle got talked into anything by a shrub."

Hale sat down and kicked his feet up onto the table. "That's where we stand then. Column marches at first light. You've got a summit to reach and a list of errands to run on the way there, and I've known you long enough to know you'll run half of them yourself instead of sending someone sane to do it."

"Only the ones worth doing myself," Harold muttered.

The others moved. Garrick unfolded off the stool and collected the great bow from the corner, and Hale was already turning toward a legionary who'd put his head through the door. Harold stayed over the map, tracing the north slope past the flagged grove and up into the high country, where the road gave out and the rivers came down loud off the rock.

There was one errand he hadn't put on the slate.

Balfiel was up there. Right now the old elf would be grinding his craft in some cold stone room, scoffing at whoever he'd found to despise this decade. Harold hadn't missed him. But a Grandmaster was a Grandmaster. There were maybe three left on the peninsula he knew by name, and the old bastard was the only one who'd ever taught him anything. The other two lived within Ism Thalor and hated Balfiel.

"Adeline."

She was already turning a fresh slate over, stylus ready, before he'd finished the word.

"Do you know if there are any good adventurer teams for exploring?" he said. "There's a pass I need found."

"The one your old master lives past?" She'd read it off his face, or the map, or both. "You want the pass, or him? Lady Renna would be a better choice."

Harold looked at her a moment. "Both." He sighed, "I guess it's time I go see the old bastard."

She snorted. "Then you'd better give me the details," she said, "Describe the pass they are looking for."