FFMS014
The heliograph tower burned like the torch of Prometheus into the night, and the crackling of the flames had finally drowned out the fading shrieks and screams of the tower's crew, who had not died easily, or well. The rails of my witch's gig were sticky-slick with my own blood, as we banked once again around the flaring tower. The tarred-oak construction had burst into spectacular fury once Bad Apple had gotten it to burn, and all of my concentration was bent upon the massive night-glamour which englobed the inferno within a lesser darkness.
The outer, moonless night rang with the clamour of the fighting below. That also, was my task to swathe and obscure, to keep the noise of the fight around the base of the dying communications station from echoing across the open terrain. The burning heliograph stood above and to the west of the tangle of streams and pastures known locally as the Wirts; her siblings to the west and east stood in theoretical view of the flames. Except we had destroyed the station to the west, and the station to the east was obscured behind the lens of darkness and silence I kept projected in front of our assault on this, particular, heliograph.
A commando of Company ground-troops had been inserted by pegasi chariot earlier that evening, along with sections deposited nearby the last two heliograph stations we had destroyed, each in its turn. A second team of witches and pegasi and commandos was working its way eastwards along the chain of stations, as far as the night took us in either direction. The links with Leveetown were already heaps of coals and corpses, destroyed in the early hours of the night. Now we were pressing our advantage as far as it would go, right up to the very regimental camps of the enemy.
This station had proven to have a larger contingent guarding it than we had expected. The section from the Second Cohort was fighting an alarmingly even fight with the enraged defenders of the dying heliograph. They must have known that they were not fighting to save their ponies, but rather to avenge them, but that did not cause a spear to lower, or a hoof to weaken in the battle. Rebel after rebel fell in the attack, but they still fought on, with the pegasi charioteers swirling overhead the scrum, their javelins expended, their wing-blades flashing in the strange, orange-red light.
The smell of the burning pitch was foul beyond all imaginings, and my pegasus driver was coughing up a lung as we counter-rotated above the fray. I yelled at Whirlwind to take us out of the smoke before she choked and we both plummeted to the angry earth below. She widened our gyre, and we didn't so much leave the stench behind, as we trailed its residual stink behind us in the cleaner night air. I could still smell it wafting off of the pony's wings. I was willing to bet that she was no longer so eager to get into the battle as she once told me she was.
My hocks shook as the blood feedback began to fade, and I looked at my spurs and my cannons, looking for a couple square inches of unscabbed, uninflamed hide to score for that one last hit of energy. I slashed, and the pain quickly faded in the rush of the return of my power. The vast bubble of illusion and baffling remained intact, and the tower burned on into the small hours.
The fight on the ground dispersed as the surviving rebels fled into the darkness, I could see several of them with javelins embedded in their backs or shoulders, looking for all the world like the bull-fighter who used to tour with the carnival when I was a child, who would challenge ponies or donkeys to try and subdue that great muscle-bound monstrosity, with light lances and throwing-darts, until the victorious bull-fighter was covered in a sort of cape of nodding, bobbing throwing-darts hooked into his thick, insensate hide.
Bad Apple and her driver came up to our orbit, and she shouted a question at me, pointing at the distant eastern horizon. I shook my head at her in negation.
I couldn't possibly keep in the air for another strike. And from the looks on the ground, I didn't think we had the resources or energy among the troops to do this again before the morning light.
I looked across the eastern horizon, and noted the next heliograph station, its lantern-lights flashing some mysterious code at its dying cousin. The Patrollers knew the code, I had been told, but I certainly didn't have it, nor had I memorized anything helpful along those lines. And the morning would reveal to them the smoldering ruins of their line of communication. These ruins would be all that they would learn of the night's battle, or the advance of the Army of the North.
That army's Middle Division regiments would have pushed past the heliograph line before this tower collapsed into itself and its constituent embers. The Reserve was even at that moment rushing through the night north of where I and my driver floated upon the foul and stinking night air. The General and her regiments were passing south-westwards, to a planned blocking-position north and west of the westernmost extent of the Wirts. And northeast and northwest of both of those Northern formations, the regiments of the Right and Left Divisions were advancing to support the flanks of the main force.
There was never a dawn that took so long to arrive. I swayed, weary, in my gig-chair, and in my mind I traded Prench nursery-songs with a dream-Cherie, a radio-Cherie, younger than the real thestral, a remembrance of our younger days, a happy little diversion from the horrible foulness. I endured that stench which we had brought into this world, which hung in the darkness and polluted Whirlwind's beautiful wings, and affrighted my offended nostrils.
The charioteers returned with their heavy chariots, and extracted the commando-section, wounded and intact alike. Whirlwind and I continued our gyre over the collapsing frame of the dead heliograph-station, and the crew that we murdered, and the dead rebel defenders scattered around the circumference of the smoldering wreckage. We left when the first glimmer of false dawn began to touch the eastern limb of the world. They would see what we had done soon enough afterwards, and it was time to return to the new lines the infantry would be laying out.
Dawn and Whirlwind and I found the Reserve on the move across farm-lanes and trails not that far away from the burning tower, their companies and battalions spread out across the landscape, scrabbling around and looking for places to sleep, places to throw up field-fortifications, places to park their wagons and their carts. From up on high, the ponies, donkeys and caribou of the North looked like an army of ants, as oddly organized as those insects, as collective and without identity as those bugs. Following the genius of our dream-Cherie, Whirlwind and I banked, and spiraled down over the forming camp of one of our cohorts, the doughy old Third, detached now from the Left Division and in support of the Reserve-brigade.
The night had brought two dozen casualties to the commandos and the ground-troops and the pegasi, and at least one fatality, an earth-pony mare named Fire Axe whose luck had run out in the assault on the second heliograph station on our tour of destruction. Dream-Cherie told me of greater casualties, greater fatalities in an evening-battle around Dover that night, which was being resumed again this morning. All among the remaining regiments of the Left Division, excepting one serious wound incurred by one of the Company sections seconded to the Chutes des Cristal.
Speaking of the Company ponies seconded to the Left Division, Not-Cherie informed me that her true self had been relieved of her duties with the II Tonnarre, and that she had been far to the south that night, exploring the long banks of the Housa, and looking for the great triremes of the rebel battle-fleet. I couldn't imagine what command thought it was doing, putting that bubbly, flighty thestral into the very den of the dragon, but I was still nothing more than an apprentice when it came to the decisions made in the interest of the Company.
But so was Cherie, and I couldn't imagine what they thought they were about, to fling her into the outer darkness like that.
Whirlwind and I found the Reserve's portable shower-wagon, which an enterprising and huge earth-pony from one of the Verdebaie regiments had hooked up to a buck-powered water pump, its long canvas-fabric inlet tube plunged into a nearby millpond. That glorious, sweating stallion pounded away with his rear legs at the water-pump levers, and the apparatus drew gallon after gallon of clean water out of the mill-pond and flushed it through the portable shower-heads. Bad Apple and a couple of pegasi were under the shower-heads, glorying in the stream of sparkling cleanliness, while soot-smirched and bloody-hooved Company commandos waited patiently for their turn to be sluiced off. We settled into our place in line.
Imagine my surprise when Cherie suddenly appeared, and took her place behind me in line. She was covered in soot and filth and powder, looking rather like she had crawled through a half-dozen granaries, or perhaps taken a wing-bath in a flour-sack.
"What the tartarus happened to you?" I asked. "And why are you way the hay and gone up here? Weren't you sent down to join the Middle Division?"
"Those silly ponies don't have their shower-wagons set up in the field. Something about them not being important enough to displace more vital supplies, or something silly like that? What's more vital than being clean?"
"Got me, filly. Got me." I paused, and debated asking… "Oh, merde. Ce que le diable is with you? You just went down there last night, where did you find all that filth in a single night?"
"Ah, un enfant doit avoir ses choses secretes!"
"Bollocks. Give it up, you know I'm supposed to be recording all this for the Annals."
She pouted, looking preposterous in the morning light all covered in cobwebs, dust, soot, and powder. "Fine, fine. The fleet, she is easy to find. Huge floating buildings bobbing about in the current? Not a problem. Finding the dark places and shadows in those enormous battle-ships? Not so little a problem."
She shook out a dirty, webbed wing. "All their dark corners, they were full of dust and loose flour. Very sloppy, these rebel westerners so full of themselves. And perhaps, I accidentally burned a one of them to the waterline in searching for places to put my future incendiaries?"
"Did you reveal our plan to the enemy, Cherie?"
"Oh, I think not. They leave such a mess, why wouldn't they lose a ship from time to time to powder-fires? They are what I would call, floating firekegs." She snorted. "Won't even be a problem when I need them all to burn."
When it came time for Whirlwind to take her place under the shower-heads, she literally fell asleep standing up. Cherie and I crowded into her shower-stall, and helped her get rinsed-down, half-asleep under the water. Then the three of us found a warm sun-lit spot somewhere we wouldn't be stepped upon, and caught up on our lost evening's sleep.