Rewrite That Witch
CH197 · Rewrite
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Chapter 197: Preparing for the Enemy

The morning report from Lightning: more than a thousand people, moving along the Redwater River road from the direction of Longsong Stronghold.

“More than a thousand?” Roland pushed back from the table. He had been expecting fifty.

“En, goo!” Maggie confirmed from Lightning’s shoulder, presently the size of a well-fed sparrow.

“The ones on foot — how are they equipped?”

Lightning described what she had seen. Mostly unarmored. Linen clothes. Different weapons — swords, axes, the short kind of hatchet that farmers kept — and several hundred carrying short spears on their backs. A handful of riders, only six.

Militia. Roland turned it over. Untrained civilians in forced service — the armies that had never been armies, used in every siege as walking distraction while the actual knights maneuvered. In open battle they had one function: absorb fire.

But that only worked if you had something worth protecting behind them. And Timothy knew what had happened at Longsong. He had seen the accounting of Duke Ryan’s defeat. Two hundred knights, a full winter’s coalition, turned back before they touched the walls. So why send a thousand militia against a prepared position?

The answer arrived with the image of the Church’s two-colored pills.

If a thousand militia had eaten the red pills — if they were running at the speed of horses, indifferent to pain, indifferent to fear — they would not function as militia. They would function as something more dangerous than knights. Faster, more numerous, and carrying spears that could travel farther than normal human arms could throw them.

One person breaking through the rifle line into the First Army’s ranks. Just one. The bunching and confusion that followed.

“Did you see any God’s Stones of Retaliation?”

“I didn’t get close enough,” Lightning said, then pointed at Maggie. “But she can see much better in eagle form.”

Maggie shook her head. “Haven’t seen, goo. Might be hidden under clothing.”

Roland thought for a moment. “Take Nightingale. Low altitude, following the river — Maggie flies ahead on watch and calls out any ships, and Nightingale steps into her fog world if you need to pass over water. Get close enough for her to look. Find out how many God’s Stones they’re carrying.” He looked at Nightingale. “Observe only. No engagement without my order.”

“Yes.” She and Lightning answered at the same moment.

When they were nearly out the door, he added: “Safety first. Both of you.”

Nightingale turned back and gave him a look — the particular look that meant you know you don’t have to say that — but she was smiling when she said it.

Roland watched the empty doorway for a second after they left.

I’m too young, too simple, he thought, and it was not self-deprecation but an honest catalogue. His intelligence work in Longsong was thin. Without Petrov’s warning, the enemy would have arrived at his walls before he knew they’d left. In a street fight, the First Army’s advantage disappeared. He had solved the problem of the Duke’s cavalry with range and prepared positions; a close engagement in an inhabited town was a different problem entirely.

Fix it after. Build the intelligence network into Longsong properly, with dedicated people and clear protocols. Bring Petrov onto the actual staff rather than using him as an awkward intermediary.

He sat at his table and could not eat lunch.

An hour passed. Then Lightning dropped through the office window with Nightingale balanced on her arm, and Roland let out the breath he had been carrying.

Maggie launched from Nightingale’s shoulder. “Doesn’t exist, goo! Doesn’t exist, goo!”

“Three or four black threads in the whole column,” Nightingale said, pulling back her hood. Her golden hair fell loose to her shoulders. “I went from front to back. The vast majority of them are clean.”

Three or four God’s Stones in fifteen hundred people. Meaningless as a suppression force. Their value was different — personal protection for whoever was giving orders.

“Good,” Roland said, and began to think.

East of Border Town, Van’er watched the stone masons and their laborers dig.

The pits had appeared first — large, regular, deep enough to crouch in. Then brick walls rising around each pit’s edge, not connecting to each other, not forming a single line. He had assumed they were building something with a roof, but the walls stayed below head height and stopped.

Each wall was hexagonal. On each flat face, thirty to forty centimeters above ground level, a long narrow opening had been left — not quite a window, narrower, more like a slot.

“It’s a bunker,” Jop said. He had gone to ask one of the masons. “His Highness designed it. The firearm team goes inside, fires through the slot. Half buried in the ground, nothing to worry about.”

Van’er looked at the ten bunkers taking shape along both sides of the road, spaced in a diamond arrangement, each able to cover the flanks of the others. He thought about the Duke’s cavalry charge — the one that had ended in smoke and silence — and tried to imagine what that formation would have looked like if the men behind the guns had been inside stone and brick rather than standing in the open.

Much worse, he decided. Much worse for whoever was coming.

He went back to drilling the artillery groups.

He had been promoted to artillery captain after the battle. Ten groups under him, the Rodney brothers and Cat Claws and Jop broken off to lead the newly formed teams. Three hundred people who had never touched a cannon before his people started teaching them. He spent afternoons moving from position to position, checking whether the recruits were following the loading sequence properly, whether they were aiming by the correct method, whether they were cleaning the barrel after each practice round or saving time in ways that would cost them in battle.

He was hoarse before evening.

At rest time, Jop passed him a flask. Van’er drank and handed it back.

“I know what they’re for,” Jop said, chin toward the bunkers.

“When did you figure it out?”

“Just now. A house you fight from, not in.” He smiled — the particular satisfaction of a man who has solved something nobody asked him to solve. “When the next lot of enemies tries their luck, they’ll be facing stone walls.”

Van’er looked at the setting sun above the Impassable Mountain Range and at the piece of land east of town that now had a stake in the ground with his name on it. Not a fantasy anymore. Soil. Property. His to farm or build on when he was done soldiering.

His Highness is keeping his promises, he thought.

He stood up and went back to work.

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