Rewrite That Witch
CH198 · Rewrite
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Chapter 198: The Sudden Opening

Three days of construction, and the defense line was finished.

Roland stood on the same raised platform he had used during the Months of Demons — far behind the front line, elevated enough to see the length of it. Anna stood at his shoulder. Nightingale had gone ahead with a specific assignment, taking Echo into the field. The two revolvers at his waist felt less like weapons than like engineering choices: in the event that the entire defense line collapsed and something with a pill-enhanced body closed to personal range, he wanted six rounds available before reloading.

The line itself was a different calculation.

Ten bunkers per side of the road, set in two interlocking diamonds. Each bunker held twenty-four soldiers — twelve veterans to shoot, twelve recruits to reload — and Soraya had painted the outer surfaces with her optical camouflage: from a distance, the bunkers merged with the dust and dried grass of the road’s edge until you were inside their effective range. Behind the bunkers, Van’er’s twenty cannons sat in their positions, the modified twelve-pounders with their extended range. Behind the artillery, a hundred soldiers with flintlocks, there to protect the guns and the man standing on the platform.

“Ten kilometers,” Maggie reported, dropping from the sky onto Roland’s shoulder. He gave her a piece of dried beef without looking away from the field, and she pecked it clean in three strokes and launched herself east again.

The problem he kept returning to was the spears. Ordinary thrown spears maxed out at fifty meters against ordinary bodies. A person running on pills, with pill-enhanced arm strength, could throw farther. How much farther was not something he could calculate precisely. He had positioned the bunkers partly to shelter the gunners from this uncertainty — half-buried in stone, with iron gates across the rear access points, designed specifically to prevent someone from scaling the outside and attacking through the roof. The diamond arrangement meant any attempt to bypass the front row exposed the attacker’s flanks to the rear bunkers.

Soraya had also contributed the optical camouflage. He was glad of it now — the bunkers would be invisible from the distance at which the spears could reach.

He watched the First Army take their positions and felt something he had no efficient engineering term for. These were the same people who had enrolled because an egg was being promised. They had stood through the Months of Demons, through the artillery trial against the Duke’s cavalry, and now they were moving into bunkers with the particular quiet efficiency of soldiers who had been here before and did not need to be told how to do it.

You made this, he thought, and immediately knew it was wrong. They made this. You just pointed.

“Two kilometers,” Lightning called from the edge of the platform.

“Lightning — go to the woods, signal the artillery.” He turned to Carter. “All units to alert positions. Pass the word.”

Carter’s salute was crisp and already moving before the words finished.

Lehman Hawes rode at a walk, conserving what his arm had left.

Two days since the injury had gone from pain to heaviness to near-numbness. The bone was broken — there was no other explanation for the architectural swelling, the blackish-red discoloration that had spread overnight. He had unlocked his armor and looked at it and locked the armor back again. A battlefield was not the place to display injury to your own men.

He studied the enemy line through his observation mirror.

The wheeled weapons were there in greater numbers than the Duke’s intelligence had reported. Much greater. And spread along both sides of the road in an arrangement that would create crossfire across the whole width of approach. Nothing about this matched a prince who should have been hiding in his castle waiting for an envoy.

“Have everyone rush at once?” Levin asked.

“The road’s too narrow.” Lehman tracked the woods to the right. “Branch some off through the trees. Slower approach, but once they circle around and hit the flank —”

He never finished the sentence.

At the corner of his vision: a flash of white. He turned and there was a woman. White robe, hood thrown back, standing thirty meters off the road in the tree line as if she had been there the whole time. He drew breath to shout a warning and she raised her hands.

The world hit him from the back of his head.

He did not feel himself fall.

“Everyone charge!” The voice of Lehman Hawes rang out over the column.

Levin turned in his saddle in time to see Lehman Hawes topple from his horse. The back of his helmet had burst outward. Red and white. His body was still moving the way bodies moved immediately after death, the momentum of sitting upright carrying forward until gravity won.

“Cease!” Levin bellowed. “Hold position — cease!”

Then: “Everyone charge!” in Lehman’s voice again, from somewhere else entirely, and then his own voice saying charge from somewhere he had not spoken, and Duane’s voice from the wrong direction giving the same order, and other voices from within the militia itself —

A witch. The understanding arrived cold and whole. She is imitating us.

The pills were already going down. He could see it passing through the column like a wave — mouths working, eyes going red, the particular forward lean of bodies that had just decided to run and were resolving the lag between decision and motion. The shouts had gotten ahead of the command structure. Looting slogans. Kill slogans. The sound an army makes when it stops being an army and becomes a crowd that happens to be moving in the same direction.

“Hold!” he shouted again, and heard his own voice come back to him from three different angles, each of them saying charge.

He controlled his horse — barely, the animal was responding to the crowd’s pressure — and worked toward the edge of the column. He could not stop this. He could survive it.

The militia ran past him like a river that had broken its bank.

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