Torrin sat in a bunker fifty feet below ground, it was warm and well lit, decadent by his take. The bunkers had started off as munitions stocks only, now with how long the war had gone on. They were basically small towns for the higher ranking men of the imperial army.
The table they sat at probably cost as much as the car he and Laurence had driven in. Usually, he would appreciate the craftsmanship at work, not today. Not here.
How many men were freezing before fighting?
Then dying, unprepared and unwell.
How many men were half stocked with ammunition to buy Torrin's meal?
The table sat four though only Torrin and the two captains; Joyce and Russel, were there with him.
For all it was worth Torrin tried to imply his way of thinking on the men, at least for the first few days.
It had been a week since he arrived and he felt as if he'd achieved nothing.
He had reported to Arron and Marie, sent his love to Markus.
Nothing had come back.
That was to be expected though, even telegrams took time to reach this far out. They would have to be read and sent again by the clerks at comm stations.
He wondered at the practicality of that, from a security sense it was near idiotic. Back in the day you could rely on oaths of service to the Builder.
Few believed truly now though.
There was an attack happening as they sat, though, their squads were not on shift.
They explained that the northmen rarely got past the lines of prisoners. The squads took turns fighting in case the tribals gained a footing in the farther trenches.
And of course. "They fight so the real soldiers don't have to." Joyce had said. "They are prisoners either way." he put out his hands as if the statement were obvious.
Slaves sounds closer, you arrogant git.
He hid a frown of disgust as they told him the phrase.
"They shall be redeemed in service." They said simultaneously, like it was some joke they were in on.
The phrase looped over in his mind.
Slaves indeed.
He snapped out of that trail of thought, returning his casual smirk. A facial expression he taught himself to appear more arrogant.
He thought of the chains, not physical but bureaucratic; the kind that bound a man without their even knowing. Binding men to silence, duty and war.
looking too morose in such circles is to kill favour, nobody liked an unhappy man with a gun.
"Interrogation going any better today? Captain Lancass." Russel asked around a mouthful of some game bird or another.
Torrin shook his head, it had not.
"Better than I thought after the first few meetings." He stood, leaving his meal half eaten, it was a roast of vegetables and beef. Not particularly to his taste but if he didnt eat they would question it.
End of week roasts were one of the only things cadets had to look forward to. Another of the things Laurence had told him during their travels.
Once near a vent and an appropriate distance from the table he lit a cigarette, blew up toward the hole in the wall.
"More of the same mostly." he continued finally. "He did say something about their religion though but I couldn't fully make out the words. Something about birthing and caves." Everyone, including Torrin, laughed dryly at its absurdity.
"Sometimes I think their whole people must be mad." Joyce sighed, pushing his plate away, going to join Torrin.
Russel followed shortly after with a bottle of wine which he set on a table below the vent.
"Mad as mushroom eaters." Russel affirmed, nodding to himself like a woodpecker.
"Mad as they may be." Torrin paused, flaring toward the dramatic. "They are doing something." He poured for himself and the two men, the action itself to hide the tremor in his false arm.
"Funny you mention mushrooms Russel, ever noticed the ones that grow out on the field?" Joyce asked half drunkenly. "Maybe they eat them."
"But they grow from their dead." Russel added.
"Speculation is pointless." Torrin cut in. "We must worry about their plans not their habbits."
The other two men nodded in agreement and thanks as he passed out glasses, their jovial personas cracking just briefly to the fear of uncertainty.
"We could torture them." Joyce offered plainly, eyebrows raised like a man settling for less.
The two other men looked at him flatly.
Torrin had already considered it but the men were fanatics, pain wouldn't be likely to encourage them.
He said as such to them.
Russel supplied. "The whole, 'mountains bleeding' thing could possibly just be a threat."
"And the 'he is coming' part?" Joyce asked.
"People think the builder will come back one day." Torrin said. "Maybe they're just waiting for their god to show up." Nobody spoke for some time after that. In fact the second bottle had been and gone by the time any of them spoke again.
"Do you think their god could be real?" Joyce asked no one in particular.
"Ours is." Russel said but sounded like he meant it as a joke.
If he is real you'd better hope he is nicer than ours. Torrin thought.
The one occasion Torrin had met the builder was possibly the singular most terrifying experience of his life. He still didn't understand it.
"They have the Chimeara." Torrin chimed, trying to digress the conversation slightly. He hated thinking of the high cathedral. "Not much could be worse than that, I don't think. I will admit though, the bodies you showed me did not look natural."
"Nothing about them is natural." Joyce said with unusual bitterness, Russel only grunted.
Killing the trail of conversation Torrin finally said.
"How have they fought this long?" surely the question must have risen up at some point but both men shrugged.
"Every scout we have sent out the last ten or so years has died. Even then the ones that did survive came back mad." Joyce said.
"And where are they?" Torrin asked. "The mad scouts I mean."
The pair only shrugged. "You'd have to go to the medics captains to find that out." Joyce said. He seemed to like explaining things.
"If you can find one sober." Russel sighed, leaning back in his chair.
Do all the medics care so little about the health of their charges? Torrin tried his best not to be horrified. In the capital he didn't even think doctors were allowed to drink.
Perfection of a craft was a holy tenet back before the reformation, he assumed it applied to military doctors aswell.
Everyone needs a vice. He thought as the two went on about poor dental service, ironically, he found they were not allowed to smoke though.
Nobody was since the law went through, higher ranks could afford not to care and they let the prisoners out of small mercy.
But even before then. Something about ash getting in wounds.
At that moment a rumbling passed through the room, in the same instant a deafening sound like every pipe in the wall rattling buzzed in his ear, chattering his teeth.
Torrin stood out of shock, he knew what it must have been.
Rail cannons. He thought he'd always wanted to see one. The capital defenses were all hidden away.
He looked to the two men who had begun getting up. Apparently unphased at the use of a weapon made by god.
"Bad sign?" He asked the pair who'd seemed to take that sound as a call to arms.
They still took their time.
"Usually a round from one of those scares them off." Joyce said as he fixed his coat in a mirror by the door. As they left Torrin followed, he was a captain after all, even with no men.
Passing through the concrete tunnels had proven easy, everyone must have been outside.
There was a room every ten feet, usually marked by a black card with a name or purpose written in white.
They rose up one long continuous staircase, one of three entrances and exits.
He wondered how they avoided flooding in winter.
As they rose the sound of gunfire rose with them, snaps and crackles highlighted by the streaks in the night. Of course muffled but even a mile and a half from the front he could see clearly.
They stood in a bunker on a rise, the front open like a viewing platform. A quarter mile to the left the cannon was being dragged along a track which wrapped the rear line. Huge wheels groaned as they heaved the thing along.
As big as a house with a barrel longer than a tug boat, the Builder's weapon stood like a monolith to destruction itself.
He could make out the magnets glowing a faint orange. The taste of iron and the scent of ozone flooded his senses.
"We won't be firing that again tonight." Russel had caught him looking at it, his grizzled face twisted in some impression of a smile. "Only meant to use them when the shells aren't enough to scare them off."
"Why is that?"
"Munitions are too expensive, tungstens getting rarer. I don't know, that brief was boring."
"Do they ever steal weapons?" Torrin continued asking questions. Trying not to be irritated at the man.
"They do." Russel said matter of factly. "But they never seem to use them."
"That's the scary part." Joyce murmured as he looked through binoculars. "I fought down south a few years back. If they stole weapons we would get them back off the corpses a week later."
"Or they would run out of ammo." Russel said as he checked a rifle. The fighting was getting closer.
"Saving them for a rainy day?" Torrin asked.
"Something like that." said Russel. "They usually don't get away with them though, that's what the shell bombardments are for really. Other than thinning the herd so to speak."
That made sense to Torrin. If they were gonna lose it, may as well destroy it.
The two men made themselves busy passing orders to sargeants, preparing the rear to defend.
Torrin only watched, looking out at a burning dot in the distance. The mountain must be riddled with craters similar to that. The cannons were too powerful to really use on the trenches.
A scare tactic. Torrin assumed.
He thought about the prisoners up the rows. Whether they had time to evacuate, whether they were even warned.
Back in Penninse; in Broom's town even, he wouldn't have batted an eye at those levels of destruction. But something felt different about this, like nobody even cared enough to try.
What was the point in all this?
—
The pair pressed into the wall as the winds tore at them.
Bowman thought he heard himself scream but he couldn't tell. The wind crushed him to the wall, pressing air from his lungs to add to the gail. A vacuum.
Anything above the trenches when the cannon fired flew through the air above him but he couldn't see, the wind would blind him if he opened his eyes.
Slowly the wind turned to a breeze and all that could be heard was the groaning of men. And screeching things.
Both Bowman and William collapsed to the ground panting. It was the first time either had been that close to the firing line of one of those things and Bowman wanted to make sure it never happened again.
"Alright?" William asked, grabbing his shoulder. The younger man nodded and let William haul him to his feet. All around them men on both sides lay dead from head injuries and being crushed.
Most would have died when the wind tore through.
Bowman saw a man of the north rising to his feet, hairless, red eyed and gaunt. He didn't look too different from some Chimeara he has seen. He shot the man without a second thought.
"Fucking officers and captains never give us a chance to run." Bowman sighed as the two made a light jog for a bunker further along. The tribesmen were withdrawing now, there was no more need for violence.
"Is redemption really worth this." Bowman said to nobody in particular, William just chuckled beside him.
"Fuck no." the aging man said, passing Bowman a cigarette and lighting it for him. "But you just saw a good example of why everyone carries on."
Bowman only nodded at that.
He'd become more jaded in the running weeks, angrier. He still had a duty to perform, he still had redemption to chase.
He would reach those doors of copper and gold, then he would spit at the Builders feet.
As was their duty he started cleaning, they both did. Using brushes to sweep blood into drainage gutters, removed the strange armour of tanned skin, bone and shell. It made lifting the bodies of the enemy to the fires easier.
'Cleaning up the commander's mess.' William had called it.
After all was done, they slept in the nearest bunker they saw. Bowman found the silver lining though. So many had the same idea that the bunker was cramped, providing some measure of warmth.
Knowing tomorrow or even ten minutes later he could be dead, slept like a log.
—-
Bowman had been fighting for nearly an hour already. Beasts swayed and jumped and howled above him as they bolted past the defenses.
They never do that. He thought as he lunged forward and put the side of his shovel into a hairless head, just below the eye. It made a wet crunch and sent a painful shock through Bowman's wrist.
He booted the man in the chest, dislodging his weapon and fell back. His rifle landed awkwardly below him. The weapon was basically useless in a trench fight.
Scraping himself to his feet he moved down the trench. He was two lines back from the front and the trench ran long, maybe a hundred yards with a bunker at either end. Men before him were fighting.
Two of the attackers were bearing down on a man from his battle group. He sprang forward, catching the serrated edge on his shovel on another of the barbarians necks. The skin split and blood showered Bowman and his ally.
Ignoring his disgust he and the other man finished off the other quick.
Bowman grabbed the man and yelled. "Any news from the rear?" Twenty yards away in the bunker a heavy rifle was being fired. Even this far away the thudding boom rang the drums of his ears.
The other man yelled back. "Non. I think that rush caught them off guard." They shared a rye grin. He thought he felt he recognised the accent but there was no time to think about that. He ran and Bowman followed.
Maybe a minute till shelling then. He thought, though he didn't share this thought. The man had probably guessed too.
Let's see if I can last that long.
As he made it to the bunker he saw William. The older man saw him and gave a small nod from where he stood cranking the receiver on the material rifle.
Not learnt his lesson from last time then. Bowman joined him and began firing at the abominations, the Chimeara. He'd never seen one of any kind during the day and wished not to ever again. He fired at one that looked faintly like a dog in frame. Though hairless, peculiar tendrils falling from its split lower jaw.
Dawn was coming. The bright streaks of bullets flying north were now becoming difficult to see.
From southward could be heard the crashing roar of oblivion.
It was too late to run from the shells. Their best bet was to wait it out and pray. All the men pulled from their posts. Huddled in the back like rats.
He saw William, they took one another's hands. Said nothing. The man was slowly becoming family to him, as close to family as he could have at least.
The screams of the shells came fast. Bowman closed his eyes and prayed to his quiet god.
—-
Torrin watched from the same bunker he'd observed the last battle from. Watched the horizon erupt in smoke.
How many of our own died in that? He thought as the second wave of shells erupted the front two lines in flames.
They hadn't even sent a warning. 'No time.' Joyce had said.
He had seen senseless death. Cities aflame, lives destroyed. Never had he seen this.
The cold blue sun rose over a bleeding world.
He didn't speak to the two captains after only returning to his quarters below.
Usually he would have liked a room like this.
It was relatively cramped but neatly furnished. The bed made from oak was tucked in one corner. A writing table made from metal and ceramic in the opposing corner.
An expensive looking bottle of brandy sat on a small table by the bed with a single glass. He paced over falling onto the bed.
For some reason he felt drinking that bottle now would sicken him.
Why do I have to gain a conscience now. He got back up and left the bunker.
He was going to go meet those men.
—-
They survived. Bowman and William had finished cleaning up with the other survivors and had begun limping back to the bunkers to rest.
Neither man slept, they talked instead. Played games and tried to enjoy even a slither of humanity.
Others joined them from time to time, betting and smoking around stacks of crates. Humanity was a short commodity in steppe.
A month ago Bowman would never have even dreamed of feeling this way. Now, despite it all, he could smile.
He was still angry that his mother abandoned them. Distraught at the thought of his sisters.
But they are gone now. His father was probably still alive though and despite not knowing where he was. He could still be glad for it.
"Those things rushed past us too." A man said to Bowman, Torrin was his name.
He was a tall man with dark hair, had a city look to him. They stood near the open end of the bunker, morning in full now.
Piles of corpses man and monster alike darkened the sky and flooded noses with the stench of burning flesh.
He can't have been here long. There's still some life in him. The smell still disgusts him. Bowman thought as he lit another cigarette.
The trenches had taught him not to trust new men. The longer term members knew such things as theft and murder were pointless. Anything worse than that would just get you a knife in your sleep.
"Never seen them do that before." Bowman said, passing the lighter to Torrin.
"Begs a question to me." Torrin said. "How smart do you think those things are?"
The question surprised Bowman, along with everyone else.
"Seem 'em do stuff like this before." A gruff looking man said from another stack of crates. William was also there, listening. He looked unusually attentive.
That caught Torrin's attention for some reason but he pretended he hadn't.
"Simple plans?" He asked.
"Some more than others, still 'thinkin though." The man shrugged.
The stranger nodded as if confirming some theory. They thanked the man for his answer before abandoning the thought.
What a strange man. Bowman thought as they said their goodbyes. Rejoining William he shared that sentiment.
William looked hard at Torrin as he left. "Don't trust capital men. And if you see him again, pretend you didn't."
He looked at his friend with confusion but his face said that Bowman would get no other answers.