in stores. You’ll probably get some other bugger’s leg.’ He laughed, and they all joined in, more for the release of it than for the humour.
So many, Emily thought, thinking over the roll call of the dead. So many she could not name; so many she could. The colonel, who had died in her arms. Justin Lascari the Warlock, and Master Sergeant Sharkey, attempted rapists both, and consigned to their unquiet graves. Captain Goss, whose living nightmare was finally over. Her dear friend Elise, dead on their first day into the swamps, and beautiful Marie Angelline the brave, the inspiring, whom Brocky had loved, and who had loved him in return, despite his vices.
Rodric. Her brother, still a red-jacketed figure in her mind as he left Grammaine, his death coming as a word from Mr Northway, with no further image and no stone.
And perhaps it would be her turn now and she would die in some Denlander trap. But it would be with her friends and, really, what more could a soldier ask for?
And a cart turned up, from the south, as requested. A cart with a Denlander soldier seated on the driver’s board, but a Lascan military cart for all that.
*
‘God protect us,’ said Tubal, the man of strong churchgoing family. The others kept only a silence between them, just watching and absorbing the enormity of what they saw when they looked upon Locke.
It was the end. The end of everything.
Doctor Lam had come with them, hiking alongside the cart with a handful of his men. When Emily turned to glance at him, she thought she saw a trace of sadness even as he looked upon the site of his victory. He caught her eye and smiled, but there was no triumph in it.
‘The march of progress, Lieutenant Marshwic,’ he said. ‘I am a man of progress, a scientist and an engineer, and yet I look upon this and I ask: what has this war made of us all? My country will never again be the place it was, and no more will yours. Who is the winner, then?’
Locke was bustling. The handful of buildings that had been the original town, first swamped by the military apparatus of Lascanne, was now merely a pinpoint in a field of grey. Ranks of grey tents stood on every side, as though they had been sown in the spring and only now sprouted. Men in grey uniforms drilled, or sat about fires, or arrived or left. A locomotive stood at the station, smoking and steaming, and Emily saw files of Denland soldiers waiting to embark, waiting to advance the war into Lascanne. There were thousands of them – perhaps three thousand or more. These could only be veterans of the Couchant front.
She saw Lascanne soldiers, too, disarmed and under guard: more veterans of the Couchant but on the losing side. She hoped that there were others, more than she could now see. How great had been the carnage there, at the end?
‘What the devil is that? Brocky demanded. Coming in down the Couchant road was a . . . thing. A traction engine, Emily realized belatedly, rumbling and steaming as it rolled into Locke under its own power. Iron plates were bolted before it, and atop it was a cannon on a swivel mount, and soldiers with their ‘rifles’.
‘Quite the invention, is she not?’ Doctor Lam said. ‘I had a hand in designing them, before I came to the Levant, but it was not until early this year that they saw any proper use. Mobile artillery, our traction-guns. Lord above, but what we have made of the world!’
‘That’s the problem with knowledge, young man,’ Doctor Lam told him. ‘You can’t put it away when you’ve no more use for it. We have them now, and who knows to what uses they will be put in the fullness of time.’ He rested a hand on the side of the cart, looking frankly at them all. ‘Now, is there doubt in your minds, any of you, as to the outcome of this war?’
‘What will happen to Lascanne?’ Scavian demanded. ‘What will you do with the King?’
‘We will capture Luthrian of Lascanne and put him on trial. There is no other way,’ Doctor Lam replied simply. Emily tensed as she felt Scavian twitch, and the heat came off him for a second, like a sudden burst of flame. His hands were balled into fists. She reached out to put