and sneaking out of the rock charged and burst harmlessly. Slate’s line passed through, taking slow methodical steps, and Lowry’s squad was wordlessly integrated.
Lowry, for a moment, lagged behind. He watched the line pass away into the fog. Muzzle flashes sparked in the gray, marking its path. The fog echoed with the crack of rifles. No screaming now.
By Lowry’s side, the fog eddied, convulsed, and a brief tiny whirl of wind like a drain in reverse lifted dust and grit and shards of flint up from the ground and spun them like potter’s clay into a form that was roughly human. Lowry shot it.
He hurried after Slate’s line and fell in.
Afterwards, he wrote in clumsy longhand a report that would almost certainly never be read, but which he nevertheless felt was necessary.
The confrontation persisted for roughly two hours. In the first minutes with the advantage of surprise and disorder 110 casualties were sustained. However, the discipline of the Line could not be broken and only six men were lost in the following two hours, mostly to friendly fire. It is probable that this action was a tactic of First Folk who claim this wilderness as theirs. Their tactics are as always ineffective against good order and training and the will of the Line.
There are now 219 men fit for duty including myself. Subalterns Thernstrom and Drum were among the dead, and First Signalman Sinclair. Gauge and Mill have been promoted to Thernstrom’s and Drum’s place. No artillery or munitions were lost. However, the Signal device was lost to friendly fire. Therefore First Signalman Sinclair will not be replaced. We can no longer listen to or track the Agent. We now operate without orders or directions or realistic hope of success. Morale is low. Nevertheless we push west.
BOOK FOUR
A LAND FIT FOR HEROES
CHAPTER 36
THE ROSE
Liv sat in a silent sunlit clearing, her legs folded beneath her, studying a rose.
The floor of the clearing was soft dirt and leaves, interrupted by occasional crests of grass. The clearing was about the size of a ballroom. It was bounded by a stream on one side, and on the other a fallen ancient oak, its shape blurred by decades of moss and decay. There was a low mound of earth in the middle of the clearing, and a single rose grew from it. The rose was the only thing visible anywhere that was neither green nor brown nor the blue of the vast sky overhead; it was only natural that it drew Liv’s attention.
What color the rose actually was was unclear. At first glance, it had seemed to be an intense sunrise red. As Liv came curiously closer, its petals had flushed shyly, shifting down through the spectrum, purpling. By the time Liv sat beside it, it was a deep pulsing amaranthine. She suspected that if she turned her head away, it might change again.
It was also not strictly speaking a rose, though of all things of the made world, it most closely resembled a flower, and of all the flowers Liv knew, it most closely resembled a rose. It was more like a sketch of a rose, perpetrated by a person who’d never seen one; or, more precisely, it was like the product of processes that would, in the made world, have resulted inevitably in a rose, but out here were not so narrowly constrained.
Its petals formed a corolla that was roselike, yet iterated over and over, whorls within whorls, past the point of ordinary botanical possibility. Nor was its pattern simply a matter of spirals; there were regularities and irregularities and repeated themes within its architecture that Liv could not begin to describe. The whole thing was no larger than the palm of Liv’s hand, but it appeared to have vast starlike depths. Liv had a sense that it might at any point slowly begin to turn.
It smelled of electricity, and slightly of motor oil; and in its heart, where a flower made more rigorously to the standard specifications would have had soft anthers and filaments, this one had a delicate crisscrossing of golden wires, enclosing something minute and fleshy that pulsed with a steady beat.
With each beat, the petals shivered as if in a breeze.
The thing was hideous. It was ridiculous. It was beautiful. All those things at once, and none of them. It was not meant for her, and her opinions of it were beside the point. It would have been both futile and insulting to classify it; it was neither