face-to-face encounter with Conductor Banks, as the expedition gathered on the vast tarmac fields just outside Kingstown’s fortifications, shortly before it was due to set off. He approached the window of Banks’s staff car and waited patiently until the window at last wound down, and Lowry’s reflection was replaced by Banks’s face. As it turned out, Banks was a man of about Lowry’s size, little more than Lowry’s age, and with much the same sort of drab shapeless round-spectacled ghost of a face—except for the tracks of exhaustion and stress that invariably came with high command in the Line, which were more deeply cut on Banks than they’d ever been on Lowry.
Banks’s lap was buried under a heap of reports, which he was studying through reading glasses. Large sections of text were blacked out.
“Yes?”
“Sub-Invigilator (Second Class) Lowry, sir.”
“Right. Right. One of the advisers. The experts. The intelligence people.” Banks took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “Do you know what we’re doing here, Lowry?”
“No, sir.”
“No, sir. No, sir—I bet you fucking don’t. I don’t. Why should you? What’s your expertise in, Lowry?”
“The enemy, sir. The—”
“Who isn’t an expert in the fucking enemy, Lowry? What do you think we do all day? Let’s see—Can you talk to the Signal Corps, Lowry?”
“Yes, sir. I’ve worked with Signals—”
“Good. I can’t make head or tails of any damn thing they say. I understand artillery, wheels and motors, fuel, supply lines, fortifications—not Signals. Report to S-I First Morningside, who’s another so-called expert all the way from Archway. He’s responsible for intelligence here and is acting in the absence of clearer orders as my second. Assist him with the Signals.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Lowry, come here. Lowry.”
Lowry leaned closer.
“Are you here to spy on me, Lowry?”
“No, sir. My orders are to assist you in any—”
“Four hundred and twenty of us. Another two thousand coming behind, Lowry, but no time to wait or fully mobilize or organize. Precipitous action. Seize and control each shitty little town in a patch of worthless red wasteland. Form a net, a circle. Why? It must be done immediately. No answer. Precipitous action; thirty years of service and never known precipitous action. Deliberation is what we are, Lowry, deliberation and control. Someone somewhere’s in a panic. A blunder? Maybe. Not mine. Not mine, Lowry. I do my duty. Forwardprogress! Right into the wasteland if that’s where it’s going, not my business. Not my blunder. I don’t complain. Tell them that, Lowry.”
It could be advantageous to Lowry’s career to be taken for an informant for higher authorities; on the other hand, it could be dangerous to lie. He therefore stayed silent.
“Get to work, Lowry.” Banks grunted with effort as he wound the window up.
Sub-Invigilator (First) Morningside assigned Lowry to ride in the back of the Signal Corps’ second truck, alongside the backup telegraph machinery and the senior officers of the Expeditionary Force’s Signal Corps. A Subaltern thrust a stack of files into Lowry’s hands.
The files were hastily prepared. The machinery was all brand new. Brass sounders and copper wires and bulbous vacuum tubes were still polished and glittering. Rows and rows of keys rattled with what sounded like enthusiasm as the truck bounced and rolled down dirt roads.
The senior officers of the Signal Corps were named Scale, Ditch, Benson, Collier, and Porter. Lowry introduced himself curtly, then sat in silence on the hard wooden bench and read the files.
THE “HOUSE DOLOROUS”: INTRODUCTION
As of Year 292 at the latest, reports place the General, see principally B.140.1–B.140.310, at a hospital on the farthest northwestern Rim, known as “The House Dolorous” aka “The Doll House,” hereinafter “The Hospital.” See C.12.21.iv–x. These reports are considered of uncertain but generally actionable reliability. See C.12.34.iii.
The following report on the Hospital has been prepared in haste and is of limited reliability.
The Hospital was founded in Year 281 by one Winston Howell II, father of the Hospital’s present director, and former resident of the town of Greenbank, see L.170.6. The Hospital has a very substantial endowment, provided primarily by Howell personally, out of the profits of the various silver-mining enterprises along the western rim with which his family was associated. The Hospital’s name is apparently derived from a romantic poem popular in the southern Baronies, and is of no significance.
Howell II claimed in a Y285 memoir that he founded the Hospital after a dream in which a number of Hillfolk appeared to him in his office in Greenbank and led him into the hills to the Hospital’s future location. See infra 4. This