The artillery finally caught up just before noon — long columns of 75mm field guns and the Empire's heavier howitzers grinding into position along the ridge we'd taken the day before. The enchanted pieces were unmistakable even from a distance: barrels etched with runes that pulsed faintly, like something with a pulse of its own, shells stacked in crates marked with sigils that made the air around them hum in a way you felt in your teeth before you understood you were hearing it. Our gunners didn't waste the daylight. At the colonel's nod, the barrage began, and it didn't stop for hours.
We sat on the hillside and watched Vranje die.
Shells screamed overhead in continuous salvos, each impact a small private earthquake that sent black smoke and orange fire boiling upward in columns visible for kilometres. The conventional rounds tore houses apart in the ordinary way — roofs collapsing inward, walls folding under their own weight, whole structures reduced to a settling cloud of dust and splinters in the time it takes to draw a breath. The enchanted shells were worse, and we all understood it without anyone saying so. They burst high above the rooftops and showered the streets below with fragments that burned on contact, white and merciless, and once the fires started they spread the way fire spreads through anything dry enough to want to burn — roof to roof, beam to beam, indifferent to whatever or whoever happened to be inside.
Even from the ridge we could hear it. Thin, distant screaming, carried up to us on currents of hot air and woodsmoke. Nobody on that hillside pretended not to hear it. We just didn't say anything about it.
By late afternoon Vranje was a smoking skeleton of itself. Church spires snapped off like broken teeth against the sky. Streets buried under rubble and twisted iron. The Nisava ran past it all thick and discoloured with runoff that none of us wanted to think too hard about. The smell drifted up the slope to us eventually — burnt hair, charred meat, and underneath it something sweetish and wrong that I recognised from twelve years ago and had hoped never to smell again.
---
When the guns finally fell silent, we went down into what was left.
There was no resistance left to meet us. Only the dead, and the particular silence that settles over a place once everything capable of making noise has either fled or stopped.
We moved down the main road in loose formation, boots crunching glass and charred timber and things I made myself stop trying to identify individually. Sarb soldiers lay scattered everywhere the shelling had caught them — some torn apart by direct hits, in pieces distributed across yards of broken pavement in ways that made the eye refuse to assemble them back into a single person. Others were reduced to blackened, contracted shapes, skin split and peeled back from the heat to show what was underneath, fists curled in the way burned bodies always curl, as if even in death the muscle was still trying to protect itself from something.
Civilians too. A woman lay in a doorway, her clothing burned to ash, what remained of her face no longer recognisable as a face, both arms still curved protectively around a small, blackened shape that had once been small enough to hold. An old man sat slumped against a wall with his chest caved in by shrapnel, one eye hanging loose from its socket by a thread of tissue I made myself stop looking at.
The gutters held things I won't list individually. The smell was thick enough that several men in our column stopped to retch against whatever wall was nearest, and nobody mocked them for it, because the only difference between them and the rest of us was timing.
Daniel walked beside me through all of it. Eighteen years old, the kind of fresh-faced that the recruiting posters are built around, and he'd spent the whole morning before the bombardment talking about medals and parades and the stories he'd tell back home. That chatter had died somewhere in the first hundred metres of the ruined town. His face had gone the colour of old paper. His eyes moved from corpse to corpse without seeming to settle on any of them, the way eyes move when the mind behind them is trying very hard not to actually look.
---
We pushed into a half-collapsed house near the central square, the door hanging from a single hinge, the roof sagging at an angle that suggested it had perhaps another hour of structural integrity left in it. Inside was dim, dust still drifting through the broken windows like grey, slow-falling snow.
Movement in the corner. Two figures, ducking behind an overturned table.
A young woman — nineteen, I'd guess, though there was no time and little point in asking — and her mother, an older woman with grey threading her hair and a kitchen knife held in front of her in both shaking hands, the blade between her daughter and us with the absolute, useless determination of someone who knows the gesture won't work and is making it anyway because there's nothing else left to do.
Daniel's rifle came up before I'd processed what I was looking at.
"Daniel—"
The shot took the mother through the chest. She went down without much drama, the knife clattering away across the floorboards, and didn't move again.
The daughter screamed and turned to run, and Daniel fired a second time before I could get a hand to his rifle, and the round caught her in the side, and she went down hard against the overturned table, and then — mercifully, and I do mean mercifully, because I have seen what the slow version looks like and I do not wish it on anyone, real or imagined — she did not move again either.
The room went silent except for Daniel's breathing, fast and ragged, the rifle still raised, his hands shaking now in a way that hadn't been there a moment before.
I crossed the room and pushed the barrel down myself.
"They weren't armed," I said. It wasn't even really an accusation. It came out flat, the way true things sometimes come out when there's no anger left to put behind them, only a kind of exhausted disbelief. "Daniel. Look at me. They weren't armed."
He didn't answer. He was looking at the two bodies on the floor with an expression I recognised, because I'd worn something like it myself once, a long time ago, on a different field, after a different war had asked something of me I hadn't been ready to give.
I have carried plenty of hatred from the last war into this one — the villages, the friends I buried at eighteen, the land I came back here specifically to take back. I will not pretend that hatred didn't rise in me in that room, old and familiar, looking for somewhere to put itself. But it had nowhere honest to go in that house, and I knew it even as I felt it, and that was its own particular kind of sickness — to feel the old fire reach for something and find only two ordinary dead women in a ruined kitchen.
I said nothing else. I turned and walked back out into the street. Daniel followed a few steps behind, quiet now in a way that was worse than his earlier chatter had ever been, the rifle barrel still faintly smoking in the cooling air.
---
New orders came down by runner while we secured the square: advance on Skopje. The rail line was intact enough for troop trains, and fresh reinforcements were already filtering in to hold what was left of Vranje. We boarded flatcars and boxcars the moment the first engine wheezed into the wrecked station, men packed shoulder to shoulder, rifles between knees, passing around the last of the tobacco and the last of anyone's clean water.
The train rattled south through Macedonian countryside that hadn't yet learned what was coming for it. Burned farmhouses slid past the windows. Occasional columns of refugees trudged north along the verges, not looking up as we passed, the particular incuriosity of people who have already used up whatever attention they had left for things that weren't directly killing them.
Someone had a portable radio. It crackled to life between half-hearted hands of cards that nobody was really paying attention to.
"...Kingdom of Turks has formally joined the Axis powers... Greeks have declared for the Allies... heavy fighting continues along the Danube..."
Then the announcer's voice sharpened, took on the particular triumphant edge reserved for the news everyone in the car had been waiting to hear.
"...Germano-Hungry forces, bolstered by Great Empire reinforcements, have broken through the outer defences. Belgrade is encircled. The Sarb capital is cut off and falling."
The car erupted. Men slapping each other across the shoulders, shouting it back and forth like a song with one line. Belgrade falls. Belgrade falls.
I stayed quiet, watching the country slide past the open boxcar door. The sun was going down somewhere behind us, painting the hills in that gold-and-rust colour that summer evenings get right before they stop being summer evenings at all.
I took the small photograph of my wife out of my breast pocket — her smile fixed in a moment from before the last war had taken so much of what used to sit easily behind my eyes. I pressed my thumb against the worn edge of it, the way I always did, and said her name quietly enough that it didn't carry over the noise of the wheels.
Skopje was waiting somewhere ahead of us. Home, maybe, waiting somewhere after that, if there was enough of me left by the time I got there to recognise it.