The shape of Claude came through the wind fast enough that the coats of every officer in the courtyard snapped up around them as he passed.
He stopped at the palace wall and leaned back against it, and his eyes went somewhere else entirely.
"Oh — Sir Claude."
...
Claude did not respond. Only his brow furrowed, a fraction deeper.
"...Sorry to disturb you, sir."
"—Wait."
"Sir?"
"Your unit reports to me, doesn't it?"
"No sir. RMO. I just got dragged over here for perimeter cover."
"Never mind, then." Claude pulled a folded paper and a pen out of his trouser pocket and wrote something against his own thigh.
"Can you get this to a courier?" He held it out.
"Ah — ah, I— Commander's orders, sir, I'm not to leave my post until the end of my—"
"Rosier Seal." Claude drew it out from inside his coat.
"B-but—"
"I'll sign your leave papers myself if it comes to that."
"...All right, sir. Addressed to who?"
"The Duke of the North. Valery Veilnoir."
"Then that's fine, sir!"
"Good."
Claude sprinted out.
Western District. On the city wall.
He came in so fast that the men on the rampart heard him arrive after he had already stopped — a hard scrape of boots on stone, coats and hair thrown forward in the wake of him, and then nothing.
"...What are they all looking at."
Nobody answered him.
That was the first thing that was wrong. There were perhaps sixty men on this stretch of wall — Standing Army in dark green, Military Police in grey, a scattering of RMO greycoats who had no business being here at all — and none of them were in formation, and none of them were talking, and none of them turned around when a ranking officer of the Black Vanguard landed among them out of the air.
They were all facing outward, shoulder to shoulder along the parapet, and they were silent.
Claude walked to the edge and looked out with them.
Western District was built to be seen from up here. That had been the point of it. The wall ran high along the eastern rim and the land fell away beneath it in a long shallow bowl, so that from the parapet a man could take in the whole district at once — the town clustered at the near end, and beyond it, filling almost a third of everything the eye could hold, the farms.
Thirty percent of the district. The grain belt that fed a nation.
It was not there anymore.
Where the field-lines had been there were now trenches — not furrows, trenches, wide enough to lose a cart in, gouged through the soil in long curving arcs as though something enormous had been dragged across the land and then dragged back. Irrigation channels had been lifted whole out of the ground and set down again facing the wrong way, still full, water spilling from their broken ends into soil that had been turned to glass in patches the size of houses.
Half a hillside was missing. Not collapsed. Missing — sheared away along a clean concave curve, and the other half of it was sitting two hundred meters east in the middle of a wheat field it had never been anywhere near.
There were things standing upright in the fields that had no business standing upright. A stone spire, three storeys of it, planted where a barn had been. A stand of trees, thirty or forty of them, arranged in a perfect ring around nothing at all. Further out, a road — a full paved road, with its curbstones and its milestones intact — hanging in a shallow arc twenty meters above the ground, its ends buried in the earth like a thrown rope frozen mid-flight.
And it kept happening. That was the part the men on the wall could not stop watching. Somewhere in the middle distance, in the smoke, a farmhouse folded in on itself and came apart into a thousand bright slivers that hung in the air for a moment before they all shot sideways at once, too fast to follow.
"Seventy percent of the arable land, easy," someone said quietly. "From this angle, anyway."
"...We're finished."
The word went along the wall and did not come back.
"Nothing is finished," Claude said, cutting into it from behind them. "Keep your mouths shut and I'll handle it from our end."
"That's— Sir from the Veilnoir!"
"That's right."
"Sir, is there anything we can do that isn't — I mean, other than going down there to help her majesty with—WHUH—"
A slab of stone the size of a house rose over the lip of the wall.
It did not arc. It did not tumble. It came in flat and fast on a line, spinning slowly, and it was going to take out a forty-meter section of parapet and every man standing on it — and the officer who had been speaking was directly in its path and had gotten perhaps a quarter of the way through turning his head.
Claude was already moving.
He went past the man close enough to spin him half around, planted, and put his heel into the underside of the slab at an angle.
It did not stop. Nothing was going to stop it. But it turned — the whole mass tipping over on its long axis with a groan of shearing stone — and went over the wall instead of through it, close enough that the wind of it took every hat and every loose paper off the rampart and threw them into the air behind it.
It came down somewhere below with a sound like a building dying.
Claude was standing on one foot. He put the other one down. There was blood coming out from under his boot heel and running into the mortar seam, and he looked at it with mild irritation, as though it had inconvenienced him.
"You," he said to the officer, who had not finished turning his head. "Don't go down there to support Her majesty. Don't go down there at all."
"S-sir—"
"Shut the gates. Don't let anyone in even civilian, especially scholar and journalist. AND shut EVERY journalist that witnessed these and aren't from The North. And keep your mouths shut."
Flaure(???) laid her hand on what had, until quite recently, been a house.
Every piece of it came apart under her palm and reassembled in the air above her: the joists, the shutters, the nails, the roof slate, the crockery still on the table inside. A hundred blades. Two hundred. They hung there in a slow spreading fan, all of them pointed the same way, catching the light of the fires burning behind her.
"No wonder you can keep Mivelle on a leash."
Flaure(???) said it lightly, the way one says a thing one has been thinking about for some time.
"Terminus."
The white-haired man in the white cloak and the mask did not answer.
He only stood there, quite still, holding an object that it look like it is swallowing its own light and surrounding's and emitting dark purple energy aura.