“I suspect not.” We walked on a bit in silence, and there it was-a thick red line of paint directly ahead.
And nothing on the far side of it but weeds.
Evis paused. I looked back but Piper and Lopside were hoofing it toward the carriage.
Evis and I were privy to a few of the Corpsemaster’s most intimate secrets. I knew the location of the house he called home. We both knew of the army of the dead he kept hidden in plain sight across Rannit.
Knowing such secrets doesn’t help either Evis or I sleep soundly.
Because if we were to both vanish suddenly, say after being eaten by whatever lurked amid those tall grasses, the Corpsemaster could sleep more soundly.
“I’ll go first, if you wish.”
“Bah. You’d just snatch up all the good beer. Better we go together, don’t you think?”
Evis laughed and nodded. We made our way to the painted red line. Evis threw his hood back and grimaced at the sun, and I loosened my collar and pushed down my hat.
We stepped across at the same time. I’ll have to ask Evis if he closed his eyes, like Lopside suggested. I know I damned well didn’t.
There was a flash, and a sensation of falling, and then the sneaky sun swung around so that it shone not in my face, but on my back.
And then there was noise. And men. And wagons and horses and the fall of hammers and the smell of wood burning.
Hell, we had just stepped into the midst of a bustling work camp. A line of canvas Army field tents stretched off as far as I could see. Stables and barns followed it. Tall, brick smokestacks attached to tin-roofed sheds dotted the landscape haphazardly. The stink of a nearby outhouse filled my nose. Men ambled, marched or idled by the hundreds.
All of them had just appeared from nowhere.
I turned around.
The cobblestone path was gone. Behind us was a smaller circle, twin to the big one we’d left behind, ringed by a thick band of bright red paint.
Beyond it was sand. Red sand, red rocks, shadows that fell long and dark over a wasteland the color of rust.
My head began to pound anew.
Evis pulled his hood back over his face.
“Hurrah. We’re not dead.”
“Not yet.”
“Always the ray of sunshine.”
A dozen armed men trotted toward us. The one in the lead slowed and met my gaze. He had a pair of vertical silver pips on the front of his cap, barely big enough so see.
“Mr. Markhat. Mr. Prestley. Welcome to the Battery. Come this way.”
The man was bellowing. Bellowing, but smiling. I bellowed right back.
“Says who?”
He frowned. “The Corpsemaster. That good enough for you?”
I sighed. “Sorry. We’ve been knocked out and sent on a hike and the sun keeps changing places. It’s not been a good morning.”
A wagon rolled up behind the troops eyeing Evis and me. I didn’t even notice at first it was being driven by a corpse.
The ponies whinnied and stamped their feet, looking back over their shoulders nervously.
“Well, you won’t be walking anymore. Get on.”
He turned and dismissed his detail. They faded into the milling crowd with obvious relief on their faces.
“I’ll come along, give you the two penny tour.” He stuck his hand out. “Call me Rafe.”
I shook his hand. He was still shouting. I began to wonder if the man was partially deaf. If so, he was getting an early start. He was probably ten years my junior.
“I’m Markhat. You knew that. This is my friend Evis. He’s a deaf mute.”
“I am nothing of the sort.” Evis shook Rafe’s hand as well. “Just Rafe? No rank?”
Rafe shrugged. “Orders. We don’t talk rank with outsiders.” He climbed aboard the wagon, sliding right up to the corpse without any sign of hesitation before turning around and motioning Evis and I into the bed of the wagon. “You probably have questions.”
We clambered aboard. The dead man stank, but there wasn’t a fly to be seen.
The corpse snapped his reins, and we rolled forward, winding our way between men and mounts and stacks of lumber and wafts of odd-smelling smokes.
“So this is where the Corpsemaster is building his cannons.”
I hadn’t phrased it as a question.
Rafe nodded. He was sun burnt and peeling. His hair was sticking out in shaggy red clumps beneath his cap. The skin on the backs of his hands was pocked with tiny burns. “Has been for ten months. How’s the weather back home? Storms been bad this spring?”
“No worse than usual. You haven’t been back?”
“Nobody goes back, unless it’s in a bag. But the pay. Oh, the pay.” Rafe grinned.
Evis leaned forward. “So, the cannons? They are operational?”
“You’ll see for yourself. But yes. We can blow the shit out of ten-foot thick walls from a mile away. Knock down infantry by the hundreds with one shot. In another month, we’ll have the big aught-eights ready to ship back home.” He waited for a response, obviously under the impression that either Evis or I had any idea what a big aught-eight might be. “An aught-seven can put a hundred pound shell nearly six miles. We figure the eights can do nine.”
Rafe raised his hands at our blank faces. “Sorry. I’m getting ahead of myself. Look. You know how cannons work?”
“A thick iron tube is packed with a powder that explodes when lit by a spark. This propels an iron sphere out of the tube at great speed.” Evis looked at Rafe over the tops of his dark glasses. “Is that correct?”
Rafe nodded and grinned. “That’s exactly how the first cannon, the old Henry, worked, Mr. Prestley. Were you on the halfdead-er, the Avalante team-working on them, during the War?”
“I was not,” replied Evis. “But I’ve read their reports.”
“Then you know about the problems they faced. The unstable powder. The balls that got stuck and cracked the cannon bodies. Misfires. Duds.”
Evis nodded, with a sideways glance at me. Whoever Rafe was, one thing was clear-the boy liked his cannons.
Rafe waved his hands. “We’ve fixed all that. No more random explosions. Well, hardly ever. No more cracked shafts. And the rounds-Mr. Prestley, we have explosive rounds now. Timed rounds. We can penetrate walls or burst them in the air over troops or…”
Rafe went on, describing in intricate, enthusiastic detail a brand new method of slaughter. I couldn’t follow all of it. There was talk of trajectory calculators and paper fuses and friction primers, delivered in a throaty bellow that got hoarser as Rafe grew more animated.
I shrugged at Evis and quit trying to follow Rafe’s running description of Parrot guns and howitzers.
I watched the camp instead.
Everywhere I looked, there was more of it. More and more of the structures were brick. The largest brick buildings were set apart from other structures and flanked by thick mounds of sand. I spotted a couple of suspicious building-sized holes in the ground, also flanked by mounds and heaps of rubble that had been left where they fell.
And everywhere there were men, moving with a purpose. They wore the same plain uniforms. My original estimate of hundreds was quickly giving way to thousands. No one shied away at sight of the dead man driving the wagon.
In the distance, I heard crashes and booms. Not thunder, as it lacked the volume and intensity, but something much like it.
Rafe grinned. “They’re just burning old powder kegs,” he shouted. “Can’t re-fill ’em. They tend to blow.”
