‘Please look through these,’ said Leaf. ‘But be prepared.’ ‘I doubt I’ll see anything,’ said Sylvie as she took the glasses. ‘These are cracked!’
‘You will see something and then I’ll explain.’ Leaf frowned as a pain shot through her head again. It was different from the pain she’d experienced before. It felt like there was an odd pressure building up inside her skull. Like a sinus pain but in the wrong places.
The mould! It must have gotten into my head already!
‘I really can’t see a thing,’ said Sylvie. She had the glasses on but was not looking out the window.
‘The window!’ urged Leaf, but she suddenly felt desperate and uncertain.
What if Dr Scamandros’s glasses only worked for her?
Thirteen
LIEUTENANT CORBIE LOWERED his perspective glass and rubbed his right eye. It was sore from looking through the telescope for so long. For a whole afternoon, he and his troop of Borderers had been watching and counting the enemy column as it advanced through the pass below them.
‘Add another five thousand to the tally,’ said Corbie to his sergeant, who was keeping count in his notebook. ‘More of the regular Nithlings, arrayed in units of one thousand.’
‘That’s more than twenty-six thousand today, sir,’ said the sergeant. ‘All on the one tile.’
‘It’s scheduled to go east and north at sundown,’ said Corbie, tapping the Ephemeris in its pouch at his side. ‘Shift a few more of them out of the way.’
‘There must be a million of them in the Maze by now,’ said the sergeant quietly. ‘What happens when every tile is full up with Nithlings? No point moving them around then.’
‘That’s defeatist talk, Sergeant, and I won’t have it,’ snapped Corbie. ‘Anyway, there are still plenty of empty tiles, and the Nithling invasion is being broken up very successfully. Tectonic strategy, as always, is working. And I heard the Second Battalion of the Regiment won another battle yesterday.’
Corbie did not mention the fact that the XIXth Cohort of the Legion had almost lost a battle the day before yesterday. While the Nithling forces were being broken up every sundown when the tiles shifted them away, there were many tiles where there were very large numbers of Nithlings. Sometimes these tiles had to be cleared or retaken because they were scheduled to come close to GHQ or one of the other fixed positions.
It was six weeks since Corbie and his troops had left the Boundary Fort. That was in Nithling hands now. Though Colonel Nage had been killed with his entire garrison, he had managed to hold the switch room for twelve hours, and the gates had been closed. But not before four to five hundred thousand Nithlings had come through. And then, a month later, the gates had somehow been opened again, even though this was supposed to be impossible. Tens of thousands more Nithlings had marched in.
Still, as Corbie had reassured the sergeant, the time-honoured tectonic strategy was working. With the tiles moving every sundown and the enemy unable to concentrate its forces, the Army was able to battle the Nithlings piecemeal, winning most of its direct confrontations.
Not that this was enough for Sir Thursday, Corbie had heard. Never even-tempered at the best of times, Sir Thursday was supposed to have become angrier than usual.
Apparently he had even lost his temper with Marshal Dawn and had seriously injured her, after Dawn had questioned some aspect of the Army’s response to this unprecedented invasion and the wisdom of changing the campaign in the first place, so radically and so late.
Corbie reflected that Dawn had been right, of course. It was very strange that the plan had been changed only hours before it commenced. Major Pravuil had been an odd messenger too. He hadn’t seemed quite right to Corbie, like he held some kind of special commission and wasn’t a regular officer at all. It all stank of politics and interference from higher up.
Corbie hated politics.
‘More movement near the tile border,’ called one of the Borderers. ‘And I reckon we’ve been spotted. There’s an officer … superior Nithling, or whatever we’re supposed to call it … directing a squad our way.’
Corbie peered down from the hill. He and his fellow Borderers were concealed among the tumbled rocks at the top, but some movement might have given them away. Or the reflection from his own perspective glass.
Instinctively he looked to the sun. It was near the horizon, making its rickety way down, but there was still half an hour at least till sundown. The tile border, visible to his trained eye as a slightly different tone of colour in the earth, was a hundred yards below them. If the Nithlings did attack, they’d have to make it past that border before dusk, when the tiles moved. Which was possible, Corbie estimated.