Blouse lowered the book. "Sergeant, I am about to tell our spy that we are seven miles further away than we really are, do you understand? And I am certain they will believe us because I have artificially reduced the light output from our device, do you understand? And I will tell them that their spies have encountered a very large party of recruits and deserters heading for the mountains and are in pursuit, do you understand? I am making us invisible, do you understand? Do you understand, Sergeant Jackrum?"
The squad held their breath.
Jackrum drew himself stiffly to attention. "Fully understood, sir!" he said.
"Very well!"
Jackrum continued at attention as the messages were exchanged, like a naughty pupil forced to stand by the teacher's desk.
Messages flashed across the sky, from hilltop to hilltop. Lights flickered. The clacks tube rattled. Wazzer called out the longs and shorts. Blouse scribbled in the book. "S... P... P... 2," he said aloud. "Hah. That's an order to remain where we are."
"More flashes, sir," said Wazzer.
"T... Y... E... 3..." said Blouse, still making notes. "That's 'be ready to give aid'. N...V...A...S...N... That's..."
"That's not a code, sir!" said Polly.
"Private, send as follows right now!" Blouse croaked. "Long... long..."
The message went. They watched, while the dew fell and, overhead, the stars came out and twinkled messages no one ever tried to read.
The clacks went silent.
"Now we leave as soon as possible," said Blouse. He gave a little cough. "I believe the phrase is 'Let us get the heck out of here'."
"Close, sir," said Polly. "Quite... close."
There was an old, very old Borogravian song with more Zs and Vs in it than any lowlander could pronounce. It was called "Plogviehze!" It meant "The Sun Has Risen! Let's Make War!" You needed a special kind of history to get all that in one word.
Sam Vimes sighed. The little countries here fought because of the river, because of idiot treaties, because of royal rows, but mostly they fought because they had always fought. They made war, in fact, because the sun came up.
This war had tied itself in a knot.
Downriver, the valley narrowed to a canyon before the Kneck plunged over a waterfall a quarter of a mile high. Anyone trying to get up through the jagged mountains there would find themselves in a world of gorges, knife-edged ridges, permanent ice and even more permanent death. Anyone trying to cross the Kneck into Zlobenia now would be butchered on the shore. The only way out of the valley was back along the Kneck, which would put an army under the shadow of the Keep. That had been fine when the Keep was in Borogravian hands. Now that it had been captured, they'd be passing in range of their own weapons.
...And such weapons! Vimes had seen catapults that would throw a stone ball three miles. When it landed it would crack into needle-sharp shards. Or there was the other machine that sent six-foot steel discs skimming through the air. Once they'd hit the ground and leapt up again they were unreliable as hell, but that only made them more terrifying. Vimes had been told that the edged disc would probably keep going for several hundred yards, no matter how many men or horses it encountered on the way. And they were only the latest ideas. There were plenty of conventional weapons, if by that you meant giant bows, catapults and mangonels that hurled balls of Ephebian fire, which clung while it burned.
From up here, in his draughty tower, he could see the fires of the dug-in army all across the plain. They couldn't retreat, and the Alliance, if that's what you could call the petulant hubbub, didn't dare head up the valley into the heart of the country with that army at their back, yet didn't have enough men to hold the Keep and corral the enemy.
And in a few weeks it would start to snow. The passes would fill up. Nothing would be able to get through. And every day, thousands of men and horses would need feeding. Of course, the men could, eventually, eat the horses, thus settling two feeding problems at a stroke. After that there would have to be the good ol' leg rota, which Vimes understood from one of the friendlier Zlobenians was a common feature of winter warfare up here. Since he was Captain "Hopalong" Splatzer, Vimes believed him.
And then it would rain, and then the rain and the snowmelt together would turn the damn river into a flood. But before that the Alliance would have bickered itself apart and gone home. All the Borogravians had to do, in fact, was hold their ground to score a draw.
He swore under his breath. Prince Heinrich had inherited the throne in a country where the chief export was a kind of hand-painted wooden clog, but in ten years, he vowed, his capital city of Rigour would be "the Ankh-Morpork of the mountains"! For some reason, he thought Ankh-Morpork would be pleased about this.
He was anxious, he said, to learn the Ankh-Morpork way of doing things, the kind of innocent ambition that could well lead an aspiring ruler to... well, find out the Ankh-Morpork way of doing things. Heinrich had a reputation locally for cunning, but Ankh-Morpork had overtaken cunning a thousand years ago, had sped past devious, had left artful far behind and had now, by a roundabout route, arrived at straightforward.
Vimes leafed through the papers on his desk, and looked up when he heard a shrill, harsh cry outside. A buzzard came in a long, shallow swoop through the open window and alighted on a makeshift perch at the far end of the room. Vimes strolled over as the little figure on the bird's back raised his flying goggles.
"How's it going, Buggy?" he said.
"They're getting suspicious, Mister Vimes. And Sergeant Angua says it's getting a bit risky now they're so close."
"Tell her to come on in, then."
"Right, sir. And they still need coffee."
"Oh, damn! Haven't they found any?"