Bolt Thrower

The Bolt Thrower is on the Tribal Alliance forest-clan rolls under the work-name Eilwen Tarn, age twenty-five, fourth generation of a forest-clan trapping family to hold the southern-ridge run and the first of them to hold it with a crossbow that has no string. The bolt hangs in a magnetic cradle above the stock, and what it does when it lands is decided by the rune-stone seated behind it; the belt she wears carries nine colours, sorted, and her grandmother — who taught her the cradle at eleven, the way the family teaches everything — taught her the ninth on the same afternoon and told her it was never fired. Eilwen has fired the red stone three hundred times, the blue forty-one, the green nine, and the ninth never. The clan-elders have the count. They have not asked what the ninth does, because the grandmother did not tell them either.

Her combat-grant is the trap-line discipline of her family, carried on the run rather than laid on it: she looses from behind, on the run's own terrain, at an enemy line that has already walked past the place she was standing, and the Empire's border-survey has recorded thirty-one engagements over four years in which an imperial formation took rear-side casualties from sources the after-action reports describe as 'undetermined.' Eilwen does not file after-action reports. The Alliance's combat-doctrine office considers the run outside its reporting jurisdiction, and the run's boundaries — roughly three hundred square miles of ridge, ford and forest-edge — are a thing the Empire's surveyors know the name of and have not been told the shape of. The clan-elders consider this a feature.

She relocates her cradles along the lattices that Tender Anouk Brede's growth-mist raises in the river-bend country, on the grounds that a formation denied its ground goes the long way round and the long way round is where the cradles are; the two of them have between them defined what 'clean corridor' means for the Alliance's rider regiments this season, and the elders have noted the collaboration as 'unusual' and have not contested it. The Empire's surveyors have offered, through an intermediary, to purchase one rune-stone of each colour for study. Eilwen has sent them eight. The surveyors have not asked about the ninth, which the clan-elders take as proof the surveyors do not know there is one, and which Eilwen takes as proof that they do.