Author's Notes: Hey all. I'm writing this fic as a departure from my other ones that I've been frustrated with lately. This one came to me after I had just finished Sabriel, and was moving on to Lirieal. I realized that I wanted to write a fic in this great world that Garth Nix had invented, but I didn't know what. I finally came upon this.It's set during the climax at the end of Sabriel. Sabriel and Touchstone have just landed from the paperwing and have been escorted into Sgt. Hoyle's office. However, this information is just to give the reader a cronological place to start from, and I must warn you that the narritive doesn't follow canon characters. Those looking for Sabriel and Touchstone smooches, or Mogget-saracasm (a personal favorite) would be wise to look elsewhere. Instead I focus on a character purely of my invention, which, for me, is a first.

Ah, and the rating. I'm shy about putting out an R-rated story, so I think I'll try to keep it PG-13. Keep in mind, however, that while I'm not a fan of gratuious swearing, there will be some situation-driven cursing in this. However, if I cleaned it up, I feel I would be cheating the reader. Also a warning about 'graphic' whatevers. They'll be in here too.

Well, with that said, enjoy. :)

Ah, the life of a soldier. Guns, glory, good pay, and maybe one day a fancy bit of metal strapped to your chest. That's supposed to be it, right? Right?

Yeah. Not fucking buying it anymore.

I mean, you pull your stint, maybe get involved in all these exciting adventures, and then it's on home to impress the girls. Leastways, that's what the recruitment officer down southways told us. "Join the Army! Become a noble defender of the homeland!"

So far, my noble duty has consisted entirely of defending this large sack of potatoes. Spud duty, it's called. I'll explain.

Down at the border, potatoes are your three course meal, and after three courses you never want to see another bloody potato again. But for some reason, some bloke were pinching food supplies, and now every bin of food has a two man guard during the evening.

My partner on this sacred task was, like me, a new recruit from southern Ancesterre, although his recruitment officer had suckered him in with "Fifty quid a week!"

You also learned quickly that this was complete shite, too. We were making barely twenty quid, minus expenses, down by the Wall. This might have been another reason why the morale of my comrade-in-arms-and-also-bunkmate, Phillips, was skimming along rock bottom.

Right now, he was cursing.

"Stupid bloody Wall, stupid bloody shift, stupid bloody sergeant..."

I let my gaze wander up to the setting sun, thinking that he must have to run out of things he could yell at sometime."

"Stupid bloody po-ta-toes..." he said, giving our bag a rough kick with each syllable.

I yawned. "Oh shut up, Phillips."

He grinned at me in a sort of maniacal way. "Same thing for you, eh, Evans? Came for guns and glory, and all we get is shitting bag of spuds to look after?"

"Basically, yeah." I said, shrugging noncommitally, playing with my rifle. It felt cold and unfamiliar in my hands. Not for the first time I wondered what I was doing here.

"And the poeple up here," continued Phillips, looking at me sideways as he stooped to pick up a rock. "They're just so wierd, y'know?" He absently juggled the rock in his hands.

"Really? I didn't know. Only just arrived, myself." It was true. I had just come from college, and was greener than most of the boys down here. "How wierd?"

He shot me a look, and said sarcastically "What I mean, Evans, is that there are fellows up there, all dressed up like they're about to go to the King's ball. All dressed up in swords and armor, you'd think they'd just rode out of the fucking fourteenth century. You must have noticed." He threw his rock, with considerable skill and accuacy, right on top of one of the unmanned concret machine gun nests.

"Yeah, I saw some stuff." I said. "If they think that chainmail can stop bullets, let 'em think it."

"Here's another thing too." Phillips said, reaching around and digging into his army sachel, where you usually put your ammunition and extra rations. He removed his bayonet fixing and bayonet for his rifle.

His voice dropped consipiritorally "This guy I'd never seen before comes up to me, says 'Mate, let me se your bayonet.' I says okay and gives it to him, and before I know what, he's done something to it. Made a little mark, right 'ere." He pointed to a small circle, which was inscribed with a smaller circle, with a triangle and a cross overlaying them both.

I leaned over and frowned at it, careful to avoid the pointed end of the blade. "I don't think I've ever seen anything like that."

"Nor 'ave I." said Phillips. "The wierd thing, Evans, is he didn't have anything to cut it with, it was just... there, where it wasn't but a 'alf second ago."

I was just about to tell Phillps a perfectly logical and reasonable explanation for this, when all of a sudden, three sharp whistle blasts came from the trenches in front of us.

"Three whistles. What does that mean?" asked Phillips, tensing up. I dug into my fresh knowlege of command signals. I started "That means-"

All of a sudden the squawk of the intercom cut through the air.

"All non-essential personnel are to leave the Perimeter Zone. Unauthorized entrance of civilians to the Perimeter Zone is strictly prohibited. Violators shall be detained or shot."

The intercom gave one final squawk, and then fell silent. "What he just said." I finished lamely.

"Not very friendly, are they?" commented Phillips, wryly. He adopted a staunchy, proprietary school headmaster accent. "Whatever has become of Ancelstierran hospitality?"

He looked at me. "What do you think is going on?"

I shrugged. "It's a lockdown. Could mean anything. It may be a full scale invasion from the Old Kingdom, and it may be that there's some trigger happy commander on the intercom and somebody's been nicking the foodstuffs again."

Phillips pointed to the small, low slung building that housed the Perimeter HQ. "Somehow I don't think it's the last one, mate."

And he was right, I realized. No amount of ration-pinching could produce what was happening before us.

The trenches had gone from a usual weekday lethargy to a sudden beehive of activity. All around us, orders and counter-orders were being called out, equipment was moving, engines were spluttering and starting up, and ranks of infantry were pouring out of the barracks.

Me and Phillips turned to each other and both gave it the raised eyebrow.

Suddenly, I caught sight of Sergeant Hoyle. He's not a man you usually see around the base, too much bureaucratic nonsense that he has to deal with. I only recognized him from his picture that I had seen, when we were shown our commanding officers.

What's more, he was worried. Every few seconds, he cast a look over his shoulder, towards the great Wall. As if he was expecting something...

I was distracted from my dark train of thought when Phillips tapped my on the shoulder, and pointed at a figure by Sgt. Hoyle's side. "Who's that now?" he asked.

I peered in between the rushing men -- men who I realized were rushing to set up embankments and barbed wire, I realized – and saw a young girl, about seventeen, with long, elbow-length dark hair, hurriedly keeping pace with the Sergeant.

I stared at her. Not in that way, of course, you understand. I mean, a man on the front lines does get a little...well, odd, sometimes, and I can't say she didn't have a rather attractive profile, but still...

Ah. Ahem. Where was I?

Oh yes. What caught my eye about the girl, aside from the fact that there was a girl here at the Perimeter, was the curious bandoleer she had slung about her shoulder, with seven... what were they? Waterskins? Ammunition pouches?

She was walking up a set of concrete steps with Sgt. Hoyle when she looked around, as if someone was watching her. Well, I was watching her, so she probably had a good reason to think that. She turned her gaze to me, and even from that distance I saw she had the darkest eyes of anybody I'd ever seen.

She looked at me, and I looked at her, and for one breath of a moment, there was a connection. She stopped, and I could see that despite the firmness of her posture, she was exhausted, and masked by her youthful figure, she had seen too many horrors to still be innocent.

She looked at me, and her eyes simply said-

I'm sorry.

Then whatever we had together snapped, and was gone. She took a breath, and continued alongside Sgt. Hoyle.

I was snapped out my revelry by a large lorry stopping in front of me between me and the girl. A man with MP's red hat and a small mustache hopped out of the drivers seat.

"You there!" he said, apparently addressing both me and Phillips. I gave him a sloppy salute, figuring that if he was yelling at me, he was a superior. Phillips just waved insuborantly and asked, "Mind telling us what's going on?"

"Captain's orders." said the man, giving the hairy eyeball to Phillips, who didn't notice or didn't care. Most likely both. "Everybody's supposed to be moved up, 'cept for a small detachment that's on special orders to relocate to Bain." He narrowed his eyes. "What are you doing?" he demanded at me.

I just looked at him. Then I said, as evenly as I could, I said "Protecting the Queen's potatoes, sir."

He gave me another extremely unfriendly look. Ah, I see -- I though – he thinks I'm mad.

Well, evidently sanity was not a extremely valued asset in the Perimeter Guard, because he all he did was order us to move up to the front lines. I shrugged and went. Phillips followed, chuckling to himself.

"That was rather good." he said. "'Protecting the Queen's potatoes, sir'. Fancy that'll throw a wrench in Captain Asshat's evaluation of the troops."

"I try." I said, giving a mock bow.

The front lines of the Perimeter are arranged in a sort of concave V-shape, about fifteen yards across at the walls end, and with machine gun nests every three yards or so behind earthen embankments. Barbed wire is strewn across much of the open ground, it's pointed spikes threatening to entangle anyone stupid enough to lean over into it.

"Nice place to spend a holiday, eh?" I remarked. I wasn't expecting gales of laughter, but several men shot me dirty looks.

Mental note to self: Joking is illegal near the wall.

Meanwhile, Phillips was trying to coerce information from a man next to us in our Llewyn machine gun pit.

"So what's command worried about anyway?"

The machine gunner looked down at us with commanding grey eyes. "I don't know." he said simply. "Command isn't saying much, just to be on our toes." He tightened his jaw, and said in a low voice to us. "Command doesn't want the men to panic, that's all. You guys are new, right?" He leaned right down next to me.

"What if I were to tell you," he said softy "That there's an army of the dead on the other side of that wall there?"

I thought about this.

"I don't know." I said. "I'd probably ask you 'Is that a thing that you'd be likely to say?'"

Phillips broke in. "Wait, wait, wait. Hang on a bit here. You're asking me to believe that there's a bunch of dead people on that side of the wall?"

"An army, yes."

"Of the dead?"

"Yes."

"A dead army?"

"Not dead dead, right?"

"Yes."

"Not just a little hung over?" Phillips asked, grinning like a maniac.

"You think I'm joking, don't you? You think this is some sort of game." he said, glaring disgustedly at Phillips, who stopped grinning.

He turned to me. "You look like you've got at least a bit of sense. You see that?" he said, pointing to a large sword bayonet poking out of the sandbag in front of the machine gun nest. "When this machine stops working, I want you to grab that and kill anything that comes in here."

I looked at the pommel of the sword bayonet, and looked back at the man.

"Do you really think something's going to happen?" I asked him, quietly.

The man shook his head.

"I wish I was lying."

Dusk came quickly. Too quickly for my liking. It was all good and well to laugh at the machinegunner's words in the light of day, but as the sun was half over the horizon, I began to grow uneasy. If somebody was dead, how did you kill them?

I was about ask this to my silent companion, when suddenly I heard a rumbling off in the distance. For a moment, I thought it was the man's 'Army of the Dead' and almost panicked, but then I realized there was a much more man-made explanation for the earth shaking like that.

Tanks.

I had never seen one in real life. But now I was amazed. Great green-grey metal beamoths, belching smoke, with many turrets sticking out of all sides, looking like a much more lethal pricker-burr. It's treads were easily as wide as Phillips' body, and I tried not to imagine what it would be like to be caught under those massive steel links.

All around me Perimeter Guardsmen were popping up like gophers out of holes to stare at the tanks. Then, somewhere, a cheer started up. It was echoed by another voice, and another, and another. I could see what they meant by their cheers. These were tanks, I mean... tanks!

Suddenly I felt better. Zombies and all were good, but nothing to a tank.

The grey-eyed machinegunner, however, did not cheer.

"They will not save them." he said, darkly and quietly, gripping the handle of his own sword.

And with that, the last rays of sunlight disappeared over the horizon.

For the next half-hour, the tension was unbearable, even worse than actually having something to deal with. My mind kept inventing imagined horrors as I looked out into the Old Kingdom. It was a place you were told stories about, in southern Ancesteirre. Not good stories, either. Stories of people who could bring souls back from the dead. Stories of half-men who walked the earth, feasting on human flesh. Stories of demons, half fire and half shadow, that would hunt down lonely travelers in the wild.

Yeah. Kid's stuff.

I shuddered.

The grey-eyed man looked at me. I could see that he saw that I was scared, which I'll admit I was. "Here," he said, and pressed his finger against my forehead. He spoke a few words that I couldn't understand, or maybe I wasn't listening properly, but all of a sudden a sudden calm filled me. Not courage, just a calm. For some reason, my eyes were drawn to his forehead, but it was covered by a protective helmet.

"Here," he said again, this time handing me a chain of ammunition. He stuck one end into his heavy Llywen machine gun and snapped the catch shut. "When I start to fire," he said "I want you to feed this end through, okay? It'll give you something to do, leastways."

I nodded dumbly. He doled out three phosphorus grenades from a box to me himself, me, and Phillips, who had grown uncharacteristically silent. He gave the rest to Phillips.

"I want you to throw those," he said to Phillips "On anything that gets stuck on that barbed wire. Understand?"

Phillips mumbled a "Yes, sir."

The machinegunner sighed "I apologize if I was a bit short with you either, but you've got to know. Things on the other side of that aren't going to be nice and exchange fire like in your neat little military drills down south. They're going to try to swarm into this nest and kill you in the worst way possible. No mercy, understand?"

Phillips looked up, and for the first time I had ever seen him, he had no jovial half-smirk on his lips. Instead, he looked pale and drawn, and I realized that I have must have been the same.

The man looked down at us, and gave a small chuckle. "Don't worry. As long as there's no wind blowing in from the Old Kingdom, we should be okay."

Phillips peered up out of the foxhole andlookedat somethingbehind the machinegunner.

"What about fog?" he asked softly.

To Be Continued...