By Heresies Distressed

by David Weber

  Neither he nor Cayleb liked the notion of allowing them to slip through their fingers, but it was unlikely that their successful escape to Delferahk was going to have much effect on events here in Corisande. Not, at least, in the short term. In the long term, it was likely to prove . . . inconvenient, of course. In fact, it was almost certainly going to prove far worse than that. Which was why Captain Athrawes was spending his time hoping that one of their schooners would get lucky.

  . II .

  Duchy of Manchyr,

  League of Corisande

  The surf boat could have been a slightly more solid piece of the moonless night as it came nosing in from the southeast. It had been carefully painted matte black, and the sailors manning the oars rowed steadily but carefully. The last thing anyone needed was for the boat to broach to in the surf and soak its passengers’ gunpowder. Among other things.

  Sergeant Edvarhd Wystahn sat on the forward thwart with his rifle standing upright between his knees while he peered at the featureless, black blur of the coast. Aside from a pale froth where the gentle surf piled up on the beach of tawny sand, he could make out no details. He thought he could just see the loom of the hills beyond the beach, standing up against the starry sky, but he was fairly sure that was his imagination.

  I’ve spent too long studying the damned maps, he thought wryly. For the last five-day, I’ve even been dreaming about them!

  Actually, that wasn’t such a bad thing. One of the primary tenets of the scout-snipers was that it made far more sense to wear themselves out ahead of time planning and training for an operation than it did to take casualties a little forethought might have avoided.

  “Easy!” the petty officer in charge of the surf boat hissed. “Toss oars. Styv, Zhak—over the side!”

  The boat swooped over the last swells, held bows-on to the beach by the sea anchor streamed over her stern, and the indicated seamen swung themselves over the gunwales and into the chest-deep water. They half-floated towards the shore, leaning their weight against the boat to guide it. Their feet found purchase as the water grew quickly shallower, and then the bow slid onto the sand with a quiet “scrunch.” The sound was just audible through the noise of wind and wave, and the petty officer nodded to Wystahn.

  “This is where you get out, Sergeant,” he called softly, and Wystahn saw the faint flash of white teeth in a broad grin. “Good hunting.”

  Wystahn nodded back, then turned to the other members of his double-squad.

  “All right, lads,” he told them. “Let’s be going.”

  He stepped over the side and waded through the wash of water, with the waves surging knee-high as they slid up the shelving beach on the last of their dying strength. Sand swirled away from under his boot soles, carried back out to sea by the receding water, and the flow plucked playfully at his calves. The solid ground seemed to curtsy underfoot as he stepped clear of the surf at last, but he ignored that—and the seawater squelching in his boots—while he looked around, then up at the stars, trying to get his bearings.

  “It looks like the swabbies put us in the right spot . . . for a change,” he said, and several of his men chuckled softly. “It’s blacker nor the inside of a dirty boot,” he continued, “but I’m thinking that’s our hill yonder.”

  He pointed, then gave the stars one more look, taking his bearings, and nodded to Ailas Mahntyn, the senior of his two corporals.

  “Off you go, Ailas. Try not t’ fall over your own flat feet!”

  Mahntyn snorted and started off through the darkness. Wystahn and the rest of the scout-snipers allowed the corporal to open a suitable lead, then followed him up the beach and into the high, stiff grass that rustled and whispered back to the murmuring sea in the steady wind.

  “I hope this brilliant idea of mine is going to live up to its billing,” Emperor Cayleb remarked as he stood on Empress of Charis’ sternwalk and gazed up at the same stars Sergeant Wystahn had just consulted. No hills were visible from where Cayleb stood, but he could see starlight glimmering on the sails of at least a half-dozen galleons, and he shook his head. “I don’t think Bryahn is particularly happy about closing the land in the middle of the night this way,” he added.

  “Nonsense,” Merlin said from where he stood “guarding” Cayleb even here. “Why should any admiral be concerned about sailing directly towards a beach he can’t even see with twelve warships and sixty transport galleons loaded with fifteen or twenty thousand Marines?”

  “Oh, thank you.” Cayleb turned to lean his back against the sternwalk railing and looked at him. “You do know how to bolster someone’s confidence, don’t you?”

  “One tries,” Merlin told him, stroking one of his waxed mustachios. Cayleb chuckled, and Merlin smiled, but his smile faded quickly as he remembered another night on another ship’s sternwalk and his final conversation with King Haarahld.

  Oh, give it a rest! he told himself. And stop looking for bad omens, too. Cayleb’s hardly going ashore in the first wave!

  “How are they doing?” Cayleb asked in a considerably more serious tone, and Merlin shrugged.

  “So far, so good.” He considered the schematic Owl was transmitting to him from the SNARCs watching over the small groups of Charisian Marines filtering inland. “Most of them landed within a thousand yards or so of the right spot,” he continued. “We’ve got one group that managed to get itself put ashore over a mile south of where it’s supposed to be, but it’s one of the dummies. At the moment, it looks like the rest of them are pretty much on schedule.”

  “Good.”

  Cayleb turned and stood gazing out into the night once again for several moments. Then he inhaled sharply and shook himself.

  “Good,” he repeated. “Now, as Domynyk recommended to me before Rock Point, I think it’s time I got some sleep.”

  “I think that’s an excellent idea,” Merlin agreed.

  “Well, there’s not anything else useful I can do until dawn,” Cayleb pointed out. He sounded much calmer about it all than Merlin knew he actually was, but he also waved one finger in Merlin’s direction. “As for you, Seijin Merlin, under the circumstances, I’ll grant you a dispensation on your ‘downtime.’ But only for tonight, mind you!”

  Merlin snorted and bowed ironically to him.

  “Yes, Your Imperial Majesty. Whatever you say, Your Imperial Majesty,” he said unctuously.

  Wystahn sighed in relief as Ailas Mahntyn rose silently out of the steep hillside’s grass. The sergeant’s raised hand stopped the men following along behind him in their tracks, and Mahntyn pointed farther up the slope.

  “Right where they said she’d be, Sarge,” the corporal murmured through the steady sigh of the wind. “Four of ’em. Got them a signal mast and some flags. Looks like a signal fire, too. Two of ’em ’re asleep. Got one man sittin’ up on a big old rock—reckon he’s got th’ duty. Last one’s making some tea or somethin’. Lookout’s ‘bout fifty yards that way.” He pointed upslope and to the right. “Cooking fire an’ th’ signal gear’s that way.” He pointed to the left. “Got their tents and other gear on th’ back side of th’ slope.”

  “Good work,” Wystahn replied quietly.

  Ailas Mahntyn had even less formal education than Wystahn did, but he’d grown up in the Lizard Range Mountains, and his ability to move silently—not to mention his ability to see in apparently total darkness—was phenomenal. He had a woodsman’s eye for terrain and a hunter’s ability to put himself inside the mind of his quarry, and his own brain was dagger-sharp, despite any lack of schooling. Wystahn was working with him on his letters, since literacy was one of the requirements for a scout-sniper sergeant. Privately, although he’d been careful not to mention it to Mahntyn, he wouldn’t be a bit surprised if the corporal ended up an officer, assuming he ever got a firm grip on reading and writing. Which wasn’t a certain thing, unfortunately. Mahntyn was trying harder than he would have cared to admit to anyone, but letters were more elusive than any prong lizard as far as he w
as concerned.

  The sergeant brushed that thought aside, then turned and beckoned for the rest of the double-squad to close up on him and Mahntyn.

  “Say it again for them,” he told the corporal, and listened himself, just as carefully the second time as he had the first. When the corporal had finished, Wystahn started handing out assignments.

  “—and you’ve got th’ lookout,” he finished two minutes later, tapping Mahntyn on the chest.

  “Aye,” the corporal replied laconically, and nodded to the other three men of his section.

  They were just as taciturn as he was, and almost as quiet. Wystahn might have heard a single boot scrape quietly over a rock . . . but he might not have, too. In either case, he had no worry about what was about to happen to the lookout. He’d given that task to Mahntyn partly because the corporal was the best man for the job in a general sense, but also because Mahntyn had already spotted the Corisandian. He knew exactly where the lookout was, and Wystahn was sure he’d already worked out the best way to approach him. The man making tea, or whatever he was doing, would be illuminated by his cook fire, and his night vision would be nonexistent, if he’d been sitting there looking into the fire while he worked. The other two were asleep in their tents, which meant none of the three of them were likely to notice anyone creeping up on them. The lookout, on the other hand, was sitting there in the dark with his eyes fully adjusted, and the nature of his duty meant he was at least supposed to be alert. Soldiers being soldiers, and given the fact that not even one of the archangels could have seen anything more than a few hundred yards offshore under the available light conditions, he probably wasn’t as alert as he ought to have been, but Edvarhd Wystahn wasn’t going to assume that. And if the Corisandian was paying attention to his duties, sneaking up on him was going to be a significantly more difficult task.

  “All right,” the noncom said to the men he hadn’t sent off with Mahntyn, “let’s go wake these lads up.”

  Emperor Cayleb stepped onto Empress of Charis’ quarterdeck and gazed up at the sky. Wispy cloud was moving slowly in from the east, but it was obviously high and thin, not the storm clouds which had been entirely too common for the previous couple of months. The stars continued to shine overhead, but those thin banners of cloud were a lighter gray, as if the sun were beginning to peer over the edge of the world, and the night had that feeling dawn sends ahead of itself. Captain Gyrard and his officers gave the emperor a respectful distance as he strode to the taffrail and looked astern. HMS Dauntless followed in the flagship’s wake, and it was definitely easier to see her than it had been earlier.

  Captain Athrawes had been talking quietly to Captain Gyrard until the emperor arrived. Now the seijin nodded to Gyrard and walked across the deck to stand behind Cayleb with his hands clasped behind his own back in an attitude of respectful waiting.

  The emperor completed his survey of sky, sea, and wind, then turned to his personal armsman.

  “Well?” he asked softly.

  “Well,” Merlin agreed, equally softly, with a very slight bow.

  No one with ears less acute than Merlin’s could possibly have heard the exchange through the inevitable background noises of a sailing ship underway at sea. No one else needed to hear, however, and somehow, without actually changing a bit, Cayleb’s expression seemed to lighten.

  Merlin’s expression didn’t, but, then, he’d already known the answer to Cayleb’s question. The boat parties of scout-snipers had been carefully briefed on exactly where they were supposed to go once they were ashore. As far as General Chermyn and his officers were concerned, they’d been dispatched to suspected lookout posts—the places where Emperor Cayleb had decided he would have placed sentinels to watch his seaward flank if he were Sir Koryn Gahrvai and feeling particularly paranoid.

  Some of the Marines had felt the emperor’s precautions were excessive. Others had privately questioned whether their emperor, for all his prowess as an admiral, had enough of a landsman’s eye for terrain to pick out actual observation points from a map. Any of those doubting souls, however, had been wise enough to keep their opinions to themselves. And Cayleb had covered himself just a bit by spending two days aboard one of the fleet’s schooners, perched in her foretop—much to her skipper’s considerable anxiety—personally surveying the coastline through a glass. The schooner had obviously been on “routine patrol,” without the crowned personal standard which officially indicated the emperor’s presence on board, and Cayleb had dutifully jotted down an entire pad full of notes. No one else had to know that the content of those notes had actually been dictated to him by the seijin sitting beside him (ostensibly to make certain the emperor did nothing foolish, like tripping over his own feet and making a large, messy spot on the schooner’s deck).

  As it happened, Koryn Gahrvai was, indeed, “paranoid” enough to have arranged observation posts. He was only too well aware of the risk he’d taken by adopting his forward deployment in Talbor Pass, and he knew what could happen if a sufficiently large force could be landed in his rear. He had no intention of allowing Cayleb to do anything of the sort, however, and he’d established an entire series of interlocking lookout posts that stretched almost fifty miles westward along the Manchyr coast from the tip of the Dark Hill Mountains. Each of those posts was equipped with signal flags, and semaphore masts had been located at central points. He’d sought out the highest elevations he could find, in order to give his lookouts the greatest visual command of the waters of White Horse Reach, and given the relatively low speed of even Charisian galleons, those lookouts would give him a minimum of six hours’ notice before any hostile landing could commence.

  They were, of course, dependent upon daylight. If the Charisians were sufficiently confident to risk grounding by approaching the coast under cover of darkness and began landing at the very crack of dawn, they could deprive Gahrvai’s sentinels of that half-dozen hours of approach time. But the lookouts would still be able to flash a warning to him long before any Charisian Marines could reach the southern terminus of Talbor Pass, especially without cavalry. Getting his own infantry out of the pass before the Charisians could seal it behind him would become a chancier proposition under those conditions, but he had posted Earl Windshare’s cavalry to watch his back.

  Overall, he had every reason to feel confident that any Charisians in his vicinity would be to the east of him, and he planned to keep them there. If they managed to flank him out of Talbor anyway, he intended to fall back as rapidly as possible on Manchyr and the extensive fieldworks whose construction around the capital his father had overseen. In the long run, any waiting game was in Corisande’s favor, especially now that Anvil Rock knew about the Charisian rifles and had begun duplicating them. The one thing Corisande could not afford was the destruction or neutralization of Gahrvai’s field force, and Gahrvai was supremely unconcerned by the very real possibility that anyone might question his courage for retreating from one heavily fortified position into another one in the face of an army little more than half the size of his own.

  Unfortunately for Sir Koryn, he had no idea of the reconnaissance capabilities Merlin Athrawes made available to Cayleb Ahrmahk. Merlin had sat in on his staff and officers’ meetings, had watched and analyzed each of his commanders, studying their strengths and weaknesses. He—and Cayleb, based on his reports—knew exactly why Gahrvai had made the command arrangements he had, and, overall, Cayleb would probably have made the same ones, given the same conditions. But the emperor also knew from Merlin’s reports that there was a potentially fatal flaw in Gahrvai’s command structure, and that was the reason he’d had Merlin pinpoint every one of the Corisandians’ observation posts. Merlin had also plotted their lines of communication and located the positions of the semaphores which formed those lines’ central nodes. And equipped with that information, Cayleb had planned the nocturnal landings which had put Sergeant Wystahn and his fellows ashore.

  He’d been very careful to select some “suspected lo
okout posts” where, in fact, no one had ever been posted. And he’d been equally careful not to select several which did exist but which reported through one of the central nodes rather than having a direct signal link to Gahrvai’s army. It would never have done for him to have unerringly dispatched attacks against every observation post, any more than it would have done for him not to have come up dry at least once or twice. Hopefully, no one would notice that the only ones he’d missed “just happened” to be unable to tell anyone what they’d seen by signal. Runners were something he couldn’t do anything about, but it would take a minimum of several hours for anyone from the surviving positions to get word to Gahrvai—and that assumed the runners in question figured out what was happening and headed directly for Talbor Pass instead of first running over to check on why the relay post to which they’d reported hadn’t acknowledged their signals.

  It wasn’t a perfect solution to the problem. It was simply a solution which not even the wisest and most cunning of enemy commanders could possibly have seen coming.

  Gahrvai’s good enough to deserve better than this, Cayleb thought. It feels like cheating. But, as Merlin says, if I’m not cheating, I’m not trying hard enough.

  The emperor turned his head to sweep his eyes across the eastern horizon one more time. The sky was definitely beginning to brighten, and additional galleons were becoming visible beyond Dauntless. There’d be enough light for his needs by the time the assault boats reached the beaches, he decided, and walked across the broad quarterdeck to Captain Gyrard. The sound of his heels on the dew-slick planking was the only sound which was not born of wind or sea, and the flag captain came to respectful attention as Cayleb stopped in front of him.

  “Very well, Captain Gyrard,” the emperor said formally. “Show the signal.”