Princeps: A Novel in the Imager Portfolio

by L. E. Modesitt Jr.

  “What were our casualties?”

  “A score or two killed in the battalion. Don’t know about your company. Less than a hundred wounded. We’ll lose some of those. That’s not bad for this kind of mess.” Meinyt shook his head. “The scouts can’t find any sign of any other Bovarian troops anywhere on this side of the river. Not within milles.”

  “So they’ll be attacking Ferravyl from somewhere else now?”

  “I’d guess that right after we left there was an attack on south Ferravyl, on the far side of the Aluse.”

  “Anything to keep us spread out.”

  “That’s my guess.”

  “I’ll have my company ready to go.” Quaeryt paused. “Is there anything else I should know?”

  “Only that this is going to be a bloody mess. But you already knew that.”

  Quaeryt did, as did every man and officer that had come out of the Tilboran revolt.

  71

  Third Battalion—and some three hundred Bovarian captives—reached the gates of North Post just before seventh glass on Lundi night. Zhelan had reported eleven deaths and twenty-two wounded, three seriously. In both the battalion and in Quaeryt’s command men and mounts were exhausted, and none of the imager undercaptains looked particularly pleased. That might have been partly due to the fact that they’d missed the evening meal and had to rely on travel rations of dried meat, hard cheese, and harder biscuits.

  The first officer to reach Meinyt and Quaeryt was Major Fhaen. “Commander Skarpa is at the main post. He departed as soon as he received your dispatch, Major. He left word that you were in command in his absence, Subcommander.”

  With the hope that you don’t do anything stupid. “Thank you. Has there been anything happening across the river since he left?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Do we have word of any attacks elsewhere?” Quaeryt pressed.

  “Not yet, sir.”

  “Once we dismount and deal with mounts and gear, I’ll be on the upper west wall, checking the river, if anyone needs to find me.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  In less than a quint Quaeryt and Meinyt were looking out from the old stone ramparts at the river, seemingly peaceful under the orangish light of the setting sun.

  “What’s the weakest point of the defenses of Ferravyl?” Quaeryt finally asked.

  “Where we are here is the weakest point. If the Bovarians cross the river to the north, and get beyond where we stopped them, there are a score of ways to attack the city. Three regiments couldn’t cover the ways they could come. Doesn’t make sense that they sent two weak battalions.”

  Quaeryt frowned. “Maybe that’s not the right question. What is the key to holding Ferravyl…” He stopped. “No. That’s not right, either. What does Kharst want? Really want? He wants unfettered use of the Aluse all the way to the sea. If he gets it, in time he can dominate Telaryn. What keeps him from that?”

  “The Narrows Bridge,” replied Meinyt.

  Quaeryt had never seen the bridge, only heard and read about it. “How narrow is the river there?”

  “Can’t be much more than fifty yards in the channel. Maybe another twenty or so on each side in the shallows, but the water there is barely head-high. Swift, though.”

  “How many spans?”

  “Four, as I recall. But you can’t take a boat under the end ones. Well … maybe a shallow draft flatboat or a small rowboat.”

  Quaeryt looked back toward the Ferrean River without really seeing it. “Skarpa and Deucalon have likely already thought of this, but why did the Bovarians use flimsy copies of barges, if they were just going to sit at the piers at Cleblois? Why weren’t there plenty of real barges around? Especially if they weren’t going to be damaged?”

  Meinyt frowned, but did not answer.

  “I’d guess,” Quaeryt said slowly, “that’s because they have another use for those barges, and one that’s far more destructive.”

  “They’re going to fill them with powder and iron and send them against the Narrows Bridge? To try to take out the bridge?”

  “All they need is to take out enough that it would take months to rebuild the center part, and then they’ll bring all their forces across the Vyl and take all the Telaryn lands on the south side of the span. Without the bridge, Lord Bhayar would have problems getting his men across the river, especially under fire, and it would be impossible to rebuild it if the Bovarians held the south side. Commander Skarpa and Marshal Deucalon likely know that, but I wonder if they’ve thought about the barges. It wouldn’t hurt to send a dispatch off immediately.”

  “No, sir, it wouldn’t.” Meinyt looked to the stone steps down to the courtyard, as if suggesting that Quaeryt ought to draft the message immediately.

  “Still … I can’t help but ask why the Bovarians haven’t already put that into action.”

  “I’m no strategist,” offered Meinyt, “but I know one thing.”

  Quaeryt waited.

  “Too many marshals either attack too soon or wait too long. When you attack matters most. They may be waiting to hear what happened with us in the north, instead of using those barges now.”

  “Let’s hope so.” Quaeryt turned and hurried down the steps to the courtyard and then across to the building holding the commander’s study.

  There, he immediately drafted a message and dispatched it. Then he returned to the west wall, alone, and studied the river again, thinking.

  What could he and the imagers do against barges loaded with explosives?

  The immediate answer to the question was to image something flaming into the explosives.

  But can you even do that, especially when great imaging effort creates chill and ice? He paused. There’s only one way to find out.

  He turned to face the river, about to image a flaming wick in oil. He did not, as another thought occurred to him. If he tried to image a lit candle or a wick into a bag of powder or a cannon shell, wouldn’t the powder just suffocate the flame? Even before it could touch off the powder?

  He glanced at the bombard at the end of the wall, then walked down to the armory.

  “Sir?” asked the duty squad leader.

  “Do you have any cannon powder here?”

  “Not any I’d want to use, sir. The bombards haven’t been fired in years. The marshal said we have to keep some powder on hand.” The squad leader shook his head.

  “I need a bit for the imagers. A small bag to begin with.”

  “Sir…?”

  “If you please, Squad Leader. If something happens, it’s my fault, not yours.”

  The squad leader looked to the young ranker standing in the archway. The young man swallowed. “I heard that, sir. Please be careful.”

  The squad leader did not quite sigh. “This way, then, sir, and watch your step.”

  Quaeryt followed the bearded and grizzled armorer back through the shop, past grindstones and workbenches to a narrow stone staircase with an ironbound door at the bottom. When he reached the bottom, the squad leader lifted a key ring from his belt and inserted a large key, then turned it. The door did open smoothly, revealing a largely empty magazine chamber lit entirely by green glass prisms set in the ceiling and funneling light from the floor above, providing but limited faint illumination, since there were but few lamps lit.

  The squad leader picked up a cloth bag from a wall peg and walked to the back of the magazine where stood two kegs. He eased open the end of the nearer keg with a wooden wedge and a wooden mallet, then used a wooden scoop to ladle the power into the bag.

  “That be enough, sir?”

  “That will be just about what I need.”

  “It isn’t clumping. Ought to be all right if you take care.”

  “Thank you.”

  After the armorer closed the keg and they retraced their steps to the upper level, with the bag of powder in hand, Quaeryt left the armory. He walked across the main courtyard and then to the north, heading for the narrow auxiliary courtyard where he’d
conducted some of the earlier imager training.

  He glanced to the wall, noting that the trees were still there barely visible against the stars. Never had the time to get around to dealing with them. That was like so much of his life recently.

  When he reached the narrow courtyard, he set the bag of powder gently down on a dry paving stone, and then stepped several paces away. First, he concentrated on imaging a tiny piece of iron, a quarter the size of a gold piece, making it red-hot. The small chunk of iron appeared, and Quaeryt lowered his fingers almost to touching the metal. He could definitely feel the heat.

  Leaving the iron on the stone pavement, he retrieved the bag of powder and walked down to the north end of the courtyard, where he carefully poured out a small pile of powder. Then, taking the bag with him, he walked back more than thirty yards. Since the powder wasn’t confined, if the red-hot iron did ignite the power, it should burn, but not explode violently.

  He concentrated on imaging another red-hot piece of iron, this time into the middle of the small pile of cannon powder.

  Almost instantly, a flash appeared, higher than Quaeryt expected, followed by a haze of smoke, barely visible in the light of the stars and little else.

  Good thing you were careful.

  Quaeryt then picked up the powder bag and walked back to the north end of the courtyard. Avoiding the place where he’d placed the first pile of powder, he poured out a smaller pile of powder and then retreated with the powder bag, setting it down on the stone pavement again and stepping away from it before he began to image. The second time, he imaged a piece of red-hot iron the thickness of a knitting needle, but less than half the width of a fingernail.

  Again, the powder flared, and the acrid smell of burned powder drifted toward Quaeryt.

  The third time he tried with an even smaller piece, and while that also ignited the powder, he had the feeling that the smaller needle-like section was about as small as would work reliably. A fourth attempt with an even smaller needle-like piece failed, but a fifth attempt with just a slightly larger needle piece did not.

  But was that because of the way you felt?

  He shook his head. One way or the other, most, if not all, of the undercaptains should be able to image the amount of iron required.

  But can they do it and have it red-hot?

  He didn’t have an answer to that question.

  He imaged a larger piece of red-hot iron into the remaining powder, which he left in the bag. The powder burned, but the flash did not seem that much different from the earlier efforts.

  In the darkness of a cloudless sky, lit but dimly by partial crescents of both Artiema and Erion, he collected several of the small pieces of iron he had used to flash the powder, then made his way back toward his quarters, worrying about whether the Bovarians would attempt to destroy the Narrows Bridge that night. Then he smiled wryly. It might happen in the early morning, but it wouldn’t happen at night, not when there wasn’t enough light to guide such barges against the bridge piers.

  Still … he hoped Meinyt was right and that the Bovarians were being too cautious.

  72

  As on Lundi morning, the alarm chimes rang again on Mardi … except they didn’t wake Quaeryt, because one of the duty rankers had rapped vigorously on his quarters door two quints earlier, informing him that all of Third Regiment and the imagers had been ordered to form up and ride to the north approach to the Narrows Bridge as soon as possible.

  Quaeryt was waiting for the imager undercaptains in the courtyard. Before he had left his quarters, he’d made certain he had the small iron pieces in a bag tucked into his saddlebags. This time the undercaptains all appeared relatively quickly, then proceeded to saddle their mounts and return in a short enough time that they did not delay the regiment’s departure. Quaeryt rode near the front of the column with Skarpa. The sky was covered with high featureless clouds, and although it was before sunrise, he had the feeling that the day would be hot and muggy, even if the sun didn’t break through the overcast.

  Again, on the ride through the city, Quaeryt’s eyes began to burn from the smoke and stench of the ironworks, possibly because the light wind was out of the north.

  When the regiment halted on the stone-paved approach to the bridge, an undercaptain quickly rode forward. “Commander, Subcommander, Marshal Deucalon and Lord Bhayar await you on the north parapet.”

  Parapet—on a bridge?

  Quaeryt looked in the direction of the undercaptain’s gesture. There was a walled structure ahead and to his right, attached to the west end of the bridge. The low stone wall that extended the entire length of the west side of the bridge roadway curved into the wall of the stone structure toward which the squad leader pointed. Although Quaeryt couldn’t be certain, from what he could see, he gained the impression that the structure had been built almost to the edge of the cliff that formed the north bank of the Aluse just west of the bridge. Belatedly, he realized that the entire long and connected set of structures comprised South Post.

  Quaeryt and Skarpa followed the undercaptain through an iron gate that was fastened open with chains and into a courtyard. A ranker was waiting to hold their mounts.

  “The steps to your right, sirs,” offered the undercaptain.

  “Thank you,” replied Quaeryt, almost in unison with Skarpa.

  As soon as he reached the top of the stone steps, which opened onto a walled parapet, Quaeryt immediately looked westward. There were no signs of any barges or other river craft. So, as he turned toward the raised stone platform at the back of the walkway behind the parapet wall, where Bhayar and several senior officers waited, he took a moment to study the bridge’s construction and its position. Over time, the river had cut through a ridge of grayish stone, leaving the sheer cliff over which the long and narrow fortress was perched. Each end of the bridge was anchored in that stone, although the cliff on the southern side was lower, and that had necessitated the building of a stone-walled structure to raise the southern approach to the same level as that of the north. The other aspect of the bridge’s construction that struck Quaeryt immediately was that the central pylon was not centered. Then he realized that it had been built on what remained of stony isle in the middle of the narrows—and that the isle was possibly the only thing that had made the bridge feasible.

  Heavy cables and nets were set in place so that they almost reached the surface of the river, leaving less than a yard between the base of the nets and the water, but Quaeryt could also see that cables attached to the bottom of the nets ran to winches on the bridge itself so that the nets could be raised and lowered as necessary.

  “Quaeryt…” murmured Skarpa.

  “I needed a quick look. I’ve never been here before,” returned Quaeryt in a low voice, turning directly toward Bhayar, who, with an officer in the uniform of a marshal, presumably Deucalon, had stepped down from the platform. When Quaeryt was several yards from the Lord of Telaryn, he stopped and inclined his head. “Lord.”

  His single word was echoed by Skarpa.

  “I don’t see any barges, Subcommander,” said Bhayar evenly.

  “I believe my dispatch only mentioned the possibility and suggested that you might already have considered that,” replied Quaeryt.

  “I had. Marshal Deucalon”—and with the mention of the marshal, Bhayar inclined his head to the slender, if wiry, gray-haired officer standing beside him—“thought it a possibility also. But he believed that the Bovarians would first attack all points of weakness before attempting a direct assault on the bridge. We have positioned cannon on the solid stone at the end of each approach to the bridge. They will attempt to sink any vessels approaching the bridge. They likely will not succeed in sinking all of them.” Bhayar looked directly at Quaeryt. “Should the Bovarians launch barges filled with explosives at the bridge, can your imagers do anything to stop the barges that the cannon cannot sink before they strike the bridge piers and supports?”

  “We can likely stop some of them, sir.
”

  “If you can stop some,” asked Deucalon, in an edged voice that Quaeryt found grating, “why not all of them?”

  “The greater the distance from the imager to the barge, the harder it will be. Imaging can take great effort. I have only six imagers. If the Bovarians have scores of barges loaded with explosives that are all coming at the same time…” Quaeryt shrugged. “I suppose it’s like a very good battalion. That battalion will likely prevail against one or two or three less able battalions. It’s unlikely to prevail against three regiments.”

  The marshal frowned.

  “That makes sense to me,” replied Bhayar. “I don’t like the idea that some may still strike the bridge, but anything that reduces the chance of damage will be helpful. Where would you place your imagers?”

  “Most likely up here, sir. But I don’t know where the channel runs, sir. I’d not wish to commit definitely until I know.”

  “Barges don’t have enough draft for it to matter,” said Deucalon. “There aren’t any shallows in the Narrows.”

  “That’s true, but the current runs faster in the main channel.” Quaeryt understood Deucalon’s point, but from the marshal’s first words, the senior officer had annoyed him. “That affects how much time an imager has, and the main target will be the center pylon.”

  “You think so, Subcommander?”

  “If they can bring down the center pylon, that will make repair the most time-consuming and difficult. It will also allow them to sail past and make it most difficult for you to stop barges carrying troops or goods in the future.”

  Before Deucalon could speak, Bhayar did. “The subcommander spent considerable time at sea, Marshal. He knows vessels as well as imagers and other scholarly matters.”

  “Major Ghesal knows the channel. I’ll have him brief you.” Deucalon was not quite dismissive. He turned and gestured to an undercaptain. “Summon Major Ghesal.”

  Quaeryt said quickly, “What I don’t know is how they will detonate the powder at the right time. Would the crew just light fuses, and dive overboard, with the tiller roped in place?”