The Road to Hell # Hell's Gate 3

by Weber, David

  All the Distance Viewers attached to Gold Company agreed that both the Arcanans in the ruins of Fort Rensar and those in the far more substantial—and comfortable—permanent bivouac in the valley of the Graystone River showed absolutely no awareness that there were any Sharonians in their vicinity. It was remotely possible they knew all about Gold Company and were setting some sort of subtle trap based on yet another unknown magical ability, but it seemed unlikely. This was one of the times when chan Mahsdyr passionately wished that he had at least a touch of the Distance Viewer Talent himself and could have avoided the need to rely on the reports of the observations of others.

  Isn’t any different from relying on any other report from a forward scout, Grithair, he told himself firmly. Just keep remembering that.

  And, if the Distance Viewers were correct about that element of surprise, it meant Gold Company and the rest of 2nd Battalion had gotten all the way to the very doorstep of Thermyn without any Arcanan seeing a thing.

  Of course, that just puts even more pressure on us to make sure the bastards behind them stay equally fat, dumb, and ignorant. It’s still thirteen hundred miles to Fort Ghartoun, even after we’re through the portal. Plenty of time for them to arrange something nasty if we fuck up at this point!

  At least the terrain favored them. The only really tricky bit was getting past the miserable, cold squad or two of Arcanans who’d staked out the ruins of the fort. The dry riverbed below the portal provided quite a lot of cover for men as well trained at wringing every possible advantage out of any terrain feature as those of the 3rd Dragoons. Its depth gave excellent cover against anyone at the level of the riverbank, at least until they were most of the way across. Better yet, the angled portal itself created a huge blind spot. If he’d been in charge of picketing it, he’d have had positions for two or three section-sized outposts stretched across each aspect, but especially on the southern side, where the river had disappeared into Thermyn. That would have given him an excellent chance of spotting anyone trying to sneak across the river towards him.

  But the Arcanans hadn’t done that. Fort Rensar had been designed as an administrative node, not a serious defensive work, and while it had an excellent view of the portion of the Tyrahl River which still had water in it, its view of the empty bed beyond the portal was badly restricted by the portal itself. By moving a mile or so downstream, chan Mahsdyr’s men had been able to cross the channel without anyone at the fort seeing a thing. Worse—or, actually, better from his perspective—it was obvious the idiot who’d picked the location for their main encampment hadn’t thought about the fact his forward pickets had such an enormous blind spot. If there’d been one approach route chan Mahsdyr would have worried about, it was the empty riverbed, not the one that was still full of icy cold, rushing water, yet the southwesternmost edge of the portal completely concealed it from anyone in the Graystone’s valley just as completely as from Fort Rensar. They literally couldn’t see anything coming around the portal’s eastern aspect. Why in Chindarsu’s name they hadn’t pulled their encampment all the way back to the Thermyn side of the portal if they weren’t going to picket this side adequately was more than chan Mahsdyr was prepared to guess.

  He wasn’t about to complain, however. His maps were both detailed and highly accurate, updated by the TTE’s surveyors to account for any discrepancies between the purely local geography of Nairsom and that of Sharona. With that advantage, it hadn’t been difficult to pick his approach route to the spot he wanted. He imagined his men—especially those of the mortar platoon—were inventing imaginative curses for him at the moment as they struggled across the rugged terrain, but he was fine with that. And they’d be fine with it, too, if they managed to get into position without being spotted.

  “Well, Doc, I guess it’s time we were heading out, too.”

  * * *

  Commander of Fifty Gilthar Vurth closed the door of 2nd Platoon’s mess hall chansyu hut and stood on the front step, idly picking his teeth with a toothpick. It was getting on towards evening—days were short this early in the year and this far north—and the cooks were about ready to start serving dinner. As Thimanus Gorzalt’s senior platoon commander and acting executive officer, it was one of Vurth’s self-appointed duties to sample each meal and make certain it was worthy of the Union of Arcana’s fighting men.

  It wasn’t like he had anything else to do out here in the middle of absolutely nowhere.

  He grimaced at the thought and wondered once again what god or demon he’d offended to end up under Gorzalt’s command. Of course, the 451st Regiment was a far cry from one of the Army’s elite units, like the 2nd Andaran Scouts. No doubt there was some sort of seismic settling process which inexorably moved less than scintillating officers into its ranks and away from those more elite units. The only problem with that theory was that while it explained how Gorzalt had ended up in the 451st, it didn’t explain what Vurth was doing here.

  Or I hope to hells it doesn’t, anyway, he reflected.

  He shrugged and turned toward the barren, unkempt “parade ground” Gorzalt had insisted on laying out between the mess hall and his HQ hut. It hadn’t gotten a lot of use since Thousand Carthos pulled back to rejoin the main expeditionary force in Traisum. Vurth tried to make sure all the men were inspected at least weekly and got at least some time on the firing range every week. It shouldn’t have been difficult, but Gorzalt seemed to have withdrawn into a sulk when he realized who was being left behind to picket the portal, and the rest of C Company appeared to have caught the malaise from its CO. Well, aside from Zakar Ustmyn, at least, and look what Ustmyn’s attitude had gotten him!

  Vurth shook his head in disgust—disgust directed almost as much at himself as at Gorzalt—and started across the “parade ground” as the shadows cast by the high ground to the northwest began to creep over it.

  * * *

  “Platoon-Captain chan Urhal’s in position, Sir.”

  Grithair chan Mahsdyr took the hastily scribbled note from Armsman 1/c chan Tylwyr, his company Flicker, and managed—somehow—not to say “At last!” It would have been unprofessional, unfair to Jersalma chan Urhal’s 3rd Platoon, and a case of blaming the wrong person, anyway. He’d been right about the way the terrain would cover his approach, but he’d made insufficient allowance for how it would slow that approach. For the last hour or so, he’d been afraid he was going to lose the light before all of his men were in place. That would have left him with the choice of mounting a night attack or waiting in position—without cover and without bedrolls—until dawn. Neither was a palatable alternative, although he was pretty sure he’d have gone with the first if it came to it. Surprise and darkness should let them sweep up the entire Arcanan encampment, but that same darkness would make it much easier for someone to get away with word of Gold Company’s presence.

  Now, fortunately, he wouldn’t have to. He still had at least forty-five minutes, more likely an hour and a half. That should be plenty of time.

  “All right, Shodan,” he told chan Tylwyr. “It’s time. Pass the word.”

  “Yes, Sir!”

  The Flicker gave him a quick, broad smile, and then concentrated on the neat row of metal message tubes laid out in front of him. They vanished in rapid, silent succession, as quickly as a Faraika spat out bullets, and chan Mahsdyr raised his field glasses and looked down from the ridgeline.

  He stood barely eight hundred yards from the center of the Arcanan outpost, looking down from the top of a five hundred-foot hill. The Graystone’s valley widened at this point, so its farther side was almost fourteen hundred yards from his present position. That was farther than he really liked, but the contour lines were also much steeper and he’d gotten chan Urhal’s platoon down onto the valley floor itself. That was one reason this had taken so long; 3rd Platoon had been forced to swing substantially wider than the rest of his attack force. That was the bad news. The good news was that chan Urhal had managed to use the Graystone’s bed to infiltrate t
o within little more than three hundred yards of the encampment without being spotted.

  Now, as chan Tylwyr’s Flicked message tubes reached their destinations, half a dozen mortars opened fire.

  * * *

  Gilthar Vurth was halfway across Thimanus Gorzalt’s parade ground when the first mortar bomb landed.

  The two support platoons assigned to Gold Company were equipped with light, three-inch mortars, not the much heavier four-and-a-half-inch weapons of a heavy mortar company, and chan Mahsdyr had brought only one platoon across the riverbed. The three-inch projectiles weighed less than a third as much as those of their bigger brethren and, at four thousand yards, they had only two thirds the range. But they had ample reach for the task in hand, and their seven-pound bombs came sliding down the frigid air with the sound of whispering silk.

  Vurth just had time to register the mortars’ muted coughs. It wasn’t much to hear, really, because they were emplaced in the dead ground behind the hill upon which chan Mahsdyr had taken up his position. The fifty’s head came up, turning as he tried to determine the peculiar sounds’ direction. Unfortunately for him, he’d never heard mortar fire before. He had no idea what he’d heard, and the incoming fire arrived long before he could figure it out.

  He’d never heard mortars firing before, and he’d never hear them again, either. One of the plunging bombs landed barely fifteen feet from him and the blast hurled his broken, bleeding body back into the front wall of the mess hall. He oozed down it in a broad, crimson streak of blood, his eyes already settling into the dull, fixed stare of death.

  * * *

  Commander of One Hundred Thimanus Gorzalt jerked upright in his chair as the explosions thundered. He sprang to his feet, eyes wide, expression incredulous, and wheeled toward the single window in the chansyu hut’s southern wall.

  He got there just as another mortar bomb impacted on the hut’s roof almost directly above him.

  * * *

  Sword Trymayn Ilkathym heard a voice bellowing orders, fighting to bring some sort of order out of the sudden, terrifying chaos. It took him a moment to realize the voice belonged to him…and that he didn’t hear a single one of C Company’s officers. He knew he wouldn’t hear Gilthar Vurth’s. He’d been waiting for the fifty on the far side of the parade ground when the first Sharonian fire exploded like Shartahk’s own thunderbolts. He’d seen his fifty blown backwards, seen him smash into the mess hall’s wall and ooze down it, and he’d seen more than enough dead men to recognize one more.

  Then he heard something no Arcanan had ever heard before. He heard the high, fiercely snarling wolf’s howl of ancient Ternathia and the wild music of the war pipes of the mountains of Delkrathia. The Imperial Ternathian Army had adopted those pipes more than two millennia ago, and their savage voice had played Ternathia’s soldiers to victory on more battlefields than even the best military historian could have counted.

  And then the Faraika machine guns which had been wrestled forward opened fire from the ridgeline on which Grithair chan Mahsdyr stood watching.

  “Move, gods damn you! Move!” Ilkathym’s sword was in his hand, somehow, and he jabbed it at the steep valley side from which that spreading thundered came. “Get your weapons and fucking follow me!”

  Perhaps a half-dozen voices answered, and he snarled. He already knew how this was going to end, but he’d been a soldier for seventeen years. That was more than half his entire life, and here at the end, he discovered that he didn’t know how to be anything else.

  “Follow me, boys!” he screamed and charged across the valley.

  He got fifty yards before a .40 caliber bullet hit him squarely at the base of his throat.

  * * *

  “Mother Jambakol!”

  Kilvyn Forstmir whirled towards the sudden sound of explosions and gunfire, his face gaunt with shock in the afternoon light pouring through from the far side of the portal. The main encampment was over four miles from Fort Rensar’s charred remains, but sound carried extraordinarily well in the cold, still air. He’d never heard anything like it, and he didn’t really know what he was hearing now, but he knew who had to be behind it.

  How? How in the names of all the gods could Sharonians have gotten this far down-chain from Traisum so quickly? And how could they have done it without anyone spotting them?

  The questions hammered through him, and his jaw tightened as he realized the answer to the last one, at least. They’d gotten into position to attack Hundred Gorzalt’s position because C Company had let them. He’d known—known—Gorzalt hadn’t even tried to properly picket the portal. And instead of trying to do anything about it himself, instead of finding some way to prod his own fifty into doing something about it, he’d sat on his own mental arse and wasted his energy bitching at his officers. It was damned well an officer’s job not to let something like this happen, but when they didn’t step up and do it, someone else had to.

  And he hadn’t.

  “What the hells is all that racket, Sword?”

  He turned to see Fifty Ustmyn bursting out of his tent, buckling his sword belt as he came.

  “Only one thing it can be, Sir,” he said grimly.

  “But how in Shartahk’s name could Sharonians have gotten all the way down-chain to Nairsom?”

  “Don’t know, Sir.” Forstmir’s tone was flat. “Hells, maybe they do have their own version of dragons! Doesn’t really matter right now though, does it?”

  “You’re right about that,” Ustmyn said after half a breath and squared his shoulders. “If they’re here, they’re twenty-five hundred miles closer to Hell’s Gate than Two Thousand Harshu. And if they got here this quickly—”

  He and his platoon sword looked at one another sickly. To get to this point, the Sharonians had traveled almost eighteen thousand miles—six thousand of them across the Treybus Ocean in the middle of winter—in no more than four months…and that assumed they’d started instantly. And if they could reach Nairsom that quickly, they could almost certainly beat Two Thousand Harshu to Hell’s Gate and cut his communications behind him.

  “Must’ve missed us somehow, Sir,” Forstmir said quietly. “Either that, or they figure they can tidy us up anytime after they deal with the rest of the Company. But they’ll be coming.”

  “I know.” Ustmyn rubbed his chin, then inhaled sharply. “Get the men turned to, Kilvyn. It probably won’t matter, but we can at least try. And in the meantime, these bastards must not’ve realized we have a hummer cot of our own.”

  “Yes, Sir.”

  “Tell Galvara I need him.”

  “Yes, Sir!”

  Forstmir slapped his breastplate in salute and headed off into the gathering twilight, shouting orders to the shaken men of 2nd Platoon. Ustmyn looked after him for a moment, then sat on one of the fort’s burned timbers, pulled a recording crystal out of his belt pouch, and began dictating his report.

  * * *

  “You wanted me, Sir?”

  Ustmyn looked up as Lance Gordymair Galvara, the leader of the three-man hummer section Hundred Gorzalt had attached to 2nd Platoon, slid to a halt beside him. Gorzalt hadn’t sent his most capable hummer master out to share 2nd Platoon’s misery, but at least Galvara didn’t seem to be panicking.

  Probably lack of imagination, the fifty thought mordantly.

  “Yes, Galvara,” he said out loud and extended the crystal. “Get this transferred and into the air as soon as possible. It’s critical this message get through, so copy it to every hummer you’ve got.”

  “But if we send them all off, Sir, we won’t have any left for additional messages,” Galvara pointed out.

  “No, we won’t,” Ustmyn said almost gently. “On the other hand, I don’t really think we’re going to need them. Do you?”

  Galvara stared at him. Then his eyes widened and he swallowed.

  “No, Sir. Don’t reckon we will,” he said, reaching for the crystal.

  “Which makes it especially important to get this one right.�
�� Ustmyn gripped the lance’s shoulder. “Make sure you do, Gordymair.”

  “Aye, Sir. I’ll do that thing.”

  The lance’s Limathian accent was more pronounced than Ustmyn had ever heard it, but his jaw firmed and he nodded sharply.

  “Good man.” The fifty squeezed his shoulder again. “Now, go get it sent,” he said and turned to follow Forstmir as Galvara ran towards the hummers.

  * * *

  “Oh, laddie, that’s a bad, bad idea,” Wendyr chan Jethos said softly.

  “Can’t blame them for trying,” Fozak chan Gyulair replied and drew a deep breath as he settled even more squarely behind his Mark 12. “And it’s why we’re here.”

  “I know.” Chan Jethos shook his head. “Doesn’t hardly seem fair, though.”

  “And what those bastards did to every Voice between Hell’s Gate and Traisum was fair?”