by David Weber
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.”
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?”
“Didn’t say that.” Chan Jethos closed his eyes, concentrating on his Talent. “Good news is there’s only one of ’em so far. Might be the others’ll take the hint.”
“Maybe.”
Chan Gyulair had his own eyes closed as he squeezed the rear trigger, transforming the one in front of it into a hair trigger that could be touched off almost with a thought. He ignored the bulky, powerful telescopic sight mounted atop his rifle. In fact, he hadn’t even opened the protective lens caps. There were times he needed that sight, because his was a very special Talent. He was a Predictive Distance Viewer. His range was too short to be useful for the artillery, where ranges of up to fifteen or even twenty miles might be required, but it was more than long enough for other purposes, and the Army aggressively recruited men like him for its snipers. He had to know where to Look, which was why he was normally paired with chan Jethos, whose Plotting Talent located his targets for him. Without that sort of spotter, he had to search for them the old-fashioned way, using his eyes first and his Talent second, which explained the sight.
But today, he did know where to Look, and as he Watched Gordymair Galvara racing towards the hummers, he recognized the exact moment when he’d be in exactly the right spot.
Of course, it wasn’t enough to simply know where the target was. No Talent could provide the breath control, the steadiness, the ability to gauge the range and put a bullet precisely where it needed to be precisely when it needed to be there. That took years of training and constant practice, but Fozak chan Gyulair had invested those years in mastering his trade.
* * *
The 320-grain bullet was still traveling at almost nine hundred feet per second when it struck Lance Galvara directly above his right eye like a five hundred and seventy-pound hammer.
Chapter Forty
March 23
“Your boys have done one hell of a job, Renyl,” Arlos chan Geraith said, exchanging a forearm clasp like hammered steel with Brigade-Captain Renyl chan Quay. “I knew I was asking a lot of you, and you’ve done all of it and more. Especially chan Malthyn and young chan Mahsdyr.”
“They have done the Brigade proud, haven’t they, Sir?” Renyl chan Quay was almost a foot taller than chan Geraith, with hazel eyes and the dark hair of his Teramandorian birth, and white teeth flashed against his dark complexion as he smiled broadly, pleased with the division-captain’s well-deserved praise.
“They’ve done the whole damned Army proud,” the division-captain corrected. “There were so many things that could’ve gone wrong with this march that I couldn’t even begin to count them. I’d say probably at least a third of them did go wrong, for that matter. But the entire corps pulled my arse out of every hole we almost fell into, and your brigade’s done more of that than anyone except—possibly—chan Hurmahl and the other engineers.”
Chan Quay nodded, his smile fading into a more sober expression, because chan Geraith had a point.
Breakdowns had accelerated at an alarming rate over the last couple of weeks. Third Corps was down almost half of the Bisons which had been assigned to it at the beginning of its epic march. Some of those had been made up out of additional Bisons sent down-chain as replacements, but the corps remained thirty percent short of its theoretical establishment and the Steel Mules and steam drays couldn’t compensate for the missing Bisons’ massive hauling capacity. It was like using switching engines in place of one of the TTE’s Paladins, and it was beginning to bite their logistics badly.
Despite that, there’d been enough redundancy—barely—in chan Geraith’s original planning to compensate for their losses. So far, at least.
“I’ve been following all your Voice reports,” chan Geraith continued, “but it’s not the same as a face-to-face briefing.”
Chan Quay nodded again, his expression neutral. Unlike chan Geraith, the brigade-captain was a Voice, although his range was only a few hundred yards. Had chan Geraith been equally Talented, the two of them could have conferred directly through their staff Voices, despite the distance between them, a point he had no intention of making. The division-captain needed no Talent to read his non-expression, however, and snorted dryly.
“Wasn’t the first time I’ve regretted being deaf as a post when it comes to Hearing reports, Renyl. Won’t be the last, either…I hope. So why don’t you just step over to my office and my maps.”
“Yes, Sir,” chan Quay said respectfully and followed chan Geraith back to the division-captain’s HQ Steel Mule.
Unlike the icy winter in Nairsom, the weather here, about midway between what should have been the towns of Carotal and Simaryn, was clear, dry, and much, much warmer. The early afternoon temperature hovered in the mid-fifties, though chan Geraith’s staff Weather Hound predicted it would drop well below freezing overnight. At the moment, however, it seemed almost balmy to the division-captain, and the windows in the shell covering the Mule’s cargo bed were open to let in the brisk southeasterly breeze.
That breeze ruffled the corners of the map paperweighted down on chan Geraith’s desk as he and chan Quay bent over it.
“We’re here,” the division-captain said, tapping a point roughly two hundred miles west of Chindar and a thousand miles east of the New Uromath portal. The long line of the Sand Rock River, snaking from northwest to southeast, lay a hundred and thirty miles to the south, and the terrain offered firm, relatively easy going for their vehicles as they rolled along, throwing up a vast plume of dust—which he hoped to every Arpathian hell there were no Arcanan eyes to see—from the dry soil.
“Yes, Sir,” chan Quay acknowledged. “As of twelve hours ago, Regiment-Captain chan Malthyn had the rest of Second Battalion here at High Rock City, a couple of hundred miles behind chan Mahsdyr’s Gold Company,” he touched a spot just over two hundred miles northwest of their current location. “Chan Grosvar’s been holding First Battalion here, about ten miles west of us, at Broken Shoe Butte, for the last couple of days.” He tapped another spot. “He’ll be moving up to join Second Battalion tomorrow morning. He’s been waiting for that load of engineering supplies Battalion-Captain chan Hurmahl needs. Assuming nothing untoward happens, he should reach chan Mahsdyr day after tomorrow.”
Chan Geraith nodded slowly, leaning forward to take his weight on his arms, his palms spread on the map while he considered the positions of the rest of his division. The 9th Dragoon Regiment had closed up with Teresco chan Urlman’s 16th Dragoons five days ago, and the 23rd would overtake the main body within another seventy-two hours. At that point, two of his three brigades would be concentrated in a single fighting force, ready to hand.
That was good, but the erosion of his Bison strength meant that Brigade-Captain chan Sharys’ 3rd Brigade had actually lost ground. As of the latest Voice report, his lead regiment remained almost two hundred miles short of the Nairsom-Thermyn portal, waiting out a bitter late-spring blizzard. The Weather Hounds predicted that would take at least three days, and even after the weather cleared, he’d make slower going than the rest of 2nd Brigade, thanks to the newly fallen snow and—even more—to his relative shortage of transport.
Well, two brigades ought to be enough to be going on with, he told himself.
And look on the bright side. If we hit a snag getting across Coyote Canyon there’ll be plenty of time for him to catch up with us. Hells, there’ll be time for chan Bykahlar’s infantry to catch up with us!
“Chan Malthyn’s left Battalion-Captain chan Hyul at High Rock City to mind the store while he moved up to Battalion-Captain chan Yahndar’s command group,” chan Quay continued, “and chan Yahndar still has chan Mahsdyr’s Gold Company out in front. According to chan Malthyn’s last Voice message, Gold Company’s actually on the rim of Coyote Canyon now.”
“Ah?” Chan Geraith looked up. “When did that come in?”
“About fifteen minutes ago, Sir.” Chan Quay grinned. “I thought I’d just save that news to give it to you personally.”
“It’s a little late for a Midwinter gift, but I’ll take it,” chan Geraith replied with an answering grin. 3rd Brigade might have been delayed, but chan Malthyn was thirty-six hours ahead of schedule. “Any sign the Arcanans’ve been poking around the bridging site?”
“None, Sir.” Chan Quay shook his head.
“Good,” chan Geraith said. “Good.”
Of course, dragons flying overhead wouldn’t leave any convenient tracks for chan Mahsdyr’s men to spot, but if the Arcanans had noticed the preparation work TTE’s advanced construction parties had done they would almost certainly have landed to inspect it in person. Or that was what Sharonians would have done, anyway. Gods only knew what sort of “magic” Arcanans might use to carry out detailed reconnaissance!