.X.

Thesmar-Cheryk High Road, The South March, Republic of Siddarmark

“What do those idiots think they’re doing?” Sir Zhadwail Brynygair muttered irritably. “Besides being a pain in the arse, that is.”

The scout made no reply, possibly because he recognized a rhetorical question when he heard it, but more probably because of Brynygair’s tone. Sir Zhadwail had a well-deserved reputation for bellicosity which did not limit itself solely to the battlefield.

The colonel glanced at his executive officer. At thirty-five, Major Ahrnahld Suvyryv was twelve years younger than Brynygair, and unlike the colonel, he was of commoner stock, the son of a wealthy Gorath merchant. He had a sharp brain and a good eye for terrain, however, and despite a certain initial disparagement of his plebeian birth, Brynygair had learned to rely on his judgment. They’d even become friends … after a fashion, at any rate. And the ferocity of young Suvyryv’s devotion to Mother Church made up for quite a lot in the colonel’s book.

“What do you think they’re doing, Major?” he growled.

“I don’t know, Sir,” Suvyryv replied with the frankness which was one of his great virtues in Brynygair’s opinion. And one, unfortunately, shared by altogether too few other cavalry officers he could have named.

“From what the sergeant here has to say, it’s a fairly good position as far as flank security’s concerned,” the major continued. He scowled. “The maps are even worse than usual once you get off the high road or away from the river, but from the looks of this”—he waved the sketch the scout had brought back with him—“we’d break the legs of every horse in the regiment trying to get through that ravine on the east. We won’t get formed infantry through there, either—it looks like some of the rocks in it are bigger than damned houses! But no more than a single regiment of pikes? Standing around in the middle of nowhere all by itself? On a crest line where even a blind man, much less one of our scouts, is bound to see it?” He shook his head. “Beats the Shan-wei out of me, Sir!”

“Could you make out uniforms, Sergeant?” Brynygair asked.

“No, Sir Zhadwail,” the scout replied. “Didn’t look like they were wearing any, to be honest. I didn’t see any breastplates, though.”

Brynygair and Suvyryv exchanged glances. Regulars wore breastplates; if the sergeant hadn’t seen any, the lunatics standing out in the open had to be militia. Of course, any surviving militia in the South March had been through a brutal period of polishing, and Siddarmarkian militia had been far better than their Dohlaran counterparts to begin with. And then there was the fact that these militia, according to the scout, had a light company armed entirely with muskets. That was an unusual and unhappy circumstance.

“All right, Sergeant.” Brynygair nodded brusquely. “A good job. Find the Sergeant Major and keep yourself handy in case we have any more questions.”

“Yes, Sir!”

The sergeant slapped his breastplate, turned his horse, and trotted off towards the regiment’s color party. Brynygair watched him go, then turned back to Suvyryv with a scowl.

“I don’t like those damned muskets,” he growled. “Not when we can’t get at them in a charge without hitting the pikes.”

“Bring up the artillery, Sir?” Suvyryv asked, and Brynygair’s scowl deepened.

“That would take hours. We’re too far out in front.”

Suvyryv nodded. Sir Ohtys Godwyl, Baron Traylmyn, commanding the column which had taken the ruins of the town of Cheryk three days ago, was the very point of the Dohlaran spear at the moment. General Rychtyr had taken two more cavalry regiments, two of the vanguard’s infantry regiments, and all of the vanguard’s horse artillery north after Colonel Byrgair to make sure of the destruction of the Fort Sheldyn garrison. From the dispatches they’d received, it had been far more firepower than could possibly have been needed, but no one had known that at the time. And by the time Byrgair’s message detailing the total obliteration of his target had reached Rychtyr, the general had been so far along the miserable cow paths he’d been following that it made more sense for him to continue to the high road, then march south along it to rejoin Baron Traylmyn.

Unfortunately, that meant ten percent of the vanguard’s cavalry and twenty percent of its infantry wouldn’t reach Cheryk for at least another two days. And it also meant the only artillery available to Baron Traylmyn was foot artillery, most of it drawn by dragons, who had a lively distaste for the sounds of artillery and musketry, rather than by horses. Worse, the nearest batteries, from Major Shanyn’s regiment, were at least an hour and more probably two from Brynygair’s current position. And that was a great pity, given what the far lighter horses guns Byrgair had taken with him had apparently done to the Siddarmarkian regulars he’d faced.

“Beggars can’t be choosers,” the colonel said after a moment’s intense thought. “We’d play hell trying to pass guns through the column in this terrain, anyway.” He waved one hand at the fifteen- or twenty-mile-deep belt of second-growth trees through which the road ran at the moment. “On the other hand, according to the Sergeant, the idiots in that clearing are over two thousand yards back from where the road comes out of the trees.” He shook his head in disgust. “They’ve given us two thousand yards of depth and at least a four- or five-thousand-yard frontage between the ravine and where the trees close back in to the east.”

He stared at the scout’s sketch for a moment, as if disgusted to see even an enemy choose such a foolish position. Even spread out the way the sergeant had reported, the Siddarmarkians could cover no more than about two hundred yards, barely a tenth of the frontage available to deploy against them. And with the woods squeezing in on the high road less than two thousand more yards behind them, they’d be in a virtual sack if they tried to retreat. Small as their force was, it would clog that narrow slot of a road solid. In the face of a determined mounted pursuit, they were looking at a massacre.

“All right,” he said, still gazing at the sketch map and thinking aloud. “We’ve got room for it, so we bring up Barwail’s and Tohmpsyn’s infantry and form them on both sides of the roadbed. Then we put our regiment on the east flank and Tahlmydg’s on the west. And let’s go ahead and close up Zherdain’s and Klymynt’s cavalry behind us. See if we can get another infantry regiment and at least a couple of batteries of twelve-pounders moved up, too. If they want to stand and fight outnumbered five to one in rifles and muskets, that’s fine with me. If they decide to turn and run—which is what they’ll probably do once they realize we’re serious—we’ve got the cavalry to ride them down from behind, and I want enough weight behind us to keep right on hammering them once they break. I don’t want them pulling themselves back together and actually finding a smart place to bog us down in these woods closer to Thesmar.”

Suvyryv narrowed his eyes, considering what the colonel had said, then nodded.

“Might be a bit of using a sledgehammer to crack a slabnut, Sir, but that’s fine with me.” He grinned. “And, frankly, the thought of hitting them from behind after they break is a lot more appealing than charging pikes head-on!”

Brynygair snorted, trying to imagine one of his more nobly born company commanders saying anything of the sort. The fact that he couldn’t was one reason he’d come to value Suvyryv so highly.

“All right, then,” he said. “Let’s get moving. Oh, and be sure to send a dispatch back to General Traylmyn!”

*   *   *

The line of pikemen blocking the high road where it crossed the east-west ridgeline looked even more ragged than Brynygair had anticipated from the scout’s report. The pikes were still in their vertical, marching positions, which made the irregularity of their ranks even more evident, and he wondered what was going through that motley formation’s minds as it watched his own efficiently trained infantry filing out of the woods and spreading across the road to face it.

The new Dohlaran infantry regiments consisted of six companies, each of two hundred and thirty men. They still didn’t have anywhere near the number of rifles they would have preferred, and until they’d had a chance to actually test the proposition in battle, no one had been willing to rely solely on the ability of bayoneted rifles to hold cavalry at bay, anyway. So each regiment contained one company of pikemen and five companies of riflemen or musketeers. The majority of the regiments—and both Sir Sahlmyn Tohmpsyn’s and Haarahld Barwail’s in particular—had three companies armed with the new rifles, but the other two non-pike companies carried old-fashioned matchlocks. Those matchlocks weren’t going to be effective at anywhere near the range rifles were, they fired far more slowly, and they needed almost twice as much frontage per man as flintlocks, since no one wanted to get too close to the other fellow’s lit match while he was loading his own weapon. But at least he wasn’t dealing with the handful of regiments where the proportions of rifles and matchlocks were reversed.

He saw a shiver go through those raised pikes as his infantry deployed into the clearing. Despite the ravine to the east and the trees to the west, the slope up to the Siddarmarkian position was clear of any real obstacle—good terrain for cavalry, and equally good for an infantry advance. Grass rose high enough to drag at their stirrups, but it was sparse enough, clustered in knots and patches, for his troopers and their mounts to be confident no hidden obstacles were going to break any legs or scatter his formation.

His own pikes stayed to the rear, prepared to form a reserve position the other infantry companies could retreat on if it turned out that by some miracle there was actually cavalry somewhere behind that crest line. The rifle companies formed a three-deep line across the high road in the knee-and waist-high grass, a thousand yards short of the Siddarmarkian position, with the matchlocks behind them in a fourth line, and his cavalry formed a solid block at either end of the infantry, anchoring its line and poised to sweep forward if the Siddarmarkians broke.

There were even fewer pikemen than he’d thought there were, he realized as he raised his spyglass and considered the mass of ragged, obviously nervous farmers along the crest line. A Siddarmarkian regiment normally consisted of eighteen hundred pikes and four hundred and fifty arbalesters or musketeers, but he’d be astonished if there were actually as many as a thousand men in that line. He couldn’t blame the scouts for their misestimate, given the way those raised pikes and extended formation confused the eye, but he wished he’d realized how weak they actually were. He probably could have driven them into headlong retreat with no more than a cavalry regiment or two, and saved the hour and a half he’d spent organizing this more elaborate attack.

Well, Suvyryv had a point, he told himself. Better to find out you’re using a sledgehammer to crack a slabnut than find out the hard way that the slabnut was actually a shellhorn pretending to be a slabnut until you walked into the stinger.

He grimaced sourly, remembering the time a far younger Zhadwail Brynygair had reached out to pick a slabnut only to discover it was one of the venomous insects, folded up inside its segmented shell. His hand had swelled to almost twice its normal size after that episode, and it had been days before the nausea fully passed. In this case, though, it not only looked like a slabnut, it was a slabnut.

And it was time to crack that shell.

“Sound advance,” he said, and the bugle notes rose clear and clean from his color party. Nothing happened for a moment, and then the infantry line started forward through the grass at a measured seventy-five paces per minute with the cavalry advancing steadily on either flank.

For one minute, then two, there was no motion out of the Siddarmarkians at all. The pikes didn’t even come down into fighting position. Then a fresh, more violent shiver ran through those upright weapons, and Brynygair’s eyes widened in surprise as that entire, ragged line simply disintegrated. They didn’t even try to take their pikes with them; they simply dropped them, turned, and bolted back across the crest line in a formless, panic-stricken mob.

For a moment, even though he’d anticipated that they’d probably break, the sheer suddenness and totality of the rout was more than he could process. Then he grinned savagely.

“Sound the charge!” he snapped, and the bugle notes rose, strident and insistent as the cavalry moved from the walk up to the trot.

The grass made things more awkward, and it took longer than usual for the horses to begin building speed. By the time they were halfway up the slope, though, they were up to a maneuvering gallop, the horses devouring over three hundred yards every minute. It took a total of just over five minutes to cover the total distance to the crest of the ridge, and they went over it in a compact, deadly bristle of lowered lances.

The universe blew apart around them.

The “routed, panic-stricken” Siddarmarkians who’d actually been Imperial Charisian Navy seamen in borrowed farmers’ smocks stood up in the waist-deep trenches to either side of the high road at the bottom of the reverse slope. The spoil from the trenches had been thrown up on the northern side, forming a parapet that covered them to the shoulder, and the breech-loading Mahndrayns they’d left in the trench were leveled across the parapet.

So were the Mahndrayns of the other fifteen hundred seamen who’d been waiting for them.

Brynygair’s stomach clenched as he saw the barrier in front of his men. It didn’t have time to register—not really, not with his cavalry racing down the slope towards it—and even if there’d been more time, he couldn’t wrap his mind around that many firearms. Not the matchlocks he’d expected, but bayoneted rifles in the hands of steady, unshaken, entrenched infantry. Infantry who were seamen of the Imperial Charisian Navy … and who had a score to settle with the kingdom which had surrendered over four hundred of their fellows to the Inquisition’s butchery.

There was no mercy behind those rifles, and the surprise was total, with far too little time for anyone to even think about stopping that headlong charge.

Twenty-five hundred rifles fired almost as one against a mere nine hundred cavalry. The astonishing thing was that almost three hundred of that cavalry survived the crashing volley.

Sir Zhadwail Brynygair was among the survivors. He found himself on the ground, half-stunned by the impact, only vaguely aware he’d managed to kick free of the stirrups when his horse went down. His right shoulder felt as if he’d been shot as well, but it was “only” broken, and he shoved himself to his knees with his good arm.

The afternoon was a bedlam of screaming men and shrieking horses, and a solid wall of smoke rose above the entrenchments in front of him. Some of the horses who hadn’t been hit had gone down, breaking legs, spilling their riders, as they crashed into other horses who’d been killed or wounded. But horses were bigger targets than men; they’d absorbed a much higher percentage of the Charisian bullets, and he saw other troopers pushing themselves back to their feet. Some of them drew pistols from their saddle holsters to shoot screaming horses, others reached for dropped lances or drew their swords, but some just stood there, looking around, dazed by the sudden, total shock of surprise. Perhaps a hundred of his men were still mounted, but their horses had stopped dead, blocked by the barricade of dead and wounded men and animals. At least twenty or thirty others had turned and bolted back the way they’d come, and Brynygair didn’t blame them. It was time to—

The second volley crashed on the heels of the first, equally large and impossibly quickly, and a half-inch rifle bullet slammed through Sir Zhadwail Brynygair’s breastplate like the sledgehammer he’d thought he was about to apply to a slabnut.

*   *   *

The Earl of Hanth raised the short, handy (and fiendishly expensive) double-spyglass—“binoculars” the Royal College called them—and his mouth was a grim line of satisfaction. He’d hoped he might entice either more cavalry or a couple more infantry regiments to come across the crest, but he’d settle for what he’d gotten. Especially since his trap was only beginning to close.

Bugles sounded, and the seamen of his naval “battalions” climbed out of their earthworks, formed into a skirmish line, and headed back towards the crest they’d “abandoned in panic.” From Hanth’s position in the trees west of them, he could see along the front slope of the ridge. Not all the way, but far enough to know the Dohlaran infantry had halted in consternation at the sudden roar of rifle fire and the tumultuous retreat of the handful of surviving horsemen.

More rifle fire crackled suddenly—this time from behind them, from the thousand Marines he’d hidden in the woods on either side of the high road. Those Marines had camouflaged their positions with care, but it hadn’t really mattered. The Dohlaran scouts had been cavalry troopers, not infantry, and it had never occurred to them to search the woods, especially after they’d spotted the “Siddarmarkians” formed up along the crest with the pikes Breygart had borrowed from General Fyguera precisely so that they could be abandoned at the critical moment. Now those Marines, responding to the seamen’s fire and scattered through the woods that were effectively impassable for cavalry, opened fire in turn, using trees, fallen logs, rocks, even folds in the ground for cover. They fired from prone positions, using the Mahndrayn’s breech-loading capability with ruthless efficiency, and panic ripped through the regiments Brynygair had brought up behind his spearhead to exploit his anticipated victory.

The men and horses packed together on the high road and pinned between the encroaching banks of forest, couldn’t even see their attackers. All they saw were muzzle flashes in the deep, green gloom—muzzle flashes everywhere—as a fog bank of gun smoke rolled through the trees. Bullets slammed into them like fists of flame, shattering flesh and bone, sending men, horses—even draft dragons—down in sodden death or screaming agony. The carnage, coupled with the sheer astonishment of the totally unexpected attack, was too much. They turned to flee back the way they’d come, but they were packed too tightly. The rifle fire continued to rip into them mercilessly, and the press of bodies turned them into a motionless mass that couldn’t escape.

A wounded seven-ton dragon shrieked in pain and fury. It heaved up on its four rearmost limbs, its front limbs hammering at everyone around it. Then it turned, heading north, and unlike infantrymen or a mere horse, it had the size and strength of Juggernaut. It trampled men and horses alike underfoot, raging back up the high road, the limbered field gun behind it crushing bone and flesh under iron-rimmed wheels.

And even as the butchery exploded in the woods, Hanth’s seamen came back across the crest line.

Colonel Tohmpsyn and Colonel Barwail had managed to hold their men together, and their front ranks had knelt, bringing their rifles to bear on the crest of the ridge while the rank behind them leveled their weapons over their heads. They were shaken, touched with more than an edge of panic, but they were also disciplined, well-trained men whose officers had earned their trust. They knew what their rifles could do, and they waited for the order to fire.

But Hanth had anticipated that, and when his “infantry” reached the crest, the seamen went across it on their bellies, prone, exposing only their heads and shoulders and scattered along the full width of the ridge. The deep grass screened even the small targets they presented, making them all but invisible, and they opened fire from that position, without ever rising even to their knees.

The bullets slammed into the tightly formed infantry who stood fully exposed to their attack. They didn’t fire in volleys; they fired as individuals, picking their own targets as rapidly as they could find them, using the doctrine Sir Kynt Clareyk had devised around the new breech-loading rifles. The Dohlarans could hardly even see their enemies, and they were packed together in the classic, close-order formation of musketeers, not the dispersal of riflemen, so dense any Charisian who missed his intended victim was almost certain to hit another one. There was no comparison between the targets the adversaries presented to one another.

Nor was there any comparison between the rates of fire they could maintain. The Dohlarans were well trained, able to load and fire their flintlock rifles in as little as fifteen seconds. But they had to stand upright to do that, and the Charisians who outnumbered them three to two could fire once every five seconds … from a prone position.

It was a massacre. That storm of fire was more than the most disciplined men imaginable, even men who knew they fought for God Himself, could endure. Blood, screams, and the Shan-wei reek of gun smoke enveloped them, and it was more than they could stand. They fired a single volley, and then chaos, confusion, and death marched through them in iron boots.

Less than a quarter of them lived long enough to run.

*   *   *

The holocaust Earl Hanth supposed would probably be called the Battle of Thesmar lasted twenty minutes. It took less than five to shatter the Dohlaran attack; the other fifteen minutes were an unmitigated slaughter as his Marines poured fire into the column trapped on the high road. His own losses were less than forty men.

Well, he thought harshly, looking out over the writhing, moaning, sobbing carpet of wounded and dying Dohlarans, you bastards know the cakewalk’s over now, don’t you? He bared his teeth. Now let’s just see if we can’t encourage you to turn around and go home while you’re still more or less in one piece.