.II.

Daivyn River, Cliff Peak Province, Republic of Siddarmark

“Crap.”

Once upon a time, Howail Brahdlai would have used a somewhat stronger term. That, however, had been when he had been Howail Brahdlai, apprentice brick mason, and not Corporal Howail Brahdlai, 191st Cavalry Regiment, Army of God. Most of the clergy attached to the army were remarkably tolerant where soldier-style language was concerned. Unfortunately, the 191st’s chaplain wasn’t among them, and he’d been “counseling” Brahdlai ever since the day he’d heard the corporal pointing out the shortcomings of his section in pungent, pithy style.

Personally, Brahdlai thought God and the archangels probably had better things to do than listen in on their servants’ language, but Father Zhames held a different view, and Colonel Mardhar had a tendency to support his chaplain … who’d been his personal chaplain before both of them had joined the Army of God. Brahdlai respected the Colonel, and the Father was a good and godly man, even if he did tend to be what Brahdlai’s mother had always called a “fussbudget,” so the corporal was genuinely trying to amend his language.

“What?” Svynsyn Ahrbukyl asked. He was the senior trooper in Brahdlai’s scouting detail—a good, solid man, like all of them.

“WW’s disappeared again,” Brahdlai growled. “Damn it,” he appended a mental apology to Father Zhames, “I told him to stay in sight!”

“Hard not to get out of sight sometimes,” Ahrbukyl pointed out philosophically. He liked Brahdlai, and the corporal was a good leader and hard-working. Like altogether too many of the Army of God’s cavalry, he’d been only an indifferent rider when he was “volunteered” for the cavalry, but he’d buckled down to master that skill the same way he had the rest of his duties. He was a bit prone to fuss and worry, though, in Ahrbukyl’s opinion.

“Sergeant Karstayrs doesn’t see it that way,” Brahdlai pointed out in reply. He liked Ahrbukyl, but the man could be so phlegmatic that sometimes the corporal wanted to choke him. “Do you want to explain to him that it’s ‘hard not to get out of sight sometimes’ after the new asshole he ripped Hyndryk last five-day?”

Perhaps, Ahrbukyl reflected, the corporal wasn’t quite that prone to worry too much, after all.

“Not especially,” he admitted, but he also shrugged. “Still, Corp, it’s WW we’re talking about.”

Brahdlai grunted in sour agreement. Wyltahn Waignair was one of their company’s characters. He was smart, he was always cheerful, and unlike Corporal Howail Brahdlai, he rode as if he were a part of his horse, all of which was fortunate, since he was constantly in trouble for one practical joke or another. He was also the best scout in the entire 191st, and Ahrbukyl was right—one of the things that made him the regiment’s best scout was a tendency to follow his nose wherever it led him. On the other hand.…

“All right, you’ve got a point. But even if it is WW, I don’t want the Sergeant ‘discussing’ my shortcomings with me. So let’s get a move on”—the corporal looked over his shoulder at the other four men of his section—“and catch up with him.”

“Suits me,” Ahrbukyl agreed, and the small group of horsemen moved up to a hard trot along the westbound tow road.

They’d been trotting for about three or four minutes when Brahdlai realized someone had been logging off the slope north of the road. They’d seen plenty of signs of that during their advance out of Westmarch, given how bitter the winter had been and how little coal had come west out of Glacierheart last year. But this was more recent than the fuel-cutting they’d seen earlier—the stumps were still green—and he frowned thoughtfully, wondering who’d been cutting up here. The Daivyn River snaked its way through a line of low hills and steep bluffs here, about a hundred and fifty miles west of Ice Lake, and aside from the abandoned inn they’d passed a few miles back, where the high road from Sangyr crossed the river, there didn’t seem to have been very many people in the area even before the Rising.

He was still scratching at that mental itch when he and his troopers trotted up and over a riverside hill and suddenly saw a cavalry horse standing by the side of the road cropping grass. The gelding’s reins had been tied to a sapling, and its rider, in the same uniform Brahdlai wore, sat facing away from them with his back to a tree, his arms crossed against his chest, and his head down, obviously catching up on his sleep on a pleasant summer afternoon.

Brahdlai drew rein, his eyes widening with too much astonishment for immediate outrage.

The insulation of surprise didn’t last long, and the eyes which had widened narrowed, crackling with a dangerous light. This was a serious business, damn it! The Siddarmarkians this close to the Glacierheart border had almost all embraced the heresy. Rather than greeting the Army of God as liberators, they’d fled before it, like the owners of the inn they’d passed, which meant there were precious few—if any—local guides available. That made scouting parties like this one the eyes and cat lizard whiskers of Bishop Militant Cahnyr’s entire army! Waignair damnned well knew better than to be taking a frigging nap at a time like this!

The corporal swung down from the saddle, his expression thunderous. Father Zhames was just going to have to set him a penance for what he was about to say, he thought as he strode angrily towards the trooper who hadn’t even bothered to wake up at the noise of his arriving companions. Well, he’d just see—

Howail Brahdlai paused in midstride as he rounded the trooper’s position and suddenly saw the bloodstain those folded arms had concealed.

An arbalest bolt protruded from the left side of Waignair’s rib cage, an isolated corner of his brain observed. The rest of his mind was still trying to catch up with what that might mean when a dozen more arbalest bolts came sizzling out of the underbrush.

*   *   *

“Told you it’d work,” Private Zhedryk Lycahn said, watching as the Marines who’d been hiding farther back along the tow road emerged from concealment to make sure none of the cavalry horses got away. He nodded in satisfaction as the last of them eased up just a bit skittishly to one of the Marines and allowed its bridle to be grasped. “Don’t think we should set them all up to be having a tea party, though,” he said then, looking over his shoulder at Corporal Wahlys Hahndail.

“Probably not,” Hahndail agreed dryly.

The corporal had always suspected that Private Lycahn hadn’t always been respectably—or even legally—employed before his enlistment. That hadn’t bothered the corporal much before, but he was beginning to wonder exactly how illegally Lycahn might have earned his living. The private hadn’t simply picked the spot for their ambush; he’d also been the one who dragged their first … customer over and arranged him so artfully to suck in the rest of his patrol. And he’d been remarkably cool about going through the first trooper’s pockets for any potentially useful information.

“I suppose that since we’ve got their horses, we might as well use them to carry the bodies back,” he continued, waving his hand to catch another Marine’s attention. He pointed at the bodies, then waved at the empty saddles, and the Marine nodded back.

“Makes sense to me,” Lycahn replied agreeably. “Can I keep the first one, though?” He showed two missing teeth when he grinned. “Makes fine bait, Wahlys!”

“Yes, Zhedryk,” Hahndail sighed, shaking his head as he watched the other Marines heaving the dead cavalry troopers up across their saddles. “You can keep the first one. Just make damned sure anyone else who stops by to visit with him gets the same treatment this batch did.”

“Oh,” the private said, his voice suddenly much less amused, “you can count on that.”

*   *   *

Private Styv Walkyr, Zion Division, Army of God, sat on the barge’s abbreviated foredeck, his legs hanging over the side, and watched the trio of dragons leaning against their collars. Walkyr was a farm boy, a man who appreciated fine draft animals when he saw them, and two of these—one of them might go as high as eight tons—were clearly well above average. They ought to be, he thought. The Church was used to getting first quality when it bought, and the dragons had come all the way from the Temple Lands—most of the trip by water themselves—and been grain-fed the entire way. It was a scandalously expensive way to feed something the size of a dragon, but he’d long since come to the conclusion that the Church (and her army) didn’t worry about the kind of mark-pinching a farmer had to keep in mind.

And, he thought grimly, remembering all of the abandoned farms they’d passed on their way through, it makes more sense to feed them grain than hay. Easier to transport and gives them more energy … and no one around here was cutting that much hay last fall, anyway.

He sighed, leaning forward and stretching one leg down until he could just dip a toe into the river water. They’d passed through some wonderful farmland on their way south into Cliff Peak, and the farmer in him hated to see it going to wrack and ruin this way. And, he admitted to himself, he hadn’t found as much satisfaction in chastising the heretics as he’d expected to. They seemed to be people much like any other people, except that their faces were gaunt and thin with hunger from the winter just past.

The Faithful who’d greeted the Zion Division along the way were no better fed, but he’d seen the fire in their eyes, heard the fierce baying of their welcoming cheers as they beheld Mother Church’s green and gold standards. That filled the army with a sense of pride, of having come to the relief of God’s loyal children, but there’d been an ugly side to that fire, as well. Walkyr was just as glad the Zion Division’s place at the head of the advance had kept it moving, prevented it from getting involved in rounding up heretics for the Inquisition’s attention. Even so, he’d seen some things he wished he hadn’t, heard the shrill edge of hatred in the voices denouncing neighbors for heresy … and the panicky edge in voices frantically protesting their innocence and orthodoxy.

He was still more than a bit bemused by how rapidly Bishop Militant Cahnyr had moved once they crossed the border, especially after such an abrupt change in plans. Aside from the brief overland march from Aivahnstyn towards Sangyr to deal with the fleeing heretical garrison—Zion had missed that one; they’d been detailed to watch the Daivyn east of the city—they’d stuck to the canals and rivers, and the lack of other traffic had let them advance even more rapidly than anyone—even the Church officials overseeing their transport, he suspected—had anticipated. There’d been only three locks between Aivahnstyn and today, and with the army in charge and civilian traffic banned, they’d used both sets of locks, eastbound and west, each time. They’d been averaging close to fifty miles a day for the entire five-day since the rest of the army had returned to Aivahnstyn. At that rate, they should reach Ice Lake and the Glacierheart border in another three or four days.

He watched the drovers slowing the dragons slightly while the barge crew veered more tow cable. They were coming up on another bend in the river as it wound its way through the hills, and the clear channel was farther from the bank than it had been. The current was with them, though, and the helmsman was swinging to the north, obedient to the buoys and channel markings, while the drovers started their dragons up a steeper than usual section of the tow road. The extra cable let them make the ascent at their own best pace, and the long, six-legged dragons whistled cheerfully as they climbed.

Walkyr leaned to one side, craning his neck to see around the bend. The trees had been cut back on either bank to clear the tow road, but the hills farther back from the stream looked green and cool. He wondered what the local hunting was like? They hadn’t seen—

The thirty-pounder shell slammed into the foredeck beside him before he heard the sound of the shot. The impact transmitted to him through the barge’s planking was enough to stun anyone, and Styv Walkyr was still trying to figure out what in Langhorne’s name had happened when the shell’s two pounds of gunpowder exploded almost directly under him.

*   *   *

“That’s the way you do it!” Petty Officer Laisl Mhattsyn shouted, capering in glee as the lead barge spewed smoking fragments, like white-edged feathers, from the red-and-white-cored explosion. “That’s the way to hit the bastards!”

“A little less dancing and a little more shooting, Mhattsyn!” Lieutenant Yerek Sahbrahan snapped. The lieutenant was fifteen years younger than the petty officer, and he used his sword like a pointer, indicating the other barges on the river below the battery’s high, bluff-top perch. “They’re not going to sit there fat, dumb, and happy for long, so let’s get back on the guns, shall we?!”

“Aye, aye, Sir!” Mhattsyn agreed, still grinning. Then he glared at the rest of his gun crew. “Come on, you buggers! You heard the Lieutenant!”

The gunners swarmed over the piece, swabbing the barrel and reloading, and Sahbrahan nodded in satisfaction and stepped up to the parapet. Building the thick earthen berm had been a backbreaking task—almost as bad as dragging the guns themselves into position, although the tow road had helped a lot in that respect. He’d thought Brigadier Taisyn’s notion of camouflaging the entrenchments’ raw earth had been ridiculous, however … until he’d taken a hike upstream and realized the cut greenery made it extremely difficult to realize the guns were there until one came within two or three hundred yards. The bends in the river helped, of course, but the brigadier and Commander Watyrs had chosen their spot with care.

The guns commanded almost two thousand yards of the river, sweeping across it at an angle, although some of the men in the redoubts closer to river level and nearer to the bend had expressed doubts about having fused shells fired over their heads. Even Charisian fuses malfunctioned occasionally, but at least they weren’t firing shrapnel … yet, at any rate.

Mhattsyn’s thirty-pounder roared again. The fourteen-pounders in the river-level redoubts were firing as well, although they weren’t provided with explosive rounds, and he heard the dull thuds of the fifty-seven-pounder carronades … and the much louder explosions of their massive shells. Two of the barges, including Mhattsyn’s target, were already sinking. Three more were heavily on fire, and as he shaded his eyes with one hand, he saw men leaping frantically over the sides into the river. Some of them, obviously, swam almost as well as rocks.

The wind was out of the east, sweeping the smoke upriver, and he couldn’t hear the shrieks and screams—not from here. The Marines and Siddarmarkian infantry in the redoubts could undoubtedly hear them just fine, though, and young Sahbrahan’s mouth was a bleak, hard line as he thought about that. He’d never been a vengeful man, but he’d seen what Archbishop Zhasyn and his people had been through over this past winter. He’d seen the way the citizens of Glacierheart had cheered as their column came up the Siddarmark River from the capital. And he’d seen their desperation as reports of the juggernaut grinding down through Cliff Peak—and what was happening to the people behind it—came to them with each fresh waves of fugitives.

And Brigadier Taisyn had made sure they’d all heard what the “Army of God” had done to General Stahntyn’s men after the Battle of Sangyr.

He could live with a few screams from those bastards, he thought.

*   *   *

“Shan-wei take them!” Bishop Khalryn Waimyan snarled. “Where the hell were our scouts?! How the fuck did we walk into something like this!?”

His regimental commanders looked at one another. There were times Bishop Khalryn reverted to the Temple Guard officer he’d been and forgot the decorum expected out of a consecrated bishop of Mother Church. At moments like that, it was best not to draw attention to oneself.

“Well, Stywyrt?” Waimyan demanded, turning on Colonel Stywyrt Sahndhaim, the CO of Zion Division’s 1st Regiment, whose men had been in the lead barges.

“I don’t know, Sir,” Sahndhaim said flatly. He was normally a calm, courteously spoken officer, but today his voice was flat and hard. His reports were still preliminary, but the casualty totals he’d already heard were ugly. “The scouts were out, and I don’t see how anyone who wasn’t deaf and blind as well as stupid could’ve missed something like that!”

He jabbed an angry fist in the direction of the heretic entrenchments on either side of the river.

“Excuse me, My Lord,” Colonel Tymythy Dowain, Waimyan’s executive officer, said. Waimyan turned a choleric eye upon him, goaded by the clerical address. It was technically correct, but he knew Dowain had used it at least partly to calm him down.

“What?” he said shortly.

“My Lord,” Dowain said, “Colonel Mardhar was responsible for the scouting today. As you know, the Hundred and Ninety-First has done an excellent job in that regard ever since we entered Westmarch. One of the first things I did was to ask him what had gone wrong, and he couldn’t answer me. But, My Lord, at least three of his scouting sections haven’t reported in.” The colonel shrugged. “I think we know now why they haven’t.”

“Why the hell didn’t anyone miss them?” Sahndhaim demanded harshly.

“Because they weren’t due to report back in yet, Stywyrt.” Dowain spoke patiently, clearly aware of what was goading his fellow colonel’s temper. “They’re supposed to send back word if they spot anything; otherwise the assumption is that if they haven’t sent back word, they haven’t spotted anything. Mardhar’s as angry and as upset as you could wish—some of those men have been with him from the very beginning, and he doesn’t pick his advanced scouts because they’re incompetent. He asked me to tell you he feels terrible about what’s happened.”

Sahndhaim’s mouth twisted, but he made himself inhale deeply and nodded. There was no point venting his fury on someone who’d clearly been doing his job … and wasn’t even present, anyway.

“All right,” Waimyan said, after a moment, following Sahndhaim’s example and forcing himself to step back from his own temper, “the Bishop Militant’s going to want to know what we’re up against. What do I tell him?”

“I’m working on that, Sir,” Dowain said, reverting to the military address he knew Waimyan preferred. “So far, it looks like they have redoubts on both sides of the river.” He laid a rough sketch on the table. “As you can see, they’re about ten miles east of where the high road crosses the river. The Daivyn gets a little narrower and deeper at that point, and it bends around these hills, here.” He tapped the sketch. “It looks like the bulk of their guns are here, on the north bank. That lets them fire up past the bend, and from the weight and accuracy of the fire, they have to be heavier than anything we’ve got.” He looked up to meet his general’s gaze. “If I had to guess, they’re naval guns.”

Waimyan’s jaw muscles clamped, but he nodded. It made sense. Siddarmark didn’t have any mobile artillery—Vicar Zhaspahr and Vicar Allayn had made certain of that, thank Langhorne!—and there probably hadn’t been time for any Charisian field guns to reach the Republic. Or to get this far forward, at any rate. One of the reasons for how rapidly they were advancing was to beat the Imperial Charisian Army into Glacierheart. But the bastards certainly did have artillery aboard their galleons, and after what had happened to Bishop Kornylys’ fleet, they could afford to spare some of it. But that meant—

“So we’re looking at thirty-pounders?” one of his other regimental commanders demanded, and Dowain shrugged.

“Probably. In fact, I think they may have some fifty-seven-pounders in their forward redoubts.” He showed his teeth in a thin smile. “They’d only be carronades, but with the bend in the river leading up to them, they don’t need a lot of range.”

“Shit,” someone muttered, and Waimyan smiled even more thinly than his executive officer had.

“Whoever decided where to put these people knew what he was about,” the bishop said. “He’s doing exactly what he needs to do: slow us down until they can get someone up to help him try to stop us.” He glowered at the map. “The bastard’s got the river locked up tighter than a drum—we’re going to have to raise the barges he’s already sunk just to clear the channel—and we’re damned well not going to be able to march right down the river and punch him out of our way. And I’ll bet you that whoever it was kept an eye on his flanks, as well. We need to find out just how well entrenched they are. I don’t want any lives thrown away in the process, but until we know that, we can’t know anything else about how to deal with them. And we will deal with them, Gentlemen.” His eyes were hard. “Trust me on that one.”

*   *   *

“Well, we damned well bloodied their noses,” Colonel Hauwerd Zhansyn observed with bitter, heartfelt satisfaction. “The bodies’re still floating downriver.” He smiled fiercely at Commander Watyrs. “Makes at least a nice little down payment for General Stahntyn. Tell your gunners my boys appreciate it.”

“You’re welcome,” Hainz Watyrs said. If a naval officer was out of place seventeen hundred miles from the nearest salt water, the Old Charisian seemed unaware of it. “It helped that they walked right into it, though.” He shook his head. “I really didn’t think we’d be able to get away with that, Brigadier.”

“Never know until you try,” Mahrtyn Taisyn said, and shrugged. “Major Tyrnyr’s suggestion that we issue arbalests to the security forces probably helped a lot. At least there weren’t any shots for anyone on the other side to hear. Not until your guns opened up, at any rate, Hainz.”

Watyrs nodded, and the three of them looked down at the river. They stood outside the log-and-earth-roofed dugout which had been built as Taisyn’s headquarters, and normally there wouldn’t have been a lot to see. The moon was only a pale sliver, and even that wan illumination was half obscured by high, thin cloud, but there were still a few smears of fire out on the river where some of the beached barges had smoldered for hours. And the lookouts had orders to ignite the massive bonfires laid ready to illuminate the water if the Temple Loyalists should be feeling adventurous enough to try forcing the river under cover of darkness.

Wish they would, the Marine brigadier told himself grimly, thinking about the barricade they’d laid across the main barge channel.

It would take work parties at least two or three days to clear the river of the logs, sunken river barges full of rock, and other obstacles his men had emplaced, and Watyrs had arranged nine of his fifty-seven-pounder carronades to cover the barricade. If the bastards would be kind enough to send men down to clear it, he’d be delighted to use them for target practice. Nobody was coming down that river alive as long as Taisyn’s batteries and redoubts commanded its channel.

“What do you think they’re going to do next, Sir?” Zhahnsyn asked.

The colonel commanded the two thousand Siddarmarkians who provided half of Taisyn’s infantry. Taisyn’s remaining five hundred Marines and Zhahnsyn’s other three thousand pikemen and arbalesters had taken over security from young Byrk Raimahn’s volunteers on the Green Cove Trace and the Hanymar Gap. Especially the Gap. If Cahnyr Kaitswyrth decided to send a flanking column overland.…

He’d hated detaching that much of his manpower, but Raimahn’s people were ready to drop. Even if he’d been willing to ask it of them, they were simply too exhausted to stop a fresh, determined push. Taisyn only hoped his professional soldiers could do half as well as those “civilian volunteers” had in holding their ground until Duke Eastshare could reach Glacierheart.

In the meantime, it was his job to slow Bishop Militant Cahnyr down, and he’d tried not to think about the enormous risk he was running. Unfortunately, Zhahnsyn’s question didn’t give him a lot of choice but to think about it.

“Everything we’ve seen or heard indicates that unlike their Navy, their Army can find its arse, as long as it gets to use both hands,” he said, eyes still fixed on the guttering flames. “According to the reports, they did for General Stahntyn’s regiments in jig time, too. I think we have to assume they aren’t going to do anything stupid … unfortunately. What I’d really like them to do is to try to assault straight down the river, but they aren’t dumb enough to do that. So I expect the first thing they’ll do is probe to see exactly where we are and try to get a feel for how strong we are. After that?”

He shrugged.

“I wish we had some cavalry to operate against their rear, Sir,” Zhahnsyn said. “Something to keep them looking over their shoulders instead of concentrating on what’s—or who’s—in front of them!”

“It’d be nice,” Taisyn agreed. “Unfortunately, neither Marines nor Siddarmarkian pikemen make very good cavalry … and you don’t even want to think about what one of Hainz’ sailors would look like in a saddle!”

“What worries me, Sir—aside from the fact that we’re outnumbered about thirty-five to one or so—is that they do have cavalry. A lot of it,” Commander Watyrs pointed out. “We’ve got a strong position here, but outside the entrenchments, we’re not very mobile. As long as we’ve got the river in our rear, the obstacles in the channel mean we can pull out faster in boats than they can march downstream or even send cavalry after us. But if they manage to cut the river between here and Ice Lake.…”

It was his turn to shrug, and Taisyn nodded.

“That’s the biggest danger,” he agreed. “And their guns don’t have to be anywhere near as good as ours if they get them to the riverbank. But like you say, it’s a strong position, and Hauwerd and I made sure we could defend from the rear or the flank, as well as frontally. If they do get around behind us, then we stay right here where we are, stuck in their throat like a frigging fishbone.” He bared his teeth in the darkness. “Trust me, if the Duke gets to Ice Lake while we’re still here, he’ll have a damned good chance of clearing the river behind us long enough to pull us out. As long as we can keep their barges and their heavy stuff west of here, at least.”

The other two nodded, their faces as grim as his own, for all of them understood the unspoken corollary. If Eastshare didn’t get here in time, and the Army of God, with its hundred thousand-plus regulars and the forty or fifty thousand Temple Loyalist militia it had added to itself, got around behind their positions, it didn’t matter how deeply and well dug in their four thousand men were. Not in the end.

But if we don’t stop them here, we lose all of western Glacierheart—probably the whole damned province, Taisyn thought. And we can’t possibly fight them in an open field battle, not when they’ve got that big a numerical advantage and even a half-ass idea of what to do with it. Give me a full army brigade, and I’d take my chances, even without cavalry, but with only two thousand Marines and sailors and Zhansyn’s pikemen? In the open? We’d hurt them—maybe—but we’d never have a prayer of stopping them … and we’d all be just as dead at the end of it.

He stood between his artillery commander and the Siddarmarkian colonel, watching the beached barges burn and prayed for the duke to hurry.