.IV.

North of Serabor, The Sylmahn Gap, Old Province, Republic of Siddarmark

Gorthyk Nybar scowled as he considered the morning casualty report. Langhorne Division was at two-thirds strength, but that was only because Bishop Militant Bahrnabai had drawn heavily on the replacements who’d been brought along in the Army of God’s advance. Vicar Allayn had known they were going to take casualties, so each army had been assigned a pool of unassigned but trained replacements equal to twenty percent of its paper strength.

They hadn’t had sufficient rifles and pikes to give each of those men weapons, but there’d been more than enough of those from men who no longer needed the ones they’d been issued, Nybar thought bitterly. And there weren’t as many of those unassigned men as there had been, either. In fact, if he simply looked at the number of replacement bodies, Langhorne had taken one hundred percent casualties. Almost half his original men were still with him; the other half had been replaced not just once, but twice.

It’s these frigging frontal assaults, he told himself, looking up from his paperwork to listen to the continually pounding guns. Our artillery ammunition expenditure’s three times what we figured, and we still have to hammer straight ahead into these bastards’ teeth. And by now, everybody they’ve got left has a Shan-wei-damned rifle of his own!

Unfortunately, understanding why his division was bleeding to death didn’t change the situation. Their spy reports about troop movements behind the heretics’ front were a lot less detailed than he would have preferred, but according to the information he did have, the first Charisians couldn’t be more than another couple of five-days from Serabor. The Army of God had to punch through and take that town’s ruins—and blow up those damned dams to drain the Gap once and for all—before that happened. He didn’t even want to think about what would happen once the Charisians got here. Servants of Shan-wei or not, they’d had longer to think about these new weapons than anyone else in the world, and what their navy had accomplished was enough to make him acutely nervous about what their army might be able to do.

He scowled again and checked his watch as the bombarding artillery began to build towards a crescendo once more. Another ninety minutes, he thought, and then he got to send his men into the meat grinder all over again. His eyes went bleak and hard at the thought of the losses to come, but the frigging Siddarmarkians had to run out of ammunition—and men—sooner or later. If he had to run them out of bullets by giving them bodies to shoot, then he’dby God do it … and afterwards, when Siddar City lay in flames, the bastards would pay in spades for every man he lost in the process.

*   *   *

The skies were clearing, Kynt Clareyk observed. That was a pity. He’d have preferred rain, since his men’s caplock Mahndrayns fired just as reliably in a thunderstorm as in clear, dry weather.

Don’t want much, do you? he asked himself sardonically. You’ve already got a big enough advantage. Except, of course, that there’s no such thing as an advantage that’s “big enough” when you’re talking about things that can get men under your command killed, is there?

Perhaps not. But it was about time to find out how well the doctrine he and Ruhsyl Thairis had put together worked out in practice.

He drew a deep breath and looked at the young lieutenant—but they were all young, weren’t they?—standing next to him.

“All right, Bryahn. It’s show time,” he said simply.

“Yes, Sir!”

Bryahn Slokym saluted, reached into a belt pouch, withdrew a Shan-wei’s candle, and rasped it across the buckle of his sword baldric. The strike-anywhere match burst into sulfurous, stinking life, and he touched it to the length of quick match.

The quick match flared almost instantly, the flame racing away from them at three hundred feet per second, and the signal rocket fifteen yards away from Green Valley’s command post hissed into the heavens on a rushing, gushing tail of flame. It rose high into the clearing morning sky, and then it burst in brilliant splendor.

*   *   *

“What the—?”

Gorthyk Nybar’s eyes narrowed as the … whatever it was climbed into the heavens above the heretic entrenchments. He felt a brief flicker of something entirely too much like fear for his comfort, but it fled as quickly as it had come, and his nostrils flared. Of course. The heretics had used … “signal rockets,” that was the term, in the past. He simply hadn’t seen one yet, and he watched it soaring higher and higher. Then it burst, shooting out dozens of tendrils of light that were pale in the morning sunlight but would undoubtedly have been spectacular in the dark.

“What is it, Sir?” one of the division runners asked in a sharp-edged voice, and Nybar snorted.

“They call it a ‘rocket,’ I think, Private,” he said. “Pretty, I suppose, but nothing to worry about—just a way to send signals.”

“Oh. Uh, I mean, thank you, My Lord!” the runner said hastily, his face turning red as he realized he’d just interrupted the commanding bishop’s thoughts. Nybar saw his expression and chuckled, but then his chuckle faded as he thought about his own words.

A signal, he thought. Now who in Shan-wei’s name could Stohnar be sending signals to … and why?

A moment later, he found out.

*   *   *

Lieutenant Hairym Clyntahn, Imperial Charisian Army, had been hazed unmercifully over his last name from the first day he’d enlisted.

He didn’t suppose he could blame anyone for it, not that understanding had made the experience any more enjoyable. And he’d been deeply disappointed when he was turned down as a cavalry officer for no better reason than that he looked like a particularly untidy sack of potatoes in the saddle. Then he’d discovered he wasn’t even being assigned an infantry platoon. Instead, they’d told him he was going to command something called a “support platoon” and tried to make it sound like it was going to be something special. He’d known better, of course, but he was a Chisholmian. He loved his Empress—and now his Emperor—and he loved the Church. Not the Church Zhaspahr Clyntahn represented, but the Church of Maikel Staynair. And because he did, he’d been prepared to serve in whatever capacity the army could find for him.

And boy, was I wrong! he thought now, turning to his platoon sergeant as the rocket burst overhead. Cavalry?! Hah! You can keep it!

“Two thousand yards, fused for airburst!” he snapped.

“Two thousand yards, airburst, yes, Sir!” the platoon sergeant responded, and turned to glower at the closest squad. The order came back, repeated by each of the platoon’s squads in turn, and Clyntahn nodded.

“Fire!”

Support Platoon, 1st Battalion, 3rd Regiment, consisted of four squads, each armed with three three-inch mortars. They were unlovely weapons, with a four-foot barrel mounted on a steel plate, supported by a bipod fitted with a wheel to control the tube’s elevation. Each projectile weighed ten pounds and terminated in a short rod. It was fitted with studs which engaged in the tube’s rifling grooves as the mortar bomb was muzzle-loaded into the tube, and a felt “donut” of gunpowder was wrapped around the rod. A sidelock at the base of the tube was fitted with a percussion cap, and when the hammer fell and the cap detonated, the bomb left the weapon at approximately six hundred and fifty feet per second. That gave it a minimum range of three hundred yards … and a maximum of twenty-five hundred, depending on the tube’s elevation.

At the moment, Clyntahn’s platoon was high on a mountainside on the western side of the Gap and well behind the Army of God’s front line. The total weight of each of their weapons was two hundred and thirty-four pounds, and it broke down into six separate pieces, the heaviest of which was the base plate, at a hundred and fifteen pounds. That made it man-portable—although Pasquale pity the poor bastard with the base plate!—but the platoon had been assisted in this instance by the pack mules it had brought along all the way from Chisholm. Sure-footed and smart, the mules had followed Clyntahn’s men and their guide along the narrow, serpentine, treacherous trails to their present positions before dawn, carrying not simply the mortars but the crated ammunition, as well.

Twenty-five hundred yards was only a mile and a quarter, and the Sylmahn Gap was over five miles wide at this point. But the high road down which every bit of traffic must travel, thanks to the flooding, passed within less than a mile of Clyntahn’s mortars, and he watched through his spyglass as the explosions began to blossom below him.

“Too much fuse!” he announced. “Either that, or they’re burning long. Elevation’s on, but cut the fuse for eighteen hundred yards!”

Responses came back, and the next covey of mortar bombs went booming into the air, shrilling towards the enemy with the peculiar, warbling whistle the rifling studs imposed.

The projectiles fell almost vertically, and this time the fuses were the right length. The bombs detonated perhaps forty feet up, spraying canister in a lethal cone. The balls hit the high road, and the water, and the mud—and half a hundred soldiers of the Army of God—in a pattern that looked like pelting hail where it pounded into the ground. But this “hail” was made of lead, and it was traveling at over six hundred feet per second.

The consequences when it met flesh instead were ghastly.

*   *   *

Each battalion in 2nd Brigade had its own support platoon, and there were twelve battalions—each one three-quarters the size of an Army of God division—in the reinforced brigade’s three regiments. Only one other platoon had been sent forward to support Clyntahn; the others were still available to accompany their parent battalions in the advance. But if all those other mortars weren’t available at the moment, the two “angle-gun” batteries Green Valley had brought from Chisholm were.

The angle-guns—or just plain “angles”—of the Imperial Charisian Army were a lighter, land-going version of the navy’s weapons. They fired rifled, six-inch, sixty-eight-pound shells at high elevations to a range of almost eight thousand yards, and there were eight of them in each of Green Valley’s batteries.

Sixteen six-inch shells came warbling down out of the heavens, and they were equipped not with time fuses, but with impact fuses. It was a very simple, rudimentary design, and it had a failure rate of almost twelve percent … but that meant it worked perfectly eighty-eight percent of the time, and the shells driving into the ground each carried almost twelve pounds of gunpowder.

A pattern of volcanoes erupted across the Army of God’s position, hurling mud, water, and bits and pieces of bodies into the air. The angles couldn’t fire as rapidly as a standard field gun, but they could still manage a peak rate of fire of three rounds every two minutes and one round a minute thereafter as their barrels heated, and the concussion of their shells marched across the Temple Loyalists’ artillery positions in flaming, hobnailed boots.

And they did it without ever actually seeing their targets.

It took them five or six rounds to range in, even with the heliograph on the cliffs on the eastern side of the Gap, opposite Clyntahn’s mortars, signaling them corrections. The angles were, after all, a very crude version of a proper howitzer, without a reliable recoil system, which required them to be repositioned for each shot. They were, however, dug into gun pits fitted with ranging and bearing stakes so that their crews could be certain they’d repositioned them correctly, and the Army of God’s artillerists had never imagined a cannon that could shoot them from an invisible, protected position four miles away, on the far side of the entrenchments they’d been trying to batter their way through for almost six days. Nor had they ever imagined a gun that could hit them with shells half again as big and twice as heavy as their own.

Their steady, pounding fire began to falter as those volcanoes erupted—scattered, at first, but growing more concentrated, moving towards them. By the sixth salvo, the angles had the range, and six-inch shells came smashing down on the tight-packed target of Temple Loyalist fieldpieces. Men and horses shrieked as shell splinters ripped and whined through them, but it was worse when the limbers started exploding. Still more of the whistling shells came slicing down, pounding the Church’s gun positions, and battery officers began shouting frantic orders to limber up.

It said an enormous amount for the Army of God’s discipline that despite the terrifying effectiveness of an attack they’d never seen coming, Bishop Militant Bahrnabai’s gunners stuck to their pieces. They’d already begun to evolve the artillerist’s tradition—the gun was the battery’s standard, its colors, and it could not be abandoned to the enemy. Men would die to avoid that dishonor … and they died this day to save their guns.

But many of them died in vain.

*   *   *

Kynt Clareyk watched through his binoculars—and through the far more capable, all-seeing sensors of an artificial intelligence named Owl—as the Army of God recoiled from the sudden, unexpected flail of his artillery.

The Gap was a miserable place to fight, even without the inundations the defenders had arranged. There was little room to maneuver, no flanks to work around, and only a single, predictable axis of advance for anything heavier than his nimble-footed mortars. It wasn’t a place for finesse … but that didn’t mean it had no possibilities, he thought, watching explosions rip along the Church gun line. Half the guns had managed to limber up and race towards the rear, but the rest had already been disabled—or simply lost so many crewmen no one remained to work them—and he nodded in satisfaction. Those guns had worried him more than the Temple Loyalists’ rifles, and he was delighted to have them silenced.

Not all of the guns which had fled were going to escape, either. They still had to run the gauntlet of Clyntahn’s mortars, and horses and men went down—dead, dying, or wounded—as that merciless rain of shrapnel marched up and down the high road.

“Stage two, Bryahn,” he said, never lowering his binoculars.

Another rocket raced into the heavens, and the angle-guns retargeted obediently. Their shells left the silenced gun line and began crashing down on the Army of God’s infantry redoubts with a fury which filled him with vengeful satisfaction.

No point pretending I don’t want to pay these bastards back, he thought coldly. I admire their discipline, I respect their guts, I understand they’re sincere in their beliefs … and I’ll strangle every last motherless one of them with my bare hands for what they’ve done. Or settle for this.

He would have liked to get some of the four-inch muzzle-loading rifles he’d brought along from Siddar City into action, as well, but there was only so much space and he refused to crowd his troops. There’d be time to get the field guns into action once he’d broken the Army of God’s current position.

Of course, there’s the little problem that even after I start driving them, I won’t be able to push them forever, he reflected. There’s just too many of them, and once they get over the shock, they’ve got the unit cohesion—and the courage, damn their black hearts to hell—not to panic and break again. For that matter, Wyrshym already covered his bets with those frigging entrenchments around Saiknyr. If they pull back across the bridge and blow it, getting across Wyvern Lake’ll be an unmitigated—and painful—pain in the arse.

For that matter, he reminded himself, a hundred thousand men were still a hundred thousand men, however he sliced it … and he had only thirteen thousand. As Merlin was fond of saying, quoting someone from Old Earth, after a certain point, quantity took on a quality all its own.

I’ll settle for driving them back across the lake. Hell, for that matter, I’ll settle for pushing them back as far as Jairth! In fact, I’d rather stop there than somewhere between Jairth and Malkyr, where the Gap gets too frigging wide to cover even with fire, much less infantry! It’s not my job to kick them all the way back to Tarikah, and I’ll be damned if I push too far too fast and let them chew up the brigade that’s hopefully putting the fear of Shan-wei into them right this minute. Besides—he smiled thinly, binoculars still to his eyes—unless Merlin’s brainstorm turns into a total disaster, I won’t have to push them any farther … this year, anyway.

The angle-guns had been pounding the redoubts for almost fifteen minutes now, and he saw the first confused signs of a withdrawal. Sensible of them. Those redoubts had been built to include overhead protection against shrapnel shells bursting in midair; they’d never been intended to resist six-inch explosive shells plunging straight down onto them. With their own artillery silenced and driven from the field, it made no sense for those men to simply hunker down in the abattoirs their fortifications had become, and their officers had the good sense—and the moral courage—to pull them out.

You’ve got to love good officers, Kynt, even when they’re on that side, he told himself. It would be nice if they’d just sit there and let you kill them with artillery, but they’re not going to. So.…

He lowered the binoculars and looked at Colonel Allayn Powairs, his chief of staff.

“Pass the word to Colonel Tompsyn,” he said. “Tell him to give them another ten minutes or so to come out into the open, then go get them. And”—he held Powairs’ eyes for just a moment—“remind him we are taking prisoners.”

“Yes, Sir,” Powairs agreed.

Zhon Tompsyn was an excellent officer, but he was also a man of firm Reformist principles … and he’d lost a brother with Gwylym Manthyr. He was unlikely to go out of his way to encourage surrenders, yet his 3rd Regiment was the best trained, best choice for his current mission; that was one reason his support platoon had been deployed so far forward.

“See to it, then,” Green Valley said, and turned back to the carnage, raising his binoculars once more.

*   *   *

Gorthyk Nybar wiped blood from his face and looked at his red palm, wondering when his forehead had acquired that cut.

He listened to the shouts of command, the screams of pain, and the thunder of the heretics’ terrible artillery and wondered how the situation could have gone so disastrously wrong so quickly.

Obviously the Charisians were a little closer than we knew, he thought bitterly. Langhorne! How the hell many of them are there?

He’d already realized there weren’t actually that many of those dreadful cannon on the other side. No more than fifteen or twenty, he estimated, although that had been more than enough to break the back of their own artillery. The Army of God had lost at least half its guns, he estimated, and that was going to hurt. But there wasn’t anything he could do about that now. The best he could hope for was to pull back, get out of range of whatever they were using to hammer his men, and reorganize.

We’re going to have to dig in deeper and better. And we have to figure out how the hell they can do this! It’s got to be more of what they used at Iythria.

He wished now that he’d paid more attention to the rumors about the bombardment of the Iythrian forts, but that whole report had been … heavily edited by the Inquisition after Baron Jahras and Duke Kholman deserted to the heretics. Still, there’d been something about firing over the forts’ walls instead of through them. He’d assumed the Charisians had simply cut their fuses so that standard shells exploded as they crossed the forts, but that wasn’t what had happened here! No, these shells were coming down vertically. They were plunging fire, and unless he was badly mistaken, the damned things were detonating on impact, not with time fuses. So how—?

Time enough to be thinking about that later, Gorthyk! For now, let’s get your arse—and as many of your men as you can—out of this bitched-up mess.

His forward regiments were disengaging, filing out of the redoubts in remarkably good order, given the unanticipated carnage which had enveloped them so abruptly, and he felt a surge of pride. It wasn’t every army that could go from a planned assault into a hasty, unplanned retreat without losing its cohesion, but his men were doing it.

Then he realized the shelling had begun to taper off. It would have been nice if he’d believed that meant they were running out of ammunition, but—

No, they aren’t, he thought coldly, looking over the parapet as infantry in strange, mottled-looking uniforms, came forward at last.

His eyes narrowed as he watched them. Those uniforms … they looked ridiculous, at first glance, but as he gazed at them, he realized that the mottled green and brown pattern would blend into most terrain far better than the Temple’s Schuelerite purple tunics and dark red trousers.

But that realization was a small and distant thing, for the Charisians were advancing like no infantry he’d ever heard of. They came forward not in a line, or in a column, but in a … swarm. At first, it looked like there was no order to it at all, but then he realized there was. It was just the … the wrong sort of order. Groups of perhaps a dozen men worked together, trotting warily forward in a loose, open formation without any immediately apparent coordination with any other group. There were hundreds of men in those groups—possibly even thousands—and he couldn’t imagine how anyone could possibly control them when they were scattered so broadly.

There was a column behind them, he saw. It was just beginning to come out of the Siddarmarkians’ entrenchments, but it was well back. Not to lend its solid, close-ordered weight to combat, he realized, but merely to simplify movement while it kept up close enough to augment the infantry already advancing towards his own positions if that should become necessary.

Rifle fire sputtered from one of the Holy Martyrs Division’s redoubts, and he saw the Charisians stop and drop. At first he thought they’d been hit, but then he realized it was a preplanned maneuver. They went prone, turning themselves into all but impossible targets … and then they began to fire back!

Impossible! he thought. Nobody can load a musket or a rifle lying on his belly!

But the Charisians could—and far more rapidly than the Army of God, to boot. He felt an icy chill as he considered the implications of a man who could lie flat—or take shelter behind a rock or a tree—shooting at another man who had to stand out in the open to reload between shots.

That’s why they’re so scattered out. They’re not going to stand up and shoot it out with us; they’re going to hide behind every scrap of cover they can find while they blow our infantry lines away!

He forced himself to remain calm. There was no weapon whose effects couldn’t be mitigated, whether it could be duplicated or not. And so far, at least, nothing else the heretics had come up with had been impossible to duplicate, he reminded himself.

We’ve got to capture some of those rifles, figure out how they work.

Even as he thought that, a fresh pattern of explosions erupted in the Holy Martyrs redoubt. They were smaller, and he couldn’t see where they were coming from. And they weren’t exploding on contact, either—they were exploding in midair, showering the redoubt’s interior with shrapnel balls.

The defending fire from the parapet died, and the Charisian infantry who’d gone to ground rose again. They went forward once more, in short, sharp rushes, while those explosions kept the defenders’ heads down, and his jaw clenched at the fresh evidence of just how sophisticated the Charisians’ tactics were.

Well, he thought grimly, watching the heretics flow towards the redoubt as remorselessly as the sea, they may be more “sophisticated” than we are now, but I’m not too proud to learn from example.

“Sir—My Lord—you have to fall back now!”

He looked over his shoulder. Colonel Mairyai’s uniform was splattered with mud and there was blood on his right cheek. He’d lost his helmet, and his black hair was clotted with still more mud.

“I’ll get the rest of the division out of here, Sir. We need you back there getting us reorganized before these bastards come right up our backside!”

“That’s probably true, Spyncyr.” His own voice sounded preposterously calm to him. “Unfortunately, if I’m going to reorganize, I’ve got to have some idea what I’m reorganizing against, don’t I?”

Mairyai stared at him, obviously wanting to protest, and Nybar gripped his shoulder.

“Go ahead and organize the withdrawal. Assign one platoon to keep an eye on me, if you like. I promise I’ll withdraw before the heretics get here. But I have to see, Spyncyr. I have to watch as long as I can, try to understand what we’re up against.”

The colonel held his superior’s eyes for a long, taut moment. Then he exhaled noisily and shook his head.

“I’m going to take you at your word, Sir … but I will assign a platoon to you, too. And its orders are going to be very explicit. When the enemy gets within five hundred yards of this redoubt, you are heading to the rear, even if I have to have you knocked on the head and dragged! Is that clear?”

“Clear, Spyncyr,” Nybar said quietly while Charisian rifle fire rattled and snarled behind his voice. “Very clear.”