by David Weber
Cheng nodded. There was no other way the band of fugitives could go. Oh, they might head off cross-country, but it was unlikely. They had women and children along, and half their carts were probably being pulled by men, not mules or dragons.
“All right. We’re here—” Rung jabbed again, this time at the square that marked the Fynghau Farm, just under six miles southeast of Ranlai “—and you’ve got horses, Captain of Bows! Get them on the damned road to the Yang-zhi Farm now. And I don’t want to hear that a bunch of shit-footed farmers and their bitches and brats carrying everything but their outhouses with them can cover thirty miles before my cavalry can cover fifteen! Is that clear?”
Cheng nodded again, although both of them knew Rung’s description of the challenge fell a bit short of reality. It was closer to twenty-eight miles by road from the Sung-tai Farm to the Yang-zhi Farm, and it was almost sixteen miles from the Fynghau Farm to the Yang-zhi Farm. More to the point, his horses were already badly worn and there was no telling how long the runaway serfs had been on the road. If they’d been warned soon enough and they’d been prepared to march in the dark, they could be halfway to the Ranlai-Zhyndow Road by now, in which case they were actually closer to it than he was.
He didn’t like to think about the state of his mounts. He’d been hoping to rest them for at least a few days, and now this! If he pushed them the way Rung obviously had in mind in their present condition, he’d lose some of them, and Baron Qwaidu would be livid if he foundered very many. In the baron’s opinion, cavalry horses were worth more than serfs, and Cheng couldn’t disagree. On the other hand, if he didn’t founder at least some of them, Rung would conclude he hadn’t tried hard enough. And if the runaway serfs got past him in the end, Baron Qwaidu was likely to agree with Rung, with unpleasant consequences for one Mahngzhwun Cheng.
“Yes, Sir,” he said. “It’s clear, and we’ll do our damnedest.”
“I don’t want to hear about any ‘damnedest,’” Rung said coldly. “What I want to hear is ‘We caught them, Sir.’”
Cheng’s jaw clenched. He truly hadn’t been trying to cover his arse with that remark. Or he thought he hadn’t. What he’d intended obviously didn’t matter, however. So instead of speaking, he only nodded again, curtly, slapped his breastplate in salute and headed across the stubbled field, shouting for his platoon commanders.
Shit, he reminded himself, flowed downhill. It was time to make sure it was in the right channel.
* * *
“Sir, I’m a little worried about Hautai’s section. Don’t like the look of their horses,” Platoon Sergeant Saiyang said.
Captain of Bows Maizhai Rwan-tai looked at him with a frown. He’d watched Saiyang cantering back towards him in a splatter of mud. Like everyone else in 3rd Platoon, the platoon sergeant looked more like a vagabond than a cavalry trooper. He was mud to the eyebrows, his even muddier horse looked ready to collapse, and Rwan-tai had strongly suspected what Saiyang was going to tell him. The problem was that none of his other three sections were in much better shape than Corporal Hautai’s.
“How bad is it?” he growled.
“Not so bad I’m worried about losing any of ’em … yet, Sir,” Saiyang replied. “Think they need a rest stop pretty damn soon, though.”
“We can’t be more than four or five miles short of the farm,” Rwan-tai said. “They’re not good for another hour?”
“More like an hour and a half, given the going,” Saiyang pointed out, glowering down at the muddy, rutted surface of the road. The last couple of five-days’ constant rain hadn’t made anyone any happier. It also hadn’t done a thing for the roadbed. This section had seen precious little traffic over the last year or so, so there’d been little incentive to maintain it, and it had never aspired to the status of the high road in the first place.
“All right, for another hour and a half,” Rwan-tai growled.
“Depends on whether or not you want ’em to be able to catch anything once we get there, Sir,” the platoon sergeant said with a shrug. “Not much spring in any of ’em, no matter what we do, and a scared man runs pretty fast. If the mounts’re already blown when we start chasing—”
He broke off with another shrug. After twenty-three years as a Spear of the Emperor, Lyungpwo Saiyang figured he’d seen just about everything. That included officers who sent their men out on harebrained, useless, Shan-wei–damned stupid excursions, and at least Rwan-tai was smart enough to listen to his noncoms.
Usually, at least.
Rwan-tai glowered at his phlegmatic platoon sergeant, but Saiyang was probably right, damn him. Not that Rwan-tai expected Captain of Swords Cheng to sympathize with him if he said so.
Fifteen miles didn’t look like much, especially by road … on the map. But that supposed the “road” in question deserved the name, and it also supposed the horses traveling along it hadn’t already been ridden hard for the last couple of five-days. They needed rest, damn it, and he simply couldn’t push them above an alternating trot-walk unless he wanted them to start breaking down. On this miserable, mucky road, the best he could manage was no more than five miles an hour, little better than a man on foot, and it had taken almost half an hour to roust his weary platoon out of its sodden bivouac and get it on the road in the first place. The rest of Captain of Swords Cheng’s squadron was at least half an hour—and probably more—behind that, and Rwan-tai didn’t doubt that Captain of Foot Rung had been riding the captain of sword’s back the entire time he was trying to get his men into their saddles.
A cavalry squadron was an impressive force—close to two hundred and fifty men at full strength, though it was seldom at full strength in the field—but horses were more fragile than most people realized. It was far easier to ruin a good cavalry mount than to keep it sound, and given the Rebellion’s chaos, finding remounts was a serious challenge. And Rwan-tai reminded himself to be less efficient about looking after his own horses in the future. If he and Saiyang hadn’t run the tightest platoon in 2nd Squadron, someone else would have been sent off to play point.
“All right,” he sighed finally. “Fifteen minutes. Then we’re back on the road.” He glowered some more. “If the other platoons catch up with us before we get to the farm, there’ll be hell to pay.”
“Know that, Sir.” Saiyang slapped his breastplate in salute, then urged his own horse back to a weary, unenthusiastic trot as he headed up the road after the platoon’s lead section.
Rwan-tai watched him go with mixed feelings. On the one hand, the platoon sergeant was right—horses as worn as theirs would have a hard time catching a terrified serf across country at the best of times. If they’d been ridden into near exhaustion before the pursuit even started, that “hard time” would turn into an exercise in futility, at which point he’d be ripped a new arsehole for having worn them out on the road. But if he didn’t wear them out on the road and the rest of the squadron overtook him despite its more laggardly start, Captain of Swords Cheng would rip him a new one for that. And the truth was that they’d probably already missed their prey, and if they had there wouldn’t be any pursuits. In which case, whether or not Corporal Hautai’s mounts were fit to catch nonexistent serfs wouldn’t matter, and Cheng would ream him up one side and down the other for resting his horses and not getting there in time for the pursuit they wouldn’t have been capable of sustaining in the first place.
The world, Maizhai Rwan-tai reflected, not for the first time, wasn’t exactly running over with fairness.
* * *
“Oh, crap,” Sergeant Taiyang growled, gazing up the road from his position behind the tumbledown stone wall. He was rather fond of that wall, and he and his platoon had spent quite a bit of effort making it look even more tumbledown—and useless for cover or concealment—than it really was. “And here I thought I was gonna have time for lunch.”
“Doesn’t look like more’n a section or so,” Corporal Ma-zhin pointed out. He was six years older than his youthful platoon sergeant, alt
hough he looked younger. Yuhnzhi Taiyang was a huge, powerfully built man whose life had been hard enough even before the Rebellion to make him look far older than his age. He was also just as tough as he looked. “Doesn’t seem like more’n we can handle.”
“Unless there’s more behind them,” Taiyang grunted.
He raised his head a bit higher above the wall, shading his eyes with one hand and wishing he had one of the rare double-glasses or even an old-fashioned spyglass. He didn’t, but from the looks of things, Ma-zhin’s estimate wasn’t far off. But it wasn’t like Qwaidu’s bully boys to ride around in single sections anymore. Especially not this close to the Valley.
“There probably are more coming on behind,” he said, dropping back. “Bet you these bastards’re out looking for that lot headed in from Kaisun. If they are, they know damned well they’ll need more’n one miserable section to haul ’em in.”
“Can’t argue with that,” Ma-zhin acknowledged. “So, what do we do?”
“Thinking,” Taiyang said.
“Might want to think faster,” Ma-zhin suggested. “Be crossing in front of Chaiyang’s squad in another ten minutes.”
Taiyang grunted again and squinted his eyes while he considered. Assuming that cavalry section was by itself, he should have at least as many men as the Spears. He was down half a dozen men, but units in the field were always understrength, whichever side they were on. If, however, there was an entire squadron behind what they’d already seen, the numbers would get a lot dicier.
He was tempted to just lie here behind these nice stone walls and let the bastards ride past, if that was what they wanted to do. The refugees whose flight his platoon was stationed to cover were well down the road by now. They should be passing Zhyndow within another couple of hours. From there, Commander Syngpu would have them under his own eye, and after that, they’d be as safe as if Langhorne himself had them cupped in his hands.
Taiyang was one of Syngpu’s original recruits. He’d been barely nineteen at the time, although he’d always been big and strong for his age. After the last four years, he would have followed Tangwyn Syngpu in an invasion of Hell itself, and he knew damned well no Spear ever born was going to ride down a column of refugees under Syngpu’s protection.
But he only knew where the refugees were supposed to be. Any number of things could have put them behind schedule, and if something had, and if he let these bastards by him.…
“Oh, the hell with it,” he growled, and Ma-zhin looked at him with a knowing smile.
“Wipe that fucking grin off your face!” Taiyang snarled. He hated being so predictable, but the truth was there’d never been any chance he’d just sit here.
“Didn’t say a thing,” Ma-zhin protested.
“Oh, shut up!” Taiyang snapped and reached for the whistle hanging from the lanyard around his neck.
* * *
“Deserted, of course,” Captain of Bows Rwan-tai growled in disgust as the dilapidated outbuildings drew into sight. The gutted main farmhouse still stood, more or less intact, but most of the barns and outbuildings had either burned or been torn down so the scavenged lumber could be used for other purposes. It looked like even some of the stone walls separating the empty fields from the road had been scavenged, as well.
“Not that big a surprise, Sir,” his platoon sergeant replied philosophically. “No reason for ’em to stop if they are ahead of us. And those Valley bastards don’t usually come this far west.”
Rwan-tai nodded. The Valley rebels were entirely too well armed and led for his taste, but there wasn’t much out here, beyond the Valley, to attract them. They did venture out from time to time, though. Usually only for some specific purpose. In fact, unlike Platoon Sergeant Saiyang, he’d half expected at least a picket somewhere along the road short of the ruined farm, given the incoming gaggle of fleeing serfs.
He wished the stubborn bastards would just leave well enough alone. It wasn’t as if Baron Qwaidu or Grand Duke Spring Flower had made any recent attempts to invade their frigging Valley. Not since the previous winter, anyway. Rwan-tai was just as happy to have missed that fiasco, but neither the grand duke nor the baron had realized then how substantially the Valleyers had been reinforced. They still didn’t have a clue who their new commander might be, but whoever he was, he obviously knew his business. And he was damned well armed, too. In fact, if he hadn’t been content to sit there behind the mountains, if he’d wanted to come into the open, he could probably have—
A whistle shrilled from behind a stone wall that looked completely deserted.
Captain of Bows Rwan-tai turned towards the sound in surprise … and discovered that one thing the Valleyers clearly understood was the need to take out the other side’s officers as quickly as possible. The bullet slammed straight through his breastplate and hurled him from the saddle. He hit the muddy road in an explosion of anguish and heard dozens of other rifles crackling like hellish thunder.
.V.
Sochal, Grand Duchy of Spring Flower, Tiegelkamp Province, North Harchong.
“Shan-wei damn it!” Grand Duke Spring Flower snapped. “What the hell happened out there?”
“It was the damned Valleyers, Your Grace,” the Baron of Qwaidu replied. “They came out of the mountains and they ambushed Captain of Foot Rung. From the sound of things, there must have been at least a couple of hundred of them, dug in on both sides of the road.” He shrugged. “I have to admit that it sounds like his lead section wasn’t as alert as it might have been, but in their defense, they’d been in the saddle pretty much constantly for at least two five-days before they got the word about the runaways.”
“That’s not much of an excuse, My Lord,” Spring Flower said coldly.
“It wasn’t meant as an excuse, Your Grace. It was only an explanation.”
Zhailau Laurahn met Spring Flower’s glare levelly. In his opinion, Spring Flower didn’t look much like a grand duke, despite his looted finery. Or possibly because of his looted finery. On the other hand, he supposed a lot of people would’ve said that about him as a baron. And whatever he looked like, Kaihwei Pyangzhow was a grand duke; the confirmation of his most recent elevation had arrived from Yu-kwau four months ago. For that matter, the same dispatch had recognized Laurahn’s title. That made him formally Spring Flower’s vassal, subject to the grand duke’s power of high, middle, and low justice, but Yu-kwau was a long way from Fangkau and Spring Flower had discovered how badly he needed a military man like the newly ennobled Baron Qwaidu.
The last year or so had been … busy. Spring Flower had pushed his borders steadily outward from Fangkau to the north and to the east. He’d decided against pushing equally hard in the south for several reasons. One was the warlords fighting it out for control of the Mynzhu River between Dosahl and Kengshai. At the moment, they were keeping one another occupied quite nicely, and the last thing he wanted was to provide an outside threat they might come together to resist. That would have been reason enough to expand his own territories elsewhere for the moment, but the enclave the Army of God had established at Zhyahngdu on Zhyahng Bay—with Charisian support, of all damned things—was another one.
Zhyahngdu had become a major relief center, administered jointly by Mother Church and the Church of Charis, which struck Qwaidu as more unnatural than anything else that had happened in the last four years. The combined effort had built entire refugee villages, complete with schools and hospitals. By now, somewhere around a quarter million Harchongians had fled to Zhyahngdu, where the combined churches had poured mountains of supplies ashore, but the AOG garrison amounted to little more than a couple of brigades. They had to be stretched thin covering the enclave’s perimeter, which had turned Zhyahngdu into a tempting prize for any raiding brigand, and three of the southern warlords had patched up their quarrels long enough to mount an attack on it.
It hadn’t worked out well. Stretched thin or not, dug in Army of God infantry fighting from prepared positions with modern rifles and artiller
y would have been bad enough, but in order to attack them, the warlords’ troops had been forced to come within artillery range of Zhyahang Bay, as well. The timing had been unfortunate, since one of the Imperial Charisian Navy’s armored cruisers had just arrived, escorting a supply convoy to the enclave. The massive weight of its artillery had turned a failed attack into a total disaster, eliminating three-quarters of the warlords’ troops, and their fellows farther from Zhyahang Bay—and wise enough to stay there—had divided their territories among themselves.
Zhyahngdu was almost eight hundred miles from Fangkau for a wyvern, and Qwaidu was just as happy Spring Flower had no intention of pushing his borders in its direction. Besides, there was plenty of hunting elsewhere.
Prior to the Rebellion, North Harchong’s thirteen provinces had been home to over twenty-five million Harchongians, with the majority concentrated in Boisseau, Tiegelkamp, Stene, and the southern half of Chiang-wu and Maddox. Somewhere around a quarter of the total had lived in Tiegelkamp, although Langhorne only knew how many of those six or seven million people had fled—or died—over the last four years. The total had to be high though, given the staggering number of deserted towns and abandoned farms. Despite the total numbers, even Tiegelcamp had always been sparsely populated, once one got away from the scattered towns. Now the entire province was in the process of reverting to wilderness, and Qwaidu had organized sweeps of territories surrounding the new grand duchy to “recruit” tenants for his and Spring Flower’s new estates.
