by David Weber
No, he wasn’t supposed to know his men felt that way, harbored those thoughts, sensed the tremors of ultimate defeat sweeping towards them. And he wasn’t supposed to feel that way, harbor those thoughts, or sense those tremors himself, either.
He flung himself into the command post bunker, crouching just inside the entrance to count off the other members of his command section as they tumbled through it behind him, and the ceiling-hung lantern began to sway and dance as 6-inch and 10-inch shells rumbled down the sky like sledgehammers of flame.
* * *
The first phase of the Charisian bombardment lasted forty-five minutes. Forty-five minutes in which hundreds of angle-gun shells and thousands of mortar bombs hammered the Dohlaran fortifications. They were shooting blind, those guns, but they had a very large target. Not all of their shells could miss, and when a 6-inch or—especially—a 10-inch shell scored a direct hit on even the deepest bunker, the consequences were lethal.
In addition to the deluge of explosive shells and the airburst shrapnel shells pitilessly probing every nook and cranny, sending their deadly rain down into lizardholes and communication trenches, the infernally inventive Charisians introduced the Army of the Seridahn to yet another innovation. A quarter of the mortar bombs slicing down out of the heavens were packed with a mix of saltpetre, coal, pitch, tar, resin, sawdust, false silver and sulfur that spewed out an incredibly noisome cloud of blinding smoke. Dohlar had received reports—fragmentary, unfortunately, like so much else from the Inquisition—about the smoke shells the heretic Eastshare had employed against the Army of Glacierheart the previous year. Very few of the AOG troops who’d experienced them had escaped to describe their effectiveness, however, and the Army of the Seridahn was sadly unprepared for its own introduction to them.
The artificial generation of smoke hadn’t received a lot of attention from Safeholdian armies, probably because gunpowder-armed armies normally had too much smoke, not too little. In this case, however, the reeking, choking cloud rolling steadily westward on a Charisian wind had two effects. One was to blind sentries like Private Rahdryghyz and Corporal Nohceeda who might otherwise have observed the combat engineers as they completed their sweeps and started back to their own lines. The second was to infiltrate dugouts and entrenchments, choking and suffocating their inhabitants. The smoke cloud wasn’t actually poisonous, but that was a minor distinction for General Rychtyr’s troops. The stench was indescribable, it was certainly capable of asphyxiating a victim under the right circumstances, and the discovery of yet another infernal Charisian innovation didn’t do a thing for the Army of the Seridahn’s morale.
But then, after only forty-five minutes, the bombardment trickled off, although the smoke rounds continued to fall.
* * *
“Out!” Lieutenant Ulysees shouted. “The bastards’ll be right on the heels of their damned artillery, boys! Man your positions!”
The men of 2nd Platoon didn’t need to be told twice. They were veterans, and they knew how closely Charisian infantry followed its artillery in an attack like this. They scrambled out of their dugouts, sat up in their lizardholes, spread out along the firing steps of their trenches.
All along Acairverah’s Regiment’s front—all along the entire Tyzwail Line—other companies, other platoons, followed suit. Riflemen settled into firing positions, capping their locks, making sure their bayonets were securely fixed, laying out hand bombs. Healers in green armbands marked with Pasquale’s caduceus took advantage of the opportunity to scurry from lizardhole to lizardhole, searching for wounded, dragging them back to the aid stations in their own deep bunkers. The enormous craters left by the new 10-inch shells had obliterated entire bunkers and the sections of trenches which had connected them, but determined squads of Dohlaran infantry settled into the craters themselves, using them in place of the entrenchments they’d demolished.
Within ten minutes, the entire front line bristled with ready and waiting riflemen, coughing on the noxious smoke, peering into it with slitted, tear-streaming eyes, waiting to greet the attackers with a withering curtain of fire.
* * *
“All right,” Admiral Lywys Sympsyn said grimly. He snapped his watch’s case shut and slid it deliberately into his pocket. “Phase two.”
“Yes, Sir!”
Another crimson rocket soared upwards to burst in the bright morning sunlight.
* * *
That’s funny, Lieutenant Ulysees thought between violent, sinus-tearing sneezes. Where the fuck are they? The one thing they don’t do is give somebody time to get set! I guess even Charisians can screw up their timing sometimes, but this isn’t like the Thesmars!
He was grateful, of course. On more than one occasion, the heretic infantry—especially their accursed scout snipers—had crept to within no more than thirty or forty yards of an isolated Dohlaran picket under cover of darkness, then swept in behind a merciless shower of grenades. Even when that didn’t happen, they hit hard and with as little warning as possible. This time, he’d been given time to get his entire platoon into its assigned positions, reinforcing the pickets, and the heretics would regret giving the Army of the Seridahn time to get set.
But something about the unnatural calm, broken only by the dull, ongoing thuds of the incoming smoke shells, made his skin crawl. It wasn’t right. Langhorne knew, the heretics were better than this! If they weren’t already storming the forward trench lines, there was a reason for it, and—
* * *
Spider webs of flame raced forward from the Army of Thesmar’s positions like fiery serpents, following the lines of quick match the combat engineers had strung across the footstool field during the night. The modified hand grenades strung along the quick match exploded in rapid succession, belching fountains of dirt, musket balls, and still more smoke as the Dohlaran footstools went up in sympathetic detonations.
A few Dohlarans trying vainly to see through the choking fog of smoke heard the explosions. Some of them recognized the sound of exploding footstools, although not even they truly realized what they were hearing. They assumed the deadly devices must be exploding as enemy infantry stormed through the protective fields and shouted in warning. The alert passed up and down the frontline positions, and the defenders settled more solidly into position. Whatever had delayed the heretics this long, they were on their way now!
But no Charisian or Siddarmarkian riflemen came out of the smoke.
Yahkeem Ulysees heard a sound like the world’s largest sail ripping in half, and his heart seemed to freeze as he realized what it was. Realized what was about to happen.
No wonder they gave us time! he thought. They wanted us back up out of the bunkers before—
The 6-inch shell whose arrival he’d heard exploded three hundred yards to his right. That one did very little damage. But it was only one shell, and the Army of the Seridahn had done precisely what Hauwerd Breygart had expected it to do when the barrage lifted. It had raced to man its defensive positions … just in time for the renewed bombardment to catch its men in the open.
“Back!” Lieutenant Ulysees screamed. He came to his feet, standing upright and waving madly to the men who couldn’t hear him in the sudden renewal of thunder but might see him, instead. “Back into the bunk—!”
One of the new 10-inch shells exploded almost directly on top of his position.
His body was never identified.
.IV.
Symyn’s Farm
and
Village of Borahn,
Duchy of Thorast,
Kingdom of Dohlar.
“Sir, you’ve got to fall back!” Colonel Mahkzwail Mahkgrudyr said fiercely. “This line’s gone! Sir Fahstyr’s going to need you at Borahn!”
“Like hell he will!” Clyftyn Rahdgyrz snarled back. “He needs me right the fuck here, turning these sorry-arsed bastards back into frigging soldiers!”
“Sir, there’s a reason he built the Borahn Line in the first place! He needs you back there direct
ing the troops into the right pos—”
“No, he doesn’t.” This time Rahdgyrz’ voice was flat, with an iron tang, and Mahkgrudyr shut his mouth and stared appealingly at Father Ahntahn Rahdryghyz.
Rahdgyrz’ intendant looked back at the general’s senior aide, then glanced at Rahdgyrz from the corner of one eye. His face tightened, and then, almost imperceptibly, he shook his head.
Mahkgrudyr’s jaw clenched, yet inside he’d already known his appeal would fail. He was certain Father Ahntahn agreed with him, but the Schuelerite had been with Rahdgyrz for a long time now. He knew as well as Mahkgrudyr that the general wasn’t about to listen to anything except his own conscience … and God.
“All right, Sir,” the colonel sighed finally. “All right. But for Langhorne’s sake, at least let me put together some cavalry to keep an eye on you!”
“You can put together whatever you want, Mahkzwail, but they’re going to have to catch up.”
Mahkgrudyr opened his mouth in fresh protest, but Rahdgyrz had already put the spurs to his horse. It thundered down the unpaved dirt track of the Symyn’s Farm Road in a shower of churned up clods of earth. Father Ahntahn was right on the general’s heels, and Mahkgrudyr spat an ugly curse before he gave his own horse the office and went galloping in pursuit.
* * *
Clyftyn Rahdgyrz leaned forward over his horse’s neck, urging his mount to greater speed while desperation ate at his soul. In only eight days of fighting, and despite all of Rychtyr’s painstaking preparations, all his troops’ determination, the heretics had driven the Army of the Seridahn back for over twenty-five miles. The heretic Hanth had disdained the flanking movements which had been his hallmark ever since he launched his counteroffensive out of Thesmar. Instead, he’d driven directly at the center of the Tyzwail Line, straight into the heaviest defenses the Army of the Seridahn could build.
The massive weight of his initial bombardment—and the diabolical timing which had drawn the defenders back out into the open to be slaughtered—explained much of his initial success. He hadn’t done it just once, either. He’d done it to them twice more, as well. Little wonder the traumatized defenders had been slower rushing back to their positions the fourth time … when the attack truly did come crashing in upon them. It hadn’t helped that his troops had proven far more adept at clearing lanes through the Kau-yungs than anyone in Dohlar’s service had anticipated, either. Shattered and demoralized by a heavier bombardment than any of them could possibly have imagined, the troops in what remained of the forward trenches and bunkers had been totally unprepared for the assault which had come out of the choking wall of smoke almost the instant that bombardment finally ended.
The defenders had captured a handful of heretic prisoners. According to interrogations, their assault troops had probably taken at least five percent of their casualties from their own artillery. That was how close behind the final, withering wave of the bombardment they’d been, waiting for it to lift. And however much Rahdgyrz might hate and despise them for their apostasy, he was confident taking those losses—being that close on the artillery’s heels—had reduced their total casualties by at least half.
Their assault parties had swarmed out of the smoke, advancing not in regiments or companies, but in platoons—even squads—heavily armed with hand bombs and revolvers, even those Shan-wei-damned repeating shotguns! Dohlaran platoons which had already been harrowed—in some cases, simply blotted out—by the deluge of shells had been a poor match for them. Half of them had still been stumbling back into their artillery-churned fighting positions—or what was left of them—when the assault came crashing in. Those who’d made it to their positions in time had fought hard, initially at least, and the heretics had paid a heavy price to force that first wedge into the heart of the Tyzwail Line. Rahdgyrz had been in the thick of that fighting, and he’d be astonished if Hanth had suffered fewer than two or three thousand casualties of his own in just the first two hours of his attack. But those assault battalions had succeeded in their mission. In seventeen hours of the most vicious, close-quarters combat Clyftyn Rahdgyrz had ever seen, they’d fought their way completely across the line of entrenchments between St. Stefyny’s Redoubt and St. Jyrohm’s Redoubt, the primary anchors of the Tyzwail Line.
He’d launched a furious counterattack into their northern flank, throwing in his last five reserve infantry regiments, supported by two regiments of cavalry and six batteries of field guns. They’d made perhaps a thousand yards before the heretics’ accursed portable angle-guns opened fire. Their crews had hauled them forward across the fields of Kau-yungs, the shell-torn ground, and the bodies of dead and dying heretics, and emplaced them in the Army of the Seridahn’s own trenches and lizardholes. The most advanced angle-guns had been barely fifty yards behind the heretic infantry’s point platoons, and they’d poured a devastating fire down upon his advancing infantry.
Those men had fought—and died—like heroes for him. They’d clawed their way forward for another hundred yards, but they’d had to advance across open ground, the heretic infantry prone behind every tiny bit of cover had poured out a tornado of accurate, aimed riflefire, and that deadly flail of shrapnel had come down on them like the hammer of Kau-yung itself.
They’d broken. For the first time ever, an attack under Clyftyn Rahdgyrz’ personal command hadn’t simply been stopped. It had broken. The survivors of those shattered regiments hadn’t fallen back; they’d fled, abandoning the field to the enemies of God Himself.
He’d cursed them, begged them, pled with them, and one or two had turned back. But most had been too terrified, too broken, and even as he’d cursed them, he hadn’t truly blamed them. There came a time when flesh-and-blood had simply taken more than it could endure. He knew that, but watching them flee had been more than he could endure. He’d drawn his saber, clapped his remaining heel to his horse, and charged the heretics single-handed.
No, not single-handed. His aides and his picked dragoon bodyguard had charged with him, although he knew at least half of them had actually been trying to catch up, seize his reins, drag him bodily back from that death ride. A third of them had died trying to do that, and each of their deaths was one more coal in the furnace of his desperate fury. But they hadn’t had to drag him away from anything. A heretic bullet had felled his horse, taking him down with it, stunning him, and Colonel Mahkgrudyr had personally dragged his half-conscious body across the withers of his own horse and ridden hell-for-leather for the rear.
He’d undoubtedly save his general’s life … and if they both lived, Rahdgyrz might someday forgive him for that. He wouldn’t have cared to wager anything important on the chance of that happening, however.
Not this time, he thought grimly, bending lower over the horse’s neck. Not this time! This time, we turn and stop the bastards!
It wouldn’t be for long. He knew that. But Mahkgrudyr was right in at least one respect. Fahstyr Rychtyr needed all the time anyone could buy him if he was going to organize a successful defense of the Borahn Line. Whether even he could do that this time was more than Rahdgyrz could say, but he’d proven time and time again that if anyone in the entire world could do it, that man was Fahstyr Rychtyr.
And if his friend failed, it wasn’t going to be because Clyftyn Rahdgyrz hadn’t given him every bleeding second he could!
* * *
“Stand, boys! Stand!” Colonel Efrahm Acairverah shouted.
He stood where the farm roads from the St. Daivyn’s and Sailyr Redoubts converged, two miles east of Symyn’s Farm and ten miles north of the Shan-Shandyr High Road, and the crackle of gunfire and the occasional crumping explosions of heretic portable angle-gun bombs came clearly on the wind. Those miserable, fugitive-crowded roads were the only path to the rear for almost a quarter of the Army of the Seridahn. The fork where they met had to be held, at least briefly, and the same engineers who’d built the Slokym Line, twenty-five miles west of the Tyzwail Line, had thrown up rudimentary breastworks, tying
together a dozen bunkered firing positions that covered the crossroad. Manned by resolute troops, a company or two of riflemen could have held up fifty times their own number from behind those breastworks. But the panicked fugitives streaming west from St. Daivyn’s Redoubt in a choking pall of dust were the furthest thing from “resolute troops” Efrahm Acairverah had ever seen in his life.
Gray-faced with exhaustion, many of them wounded, covered with dust and dirt, their uniforms filthy and torn, their faces blackened with powder smoke from almost two solid five-days of combat, they were ghosts of the men who’d held the Tyzwail Line before the heretics’ attack.
Some of those shambling ghosts were Acairverah’s own men. Not many, he thought, his eyes burning even as he shouted at them to stand, grabbed at equipment harnesses, kicked them when they wouldn’t turn. One or two snarled at him, threatening him with rifle butts or even bayonets. One of them had actually followed through on the threat, hammering the colonel to the ground with his clubbed rifle, leaving him stunned for several seconds while the endless sea of boots trampled around him until he could get back to his own feet. But most of them simply squirmed away, flowed past him like the sea, kept stumbling westward. Most of his men had already died, and he wanted—wanted desperately—to hate these fugitives for being alive when his men weren’t. But even in his fury and his despair, he couldn’t. And even as they continued to stream by him, most of them still clung to their personal weapons.
They haven’t given up, he thought wearily. Not really. If they had, they’d’ve thrown away anything that slowed them down. But they’re beaten. For now, for today, they’re simply beaten. It’s as simple as that. They’re beaten, and until someone can convince them they aren’t—
