At the Sign of Triumph

by David Weber

  They’d had it much easier than the single mounted infantry brigade which had sailed all the way back around the western coast of Chisholm, staying well out to sea, to make landfall on a remote stretch of the Eastshare coast.

  That brigade had moved very quietly through the most deserted stretches of the Barony of Green Mountain and the Duchy of Halbrook Hollow. Elahnah and Sailys Waistyn might still grieve for the loss of a husband and a father, and they might still cherish doubts about where the Church of Charis was ultimately headed, but they knew where they stood. The butchery of Zhaspahr Clyntahn’s Inquisition had removed any doubts they might have had about who he truly served, and the present Duke of Halbrook Hollow’s loyalty to his cousin had proven unshakable, when the test finally came.

  He’d passed the brigade across his lands to the Duchy of Tayt, where they’d been met by Sir Awstyn Tayt, Sharleyan Tayt Ahrmahk’s third cousin. Duke Tayt had personally led them to Khantrayl’s Hollow, hidden in the shadows of the Iron Spine Mountains, where they’d recovered from their stealthy march and prepared for their part in Empress Sharleyan’s response to the conspiracy against her.

  Saint Howan could easily have stayed in Cherayth. In fact, he probably should have, all things considered. His decision to come home for a visit had run the very real risk of inviting his assassination as a way to destabilize his earldom before the combined forces of Black Horse, Swayle, and Holy Tree moved in to crush it between them. But from the moment the seijins had told him about the conspirators’ plans, he’d known where he had to be on this day.

  Now the two mounted brigades aboard those galleons sailing so steadily towards him were about to deliver Sharleyan Ahrmahk’s answer to the men—and women—who’d believed they could murder her vassals, defy her laws, and strip her subjects of the rights she and her husband had guaranteed to them.

  Somehow, the Earl of Saint Howan thought, lowering the double-glass at last, he doubted they’d enjoy what she had to say.

  * * *

  “What?” the Duke of Black Horse demanded just a bit irascibly as someone rapped sharply on the study door. It was close to midnight, he was deeply immersed in the latest wyvern messages from Rock Coast and Lady Swayle, and he was an orderly man who disliked interruptions.

  “Excuse me, Your Grace,” Kynton Strohganahv said, as he opened the door. “I … know you dislike intrusions, but … but I think you need to speak to this … person.”

  Black Horse’s forehead furrowed in consternation. Strohganahv had been his chamberlain for well over thirty years, and he’d been the assistant to Black Horse’s father’s chamberlain for ten years before that. The one characteristic Pait Stywyrt associated with him most strongly was composure. Nothing ever threw Strohganahv off balance. He’d been composed even when he’d respectfully expressed his own reservations about Black Horse’s current endeavors before going out and putting his instructions into effect. But today he sounded positively rattled, and his face was pale.

  “And who might ‘this person’ be?”

  “I think … I think I’d better let her introduce herself, Your Grace,” Strohganahv said, and Black Horse’s frown deepened. Then he shrugged.

  “Very well, Kynton. Show whoever she is in.”

  The chamberlain bowed and disappeared. He reappeared a moment later, and Pait Stywyrt shot to his feet in stunned disbelief.

  “Good afternoon, Your Grace,” the attractive young woman in the blackened chain mail of the Charisian Imperial Guard said calmly. “Men call me Merch O Obaith, and I’m afraid I have some bad news for you.”

  “Wh-wh-wh…?”

  Dull fury—and shame—washed through Black Horse as he heard his own incoherence, but Obaith only smiled, sapphire eyes glittering in the lamplight. If the seijin—and with that outlandish name, that uniform, and those eyes that was what she had to be—was remotely concerned by the fact that he had over five hundred armed retainers right here in Maryksberg, she gave no sign of it.

  “In about another five hours,” she told him, “HMS Maikelberg is going to sail into Maryksberg Harbor. She’ll be accompanied by a pair of bombardment ships and transport galleons with twenty-five hundred Charisian Marines. Captain Zohannsyn is under orders to put those troops ashore here in Black Horse, where they’ll take control of your capital, and then march into Swayle to join the two mounted brigades advancing from Saint Howan to meet them.”

  Black Horse swayed, his eyes wide in shock, and she cocked her head.

  “Now, I realize the Army invested quite a few marks in emplacing modern artillery to protect your waterfront. I also realize that one of the very first things you did as your part in your treasonous conspiracy was to place the Army gun crews under arrest and replace them with men loyal to you. So, I suppose it’s possible you’ll be foolish enough to attempt to prevent Captain Zohannsyn from carrying out his orders. If you do, I’m afraid things will get very … messy and there probably won’t be a great deal left of Maryksberg when the smoke clears.”

  Her calm tone never wavered, but those unearthly blue eyes—eyes exactly like the ones Black Horse had seen looking out of Merlin Athrawes’ face—were hard and cold.

  “I’m a simple woman at heart, Your Grace,” she told him, “and I really don’t like messy solutions to problems. So I thought I’d just come ahead of Captain Zohannsyn and take this opportunity to avoid one here. You see, my instructions from Her Majesty are to take you into custody for treason, and I’m sure she’ll be disappointed if I’m unable to arrest you unharmed. But she’s a practical woman, and I’m equally sure she’ll forgive me if that turns out to be impossible. So it occurred to me that one way to prevent you from ordering the batteries to open fire and getting quite a lot of your own subjects killed would be to remove your head before you do.”

  Steel whispered, and Black Horse swallowed convulsively as the curved blade gleamed under his study’s lamps. The katana was rocksteady in her slim hand, and she raised one eyebrow.

  “Are you going to make it necessary for me to disappoint Her Majesty, Your Grace?”

  .X.

  Army of the Center Command Post,

  Selyk,

  and

  Forward Lines,

  Holy Langhorne Band,

  Talmar,

  Westmarch Province,

  Republic of Siddarmark.

  “Go on with what you were doing.” Archbishop Militant Gustyv Walkyr waved one hand as the on-duty members of his staff started coming to attention. Heads had turned and more than one eyebrow had risen as he came down the steps into the enormous bunker Earl Silken Hills had bequeathed him as his central command post. That was scarcely surprising, given the lateness of the hour.

  “You’ve all got better things to do than stand around saluting me!” he continued, trying to defuse the tension he’d seen in one or two sets of eyes, and several staffers chuckled appreciatively as they turned back to the paperwork that never stopped in the headquarters of an army with roster strength of well over nine hundred thousand. Walkyr left them to it and crossed to the center of the bunker where Bishop Militant Ahlfryd Bairahn, the Army of the Center’s chief of staff, stood by the map table at the center of the big, earthy-smelling chamber below the brightly burning oil lamps hung from the overhead.

  “Have we gotten any further information from Bishop Militant Styvyn, Ahlfryd?” Walkyr asked, trying to sound concerned but confident. He was pretty sure he’d succeeded in the former. The “confident” bit came a little harder.

  “No, Your Eminence, not really,” Bairahn replied. Under normal circumstances, he wouldn’t have been here at this hour, either, Walkyr reflected. “The Bishop Militant’s been sending regular reports—until the semaphore shut down for the night, at least—but they’re all very much the same as the first one. I’ve been compiling them for your morning brief. My impression is that he’s conserving his messenger wyvern’s until he’s had a chance to check with all of his divisional commanders, so I don’t anticipate more from him befo
re dawn. I also queried Bishop Militant Parkair just before the semaphore closed up shop. As of thirteen o’clock, he’d observed no heretic activity on his front.”

  “I see.”

  Walkyr rubbed his mustache with the knuckle of his right hand, turning to frown down at the large map that showed the curve of the enormous eight-hundred-mile front for which the Army of the Center was responsible. Most of that front, aside from the carefully prepared defensive positions protecting the critical roads, was covered only by picket forces. Mostly, that was because the rest of the front could be covered only by pickets and observation posts, given the paucity of the secondary road net. It was also because only about two-thirds of his designated force had actually reached him, however. The other third was “en route” … and it had been that way for five-days.

  Walkyr had cherished his doubts about the decision to give supporting Silken Hills maximum priority when it was made, but he’d had to agree that on the face of things, it had made sense. And it still did, based on anything he actually knew. Based on what he was beginning to suspect, however.…

  “Would it happen Tohbyais is also up?”

  “By the strangest coincidence, I believe he just might be, Your Eminence.” Bairahn smiled. “He told me he was going for a fresh pot of cherrybean. I pointed out that that was what we had orderlies for, but you know how he is about being ‘cooped up in this damned cave.’”

  “Actually, I have no idea about that. He’s much too tactful to express those sentiments to me, you know.”

  “We are talking about the same Tohbyais, aren’t we, Your Eminence? You know, the one who’s about as diplomatic as a baseball bat?”

  “Did I just hear my name taken in vain, Your Eminence?” a tenor voice asked from behind Walkyr, and he turned his to see a tallish, very fair-haired AOG colonel.

  Like Walkyr, Tohbyais Ahlzhernohn was a native of the Episcopate of St. Bahrtalam in the southern Mountains of Light. In fact, they’d grown up in the same village, and they’d both spent their boyhoods among the high peaks, where horses were relatively scarce. That made it rather ironic, in Walkyr’s opinion, that Ahlzhernohn was the closest thing the Army of God had to an expert when it came to using mounted infantry on the Charisian model.

  “Not by me,” Walkyr said mildly. “Assuming you’re the always tactful fellow I was talking about.”

  “Sorry, Your Eminence. You must’ve been thinking about someone else,” Ahlzhernohn said with a grin, and Bairahn shook his head in resignation.

  Despite the vast difference in their ranks, Ahlzhernohn was only two years younger than Walkyr, and they’d played on the same boyhood baseball teams before Walkyr went off to seminary and Ahlzhernohn joined the Temple Guard. No one could have been more professional when it came to the actual discharge of his duties, but Ahlzhernohn was far more comfortable than anyone else on the archbishop militant’s staff when it came to exchanging jokes with him. Although, to be fair, Walkyr was far more readily approachable by any of his staffers than anyone else under whom Bairahn had ever served.

  “Tact isn’t exactly my middle name,” the colonel continued now, and held up his left hand to display the three tea mugs in it. “On the other hand, I do come bearing fresh cherrybean.”

  “And welcome it is,” Walkyr said, taking the mugs from him.

  He cocked an eyebrow at Bairahn, but the bishop militant shook his head with a shudder. Walkyr chuckled and set one of the mugs aside and held the other two for Ahlgyrnahn to fill. The colonel poured the hot cherrybean, then parked the pot on a hot plate, adjusted the hot plate’s wick to a slightly hotter flame, and turned back to the archbishop militant. His expression was rather more sober than it had been.

  “I expect you were asking about me to see if I’d had any brilliant insight into Bishop Militant Styvyn’s reports, Your Eminence?”

  Walkyr nodded, and Ahlzhernohn grimaced. He took a cautious sip of the hot cherrybean, eyes thoughtful, then lowered the cup and shook his head.

  “Until we can at least figure out who those people are, I’m afraid brilliant insight’ll be hard to come by,” he said. “The one thing I can tell you is that I don’t like it one bit. There could be all kinds of harmless explanations. For example, this could just be their notion of a reconnaissance in force. Or it could even be a deliberate diversion from what they’re really up to. But when we all know the heretics are launching their major offensive in the south, having a forty- or fifty-mile swath of our cavalry screen kicked in way up here.… Well, Your Eminence, I guess the best way to put it is that it gives one furiously to think.”

  “There are times, Tohbyais, when I could wish our minds didn’t work so much alike,” Walkyr said a bit grimly.

  He sipped his own cherrybean and his tense expression eased a bit as he sighed in approval. Ahlzhernohn probably had seized upon the beverage-fetching mission to get out of the command post, because he’d always hated confined spaces. In fact, Walkyr knew he had a touch of what the Bédardists called claustrophobia, though he managed to conceal it pretty well from the rest of the staff. But he’d also gone to get proper cherrybean, made the way people who spent their winters freezing in the Mountains of Light liked it. Which explained why an effete lowlander like Bairahn had declined the elixir of the Archangels. Walkyr couldn’t quite have floated a horseshoe on it, but he could’ve come close.

  Now he held the mug in both hands, moving closer to the map, and his frown returned as he gazed down at it.

  “It does seem odd they’d have mounted columns that strong wandering around this far from the Tymkyn Gap,” he said. “And I really don’t like it when ‘odd things’ start turning up in our command area.”

  “Henrai’s queried Earl Rainbow Waters and Earl Silken Hills for any information they have that might shed any light on the heretics’ intentions north of the Black Wyverns,” Bairahn replied, and Walkyr nodded in approval.

  Bishop Militant Henrai Shellai was the officer charged with collating every scrap of intelligence flowing to the Army of the Center. Walkyr’s intendant, Archbishop Ahlbair Saintahvo, wasn’t happy about that, since Shellai was neither an inquisitor nor a Schuelerite, but he was so damn good at his job that not even Saintahvo could come up with a plausible reason to replace him with someone more … reliable. Or pliant, perhaps. “I don’t want you getting good intelligence if it conflicts with what the Inquisition’s telling you” would have been just a bit too blatant even for one of Zhaspahr Clyntahn’s favorites.

  “So far, all we really know is that we’ve got lots of cavalry—Charisian mounted infantry, not Siddarmarkian dragoons—driving in our outposts along the Mahrglys-Talmar High Road,” Ahlzhernohn said now, coming to stand at Walkyr’s elbow with his cherrybean in his right hand. The forefinger of his left hand traced the road in question. “The fact that they’ve spread out to cover every lizard trail and cow path for thirty miles on either side of the road—and that the Harchongians at Marylys haven’t seen a thing—makes me pretty damned nervous, Your Eminence.”

  He tapped the dot of the fortified Harchongese position midway between Glacierheart and Lake Langhorne, then shook his head.

  “The natural tendency when something like this happens is to overestimate the numbers coming at you, and to be fair, it’s usually better to overestimate than underestimate. Of course, that’s not always the case.” He glanced up at Walkyr’s profile, and the archbishop militant grimaced in acknowledgment of the obvious reference to Cahnyr Kaitswyrth. “But to cover that much frontage, this has got to be at least a full Charisian mounted brigade. For that matter, it sounds like it’s at least a couple of them. That’s in the vicinity of sixteen thousand men. It’s not enough to pose a serious threat to any of our nodal positions, but it’s enough to drive our own cavalry back into our lines. That gives them a lot of freedom to roam around and do whatever the Shan-wei they came to do in the first place. And unless Symkyn’s managed to get around Silver Moon, they almost have to be from Eastshare.”

 
“It’s not very likely Symkyn’s gotten around Silver Moon, Your Eminence, but it is possible,” Bairahn said quietly. Walkyr looked at him—not in disagreement, but clearly inviting expansion—and his chief of staff shrugged. “Baron Silver Moon has a reputation—well-deserved, as far as I can tell—as an experienced and capable commander. But he’s not as … mobility-minded, I suppose, as some of Earl Silken Hills’ other commanders. From the sound of things, Symkyn’s cavalry has been quietly filtering around the flanks of Silver Moon’s position for quite some time now. There’s no sign of any serious movement against Marylys—not yet, at any rate—but there’s been a lot of skirmishing back and forth. Mostly reconnaissance activity, probably, and our latest evaluation out of Zion—” which meant “from the Inquisition,” Walkyr reflected as Bairahn shot him a sharp glance “—has been that it’s an effort to distract us from the heretics’ intentions farther south. They certainly haven’t launched anything like a serious attack on Silver Moon’s fortified positions or tried very hard to break his supply line. Whatever they’re up to, though, they’re managing to dominate the open space outside his lines and the chain of fortified posts he has along the High Road back to Lake Langhorne. So it’s possible Symkyn might have slipped a brigade or two past him.”

  “It’s possible,” Ahlzhernohn acknowledged, “but with all respect, My Lord, you’re right about how unlikely it is. Lord of Horse Silver Moon may not be as cavalry-minded as some, but he’s no fool, and he spent twenty-five years in the Imperial Army before the Harchongians raised the Mighty Host. He understands flank security, and those fortified posts of his on the high roads are big enough and close enough together that getting a force this size between them without anyone seeing a thing would be … let’s call it a real challenge.” The colonel shook his head. “No, it’s a lot more likely this is Eastshare, coming out of Glacierheart and using the farm roads northeast of Marylys.” He tapped the map again. “We still don’t show enough detail on this map, really, and the farm roads aren’t much compared to the high road, but they’re there. And the fact that every farm and village between Glacierheart and the Siddarmark border’s been deserted for so long means even large forces can move long distances without being spotted just because there’re no eyes left to see them. It’s almost like moving through the middle of a desert.”