Like a Mighty Army

by David Weber

  Rottweiler’s guns were grouped in three-gun divisions, five per broadside, each under the control of a lieutenant or a midshipman, and Mastyrsyn saw Fynlaityr standing beside Lieutenant Graisyn, commanding the forward starboard division. The gunner’s arms were crossed as he watched the youthful lieutenant with an almost fatherly expression. Graisyn fussed for a moment over the division’s number two gun, then stood back and raised his sword.

  Mastyrsyn couldn’t hear the command through the general bedlam, but he saw the sword come down. All three guns fired as one, and all three of them scored direct hits. Explosions roared, the target’s side disintegrated into splinters and fresh gouts of smoke.

  Fynlaityr was already pointing out the second raft to Graisyn, and Mastyrsyn nodded in satisfaction. The only disappointing aspect of the attack was that just as their spy reports had indicated, the Dahltyn yards had completed four new schooners which were waiting only for their crews before putting to sea. They’d hoped to surprise those schooners and add them to Admiral Shain’s squadron, but shifting, fluky winds had delayed the attack until well after dawn, and a lot of the smoke billowing above the harbor came from the schooners in question, set ablaze to prevent their capture. From the looks of things, the landing parties would be able to add the yards themselves to the bonfire shortly, along with the half-built hulls of two more schooners and a brig, the piles of timbers, the waiting sails, paint, turpentine, and pitch, and all the other components that went into building a ship.

  The seaman in Symyn Mastyrsyn grieved for the ships which would never sail, never have the opportunity to pit their strength and speed against the sea and its power. The naval captain in him rejoiced at those towers of smoke and showers of sparks and that, after all, was what mattered.

  Next time I’ll have to remember to bring the marshmallows, he thought as the nearer fire raft rolled up on its shattered side in a cloud of mingled smoke and steam. But for right now, I’ll settle for sinking that bitch right where she is.

  .VI.

  Guarnak, Mountaincross Province, Republic of Siddarmark

  Bishop Militant Bahrnabai Wyrshym was not in a pleasant mood as he gazed out his window at the Guarnak canalfront.

  There were several reasons for that, including how little water there was in that canal. Then there were the beached—and burned out—barges and warehouses serving as reminders of the Charisian raid which had left such ruin in its wake. Too many of the supplies which had been salvaged or shipped in since were under canvas rather than the weather-tight roofs which would soon be needed, thanks to that arson, despite all his work crews had been able to accomplish.

  Depressing as that was, what he couldn’t see from his office was even more depressing. The road net which now constituted his army’s only line of supply was already feeling the effect of sleet and snow, especially in the higher elevations. His quartermasters couldn’t keep the dragons on their feet much longer in the increasingly inclement weather, and the Harchongians were being their usual Harchongese selves, charging exorbitant prices for the snow lizards which were going to be a far less efficient substitute for the dragons. The Temple Lands had sent more than two thousand of them forward, but less than six hundred had yet arrived. Worse, the Temple Lands couldn’t send many more without seriously crippling their own transport system over the winter months.

  The fact that the heretics had driven the Faithful completely out of Midhold and out of all of Mountaincross east of the Moon Thorns and Kalgarans, inflicting heavy casualties in the process, made him no happier. There was at least one brighter side to that particular situation, however. The Mountaincross rangers had suffered badly in the process, and try as he might, Wyrshym couldn’t convince himself that was a bad thing. Aside from their knowledge of local terrain, they had virtually no military value and, frankly, he didn’t want them corroding the discipline of the Faithful militia he’d incorporated into the Army of the Sylmahn. Those militia had been transformed into soldiers worthy of the name, and he refused to see all that good work undone by brigands, rapists, and thieves.

  The influx of thousands of additional hungry civilians—the best current estimate put it at in excess of two hundred thousand of them, with more to come—was something else entirely. He was moving them farther west in one enormous convoy after another, as rapidly as he could, but until they got at least as far as Tarikah he had to feed them somehow, and this was a bad time to be dipping into the supply magazine he’d managed to build up here at Guarnak. The only good news on that front was that Archbishop Arthyn had managed to plant more cropland than anyone had anticipated, and the mild weather—up until the last few five-days, anyway—had given the crops time to ripen. Labor to harvest them had been in critically short supply, but Wyrshym had diverted as many of his rear area personnel to help as he could. Several of his pike regiments had paused on their way west to assist, as well, but even that would have been too few hands if not for Inquisitor General Wylbyr and Father Zherohm. Wyrshym knew he should feel no qualms over conscripting the labor of heretics and suspected heretics, and he couldn’t pretend he wasn’t vastly relieved that labor had been available. But neither could he pretend that when food came up short this winter, as it inevitably must, the miserable inhabitants of Wylbyr Edwyrds’ concentration camps, including the very ones who’d labored to make the harvest possible, would starve first.

  There was probably enough abandoned housing in Tarikah for the refugees, and that was good news, too. Yet while they might have roofs over their heads, they’d still need fuel, and there was precious little of that, since the sources which should have delivered the winter’s supply of coal during the warmer months had been … unavailable.

  Tarikah’s coal traditionally came from Glacierheart and the Ice Ash Mountains via the New Northland Canal and the Guarnak-Ice Ash Canal, both of which had suffered significant damage from the Sword of Schueler during the Rising. When they’d been put back into operation, they’d been needed to supply Wyrshym’s own advance; and then the heretics had smashed the entire Guarnak-Ice Ash and the critical western locks of the New Northland. Not only had no fuel been shipped from the east before they were put out of action, but even the Holy Langhorne Canal, the only remaining route to Tarikah, could send it no farther east than East Wing Lake. Nor had they been able to ship it via Hsing-wu’s Passage and the Hildermoss River. Even if the accursed Charisian Navy hadn’t been patrolling the Passage, sudden death on any shipping on the broad waterway which had always been Mother Church’s own, the heretic garrison at Salyk had sealed the mouth of the Hildermoss like a spiked cork. Besides, the Temple Lands, from which the fuel must now come, had always been a net importer of coal, and the ever increasing demand of the foundries and manufactories supporting the Jihad only made that worse.

  There were rich coalfields in North Harchong, but with so few canals and navigable rivers, shipping it anywhere had always been prohibitively costly, so there’d been little incentive to mine it. Harchongese production had increased over the last two years, despite the expense, but the loss of Glacierheart and Mountaincross coal had been a near catastrophic blow to Mother Church’s coking ovens. Indeed, one reason for Cahnyr Kaitswyrth’s advance into Glacierheart had been to secure control of the Glacierheart mines.

  And that didn’t work out, either, did it? Wyrshym reflected sardonically. By now, all those mines must be back into full operation, and I’m sure they’ve spent the last few months shipping coal east to Stohnar and his friends, instead.

  And then there were those “exhortations” from the Grand Inquisitor.

  Allayn Maigwair’s dispatches showed a grasp of the military realities; Zhaspahr Clyntahn didn’t seem to care very much about them. He was incensed by the manner in which the Faithful had been “driven from their homes by the bloodstained bayonets of heretics, blasphemers, and murderers.” Not content with hurling anathemas at the aforesaid heretics, he wanted to hurl the Army of the Sylmahn at them, as well, although precisely how he expected that
to happen was a bit less clear.

  It wasn’t as if Wyrshym didn’t want to counterattack. Indeed, he’d been contemplating just that long before Clyntahn started fulminating. It had been so tempting to leave a portion of his own force to confront the heretics south of Wyvern Lake and pull the rest of it around to the northeast, through the Ohlarn Gap and Northland Province, to hit Green Valley head on. Granted, with the pikemen’s departure his numerical advantage was less than it had been, but his actual combat power had increased and he still outnumbered the heretics substantially. The loss ratio would undoubtedly have favored Green Valley, but he ought to have been able to make his superiority in numbers effective outside the straitjacket of the Sylmahn Gap. If the Charisian general had been so considerate as to move far enough west, it was even possible Wyrshym might have gotten his far more numerous cavalry into Green Valley’s rear and done to the heretics’ supply lines what those accursed armored ships had done to his own.

  But desperately as he’d wanted to do that, Green Valley had amply demonstrated that he was no fool. It was unlikely he would allow his army to be so badly outmaneuvered as to be encircled or destroyed. At best, he might have been forced back south of Grayback Lake, which would have accomplished exactly nothing for the Army of the Sylmahn. And to manage even that would have required Wyrshym to draw heavily on the supplies he’d accumulated so laboriously at Guarnak. He’d dared not do anything of the sort when Green Valley’s displacement of the Faithful had already inflicted such a dangerous strain on those same supplies. He could all too easily have found his army literally starving to death, and he strongly suspected that was precisely what Green Valley had hoped he’d do.

  So far, Clyntahn had restricted himself to dictating blistering homilies to the Army of God’s chaplains; launching salvo after salvo of anathemas at the heretics, cursing them root and branch unto the hundredth generation; and “strongly urging” Wyrshym to be as aggressive and proactive as possible. The bishop militant was more grateful for Ernyst Abernethy—and the way he’d been corrupted by exposure to the realities the Army of God faced—with every passing day. The auxiliary bishop couldn’t argue openly with the Grand Inquisitor’s views or ignore Clyntahn’s correspondence, but he could—and did—craft his own reports and correspondence very carefully.

  And it wasn’t as if there wasn’t any good news, Wyrshym reminded himself. Rhobair Duchairn’s most recent estimate was that his repair crews ought to have completed repairs to the locks between Cat Lizard Lake and Five Forks, where the New Northland Canal joined the Hildermoss River, by mid-April, and the campaigning season in northern East Haven never started before May. That was better than Wyrshym had dared hope … and that accomplishment, too, would owe a great deal to the slave labor from Edwyrds’ concentration camps. Wyrshym wondered, in his darker moments, if Father Zherohm’s efficiency would extend to slaking the canals’ mortar with the ground skeletons of the camp inmates who would undoubtedly die laboring on them in the subzero temperatures of a Siddarmarkian winter.

  In his even darker moments, he knew how relieved he was that those inmates were there to do the dying if it would reopen the canals he needed so desperately.

  In addition to the more optimistic estimates about the repairs, Duchairn and Maigwair were promising him new and improved artillery by spring. Even allowing for the state of his supply line, Maigwair believed they might actually get the first few rifled field pieces to him by the end of November, and apparently one of his foundry masters had come up with at least a partial answer to the heretics’ portable angle-guns. In the meantime, he’d received an entire artillery regiment—four six-gun batteries—of full-sized angle-guns of his own. The concept had been copied from the Royal Dohlaran Army’s, but they were longer barreled and, unlike the Dohlarans’ twelve-pounders, the Army of God’s had been designed to fire the Navy of God’s standard twenty-five-pounder shells. They’d have far less range than the heretics’ angle-guns, but that still represented a vast improvement on anything the Army of the Sylmahn had previously possessed. More had been promised, and according to his latest messages from Maigwair the reliability of the artillery’s fuses had also been improved.

  But most enheartening of all was the new breech-loading rifle—the “St. Kylmahn Rifle,” they were going to call it. They’d actually sent a half dozen to Guarnak, accompanied by the caution that they were still experimental models, and he’d experienced the first true optimism he’d felt since the canal raid as he examined one of them and personally fired it. The name was apt, he thought, both because the rifles had been manufactured at St. Kylmahn’s Foundry and because Saint Kylmahn was one of the most revered of Mother Church’s warrior saints. He’d suffered martyrdom in the War Against the Fallen fighting under the command of the Archangel Chihiro himself, and no name could have been more fitting for such a magnificent weapon.

  Wyrshym had achieved an aimed rate of fire of six rounds per minute with the unfamiliar rifle, fifty percent higher than a trained, experienced rifleman could manage with a muzzleloader. He was confident that someone properly trained with a St. Kylmahn would be able to do even better. And if the hope in Maigwair’s private, wyvern-delivered letter turned out to be accurate—if he and Duchairn were able to convince Clyntahn to allow duplication of the heretics’ “priming caps”—his infantry would finally have a weapon which could meet the accursed Charisian infantry on their own ground.

  The bishop militant’s nostrils flared as he considered that possibility. Then he shook himself and turned away from the window. Hopeful as all that sounded, he was unlikely to receive the new rifles in useful numbers before February or even March. The Army of the Sylmahn would have to survive the winter without them, and that promised to be an unpleasant experience. But he’d experienced unpleasant things before. With a little luck, he’d live long enough to experience them again. And in the meantime, he had all of those reports and plans and conferences to work his way through if he intended to hold his army together long enough to kick the heretics’ arse.

  As motivators went, he thought, his eyes hardening, that one would take some beating.

  .VII.

  City of Cherayth, Kingdom of Chisholm, Empire of Charis

  “My God it’s brisk out there!”

  Tahvys Sahndfyrd shivered dramatically and made a beeline towards the iron stove. The cavernous fireplace which had once heated (more or less) the large, luxuriously furnished office had been closed with brickwork through which the Delthak Works stove had been ducted to the old flue, and a great improvement it was, too. Now he parked himself directly by the stove, holding his hands out over it, and Byndfyrd Raimahnd chuckled.

  “You only think it’s ‘brisk out there,’ Master Sahndfyrd.” The slightly built, silver-haired banker shook his head. “Spoiled by the climate in Tellesberg, that’s what you Old Charisians are!”

  “It’s brisk enough to do for me,” Sahndfyrd replied tartly. He was twenty years younger than Raimahnd, with brown hair and brown eyes which always looked a bit owlish behind their wire-rimmed spectacles. Of course, owls were predators, and they were quite sharp, those eyes.

  Raimahnd only smiled, although it was still at least ten degrees above freezing. Which, he supposed, probably was on the frigid side for someone who’d been born and raised in Tellesberg. He remembered his own single trip to the Charisian capital, with its brilliant flowers, exotic birds, and overpowering sunlight and wondered how well Sahndfyrd would survive a Chisholmian winter.

  Or if he was going to, for that matter.

  “Have a seat,” he invited. “If you want, you can pull that armchair over by the stove.”

  “Don’t think I won’t,” Sahndfyrd said with a twinkle.

  The Old Charisian wasn’t the most tactful individual Raimahnd had ever met, which might be something of a handicap in his mission to Chisholm, but he had a sense of humor, he was smart, and he knew the new manufacturing processes inside and out.

  “That was a nice touch, with Her Ma
jesty,” the Chisholmian said now, sitting behind his desk as Sahndfyrd did, indeed, pull one of the armchairs to within a couple of feet of the stove.

  “I wish I could claim credit for it, but she and His Majesty started the practice in Old Charis two years ago. It does rather make the point that the Crown’s behind our efforts, though, doesn’t it?”

  “It certainly does,” Raimahnd agreed, although the truth was that he was a bit in two minds about it.

  Having Empress Sharleyan herself turn the first spadeful of dirt for the new manufactory with a silverplated shovel had definitely underscored the Crown’s commitment. The fact that the Chisholmian treasury was a ten percent partner in the endeavor should have made that clear enough for anyone, but not everyone had realized that, despite his best efforts to make it public knowledge. Besides, the visual impact of Sharleyan stamping on the shovel to drive its blade into the earth of Chisholm was far more immediate.

  It had also drawn quite a crowd, which was the reason Raimahnd’s feelings were ambiguous. Her appearance had communicated Sharleyan’s support for the industrialization of Chisholm to the common folk in a way the esoteric details of investments and capitalization never could. And, as always, she’d been greeted by wildly enthusiastic cheers. Unfortunately, not everyone in the crowd had been equally enthused. In fact, the guilds were beginning to recognize the implications of Charisian-style manufactories in Chisholm. They weren’t entirely in favor of the notion, to say the very least, and those same enthusiastic crowds could all too easily provide cover for some lunatic with a pistol.