by David Weber
Walkyr stared at him, and even through his own rage, he felt Eastshare’s icy sincerity. He could surrender now, and the Charisians probably would honor the terms of that surrender. They might even be able—and willing—to protect their prisoners from the Siddarmarkian traitors. And if he didn’t surrender, Eastshare would indeed send his men in with orders to offer no quarter.
But if he surrendered, he failed Mother Church. Death in the service of God should hold no terror for any man, he told himself; failure to give God that service should terrify anyone. And whatever might happen to him or to his soldiers if he surrendered, Father Naiklos and every other Inquisitor attached to his force would be murdered anyway. He, Lairays Walkyr, would face God with their blood upon his hands as the man who’d handed them over to their murderers.
Besides, this arrogant prick may think my boys will roll over when they try to come across the walls, but he’s damned well wrong! He remembered his morning’s conversation with Vahnhain. If they’re really willing to send in an assault, they’ll finally come into range. After sitting out here and shooting and shelling us for a five-day while we couldn’t respond at all, they don’t have any idea what that means. And if they want to tell us they’ll be offering no quarter, so much the better! None of the boys will give an inch if they know they’re going to be killed anyway. We’ll break the bastards on the walls!
He glared at Eastshare and then, deliberately, spat on the ground.
“That for your offer of quarter. If you think you can take Fort Tairys, come ahead and try!”
“Oh, we won’t try, ‘General’ Walkyr.” Eastshare smiled thinly. “And at least you’ve just solved my problem about what to do with all the prisoners of war. Go back to the fort. By this time tomorrow, your problems will be over.”
Walkyr spat again, then turned and stalked back to his horse, accompanied by his stonefaced colonels. They mounted and went cantering back towards the battered fort, and Eastshare glanced at his aide.
“Go find Colonel Raimahn, Lywys. Tell him his request is approved.”
* * *
Byrk Raimahn waited as calmly as he could and hoped he looked calmer than he felt.
He wasn’t looking forward to this, and not simply because his experiences in the Green Cove Trace had disabused him of youth’s illusions of immortality. He’d discovered not only that he could die but that the world would go right on without him. He’d discovered other things, as well. Like the burning power of hatred. Like his own capacity to do whatever his duty required of him. Like the horrors of combat … and the greater horrors of combat’s aftermath.
In many ways, he suspected, the bitter, broken-back guerrilla warfare of the Gray Walls actually left him better prepared than Eastshare’s regulars for what was about to happen. Certainly there was no hesitation in the men of the 1st Glacierheart Volunteers, and some remnant of the man he’d been a year before wanted to weep because there wasn’t. He’d passed on their request to the duke because it was important to them, and he wished to all the Archangels that it wasn’t what they wanted. But almost more than he wished that, he wished it wasn’t what he wanted.
Someday this will be over, he thought, checking his double-barreled pistol. One day we’ll go home again—those of us who’re still alive and still have homes, anyway. And who will we be when we do? What are we going to do with the memories of the sights and the smells and the sounds? With the memories of what we’ve done and why … and of how we felt while we did it?
He was afraid of those questions’ answers. But for any of this to haunt them in years to come, first they had to survive. It was his job to see to it that as many of his men as possible did just that, and in the meantime.…
He heard the squelching, sucking sound of someone’s boots and turned as Sailys Trahskhat appeared beside him.
“Men’re ready, Sir,” the ex-baseball player reported. “Most of ’em’re really looking forward to seeing how these grenades work.”
Raimahn nodded. Duke Eastshare’s advance along the Branath Canal had allowed him to bring along a not so small mountain of ammunition. His artillery had expended quite a lot of that, but a fresh convoy of it was en route, scheduled to arrive within the next three days, along with a generous supply of Shan-wei’s fountains and footstools. He’d included large numbers of Charisian hand grenades in his original advance, however, and each of Raimahn’s infantrymen had been issued six of them. They’d spent a few days training with them during the canal voyage, but they’d had no opportunity to use them in combat and Trahskhat was right about how eager they were to try them out.
“And the mortars?”
“Ready to go, Sir, and so are the ASPs.”
Raimahn nodded again. No other army had ever been able to provide indirect fire, which meant no one else had ever been required to control it, either. That was what the ASPs, or Artillery Support Parties, were for. Equipped with heliographs, signal flags, rockets, and runners, they were trained to control and coordinate the fire of angle-guns and—especially—of the mortars of the ICA’s support platoons. The mortars’ ability to keep up with advancing infantry in almost any terrain was a huge advantage; the ASPs were designed to use it most effectively, and they’d proved their efficiency on the Daivyn. They were a welcome addition to any unit, especially ones like the Glacierheart Volunteers who had no mortars of their own and were forced to rely on those of their Charisian allies. That was one reason Raimahn had assigned an entire thirty-man section of riflemen as each ASP’s security element and as additional runners, if they turned out to be necessary.
“In that case,” he said, “I suppose you and I should wander along to join the party.”
“S’pose we should, Sir,” Trahskhat agreed, just as casually.
Neither of them fooled the other, of course.
* * *
“All three columns are ready to advance, Your Grace,” Sir Zhaksyn Traimynt reported.
The Duke of Eastshare didn’t reply for a moment. He was gazing through his double-glass at the smoke rising from Fort Tairys. The endless rain had ceased, and there were actually some breaks in the southwestern cloud cover. Afternoon sunlight struck down through the gaps, touching the sodden trees and grass like a lover’s hand and gilding the mountains to either side of Ohadlyn’s Gap in antique gold. It was still cold, though, and the air remained humid, with a wet chill that struck a man to the bone.
Of course, there were chills and then there were chills, and he wondered what might be going through the minds of Lairays Walkyr’s waiting men.
He hoped it was as unpleasant as they deserved.
The renewed thunder of his artillery rolled in waves as shellfire marched back and forth across the battered defenses. One of the angle-guns’ shells had found an ammunition magazine, and the resultant blast had produced an enormous fireball and found something flammable despite the past several days’ drenching rain. Eastshare imagined it had killed or maimed quite a few men in the process, and the rising smoke was still thick over an hour after the explosion.
He turned away and swept his double-glass across the waiting columns.
There were three of them. The left flank column was made up of three companies of the 1st Glacierheart Volunteers. The second, the one in the middle, consisted of 2nd and 3rd Battalions, 1st Regiment, ICA, while three companies of Colonel Bryntyn Howail’s 37th Infantry Regiment, Republic of Siddarmark Army, formed the right flank column.
General Wyllys had sent Howail’s regiment around through the foothills’ muddy, slippery paths for this very moment. Mostly to ensure that the RSA was represented in the attack, but the 37th Infantry had personal—and pointed—reasons of its own. Some of its men (not many, given how few of the original 37th had survived) remembered the Sylmahn Gap, and all of them had marched through the wreckage of western Shiloh. Like Byrk Raimahn’s Glacierhearters, the 37th had a score to settle with the men who’d betrayed the Republic, and there was only one coin in which they were prepared to accept paym
ent.
There were between thirteen hundred and two thousand men in each of those columns, with an additional four thousand waiting reinforcements. Each column was supported by four of his infantry support platoons, and he’d made certain they were amply provided with hand grenades.
He gazed at them for several seconds, seeing the differences between them. His Charisians and the Glacierhearters who’d trained with them had deployed clouds of skirmishers to cover their columns. They were already a good hundred yards ahead of the main body, scattered to take advantage of terrain features and shell holes while they maintained a steady, galling fire on the Temple Loyalist lookouts crouched along the shattered parapet. The 37th was in a more open formation than any pike square would have tolerated, but it remained tighter than the other columns, its men less comfortable with the ICA’s tactics. It was also more liberally festooned with company and section standards, and he saw additional bloodred streamers snapping on the breeze from every staff.
He knew what those streamers meant, and he lowered his double-glass slowly.
“All right, Zhaksyn. Fire the signal.”
* * *
The signal rocket arced heavenward, riding a ribbon of smoke, and exploded almost directly above Fort Tairys.
Byrk Raimahn watched it burst, and the flower of flame was greeted by a deep, hungry baying. It snarled up from deep in the men’s bellies, and then the ICA’s bugles gave it wings. They sounded clear and sharp, the signal to advance falling in the cascade of their notes, and the 1st Glacierheart Volunteers’ Charisian-trained buglers took up the call in turn.
There were no bugles from the 37th Infantry. The RSA used drum calls, and their deep-throated thunder was an earthquake rumble under the high, insistent chorus of the buglers. Yet even though Siddarmark used drum signals, each regiment had its pipers, as well, and they too could be used to pass orders upon occasion. Like this one, Raimahn thought, as the notes of “The Pikes of Kolstyr” rose in the fierce, skirling voice of the 37th’s war pipes.
“The Pikes of Kolstyr” dated from the first war between Desnair and the Republic, which had begun so disastrously for Siddarmark that the Desnairians had been certain the ultimate victory would be theirs. To encourage the Republic to acknowledge the inevitable, a Desnairian commander had accepted the surrender of the thousand-man garrison of the Siddarmarkian town of Kolstyr, four hundred miles inside Shiloh Province, on honorable terms. And when the garrison had marched out and stacked its weapons, he’d chosen one man in ten … and not killed him. Then he’d burned the town and sent the hundred survivors of its garrison back to their fellows minus their right hands as a pointed warning of what would happen to the Republic as a whole unless it abandoned the struggle.
Unfortunately for the Desnairian Empire, the Republic had taken a rather different lesson from his message, and “The Pikes of Kolstyr” was the result. In peacetime, it was a somber reminder of the price of duty; in wartime, it was the march the war pipes played when the Republic of Siddarmark intended to take no prisoners. Siddarmark had never been especially atrocity prone, but neither had it been shy about reprisals in the face of someone else’s atrocities. The Desnairians had learned that lesson the hard way; the men of the 37th Infantry intended to teach it to the Fort Tairys garrison, as well.
It was a pity they’d have so little time to profit from the tutorial.
Byrk Raimahn wasn’t the only man who recognized “The Pikes of Kolstyr,” and the roar that went up from the assault columns should have brought the sky crashing down in wreckage. For just a moment, Raimahn actually pitied the men inside those fortifications as they heard that hungry sound.
But only for a moment.
“All right, Sailys.” He had to raise his voice to be heard, yet the words came out unnaturally calm, almost cold, and Trahskhat looked at him levelly. “Let’s be about it. The Regiment will advance.”
.XIX.
Kharmych-Fort Tairys Road, The South March Lands, and Siddar City, Republic of Siddarmark
The Duke of Harless stared at the dispatch in his hands and tried to wrap his mind around its message.
It was short, and not simply because it had come by wyvern. Wyvern-borne dispatches were usually chary with word count, but this was more than that. This was the brevity of a man who’d known he had very little time to draft it.
He listened to the rain on his pavilion’s roof. It wasn’t the downpour of the last few days, but it was more than enough to prevent the ground from even contemplating drying out. And, he admitted, more than enough to spread still more sickness through his army’s ranks. The Army of Shiloh’s attached Pasqualates were doing all anyone could have done, but it was simply impossible to march two hundred thousand men and all their draft and food animals through these accursed winter rains without those men becoming riddled with illness. The pace at which he’d driven them only made that worse, and hunger, fatigue, and the lack of dry firewood had all combined to sap a little more of his army’s strength with every mile it marched.
He laid the dispatch on his field desk, leaned back in the upholstered chair with closed eyes, and pinched the bridge of his nose.
The dispatch was eight days old. It had taken that long to reach the wyvernry at Trevyr, seven hundred miles in his rear, and then overtake him. Much though it irritated Harless to admit it, they were fortunate Sir Fahstyr Rychtyr had thought to send Walkyr a wyvern coop—escorted by an entire cavalry company to make sure it arrived—before allowing himself to be penned up in Trevyr by the heretic Hanth last June. It was probably the single foresightful thing he’d managed to accomplish, but it had proved its worth.
The destruction wreaked upon the semaphore chain explained most of the dispatch’s delay in reaching him. Had the stations been intact all the way from Thesmar to Kharmych, Rychtyr could have transmitted it in little more than an hour. The need for relays of couriers to bridge the gaps had stretched that hour into more than a five-day. At that, he was fortunate it had reached him at all.
He drew a deep breath and reached for the handbell. Its incongruously cheerful jingling had barely ceased when his clerk appeared.
“Yes, Your Grace?”
“Inform my nephew I need to see him immediately. Then send messages to Father Tymythy, Earl Hankey, Earl Hennet, Baron Climbhaven, and Sir Borys Cahstnyr. I require their presence as soon as possible. And send a courier to General Ahlverez. Ask him to join us at his earliest convenience.”
The clerk’s eyes widened, but he knew better than to dally or ask questions when Harless spoke in that tone.
“Of course, Your Grace,” he said instead and vanished once more.
* * *
Sir Rainos Ahlverez managed to keep his tongue between his teeth as his horse trotted past the well-sprung, mud-splashed coaches drawn up on either side of the high road. Harless’ was the biggest and most luxurious, but Hennet and Hankey weren’t far behind when it came to pampering their fat arses. He was inclined to be more generous where Baron Climbhaven and Sir Borys Cahstnyr were concerned; the artillerist’s crippled leg must be more painful than ever in this sort of weather, and Sir Borys’ health, never robust, was breaking down. More than that, the two of them had agreed to share a single coach when Harless ordered the Army of Shiloh to strip down for the forced march to relieve Fort Tairys. Obviously none of that army’s more senior Desnairian officers had been able to emulate that sacrifice.
To be fair, the army had covered over three hundred and seventy miles in eleven days, a hundred and thirty of them through the heart of the Kyplyngyr Forest, which would have been a very creditable rate of advance for most armies of bygone days. Unfortunately, they weren’t in “bygone days.” Even worse, the Desnairian component of the Army of Shiloh was in seriously depleted condition. His own troops had fared far better, partly because they found it relatively easy to match the Desnairians’ pace but more because they’d been properly supplied from the outset. Sluggish though the army’s speed might seem to Ahlverez and his of
ficers, it was still too rapid for foragers to sweep up the supplies the Desnairians required, and the four days they’d spent crossing the Kyplyngyr had been a nightmare, without even grass for grazing. Short rations, rain, mud, cold, and poor shelter had exercised their inevitable baleful effect and Harless had lost somewhere close to twenty percent of his total troop strength to illness, exhaustion, or outright desertion. Ahlverez had been forced to leave more of his own men behind with the healers than he’d liked, but his desertion rate was miniscule and his total losses to all causes had been little more than five percent.
