By Heresies Distressed (53 page)

Sergeant Edvarhd Wystahn sat on the forward thwart with his rifle standing upright between his knees while he peered at the featureless, black blur of the coast. Aside from a pale froth where the gentle surf piled up on the beach of tawny sand, he could make out no details. He thought he could just see the loom of the hills beyond the beach, standing up against the starry sky, but he was fairly sure that was his imagination.

I've spent too long studying the damned maps
, he thought wryly.
For the last five-day, I've even been
dreaming
about them!

Actually, that wasn't such a bad thing. One of the primary tenets of the scout-snipers was that it made far more sense to wear themselves out ahead of time planning and training for an operation than it did to take casualties a little forethought might have avoided.

“
Easy!
” the petty officer in charge of the surf boat hissed. “Toss oars. Styv, Zhak—over the side!”

The boat swooped over the last swells, held bows-on to the beach by the sea anchor streamed over her stern, and the indicated seamen swung themselves over the gunwales and into the chest-deep water. They half-floated towards the shore, leaning their weight against the boat to guide it. Their feet found purchase as the water grew quickly shallower, and then the bow slid onto the sand with a quiet “
scrunch
.” The sound was just audible through the noise of wind and wave, and the petty officer nodded to Wystahn.

“This is where you get out, Sergeant,” he called softly, and Wystahn saw the faint flash of white teeth in a broad grin. “Good hunting.”

Wystahn nodded back, then turned to the other members of his double-squad.

“All right, lads,” he told them. “Let's be going.”

He stepped over the side and waded through the wash of water, with the waves surging knee-high as they slid up the shelving beach on the last of their dying strength. Sand swirled away from under his boot soles, carried back out to sea by the receding water, and the flow plucked playfully at his calves. The solid ground seemed to curtsy underfoot as he stepped clear of the surf at last, but he ignored that—and the seawater squelching in his boots—while he looked around, then up at the stars, trying to get his bearings.

“It looks like the swabbies put us in the right spot . . . for a change,” he said, and several of his men chuckled softly. “It's blacker nor the inside of a dirty boot,” he continued, “but I'm thinking that's our hill yonder.”

He pointed, then gave the stars one more look, taking his bearings, and nodded to Ailas Mahntyn, the senior of his two corporals.

“Off you go, Ailas. Try not t' fall over your own flat feet!”

Mahntyn snorted and started off through the darkness. Wystahn and the rest of the scout-snipers allowed the corporal to open a suitable lead, then followed him up the beach and into the high, stiff grass that rustled and whispered back to the murmuring sea in the steady wind.

“I hope this brilliant idea of mine is going to live up to its billing,” Emperor Cayleb remarked as he stood on
Empress of Charis'
sternwalk and gazed up at the same stars Sergeant Wystahn had just consulted. No hills were visible from where Cayleb stood, but he could see starlight glimmering on the sails of at least a half-dozen galleons, and he shook his head. “I don't think Bryahn is particularly happy about closing the land in the middle of the night this way,” he added.

“Nonsense,” Merlin said from where he stood “guarding” Cayleb even here. “Why should any admiral be concerned about sailing directly towards a beach he can't even see with twelve warships and sixty transport galleons loaded with fifteen or twenty thousand Marines?”

“Oh, thank you.” Cayleb turned to lean his back against the sternwalk railing and looked at him. “You do know how to bolster someone's confidence, don't you?”

“One tries,” Merlin told him, stroking one of his waxed mustachios. Cayleb chuckled, and Merlin smiled, but his smile faded quickly as he remembered another night on another ship's sternwalk and his final conversation with King Haarahld.

Oh, give it a rest!
he told himself.
And stop looking for bad omens, too. Cayleb's hardly going ashore in the first wave!

“How are they doing?” Cayleb asked in a considerably more serious tone, and Merlin shrugged.

“So far, so good.” He considered the schematic Owl was transmitting to him from the SNARCs watching over the small groups of Charisian Marines filtering inland. “Most of them landed within a thousand yards or so of the right spot,” he continued. “We've got one group that managed to get itself put ashore over a mile south of where it's supposed to be, but it's one of the dummies. At the moment, it looks like the rest of them are pretty much on schedule.”

“Good.”

Cayleb turned and stood gazing out into the night once again for several moments. Then he inhaled sharply and shook himself.

“Good,” he repeated. “Now, as Domynyk recommended to me before Rock Point, I think it's time I got some sleep.”

“I think that's an excellent idea,” Merlin agreed.

“Well, there's not anything else useful I can do until dawn,” Cayleb pointed out. He sounded much calmer about it all than Merlin knew he actually was, but he also waved one finger in Merlin's direction. “As for you,
Seijin
Merlin, under the circumstances, I'll grant you a dispensation on your ‘downtime.' But only for tonight, mind you!”

Merlin snorted and bowed ironically to him.

“Yes, Your Imperial Majesty. Whatever you say, Your Imperial Majesty,” he said unctuously.

Wystahn sighed in relief as Ailas Mahntyn rose silently out of the steep hillside's grass. The sergeant's raised hand stopped the men following along behind him in their tracks, and Mahntyn pointed farther up the slope.

“Right where they said she'd be, Sarge,” the corporal murmured through the steady sigh of the wind. “Four of 'em. Got them a signal mast and some flags. Looks like a signal fire, too. Two of 'em 're asleep. Got one man sittin' up on a big old rock—reckon he's got th' duty. Last one's making some tea or somethin'. Lookout's ‘bout fifty yards that way.” He pointed upslope and to the right. “Cooking fire an' th' signal gear's that way.” He pointed to the left. “Got their tents and other gear on th' back side of th' slope.”

“Good work,” Wystahn replied quietly.

Ailas Mahntyn had even less formal education than Wystahn did, but he'd grown up in the Lizard Range Mountains, and his ability to move silently—not to mention his ability to see in apparently total darkness—was phenomenal. He had a woodsman's eye for terrain and a hunter's ability to put himself inside the mind of his quarry, and his own brain was dagger-sharp, despite any lack of schooling. Wystahn was working with him on his letters, since literacy was one of the requirements for a scout-sniper sergeant. Privately, although he'd been careful not to mention it to Mahntyn, he wouldn't be a bit surprised if the corporal ended up an officer, assuming he ever got a firm grip on reading and writing. Which wasn't a certain thing, unfortunately. Mahntyn was trying harder than he would have cared to admit to anyone, but letters were more elusive than any prong lizard as far as he was concerned.

The sergeant brushed that thought aside, then turned and beckoned for the rest of the double-squad to close up on him and Mahntyn.

“Say it again for them,” he told the corporal, and listened himself, just as carefully the second time as he had the first. When the corporal had finished, Wystahn started handing out assignments.

“—and you've got th' lookout,” he finished two minutes later, tapping Mahntyn on the chest.

“Aye,” the corporal replied laconically, and nodded to the other three men of his section.

They were just as taciturn as he was, and almost as quiet. Wystahn might have heard a single boot scrape quietly over a rock . . . but he might not have, too. In either case, he had no worry about what was about to happen to the lookout. He'd given that task to Mahntyn partly because the corporal was the best man for the job in a general sense, but also because Mahntyn had already spotted the Corisandian. He knew exactly where the lookout was, and Wystahn was sure he'd already worked out the best way to approach him. The man making tea, or whatever he was doing, would be illuminated by his cook fire, and his night vision would be nonexistent, if he'd been sitting there looking into the fire while he worked. The other two were asleep in their tents, which meant none of the three of them were likely to notice anyone creeping up on them. The lookout, on the other hand, was sitting there in the dark with his eyes fully adjusted, and the nature of his duty meant he was at least supposed to be alert. Soldiers being soldiers, and given the fact that not even one of the archangels could have seen anything more than a few hundred yards offshore under the available light conditions, he probably wasn't as alert as he ought to have been, but Edvarhd Wystahn wasn't going to assume that. And if the Corisandian was paying attention to his duties, sneaking up on
him
was going to be a significantly more difficult task.

“All right,” the noncom said to the men he hadn't sent off with Mahntyn, “let's go wake these lads up.”

Emperor Cayleb stepped onto
Empress of Charis'
quarterdeck and gazed up at the sky. Wispy cloud was moving slowly in from the east, but it was obviously high and thin, not the storm clouds which had been entirely too common for the previous couple of months. The stars continued to shine overhead, but those thin banners of cloud were a lighter gray, as if the sun were beginning to peer over the edge of the world, and the night had that feeling dawn sends ahead of itself. Captain Gyrard and his officers gave the emperor a respectful distance as he strode to the taffrail and looked astern. HMS
Dauntless
followed in the flagship's wake, and it was definitely easier to see her than it had been earlier.

Captain Athrawes had been talking quietly to Captain Gyrard until the emperor arrived. Now the
seijin
nodded to Gyrard and walked across the deck to stand behind Cayleb with his hands clasped behind his own back in an attitude of respectful waiting.

The emperor completed his survey of sky, sea, and wind, then turned to his personal armsman.

“Well?” he asked softly.

“Well,” Merlin agreed, equally softly, with a very slight bow.

No one with ears less acute than Merlin's could possibly have heard the exchange through the inevitable background noises of a sailing ship underway at sea. No one else needed to hear, however, and somehow, without actually changing a bit, Cayleb's expression seemed to lighten.

Merlin's expression didn't, but, then, he'd already known the answer to Cayleb's question. The boat parties of scout-snipers had been carefully briefed on exactly where they were supposed to go once they were ashore. As far as General Chermyn and his officers were concerned, they'd been dispatched to
suspected
lookout posts—the places where Emperor Cayleb had decided
he
would have placed sentinels to watch his seaward flank if he were Sir Koryn Gahrvai and feeling particularly paranoid.