Hell's Foundations Quiver (7 page)

The column of marching infantry swung along on their snowshoes with the practiced gait of men who'd spent the last several five-days regaining and sharpening their skills. It was unlikely many Army of God patrols would be out and about in the snow and cold (in fact, Green Valley knew from the SNARCs that none of them were), yet the scout sniper battalions ranged well out in front of the main column on cross-country skis. He couldn't exactly tell them there was no one in the vicinity, and he wouldn't have even if he could. There were limits to how many “inspired guesses” he could make, and however readily he could talk with the other members of the inner circle, he was limited to more mundane methods of communication with his subunit commanders … none of whom had the SNARC access he did. Even when the SNARCs told him exactly what they might be walking into, it wouldn't do any good unless he had some way to tell
them
, which all too often he would not. They needed the sort of reconnaissance which was the scout snipers' specialty, and it was best that they stay in the habit of making certain they had it.

Behind the infantry, caribou and snow lizards hauled heavy cargo sleds, loaded with food, fuel, forage, and ammunition. Each infantry support squad was accompanied by its assigned caribou, pulling its mortars and ammunition on dedicated sleds, and each twelve-man squad of infantry towed two sleds of its own. One normally carried the men's packs, sparing them that sixty-pound load, at least, while the other was loaded with the arctic tent assigned to that squad. The tent's outer layer was steel thistle silk—light, strong, and so tightly woven it was virtually impervious to wind. The inner layer was woven cotton, quilted with eiderdown, and when the tent was erected there was an insulating two-inch airspace between the layers. The same sled also carried a lightweight steel chimney and a relatively small but highly efficient oil-fired stove. In a worst-case scenario, a smoke hood could be rigged at the base of the chimney to permit other fuels to be used in an open fire pit, although that would be very much a second—or third—choice for the tent's occupants. It also would have posed a small problem for the tightly rolled caribou-hide sleeping mats strapped to the sleds to provide an insulating floor inside the tents.

Sleeping bags had been provided, as well, made in three layers—an inner removable liner, once again of steel thistle silk, followed by a thickly quilted insulating layer of eiderdown, followed by an outer layer of additional, insulated wind-resistant steel thistle silk. The liberal use of thistle silk was expensive, even for the Charisian textile industry, but it was no longer
prohibitively
expensive, and it also meant they were light enough to carry rolled and lashed to the top of a rifleman's pack. They were undeniably bulky, however, and because they made awkward loads, they were normally stowed on the sleds with the tents.

The men themselves wore white snow smocks over fleece-lined outer parkas and trousers of supple, well-tanned caribou hide. Inside that came inner parkas of steel thistle silk-lined, triple-knit wool over woolen shirts and corduroy trousers, and more steel thistle silk had been expended on each man's long-sleeved and legged underwear. That “layered” effect was essential for arctic clothing, and the silk served as a barrier against the menace of water vapor. Arctic air could accept less water as vapor, so moisture like sweat quickly condensed out of it. The steel thistle silk prevented perspiration from saturating the layers outside it, which would quickly have destroyed their insulating capacity.

To protect his hands, each man wore heavy, multilayered mittens or thick fleece-lined gloves over an inner glove of knitted wool and a separate liner of steel thistle silk. The mittens were warmer than gloves because they gathered and held the heat of the entire hand, not individual fingers, but they were clumsy, to say the least, and the gloves allowed greater manual dexterity when it was required.

Boots had been as carefully considered as the rest of the troops' gear. Made of sealskin and lined with fleece, they had double soles and an inner, moccasin-like liner which could be removed to dry, or worn as a sort of house shoe inside one of the tents.

The weight of all those garments was a significant burden, but one which allowed them to move and operate in temperatures far below freezing. Nature had provided the caribou and snow lizards with their own formidable insulation, and the High Hallows had been bred by centuries of Chisholmian breeders for conditions very similar to these. Nonetheless, arctic rugs had been provided for the horses as additional protection if the temperature plunged still lower.

The snow made marching difficult, even with snowshoes, but it provided easy going for the sleds which followed in the broad, beaten-down lanes the infantry's snowshoes provided. In many ways, conditions were actually less difficult than they might have been for dragons pulling conventional wagons cross-country in mid-summer.

And best of all
, Green Valley thought,
no one on the other side has a clue of just how winter-mobile we are
.

If he'd ever entertained any doubts on that subject, the SNARC imagery of the Army of God's outposts would have put them to rest. Very few of those half-frozen men, shivering in inadequate clothing as they crouched around fires in whatever structures they'd found or whatever huts they'd been able to piece together, had any interest in going
anywhere
else. Nor would they survive if their shelters were destroyed, Green Valley reflected, his expression bleak under the two layers of snow mask—what would have been called balaclavas back on Old Earth—and the ski goggles he and every other man in the column wore. Freezing to death was a very unpleasant way to die, and the baron took no pleasure in the thought of inflicting that particular death even on his enemies.

Which wouldn't stop him from doing it for a moment.

 

.V.

Two Recon Skimmers, Above East Haven, and Nimue's Cave, The Mountains of Light, The Temple Lands

“I never imagined clouds could look so beautiful from above,” Aivah Pahrsahn said softly. She sat in the recon skimmer's rear seat, turned to the left to look down from the rear canopy over its wingtip as it banked, and the moon shining down through the thin, cold atmosphere turned the clouds' summits into shining silver and their gulfs into bottomless ebon canyons far below. “I always knew God was an artist, but this.…”

She shook her head, and Merlin smiled as he gazed out through his own canopy. They'd come two thousand miles from Siddar City in a little over three hours; they should reach their destination in the Mountains of Light in another hour and a half. He'd been a bit surprised by how calmly Aivah had taken the materialization of not one but two recon skimmers out of the snowy dark, but however calm she'd been, her sense of wonder had been obvious. If she'd felt any trepidation at climbing the access ladder into the needle-nosed, swept-wing skimmer, she'd concealed it admirably, and her enjoyment of the trip so far reminded Merlin irresistibly of Cayleb Ahrmahk's first flight.

He leveled the skimmer as he completed the turn, and glanced out over his starboard wing to where an identical skimmer kept meticulous station upon him. He hadn't initially anticipated needing both of them, but each could carry only a single extra passenger and Aivah had insisted upon being accompanied by Sandaria Ghatfryd, who'd been her personal maid for the last two decades. At first, he'd been surprised by the anxiety that seemed to indicate, but that lasted for only a very few minutes after the two women had joined him in the service alley behind Madam Pahrsahn's luxurious townhouse.

Sandaria was a good two inches shorter than Aivah, with mousy brown hair, a swarthy complexion, and an even more pronounced epicanthic fold than most Safeholdians, courtesy of her Harchongese mother. Merlin knew she'd been with Aivah for at least twenty years; what he hadn't known (until Aivah explained there in the alley) was that she'd actually been with her ever since Nynian Rychtair's convent days. In fact, Sandaria Ghatfryd had been a novitiate at the same time, and today she was a senior member of the Sisters of Saint Kohdy, not to mention Aivah's second-in-command … and closest confidante.

Sandaria, unlike Aivah, had evinced a little nervousness when they emerged from the city via one of Aivah's discreet routes and she discovered that she and Aivah would be aboard separate skimmers. She'd handled the silent appearance of the craft remarkably calmly; it was clearly the
separation
that concerned her. Unfortunately, except for the armored personnel carriers—and the full-sized assault shuttles—in Nimue's Cave, they were the only passenger vehicles available. The assault shuttles were about the size of an old pre-space jumbo jet, and hiding something that size in proximity to Siddar City would have been … a nontrivial challenge even with Federation technology. The APCs were smaller and more readily concealable than assault shuttles, but they were also much slower. Even on counter-grav, they were uncompromisingly subsonic, capable of only about five hundred miles per hour, and Merlin preferred to have a supersonic dash capability in hand, just in case. And while the far smaller air lorries were easier to conceal, they'd been designed to transport
cargo
. It had never occurred to anyone they might find themselves shuttling people back and forth from Nimue's Cave in job lots. Now that the possibility had suggested itself to them, Owl's remotes were busy converting two of those lorries into air buses at this very moment, but the process would require another day or so, and no one had wanted to wait the extra time.

Besides, the second recon skimmer had let him bring along a second pilot.

“How much longer will it take, Merlin?” Aivah asked now, and he looked down into the small display which connected him to the rear cockpit.

Aivah looked back out of it at him as if she'd been using coms all her life. She'd operated the controls he'd demonstrated to her with equal facility and confidence, and a smile tugged at the corners of his lips as he reflected on why she'd needed only a single demonstration.

Yet another mystery solved
, he thought dryly.
No wonder the SNARCs and I never caught her decoding anything. She never
needed
to! And I do feel a little better about her remembering details of Ahbraim and Merlin to match against each other. “I have a very good memory,” indeed!

The rare gene group which produced true eidetic memory had been discovered (many skeptics had argued that “invented” was a better verb) in the mid-twenty-first century, and gengineering it into children had been something of a fad for the next fifty years. It had been far less damaging than
some
of those fads had proven before the whole field of human genetic design was brought under rigorous control, but with the development of direct neural interfacing and the cloud storage of memories,
everyone
had effective eidetic memory. Interest in the ability had waned, and far fewer parents had opted to build it into their offspring. Nonetheless, it had remained far more common than it had been among earlier generations and it still cropped up occasionally—not often, but more frequently than on pre-space Old Earth—on Safehold.

Nynian Rychtair had it. She'd never needed to consult her codebooks when she wrote or read a message, because she carried them—
all
of them—in her head. Merlin and Owl had always known she smuggled a voluminous correspondence back and forth across the Border States, despite the war, but so far as they'd been able to tell, all of it was fairly innocuous: correspondence with the business managers she'd left behind, letters to some of the young women who had worked for Ahnzhelyk Phonda for so long, or messages from refugees to family and friends left behind, for example. They'd been unable to keep track of all of that correspondence once it flowed into Zion or other major Temple Land cities, and since they'd “known” none of it had been encoded—and that Aivah was on their side, at least for now—they hadn't actually tried all that hard, given all the other charges on Owl's surveillance ability.

“We should be there in about another ninety minutes,” he said now. “We'll get there well before dawn, not that I expect anyone would be in a position to see us even at high noon. Not in the middle of the Mountains of Light in March.”

“I imagine that would be … somewhat unlikely,” she acknowledged, and he snorted.

“I think you can pretty much take it for granted. That's the real reason Nimue's Cave was located here in the first place.”

“‘Nimue's Cave'?” she repeated with a quirked eyebrow. “That's an odd name, even for a
seijins
' training camp. Does Captain Chwaeriau's name have anything to do with the person it's named for?”

“Actually, it does. Quite a lot, in fact. I can't explain exactly what the connection is—not yet—but I think you'll understand once we get around to explaining everything else to you.”

“I'm looking forward to that … I think.” Aivah's eyes gleamed with anticipation, yet his indirect reference to how little she still knew, how much faith it had required to come this far on the basis of so few hard facts, awakened an undeniable darkness under the anticipation. “I have to admit it was probably wise of you not to tell me quite how far we'd have to travel for that explanation until we were in the air. I won't guarantee I wouldn't have backed out and run for my life, despite Saint Kohdy's journal and his description of his
hikousen
, if you'd told me any sooner!”

She did not, he noticed, mention how much easier the isolation of their destination would make it if the inner circle ultimately decreed she must disappear.

“Oh, I think you're made of sterner stuff than that,” he said out loud. “Still, honesty compels me to admit that my timing wasn't exactly a coincidence.”