Hell's Foundations Quiver (70 page)

*   *   *

“This is starting to make me a little nervous,” Cayleb Ahrmahk acknowledged.

Eight in the morning on Shwei Bay was thirteen o'clock, the Safeholdian equivalent of noon, in Siddar City, and the remains of lunch sat on the table between him and Aivah Pahrsahn. They awaited the arrival of Henrai Maidyn and Daryus Parkair, the Republic's Chancellor of the Exchequer and Seneschal, who were en route to the embassy to discuss the latest dispatches from General Stohnar and Duke Eastshare. Although Maidyn did his dead level best—generally successfully—not to resent the efficiency of the Charisian spy network which provided the vast bulk of the Allies' intelligence, there was no point pretending his own agents had anywhere near the penetration and reach Charis did. Cayleb—well, more precisely
Seijin
Merlin and his far-flung web of spies—and Madam Pahrsahn were far more effective, and the Republic had come to rely upon them heavily.

“It's not precisely causing me to turn handsprings of delight either, Your Majesty,” Sir Dunkyn Yairley said over the com from his flagship as HMS
Destiny
and her small squadron continued to drive steadily eastward across the Sea of Harchong under the pressure of a far more lively westerly. It was only three in the morning aboard
Destiny
, but he and Lieutenant Aplyn-Ahrmahk had roused early for the conference. “I understand exactly what Sir Bruhstair is doing, and I think he's right. I also like to think I'd've made the same call in his place, and it's true that anyone who refuses to run a risk guarantees he can never win. But Rohsail's better coordinated than he'd expected—than
I'd
expected, for that matter—and with the wind conditions he's been encountering.…”

His voice trailed off and he shook his head.

“I believe you've had a little experience of your own with … adverse wind conditions, My Lord,” Merlin observed.

He stood gazing out the window of the conference room in which Cayleb, Aivah, Maidyn, and Parkair would shortly gather. Ostensibly, he was conducting the routine security check he and the other members of the Imperial Guard carried out before any meeting of such august personages, but the imagery he was actually watching was a display of Harchong's Shwei Province. Small green and crimson icons crept slowly across it, moving steadily south, and there were far more of the red ones.

“Yes, I have,” Baron Sarmouth acknowledged. He was still new enough to the inner circle to feel a flicker of uneasiness talking to the fearsome
Seijin
Merlin through a medium all previous training and experience insisted had to be demonic, but his mouth quirked in a smile. “In fact, Hektor and I both have. It was a rather different sort of adverseness, however.”

“Agreed,” Cayleb said. “On the other hand, even though you and he didn't know it at the time, Sharleyan and I were both watching through the SNARCs the whole time you were fighting that hurricane. When I told you afterward how much I admired your seamanship, especially after that anchor cable snapped, I was speaking from a more … informed perspective than you probably realized.”

“You should've seen it from his quarterdeck, Cayleb,” Hektor put in. “I don't think any of us would've believed he could pull it off if there'd been time to stop and think about it.” The lieutenant shrugged. “Fortunately, there wasn't. We were too busy doing what he told us to do to worry about whether or not it was the right thing!”

“Well, that may be true,” Sarmouth's embarrassment at their praise was evident, “but it doesn't change the fact that Rohsail's managed to make up at least a full day's sail on them. Or that between them he and Raisahndo have better than three times Ahbaht's strength.”

“No, it doesn't,” Merlin agreed. “And I wish there were a way we could tell him all of that.” He grimaced unhappily. “I keep telling myself this isn't going to be Gwylym Manthyr and the Battle of the Harchong Narrows all over again, but it's not the easiest thing I've ever tried to convince myself of.”

“I don't see any sign of the sort of heavy weather that crippled Gwylym's rigging, and neither does Owl,” Cayleb pointed out. “And Rohsail may have made up time on them, but so has
Dreadnought
. Haigyl ought to catch up with Ahbaht well before Rohsail could overtake either of them, and I can't think of a captain I'd rather have supporting me. As long as those damned screw-galleys aren't part of the equation,
Thunderer
and
Dreadnought
between them ought to just about equalize the odds. And don't forget about
Tumult
and
Turmoil
; they aren't armored, but those rifled angle-guns are going to blow great big holes through any galleon that gets in their way.”

“Forgive me for asking this,” Aivah said, “but I'm not as informed about boats as all you Charisians are.” Cayleb winced at the word “boats,” and Aivah's eyes twinkled at him briefly. “But how dangerous
are
those ‘screw-galleys'?”

“That's the thousand-mark question,” Merlin replied. “The six-inch rifles ought to punch through their armor, but it's thicker than we originally projected the Dohlarans would be able to produce. At least it's iron, not steel, and it isn't face-hardened the way Ehdwyrd's armor plate is, but it's going to stand up to thirty-pounder shells all day long. Even solid thirty-pound round shot probably won't be able to break through without pounding a lot of hits into the same piece of plating, and I'm none too sure
standard
six-inch shells will penetrate it as readily as we'd all like, either. I'm confident the armor piercing can handle it, but neither of the ironclads have as many rounds of that as I'd like, and the bombardment ships have even less of it.”

“But only the forward parts of their hulls are armored, aren't they?”

“For all intents and purposes,” Merlin agreed. “They have some light plating to protect their helmsmen from small-arms fire and wolves, but aside from that, two-thirds of their hulls are unarmored. The problem is that between their schooner rig and those damned propellers, they could easily keep their bows towards our ships in weather conditions like this. For that matter, they could manage it even in considerably heavier winds, under the right circumstances. And to make bad worse, they can work upwind of any of our galleons under sail alone with that fore-and-aft rig, which doesn't even consider their ability to move directly into the wind under power. When you add that to the weight of the guns they carry forward, you get something a lot more dangerous than it ought to be.”

“And they're faster than they ought to be, too.” The frustration in Hektor's tone was obvious. “They should barely be able to move ‘under power' without steam!”

“Propellers are more efficient than oars, although I didn't really expect Zhwaigair to give the cranks such a heavy gearing advantage,” Merlin said philosophically. “And they built the things light enough to give them decent ‘sprint' capability. On the other hand, the gears're a potential weak spot—they've certainly had enough of them break in training exercises—and that light build of theirs is why they're so fragile, and
that
means that out on blue water they'll be even more useless than Dohlar's galleys were off Armageddon Reef.”

“Which would help a lot if we weren't talking about an inland bay,” Cayleb pointed out sourly. He glowered at the same map imagery Merlin was looking at, then shook himself. “Well, there's not anything we can do about the situation from here, anyway.” His lips twisted for a moment. “Something I've had a lot more experience with than I ever wanted. And in the meantime, Henrai and Daryus will be here any minute. Which brings us to the ice on Wyvern Lake and our good friend Bishop Gorthyk.”

His lips twitched again, in a far more unpleasant smile.

 

.V.

The Sylmahn Gap, Mountaincross Province, Republic of Siddarmark

General Trumyn Stohnar checked his watch again.

It was, alas, only seven minutes later than the last time he'd looked, which didn't seem possible, given the iron will with which he'd stopped himself—dozens of times, surely!—from pulling it back out of his pocket in the interim.

He snorted at his own anxiety, wondering how it felt for the men under his command who were waiting for the same event. The Army of Hildermoss was a far cry from the desperate, outnumbered, and dwindling force he'd commanded the previous spring. The handful of starving, exhausted regiments had been transformed into six rifle divisions, supported by six regiments of Siddarmarkian dragoons, and if their equipment remained inferior to that of their Charisian allies, it was enormously better than the Republic of Siddarmark Army had ever before boasted. Every one of its eighty thousand infantrymen was equipped with a bayoneted rifle, over a third of them breechloaders; every one of its twelve thousand dragoons was equipped with a rifle or a rifled carbine; and his divisions were equipped with over two thousand mortars and almost six hundred field guns. Admittedly, the field guns were still the naval thirty-pounders and fourteen-pounders mounted on field carriages Charis had provided, rather than the four-inch rifled guns equipping more and more of the ICA's field artillery regiments, but they still gave his artillery park a massive punch.

And if
he
didn't have any of the Charisians' rifled field guns, he knew where he could—

A rocket soared upward out over the predawn blackness of Wyvern Lake.

*   *   *

“Sir!
Colonel Olyvyr!”

Bryntyn Olyvyr's spine snapped upright in his camp chair, sloshing half his meager cup of precious hot chocolate over his tunic. It was only five o'clock, still well short of sunrise this far north this early in the year, and he'd been half drowsing over his spartan breakfast, allowing his mind to dream of home, of his wife and three sons.

He swore softly but with feeling as he spilled the chocolate, but more at his own clumsiness than at his aide. Lieutenant Dahntahs had been with him since the St. Yura Division marched east the previous summer. He didn't interrupt his colonel on a whim, and whatever had startled that tone into his voice probably foretold something far worse than a chocolate-soaked tunic.

The door of his headquarters hut opened, and young Dahntahs half flew through it. His brown eyes were wide, and his normally unruly hair seemed to bristle in all directions as he skidded to a halt.

“What is it, Taydohr?” Olyvyr asked sharply.

“A signal rocket, Sir—out over the lake!”

A chill which owed nothing to the cold, damp morning started somewhere around the nape of Olyvyr's neck, ran down his spine, and took up residence in his perpetually hungry stomach. Every officer in the Army of the Sylmahn knew the heretics would attack as soon as the weather permitted them to move, but Wyvern Lake's ice had been melting for five-days, hastened by the beginning of the spring floods. Olyvyr, like most of Bishop Militant Bahrnabai's senior officers, remembered those same spring floods from last year. Langhorne knew the Sylmahn Gap had been a nightmare of mud and chest-deep water this time last year! Surely that meant the heretic Stohnar was as mud-bound as the Army of the Sylmahn and the anticipated attack would have to come from the west along the Guarnak-Ice Ash Canal.

Apparently, however, it meant nothing of the sort.

He set his cup back down, took one swipe at his tunic with a napkin, reached for his coat with his other hand, and headed for the door. Behind him, Dahntahs tarried just long enough to collect his colonel's sword belt, then hurried after him.

Olyvyr bolted out into the open, still shrugging his arms into his coat. The signal rocket Dahntahs had reported drifted high in the heavens, fuming and smoking in blue fury under one of the parasols the heretics used to hold them up. The sudden eruption of light made the darkness over the lake even more impenetrable, yet the thing had obviously been launched from no more than a few thousand yards from 1st Regiment's muddy, half-flooded entrenchments. That meant it had been fired from somewhere out
on the lake
, and the colonel shaded his eyes against the glare with both hands, staring into that blackness for what he knew had to be out there somewhere, wondering what the heretics intended.

What the hell are they doing over here on the
east
side of the lake, anyway?
The thought burned through his brain.
They ought to be hitting Bishop Zhasyn, not
us!

The narrow water gap which connected the eastern and western lobes of Wyvern Lake was barely six miles wide where the bridge and causeway had crossed it before Bishop Militant Bahrnabai ordered them destroyed. Even now, with all the flooding, it couldn't be much more than eight miles across, whereas it was the next best thing to thirty-five miles from the closest heretic-held point on the southern shore of the lake to St. Yura's position. Bishop Zhasyn Howail's St. Thadyus Division held the wreckage of the causeway, and he'd been heavily reinforced from the Army of the Sylmahn's straitened artillery park precisely because it was the most vulnerable point. Despite the current high water, the demolished roadway's piers still rose above the surface, a priceless advantage for infantry trying to assault across the water gap or engineers attempting to bridge that same gap on the infantry's heels. So why—?

“
Sweet Chihiro!
”

Olyvyr staggered back a full step in sheer surprise as a dozen more rockets—no,
dozens
more rockets!—streaked into the heavens. They erupted in an arc which must have been at least four or five miles across, blazing in the darkness like a bevy of curses as they howled upward on steeply slanting trajectories. The colonel wanted to fling himself facedown, cowering against the ground like a rabbit or near squirrel before the cry of a hunting wyvern. He managed not to only because he knew every eye which wasn't glued to those rockets was watching
him
, instead. And so he made himself straighten, watching those fuming lines of light climb, even though he doubted he was fooling anyone.