Hell's Foundations Quiver (79 page)

Worse, unless the weather changed drastically—and that wasn't going to happen, according to Owl's meteorological projections—Sir Dahrand Rohsail would reach Hahskyn Bay no later than the twenty-sixth. Sailing with the current, rather than against it, and with the wind out of the east, however, Ahbaht should reach Ki-dau by early next morning. He'd be well out into the bay by the time he ran into Rohsail, and Kahrltyn Haigyl and
Dreadnought
should have joined him before that happened.

“Do you think Rohsail will attack, Sir?”

“I'm positive he will,” Sarmouth said in a grimmer tone. Then he sat back in his chair and took a deliberate sip of tea. He set the cup back on its saucer and shrugged. “Whatever else Rohsail may be, he's no coward, and he has to realize this is absolutely the best chance he'll ever have. By the same token, though, I doubt any of his captains will be what you might call eager to get to grips with
Thunderer
or
Dreadnought
.” He smiled briefly. “So it's possible—especially since he knows Hahlynd and those damned screw-galleys will be arriving on Ahbaht's heels—that he won't rush straight in to attack. If he blocks the Kaudzhu Narrows with his galleons long enough for Hahlynd to bring his galleys up, the odds would shift heavily in his favor. On the other hand, somehow I don't see Ahbaht—or especially Kahrltyn Haigyl—sitting on their thumbs and letting him get away with that.”

*   *   *

Rain fell steadily.

It wasn't heavy, pounding rain, yet it was damnably persistent, Colonel Zhandru Mardhar reflected. The day limped towards evening, the local water table rose relentlessly under the steady, soaking rain, and it wasn't as if the heavily forested terrain between Kyrnyth and the village of Gyrdahn, thirty-eight miles to the northeast, wasn't already swampy enough. They didn't call Gyrdahn “Gyrdahn of the Marshes” for nothing! And Shan-wei knew spring in Cliff Peak could be thoroughly cold and miserable enough without rain. As it was, the soupy mud and raw, humid chill weren't doing a single thing for his men's morale.

Morale!
he snorted and shook his head.
They don't
have
any morale any longer—not really. And how in Langhorne's name do I blame them for that?

“The guns are getting louder,” a voice said quietly, and he turned to look behind him.

Father Zhames Tymkyn, the 191st Cavalry Regiment's chaplain, had followed him out of what passed for the village of Kyrnyth's local inn into the rain, and Mardhar smiled thinly. Father Zhames was a Langhornite, not a Schuelerite, and he'd been Mardhar's personal chaplain before Mardhar was assigned to command of his regiment.

“I don't know if they're getting louder or only closer,” he said, with a frankness he would have shown to very few others. “Treykyn's not much of a strong point when you come down to it, Zhames.”

“But surely Bishop Sebahstean can hold a little longer.” Tymkyn's protest came out sounding more like a prayer than a prediction.

“To be honest, I can't figure out why the bastards haven't already overrun him.” Mardhar gazed off towards the village of Treykyn, twenty-seven miles southeast of his present position. “I wish I could believe it was because the Bishop's position was strong enough to stop them, but we both know it's not. Not with the amount of artillery they can bring to bear!”

“The softness of the ground has to be making it difficult to drag those really big cannons forward, though,” Tymkyn objected, and Mardhar nodded.

“Yes, it does. And I know the latest dispatches from Aivahnstyn say that's what's slowing the heretics down. But I don't believe it.” The colonel shook his head grimly. “One thing that bastard Eastshare showed us last summer was that he knows how to drive an attack home. And much as I respect Bishop Sebahstean, I don't see any way he could have dug in deeply enough to keep the heretics from pushing him farther back if they really wanted to. They've got too many of those portable angle-guns and too much regular field artillery to do the job even without the heavy angles.”

“Then why haven't they overwhelmed the Bishop yet?”

“That's what worries me,” Mardhar admitted. “There has to be a reason, and I don't think we're going to like it when we find out what it is.”

*   *   *

“We've got trouble, Sarge!”

Platoon Sergeant Zhykohma Kahldonai looked up from his hoarded cup of hot tea with a sour expression. He had a well-deserved reputation for the zealousness of his faith and he was always ready to do his duty, but getting a fire to burn at all in this sort of weather was no inconsequential challenge. Finding a place to light one where it wouldn't betray one's position was even harder. The thought of being obliged to move away from it did not fill him with pleasure, but he didn't even consider saying so—not when Corporal Crahnstyn gave him that sort of news in that sort of tone.

“What sort of trouble, Shadow?” he asked.

“
Bad
trouble,” Lairmahnt Crahnstyn replied grimly. The corporal was Company A's most accomplished scout by any measure. He'd earned his nickname for his ability to pass through even dense underbrush almost noiselessly, he had eyes like needles and the ears of a catamount, and he and his section of cavalry had a sort of roving commission. Major Grausmyn, Company A's CO, had learned to give Crahnstyn his head, although he did like to suggest certain areas—tactfully of course—in which he might like the corporal to expend his efforts.

“There's a shit pot of heretic cavalry three miles northwest of us,” Crahnstyn continued, “and sure as Shan-wei they're heading for the Kyrnyth Road.”

Kahldonai put down his cup and stood abruptly.

“How many?” he asked urgently.

“Couldn't tell you,” the corporal replied. That was another thing about Crahnstyn; he never reported anything he wasn't
certain
of. “There's a lot of 'em, though—that's for sure! If I had to
guess
,” he stressed the verb, “what I saw was probably the head of one of those big-assed regiments of theirs.” He shrugged. “I figured it was more important to get back and tell somebody about them than get myself killed trying to get close enough to actually count them!”

“Can't argue with that.” Kahldonai gripped Crahnstyn's shoulder for a moment, thinking hard.

At the moment, he and his platoon were spread along the road between the small town or large village of Hanjyr and Bishop Sebahstean's headquarters at Treykyn. But if Crahnstyn was right—and he usually was—and the heretics had gotten far enough around the company's right flank to reach the road between Hanjyr and
Kyrnyth.
…

“Right,” he said decisively and tapped Crahnstyn's breastplate. “Lieutenant Oraistys is about two thousand yards that way.” He pointed. “Go find him and tell him what you just told me.”

“Gotcha.” Crahnstyn sketched an abbreviated scepter in salute and headed off at a quick jog, despite the mud and his tall cavalry boots, and Kahldonai turned to another member of Crahnstyn's section.

“Zhakky, I want you back on your horse and headed for Treykyn five minutes ago. You tell them exactly what you and Shadow saw. I'm guessing the Lieutenant or the Captain're going to send a written dispatch, too, but Bishop Sebahstean needs to know about this fast!”

“Right, Sarge!” Private Kyndyrs saluted, vaulted back into his saddle, and disappeared down the muddy track to Treykyn in a spatter of mud.

“As for the rest of you,” Kahldonai took time to gulp down the last of his tea, “saddle up. I'm sure the Lieutenant will have something he'd like us to be doing pretty damned soon.”

*   *   *

“They're
where?!
”

Bishop Militant Cahnyr Kaitswyrth stared at Colonel Maindayl.

“According to Colonel Mardhar, at least an entire regiment of Charisian dragoons is on its way to Kyrnyth,” the colonel replied. “In fact, they may already
be
at Kyrnyth. It looks like Mardhar got his dispatch off the instant his scouts reported the movement. For that matter, one of his company commanders sent a separate dispatch carried by the corporal who spotted them.” Maindayl's expression was grim, but there was approval in his tone. “He wanted us to have the best information available. The corporal says he heard firing from behind him before he was a mile past Kyrnyth, though.”

“
Shan-wei
.” Kaitswyrth muttered the curse, staring down at the map table in his Aivahnstyn headquarters, and his heart was a lump of ice as he realized Allayn Maigwair's suspicions had been better taken than he'd wanted to believe.

He knew Maindayl was thinking the same thing. For that matter, the colonel had already expressed his own concern that the Captain General might be onto something. Kaitswyrth and Father Sedryk had preferred to think Maigwair was being alarmist, and the heretics' relatively slow progress against the Army of Glacierheart's ferocious defense after their initial, crushing bombardment had seemed to support that belief.

Or it had seemed that way to
him
, at any rate, he admitted harshly, wishing fervently that Sedryk Zavyr hadn't chosen this particular night to tour his army's frontline positions.

“All right,” he said, rubbing his hands together while he thought. “All right. If this corporal heard firing at Kyrnyth, then we have to assume Mardhar was also right about what was coming at him. And they wouldn't have sent just the one regiment—not into Taylar's rear.” He grimaced and made the bitter admission. “It sounds like Vicar Allayn was right to worry about our flanks. But how in Chihiro's name did they get all the way to Hanjyr—and from there to Kyrnyth—this damned quickly without going through Tyrath?”

That, Maindayl had to acknowledge, was an excellent question. Even passing through the village of Tyrath, the southern anchor of the Army of Glacierheart's original position, it was over a hundred miles—thirty of them cross-country through dense woods—from the heretics' pre-attack position on the Daivyn to Hanjyr. Going farther south, the high road would offer much better going by way of the city of Sangyr, but the cross-country portion of the trip would rise to almost fifty miles and the total distance to over two hundred, and Sangyr was picketed by a garrison of almost six thousand Faithful militia. So how
had
Charisians reached Hanjyr so quickly … and without being spotted until they were already there?

“They must've gone by the high road, Sir,” he said. “They could've saved forty miles by cutting across between the Sangyr-Glacierheart High Road and the Sangyr-Aivahnstyn High Road south of the forest. It'd be slower going cross-country in this kind of slop, but they might have made it by now, especially if they actually started before they began the initial bombardment.”

Or they might have gone straight
through
Sangyr without our knowing a thing about it
, he thought to himself.
I never was happy about “General Klaibyrn's” scouting, and Charisian regulars'd go through his militia like shit through a wyvern. Damned Siddarmarkians can't do
anything
right!

He might be being unfair to General Zhames Klaibyrn, the loyal Siddarmarkian militia commander to whom Kaitswyrth had entrusted responsibility for Sangyr, but he doubted it. More to the point at the moment, he didn't care.

“However they did it, though,” he said urgently, stepping to the bishop militant's side and tapping Kyrnyth's position on the map, “they're squarely across Bishop Sebahstean's most direct line of retreat from Treykyn to Aivahnstyn, and that threatens the entire army.”

His finger traced the line of the Army of Glacierheart's current front. Treykyn lay thirty miles west of its over-winter position, on the far side of the large town of Styltyn, where the heretics had punched a deep, triangular salient into the Church's starting position. The Army of Glacierheart had been driven back for as much as twenty miles, but it had fallen back sullenly, contesting every inch of ground after the initial ferocious heretic bombardments. He knew the heretics' casualties had been minute compared to the Army of Glacierheart's, despite the fact that it was Mother Church whose troops were fighting from defensive positions. But Kaitswyrth's battered, disheartened men had refused to give up, and the Border States contingent under Baron Wheatfields' command had fought like heroes at the northern end of the Army of Glacierheart's lines. They'd clung stubbornly to the line of the West Black Sand River, flowing out of the Gyrdahn Marshes to the Daivyn, high and brown, laced with furrows of yellow foam as the drenching rains filled it to overflowing. And the Army of God's divisions had fought equally hard, spearheaded by Sebahstean Taylar's own St. Zhudyth Division, to hold the almost equally over-full Cow Ford River to the south. They'd been pushed back everywhere—especially in the center, towards Treykyn—but the heretic Eastshare had seemed unwilling to pay the cost in blood to drive his way through like a bull dragon.

We thought it was because now that he had all that artillery he was trying to husband his manpower, and maybe he was. But what if Vicar Allayn was right about what
else
he had in mind?

“If they've taken Kyrnyth and they're able to hold it, they've got a quarter of Bishop Sebahstean's total strength—basically everything south of the Treykyn-Hanjyr Road—in a pocket, Sir,” he continued harshly. “The only line of retreat still open to them would be that miserable track from Treykyn to Gyrdahn. And if he has to fall back, then everything
north
of Treykyn would have to go the same way, as well.”

“Then they'd better not have to retreat at all!” Kaitswyrth snapped.