The distance to Fairkyn was twenty percent shorter cross-country, but covering that kind of distance under arctic conditions would take at least seven or eight days even for Makrohry’s 1st Corps, and he really couldn’t justify sending Makrohry on his way until Brohkamp had reached St. Tyldyn. First Corps consisted of just over twenty-three thousand men, including its field artillery and attached engineers. Its actual combat formations, however, were down to a scant twenty thousand, barely seventy percent of their “paper” strength. While that was quite a lot more than Gorthyk Nybar commanded, it wasn’t a lot more than Nybar would have shortly, because Wyrshym had pulled out all the stops after the loss of Esthyr’s Abbey and St. Zhana. Nybar’s units had been brought almost up to their official establishment with fresh replacements, and two more AOG infantry divisions were earmarked to join him over the next two or three five-days.
Worse, Nybar had kept his men busy improving their positions, despite the bitter weather, and Wyrshym had managed to squeeze out enough transport to stockpile two months’ rations for Nybar’s troops at Fairkyn. It hadn’t been easy. Despite Rhobair Duchairn’s improvements to the Army of the Sylmahn’s supply situation, Wyrshym’s entire command was still living hand to mouth. He’d run serious risks and pinched his own logistic capability at Guarnak to build up Nybar’s supplies at Fairkyn, and he’d been forced to shave the rest of the Army of the Sylmahn’s ration dumps dangerously thin, but he’d done it.
All of which meant Green Valley would shortly be looking at close to eighteen thousand well dug in, reasonably well-supplied infantry and cavalry. Their artillery would be weak, but Fairkyn sat at the top of a steep line of bluffs west of the Ice Ash. Those bluffs were the reason for the canal locks around which the town had grown, and the elevation would give the defenders the advantage of the high ground. Worse, Nybar—who was depressingly willing to learn from other people’s experience, as well as his own—had built observation towers in Fairkyn itself and at regular intervals around his entire defensive position. His guns would be outclassed, in both numbers and capability, but Green Valley’s artillerists would be unable to use their own weapons to full advantage because they simply wouldn’t be able to see their targets. The last thing Green Valley wanted was to turn Fairkyn into some sort of deep-winter siege operation, and however superior to Wyrshym’s his own supply capabilities might be, feeding the big guns’ voracious appetite for any sort of lengthy artillery duel would impose a significant strain.
We can still do this, he told himself, looking down at the maps. I can still get 1st Corps around Nybar’s flank into the Ohlarn Gap, cut his direct connection to Guarnak, and there’s no way in hell Wyrshym can move north and push me back out of the Gap before Brohkamp comes up through St. Tyldyn to invest Fairkyn from the east. But Nybar’ll be able to hold out at least a month longer than I’d hoped he would, unless I want Brohkamp to pay the butcher’s bill to storm his positions, and that’d gut 2nd Corps … at best. But if we let Nybar tie us down that long, Wyrshym’ll have at least another month to improve his own supply chain and that pain in the arse Duchairn will spend it shipping in still more rifles, and this time they’ll be new-build St. Kylmahns, not field conversions. Unless.…
He gazed at the map, eyes measuring distances and considering the opponents’ relative speeds. He didn’t want to tie down and bloody 1st or 2nd Corps in a siege, no. That would sacrifice the priceless advantage of his Charisians’ mobility and buy Wyrshym too much time, exactly as the bishop militant hoped. But if he was willing to let Makgrygair’s Siddarmarkians invest Fairkyn with Charisian artillery support—and if he could get Makgrygair moved up quickly enough—then pass the rest of Brohkamp’s corps north of Fairkyn, out of sight of Nybar’s observation towers, while 1st Corps went south of Fairkyn.…
Risky, Kynt, he told himself. Maybe even very risky. If Nybar gets feisty—or desperate—enough to come out of Fairkyn, Makgrygair would have his hands full. And if Nybar figures out what you’re doing, and you already know he’s no dummy, that’s exactly what he ought to do. Because if you lose the high road through Ohlarn and then down through the Gap, you’ll have sixty thousand hungry Charisians stuck in the middle of goddamned nowhere. No way even your supply trains could move enough food and ammunition forward cross-country to sustain them for very long.
But if you can pull it off and keep the boys fed long enough.…
He sank into one of Gairwyl’s camp chairs, leaning both elbows on the library table, propping his chin in his palms, and his eyes were dreamy.
He never even noticed the speculation in Gairwyl’s eyes … or the resignation in Lieutenant Slokym’s.
.XVII.
Charisian Embassy, Siddar City, Republic of Siddarmark
“Well, what do you think of Kynt’s latest brainstorm?” Cayleb Ahrmahk asked dryly.
He and Merlin Athrawes sat on a pair of well-stuffed settees, facing each other across the hearth in the sitting room of the emperor’s suite. Aivah Pahrsahn sat comfortably at Merlin’s side, her legs folded under her, and all three of them nursed glasses of Seijin Kohdy’s Premium Blend. It was an excellent whiskey, and although Merlin actually preferred Sharleyan’s favorite Glynfych, it had become the drink of choice whenever Aivah dropped by to confer with him and Cayleb.
“I think it’s … audacious,” he replied judiciously.
“‘Audacious,’ the man says!” Cayleb shook his head. “How about ‘He’s out of his frigging mind’?!”
“Now, that really isn’t fair, Your Majesty,” Aivah put in. Cayleb looked at her, and she shrugged. “I’m not a military person like you and Baron Green Valley, but he’s never struck me as the sort who’s likely to run off chasing wild wyverns. I don’t pretend to understand all the movements he’s talking about in this instance, but Owl and Prince Nahrmahn—and I, for that matter—all agree with his estimates of Nybar’s and Wyrshym’s supply situation. And whatever he does, he’ll have the SNARCs to keep anyone from surprising him.”
“The only problem, Aivah,” Cayleb said in a considerably more somber tone, “is that seeing what’s coming doesn’t help a lot if you can’t get out of the way. That’s sort of what happened to us in the Markovian Sea two years ago. Even worse, it’s what happened to Admiral Manthyr in the Gulf of Dohlar.”
Aivah’s expression tightened in understanding, but Merlin shook his head.
“You’re right about that, Cayleb.” His voice was gentler than usual, an acknowledgment of the pain he and Cayleb shared over what had happened to Gwylym Manthyr and his men, but his eyes were level. “On the other hand, Kynt’s faster on his feet than anybody on the other side. Admittedly, Second Corps isn’t quite as nimble as First Corps, but either one of them could march rings around anything the Church has, especially under winter conditions. So the odds are damned good that he could get out of the way in time if anything untoward came at him. And he’d have pretty close to parity with Wyrshym’s entire army, to boot.”
“A parity he’d be busy splitting at least three ways, counting Makgrygair’s division,” Cayleb pointed out.
“Fair enough. But the Army of the Sylmahn’s already split three ways, and if Kynt pulls it off, Wyrshym won’t be able to reunite his command in time to make much of a difference. For that matter, he won’t be able to unite with Nybar at all, and frankly, given Nybar’s capability, that would be a very good thing in a whole bunch of ways.”
Cayleb’s grunt might have signified agreement, or simple acknowledgment, or mere irritation, and he stared down into his whiskey for several seconds. Then his nostrils flared and he looked back up again.
“Are you seriously suggesting I should let him try this?” he asked quietly.
It was, Merlin acknowledged, a reasonable question, and he turned to gaze into the heart of the fire while he considered it.
Green Valley’s original strategy had been to pinch out Gorthyk Nybar’s command at Fairkyn, then move south through the Ohlarn Gap down the high road to Guarnak to threaten
Wyrshym’s primary forward supply head. Unfortunately, as Green Valley had pointed out, Wyrshym had thrown everything he could into reinforcing Nybar and Nybar had dug in too quickly and too damned efficiently. Like Green Valley, Merlin found himself respecting the Army of Fairkyn’s CO more than he might have wished. Gorthyk Nybar was entirely too flexible when it came to tactical innovation and far too iron-willed when it came to hammering his plans through to success.
He’d lost better than five percent of his initial troop strength, mostly to frostbite, driving his men to fortify their position in the teeth of a North Haven winter, but he’d refused to flinch. And as they’d hacked entrenchments and dugouts out of the frozen earth, they’d also improved their quarters. Every one of those dugouts had its own crude chimney, and earthen walls and sandbags designed to be bulletproof also tended to be wind and weather proof, which had led to a significant decrease in subsequent frostbite casualties. That was scarcely a minor consideration, but from the Allies’ perspective, what mattered most was that Nybar had already seen mortars and heavy Charisian artillery in action, and his fortifications reflected that experience. They might not be up to the standards of Old Terra’s Western Front in 1918, but they were far better than any pre-Merlin fieldworks would have been, and black powder artillery was less effective against fieldworks than the high-explosive which had churned Flanders’ fields into a moonscape. Even worse, perhaps, his own artillery had learned a few lessons of its own. It remained far from equal to its opposition, but it was better than it had been, and it was dug in where any assault would have to come to it.
The fortifications would go a long way towards redressing the imbalance between muzzle-loading and breech-loading rifles, as well. And that didn’t even consider the minor point of how much of his current infantry force had been rearmed with breechloaders. All of which would make taking Fairkyn a much more unpleasant—and lengthier—proposition than anyone had anticipated when Green Valley formulated his original plan of campaign.
And, as Aivah had just pointed out, Green Valley was entirely correct about Wyrshym’s improved logistics. Now that Nybar’s needs had been seen to, the bishop militant’s snow lizards and mountain dragons were busily hauling supplies forward to Guarnak from Five Forks, the Hildermoss River city where those supplies had been accumulating for the past two or three months. If Wyrshym was allowed to go on doing that.…
“If Kynt goes ahead with his original plan to crunch up Nybar, he’s going to lose at least a month, Cayleb—probably more like two,” Merlin said finally. “Now, at the moment, he’s got something like a month and a half or even two months more of winter to work with, but once the thaw sets in he won’t be a lot more mobile than the Temple Boys, at least until the snowmelt runs off, the rivers go back down, and the mud dries. Nobody’ll be moving anywhere except along the high roads—and not too damned quickly even there, given what spring flooding usually looks like north of Shiloh—until then. He’d probably take a lot of casualties punching Nybar out of Fairkyn, too, after how thoroughly the Temple Boys’ve dug themselves in around the town. But what’s worse is that Wyrshym would have all that time to improve his own supply position. I figure the Army of the Sylmahn’ll be short on food whatever happens, at least until sometime in late May or early June, but Wyrshym’s already better off in that respect than he was in October. And if we don’t do something about him before June, at the latest, he’s going to’ve been heavily resupplied with the new rifles and those Parrott guns of Brother Lynkyn’s, too … not to mention the damned rockets. We still don’t know how well his version of the Katyusha’s going to work, but I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for him to fail. He probably won’t have any available in quantity until midsummer or early fall, but remember how low his—and our—estimates on rifle production turned out to be.”
Cayleb grimaced sourly in acknowledgment of Merlin’s points … especially the last two.
Lynkyn Fultyn’s banded artillery concept had been bad enough by itself, but Sylvestrai Pynzahn had made it much worse. A lot of nineteenth-century ironmasters back on Old Earth had experimented with ways of banding cast-iron artillery pieces to strengthen their breeches, but few of them had been truly satisfactory. Until Robert Parrott’s technique had come along, at least. Parrott Rifles had still been inferior to contemporary wrought-iron guns like the US Army’s three-inch ordnance rifle, which hadn’t needed to be banded at all, but Parotts had been available in much heavier shell weights, iron was far cheaper than wrought iron, his method had offered what was almost certainly the best combination of strength and affordability of any of the banded iron guns, and between them, Fultyn and Pynzahn had essentially re-created Parrott’s methodology.
The new guns remained heavier for a given shell weight and range than Ehdwyrd Howsmyn’s pieces, and no doubt the Church’s gun founders would shift over to steel as soon as they got enough of the new hearths into operation. But the Fultyn Rifles which had already reached the AOG’s artillerists had increased their range and lethality dangerously, and Fultyn clearly recognized that the same technique could go right on reinforcing existing iron cannon even after steel became available for new pieces. That meant many guns which would otherwise have been scrapped were likely to find themselves bored out, rifled, banded, and retained for service, instead. They might be inferior to the Church’s new guns, far less the products of the Delthak Works, but they’d be one hell of a lot more effective than they had been, and there were a lot of them lying around.
The Church was unlikely to approach the sophistication of Charisian gunnery techniques for a long time to come, but the margin of superiority was narrowing. And until Charis managed to put the new propellants and shell fillers into production, the difference in range and effectiveness would be a lot lower than any of the Allies could wish, as well.
Yet Brother Lynkyn’s proposed rocket artillery actually looked like being even worse news, especially since he’d put his finger so unerringly on the need to use the rockets en masse. In the absence of internal combustion engines they’d be less mobile than the rockets which had been used as area effect weapons during Old Earth’s Second World War—in that sense, Merlin’s reference to them as “Katyushas” was historically suspect—but over their effective range, they ought to be able to lay down devastating fire.
The Delthak Works had already started adapting its own rockets as artillery in response to a fresh Ehdwyrd Howsmyn inspiration, now that the concept had suggested itself to the AOG. They’d refrained this long simply because they hadn’t wanted to draw Church attention to an idea so thoroughly within its means … and because properly employed rockets would offer far more advantage, proportionately, to Charis’ foes than to its own forces. The new weapons would undoubtedly be useful to the ICA, yet they’d represent no more than an incremental increase in the power of its existing artillery while they’d confer a whole new order of capability upon the Church. One that was likely to kill a lot of Charisians before the smoke finally cleared.
None of which even considered what the receipt of several thousand more new-build St. Kylmahn breechloaders would do to the Army of the Sylmahn’s effectiveness in the field.
Or, the emperor thought sourly, exactly what all those damned Harchongians who already have St. Kylmahns are likely to be doing.
“I hope you won’t take what I’m about to say wrongly, Merlin, and I’m sure all the innovations coming out of people like Zhwaigair and Fultyn are exactly what we need to undermine the Proscriptions in the long run. But even bearing all of that in mind, I’m strongly tempted to apply the Nahrmahn Method to certain parties in Zion and Gorath.”
“I don’t blame you a bit,” Merlin acknowledged. “But even if we decided it’d be a good idea, Fultyn and Zhwaigair are hardly the only ones on the other side who’re pushing the envelope now. As you say, it’s what we need to happen all over the planet eventually, and we’d need an army of assassins to take out all the people popping out ideas for them by now.”
&n
bsp; “Between you and Owl we have ‘an army of assassins,’” Cayleb pointed out gamely. “A fact I believe you demonstrated at Camp Chihiro not so long ago.”
“That’s true, Your Majesty,” Aivah put in. “On the other hand, if we started killing their more innovative thinkers, it would only underscore their importance to someone like Clyntahn. His Rakurai may be little more than single-shot terrorist weapons, but that’s only because he’s come to the conclusion that he can’t coordinate targeted assassinations against our counterintelligence. He fully understands the value of that kind of operation, though, and even if he didn’t, we’ve been underscoring it for him with Owl and Merlin’s reprisals against the worst of his inquisitors. If we start picking off Maigwair’s weapons developers, we’ll only confirm to him how dangerous we think they are. That might be enough for a man of his mindset to decide to get behind them and push hard instead of dragging his feet the entire way.”
“It might,” Merlin agreed. “Mind you, some things are more likely than others, but he’s never been shy about embracing pragmatism when he decides it’s necessary, no matter how badly it flies in the face of the letter of the Writ. I expect that’s only going to get even more pronounced as the Church’s military position continues to deteriorate.”