Hell's Foundations Quiver

“Support parties say ‘Target destroyed,’ Sir.” Matthysahn spoke loudly enough to be heard through the earplugs they both wore, and Bahrns nodded, then looked over his shoulder through the open conning tower door.

  “Cease fire!”

  His order came too late to stop the next broadside, and he coughed as the dense brown cloud of smoke erupted across the open bridge wing. The concussion of the muzzle blast would have blown his hat off his head if he hadn’t already removed it.

  You really don’t have to be standing out here, you know, he told himself. In fact, it’d be a whole hell of a lot easier on you if you were smart enough to stay inside the conning tower with young Cahnyrs!

  Well, of course it would. He wouldn’t have been able to see as well, and the interior of the conning tower left a little something to be desired in terms of comfort and breathability when the big guns were in action, but at least the armor would have prevented his feeling as if the Tellesberg Krakens had decided to use him for batting practice. All of that was true, yet it didn’t really matter. He needed to be out here in the open, where he could see and hear. Where he could keep an eye out for obstacles in the water or any more of those powder kegs the Dohlarans had floated down the river to greet them.

  “New target, Sir!” Matthysahn called out, peering at the shoreside signal party through a rail-mounted telescope he could steady with his good hand, and Captain Bahrns nodded with a smile of grim satisfaction.

  * * *

  “Is this confirmed?” Sir Fahstyr Rychtyr asked, looking up from the semaphore dispatch. “That far?”

  He stood on a hilltop above the Sheryl-Seridahn Canal, fifteen miles west of Evyrtyn, where the mounted courier had overtaken his small party. The wind was out of the west—again—and powerful enough to roar quietly through the leafless trees and winter grass, which probably explained why none of them had heard anything.

  “I’m afraid it is, Sir,” Colonel Mohrtynsyn said grimly, then glanced at Rychtyr’s aide. “We need the Evyrtyn artillery map, Zhulyo.”

  “Of course, Sir.” Lieutenant Zhulyo Gohzail thumbed quickly through the maps in his case for the one Mohrtynsyn wanted. “Here, Sir,” he said, kneeling on the damp grass to spread the large-scale map. He weighted its corners with handy pebbles, and Rychtyr went down on one knee to look at it.

  “Colonel Wykmyn isn’t just guessing at the range, Sir.” Mohrtynsyn, who headed Rychtyr’s headquarters staff, drew his sword and used it as a pointer. “He’s confirmed that the heretic ironclad is right here.” He touched a point on the map, two-thirds of the way across the six-hundred-yard-wide river. “And he’s also confirmed that it’s not only destroyed the signal mast in Evyrtyn but also taken this twelve-pounder battery right here under fire.” The sword tip tapped again, and his expression was grim when he looked up at his general. “They must have observers out somewhere who can see it, because the gunners aboard that ship sure as Shan-wei can’t. But we don’t have any idea where those observers are or what else they may be able to see.”

  Sir Fahstyr’s jaw tightened. He glared down at the map for a moment, nodded, and stood once more. One hand brushed at the damp patch on his knee; the other had clenched around his own sword hilt. His eyes were unfocused for several seconds, staring at something only he could see. Then he drew a deep, nostril-flaring breath, and turned to the Schuelerite upper-priest at his elbow.

  “It’s even worse than I feared, Father,” he said in a flat, toneless voice.

  “What do you mean, my son?” Father Pairaik Metzlyr, the Army of the Seridahn’s special intendant, looked back at him with a worried expression. “Surely we knew the heretics would bring every weapon to bear on Evyrtyn?”

  “Of course we did, Father.” Rychtyr nodded. “And we saw what that meant at Cheryk and above Trevyr.”

  Metzlyr’s expression went from worried to bitter and it was his turn to nod. They had, indeed, seen what HMS Delthak’s guns could do at point-blank range. None of Major Sylvstyr’s guns had survived to withdraw from his riverbank redoubt, yet so far as anyone knew, the ironclad, with its preposterously long-barreled cannon, hadn’t lost a man, and it had continued to pour fire ashore afterward. Rychtyr’s army had managed to retreat without disintegrating only because of the general’s forethought in blocking the navigable channel with successive chains of sunken canal barges. He’d still suffered heavy casualties, and three of his regiments had sacrificed themselves holding the Marines Hanth had thrown across the river to cut off the rest of his army’s retreat. But at least the blocked channel had prevented the infernal ironclad from continuing its bombardment once he disengaged and managed to fall back upriver towards Evyrtyn.

  “I knew they’d come calling as soon as they cleared the obstacles,” Rychtyr continued now, his voice heavy. “I’d hoped it would take longer than it did. Or that we might have gotten lucky with the explosion rafts.”

  The inquisitor nodded again, this time hard and choppy—and not because he was angry at Rychtyr or the pessimism in the general’s voice.

  The thinly veiled contempt for Rychtyr’s judgment which had permeated the late Duke of Harless’ dispatches had infuriated Metzlyr. Given how spectacularly Harless had marched into the jaws of annihilation with an army six or seven times the size of Rychtyr’s, the Desnairian duke’s contempt should be considered a badge of honor!

  True, Rychtyr’s Cheryk garrison had been surprised by the heretics’ sudden attack, but Cheryk had been demoted to little more than a forward screening post for Thesmar when General Ahlverez turned the St. Alyk into his primary supply route. Manning Cheryk heavily enough to stave off a serious attack from the south would have required reducing the Trevyr garrison to no more than four or five thousand men, and Rychtyr had decided it was more important to be certain he held what had become the Army of Shiloh’s most vital supply point. With luck, the screening force Harless had detached for that specific purpose would keep Hanth and his heretics penned up in Thesmar and he would hold both; if he had to lose one of them, however, the one he (and General Ahlverez) simply could not afford to surrender was Trevyr. Not only that, but if the Imperial Charisian Navy ever got loose on the river, Trevyr itself was only too likely to prove impossible to hold, at which point any troops deployed east of it—like at Cheryk, for example—would be cut off and doomed.

  The Desnairians, predictably, had turned up their noses and ridiculed their Dohlaran allies’ timidity. They’d been at least reasonably careful not to express their views of Rychtyr’s feckless cowardice openly, but Metzlyr and his fellow inquisitors heard everything, sooner or later. And in fairness, the Desnairians had had at least some justification for pointing out how important Cheryk was to their supply line. And if he was going to be honest, the intendant had to admit that even he had thought the general was being … overly cautious, perhaps. The Seridahn, after all, was too shallow for the heretics’ galleons or their accursed bombardment ships, and he hadn’t quite been able to bring himself to believe the preposterous stories about smoking, self-propelled ships sheathed in iron even after the devastation of Bishop Militant Bahrnabai’s communications.

  But Rychtyr had been right … again.

  No one was any too certain how the heretics had managed to blow a gap in that first river barrier north of Trevyr, but Rychtyr had already erected a second one farther north. There’d been less laughter about that one … and no laughter at all once the second row of sunken barges prevented the ironclad from steaming straight past and shelling the Army of the Seridahn as it retreated along the tow paths and country lanes which followed the river north.

  Nor had the general settled for purely defensive measures, and the explosion rafts should have accomplished more than they had. Certainly the men who’d come forward, volunteering for the hazardous duty, had tackled their assignment with all the faith and courage the Archangels could have asked for, and conditions had seemed close to perfect. The night of the attack had been cloudy, rainy, cold, and moonless. The ten rafts—plank platf
orms laid across floating barrels—had each been loaded with half a ton of gunpowder, painted black, and smeared with pitch, both to make them harder to see and to protect the powder kegs from rain and riverwater, and they’d drifted with the current like darker, solider chunks of the night. Each raft had been manned by half a dozen men, working the stern sweeps and guiding the small flotilla towards its target. If even one of them had managed to get alongside the ironclad and detonate, it ought to have inflicted severe, probably crippling, and possibly fatal damage.

  But the heretics had anchored a heavy boom between a trio of barges upstream from the anchored warship, and they’d positioned field guns and those infernal infantry angle-guns to cover the boom. Even worse, perhaps, they’d put riflemen aboard the barges, ready to sweep the river’s surface with bullets, and one of their accursed illuminating rockets had burst overhead, revealing the rafts with pitiless clarity while they were still two hundred yards short of the boom. None of them had survived. The best the sixty men who’d given their lives for God and Mother Church had been able to do was to sink one of the boom-anchoring barges.

  And now this.

  Rychtyr had placed yet another barrier across the river below Evyrtyn, but the heretic engineers continued to show Shan-wei’s own demonic energy. Heretic infantry, probing up the river, covered and supported by the ironclad’s guns, had secured the eastern bank and dug in to provide their engineers with cover as they labored to clear the river. Despite more rain, fog, and the iciness of the riverwater, they’d dealt with the barrier—blown it to pieces just like the others, actually—in a bare two days, ripping yet another gap for the ironclad to creep through. And then, of course, Rychtyr’s forward regiments had been forced to withdraw into the Evyrtyn entrenchments. Where.…

  “Father, they’re accurately engaging targets over three miles back from the river,” Rychtyr said into the Schuelerite’s thoughts. “To be honest, we don’t have any way of knowing they can’t reach even farther than that, and unless they screw up and let us get an explosion raft through after all, there’s not a single thing we can do to stop that damned ship from systematically destroying all of the town’s defenses.” He met the upper-priest’s eyes levelly. “By itself, the ironclad can’t take Evyrtyn away from us. Hanth’s army, though—that’s another matter. And what the ironclad can do—what it’s already doing—is massacre any artillery we try to use to defend the town. Our entrenchments offer good protection against rifle fire, but they’re weak enough against field guns and infantry angles. Against the kind of fire that ironclad can hand out, they’re death traps. They’ll knock out our own artillery so their infantry can get close enough to take us under fire with their angle-guns. They’ll keep our men’s heads down with their angles and field artillery, then work their troops forward until they can storm our trenches with grenades and bayonets. I can bleed them, but nowhere near as badly as they can bleed us, and you’ve read the dispatches from Gorath.”

  Metzlyr’s face tightened, for he had, indeed, read the dispatches. It was unlikely Sir Rainos Ahlverez would ever reach home; it was even more unlikely more than a handful of the Army of Shiloh’s troops would be with him if he did. The Royal Dohlaran Army had suffered catastrophic losses, and the stark truth was that the Army of the Seridahn was the only field force it had left. Duke Salthar and Duke Fern were laboring frantically to rebuild, calling up thousands of militia and enlisting even more thousands of new recruits. But while the militia could be integrated into existing, understrength regiments stationed at home in Dohlar, and while the depot companies each of the field regiments had left behind to train replacements could be expanded into full regiments in their own rights, equipping that militia would be a far harder task. And raising, training, and equipping entirely new regiments would be harder still. The ugly truth was that neither the Jihad nor the Kingdom of Dohlar could afford to lose the Army of the Seridahn. For that matter, they could no longer afford to exchange casualties with the heretics even on a one-for-one basis.

  “What, exactly, are you proposing, my son?”

  “Father, we must retreat from Evyrtyn. We have to get far enough from the river to be outside the range of the ironclad’s guns, and we must destroy the locks behind us so that it can’t follow us along the canal.”

  To his credit, Rychtyr’s tone was completely level and he met Metzlyr’s gaze squarely.

  “And how far will be far enough, my son?” the Schuelerite asked softly.

  “I can’t say for certain,” Rychtyr admitted, still holding Metzlyr’s gaze. “I wouldn’t’ve believed they could reach targets three miles from the riverbank, frankly. As it is, I think we have to assume they still have additional range in reserve. Operating on that assumption, I believe we should fall back for at least five miles.”

  “Five miles?” Metzlyr couldn’t hide his dismay, but Rychtyr only nodded.

  “At least five miles,” he emphasized. “Father, giving additional ground to the heretics has to be disappointing to anyone. On the other hand, we’re still over three hundred miles from the Dohlaran border. In my opinion, our best option at this time is to keep the canal open behind us but deny the heretics the use of it in front of us and be willing to retreat along it if they press us. With your permission, I’d like to request additional civilian laborers. At the moment, we don’t have enough weapons to equip large numbers of new troops, but civilians can wield shovels as well as trained soldiers. If we have the workforce available, we can throw up an entire succession of strong points between Evyrtyn and the border—entrenchments and field works we can withdraw into at need.”

  “But if we fall back far enough to beyond reach of the ironclad’s artillery.…”

  “Father, the heretics have destroyed the Army of Shiloh. They didn’t simply defeat it or drive it back—they destroyed it. That means every regiment they had tied down against Duke Harless and Sir Rainos is available to be used somewhere else.” Rychtyr’s face was carved out of iron. “If I were Eastshare or Cayleb or Stohnar, that ‘somewhere else’ would be driving directly along the canal and into Dohlar. Admittedly, I’m a Dohlaran, so perhaps that course of action seems more obvious to me than it will to them. After all, there’s Silkiah and the Salthar Canal to the south, and there’s also the Army of Glacierheart to the north. Either of those would certainly constitute worthwhile strategic objectives, and much as it pains me to admit it, it’ll be months—probably even next year—before the Kingdom can field another army powerful enough to threaten the heretics.”

  He did not, Metzlyr noticed, comment on the Charisian galleons currently rampaging through the western reaches of the Gulf of Dohlar. Exactly what the heretics intended to do once they finished ravaging the coasts of Harchong remained to be seen, but no one expected it to be good for King Rahnyld. And if the Charisians could put together yet another army, one that could be transported east from Chisholm rather than west from Charis.…

  “Very well, my son,” the upper-priest said heavily. He reached out and laid a hand on Rychtyr’s shoulder. “I know how little you must relish giving ground, whatever the strategic wisdom in doing so.” He squeezed the general’s shoulder, looking into his eyes. “I also know the courage it’s taken for you to be this honest with me. And I agree about the need to fall back immediately. For that matter, I agree with the wisdom of your larger plan. I can’t promise anything about the reaction in Gorath—or in Zion—when they hear your proposal, but I can promise you this: when they hear it, it won’t be your proposal, it will be ours.”

  “Thank you, Father.” Rychtyr couldn’t keep the gratitude out of his tone. For that matter, he didn’t even try. He stood for a moment, looking back at the Schuelerite, then turned to Mohrtynsyn and Gohzail. “I think we’d better be climbing back into the saddle,” he told them, his voice harsh. “We’ve got some orders to write, so we’d best get back to headquarters and get started.”

  .XX.

  Wyllym Rayno’s Office, The Temple, City of Zion, and Nimue’s
Cave, Mountains of Light, The Temple Lands

  Wyllym Rayno, Archbishop of Chiang-wu, frowned at Father Allayn Wynchystair. It was unlike the upper-priest to enter his office without arranging an appointment ahead of time.

  Wynchystair managed to look nondescript even in his inquisitor’s cassock; when he’d been an under-priest, that ability to fade into the background had served him well as an agent inquisitor who’d specialized in covert operations. These days, he spent most of his time in an office three doors down the hall from Rayno’s own, and the record of successes which had put him in that office had also dumped responsibility for combating the “Fist of Kau-Yung” upon him.

  From the expression on his face, he hadn’t called upon the Inquisition’s adjutant to announce a glorious success.

  “I’m afraid you should see this, Your Eminence,” Wynchystair said. One of his virtues was a willingness to bring bad news to his superiors without trying to dress it up in more palatable clothing. “We lost another agent inquisitor last night—a sexton assigned to the Vicar Sebahstean murder.” His lips tightened. “That’s bad enough, but they found this pinned to his cassock. It was brought to me still sealed and unopened. I took it upon myself to open it when I saw that it was addressed to you, however, in case its contents suggested there might be other information I should bring to you at the same time.”

  He extended an envelope marked with ominous reddish-brown stains.

  Rayno looked at it for a moment. Those sorts of envelopes had become unhappily common over the past several months. The rest of them, however, had been left with inquisitors operating in Siddarmark, not right here in Zion.

  “What was our man doing before he was killed?” he asked.

  “According to his last report, he was looking into the possibility that the assassins”—even Wynchystair hesitated to use the term “Fist of Kau-Yung” in conversation with his superior—“had suborned one of the Vicar’s bodyguards. The one who simply disappeared following the attack.”