And they did it without ever actually seeing their targets.
It took them five or six rounds to range in, even with the heliograph on the cliffs on the eastern side of the Gap, opposite Clyntahn’s mortars, signaling them corrections. The angles were, after all, a very crude version of a proper howitzer, without a reliable recoil system, which required them to be repositioned for each shot. They were, however, dug into gun pits fitted with ranging and bearing stakes so that their crews could be certain they’d repositioned them correctly, and the Army of God’s artillerists had never imagined a cannon that could shoot them from an invisible, protected position four miles away, on the far side of the entrenchments they’d been trying to batter their way through for almost six days. Nor had they ever imagined a gun that could hit them with shells half again as big and twice as heavy as their own.
Their steady, pounding fire began to falter as those volcanoes erupted—scattered, at first, but growing more concentrated, moving towards them. By the sixth salvo, the angles had the range, and six-inch shells came smashing down on the tight-packed target of Temple Loyalist fieldpieces. Men and horses shrieked as shell splinters ripped and whined through them, but it was worse when the limbers started exploding. Still more of the whistling shells came slicing down, pounding the Church’s gun positions, and battery officers began shouting frantic orders to limber up.
It said an enormous amount for the Army of God’s discipline that despite the terrifying effectiveness of an attack they’d never seen coming, Bishop Militant Bahrnabai’s gunners stuck to their pieces. They’d already begun to evolve the artillerist’s tradition—the gun was the battery’s standard, its colors, and it could not be abandoned to the enemy. Men would die to avoid that dishonor … and they died this day to save their guns.
But many of them died in vain.
* * *
Kynt Clareyk watched through his binoculars—and through the far more capable, all-seeing sensors of an artificial intelligence named Owl—as the Army of God recoiled from the sudden, unexpected flail of his artillery.
The Gap was a miserable place to fight, even without the inundations the defenders had arranged. There was little room to maneuver, no flanks to work around, and only a single, predictable axis of advance for anything heavier than his nimble-footed mortars. It wasn’t a place for finesse … but that didn’t mean it had no possibilities, he thought, watching explosions rip along the Church gun line. Half the guns had managed to limber up and race towards the rear, but the rest had already been disabled—or simply lost so many crewmen no one remained to work them—and he nodded in satisfaction. Those guns had worried him more than the Temple Loyalists’ rifles, and he was delighted to have them silenced.
Not all of the guns which had fled were going to escape, either. They still had to run the gauntlet of Clyntahn’s mortars, and horses and men went down—dead, dying, or wounded—as that merciless rain of shrapnel marched up and down the high road.
“Stage two, Bryahn,” he said, never lowering his binoculars.
Another rocket raced into the heavens, and the angle-guns retargeted obediently. Their shells left the silenced gun line and began crashing down on the Army of God’s infantry redoubts with a fury which filled him with vengeful satisfaction.
No point pretending I don’t want to pay these bastards back, he thought coldly. I admire their discipline, I respect their guts, I understand they’re sincere in their beliefs … and I’ll strangle every last motherless one of them with my bare hands for what they’ve done. Or settle for this.
He would have liked to get some of the four-inch muzzle-loading rifles he’d brought along from Siddar City into action, as well, but there was only so much space and he refused to crowd his troops. There’d be time to get the field guns into action once he’d broken the Army of God’s current position.
Of course, there’s the little problem that even after I start driving them, I won’t be able to push them forever, he reflected. There’s just too many of them, and once they get over the shock, they’ve got the unit cohesion—and the courage, damn their black hearts to hell—not to panic and break again. For that matter, Wyrshym already covered his bets with those frigging entrenchments around Saiknyr. If they pull back across the bridge and blow it, getting across Wyvern Lake’ll be an unmitigated—and painful—pain in the arse.
For that matter, he reminded himself, a hundred thousand men were still a hundred thousand men, however he sliced it … and he had only thirteen thousand. As Merlin was fond of saying, quoting someone from Old Earth, after a certain point, quantity took on a quality all its own.
I’ll settle for driving them back across the lake. Hell, for that matter, I’ll settle for pushing them back as far as Jairth! In fact, I’d rather stop there than somewhere between Jairth and Malkyr, where the Gap gets too frigging wide to cover even with fire, much less infantry! It’s not my job to kick them all the way back to Tarikah, and I’ll be damned if I push too far too fast and let them chew up the brigade that’s hopefully putting the fear of Shan-wei into them right this minute. Besides—he smiled thinly, binoculars still to his eyes—unless Merlin’s brainstorm turns into a total disaster, I won’t have to push them any farther … this year, anyway.
The angle-guns had been pounding the redoubts for almost fifteen minutes now, and he saw the first confused signs of a withdrawal. Sensible of them. Those redoubts had been built to include overhead protection against shrapnel shells bursting in midair; they’d never been intended to resist six-inch explosive shells plunging straight down onto them. With their own artillery silenced and driven from the field, it made no sense for those men to simply hunker down in the abattoirs their fortifications had become, and their officers had the good sense—and the moral courage—to pull them out.
You’ve got to love good officers, Kynt, even when they’re on that side, he told himself. It would be nice if they’d just sit there and let you kill them with artillery, but they’re not going to. So.…
He lowered the binoculars and looked at Colonel Allayn Powairs, his chief of staff.
“Pass the word to Colonel Tompsyn,” he said. “Tell him to give them another ten minutes or so to come out into the open, then go get them. And”—he held Powairs’ eyes for just a moment—“remind him we are taking prisoners.”
“Yes, Sir,” Powairs agreed.
Zhon Tompsyn was an excellent officer, but he was also a man of firm Reformist principles … and he’d lost a brother with Gwylym Manthyr. He was unlikely to go out of his way to encourage surrenders, yet his 3rd Regiment was the best trained, best choice for his current mission; that was one reason his support platoon had been deployed so far forward.
“See to it, then,” Green Valley said, and turned back to the carnage, raising his binoculars once more.
* * *
Gorthyk Nybar wiped blood from his face and looked at his red palm, wondering when his forehead had acquired that cut.
He listened to the shouts of command, the screams of pain, and the thunder of the heretics’ terrible artillery and wondered how the situation could have gone so disastrously wrong so quickly.
Obviously the Charisians were a little closer than we knew, he thought bitterly. Langhorne! How the hell many of them are there?
He’d already realized there weren’t actually that many of those dreadful cannon on the other side. No more than fifteen or twenty, he estimated, although that had been more than enough to break the back of their own artillery. The Army of God had lost at least half its guns, he estimated, and that was going to hurt. But there wasn’t anything he could do about that now. The best he could hope for was to pull back, get out of range of whatever they were using to hammer his men, and reorganize.
We’re going to have to dig in deeper and better. And we have to figure out how the hell they can do this! It’s got to be more of what they used at Iythria.
He wished now that he’d paid more attention to the rumors about the bombardment of the Iyth
rian forts, but that whole report had been … heavily edited by the Inquisition after Baron Jahras and Duke Kholman deserted to the heretics. Still, there’d been something about firing over the forts’ walls instead of through them. He’d assumed the Charisians had simply cut their fuses so that standard shells exploded as they crossed the forts, but that wasn’t what had happened here! No, these shells were coming down vertically. They were plunging fire, and unless he was badly mistaken, the damned things were detonating on impact, not with time fuses. So how—?
Time enough to be thinking about that later, Gorthyk! For now, let’s get your arse—and as many of your men as you can—out of this bitched-up mess.
His forward regiments were disengaging, filing out of the redoubts in remarkably good order, given the unanticipated carnage which had enveloped them so abruptly, and he felt a surge of pride. It wasn’t every army that could go from a planned assault into a hasty, unplanned retreat without losing its cohesion, but his men were doing it.
Then he realized the shelling had begun to taper off. It would have been nice if he’d believed that meant they were running out of ammunition, but—
No, they aren’t, he thought coldly, looking over the parapet as infantry in strange, mottled-looking uniforms, came forward at last.
His eyes narrowed as he watched them. Those uniforms … they looked ridiculous, at first glance, but as he gazed at them, he realized that the mottled green and brown pattern would blend into most terrain far better than the Temple’s Schuelerite purple tunics and dark red trousers.
But that realization was a small and distant thing, for the Charisians were advancing like no infantry he’d ever heard of. They came forward not in a line, or in a column, but in a … swarm. At first, it looked like there was no order to it at all, but then he realized there was. It was just the … the wrong sort of order. Groups of perhaps a dozen men worked together, trotting warily forward in a loose, open formation without any immediately apparent coordination with any other group. There were hundreds of men in those groups—possibly even thousands—and he couldn’t imagine how anyone could possibly control them when they were scattered so broadly.
There was a column behind them, he saw. It was just beginning to come out of the Siddarmarkians’ entrenchments, but it was well back. Not to lend its solid, close-ordered weight to combat, he realized, but merely to simplify movement while it kept up close enough to augment the infantry already advancing towards his own positions if that should become necessary.
Rifle fire sputtered from one of the Holy Martyrs Division’s redoubts, and he saw the Charisians stop and drop. At first he thought they’d been hit, but then he realized it was a preplanned maneuver. They went prone, turning themselves into all but impossible targets … and then they began to fire back!
Impossible! he thought. Nobody can load a musket or a rifle lying on his belly!
But the Charisians could—and far more rapidly than the Army of God, to boot. He felt an icy chill as he considered the implications of a man who could lie flat—or take shelter behind a rock or a tree—shooting at another man who had to stand out in the open to reload between shots.
That’s why they’re so scattered out. They’re not going to stand up and shoot it out with us; they’re going to hide behind every scrap of cover they can find while they blow our infantry lines away!
He forced himself to remain calm. There was no weapon whose effects couldn’t be mitigated, whether it could be duplicated or not. And so far, at least, nothing else the heretics had come up with had been impossible to duplicate, he reminded himself.
We’ve got to capture some of those rifles, figure out how they work.
Even as he thought that, a fresh pattern of explosions erupted in the Holy Martyrs redoubt. They were smaller, and he couldn’t see where they were coming from. And they weren’t exploding on contact, either—they were exploding in midair, showering the redoubt’s interior with shrapnel balls.
The defending fire from the parapet died, and the Charisian infantry who’d gone to ground rose again. They went forward once more, in short, sharp rushes, while those explosions kept the defenders’ heads down, and his jaw clenched at the fresh evidence of just how sophisticated the Charisians’ tactics were.
Well, he thought grimly, watching the heretics flow towards the redoubt as remorselessly as the sea, they may be more “sophisticated” than we are now, but I’m not too proud to learn from example.
“Sir—My Lord—you have to fall back now!”
He looked over his shoulder. Colonel Mairyai’s uniform was splattered with mud and there was blood on his right cheek. He’d lost his helmet, and his black hair was clotted with still more mud.
“I’ll get the rest of the division out of here, Sir. We need you back there getting us reorganized before these bastards come right up our backside!”
“That’s probably true, Spyncyr.” His own voice sounded preposterously calm to him. “Unfortunately, if I’m going to reorganize, I’ve got to have some idea what I’m reorganizing against, don’t I?”
Mairyai stared at him, obviously wanting to protest, and Nybar gripped his shoulder.
“Go ahead and organize the withdrawal. Assign one platoon to keep an eye on me, if you like. I promise I’ll withdraw before the heretics get here. But I have to see, Spyncyr. I have to watch as long as I can, try to understand what we’re up against.”
The colonel held his superior’s eyes for a long, taut moment. Then he exhaled noisily and shook his head.
“I’m going to take you at your word, Sir … but I will assign a platoon to you, too. And its orders are going to be very explicit. When the enemy gets within five hundred yards of this redoubt, you are heading to the rear, even if I have to have you knocked on the head and dragged! Is that clear?”
“Clear, Spyncyr,” Nybar said quietly while Charisian rifle fire rattled and snarled behind his voice. “Very clear.”
.V.
Guarnak–Ice Ash Canal, New Northland Province, and Ice Ash River, Northland Province, Republic of Siddarmark
Merlin Athrawes’ recon skimmer floated silently above the Guarnak–Ice Ash Canal, three hundred and forty miles inland from the city of Ranshir, where the Ice Ash emptied into the bay of the same name, while he watched the SNARCs imagery of two ironclads preparing to get underway. No one would have guessed from looking at him, as he reclined in the comfortable flight couch, that he was at least as anxious as Captain Halcom Bahrns himself. Probably more, he reflected with a humorless smile. It was his idea, after all.
He checked his instruments, not that he had any need to. He had plenty of time for what he had to do, and he was pretty sure he was trying to find reasons to delay. He caught himself wishing yet again that there were some way to avoid his self-assigned task. Unfortunately, there wasn’t.
His plan’s one enormous drawback was that there was a very simple way to thwart it. Not just thwart it, but turn it into hideous disaster.
HMS Delthak and her sisters had been intended to work on inland waterways, but he’d had rivers in mind when he came up with that idea. And he hadn’t been thinking only of rivers—he’d been thinking of the model of Old Earth’s rivers in the American Civil War. Although they were sixty feet shorter than the Passaic-class monitors from that war and had considerably thinner (though far tougher) armor, they came within two hundred tons of the monitor’s displacement. Small as they were by oceanic standards, that made them big ships by riverine standards … and it had never occurred to him to think of their using canals except as a means of getting from one river to another. He’d certainly never thought of their fighting their way along canals whose locks were controlled by someone else!
Yet as Ehdwyrd Howsmyn had told him on that seemingly long-ago night when the River-class gunboats were born, the newer mainland canals—like the ones in northeastern Siddarmark—had been built with bigger locks than the older ones, and the same was true for improvements to the rivers they served, as well. That
meant Delthak and her sister could use those locks, which was precisely what Merlin intended for them to do now. But it also meant that without those locks—or with the canals simply blocked ahead and behind them—the ironclads would be trapped inland, far from the sea, with no possible way to withdraw or escape, and there were over thirty critical locks along Bahrns’ course. Obstacles might achieve the same purpose in unimproved stretches of the river, much as Brigadier Taisyn had managed on the Daivyn, but it would take time—and quite a lot of it—for anyone to erect an obstacle a thousand tons of armored gunboat couldn’t ram out of the way. And the three thousand infantry riding the barges behind the ironclads ought to be enough to clear any obstacle which could be quickly dumped into a canal while the ironclads’ guns discouraged any interference with the task.
No, it was the locks which were his plan’s Achilles’ heel. Without them, it was doomed, and despite his own arguments, despite the persuasive logic based on the Book of Langhorne’s injunctions and Safehold’s nine hundred years of history, he couldn’t be positive some senior commander wouldn’t realize that and order the locks upon which everything depended destroyed. No Temple Loyalist would consider that lightly—it had taken direct orders from the Inquisition, the keeper of doctrinal orthodoxy, to authorize the Sword of Schueler to disable canals even temporarily—but what if someone with the moral courage to risk condemnation recognized what needed to be done and acted without that authorization? Or what if some senior inquisitor, alerted by the semaphore, saw the answer and sent the order back down the chain? In daylight, the semaphore transmitted messages at up to six hundred miles in an hour, and it was only five hundred and ninety miles by the semaphore chain from Fairkyn on the Guarnak–Ice Ash Canal to Bishop Militant Barnabai’s headquarters in Guarnak itself. He could learn of the ironclads’ intrusion within less than one hour of their passage of Fairkyn, and his intendant could send back a special injunction to destroy the locks just as quickly.