Heirs of Empire

was willing to play along, even though Lord Sean and Lord Tamman were probably the only people who thought they were fooling anyone.

In all his years, Tibold had never met anyone like these two. They were young; he’d seen enough hot- blooded young kinokha in his career to know that, and Lord Tamman was as impulsive as he was young. But Lord Sean … There was a youthful recklessness in his eyes, and a matching abundance of ideas behind them, but there was also discipline, and Tibold had known gray-bearded marshals less willing to listen to suggestions. And though he tried to hide it, Tibold had seen how his strange, black eyes warmed whenever the Angel Sandy was about. He treated her with the utmost respect, yet Tibold had the odd suspicion that was more for the army’s benefit than for the angel’s. Indeed, the angel seemed to watch for Lord Sean’s reaction to whatever she might be saying even as she said it.

Tibold hadn’t figured out why an angel should—well, defer wasn’t quite the word, though it came close— even to Lord Sean’s opinion, but there was no denying Lord Sean and Lord Tamman were uncanny. They might have keener eyes and greater strength than other men, and they certainly knew things Tibold hadn’t, yet there were peculiar holes in their knowledge. For instance, Lord Tamman had actually expected nioharqs to slow infantry, and Lord Sean had let slip a puzzling reference to “heavy cavalry,” a manifest contradiction in terms. Branahlks were fleet, but they had trouble carrying an unarmored man.

Yet neither seemed upset when he corrected them. Indeed, Lord Sean had spent hours picking his brain, combining Tibold’s experience with things he did know to create the army they now led, and he’d been delighted by Tibold’s insistence upon remorseless drill—one more thing whose importance young officers frequently failed to appreciate.

And if their ignorance in some matters was surprising, their knowledge in others was amazing! He’d thought them mad to emphasize firearms over polearms. A joharn-armed musketeer did well to fire thirty shots an hour, while the heavier malagor could manage little more than twenty. There was simply no way musketeers could break a determined charge … until Lord Sean opened his bag of tricks. And, of course, until the angels intervened.

Even Tibold had felt … unsettled … when the Angel Sandy had Father Stomald stack a thousand joharns in a small, blind valley and leave them there overnight. Indeed, he’d crept back—strictly against Father Stomald’s orders—late that night … and crept away again much more quietly than he’d come when he found all thousand of them had disappeared!

But they’d been back by morning, and Tibold hadn’t argued when the Angel Sandy had him pile two thousand in the same valley the next night. Not after he’d seen what had happened to the first lot.

Changing wooden ramrods for iron had been but the first step, and Lord Sean had accompanied it by introducing paper cartridges to replace the wooden tubes hung from a musketeer’s bandoleer. A man could carry far more of them, and all he had to do was bite off the end, pour the powder down the barrel, and spit in his ball. The paper wrapper even served as a wad!

The thing Lord Sean called a “ring bayonet” was another deceptively simple innovation. Hard-pressed musketeers often shoved the hafts of knives into their weapons’ muzzles to turn them into crude spears as the pikes closed in, yet that was always a council of desperation, since it meant they could no longer fire. But they could fire with the mounting rings clamped around their weapons’ barrels, and Tibold looked forward to the first time some Guard captain assumed musketeers with fixed bayonets couldn’t shoot him.

Then there was the gunlock. No one had ever thought of widening the barrel end of the touch-hole into a funnel, but that simple alteration meant it was no longer necessary to prime the lock. Just turning the musket on its side and rapping it smartly shook powder from the main charge into the pan.

Yet the most wonderful change of all was simpler yet. Rifles had been a Malagoran invention (well, Cherist made the same claim, but Tibold knew who he believed), yet it took so long to hammer balls down their barrels—the only way to force them into the rifling—that they fired even more slowly than malagors. While prized by hunters and useful for skirmishers, the rifle was all but useless once the close-range exchange of volleys began.

No longer. Every altered joharn—and malagor—had returned rifled, and the angels had provided molds for a new bullet, as well. Not a ball, but a hollow-based cylinder that slid easily down the barrel. Tibold had doubted the rifling grooves could spin a bullet with that much windage, but Lord Sean had insisted the exploding powder would spread the base into them, and the results were phenomenal. Suddenly a rifle was as easy to load as a smoothbore—and able to fire far more rapidly than anyone had ever been able to shoot before! Tibold couldn’t see why Lord Sean had been so surprised to find the weapons were … “bore-standardized,” he called them (it only made sense to issue everyone the same size balls, didn’t it?), but the Captain-General had been delighted by how easy that made it to produce the new bullets for them.

Nor had he ignored the artillery. Mother Church restricted secular armies to the lighter chagon, and the Guard’s arlaks threw shot twice as heavy, even if their shorter barrels didn’t give them much more range. But Lord Sean’s gunners were supplied with cloth bags of powder instead of clumsy loading-ladles of loose powder. And for close-range firing there were “fixed rounds”—thin-walled, powder-filled wooden tubes with grape or case shot wired to one end. A good crew could fire three of those in a minute.

And when all those changes were added together, the Angels’ Army could produce a weight of fire no experienced commander would have believed possible. Instead of once every five minutes, its artillerists fired three times in two minutes—even faster, using the “fixed rounds” at close range. Instead of thirty rounds an hour, its musketeers—no, its riflemen—could fire three or even four a minute and hit targets they could hardly even see! Tibold still wasn’t certain fire alone could break a phalanx, but he wouldn’t care to charge against such weapons.

Perhaps even better, there were maps. Wonderful maps, with every feature to scale and none left out. It was kind of the angels to try to make them look like those he’d always used, and he lacked the heart to tell them they’d failed when they seemed so pleased by their efforts, but no mortal cartographer could have produced them. Some of his militiamen hadn’t realized how valuable they were, but he’d worn his voice hoarse until they did. To know exactly how the ground looked, where the best march routes lay, and precisely where the enemy might be hidden—and where your own troops could be best deployed—was truly a gift worthy of angels.

Best of all, the angels always knew what was happening elsewhere. The big map in the command tent showed every hostile army’s exact position, and the angels updated it regularly. The sheer luxury of it was addictive. He was glad Lord Sean continued to emphasize scouting, but knowing where and how strong every major enemy force was made things so much simpler … especially when the enemy didn’t know those things about you.

Still, he reminded himself, the odds were formidable. None of Malagor had remained loyal to the Church, but the “heretics” had far too few weapons for their manpower, and garrisoning the Thirgan Gap fortresses had drawn off over half of their strength, while the Temple had over two hundred thousand Guardsmen in eastern North Hylar, not even counting any of the secular armies.

Yet Tibold no longer doubted God was on their side, and while he knew too much of war to expect His direct intervention, Lord Sean and Lord Tamman were certainly the next best thing.

* * *

Sean closed the spyglass and rolled onto his back to stare up into the sky. Lord God, he was tired! He hadn’t expected it to be easy—indeed, he’d feared the Pardalians would resist his innovations, and the eagerness with which they’d accepted them instead was a tremendous relief—but even so, he’d underestimated the sheer, grinding labor of it all, and he’d expected to get more advantage from Israel’s machine shops. To be sure, Sandy’s stealthed flights to shuttle muskets back and forth for rifling had been an enormous help, but this was Sean’s first personal contact with the reality of military logistics, and he’d been horrified by the voracious appetite of even a small, primitively-armed army. Brashan and his computer-driven minions had been able to modify existing weapons at a gratifying rate, but producing large numbers of even unsophisticated weapons would quickly have devoured Israel’s resources.

Not that Sean intended to complain. His troops were incomparably better armed (those who were armed at