mirrors and flags were “daylight-only,” and the afternoon was passing.
He wanted to pace, but that would never do for an angelically chosen war captain. Besides, he was out here instead of Sean expressly to win his men’s confidence, which might be important tomorrow, so he contented himself with crushing dried thyru husks under his heel. The thyru resembled an enormous acorn, but its soft, inner tissues produced an oil which filled much the same niche as Terra’s olive oil, and he wondered how the Pardalians dealt with its thick shell. Now
He realized his mind was straying and tinkered with his adrenaline levels. He didn’t really know why he was watching the road so hard. Unlike his scouts, he had a direct link to
He gave himself a shake and moved along the line, patting shoulders and exchanging smiles. Pardalian armies knew about mounted firearms—indeed, most Pardalian cavalry were dragoons—but they’d never been a real threat. While handy for scouting and harassment, dragoons could wear only light armor, their shorter muskets had neither the range nor rate of fire to stand off pikemen, and you couldn’t put pikes on branahlks. But
He reached the end of the line and strolled back to his tree, then rechecked his uplink.
“Rethvan?” He glanced up at the signaler once more.
“Yes, Captain?”
“I expect their point to round the bend in about five minutes. Get ready to pass the signal.”
“At once, Lord Tamman.” Rethvan couldn’t see around that bend, but he sounded so confident Tamman grinned. Now all we have to do is never ever make a mistake—’cause if we do, that confidence could turn around and bite us right on the ass.
The westering sunlight turned steadily redder, and a corner of his mind looked down through the scanner arrays. Just … about … now.
The first mounted scout rounded the bend exactly on cue.
“Send it, Rethvan.” He was pleased by how calm he sounded.
“Yes, Captain.”
The flashing mirror alerted the outposts to the west, and Tamman heard branahlks whistle behind his hill as their holders got them ready, but it was only a distant background. His attention was on the advancing company of Temple Guard cavalry, and his eyes slipped into telescopic mode.
They looked tired, and little wonder. Lord Marshal Rokas had moved fast once he started. The logistic capabilities of Pardalian armies amazed Tamman; he’d expected something like Earth’s pike-and-musket era, but Pardal had nioharqs. The huge, tusked critters—they reminded him of elephant-sized hogs—could eat almost anything, which made forage far less of a problem than it had been for horse-powered armies, and their sustained speed was astonishing. True, their low
Even so, Rokas’s troops had to be feeling the pace. Sean had sealed the borders, and the Temple didn’t know diddly about their deployment—their remotes couldn’t penetrate the Temple itself, but they’d eavesdropped on enough of Rokas’s field conferences to prove that. Yet the lord marshal had made a pretty fair estimate of their maximum possible strength, and he wasn’t worrying about subtle maneuvers. He was going to throw enough bodies at them to plow them under and bull right through … he thought.
Tamman’s smile was evil as he watched the scouts advance. They might be tired, but they seemed alert. Unfortunately for them, however, they were watching for threats inside the range they “knew” Pardalian weapons had.
“Let’s get ready, boys,” he said quietly as the first branahlk passed the four-hundred-meter range stakes. A soft chorus of responses came back, and his hundred dragoons settled down in their paired-off positions. He watched them sighting across fallen trees and logs as Rokas’ scouts closed to just over two hundred meters. That was still far beyond aimed smoothbore range, but some of them were beginning to look more speculatively his way than he liked.
“Fire!” he barked, and fifty rifled joharns cracked as one.
The muzzle flashes were bright in the shadows of the grove, and powder smoke stung his nose, but his attention was on the scouts. Thirty or more went down—many, he was sure, dismounted rather than hit; branahlks were bigger targets than men—and the others gaped at the smoke cloud rising from the trees. Tamman grinned at their stunned reaction, counting under his breath while the first firers reloaded. The second half of each team waited until his partner was half-reloaded, then fired, and more riders went down. The survivors wheeled and spurred frantically back towards the bend, dismounted men racing after them on foot, but individual shots barked at their heels, and most of them were picked off before they could get out of range.
“Okay, boys, saddle up,” Tamman said, and grinning dragoons filtered back towards their mounts. Their commander waited a moment longer, and his own grin faded as he watched the road. A handful of wounded crawled along it, their agony plain to his enhanced eyes, while others writhed where they’d fallen, and even unenhanced ears could have heard their screams and sobs.
He shivered and turned away, hating himself just a little because not even his horror made him feel one bit less satisfied.
Lord Marshal Rokas glowered at the map in the lamplight, but his glare couldn’t change it, and the reports were just as disturbing now as they’d been when they were fresh.
He scowled. The first ambush had cost him seventy-one men, and that at a range Under-Captain Turalk swore was two hundred paces if it was a span. The second and third had been worse. The Host’s total losses were over four hundred, and they were concentrated in his cavalry—which he wasn’t over-supplied with in the first place.
His scouts would be more than human if what had happened today didn’t make them cautious tomorrow, which was bad enough, but how had the heretics done it? Where had they gotten that many dragoons? Or hidden them? He wouldn’t have believed more than a hundred men could be concealed in any of those ambush sites, but his casualties argued for three or four times that many—with malagors, at that—in each.
He poured a goblet of wine and sank into a folding chair. How they’d done it mattered less than that they had, but ambushes wouldn’t save them. Unless they wanted to lose any chance to bottle him up in the mountains, they had to stand and fight; when they did, he would crush them.
He’d better, for two-thirds of Mother Church’s own artillery and muskets and half her armor and pikeheads had come from Malagor’s foundries. Rokas had never liked being so dependent on a single source, yet what they faced now was worse than his worst nightmare, for every foundry Mother Church had lost, the heretics had gained.
Rokas knew to the last pike and pistol how many weapons had lain in the Guard’s armories in Malagor. His figures were less accurate for the secular arsenals but still enough for a decent guess, and even if the heretics had them all, they could field little more than a hundred thousand men. Yet given time, Malagor’s artisans could arm every man in the princedom, and if that happened, the cost of invading that mountain-guarded land would become almost unbearable.
He’d finally managed to convince the Circle of that simple, self-evident fact; if he hadn’t, the prelates would have delayed the Host until first snow “strengthening their souls against heresy.”
But High Priest Vroxhan had listened at last, and now Rokas brooded down at the map tokens representing a hundred and twenty thousand men—the picked flower of the Guard from eastern North Hylar. His force was really too large for the constricted terrain, but, as he’d told the high priest, strategy and maneuver were of scant use in this situation.
He stared unhappily at the blue line of the Mortan River and sipped his wine. An infant could divine his only
