At the Sign of Triumph (Safehold)

.III.

Shandyr Bulge,

Duchy of Thorast,

Kingdom of Dohlar.

“It’s time, Sir.”

Sir Hauwerd Breygart’s eyes popped open as the hand on his shoulder shook him gently. He’d be fifty years old in another seven days, and he’d recently begun feeling his age. The habits of a thirty-year military career didn’t disappear just because a man had torn a few more sheets off the calendar, though, and he still woke quickly, almost instantly.

He sat up, swung his legs over the edge of the cot, and stood. He stretched, then massaged the small of his back with both hands. That was one of part that seemed to be aging somewhat more rapidly than the rest of him, and he missed the comfortable bed he’d become accustomed to at his headquarters in Shandyr. But he needed to be closer to the front for this, and at least he had a proper headquarters tent, which was a far cry from the hand-to-mouth, desperate days defending Thesmar.

In more ways than one, he thought with grim satisfaction.

The once threadbare, cobbled-together Army of Thesmar had been reinforced to almost eighty thousand well-fed, well-equipped men … exclusive of its artillery. And that artillery had been heavily reinforced, as well, with the promised 6-inch angle-guns and even a single battery of the newer and even more powerful 10-inch angles, based on a squat, sawed-off version of the King Haarahld-class’ main gun tubes. Those were actually too much gun for field use; even with double teams of dragons, they weren’t exactly highly mobile once they got off the high road. They did get around better than one might have anticipated out of weapons that weighed seventeen tons in firing position, however, and they packed one hell of a whallop.

Lieutenant Karmaikel held out a steaming mug of cherrybean and the earl accepted it with a nod.

“Thank you,” he said, and took a large—but cautious; it was hotter than the hinges of Shan-wei’s hell, the way he liked it—sip. Then he set the mug on the camp table by his cot and sat back down while he reached for his boots.

“I’m assuming that if any last-minute disaster had hit you’d already have told me about it, Dyntyn?”

“Probably not before you’d had your first cup of cherrybean, My Lord,” Karmaikel replied straightfaced, and the earl snorted as he shoved his right foot into its boot.

“Seriously, My Lord,” Karmaikel continued, “things have gone almost too well. Everything seems to be exactly on schedule, and I tend to worry when things go that well.”

“Sometimes, Lieutenant Karmaikel, things actually do go according to plan,” Hanth observed. “Mind you, it’s better to operate on the assumption they won’t. You get surprised a hell of a lot less often that way … and some of your surprises are actually pleasant ones.”

“Exactly, Sir.”

Hanth stamped into his other boot, stood, collected his cherrybean, and followed his aide out of the small, screened off section of the HQ tent set aside for the commanding general’s cot. A dozen other aides—not to mention a few dozen clerks and messengers—came to attention as Karmaikel held the flap for him to pass under it, and he waved his mug.

“Stand easy,” he growled and crossed to the enormous map while he sipped more of the hot cherrybean.

There was a lot of detail on that map, most of it garnered by his own patrols, although quite a bit had also been assembled from reports from the network of informants the seijins seemed to be able to put together anywhere on the face of the world. He’d lost more than a few scout snipers filling in that detail, and he didn’t like that any more than the next commander would have, but the price those men had paid was going to save one hell of a lot more men’s lives in the next few days. A few items remained a little … amorphous, but overall he was reassuringly confident of both the terrain and the Army of the Seridahn’s current dispositions. He wasn’t entirely happy about those dispositions, but at least he knew where the bastards were.

Sir Fahstyr Rychtyr had been busy as Shan-wei over the five five-days since he’d broken contact. He’d fallen back to his current position, where the Sheryl-Seridahn Canal and the high road passed between Duhnsmyr Forest and Kaiylee’s Woods, and dug in hard. Breaking contact had cost him close to four thousand men—over half of them POWs, not dead or wounded—from the rearguard he’d been forced to leave behind. The fact that so many Dohlarans had been willing to surrender said some interesting things about the RDA’s current morale, in Hanth’s judgment, and Rychtyr couldn’t have been happy with how many men he’d lost. Still, the earl was fairly certain the Dohlaran CO thought the prize had been worth the price. He’d certainly made damned effective use of the time, anyway!

A solid line of entrenchments, redoubts, dugouts, and—unfortunately—footstools stretched across the twenty-mile-wide gap between the two forests, with its flanks anchored on the tiny canalside village of Tyzwail in the north and the large Zhozuah Farm to the south. Most of that line had been awaiting his arrival, built by the enormous labor gangs who’d been assembled for the task, but he’d gone right on improving them from the moment of his arrival.

He’d established similarly formidable positions covering the gap between Kaiylee’s Woods and the appropriately named “Forty-Mile Wood” farther south of it. And, for that matter, between Forty-Mile Wood and Moon Shadow Forest, just over a hundred miles southwest of his Tyzwail-Zhozuah Farm line. Those labor gangs had built two additional fallback positions behind his main line of defense, as well, the rearmost of them—still under construction at the moment—a good sixty miles behind his present front line, and every little fold in the ground between the major defensive lines had been surveyed by his engineers and marked on his army’s maps. His subordinates knew exactly where to find the best terrain for delaying actions if his front broke, and, in many cases, the most defensible ground had been provided with at least rudimentary trenches and breastworks, as well.

A competent opponent is a genuine pain in the arse, Hanth reflected moodily. And being told I can’t go ahead and attack as soon as I’m ready—and before the miserable Dohlaran bastard has time to dig his arse in—doesn’t make it any better. Damn it, Cayleb knows better than to screw around with his field commanders this way! I ought to send that young man a dispatch that gives him a good piece of my mind!

He snorted in amusement as he imagined how his emperor would respond to any such note. And, however much he might grumble, he understood exactly why he’d been ordered to wait. For that matter, it even made sense, on the grand strategy level, however painful it was going to be for the Army of Thesmar. He just hoped the Navy was ready to hold up its end of the timing.

Of course it is, Hauwerd, he told himself. You just want something to think about besides the number of men who’re about to get killed. On both sides.

In addition to digging in like a rabid trap lizard, Rychtyr had been reinforced himself, and not just with the garrisons the overly capable bastard had pulled out of Bryxtyn and Waymeet, ether. The spies’ latest estimates were that he had about sixty thousand men suitable for field service and another twenty thousand or so odds-and-sods armed with whatever Duke Salthar had been able to scare up. Most of that twenty thousand were occupied holding down positions in the flanking redoubts. They were little more than militia and unlikely, to say the least, to stand up to a heavy new-model attack. But if their morale held, they’d give a better account of themselves from fortified positions than one might have expected out of hastily levied troops … and they freed up twenty thousand veterans Rychtyr would otherwise have been forced to fritter away covering those same positions. He still had to split his field force between the Tyzwail-Zhozuah Farm line and the redoubts and entrenchments covering the gap between Kaiylee Woods and Forty-Mile Wood, however. That gave him a combined frontage of damned near thirty-five miles, and sixty thousand men turned into a much smaller number when they were spread that thin. Rychtyr’s well-designed and laid-out field works allowed him to economize on manpower, yet Hanth was confident he could break the front at any point of his choosing. He could simply concentrate too much artillery and infantry for it to be any other way.

Which doesn’t mean it can’t still end up costing like Shan-wei, he reflected grimly.

At least those same spy reports confirmed that Rychtyr hadn’t received any of the new Temple Boy rockets. Apparently, every rocket Dohlar could produce was earmarked for the kingdom’s coastal defenses while Temple Lands rocket production was all going to the Mighty Host of God and the Archangels. That wasn’t going to make things any easier for Baron Green Valley and Duke Eastshare—or for Earl Sharpfield and Baron Sarmouth, for that matter—but Hanth couldn’t pretend he wasn’t happy his boys weren’t going to be facing them.

He gazed at the map for another few minutes, then pulled out his watch, opened it, and checked the time.

“Why don’t we take this outside, gentlemen?” he said with a wintry smile as he snapped the case shut again. He took another sip of cherrybean, and nodded at the tent fly open on the Dohlaran night. “I expect the light show to be pretty spectacular.”

* * *

It was a beautiful night, for certain values of the word “beautiful.” If one was an admirer of moonlight and clear, starry skies, then that would not have been the word one would have chosen. If, on the other hand, one was a combat engineer charged with clearing a path through a field of footstools—what a denizen of Old Terra would have called landmines—it was gorgeous. Not that it didn’t have certain drawbacks even from that perspective.

Lieutenant Klymynt Hahrlys crawled forward on his belly, inching through the warm, humid darkness and coated in sweat that owed nothing to the overcast night’s closeness. Well, perhaps a little bit, he reflected as he paused to lay down his prodding tool, swipe at the sweat glazing his carefully blackened face, and blot his palm dry on the leg of his trousers. Then he picked the probe back up and began edging forward again, prodding gently and cautiously at the ground before him in a carefully planned and practiced arc.

He really ought to be leaving this to his noncoms and enlisted personnel while he stayed back and supervised, and he knew it. He also knew Captain Maizak was going to rip a strip off his hide when he found out how 2nd Platoon’s CO had spent the evening. It had been drummed into him that an officer’s true duties were managerial. He was supposed to run his platoon efficiently, make sure its training was up to snuff, that its men were healthy and well fed, and that they understood—and accomplished—whatever tasks they were assigned. That had damn-all to do with things like gallantry, and—as Captain Maizak had pointed out a bit acidly after the Zhonesberg attack—the inspirational value of leading his men from the front wouldn’t be especially useful if he managed to get himself blown up in the process.

On the other hand, he also knew Maizak’s heart wouldn’t really be in it. For that matter, if he was truly lucky, Maizak was out doing exactly the same thing he was on this fine, cloudy night.

The Imperial Charisian Army had determined that the Royal Dohlaran Army’s version of its own footstools were both larger than its own and made of wood. Their wooden construction made them more susceptible to leaks and rot, so it was unlikely they’d last as long as the Charisian versions once they’d been emplaced. Probably a quarter of the footstools out here were already inoperable, thanks to the last five-day’s rain, and their larger size made each of them a larger target for detection, too.

Neither of which things made him feel one bit better at the moment.

Somebody’s got to do it, Klymynt, he reflected. And in the Army, “somebody” is usually the poor bloody engineers.

He would vastly have preferred to be doing this in daylight … if not for the minor drawback that a Dohlaran sniper would almost certainly have blown his brains out. As it was, the clouds along the eastern horizon had begun to show the very faintest hint of gray behind him, which made the darkness in front of him even blacker. That didn’t make his present task any easier, but in another twenty or thirty minutes that eastern sky was going to be far brighter. That would make it far easier to spot any footstools. Unfortunately, it would also make it far easier for that Dohlaran sniper to spot him.

Actually, the odds were substantially in his favor at the moment, despite—or perhaps because of—the darkness. He knew that, but he also knew at least some of his men were going to crap out. Sooner or later—and probably sooner—one of them was going to detonate a footstool rather than detect it with the curved tip of his five-foot probe. Hahrlys didn’t like that, and he knew Colonel Sylvstyr, the 19th Combat Engineer Battalion’s CO, didn’t like it, either. That didn’t change the fact that somebody had to do it or that one of the unpleasant truths about armies was that they suffered casualties. The object of a good army was to suffer as few of them as possible, and Hahrlys and his highly trained, veteran engineers were going to take a hell of a lot fewer than a couple of infantry battalions attacking across an uncleared field of footstools would.

Yeah, but those casualties wouldn’t be my people, he thought grimly. And, for that matter—

He swung his probe to the right once more, a precisely metered eighteen inches and brought its curved tip down again.

Thunk.

He froze as he heard the unmistakable sound of steel on wood.

“Got one,” he whispered very, very quietly, and a hand pressed his right bootheel in acknowledgment.

Corporal Fhranklyn Sygzbee, 2nd Platoon’s runner—known, more or less affectionately, to his platoon mates as “Clumsy”—had kept his mouth shut when he learned his lieutenant intended to crawl around in the dark along with the rest of the platoon and had nominated him as his partner, but his expression had been eloquent. Hahrlys couldn’t quite decide whether Sygzbee’s … limited enthusiasm had more to do with the possibility of being blown up or the possibility of seeing Hahrlys blown up and then returning to face Platoon Sergeant Tyllytsyn.

The lieutenant chuckled softly at the thought. Then he pressed himself as closely as possible to the ground and moved the probe again, very gently, trying to find the dimensions of the damned thing. After several seconds of careful probing, he was reasonably confident he had the footstool located, and he drove the probe firmly through the soil covering it and into the wood of its case, anchoring the curved, sharply pointed steel tip.

He crawled towards it very carefully, following the shaft of his probe, using it to position himself. When he was within arm’s reach of the probe’s tip, he ran his hand forward along the shaft and felt for the footstool’s case—or detonator or tripwire—with gentle fingertips.

Funny. The night hadn’t gotten any warmer, but he was absolutely saturated with sweat as those fingertips found the telltale mounded earth. Fortunately, the Dohlarans’ doctrine for footstool use was still in the developmental stage. They weren’t as careful about leveling the ground when they emplaced them as they ought to be—not that Klymynt Hahrlys had any intention of complaining!

He and his men had spent hours playing with inert copies of the Dohlaran footstools which had been brought back by the Army of Thesmar’s scout sniper patrols. There were two main versions, and Hahrlys’ fingertips quickly identified this one as a Type I: a wooden case approximately fourteen inches wide, ten inches from front to back, and six inches deep, filled with black powder under a layer of old-style musket balls. The Type II was nastier, in a lot of ways: a wooden case topped with a built-up dome formed out of pitch as a matrix to hold sixty-five musket balls. It was designed to throw them in a hemispherical pattern, almost like one of the ICA’s “sweepers,” and its lethal zone was considerably wider than the straight-up cone of a Type I even though its directional pattern was more limited than a sweeper’s.

If it was a Type I, then the detonator ought to be … right about.…

There! His fingertips found the raised bridge of the pressure switch. The Type I used an internal percussion lock for detonation, but the trigger was a rectangular plate that was pulled up and turned through ninety degrees to arm it. And that meant.…

“Type I,” he told Sygzbee softly. “Got the bridge. Pass me a wedge.”

He reached back with his left hand, never taking his right off of the pressure switch. The last thing he needed now was to lose the damned thing in the dark and have to find it all over again.

Something pressed his left hand, and he closed his fingers on one of the precisely shaped wooden wedges from Corporal Sygzbee’s backpack. It was awkward to squirm around on his belly to get both hands on the footstool, but he managed and held his breath as he very, very gently slid the wedge under the raised bridge. He pushed it firmly home, careful to exert steady pressure rather than jam it into place, then exhaled the breath he hadn’t realized he was holding.

“Flag,” he murmured, and Sygzbee passed him the four-inch-long orange pennant fastened to the thin eighteen-inch steel pin. He pushed the sharp end of the pin into the ground right next to the footstool, then rolled onto his side, leaning on one elbow to look back at the corporal, only dimly visible even to his darkness accustomed eyes, despite his proximity.

“Charge,” he said, and Sygzbee handed across the modified hand grenade for Hahrlys to nestle into the dirt covering the footstool.

The corporal had attached the grenade to the strong length of quick match which had been unreeling from the spool clipped to his web gear. There were already fourteen grenades spaced out behind them, all connected by the same quick match, and Hahrlys made sure the match was spiked firmly to the ground between the fifteenth grenade and the length still unreeling behind Sygzbee. In theory, when the time came, the quick match would be lit and each of the grenades strung along it would detonate, taking its footstool with it. Assuming that failed, the flag should alert any advancing Charisian infantryman to the footstool’s presence. And assuming that failed, the wedge should prevent the bridge from being depressed and setting the damn thing off even if some poor sod stepped right on top of it.

Now if there’s just not a tripwire backup that I missed finding, we’re golden, Hahrlys thought.

“All right, I guess we’ve rested long enough,” he whispered.

“Seems that way to me, anyway, Sir,” another voice observed softly, barely audible above the quiet sigh of the wind, from the darkness to their left where Corporal Ahlvyn Ahdahmski and Private Zhon Vyrnyn were assigned to clear the northern flank of their lane. “Don’t want to sound like I’m complaining,” Ahdahmski continued, “but you and Clumsy’re making an awful lot of racket.”

“That’s because some of us are actually finding the Shan-wei-damned things,” Hahrlys whispered back a bit pointedly, and Sygzbee chuckled sourly. “Don’t tell me you’re going to let an officer find more of them than you do!”

“Does seem unnatural, doesn’t it?” Ahdahmski acknowledged.

“Damned right it does. And I think we’re getting close enough it’d probably be a good idea to keep your mouth shut, Ahlvyn.”

“Good point, Sir.” Ahdahmski’s whispered response was the next best thing to impossible to hear, even from a distance of less than twenty feet, and Hahrlys grunted in soft approval as he began crawling slowly ahead once more. The admonition probably hadn’t been truly necessary … yet, at least. By his calculations, they were still at least two hundred yards from the Dohlarans’ most advanced listening posts. But it was always possible his estimate was wrong … or that they’d decided to move their pickets forward, just to be difficult. It was the sort of thing the irritatingly competent bastards were likely to do, although they wouldn’t want to get too far out into their own footstools.

Well, if the gun dogs are on schedule, they’ll have something else to be listening to any minute now, wherever the hell they are, he reflected. And when that happens—

His probe touched something, and Lieutenant Klymynt Hahrlys had just under two seconds to realize he’d found another footstool before the tripwire he’d snagged detonated the Type II and a storm front of musket balls killed him instantly.

* * *

“Somebody in the Kau-yungs!” Private Yaisu Rahdryghyz shouted as the brilliant explosion flared in the darkness.

The private was part of a three-man picket from 2nd Platoon of Captain Ahbaht Mahrtynez’ company of Colonel Efrahm Acairverah’s infantry regiment. It was the third night in a row he’d had the duty, and he’d been looking forward to going off watch in another couple of hours. He could think of very few things which simultaneously produced so much nervous tension and boredom as sitting here in the dark, staring out into more dark, for five-days on end with absolutely nothing happening. If not for the heretics’ nasty habit of sneaking their damn scout snipers all the way across the defensive zone to cut some poor damned sentry’s throat, boring was all it would have been.

Frankly, Rahdryghyz would have been simply delighted to be bored.

Not happening tonight, he thought, straining his eyes as the explosive crack of the detonating Kau-yung rolled over him and he peered towards the afterimage of its blinding flash.

There’d been a few of those detonations over the last couple of five-days. A lot of them had been stray livestock or local wildlife, but three of the heretic scout snipers had been killed in 1st Platoon’s area night before last. So this could be something a lot more important than another unlucky grass lizard or prong buck. He was still blinking his eyes against the flash, trying to decide exactly where it had been, when someone slid into his lizard hull with him.

“Where was it?” Corporal Ahndru Nohceeda asked.

“Hard to say,” Rahdryghyz replied. “Wasn’t looking right at it when it went off, but it looked like it was maybe a hundred, a hundred and fifty yards out.”

“Think it was another prong buck?”

“Now, how in Shan-wei am I supposed to know that?” Rahdryghyz demanded. “It’s blacker’n Shan-wei’s boots out there! If it was a prong buck, though, it got through a hell of a lot of other Kau-yungs before it set one off!”

“Got a point,” Nohceeda conceded. He put two fingers into his mouth and whistled. “Raidahndo!”

“Yo!” Private Ahbsahlahn Raidahndo acknowledged from his own lizardhole, fifteen yards behind Rahdryghyz’ position.

“Get back to the CP. Tell Lieutenant Ulysees we just saw—”

Dawn came early in a rolling crescendo of thunder.

* * *

The single rocket burst in crimson splendor against the moonless sky two miles behind the Army of Thesmar’s front lines. It blazed there for long seconds, floating slowly down under its parachute. The night seemed to hold its breath as the fuming red eye slid down it, and then the massed artillery which had awaited its presence spoke.

The heavy angle-guns had been in place for almost a month, preparing for this moment. Each battery had been allowed to range in one gun, determining deflection and elevation for each of its assigned targets. There’d been no heavy bombardments to warn the Dohlarans of what those targets were, and the ranging shots had been hidden as “random” harassing fire. Now that carefully prepared artillery—deployed in a gun line almost ten miles long—opened fire. The eruption began in the center, running out towards either end, and hundreds of heavy shells painted streaks of fire across the night.

Fifteen seconds later, the mortar companies just behind the Charisian frontline positions joined the holocaust. Airburst antipersonnel mortar bombs exploded like brief, hateful suns, sending their deadly showers of shrapnel down to search every fold and hollow.

The torrent of fire arced across the ground between the armies’ front lines, a canopy of thunderous flame above the engineers still picking their careful way through the defensive fields of footstools.

Beneath that canopy, Platoon Sergeant Gyffry Tyllytsyn gently closed his lieutenant’s eyes. He looked down at the dead young man he’d followed so far, looked after so long, for fifteen or twenty seconds, his face carved out of stone in the reflected fury of the bombardment. Then he drew a deep breath and patted Hahrlys once on the chest.

“All right!” He had to clear his throat twice to get it out, but that was all right. His voice could barely be heard over the steadily swelling bellow of the guns, anyway. “We’ve got a job to finish for the Lieutenant, so let’s get to it!”

* * *

“Get your heads down! Get your heads down!” Lieutenant Ulysees shouted, and heard Platoon Sergeant Gyairmoh Sahlazhar repeating the order.

Here and there, someone cried out in alarm as the shower of heretic angle-gun shells grew from a thunderstorm’s first, scattered raindrops into the catastrophic downpour of a fiery typhoon. For the most part, though, his men responded with almost instant, wordless discipline. They were veterans, every one of them, and they went deep in their individual lizardholes or rolled into one of the deep, heavily sandbagged bunkers.

His pride in them swelled fiercely, but there was an arsenic-bitter edge to that pride. They’d fought so hard, so tenaciously. Taken so much pride in their long, fighting retreat—in knowing they were the one army the heretics had fully engaged which had survived the experience. The Army of the Sylmahn, the Army of Glacierheart, the Army of Shiloh … the heretics had utterly destroyed each of them. But the Army of the Seridahn had fought them every step of the way, over seven hundred miles from Cheryk to the Tyzwail Line, without ever once breaking. It had been close a time or two, perhaps, but the men had always remembered who they were, rallied again and again.

And now, at last, that spirit, the tenacity which had carried them so far, was beginning to erode. Ulysees wasn’t supposed to know about the whispers, the quiet discussions where no inquisitor’s ears were likely to hear. Wasn’t supposed to know some of them had come to refer to this as “Clyntahn’s War,” and not the Jihad. Wasn’t supposed to know how his men had reacted to the news about Earl Thirsk’s family. And he wasn’t supposed to know about the steady, ominous corrosion of his men’s confidence as one disaster after another rolled in from the Gulf of Dohlar—disasters made ever so much worse in the wake of the RDN’s victory in the Kaudzhu Narrows.

No, he wasn’t supposed to know his men felt that way, harbored those thoughts, sensed the tremors of ultimate defeat sweeping towards them. And he wasn’t supposed to feel that way, harbor those thoughts, or sense those tremors himself, either.

He flung himself into the command post bunker, crouching just inside the entrance to count off the other members of his command section as they tumbled through it behind him, and the ceiling-hung lantern began to sway and dance as 6-inch and 10-inch shells rumbled down the sky like sledgehammers of flame.

* * *

The first phase of the Charisian bombardment lasted forty-five minutes. Forty-five minutes in which hundreds of angle-gun shells and thousands of mortar bombs hammered the Dohlaran fortifications. They were shooting blind, those guns, but they had a very large target. Not all of their shells could miss, and when a 6-inch or—especially—a 10-inch shell scored a direct hit on even the deepest bunker, the consequences were lethal.

In addition to the deluge of explosive shells and the airburst shrapnel shells pitilessly probing every nook and cranny, sending their deadly rain down into lizardholes and communication trenches, the infernally inventive Charisians introduced the Army of the Seridahn to yet another innovation. A quarter of the mortar bombs slicing down out of the heavens were packed with a mix of saltpetre, coal, pitch, tar, resin, sawdust, false silver and sulfur that spewed out an incredibly noisome cloud of blinding smoke. Dohlar had received reports—fragmentary, unfortunately, like so much else from the Inquisition—about the smoke shells the heretic Eastshare had employed against the Army of Glacierheart the previous year. Very few of the AOG troops who’d experienced them had escaped to describe their effectiveness, however, and the Army of the Seridahn was sadly unprepared for its own introduction to them.

The artificial generation of smoke hadn’t received a lot of attention from Safeholdian armies, probably because gunpowder-armed armies normally had too much smoke, not too little. In this case, however, the reeking, choking cloud rolling steadily westward on a Charisian wind had two effects. One was to blind sentries like Private Rahdryghyz and Corporal Nohceeda who might otherwise have observed the combat engineers as they completed their sweeps and started back to their own lines. The second was to infiltrate dugouts and entrenchments, choking and suffocating their inhabitants. The smoke cloud wasn’t actually poisonous, but that was a minor distinction for General Rychtyr’s troops. The stench was indescribable, it was certainly capable of asphyxiating a victim under the right circumstances, and the discovery of yet another infernal Charisian innovation didn’t do a thing for the Army of the Seridahn’s morale.

But then, after only forty-five minutes, the bombardment trickled off, although the smoke rounds continued to fall.

* * *

“Out!” Lieutenant Ulysees shouted. “The bastards’ll be right on the heels of their damned artillery, boys! Man your positions!”

The men of 2nd Platoon didn’t need to be told twice. They were veterans, and they knew how closely Charisian infantry followed its artillery in an attack like this. They scrambled out of their dugouts, sat up in their lizardholes, spread out along the firing steps of their trenches.

All along Acairverah’s Regiment’s front—all along the entire Tyzwail Line—other companies, other platoons, followed suit. Riflemen settled into firing positions, capping their locks, making sure their bayonets were securely fixed, laying out hand bombs. Healers in green armbands marked with Pasquale’s caduceus took advantage of the opportunity to scurry from lizardhole to lizardhole, searching for wounded, dragging them back to the aid stations in their own deep bunkers. The enormous craters left by the new 10-inch shells had obliterated entire bunkers and the sections of trenches which had connected them, but determined squads of Dohlaran infantry settled into the craters themselves, using them in place of the entrenchments they’d demolished.

Within ten minutes, the entire front line bristled with ready and waiting riflemen, coughing on the noxious smoke, peering into it with slitted, tear-streaming eyes, waiting to greet the attackers with a withering curtain of fire.

* * *

“All right,” Admiral Lywys Sympsyn said grimly. He snapped his watch’s case shut and slid it deliberately into his pocket. “Phase two.”

“Yes, Sir!”

Another crimson rocket soared upwards to burst in the bright morning sunlight.

* * *

That’s funny, Lieutenant Ulysees thought between violent, sinus-tearing sneezes. Where the fuck are they? The one thing they don’t do is give somebody time to get set! I guess even Charisians can screw up their timing sometimes, but this isn’t like the Thesmars!

He was grateful, of course. On more than one occasion, the heretic infantry—especially their accursed scout snipers—had crept to within no more than thirty or forty yards of an isolated Dohlaran picket under cover of darkness, then swept in behind a merciless shower of grenades. Even when that didn’t happen, they hit hard and with as little warning as possible. This time, he’d been given time to get his entire platoon into its assigned positions, reinforcing the pickets, and the heretics would regret giving the Army of the Seridahn time to get set.

But something about the unnatural calm, broken only by the dull, ongoing thuds of the incoming smoke shells, made his skin crawl. It wasn’t right. Langhorne knew, the heretics were better than this! If they weren’t already storming the forward trench lines, there was a reason for it, and—

* * *

Spider webs of flame raced forward from the Army of Thesmar’s positions like fiery serpents, following the lines of quick match the combat engineers had strung across the footstool field during the night. The modified hand grenades strung along the quick match exploded in rapid succession, belching fountains of dirt, musket balls, and still more smoke as the Dohlaran footstools went up in sympathetic detonations.

A few Dohlarans trying vainly to see through the choking fog of smoke heard the explosions. Some of them recognized the sound of exploding footstools, although not even they truly realized what they were hearing. They assumed the deadly devices must be exploding as enemy infantry stormed through the protective fields and shouted in warning. The alert passed up and down the frontline positions, and the defenders settled more solidly into position. Whatever had delayed the heretics this long, they were on their way now!

But no Charisian or Siddarmarkian riflemen came out of the smoke.

Yahkeem Ulysees heard a sound like the world’s largest sail ripping in half, and his heart seemed to freeze as he realized what it was. Realized what was about to happen.

No wonder they gave us time! he thought. They wanted us back up out of the bunkers before—

The 6-inch shell whose arrival he’d heard exploded three hundred yards to his right. That one did very little damage. But it was only one shell, and the Army of the Seridahn had done precisely what Hauwerd Breygart had expected it to do when the barrage lifted. It had raced to man its defensive positions … just in time for the renewed bombardment to catch its men in the open.

“Back!” Lieutenant Ulysees screamed. He came to his feet, standing upright and waving madly to the men who couldn’t hear him in the sudden renewal of thunder but might see him, instead. “Back into the bunk—!”

One of the new 10-inch shells exploded almost directly on top of his position.

His body was never identified.